People older than 60 with high blood pressure are less likely than other groups of patients to receive advice from their doctors about lifestyle modifications that can help lower their blood pressure, a study by UNC researchers concludes.
Despite the availability of life-saving antiretroviral treatment, people infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) continue to die and suffer from complications of AIDS, mainly due to delayed diagnosis and initiation of treatment. A researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and colleagues at Yale University have shed light on why this problem persists. They report their findings in the November issue of the journal Medical Care.
Platinum complexes such as the well-known cisplatin are powerful antitumor medications. They cross the cell membrane and reach the nucleus, where they attach to DNA and stop cell growth. But how does cisplatin get to the nucleus? Italian researchers have now proven that a copper transport protein may play a critical role. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, they present their hypothesis about the transport mechanism.
The term Emotional Intelligence could be defined as the capacity to perceive, comprehend and regulate one’s own emotions and those of others so as to be able to distinguish between emotions and use this information as a guide for one’s thoughts and actions. One of the important benefits of developing this type of intelligence is the ability to learn how to interact with others and to face an ever changing social and cultural world more effectively.
The challenges that autistic patients face become more pronounced during adolescence, a crucial period when many kinds of social behaviours are developed and when these individuals can become more keenly aware of their relationship difficulties. A paper by Dr. Eric Fombonne, Head of the Division of Child Psychiatry at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders describes the effectiveness of social skills training groups for autistic adolescents.
The role of endosonography (ES) in digestive diseases is expanding gradually from diagnostic applications to therapeutic ones. The feasibility of ES-guided cholangiopancreatography was first reported by Harada et al. (pancreatography) and Wiersema et al. (cholangiography) in 1995 and 1996, respectively. Several reports on the application of ESBD for a therapeutic purpose have been published since 2001. However, there have been no reports as to the influence of this technique on the gut wall, the bile duct, and the intervening tissues.
Liver cirrhosis is a worldwide disease with an incidence of 5 – 10% and represents a major health problem everywhere. Prognosis depends on the degree of liver damage and etiology of cirrhosis. Treatment is complex and often very expensive. Due to this, the attempts of researchers are focused on finding the most optimal therapeutic modalities, which depend mostly on the stage of cirrhosis.
Two recent commentaries appearing in the November issue of Nutrition Reviews find that the introduction of flour fortified with folic acid into common foods was followed by an increase in colon cancer diagnoses in the U.S. and Canada. The two new review articles address these recent findings and provide an overview of the existing evidence on folic acid fortification and the associated policy issues.
Severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) is a fatal systemic disease featuring acute onset, serious conditions, high incidence of complications and 20 – 30% mortality, mainly due to multiple organ failure at its early stage. The pathogenesis of SAP is closely related to factors such as activation of pancreatin, release of inflammatory mediators, microcirculation disturbance and apoptosis.
When a person learns they are suffering from cancer, the first question in their mind is always: “How much time do I have?” Unfortunately, this is a question to which the researchers have long been seeking an absolute answer. Tumor progression to local invasion and metastasis are the most relevant processes for prognosis, and predictive factors for survival are sometimes the only hope for cancer patients. Tumor suppressors and adhesion molecules represent one of the primary challenges in cancer therapy.