Health News

Study Suggests That The Brain May 'See' More Than The Eyes

Date: Nov-05-2012
Vision may be less important to "seeing" than is the brain's ability to process points of light into complex images, according to a new study of the fruit fly visual system currently published in the online journal Nature Communications. University of Virginia researchers have found that the very simple eyes of fruit fly larvae, with only 24 total photoreceptors (the human eye contains more than 125 million), provide just enough light or visual input to allow the animal's relatively large brain to assemble that input into images...

Cells From Bone, Fat Tissue And Umbilical Cord Blood Can Help Animals Heal

Date: Nov-05-2012
Tendon injuries affect athletic horses at all levels. Researchers from the University of Connecticut are studying the use of stem cells in treating equine tendon injuries. Their findings were published in the Journal of Animal Science Papers in Press. Tendon injuries in horses tend to worsen over time as damage to the tendon creates lesions. Currently, horse owners treat tendon injuries by resting the horse and then carefully exercising the horse to control the growth of scar tissue in the tendon. Unfortunately, this treatment does not always work...

New Therapeutic Target Identified For Alzheimer's Disease

Date: Nov-05-2012
Research led by Chu Chen, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has identified an enzyme called Monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL) as a new therapeutic target to treat or prevent Alzheimer's disease. The study was published in the Online Now section of the journal Cell Reports. The research team found that inactivation of MAGL, best known for its role in degrading a cannabinoid produced in the brain, reduced the production and accumulation of beta amyloid plaques, a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease...

Discovery Of Gene Switch Important In Cancer Development

Date: Nov-05-2012
Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Helsinki in Finland have shown that the "switches" that regulate the expression of genes play a major role in the development of cancer. In a study, published in Science, they have investigated a gene region that contains a particular single nucleotide variant associated with increased risk for developing colorectal and prostate cancers - and found that removing this region caused dramatic resistance to tumor formation...

The Science Of Timbre: Music In Our Ears

Date: Nov-05-2012
New research, published in PLOS Computational Biology, offers insight into the neural underpinnings of musical timbre. Mounya Elhilali, of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues have used mathematical models based on experiments in both animals and humans to accurately predict sound source recognition and perceptual timbre judgments by human listeners. A major contributor to our ability to analyze music and recognize instruments is the concept known as 'timbre'. Timbre is a hard-to-quantify concept loosely defined as everything in music that isn't duration, loudness or pitch...

Feedback Loop Maintains Basal Cell Population

Date: Nov-05-2012
Notch - the protein that can help determine cell fate - maintains a stable population of basal cells in the prostate through a positive feedback loop system with another key protein - TGF beta (transforming growth factor beta), said Baylor College of Medicine researchers in the journal Cell Stem Cell. "When basal cell homeostasis (or maintenance of a stable population) is disrupted, it may be part of the process that initiates prostate cancer," said Dr. Li Xin, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at BCM and a senior author of the report...

Producing Stem Cells From Peripheral Blood

Date: Nov-05-2012
Stem cells are a valuable resource for medical and biological research, but are difficult to study due to ethical and societal barriers. However, genetically manipulated cells from adults may provide a path to study stem cells that avoid any ethical concerns. A new video-protocol in JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), details steps to generate human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from cells in the peripheral blood. The technique has been developed by Boston University's Dr. Gustavo Mostoslavsky and his colleagues...

Pradaxa (Dabigatran) Bleeding Rates No Higher Than Warfarin, Says FDA

Date: Nov-04-2012
Bleeding rates linked to new use of Pradaxa (Dabigatran) are no higher than they are with new users of warfarin, says a new FDA Drug Safety communication report update (November 2, 2012). The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) carried out an evaluation on Pradaxa after receiving several post-marketing reports of bleeding among new users...

ADHD Drugs Do Not Raise Heart Risk In Children

Date: Nov-04-2012
Children who take Adderall, Ritalin, and other central nervous system stimulants, do not have a higher chance of developing serious heart conditions. This finding, confirming research from 2011, came from a study at the University of Florida and was published in the British Medical Journal. The study contributes to a clinical and policy debate of treatment risks for kids with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) that has been going on for 10 years. "This is a question that has been lingering for about 10 years," said Almut Winterstein, Ph.D...

Scientists Identify Gene Required For Nerve Regeneration

Date: Nov-04-2012
A gene that is associated with regeneration of injured nerve cells has been identified by scientists at Penn State University and Duke University. The team, led by Melissa Rolls, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, has found that a mutation in a single gene can entirely shut down the process by which axons -- the parts of the nerve cell that are responsible for sending signals to other cells -- regrow themselves after being cut or damaged...