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Hand Fractures

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Hand fractures are very common and can result in disability if not treated adequately.

Wrinkles and Anti-Wrinkle Treatments

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Anti-wrinkle treatments are for the repair of deep wrinkles, crow's feet and aging, for youthful skin. The procedures are laser wrinkle removal, anti wrinkle creams and other anti aging products.

Lack of Enzyme Explains Why Typhoid Fever is a Human-Specific Disease

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The bacterium Salmonella Typhi causes typhoid fever in humans, but leaves other mammals unaffected. Researchers at University of California, San Diego and Yale University Schools of Medicine now offer one explanation - CMAH, an enzyme that humans lack. Without this enzyme, a toxin deployed by the bacteria is much better able to bind and enter human cells, making us sick. The study is published in the Dec. 4 issue of iCell/i. In most mammals (including our closest ...

'Satiety Hormone' Links Obesity to High Blood Pressure

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Leptin, a hormone that regulates the amount of fat stored in the body, also drives the increase in blood pressure that occurs with weight gain, according to researchers from Monash University and the University of Cambridge. Being obese or overweight is a major risk factor for the development of high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Whilst a number of factors may be involved, the precise explanation for the link between these two conditions has been unclear. ...

People With Mental Illness More Likely to be Tested for HIV

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People with mental illness are more likely to have been tested for HIV than those without mental illness, according to a new study from a team of researchers at Penn Medicine and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published online this week in AIDS Patient Care and STDs. The researchers also found that the most seriously ill - those with schizophrenia and bipolar disease - had the highest rate of HIV testing. The study assessed nationally ...

NFL Athletes are Seeking Unproven Stem Cell Treatments

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Some National Football League (NFL) players have been seeking out unproven stem cell therapies to help accelerate recoveries from injuries, according to a new paper from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. While most players seem to receive treatment within the United States, several have traveled abroad for therapies unavailable domestically and may be unaware of the risks involved, the paper found. The paper is published in the 2014 ...

What Do New Parents Think About Newborn Genomic Testing?

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A study published this week in iGenetics in Medicine/i is the first to explore new parents' attitudes toward newborn genomic testing. The findings suggest that if newborn genomic testing becomes available, there would be robust interest among new parents, regardless of their demographic background. The study, led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Boston Children's Hospital, found that the majority of parents surveyed were interested in ...

Malaria

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Malaria is caused by a parasite that enters blood through the bite of an infected mosquito. It is characterized by fever, vomiting, shivering, sweating and other symptoms.

US Medical Schools Should Amend Admission Policies

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An article published in the journal 'Academic Medicine', a journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, states that medical schools have an ethical obligation to change admission policies in order to accept applications from undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. Such students are referred as Dreamers after a proposed federal law called the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors). The DREAM Act is yet to become law. Co-authors ...

Link Between Sexting and Pornography

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Researchers have found a statistically significant link between adolescents viewing pornography or music videos and sexting i.e. sharing sexually explicit content via text, photo, or video using cell phones, email, or social networking sites for both boys and girls. 300 teens were part of the study. Editor-in-Chief Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCB, BCN, Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, California and Virtual Reality Medical Institute, Brussels, Belgium ...

PET Scans Help Identify Effective TB Drugs

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Sophisticated lung imaging techniques like the PET scan can better predict which drugs are likely to be effective for treating tuberculosis (TB) lung infection in human and macaque studies, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine and their international collaborators. Researchers are hoping the scans could be useful in confirming drug resistance that can help get new treatments to patients faster. First-line treatment of TB ...

ISP Drug Shows Promising Results Rat Experiments to Treat Paralysis

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Laborartory studies in mice have shown that a drug called intracellular sigma peptide (ISP) has promising results in restoring functions like the ability to walk, to balance and urinate, lost due to paralyzing injury to the spinal cord. Scientists are hoping that with further studies ISP could be used for therapy in humans. Jerry Silver, a professor of neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio said, "We're very excited at the possibility ...

Novartis Flu Vaccine Cleared by European Medicines Agency

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No evidence for a causal relation between the reported fatal events in Italy and the administration of Novartis flu vaccine Fluad has been found by the Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). During the current vaccination campaign in Italy, 19 people were reported to have died after being given the jab. The Italian Pharmaceutical Agency (AIFA) said, "It had been notified of 19 deaths among people who had died ...

Latent Herpes Virus Infection can be Treated With Tranylcypromine (TCP)

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Researchers have found an effective treatment approach to inhibit and keep the latent herpes simplex virus from reactivating and causing disease with the help of an existing drug, tranylcypromine (TCP), which blocked a protein called LSD1 that plays a major role in the initiation of herpes simplex virus infection. Current treatments require active viral replication and targets late stages of the infection, which has led to development of drug resistance. This study ...

EU's Ebola Coordinator Focused to Have More Medical Personnel on the Ground

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The European Union's (EU) Ebola coordinator, Christos Stylianides, said that Europe must send more specialized medical personnel, including doctors, nurses, hygienists, disease specialists, psychologists and social workers, to West Africa and help reconstruct local health systems to tackle the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Mali. It has been difficult to find volunteers due to the risk of contagion for medical personnel. The EU has tried ...

Using Executed Prisoner Organs to be Stopped: China Renews Pledge

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The controversial practice of using executed prisoners as a source of transplant organs will be stopped in China from January 2015, a Chinese newspaper reported Thursday. This promise has been made repeatedly in the past. High demand for organs in China and a chronic shortage of donations mean that death row inmates have been a key source for years, generating heated controversy. International human rights groups have accused Chinese authorities of harvesting ...

Ebola Tops Yahoo 2014's Most Searched Topic, Searched More Than IPhone

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Ebola tops the most searched topic on Yahoo for the year 2014, and is well ahead in number of searches for celebrities and gadgets. Yahoo revealing its Year in Review for 2014, where the deadly disease emerged as the most-searched item of the year, while Minecraft, a popular video game whose developer was bought by Microsoft, ranked 2nd, CNet reported. Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lawrence, Kaley Cuoco, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus and Jennifer ...

Creating a Better Health Care Experience to Alleviate Distress in Lesbian, Bisexual Women

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Sitting on an exam table in a flimsy gown can intimidate anyone. And if you happen to be gay, lesbian or bisexual, the experience can be even worse. As a woman of sexual minority, Nicole Flemmer has encountered medical misinformation and false assumptions. She was once diagnosed with "ego dystonic homosexuality" - a long-discredited term - without her knowledge or an appropriate discussion with the doctor. She discovered the notation years later when she happened ...

Reducing Drug Allergies Without Alerting the Immune System

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An enzyme that usually triggers strong allergic reactions now circulates in the veins without alerting the immune system in a group of mice. As INRS Energie Materiaux Telecommunications Research Centre Professor Marc A. Gauthier explains in an article published in the journal emNature Communications/em, a polymer was used to camouflage the enzyme before it was injected into the rodents. This was achieved by coating the enzyme to avoid an immune ...

Sierra Leone Receives (Dollar) 160m from World Bank

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World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim announced a (Dollar) 160 million two-year economic recovery plan to help Sierra Leone fight the worst Ebola outbreak on record. Kim said after a closed-door meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma in Freetown the cash would go towards regional operations centres and emergency response teams in the hard-hit west and north of the country. The aid would also focus on the country's floundering farming sector and rural job creation, ...

Virginia Tech Biologists Connect Sleep Cycle, Cancer Incidence

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People who work around the clock could actually be setting themselves back, claim Virginia Tech biologists. Researchers found that a protein responsible for regulating the body's sleep cycle, or circadian rhythm, also protects the body from developing sporadic forms of cancers. "The protein, known as human period 2, has impaired function in the cell when environmental factors, including sleep cycle disruption, are altered," said Carla Finkielstein, ...

Four New Bird Flu Deaths in Egypt

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Egypt reported four new deaths from bird flu, taking to seven the number of people that the H5N1 virus has killed so far in 2014. The latest deaths from H5N1, a strain that has killed more than 400 people worldwide since first appearing in 2003, were reported in the North African country in the past two weeks. Over the same period the number of cases of H5N1 infections in Egypt had doubled to 14, health ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghafar told AFP. ...

Brace is Necessary for Spinal Fracture Healing

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Compression fractures in the spine due to osteoporosis, a common condition causing progressive bone loss and increased fracture risk are common in older women. A new study appearing in the December 3rd issue of the iJournal of Bone (and) Joint Surgery/i (JBJS) found that patients who wore a brace as treatment for a spinal compression fracture had comparable outcomes in terms of pain, function and healing when compared to patients who did not wear a brace. Nearly ...

Life-Threatening Higher Blood Clot Risk in Longer Surgeries

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The longer the duration of surgery, the higher the risk of a life-threatening blood clot, suggests a first large-scale, quantitative national study of the risk across all surgical procedures. The Northwestern Medicine study was published Dec. 3 in iJAMA Surgery/i, the iJournal of the American Medical Association/i. The finding will help guide surgical decision-making by enabling surgeons and patients to better understand the potential risk ...

ISP Drug may Lead to Spinal Cord Injury Treatments

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The barrier-breaking ISP drug did not cause spinal cord axons known to control movements to cross the scar and reconnect with brain neurons above the injury site. Dr. Silver and his colleagues think this means the ISP-induced sprouting helped the rats recover by increasing the signal sent by the few remaining intact axons. "This is very promising. We now have an agent that may work alone or in combination with other treatments to improve the lives ...

Peptide Shows Extraordinary Promise for Treating Spinal Cord Injury

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Scientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have developed a new chemical compound that shows extraordinary promise in restoring function lost to spinal cord injury. The compound, which the researchers dubbed intracellular sigma peptide (ISP), allowed paralyzed muscles to activate in more than 80 percent of the animals tested. The remarkable study, partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, appears in the December 3 edition of the ...

Novel Mechanism may Explain Chemo-Resistance in Bladder Cancer

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A novel mechanism, similar to how normal tissue stem cells respond to wounding, may explain why bladder cancer stem cells contribute to chemo-resistance after multiple cycles of chemotherapy drug treatment. Targeting this "wound response" of cancer stem cells can potentially provide a novel approach for therapeutic invention, said researchers from the National Cancer Institute-designated Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine. The ...

Scientists Identify Principal Protein Sensor for Touch

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At The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), a team led by biologists has solved a long-standing mystery in neuroscience by identifying the "mechanoreceptor" protein that mediates the sense of touch in mammals. Mice that lack the Piezo2 ion-channel protein in their skin cells and nerve endings lose nearly all their sensitivity to ordinary light touch, but retain a mostly normal sensitivity to painful mechanical stimuli. "We can say with certainty that ...

Health Insurance More Affordable Under Obamacare

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This is now the second year for open enrollments and the critics have one question - did Obamacare really make health insurance more affordable? When enrollments under the Affordable Care Act first started last year, it was difficult to decide about whether premiums were too high or lower as the site was malfunctioning and many people were losing plans they wanted to keep. Very soon the website got fixed and 8 million people enrolled for health care. The number of uninsured ...

Children Conceived During Dutch Famine Have Altered Regulation of Growth and Development Genes

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According to researchers at the Leiden University Medical Center, Harvard University, and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, individuals conceived in the severe Dutch Famine, also called the Hunger Winter, were delivered with a normal birth weight but extensive research on the DNA of these children shows that the regulatory systems of their growth genes were altered, which may also explain why they appear to be at higher risk for metabolic disease ...

Study Set to Shape Medical Genetics in Africa

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Scientists from the African Genome Variation Project (AGVP) have published the first attempt to comprehensively characterise genetic diversity across Sub-Saharan Africa. The study of the world's most genetically diverse region will provide an invaluable resource for medical researchers and provides insights into population movements over thousands of years of African history. These findings appear in the journal iNature/i. "Although many studies have focused ...

New Smart Textiles can Monitor and Transmit Biomedical Info on Wearers

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Researchers at Universite Laval's Faculty of Science and Engineering and Centre for Optics, Photonics and Lasers have developed smart textiles able to monitor and transmit wearers' biomedical information via wireless or cellular networks. This technological breakthrough, described in a recent article in the scientific journal iSensors/i, clears a path for a host of new developments for people suffering from chronic diseases, elderly people living alone, and even firemen ...