Health News

Obesity risk among adolescents reduced with 5 regular meals a day

Date: Oct-07-2013
A regular eating pattern may protect adolescents from obesity, according to a Finnish population-based study with more than 4,000 participants. When eating five meals - breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks - a day, even those with a genetic predisposition to obesity had no higher body mass index (BMI) than their controls. The collection of the data on the study population began prenatally, and the participants were followed up until the age of 16...

Brain stimulation affects compliance with social norms

Date: Oct-07-2013
How does the human brain control compliance with social norms? The biological mechanisms that underlie norm compliance are still poorly understood. In a new study, Christian Ruff, Giuseppe Ugazio, and Ernst Fehr from the University of Zurich show that the lateral prefrontal cortex plays a central role in norm compliance. Prefrontal cortex controls norm behavior For the study, 63 participants took part in an experiment in which they received money and were asked to decide how much of it they wanted to share with an anonymous partner...

Clues to preventing the spread of disease from Facebook and Twitter

Date: Oct-07-2013
Facebook and Twitter could provide vital clues to control infectious diseases by using mathematical models to understand how we respond socially to biological contagions. Cold and flu season prompts society to find ways to prevent the spread of disease though measures like vaccination all the way through to covering our mouths when we cough and staying in bed. These social responses are much more difficult to predict than the way biological contagion will evolve, but new methods are being developed to do just that...

Liver transplants: substance abuse treatment improves relapse

Date: Oct-07-2013
A study has shown that liver transplant patients who undergo substance abuse treatment before and after transplantation have significantly lower relapse rates, compared with patients who have not received treatment or are only treated before transplantation. The results of the study were published in the journal Liver Transplantation. Researchers from The Transplant Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, conducted a study involving 118 patients who had undergone liver transplantation...

Target for drug development identified for triple-negative breast cancer

Date: Oct-07-2013
Often deadly "triple-negative" breast cancers might be effectively treated in many cases with a drug that targets a previously unknown vulnerability in the tumors, according to a UC San Francisco researcher who described her discovery in a study published online in the journal Cancer Cell...

Dampened mTOR signaling linked with the developmental disorder Roberts syndrome

Date: Oct-07-2013
Children born with developmental disorders called cohesinopathies can suffer severe consequences, including intellectual disabilities, limb shortening, craniofacial anomalies, and slowed growth. Researchers know which mutations underlie some cohesinopathies, but have developed little understanding of the downstream signals that are disrupted in these conditions. In a study published in PLoS Genetics, researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research report that a prominent signaling pathway that drives cell growth is inhibited in the cohesinopathy known as Roberts syndrome (RBS)...

Researchers identify possible culprits in congenital heart defects

Date: Oct-07-2013
Mitochondria are the power plants of cells, manufacturing chemical fuel so a cell can perform its many tasks. These cellular power plants also are well known for their role in ridding the body of old or damaged cells. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Padua-Dulbecco Telethon Institute in Italy have shown that mitochondria remarkably also orchestrate events that determine a cell's future, at least in the embryonic mouse heart. The new study identifies new potential genetic culprits in the origins of some congenital heart defects...

Targeting genetics of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy: silencing sudden death

Date: Oct-07-2013
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease in which cardiac muscle thickens, weakening the heart, can be prevented from developing for several months in mice by reducing production of a mutant protein, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School. The work takes a first step toward being able to treat or prevent the leading cause of sudden death in athletes and sudden heart-related death in people under 30 in the United States. "There's really no treatment for HCM right now...

Sieving through 'junk' DNA reveals disease-causing genetic mutations

Date: Oct-07-2013
Researchers can now identify DNA regions within non-coding DNA, the major part of the genome that is not translated into a protein, where mutations can cause diseases such as cancer. Their approach reveals many potential genetic variants within non-coding DNA that drive the development of a variety of different cancers. This approach has great potential to find other disease-causing variants. Unlike the coding region of the genome where our 23,000 protein-coding genes lie, the non-coding region - which makes up 98% of our genome - is poorly understood...

Gene deletions discovered in autism may be linked to miswiring of brain neurons

Date: Oct-07-2013
Using powerful genetic sequencing technology, a team of investigators, led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, scanned the genome of hundreds of individuals, and discovered those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were more likely to have gene deletions than were people without the disorder. That means those individuals -- seven percent of the study group -- had one copy of one or more genes when they should have had two...