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.
MIT has announced a $100 million gift from Koch Industries executive and MIT alumnus David H. Koch that will usher in new paradigms in highly integrative cancer research. The gift will bring together MIT scientists and engineers under one roof to develop new and powerful ways to detect, diagnose, treat, and manage this often deadly disease.
High blood levels of C-reactive protein, a substance linked to inflammation, appear to be associated with an increased risk for age-related macular degeneration, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Long denigrated as vestigial or useless, the appendix now appears to have a reason to be – as a “safe house” for the beneficial bacteria living in the human gut.
People who experience chronic job strain after a first heart attack double their risk of suffering from a second one, reports a research team from Université Laval’s Faculty of Medicine in the October 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A group of scientists, led by mathematicians, has taken on the challenge of building a common model of immune responses. Their work will radically improve our understanding of the human immune system by allowing all the scientific disciplines working on it to have a common reference point and language.
Professor Sir Martin Evans, Professor of Mammalian Genetics at the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Medicine. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, announced this morning that Professor Sir Martin was one of three winners for “a series of ground-breaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals.”
Pan-European collaboration is important for many clinical trials and essential for trials that are investigating treatments for rare diseases. That was the message delivered today by the European Medical Research Councils (EMRC), the membership organisation for medical research councils across Europe based at the European Science Foundation (ESF) in Strasbourg, which is coordinating two trials in rare diseases and about to launch a review of how best to implement clinical trials that are initiated by investigators.
A new study finds treatment for breast cancer differs between African-American women and white women, though the differences are partly dependent on insurance type. The study appears in the November 15, 2007 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.