African-American men are more likely to have their prostate cancer return after treatment, but their disease is no more aggressive when it does recur than that of their white counterparts, according to a study led by Duke Prostate Center researchers.
Many consumers take precautions against identity theft, but what about medical identity theft? In addition to financial peril, victims can suffer physical danger if false entries in medical records lead to the wrong treatment.
In a study of the maternity records of more than 6,000 women, David J.P. Barker, M.D., Ph.D., and Kent Thornburg, Ph.D., of Oregon Health & Science University discovered a strong correlation between the size and shape of a woman’s hips and her daughter’s risk of breast cancer. Wide, round hips, the researchers postulated, represent markers of high sex hormone concentrations in the mother, which increase her daughter’s vulnerability to breast cancer.
The study is based on data of patients, treated in any of the 10 Andalusian public hospitals for one year, who were submitted to radiotherapy procedures for the treatment of tumours in the breast, lung, head and neck, cervix and endometrium.
Do cell phones cause brain cancer? There’s no sign of it, say many. But, if researchers in Europe are to be believed, regular use of a mobile phone over more than a decade raises the risk of brain cancer.
A US nationwide study examining the safety of Tasers® used by law enforcement agencies suggests the devices are safe, causing a low occurrence of serious injuries.
Among patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia, those who had previously received the pneumococcal vaccine had a lower risk of death and admission to the intensive care unit than patients who were not vaccinated, according to a report in the Oct. 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
New research shows that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a group of drugs commonly used to treat depression, may double the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, according to researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and colleagues. When the drugs are taken with aspirin and other similar pain medications, the risk is more than 600 percent higher.
By targeting a site in a mouse brain well connected to other areas, researchers successfully delivered a beneficial gene to the entire brain—after one injection of gene therapy. If these results in animals can be realized in people, researchers may have a potential method for gene therapy to treat a host of rare but devastating congenital human neurological disorders, such as Tay-Sachs disease.
A team led by researchers at the UCSF Positive Health Program has been named to receive $15 million over five years to expand understanding of the complex interactions between HIV and the immune systems of newly infected patients following HIV transmission.