As people embark on the festive season’s usual round of drinking they should spare a thought for the damage they are doing to their brains. In particular, new research has revealed that while the brain is able to recover from some of the damage caused by alcohol abuse, the longer alcoholics postpone sobriety the less likely their brains may be to regenerate.
When it comes to an immune response against HIV, research funded by the Wellcome Trust in the UK and the National Institutes of Health in the US has found that bigger is not necessarily better, contrary to conventional medical wisdom. The research may have a profound impact on the development of a vaccine against the disease.
A new variant Chlamydia trachomatis strain has been isolated in Sweden [1,2]. Certain commercial diagnostic platforms generate false negative results when screening specimens from patients who are infected with the new variant strain.
Between 1 January and 31 October 2006, 106 cases with evidence of chikungunya infection, have been reported by the HPA Special Pathogens Reference Unit (SPRU).
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced that the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee has been re-chartered through 2008, and as part of this re-charter, the agency has updated the Committee?s role in the Medicare national coverage process.
Reducing dietary fat intake may decrease the chance of a breast cancer recurrence in women who have been treated for early-stage breast cancer, according to a randomized, phase III trial in the December 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today approved Cyanokit (containing the drug hydroxocobalamin, intravenous tubing and a sterile spike for reconstituting the drug product with saline) for the treatment of known or suspected cyanide poisoning. The approval, which is based on evidence of the drug’s effectiveness when tested in animals, improves the nation’s ability to respond to emergencies, including a potential attack by terrorists.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today narrowed its investigation of an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to Taco Bell restaurants in Northeastern states by focusing its efforts on finding the sources of shredded lettuce served at the stores. This new focus is based on the fact that three items — shredded lettuce, cheddar cheese and cooked ground beef — were implicated in a study conducted by the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the items most likely to have been the vehicles of pathogen (disease-causing agent) transmission in this outbreak. Based on a number of other factors, as well as food processing techniques used for cheese (pasteurization) and ground beef (cooking), lettuce is considered overall to be the single most likely source of the outbreak at this time.
New data from the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) B-33 study, presented today at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, showed that postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer who received Aromasin after five years of tamoxifen were 56 percent less likely to have a relapse of breast cancer than those who received placebo.
Researchers at Ohio State University have discovered that two microRNA (miRNA) molecules help control the oncogene responsible for a dangerous form of B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL), the most common human leukemia in the world.