By all expectations, it shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. A combination of bone marrow transplantation and gene therapy greatly lengthened the lives of laboratory mice doomed by a rapidly progressing, fatal neurodegenerative disorder also found in people.
Advances in medical technology are a main factor driving the trend of increasing health-care costs, and industry stakeholders agree that improved evaluation methods are needed to better measure the benefits and risks of new technologies and procedures in order to avoid misallocation of health-care dollars.
Preliminary research indicates that several specific genetic alterations are associated with the development of smoking-related head and neck skin cancers, according to a report in the Jan. 10 issue of JAMA.
A simple blood test for the protein NT-proBNP accurately predicts the risk of heart attack, heart failure, stroke and death in patients with known cardiovascular disease, according to a study led by a researcher at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) recently made significant strides toward settling a decades-old debate centering on the role played by stem cells in cancer development. According to the study’s findings, which appear in an upcoming issue of Nature Genetics and now available online, genes that are reversibly repressed in embryonic stem cells are over-represented among genes that are permanently silenced in cancers; this link lends support to the increasingly discussed theory that cancer is rooted in small populations of stem cells.
The Department of Health (DH) today (January 9) urged members of the public not to buy or use a proprietary Chinese medicine called Boy Joy, which was found to contain potentially hazardous ingredients that may cause side effects.
Scientists have discovered a new source of stems cells and have used them to create muscle, bone, fat, blood vessel, nerve and liver cells in the laboratory. The first report showing the isolation of broad potential stem cells from the amniotic fluid that surrounds developing embryos was published today in Nature Biotechnology.
A preliminary study suggests there may be hope in the offing for some sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome with a new therapy being tested by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Unexplained chest pain after a heart attack might be more dangerous than many physicians originally think. In a case study to be published in the January issue of the international journal Clinical Cardiology, physicians at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia report on a seemingly healthy 55-year-old man who had a silent heart attack and subsequent unexplained chest pain.
University of Pittsburgh investigators have successfully prevented the onset of type 1 diabetes in mice prone to developing the disease using an antibody against a receptor on the surface of immune T-cells. According to the investigators, these findings, which are being published in the January issue of the journal Diabetes, have significant implications for the prevention of type 1 diabetes.