Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
"No Child Left Behind" was a bipartisan law overwhelmingly approved by both Democrats and Republicans and signed into law by US President George W. Bush. It was created to address crippling flaws in an American education system that was still operating in the 1920s.
And it worked. For the first time in history, boys and girls achieved parity in math scores and scores for minorities went up across the board. Yet the law was vilified and when President Obama took office he honored the wishes of his education union campaign donors and gutted the program.
2,500 years after acupuncture - inserting needles into the body to control energy flow - was first used by the ancient Chinese, it remains in the realm of alternative medicine.
Some people swear by it, just like some swear by Atkins Diets and homeopathy, but alternative medicine does not become real medicine unless it survives double-blind clinical trials, and acupuncture can't beat placebos in those. As a substitute, we get a meta-analysis of randomized, clinical trials. A new meta analysis in Menopause indicates that acupuncture can affect the severity and frequency of hot flashes for women in natural menopause.
Hospice is the name for palliative care, primarily of terminally ill patients. There are few examples of more gracious, compassionate people, so if a patient wants antibiotics they are going to get them - even though there is little evidence that such medications improve symptoms or quality of life, and the downside is they may cause unwanted side effects.
Antibiotics are ingrained in contemporary medicine - they have saved an unknown number of lives, but in the hundreds of millions. 21 percent of patients being discharged from hospitals directly to a hospice program leave with a prescription for antibiotics, even though more than one fourth of them don't have a documented infection during their hospital admission.
In the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, the age of onset criterion for
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
was changed from 7, where it was placed in DSM-IV, to 12.
The writers said they changed the age to reflect the importance of clinical presentation during childhood for accurate diagnosis, while also acknowledging the difficulties in establishing precise childhood onset retrospectively. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says it has validated that decision.
Cancer, it is said, is nature's way of telling us to 'get the hint'. At a certain age, we all have more friends who get cancer. The older we get, the more often it happens. Even if we somehow slow aging, we would end up with cancer eventually, just like Gilles-Eric Séralini's experimental rats were predestined to get cancer when he let them live long enough.
Cancer is inevitable.
Perhaps not all cancer. The risk of developing several common cancers decreases with age, which has been a mystery. Mystery or not, it is what it is and researchers want to be able to take advantage of what they know.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is rightfully concerned that the U.S. faces “potentially catastrophic consequences” from the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill about 23,000 Americans a year.One solution is personalized antibiotic therapy, but that would require both rapid bacterial identification and narrow-spectrum antibiotics. Tailored antibiotic therapy would not only extend the clinical lifetime of new antibiotics by better managing resistance, it might also revive old antibiotics that have been abandoned due to resistance, toxicity, or their inability to penetrate bacterial membranes.
Cachexia is a profound wasting of fat and muscle occurring in about half of all cancer patients, raising their risk of death.
Many strategies have been tried to reverse the condition, which may cause such frailty that patients can't endure potentially life-saving treatments, but none have had great success.
Researchers recently demonstrated that, in mice bearing lung tumors, their symptoms of cachexia improved or were prevented when given an antibody that blocked the effects of a protein, PTHrP, secreted by the tumor cells. PTHrP stands for parathyroid hormone-related protein, and is known to be released from many types of cancer cells.
Biophysics researchers recently used short pulses of light to peer into the mechanics of photosynthesis to try and determine the role of molecule vibrations in the energy conversion process that powers life on earth.
Through photosynthesis, plants and some bacteria turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into food for themselves and oxygen for animals to breathe. It's perhaps the most important biochemical process on Earth and scientists don't yet fully understand how it works. New 'quantum biology' findings could potentially help engineers make more efficient solar cells and energy storage systems and provide evidence for exactly how photosynthesis manages to be so efficient.
Eosinophillic esophagitis (EoE) is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the esophagus. The condition is triggered by allergic hypersensitivity to certain foods and an over-accumulation in the esophagus of white blood cells called eosinophils.
EoE can cause a variety of gastrointestinal complaints including reflux-like symptoms, vomiting, difficulty swallowing, tissue scarring, fibrosis, the formation of strictures and other medical complications.
New research has identified a novel genetic and molecular pathway in the esophagus that causes eosinophillic esophagitis, opening up potential new therapeutic strategies for an enigmatic and hard-to-treat food allergy.
A decreased ability to identify odors might indicate the development of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, according to results of research reported at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2014 in Copenhagen.
Examinations of the eye could also indicate the build-up of beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer's, in the brain.
An international research project has reported that a new oral medication is showing significant progress in restoring vision to patients with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). This inherited retinal disease that causes visual impairment ranging from reduced vision to complete blindness, has remained untreatable.
"This is the first time that an oral drug has improved the visual function of blind patients with LCA," says the study's lead author, Dr. Robert Koenekoop, who is director of the McGill Ocular Genetics Laboratory at The Montreal Children's Hospital of the MUHC, and a Professor of Human Genetics, Paediatric Surgery and Ophthalmology at McGill University. "It is giving hope to many patients who suffer from this devastating retinal degeneration."
An archaeological dig in southeast Turkey has uncovered a large number of clay tokens that would ordinarily been have dated before the invention of writing - but the new find of tokens dates from a time when writing was commonplace, thousands of years after it was previously assumed this technology had become obsolete.
Sound strange? Perhaps not. Researchers compare it to the continued use of ink pens from the early 1800s in the age of computers.
