Health News

New study shows link between perfluorinated compounds and diabetes

Date: Dec-16-2013
The research group at Uppsala University has previously shown associations between high levels of environmental toxins, such as PCB, pesticides, and phthalates and diabetes. In the new study they have investigated whether elevated levels of another type of environmental toxin, so-called perfluorinated compounds, are related to diabetes. Perfluorinated compounds are used in a wide variety of industrial and consumer products, including fire fighting foam, non-stick cookware, and grease and water-repellent materials such as food contact material, ski wax and GoreTex, for example.

Altitude training: athletes 'only benefit at certain heights'

Date: Dec-16-2013
Exposure to high altitudes has been long believed to benefit athletes during training. The higher the altitude, the less oxygen there is, meaning the body works harder to increase its oxygen levels. It is thought this process can lead to better athletic performance, but it has been unclear as to which altitude height is the most beneficial - until now.A team of researchers, led by Benjamin D.

Sleep deprivation and increasing age linked to diabetes

Date: Dec-16-2013
Aging mice who are deprived of sleep displayed cellular stress in the pancreas. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania claim that this disrupts glucose homeostasis and is associated with type 2 diabetes.Lack of sleep has long been associated with adverse effects on human physiology. Previous studies have linked insomnia with a higher risk of death, increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and other chronic illnesses.

'Significant minority' of Dutch public backs euthanasia for elderly

Date: Dec-16-2013
Physician-assisted suicide has been legal in The Netherlands since 2002, where doctors can legally help patients die if the request is voluntary, has been well thought out and if the patient is suffering with no hope of improvement. This recent study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, explores to what degree the public agrees with the right for older people - who do not have a serious medical condition and who have a wish to die - to receive physician-assisted suicide.

Programming smart molecules: Harvard machine-learning algorithms could make chemical reactions intelligent

Date: Dec-16-2013
Computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have joined forces to put powerful probabilistic reasoning algorithms in the hands of bioengineers.In a new paper presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference on December 7, Ryan P. Adams and Nils Napp have shown that an important class of artificial intelligence algorithms could be implemented using chemical reactions.

New models of drug-resistant breast cancer point to better treatments

Date: Dec-16-2013
Human breast tumors transplanted into mice are excellent models of metastatic cancer and are providing insights into how to attack breast cancers that no longer respond to the drugs used to treat them, according to research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.The transplanted tumors maintain the genetic errors that caused the original cancer, even though they are growing in mice. As such, mice carrying human tumors can help identify drivers of tumor growth and serve as excellent test subjects for investigating new drugs.

Health spending is more efficient for men than for women

Date: Dec-16-2013
Health care spending is a large - and ever increasing - portion of government budgets. Improving its efficiency has therefore become critically important. In the first-ever study to estimate health spending efficiency by gender across 27 industrialized nations, researchers discovered significant disparities within countries, with stronger gains in life expectancy for men than for women in nearly every nation."We were surprised to find a large gender gap in spending efficiency throughout the industrialized countries of the world. The average life expectancy of women rose from 75.5 to 79.

Everolimus Added to Exemestane Boosts Overall Response in Postmenopausal Women with Advanced Breast Cancer

Date: Dec-16-2013
SAN ANTONIO, TX - The oral mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor everolimus combined with the steroidal aromatase inhibitor exemestane significantly improves the overall response rate in postmenopausal women with advanced breast cancer, according to data released at the 37th Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS).Howard Burris, MD, Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues elsewhere evaluated the secondary endpoints from the phase 3 Breast Cancer Trial of Oral Everolimus (BOLERO)-2.

Researchers at Penn help develop a dynamic model of tissue failure

Date: Dec-16-2013
The idea of growing replacement tissue to repair an organ, or to swap it out for an entirely new one, is rapidly transitioning from science fiction to fact. Tissue engineering techniques are improving in their ability to generate three-dimensional masses of cells and provide them with vascular systems for keeping them alive, but a more mathematically rigorous approach for designing these tissues is still needed.

Helping cancer researchers make sense of the deluge of genetic data

Date: Dec-16-2013
A newly improved internet research tool is helping cancer researchers and physicians make sense out of a deluge of genetic data from nearly 100,000 patients and more than 50,000 mice.The tool, called the Gene Expression Barcode 3.0, is proving to be a vital resource in the new era of personalized medicine, in which cancer treatments are tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual patient's tumor.Significant new improvements in the Gene Expression Barcode 3.0 are reported in the January issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research, published online ahead of print.