Scientists have pinpointed a possible reason why pancreatic cancer is such an aggressive disease. Pancreatic cancer cells overexpress gelsolin family-capping proteins, which contribute to their cell motility.
Kids and adults will stay glued to video games this holiday season because the fun of playing actually is rooted in fulfilling their basic psychological needs. Psychologists at the University of Rochester, in collaboration with Immersyve Inc., a virtual environment think tank, asked 1,000 gamers what motivates them to keep playing. The results published in the journal Motivation and Emotion this month suggest that people enjoy video games because they find them intrinsically satisfying.
A long-term study of the most widely used osteoporosis drug has found that many women can discontinue the drug after five years without increasing their fracture risk for as long as five more years.
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.
Kasturi Haldar and colleagues from Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, investigated a protein in red blood cells (erythrocyte guanine nucleotide regulatory protein Gs) as a novel antimalarial target.
Two papers in this week’s PLoS Medicine suggest possible new avenues of treatment against malaria.
Latent infection with tuberculosis is common and some infected people develop the active form of the disease. Health-care workers (HCWs) can become infected, develop active disease, and can pass their infection on to patients and others. Research published in PLoS Medicine shows that HCWs in developing countries are at particularly high risk. Over half were found to have latent TB.
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.
Methamphetamine use may be associated with increased risks of major neck artery tears and stroke, according to an article published in the December 26, 2006, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
A gene variant linked to living a very long life–to 90 and beyond–also serves to help very old people think clearly and retain their memories, according to new research by scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their findings are published in the December 26, 2006 issue of Neurology.