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.
Defensive medicine, to prevent malpractice claims, are far higher costs than medical personnel, but the United States shift to government health care is going to add a third component. Tests will be free and people will demand them.
Dr. Alai Tan, a senior biostatistician in the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Sealy Center on Aging and lead author of a new study has concluded that providing better access to health care may lead to the overuse of mammograms for women who regularly see a primary care physician and who have a limited life expectancy.
Screening women in this category could subject them "to greater risks of physical, emotional and economic suffering" but it could happen anyway.
First Lady Michelle Obama may mean well, but overturning school lunch policy based on the beliefs of someone who was paid $300,000 per year to do community outreach for a university wasn't really helping the poor children for whom a school lunch may be their most meaningful meal of the day.
Mandating fruit, which is what the USDA required in 2012, is fine, except a lot of it goes in the garbage. Most decisions are based on fads and gimmicks rather than real data.
Vermont's Charlotte Central school cafeteria has basically a restaurant menu, with locally sourced ingredients, including herbs and vegetables from the playground garden. There's just one problem; the higher cost is obvious but does it work?
A study published today in EMBO Molecular Medicine reveals that the loss of function of the gene RARRES3 in breast cancer cells promotes metastasis to the lung.
The research, headed by Roger Gomis, ICREA Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), is the result of a collaboration between two IRB labs and Joan Massagué, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
The scientists demonstrate that RARRES3 is suppressed in estrogen receptor-negative (ER-) breast cancer tumours, thus stimulating the later invasion of the cancer cells and conferring them "a greater malignant capacity," says Gomis, head of the Growth control and cancer metastasis lab at the IRB.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) receives comprehensive clinical study data from drug manufacturers and that data form the basis for the decision on the approval of new drugs.
In 2013, EMA issued a draft policy to make
clinical study data
available to researchers and decision-makers, with extensive data transparency, a move which Science 2.0 applauded. But the latest policy clarification is a puzzle, because it accomplishes almost nothing of any value to the broad community.
Only reading allowed
WASHINGTON D.C., May 27, 2014 -- It took every inch of the Large Hadron Collider's 17-mile length to accelerate particles to energies high enough to discover the Higgs boson. Now, imagine an accelerator that could do the same thing in, say, the length of a football field. Or less.
That is the promise of laser-plasma accelerators, which use lasers instead of high-power radio-frequency waves to energize electrons in very short distances. Scientists have grappled with building these devices for two decades, and a new theoretical study predicts that this may be easier than previously thought.
New Johns Hopkins research suggests that critically ill patients receiving steroids in a hospital's intensive care unit (ICU) are significantly more likely to develop delirium. Results of their research, they say, suggest minimizing the use of steroids could reduce delirium in the ICU.
While it usually goes away after a few days, studies show delirium in the ICU has a long-term impact. It has been associated with worse functional recovery and cognitive impairments of a magnitude consistent with moderate traumatic brain injury or mild Alzheimer's disease.
Overall, up to 80 percent of ventilated patients develop delirium in the ICU, and researchers have been looking for risk factors.
Heat shock protein (HSP90) has been suggested to be involved in neuronal protein misfolding and accumulation in Parkinson's disease (PD) brains leading to dopaminergic neuronal death and the eventual dopamine depletion. Therefore, HSP90 has been suggested as a therapeutic target in PD. Dr. Muhammed Al-Jarrah and co-workers from Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) point out exercise training significantly inhibited HSP90 overexpression in the soleus and gastrocnemius in PDe rats, which is a potential therapeutic target for ameliorating skeletal muscle abnormalities in PD. The relevant article has been published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 6, 2014).
Do you have a soul?
Even if you do, psychologists say, free will is a conscious choice.
This is nothing new. Religious people of 400 B.C. debunked atomic determinism because they believed in free will, just like they debunked genetic determinism of the early 20th century. To scholars, there has always been a difference between mind and soul but an article in Consciousness and Cognition rehashes ancient metaphysical arguments and use results from Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteers to do so, which means it is not a representative sample.
When it comes to e-cigarettes, critics seem to prefer regular cigarettes. Or snuff. Or snus. Or they just want to ban behavior. And the biggest tool they have is the precautionary principle. Sure, there are no known health effects but that is easy to fix - speculate about unknown potential ones.
Smoking is, of course, bad. E-cigarettes are not smoking, it is instead a nicotine vapor. The number of people who have gotten lung cancer from nicotine vapor is zero, which is not evidence for much, but it is certainly not evidence it is harmful. Since even among lung cancer patients, up to 50 percent have never smoked, smoking itself is only a risk factor for the disease. E-cigarettes are not even that.
Puberty is the defining process of adolescent development and it leads to variety of changes throughout the body - even including the brain.
Writing in
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), researchers find that cerebral blood flow (CBF) levels decreased similarly in males and females before puberty, but then diverge sharply in puberty, with levels increasing in females while decreasing further in males, which could give hints as to developing differences in behavior in men and women and sex-specific pre-dispositions to certain psychiatric disorders.
May 27, 2014 – A groundbreaking new study published today in Obesity, the journal of The Obesity Society, confirms definitively that drinking diet beverages helps people lose weight.
"This study clearly demonstrates that diet beverages can in fact help people lose weight, directly countering myths in recent years that suggest the opposite effect – weight gain," said James O. Hill, Ph.D., executive director of the University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and a co-author of the study. "In fact, those who drank diet beverages lost more weight and reported feeling significantly less hungry than those who drank water alone. This reinforces that if you're trying to shed pounds, you can enjoy diet beverages."
Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, have identified how a specific stretch of DNA controls far-off genes to influence the formation of the face. The study, published today in Nature Genetics, helps understand the genetic causes of cleft lip and cleft palate, which are among the most common congenital malformations in humans.
"This genomic region ultimately controls genes which determine how to build a face and genes which produce the basic materials needed to execute this plan", says François Spitz from EMBL, who led the work. "We think that this dual action explains why this region is linked to susceptibility to cleft lip or palate in humans."
