In a case study in PLoS Medicine, doctors report on the case of a 35-year-old heroin user who came to the accident and emergency department with double vision, slurred speech, drooping eyelids and eye muscle weakness. The diagnosis turned out to be wound botulism. Wound botulism is a potentially fatal illness that occurs when spores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum contaminate a wound, germinate and produce botulimum nerve toxin.
It is widely hoped that neural stem cells will eventually be useful for replacing nerves damaged by degenerative diseases like Alzheimer disease and multiple sclerosis. But there may also be another use for such stem cells — delivering anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells.
Much like flipping a light switch, the hepatitis C virus turns on human immune defenses upon entering the body but also turns off those defenses by manipulating interaction of key cellular proteins, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.
Despite the explosive growth in size and complexity of the human brain, the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has actually slowed since the split, millions of years ago, between human and chimpanzee, an international research team reports in the December 26, 2006, issue of the journal, PLOS Biology.
Lancet study forcasts if a worldwide flu pandemic like the one in 1918-20 were to strike today it would kill between 51 and 81 million people, with 96 per cent of deaths being in poorer countries. The US study was led by Professor Chris Murray of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health.
UCSF scientists have identified a cell population that is a primary target of the degenerative brain disease known as frontotemporal dementia, which is as common as Alzheimer’s disease in patients who develop dementia before age 65.
The New York City trans fat ban is a step in the right direction, but the regulation that requires some restaurants to display calories as prominently as price is just as important. Also missing in the discussion? Replacing trans fat will saturated fat would be problematic.
New studies on nutrition and HIV from researchers at Tufts University in Boston find that a high percentage of people with HIV have the same two characteristics of metabolic syndrome, and that people with HIV on HAART may be at risk for zinc deficiency.
New research explains how movie theaters may increase profits by moving away from uniform pricing to variable pricing. The study is being published in an upcoming issue of the International Review of Law & Economics.
Psychological interventions for chronic low back pain are effective, a new review of studies has found. Not only do these approaches improve psychological outcomes such as depression and health-related quality of life, they also reduce patients’ experience of pain.