There’s already enough evidence to justify increasing vitamin D levels to improve health, according to the opinion piece by Drs Michael F. Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic and Jeffrey D. Roizen of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, they propose a randomized trial to conclusively determine whether vitamin D can reduce complication rates after surgery…
Using breast cancer patient data taken from The Cancer Genome Atlas, molecular biologists Curt M. Horvath and Robert W. Tell used powerful computational and bioinformatics techniques to detect patterns of gene expression in two cancer subtypes. …
Dasatinib fights leukemia by checking the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. But when used against other cancer cells, researchers found, the drug employs a different strategy: It causes the cells to clump together, thus preventing them from migrating. Without the ability to migrate, cancer cells cannot metastasize (spread to other parts of the body)…
Influenza is a major global health problem. Annual epidemics of seasonal influenza cause approximately three to five million cases of severe illness, leading to between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths worldwide. In the United States, seasonal influenza epidemics are estimated to account for 3.1 million hospitalization days and an average of $10.4 billion loss in direct medical costs. “It is thus urgent to develop new drugs for fighting influenza infection, which requires an understanding of the virus’s life cycle and its interaction with the host’s immune system,” said Yotam Bar-On, a Hebrew University Ph.D. …
Dasatinib fights leukemia by checking the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. But when used against other cancer cells, researchers found, the drug employs a different strategy: It causes the cells to clump together, thus preventing them from migrating. …
“Scientists have long observed that human and mouse cancers contain a lot of nerves in and around the tumor cells,” said Dr. …
Despite advancements in cancer treatment, breast cancer remains the most common cancer among Singapore women. Thirty percent of early breast cancer patients in the world experience relapse due to metastasis, or the spread of cancer cells to other organs in the body. Some patients also do not respond well to chemotherapy…
The authors are Trevor J. Royce, M.D., M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues…
UK researchers at the London School of Hygiene &Tropical Medicine and the Farr Institute of Health Informatics estimate that over 12,000 cases of these 10 cancers each year are attributable to being overweight or obese, and calculate that if average BMI in the population continues to increase, there could be over 3500 extra cancers every year as a result. “The number of people who are overweight or obese is rapidly increasing both in the UK and worldwide. It is well recognised that this is likely to cause more diabetes and cardiovascular disease. …
The study was conducted amongst children with Down’s syndrome — who are 20-50 times more prone to childhood leukemias than other children — and involved analysing the DNA sequence of patients at different stages of leukemia. The researchers uncovered that two key genes (called RAS and JAK) can mutate to turn normal blood cells into cancer cells. However, these two genes never mutate together, as one seems to exclude the other. This discovery means we can begin to identify which of the two genes are mutated in patients, and therefore more effectively target their cancer in lower doses (reducing toxicity for the patient) with less side-effects…