Health News

Schizophrenia, Other Brain Abnormalities Respond To Early Intervention

Date: Aug-23-2012
Preemptive cognitive training - an early intervention to address neuropsychiatric deficiencies - can help the brain function normally later in life, a team of researchers has found through a series of experiments on laboratory rats. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the journal Neuron, hold promise for addressing a range of brain impairments in humans, including schizophrenia...

Makeup That Shields Soldiers From Searing Heat Of Bomb Blasts

Date: Aug-23-2012
Camouflage face makeup for warfare is undergoing one of the most fundamental changes in thousands of years, as scientists described a new face paint that both hides soldiers from the enemy and shields their faces from the searing heat of bomb blasts. Firefighters also could benefit from the new heat-resistant makeup, according to the report. It was part of a broader symposium on innovations in ingredients for personal care products held during the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society...

Mechanism Responsible For Eye Movement Disorder Identified

Date: Aug-23-2012
Discovery could lead to therapies for this condition, and a better understanding of how genetic mutations in the nervous system cause movement disorders in other parts of the body with a long term view to encouraging the re-growth of damaged cells A research team from King's College London and the University of Exeter Medical School has identified how a genetic mutation acts during the development of nerves responsible for controlling eye muscles, resulting in movement disorders such as Duane Syndrome, a form of squint...

Key Discovery Improves Understanding Of How Stem Cells Can Become Anything

Date: Aug-23-2012
How do stem cells preserve their ability to become any type of cell in the body? And how do they "decide" to give up that magical state and start specializing? If researchers could answer these questions, our ability to harness stem cells to treat disease could explode. Now, a University of Michigan Medical School team has published a key discovery that could help that goal become reality. In the current issue of the prestigious journal Cell Stem Cell, researcher Yali Dou, Ph.D...

"Antibody-Recruiting Molecules" Being Developed To Aid The Body's Natural Disease-Fighting Proteins

Date: Aug-23-2012
Like recruiters pitching military service to a throng of people, scientists are developing drugs to recruit disease-fighting proteins present naturally in everyone's blood in medicine's war on infections, cancer and a range of other diseases. They reported on the latest advances in this new approach at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. David Spiegel, M.D., Ph.D...

Neurotransmitter Production Appears To Be Slowed Down By 'Alzheimer Protein'

Date: Aug-23-2012
RUB researchers analyze proteome of cells How abnormal protein deposits in the brains of Alzheimer's patients disrupt the signalling between nerve cells has now been reported by researchers in Bochum and Munich, led by Dr. Thorsten Müller from the Medizinisches Proteom-Center of the Ruhr-Universität, in the journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. They varied the amount of APP protein and related proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease in cell cultures, and then analysed how this manipulation affected other proteins in the cell...

A Wealth Of Information About Epigenetics And Disease Could Be Provided By Archived Guthrie Cards

Date: Aug-23-2012
Over the last 50 years, the spotting of newborn's blood onto filter paper for disease screening, called Guthrie cards, has become so routine that since 2000, more than 90% of newborns in the United States have had Guthrie cards created. In a study published online in Genome Research, researchers have shown that epigenetic information stored on archived Guthrie cards provides a retrospective view of the epigenome at birth, a powerful new application for the card that could help understand disease and predict future health...

Social Rejection Can Inhibit Cognitive Ability Or Fuel Imaginative Thinking

Date: Aug-23-2012
It's not just in movies where nerds get their revenge. A study by a Johns Hopkins University business professor finds that social rejection can inspire imaginative thinking, particularly in individuals with a strong sense of their own independence. "For people who already feel separate from the crowd, social rejection can be a form of validation," says Johns Hopkins Carey Business School assistant professor Sharon Kim, the study's lead author. "Rejection confirms for independent people what they already feel about themselves, that they're not like others...

Seeking A Cure For Type 1 Diabetes: A New Marker For Identifying Precursors To Insulin-Producing Cells In Pancreas

Date: Aug-23-2012
For the millions of people worldwide with type 1 diabetes who cannot produce sufficient insulin, the potential to transplant insulin-producing cells could offer hope for a long-term cure. The discovery of a marker to help identify and isolate stem cells that can develop into insulin-producing cells in the pancreas would be a critical step forward and is described in an article in BioResearch Open Access, a new bimonthly peer-reviewed open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online at the BioResearch Open Access website*...

Discovery Of Brain's Code For Pronouncing Vowels May Hold Key To Restoring Speech After Paralysis

Date: Aug-23-2012
Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease at 21, British physicist Stephen Hawking, now 70, relies on a computerized device to speak. Engineers are investigating the use of brainwaves to create a new form of communication for Hawking and other people suffering from paralysis. -Daily Mail Scientists at UCLA and the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech...