A UNSW researcher has developed a world-first test which will radically improve cancer management. Professor Philip Hogg, the co-director of UNSW’s Lowy Cancer Research Centre, has developed the technology which will determine whether cancer cells are dying within one day of a patient’s treatment with radiation or chemotherapy.
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.
Rapid assessment and treatment of minor strokes and transient-ischaemic attacks (TIAs) massively reduces the chances of occurrence of subsequent major stroke, conclude two separate studies, one early Online and in an upcoming edition of The Lancet, and the other early Online and in the November issue of The Lancet Neurology.
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.
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.
University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers have identified the neurotransmitter serotonin as the chemical responsible for inhibiting milk production and secretion in human mammary glands.
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.
Almost immediately after it is donated, human blood begins to lose a key gas that opens up blood vessels to facilitate the transfer of oxygen from red blood cells to oxygen-starved tissues.
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.