Tag Archives: disease

Unexpected discovery of the ways cells move could boost understanding of complex diseases

The study appears June 23, 2013 in an advance online edition of Nature Materials. "We were trying to understand the basic relationship between collective cellular motions and collective cellular forces, as might occur during cancer cell invasion, for example. But in doing so we stumbled onto a phenomenon that was totally unexpected," said senior author Jeffrey Fredberg, professor of bioengineering and physiology in the HSPH Department of Environmental Health and co-senior investigator of HSPH’s Molecular and Integrative Cellular Dynamics lab. Biologists, engineers, and physicists from HSPH and IBEC worked together to shed light on collective cellular motion because it plays a key role in functions such as wound healing, organ development, and tumor growth. …

Herding cancer cells to their death

If caught early, melanoma is relatively easy to treat. But in its late stages, it is a stubborn and deadly cancer. Until about a decade ago, patients survived only about seven months after starting treatment. Since then, therapies, such as vemurafenib, that specifically target signaling proteins essential to the proliferation and survival of melanoma cells have extended the lives of some patients. …

Pluripotent stem cells made from pancreatic cancer cells are first human model of the cancer’s progression

Still, researchers and clinicians don’t have a non-invasive way to even detect early cells that portent later disease. ‘There’s no PSA test for pancreatic cancer,’ they say, and that’s one of the main reasons why pancreatic cancer is detected so late in its course. They have been searching for a human-cell model of early-disease progression…

US adult smoking rate dips to 18 percent

Fewer U.S. adults are smoking, a new government report says. Last year, about 18 percent of adults participating in a national health survey described themselves as current smokers. The nation's smoking rate generally has been falling for decades, but had seemed to stall at around 20 to 21 percent for about seven years. In 2011, the rate fell to 19 percent, but that might have been a statistical blip. Health officials are analyzing the 2012 findings and have not yet concluded why the rate dropped, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The CDC released its study Tuesday. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable illness and death in the United States. It's responsible for the majority of lung cancer deaths and is a deadly factor in heart attacks and a variety of other illnesses. Concerned about the stalled smoking rate, the CDC launched a graphic advertising campaign last year that was the agency's largest and starkest anti-smoking push. The campaign triggered an increase of 200,000 calls to quit lines, and CDC officials said thousands of smokers probably went on to kick the habit. The CDC did a second wave of the ads earlier this year. The new report is from a survey of about 35,000 U.S. adults. Current smokers were identified as those who said they had smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and now smoke every day or some days. The rate was only 9 percent for people ages 65 and older, but about 20 percent for younger adults. More men than women described themselves as current smokers. The report did not include teens. About 16 percent of high school students were smokers in 2011, according to an earlier CDC report. Patrick Reynolds, executive director of the Foundation for a SmokeFree America, told The Associated Press that he was elated that the adult smoking rate, for years at about 20 percent, had dropped below that longstanding plateau. He said factors he thinks have contributed to fewer adults smoking include rising state and federal tobacco taxes, more spending on prevention and cessation programs, and more laws banning smoking in public. “This is a real decline in smoking in America. I'm ecstatic about it. It's proof that we are winning the battle against tobacco,” he said by telephone from Los Angeles.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/18/us-adult-smoking-rate-dips-to-18-percent/