Social Sciences
A new therapy for metastatic prostate cancer has shown considerable promise in early clinical trials involving patients whose disease has become resistant to current drugs.
Chemists and biologists at UCLA and colleagues at several other institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, have created a new drug to treat a particularly lethal form of the disease, known as castration-resistant prostate cancer, or CRPC. Also referred to as hormone-refractory prostate cancer, CRPC is resistant to further treatment by anti-hormone drugs such as Casodex and Eulexin.
In an article…
The prevalence of a certain form of drug-resistant bacteria, called multidrug-resistant gram-negative (MDRGN) organisms, far surpassed that of two other common antimicrobial-resistant infections in long-term care facilities, according to a study conducted by researchers at Hebrew SeniorLife's Institute for Aging Research.
Residents at long-term care facilities are one of the main reservoirs of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. Epidemiological studies have focused primarily on two common antimicrobial-resistant organisms—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureas (MRSA) and vancomycin-…
A test developed by physician-scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may help assess more quickly the ability of Alzheimer's drugs to affect one of the possible underlying causes of Alzheimer's disease in humans, accelerating the development of new treatments.
Scientists used the test to show that an Alzheimer's drug given to healthy volunteers reduced production of a substance known as amyloid beta (A-beta), a normal byproduct of human metabolism that builds to unhealthy levels forming brain plaques in Alzheimer's patients. The drug candidate, LY450139, which is…
A new statistical method that can estimate the origin and time of an aerosolized release of the pathogen causing anthrax, following detection of the first few cases has been developed by researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London in collaboration with the Health Protection Agency's Microbial Risk Assessment group.
The method, described in an article published April 10 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, predicts where the most critically affected areas will be following the release of this…
Researchers from Peninsula Dental School and the UCL Eastman Dental Institute have used data from the Hospital Episodes Statistics resource to identify a marked increase in the number of hospital admissions for children with caries and other dental conditions, between 1997 and 2006.
The study, which is to be published in the British Dental Journal on 11th April 2009, revealed that there were 517,885 NHS 'episodes of care' for children with dental conditions in the nine-year period. Of these, over half were for dental caries and 80 per cent involved extractions.
There was a year-on-year…
NEW YORK (April 9, 2009) -- A newly discovered gene fusion is highly expressed in a subset of prostate cancers, according to a study by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College. The findings, reported in the April 1 issue of Cancer Research, may lead to more accurate tests for prostate cancer. The gene fusion biomarker is also a different type of fusion than researchers have found in cancer previously and may represent an entirely new mechanism that cancer cells use to outgrow their healthy neighbors.
The SLC45A3-ELK4 gene fusion is detectable at high levels in the urine of some men at…
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that understanding the precise timing of communication between cells that coordinate the body's response to disease could be key to new drug developments.
Researchers, in collaboration with AstraZeneca and the Universities of Manchester and Warwick, are investigating the NF-kappa-B signalling system, which governs the responses within cells to stimuli such as stress and infection. It plays a central role in conditions such as cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.
It was thought that blocking NF-kappa-B…
CHAPEL HILL – Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have identified a compound that could be modified to treat one of the most deadly types of cancer, and discovered how a particular gene mutation contributes to tumor growth.
The findings and potential treatment apply to a type of brain tumor called secondary glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). GBMs are part of a larger group of brain tumors called malignant gliomas, which is the type of cancer Senator Edward Kennedy suffers from.
A report of the research will appear in the April 10, 2009 issue of the…
The first antiretroviral treatments appeared in 1996. Since then, new and better drugs have been discovered that have almost turned AIDS into a chronic disease. Nevertheless, there is still room to improve the performance of the the therapeutic strategies used in clinical practice. This is shown by a study published in the online edition of The Lancet, suggesting that early administration of antiretroviral treatment reduces the rate of AIDS development and death in HIV-positive patients by 28%. This study analyzed information from more than 45,000 patients in Europe and North America and…
New research by economics and psychology researchers at the University of Warwick has found that promotion on average produces 10% more mental strain and gives up to 20% less time to visit the Doctors.
In a research paper entitled "Do People Become Healthier after Being Promoted" Chris Boyce and Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick questioned why people with higher job status seem to have better health. A long-held assumption by researchers is that an improvement to a person's job status, through a promotion, will directly result in better health due to an increased sense of…