Health News

Gout Guidelines Arm Patients And Physicians With Tools To Fight Painful Disease

Date: Sep-28-2012
Gout is one of the most common forms of inflammatory arthritis, affecting nearly 4% of adult Americans. Newly approved guidelines that educate patients in effective methods to prevent gout attacks and provide physicians with recommended therapies for long-term management of this painful disease are published in Arthritis Care & Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). Uric acid is produced by the metabolism of purines, which are found in foods and human tissue...

Unexpected Epigenetic Function Of Common Cancer-Causing Protein

Date: Sep-28-2012
Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is diagnosed in about 700,000 people in the United States every year. Commonly contributing to SCC is a protein called DNp63a - it goes abnormally high and the ability of a patient's body to kill cancer cells goes abnormally low. In many cases of SCC, it's just that simple. And science thought the function of DNp63a was simple, as well: the tumor suppressor gene p53 is responsible for recognizing and killing cancer cells, and in SCC, it's usually inactivated. It looked like high DNp63a repressed p53, made SCC...

Stivarga (Rcoloegorafenib) Approved For Colorectal Cancer Treatment

Date: Sep-27-2012
Stivarga (regorafenib), a multi-kinase inhibitor, has been approved for the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer that has continued to spread after treatment, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) informed today. The medication is presented as tablets and taken orally. Stivarga is a compound which was developed by Bayer Health Care and still belongs to the company. Bayer signed an agreement with Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. under which Onyx is given a royalty for any future worldwide net sales of Stivarga in oncology. Stivarga will be jointly promoted in the USA by Onyx and Bayer...

Viruses Could Sanitize Water Plants And Fight Deadly Superbugs

Date: Sep-27-2012
Scientists who have developed a way of using viruses to kill colonies of the common disease-causing bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, say it could be adapted to sanitize water treatment plants and help fight deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria or so-called "superbugs"...

Women's Brains Contain Male DNA

Date: Sep-27-2012
The brains of women often contain male DNA, which is most likely acquired from a pregnancy with a male fetus. Scientists have yet to discover what male DNA and male cells in the brain indicate, but there has been research of other kinds of microchimerism showing a link between the phenomenon to autoimmune diseases and cancer. Sometimes the connection is beneficial, but not always. Microchimerism is the existence of a small number of cells that emerge from another person, which in turn, makes them genetically different from the cells of the host...

Scientists Discover How To Halt Aging Muscles

Date: Sep-27-2012
New research distinguishes for the first time a key reason for declining muscle repair during aging and a way to stop this process in mice using a certain drug. This groundbreaking study, published in Nature, explains why muscle mass decreases with age, an important factor in weakness, causing lack of mobility and falls in elders.  Previous research has told us that stem cells can play a crucial role in stimulating muscle regeneration...

Black Youth Exposed To Alcohol Advertisement More Than Other Adolescents

Date: Sep-27-2012
African-American adolescents between the ages of 12 and 20 are exposed to more alcohol advertisements on TV and in magazines than youth in general, as stated by a recent report from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The recent study examines African-American youth exposure to alcohol by brand name and type, as well as African-American adolescent exposure to advertisements relating to black adults from a variety of different media companies, by use of data from recent years...

Spiny Mouse Regrows Skin With No Scarring

Date: Sep-27-2012
The African Spiny Mouse can regrow damaged tissues which has inspired scientists to seek out ways of applying this ability to human skin, researchers from the University of Florida wrote in the journal Nature. Biologists have been studying how salamanders manage to regrow lost limbs. A salamander is an amphibian, not a mammal, like we are. Translating what happens in amphibians to humans is extremely difficult. However, the African Spiny Mouse, a mammal, appears to have similar regenerative abilities to the salamander...

Novartis Psoriasis Drug Has Promising Results

Date: Sep-27-2012
AIN457 (secukinumab) can considerably improve the symptoms of moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis on the feet, hands and nails when taken once weekly during the first four weeks of treatment, compared to placebo therapy, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis announced today. Novartis added that the patients on secukinumab enjoyed improved quality of life by the twelfth week of therapy. Prof...

Study Adds To Efforts To Find More Effective Anti-Inflammatory Drugs

Date: Sep-27-2012
Researchers have discovered a previously unknown function for a protein that could add to the expanding arsenal of potential new drugs for battling inflammation and tissue fibrosis in a number of disease processes. Scientists from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report Sept. 27 in Developmental Cell that, a protein called TRPC6 mediates a molecular pathway critical to the body's repair processes following various forms of injury caused by disease...