Tag Archives: medical

Vitamin D deficiency, depression linked in international study

“Rather than being one of many factors, vitamin D could have a regulative role in the development of SAD,” said Alan Stewart of the University of Georgia College of Education. An international research partnership between UGA, the University of Pittsburgh and the Queensland University of Technology in Australia reported the finding in the November 2014 issue of the journal Medical Hypotheses. Stewart and Michael Kimlin from QUT’s School of Public Health and Social Work conducted a review of more than 100 leading articles and found a relationship between vitamin D and seasonal depression…

Antiangiogenic treatment improves survival rates in animal model of ovarian cancer

Now research in an animal model finds that a novel combination therapy, which couples low-dose chemotherapy with an antiangiogenic treatment, resulted in better survival rates compared with standard therapy. Led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the University of Guelph, the findings show that the agent, 3TSR, not only led to tumor regression, but also improved tumor blood flow and enabled more efficient delivery of much smaller and less toxic doses of chemotherapy. The study currently appears online in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and will be published in the February 2015 print issue. …

Establishment of induced pluripotent stem cells from Werner syndrome fibroblasts

Werner syndrome is characterized by the premature appearance of features associated with normal aging and cancer predisposition. This syndrome occurs frequently in Japan, affecting 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 40,000 people. The therapeutic methods for this disease are very limited and it is expected that iPS cells can be used for the development of innovative therapies…

Need to encourage patients to screen for colon cancer? Try a lottery

Patients who were told they had a 1-in-10 chance of winning $50 were more likely to complete home stool blood tests that help screen for colon cancer, according to a new study led by a researcher at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University of Michigan. The findings appear in a special issue of Annals of Internal Medicine…

Gene Mutations and Process for How Kidney Tumors Develop identified

“These studies, which were performed in collaboration with Genentech Inc., identify novel therapeutic targets and suggest that predisposition to kidney cancer across species may be explained, at least in part, by the location of tumor suppressor genes with respect to one another in the genome,” said Dr. James Brugarolas, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Developmental Biology, who leads UT Southwestern’s Kidney Cancer Program at the Harold C. Simmons Cancer Center. The scientists’ findings are outlined in separate reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Genetics. …

Bone drug should be seen in a new light for its anti-cancer properties — ScienceDaily

Several clinical trials – where women with breast cancer were given these drugs (bisphosphonates) alongside normal treatment for early-stage disease – showed that they can confer a ‘survival advantage’ and inhibit cancer spread in some women, although until now no-one has understood why. A new study by Professor Mike Rogers, Dr Tri Phan and Dr Simon Junankar from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research has used sophisticated imaging technologies to reveal that bisphosphonates attach to tiny calcifications in tumours in mice. These calcium-drug complexes are then devoured by ‘macrophages’, immune cells that the cancer hijacks early in its development to conceal its existence. The study, which includes remarkable movies of the entire process described above, is published in the journal Cancer Discovery, now online…