Health News

Male Smokers With Low Levels Of Serum Bilirubin At Greater Risk For Lung Cancer

Date: Apr-10-2013
Elevated levels of bilirubin in the blood get attention in the clinic because they often indicate that something has gone wrong with the liver. Now researchers have found that male smokers with low levels of the yellow-tinged chemical are at higher risk for lung cancer and dying from the disease. A team led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reported its findings in a late-breaking abstract at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 in Washington, D.C...

New Link Discovered Between Heart Disease And Red Meat

Date: Apr-10-2013
A compound abundant in red meat and added as a supplement to popular energy drinks has been found to promote atherosclerosis - or the hardening or clogging of the arteries - according to Cleveland Clinic research published online this week in the journal Nature Medicine. The study shows that bacteria living in the human digestive tract metabolize the compound carnitine, turning it into trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), a metabolite the researchers previously linked in a 2011 study to the promotion of atherosclerosis in humans...

New 2-Drug Combination Effective For Some Patients With Incurable Tumors And BRCA Mutations

Date: Apr-10-2013
A novel combination of two drugs has shown anti-cancer activity in patients who had incurable solid tumors and carried a germline mutation in their BRCA genes, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers reported at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Washington, April 6-10. The findings (abstract LB-202) were released at a press conference and later at an oral presentation...

'Jumping Genes' May Contribute To Aging-Related Brain Defects

Date: Apr-10-2013
As the body ages, the physical effects are notable; wrinkles in the skin appear, physical exertion becomes harder. But there are also less visible processes going on. Inside aging brains there is another phenomenon at work, which may contribute to age-related brain defects. In a paper* published in the journal Nature Neuroscience CSHL Associate Professor Joshua Dubnau and colleagues show that so-called "jumping genes," or transposons, increase in abundance and activity in the brains of fruit flies as they age...

Promoting Physician Health Leads To Healthier Patients

Date: Apr-10-2013
Patients are more likely to follow preventive health practices like getting a flu shot or mammography if their doctors do likewise, researchers at the University of British Columbia and in Israel have discovered. "We found that patients whose physicians adhered to the recommended screening or vaccination practices were significantly more likely to also undergo screening or vaccination compared with patients of non-compliant physicians," said Dr. Erica Frank of UBC's School of Population and Public Health. Dr...

Treatment Leads To Near-Normal Life Expectancy For People With HIV In South Africa

Date: Apr-09-2013
In South Africa, people with HIV who start treatment with anti-AIDS drugs (antiretroviral therapy) have life expectancies around 80% of that of the general population provided that they start treatment before their CD4 count drops below 200 (cells per microliter), according to a study by South African researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine...

Shingles Vaccine Is Associated With Reduction In Both Postherpetic Neuralgia And Herpes Zoster, But Uptake In The US Is Low

Date: Apr-09-2013
A vaccine to prevent shingles may reduce by half the occurrence of this painful skin and nerve infection in older people (aged over 65 years) and may also reduce the rate of a painful complication of shingles, post-herpetic neuralgia, but has a very low uptake (only 4%) in older adults in the United States, according to a study by UK and US researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine...

New Guidelines For Writing Abstracts Will Help Authors Summarise Their Research

Date: Apr-09-2013
A new extension to the PRISMA guideline on reporting systemic reviews and meta-analyses (types of studies that analyse information from many studies) will help authors to give a more robust summary (abstract) of their study and is detailed by an international group of researchers in this week's PLOS Medicine. These guidelines for abstracts of systemic reviews and meta-analyses are important, as the abstract is the most frequently read part of most papers and these types of studies are particularly important for influencing evidence-based research...

Scientists Find That Prostate Cancer Patients With BRCA2 mutations Require Urgent Treatment

Date: Apr-09-2013
Men who develop prostate cancer after inheriting a faulty gene need immediate surgery or radiotherapy rather than being placed under surveillance, as their disease is more aggressive than other types, a new study has found. A team at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust found prostate cancers spread more quickly and were more often fatal in men who had inherited a faulty BRCA2 gene than in men without the faulty gene...

Study Finds Similarity In Genes Associated With Alzheimer Disease Among African Americans And Individuals Of European Ancestry

Date: Apr-09-2013
In a meta-analysis of data from nearly 6,000 African Americans, Alzheimer disease was significantly associated with a gene that have been weakly associated with Alzheimer disease in individuals of European ancestry, although additional studies are needed to determine risk estimates specific for African Americans, according to a study in the April 10 issue of JAMA, a Genomics theme issue...