Health News

Successful Weight Loss Program For Patients With Serious Mental Illness

Date: Mar-25-2013
Through a program that teaches simple nutrition messages and involves both counseling and regular exercise classes, people with serious mental illness can make healthy behavioral changes and achieve significant weight loss, according to new Johns Hopkins research. These weight loss amounts were similar to those in other successful programs studied with subjects in the general population - studies that specifically excluded people with serious mental illnesses, the researchers say...

Outcomes In Tennis Elbow Significantly Improved By PRP

Date: Mar-25-2013
Eighty-four percent of patients suffering from chronic tennis elbow (lateral epicondylar tendinopathy) reported significantly less pain and elbow tenderness at six months following platelet rich plasma (PRP) treatment, according to results from the largest, multi-center study, to date, on PRP and tennis elbow, presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). Tennis elbow is a common, painful condition affecting approximately 1 to 2 percent of the population...

Signal Orientation Used By Stem Cells To Guide Division

Date: Mar-25-2013
Cells in the body need to be acutely aware of their surroundings. A signal from one direction may cause a cell to react in a very different way than if it had come from another direction. Unfortunately for researchers, such vital directional cues are lost when cells are removed from their natural environment to grow in an artificial broth of nutrients and growth factors. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have devised a way to mimic in the laboratory the spatially oriented signaling that cells normally experience...

Improved Education For Kidney Failure Patients May Increase Chances Of Living Donor Transplantation

Date: Mar-25-2013
Patients with kidney failure who have greater transplant knowledge and motivation are ultimately more likely to receive a kidney transplant from a living donor, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). The findings suggest that improving patient education may help reduce disparities in transplantation. A kidney transplant is the best treatment for patients with kidney failure, offering patients a longer and healthier life than dialysis...

Longer Survival Among Kidney Disease Patients With Healthy Lifestyle

Date: Mar-25-2013
Certain lifestyle factors - such as not smoking, getting regular physical activity, and avoiding a low body weight - may help prolong the lives of individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). More than 26 million individuals in the United States have CKD...

A Protein Linked To The Exacerbation Of COPD Identified By Japanese Researchers

Date: Mar-25-2013
Researchers from the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and Nippon Medical School in Japan have identified a protein likely to be involved in the exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This protein, Siglec-14, could serve as a potential new target for the treatment of COPD exacerbation. In a study published in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences the researchers show that COPD patients who do not express Siglec-14, a glycan-recognition protein, are less susceptible to exacerbation compared with those who do...

Excess Salt Found In Most Pre-Packaged Meals, Snacks For Toddlers

Date: Mar-25-2013
Nearly 75 percent of commercial pre-packaged meals and savory snacks for toddlers are high in sodium, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 Scientific Sessions. In the first study to look at the sodium content in U.S. baby and toddler foods, researchers compared the sodium content per serving of 1,115 products for babies and toddlers using data on major and private label brands compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)...

Motor Disorders And Epilepsy Can Be Caused By Dysfunction In Cerebellar Calcium Channel

Date: Mar-25-2013
A dysfunction of a certain Calcium channel, the so called P/Q-type channel, in neurons of the cerebellum is sufficient to cause different motor diseases as well as a special type of epilepsy. This is reported by the research team of Dr. Melanie Mark and Prof. Dr. Stefan Herlitze from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. They investigated mice that lacked the ion channel of the P/Q-type in the modulatory input neurons of the cerebellum...

Immunotherapeutic Approach To Melanoma Treatment Shows Promise

Date: Mar-25-2013
Scientists have characterized how the functionality of genetically engineered T cells administered therapeutically to patients with melanoma changed over time. The data, which are published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, highlight the need for new strategies to sustain antitumor T cell functionality to increase the effectiveness of this immunotherapeutic approach...

An Effective HIV Vaccine May Be Possible By Harnessing Immune Cells' Adaptability To Design

Date: Mar-25-2013
In infected individuals, HIV mutates rapidly to escape recognition by immune cells. This process of continuous evolution is the main obstacle to natural immunity and the development of an effective vaccine. A new study published by Cell Press in the journal Immunity reveals that the immune system has the capacity to adapt such that it can recognize mutations in HIV. The findings suggest that our immune cells' adaptability could be harnessed to help in the fight against AIDS...