Health News

Increased Seat Belt Use Improves A Teen's Chance Of Survival In A Crash

Date: Apr-08-2013
A new report on teen driver safety released by The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and State Farm® shows encouraging trends among teen passengers. In 2011 more than half of teen passengers (54 percent) reported "always" buckling up...

Potential Drug Target For Infectious Disease Revealed By Scissor-Like Enzyme

Date: Apr-08-2013
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report that a pathogen annually blamed for an estimated 90 million cases of food-borne illness defeats a host's immune response by using a fat-snipping enzyme to cut off cellular communication. "Our findings provide insight into severe bacterial infectious diseases, as well as some forms of cancer, in which the attachment of fat molecules to proteins is an essential feature of the disease process," said Dr. Neal Alto, assistant professor of microbiology and senior author of the study in the print edition of Nature...

Scientists Describe The Mechanics Of Oncogene-Induced Senescence

Date: Apr-08-2013
Researchers from The Wistar Institute explain a new molecular mechanism behind the phenomenon of oncogene-induced senescence. By depriving the cell of the ability to make new nucleotides - the building blocks of DNA molecules - cells can suppress cancer development by forcing a damaged cell into a senescent state, where the cell remains alive yet cannot reproduce. According to the researchers, their findings may offer a new strategy to strengthen the effects of anti-cancer drugs and chemotherapies...

Rethinking The Mechanism Underlying The Well-Documented Efficacy Of Hepatitis A Vaccine

Date: Apr-08-2013
Viruses have historically been classified into one of two types - those with an outer lipid-containing envelope and those without an envelope. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina have discovered that hepatitis A virus, a common cause of enterically-transmitted hepatitis, takes on characteristics of both virus types depending on whether it is in a host or in the environment. "The whole universe of virology is divided into two types of viruses - viruses that are enveloped and viruses that are not enveloped...

Offensive Weapons Used By Bacteria Against Each Other

Date: Apr-08-2013
A new study which was performed jointly at Umea University and the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, discovered that bacteria can degrade the cell membrane of bacterial competitors with enzymes that do not harm their own membrane. This exciting finding opens the way for the development of new antibacterial drugs to fight bacteria using their own weapons. (NATURE, 2013). During the infection of a host organism, pathogenic bacteria can excrete toxins that cause damage to host cells and tissue. Interestingly, bacteria also use similar mechanisms in competition with one another...

Liver Transplant Eligibility May Be Affected By Incarceration, Marijuana Use And Suicide Attempts

Date: Apr-08-2013
Results from an anonymous survey of U.S. transplant providers report that incarceration, marijuana use, and psychiatric diagnoses, particularly suicide attempts, may lower patients' eligibility for liver transplantation. The study published in the April issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, also found that most providers would not offer transplants to patients with advanced age, those severely obese, or with lifetime imprisonment...

Hallucinations Of Musical Notation

Date: Apr-08-2013
Professor of neurology, physician, and author Oliver Sacks M.D. has outlined case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations, in a new paper for the neurology journal Brain. In this paper, Dr Sacks is building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000, which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations)...

Study Finds Post-Stroke Aphasia Recovery Impeded By Shift Of Language Function To Right Hemisphere

Date: Apr-08-2013
In a study designed to differentiate why some stroke patients recover from aphasia and others do not, investigators have found that a compensatory reorganization of language function to right hemispheric brain regions bodes poorly for language recovery. Patients who recovered from aphasia showed a return to normal left-hemispheric language activation patterns. These results, which may open up new rehabilitation strategies, are available in the current issue of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience...

Hip Or Knee Replacement Benefits About Half Of Patients With Arthritis

Date: Apr-08-2013
Only half of people with arthritis who had a hip or knee replacement reported a significant improvement in pain and mobility after surgery, according to a new study led by Women's College Hospital and the Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences (ICES). "Many patients with hip and knee arthritis have the condition in more than one of their hip or knee joints," said the study's lead author Dr. Gillian Hawker...

Advancing Tissue Engineering By Building Better Blood Vessels

Date: Apr-08-2013
One of the major obstacles to growing new organs - replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys - is the difficulty researchers face in building blood vessels that keep the tissues alive, but new findings from the University of Michigan could help overcome this roadblock. "It's not just enough to make a piece of tissue that functions like your desired target," said Andrew Putnam, U-M associate professor of biomedical engineering. "If you don't nourish it with blood by vascularizing it, it's only going to be as big as the head of a pen...