Fifteen top international specialists in this field will gather from 25-27 June for a conference entitled, ?Inflammation and Chronic Disease?, part of the ?Barcelona BioMed? conference series organised by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the Fundaci?n BBVA.
Breastfeeding for a period of thirteen months or more has been shown to reduce the mother?s the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA), according to new data presented at EULAR 2007, the Annual European Congress of Rheumatology in Barcelona, Spain.
A NYC based anesthesiologist seemed to have passed on the hepatitis C infection to his patients. US Health Department is investigating a cluster of 3 new hepatitis C infections in people who received intravenous (IV) anesthesia from the same NYC-based anesthesiologist in August 2006.
A gene responsible for the single most common cause of hearing loss among white adults, otosclerosis, has been identified for the first time, a scientist told the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Nice, France. Melissa Thys, from the Department of Medical Genetics, University of Antwerp, Belgium, said that this finding may be a step towards new treatments for otosclerosis, which affects approximately one in 250 people.
Two studies presented today demonstrated that ROZEREM did not affect body sway at peak plasma levels, nor did it impair middle-of-the-night balance, mobility or memory performance in patients who suffer from chronic insomnia. The results of the studies were presented at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
“Junk DNA” is what biologists used to call heterochromatin, the highly repetitive, gene-poor DNA concentrated near the centromeres and telomeres of chromosomes. With the publication of version 5.1 of the genome of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, led by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their colleagues, the term “junk” will be heard less often. Heterochromatin, it appears, is crucial to genome maintenance and cell biology.
Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that patients with COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, have greater arterial stiffness. The researchers also found that those COPD patients with osteoporosis, a common complication of the respiratory disease, had even greater arterial stiffness. These premature signs of aging may explain why COPD patients are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease.
Researchers in the United Kingdom have demonstrated that high levels of pepsin, a digestive enzyme that is a marker for gastric aspiration, are associated with acute rejection of a lung transplant.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) researchers led by Daniel Nolan and Assistant Professor Vivek Mittal have found that bone marrow (BM) derived endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) play a critical role in the early stages of tumor progression and that eliminating EPCs stops cancer growth.
In a study appearing online on June 14 in advance of publication in the July print issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers at Charit?-Universit?tsmedizin Berlin report that the molecule known as TRAIL can limit excessive immune responses in bacterial meningitis, and as such may be of use to control inflammation of the spinal cord and brain, which causes brain cell death in this life-threatening disease.