Neufeld, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, studies the adenomatous polyposis coli protein, which protects against colon cancer. Many of her experiments involve testing mice with APC mutations, which cause colon cancer, and seeing if any new drug compounds will work against the mutations…
That’s hardly an earth-shattering observation, but the fact is that, aside from the most obvious physical differences between the sexes, medicine has traditionally treated women as if they were merely smaller men. “When we look closely, we tend to find differences” between men and women, said Sarah L. Berga, M.D., professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology and vice president for women’s health services at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “But for most of the past, we never looked.” That started to change in the late 1980s, when physicians and researchers recognized that women’s health encompassed more than those conditions unique to females; that women’s experiences with gender-common conditions and the treatments for them often differed significantly from those of men…
How a single protein can exert both a push and a pull force to nudge a neuron in the desired direction is a longstanding mystery that has now been solved by scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and collaborators in Europe and China. Jia-huai Wang, PhD, who led the work at Dana-Farber and Peking University in Beijing, is a corresponding author of a report published in the August 7 online edition of Neuron that explains how one guidance protein, netrin-1, can either attract or repel a brain cell to steer it along its course. Wang and co-authors at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Hamburg, Germany, used X-ray crystallography to reveal the three-dimensional atomic structure of netrin-1 as it bound to a docking molecule, called DCC, on the axon of a neuron…
“You can’t imagine the tangled web of data that describes the cause and effect relationships of microRNAs and genes. This multiMiR database will let researchers search efficiently through these relationships for pairings relevant to the diseases they study,” says Katerina Kechris, PhD, associate professor of Biostatistics and Informatics at the University of Colorado Denver, and one of the study’s senior authors. In addition to assisting researchers search for relationships between microRNAs and their genetic targets, the database includes drugs known to affect these microRNAs and also lists diseases associated with microRNAs. “Right now, within this database, investigators can find clues to potential new treatments for various diseases including cancer,” says Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, professor of Surgery and Pharmacology at the CU School of Medicine, director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center and one of the study’s senior authors. …
"Having timely discussions with terminally-ill cancer patients to establish goals for end-of-life care is important to maximize the quality of patient care. But by and large we’re not doing a good job at having these discussions early on," says lead author Garrett Chinn, MD, MS, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Division of General Medicine. "We know that patients facing terminal illness often wish to spend their remaining days at home, surrounded by loved ones. Since end-of-life care in the U.S…
source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/19/obesity-as-disease-what-does-it-mean-for-americans/
There are many routes to making snap judgments (not all of them particularly useful). One of these is our ability to get the "gist" of an entire image by analyzing the whole scene at once, based on interpretation of global properties and image statistics, not focusing on specific details.That seems to be what medical experts can do. They are not perfect in a fraction of a second but they do far better than random guessing when classifying medical images as normal or abnormal even though, in that blink of an eye, they cannot tell you where the problem might be located. …