Doctors in doubt about a patient’s ailment could use Google to help them reach a diagnosis, researchers said today. A new Australian study recommends doctors use Google to help diagnose difficult cases, despite indications it’s only 60 per cent accurate. Specialists at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane studied how effective the world’s largest and most popular search engine is for helping diagnose rare diseases.
Researchers have identified a novel biomarker for brain tumors and have uncovered a potential role the marker may play when the tumor spreads or comes back after treatment. The biomarker, a protein known as “soluble attractin,” is normally absent in the central nervous system and is undetectable in cerebral spinal fluid unless malignant astrocytomas are present in the CNS. This newfound ability to identify biomarkers for malignant astrocytomas means physicians will have a minimally invasive method to track the success of treatments.
A study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis showed that in women whose initial breast biopsies revealed certain rare, yet benign breast conditions, more extensive follow-up surgical biopsies found cancer up to 25 percent of the time. Most of the cancers were invasive, meaning the tumors had penetrated normal breast tissue and would require treatment.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have figured out how one particular protein contributes to long-term memory and helps the brain remember things longer than an hour or two. The findings are reported in two papers in the November 9 issue of Neuron.
Just as clouds block the sun, they interfere with laser communications systems, but Penn State researchers are using a combination of computational methods to find the silver lining and punch through the clouds.
Researchers at the University of Rochester may have answered one of neuroscience’s most vexing questions — how can it be that our neurons, which are responsible for our crystal-clear thoughts, seem to fire in utterly random ways?
Revisions to the stem cell act would improve framework conditions for German researchers. International stem cell research has yielded important new findings in recent years, especially in research on human embryonic stem cells. It has extended and enhanced our knowledge of the properties of stem cells, for example in connection with regenerative cell treatment or the investigation of genetic diseases.
American researchers have found that giving a combination of imantanib and a drug that induces cell death was better at inhibiting the growth of Ewing’s sarcoma in mice than either therapy on its own, according to research presented at the 18th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Prague on Friday.
Scientists have found a way of using a protein made by prostate cancer to target and kill the cancer cells themselves. In preliminary studies the new therapy affected only the prostate, without causing damage to other healthy tissues, and now it is being tested in a phase I clinical trial, according to research presented at the 18th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Prague on Friday.
Researchers in the UK and the United States have found that a drug composed of an antibody carrying a highly toxic anti-cancer agent is well tolerated by patients at much higher doses than have been used before, according to research presented at the 18th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Prague on Friday.