Clinical Research

Overweight men are not more likely to be infertile, as past research has shown to be true in obese women, according to a new study. The results will be presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Findings of the study, performed in New York in nearly 300 very overweight men, were unexpected, said coauthor Nanette Santoro, MD, an Albert Einstein College of Medicine obstetrician-gynecologist who is trained in reproductive endocrinology. Santoro and her colleagues studied 292 men who gave semen samples at fertility clinics. The men were ages 18 to 50 and, on…

Every year, about 500 million people worldwide are infected with the parasite that causes dysentery, a global medical burden that among infectious diseases is second only to malaria. In a new study appearing in the June 15 issue of Genes and Development, Johns Hopkins researchers may have found a way to ease this burden by discovering a new enzyme that may help the dysentery-causing amoeba evade the immune system. "This is the first enzyme to be identified that looks like it could mediate immune system evasion," says Sin Urban, Ph.D., an assistant professor of molecular biology and genetics…

A propensity for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might be beneficial to a group of Kenyan nomads, according to new research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology. Scientists have shown that an ADHD-associated version of the gene DRD4 is associated with better health in nomadic tribesmen, and yet may cause malnourishment in their settled cousins. The DRD4 gene codes for a receptor for dopamine, one of the chemical messengers used in the brain. One version of the DRD4 gene, the '7R allele', is believed to be associated with food craving as well as ADHD. A study led by Dan…

Maternal diet influences the chances of having male or female offspring, according to research in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology. The study says that ewes fed a diet enriched with polyunsaturated fats for one month prior to conception have a significantly higher chance of giving birth to male offspring. Polyunsaturated fats are essential nutrients. It is believed that the dietary ratio between omega-3 and omega-6 fats has important biological effects, especially in terms of inflammation, immunity and central nervous system signalling. The omega-6 fats used in this study were…

British scientists are developing a new type of glass that can dissolve and release calcium into the body. This will enable patients to regrow bones and could signal a move away from bone transplants. The porous glass, originally developed at Imperial College is capable of acting as an active template for new bone growth, dissolving in the body without leaving any trace of itself or any toxic chemicals. As it dissolves it releases calcium and other elements such as silicon into the adjacent body fluids, stimulating bone growth. The glass activates genes present in human bone cells which…

Prenatal biochemical screening tests are widely used to look for chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus which can lead to serious handicap, or even death during gestation or in the first few days after birth. But these tests are only able to detect fewer than half of the total chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus. Dr. Francesca R. Grati, of the TOMA Laboratory, Busto Arsizio, Italy, says women should be better informed before deciding to undertake it. The researchers studied 115,576 prenatal diagnoses carried out during the last fourteen years. 84,847 were amniocenteses, usually carried out…

More than 34 percent of American adults — about 72 million people — are obese or overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists once hoped leptin, a hormone that sends the body chemical signals to stop eating and use stored energy, would be a weight-loss weapon. Studies in thin animals looked promising but overweight animals and people didn’t respond the same way, likely because their bodies already overproduce leptin, causing them to develop resistance to the hormone. But now University of Florida researchers say pairing leptin with just a minor amount…

Being obese can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by as much as 80 percent, according to a study in the May issue of Obesity Reviews. But it's not just weight gain that poses a risk. People who are underweight also have an elevated risk of dementia, unlike people who are normal weight or overweight. US researchers carried out a detailed review of 10 international studies published since 1995, covering just over 37,000 people, including 2,534 with various forms of dementia. Subjects were aged between 40 and 80 years when the studies started, with follow-up periods ranging from three to…

The electromagnetic fields produced by incubators alter newborns’ heart rates, says a small study published in the Fetal and Neonatal Edition of Archives of Disease in Childhood. The research team assessed the variability in the heart rate of 43 newborn babies, none of whom was critically ill or premature. The heart rates of 27 of these babies were assessed over three periods of five minutes each, during which the incubator motor was left running, then switched off, then left running again. To see if noise might be a factor, because incubators are noisy, 16 newborns were exposed to “…

Gestational age has long been the factor most commonly used to predict whether an extremely low-birth-weight infant survives and thrives, but four additional factors that can help predict a preemie’s outcome have been identified by the National Institutes of Health Neonatal Research Network. Birth weight, gender, whether the baby is a twin and whether the mother was given antenatal steroid mediation to aid the baby’s lung development are all factors that affect survivability and risk of disability, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine by a consortium of researchers…