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Scientists believe they have hit upon an early-warning system for identifying Alzheimer’s, after two separate new studies identified a “biomarker” of the disease that can be spotted in an eye test.
Early trials of two different techniques reveal that an indicator for the degenerative disorder can be identified in the retina and lens of the eye. Both methods were able to distinguish between probable Alzheimer’s patients and healthy volunteers with a high level of accuracy.
The scientists behind both projects stressed that their research was still at a very early stage but expressed hope that it could be developed into an eye test which could be used to identify people with the disease.
Dr Simon Ridley, head of science at the Alzheimer’s Research UK charity welcomed the research.
(Reuters) - An experimental drug from Roche helped people with an advanced form of skin cancer live longer without their disease worsening when used in combination with another treatment, the Swiss drugmaker said on Monday.
Pharmaceutical companies are looking to combination therapy to yield better results and drug cocktails are expected to be crucial as oncologists seek to block cancer on multiple fronts.
Cobimetinib, which is being developed in collaboration with Exelixis Inc, is designed to be used with another Roche drug called Zelboraf for patients with tumors that have a mutation in a gene known as BRAF that allows melanoma cells to grow.
About half of all melanomas have the genetic aberration the drugs target.
Results of a Phase III study involving 495 patients previously untreated for advanced melanoma found those taking both drugs lived significantly longer without their disease worsening compared to those taking Zelboraf alone.
Roche plans to present the results at an upcoming medical meeting and said it would file the data for approval with health regulators worldwide.
A large German database research is the latest clinical test to propose that a cheap generic treatment for diabetes can cut Alzheimer's risk, though conclusive evidence from a formal test could be 5 years away.
Previous researches have indicated that animals and people given the widely used drug for type 2 diabetes named pioglitazone, were less likely to develop Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia.
Stanford researchers have invented an inexpensive, portable, microchip-based test for diagnosing type-1 diabetes that could improve patient care worldwide and help researchers better understand the disease, according to a new study.
The test employs nanotechnology to detect type-1 diabetes outside hospital settings. The handheld microchips distinguish between the two main forms of diabetes mellitus, which are both characterized by high blood-sugar levels but have different causes and treatments, the press release added.
Up until now, making the distinction has required a slow, expensive test available only in sophisticated health-care settings.
"With the new test, not only do we anticipate being able to diagnose diabetes more efficiently and more broadly, we will also understand diabetes better - both the natural history and how new therapies impact the body," said Brian Feldman, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatric endocrinology and the Bechtel Endowed Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine, in the press release. Feldman, the senior author of the paper, is also a pediatric endocrinologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford.
Researchers are now seeking Food and Drug Administration approval of the device
Genes determining a person's ability to tackle one subject influences their aptitude at the other, accounting for around half of a person's overall ability, a new research has found.
The study considered around 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins. It focused on teasing apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability.
Twin studies provide an efficient way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture.
"Twins are like a natural experiment," said Robert Plomin, a psychologist at Kings College London who worked on the study.
After administering a set of math and verbal tests to the children, researchers found that the twins' scores were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. Findings further suggested that approximately half the children's math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic markup.
(Reuters Health) - The number of Americans having strokes and the number dying following strokes decreased over the past 20 years, according to a new study.
The declines in strokes and improvements in survival were similar between blacks, whites, men and women, according to the researchers.
“Stroke is still the fourth leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability in the U.S. but we’re doing better,” said Dr. Josef Coresh, the study’s senior author from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
More than 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 130,000 die as a result.
The vast majority of strokes are ischemic strokes, which occur when blood flow to the brain is blocked. About 10 percent of strokes, known as hemorrhagic stokes, are caused by leaking blood vessels.
Coresh and his colleagues write in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, that some studies have reported a decline in stroke rates.
Whether that decline has been consistent among people of all races and among both men and women is still up for debate, however.
Scientists funded by the Defense Department have just announced a breakthrough that could allow researchers to create in 220 days an extremely detailed picture of the brain that previously would have taken 80 years of scans to complete.
The military has been looking to build better brain hacks for decades with results that ranged form the frightening to the comical. This latest development could revolutionize the study of the brain but also the national security applications of neuroscience.
Scientists at Stanford University who developed the new way to see the brain in greater detail, outlined in the journal Nature Protocols, said that it could mark a new era of rapid brain imaging, allowing researchers to see in much greater detail not only how parts of the brain interact on a cellular level but also to better understand those interactions across the entire brain.
A Breakthrough in the Checkered History Of Brain Hacking
Scientists funded by the Defense Department have just announced a breakthrough that could allow researchers to create in 220 days an extremely detailed picture of the brain that previously would have taken 80 years of scans to complete.
The military has been looking to build better brain hacks for decades with results that ranged form the frightening to the comical. This latest development could revolutionize the study of the brain but also the national security applications of neuroscience.
Scientists at Stanford University who developed the new way to see the brain in greater detail, outlined in the journal Nature Protocols, said that it could mark a new era of rapid brain imaging, allowing researchers to see in much greater detail not only how parts of the brain interact on a cellular level but also to better understand those interactions across the entire brain.
A Breakthrough in the Checkered History Of Brain Hacking - Defense One
Pacemakers serve an invaluable purpose, by electrically stimulating a recipient's heart in order to keep it beating at a steady rate. The implantation of a pacemaker is a major surgical procedure, however, plus its presence in the body can lead to complications such as infections. Now, for the first time, scientists have instead injected genes into the defective hearts of pigs, converting unspecialized heart cells into "biological pacemakers."
The procedure was reportedly the result of "dozens of years of research," and was carried out by a team led by Dr. Eduardo Marbán at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.
The pigs, all of which suffered from complete heart blocks, had the gene TBX18 injected into their hearts via what is described as a minimally invasive catheter procedure. As a Cedars-Sinai representative explained to us, this caused some of the existing unspecialized cardiac cells to transform into sinuatrial node cells. The sinuatrial node consists of tissue that initiates the electrical impulses that set the rhythm of the heart – it's essentially the heart's natural pacemaker.
(Medical Xpress)—French researchers have developed a new radiation technique that appears to target tumour cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed, according to a new study in mice.
The technique, known as 'FLASH', was developed by researchers at the Institut Curie in Paris and delivers short pulses of intense radiation to tumour cells.
Radiotherapy uses high-energy radiation to permanently damage the DNA of cancer cells, causing them to die by committing suicide.
Standard radiotherapy treatment delivers a continuous beam of radiation to targeted areas. But this can also damage normal tissue surrounding tumours.
Most of the genetic risk for autism comes from versions of genes that are common in the population rather than from rare variants or spontaneous glitches, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found. Heritability also outweighed other risk factors in this largest study of its kind to date.
About 52 percent of the risk for autism was traced to common and rare inherited variation, with spontaneous mutations contributing a modest 2.6 percent of the total risk.
"Genetic variation likely accounts for roughly 60 percent of the liability for autism, with common variants comprising the bulk of its genetic architecture," explained Joseph Buxbaum, Ph.D., of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), New York City. "Although each exerts just a tiny effect individually, these common variations in the genetic code add up to substantial impact, taken together."
Buxbaum, and colleagues of the Population-Based Autism Genetics and Environment Study (PAGES) Consortium, report on their findings in a unique Swedish sample in the journal Nature Genetics, July 20, 2014.
Scientists have successfully tested in pigs a form of gene therapy that turns ordinary cardiac muscle cells into specialized ones that signal to the heart when it should beat, effectively creating a biological pacemaker that restored normal heart rhythm to pigs with heart block. Pig and human hearts are quite similar, so the results are encouraging, and researchers hope to begin human trials within a few years. Eventually, this procedure could offer an alternative to artificial pacemakers, which require surgical implantation and regular replacement.
Over the past few years scientists and researchers have made some inroads in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, but as yet no definitive cure has been found. In the latest promising development, a team of Canadian researchers has identified a genetic variant that can delay the onset of the disease by up to four years.
Alzheimer’s has been the focus of a great deal of research in the past few years. Scientists have identified genetic markers through advanced blood tests, discovered proteins complicit in the onset of the disease, investigated lasers that could potentially remove proteins that affect neurological processes and recently, a study by the University of California showed that the disease could be successfully halted, and even reversed, in mice. But while many of these developments are promising in the long run, the need to delay the diseases onset is considered crucial in the interim.
The Canadian research team, led by Judes Poirier, PhD, C.Q., from the Douglas Mental Health Institute and McGill University in Montréal, conducted a study on an extensive scale in which they found natural genetic variants that provided protection against the most common form of Alzheimer's.
"We found that specific genetic variants in a gene called HMG CoA reductase, which normally regulates the production and mobilization of cholesterol in the brain, could change the process and delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease by almost four years,” says Poirier. “This is a remarkable breakthrough in an area where research has been rarely successful in recent years.”
On July 24, British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced the release of new malaria vaccine known as RTS,S, to the European Medicines Agency (EMA). According to the companys recent press release, the EMA will then assess the quality, safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Reuters explains that although the shot will be assessed by EMA as well the World Health Organisation (WHO), the vaccine is anticipated to be used solely outside of the European Union.
As outlined on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), all forms of human malaria are carried by female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, but between 30 and 40 of the 430 species defined under this genus are vectors for transmission. Furthermore the CDC identifies four particular species of Plasmodium, the genus under which malaria parasites are defined, that can infect humans.
A new type of radiotherapy which could be delivered in a single dose during surgery is offering new hope for tens of thousands of women with breast cancer.
Intrabeam radiotherapy has been given a provisional go-ahead for NHS use by the health finance watchdog.
In new draft guidance, the National Institute for Health and Care excellence (Nice) said that the treatment option should be considered for people with early stage breast cancer.
Professor Carole Longson, director of health technology evaluation at Nice, said: "Unlike regular radiotherapy, with the Intrabeam Radiotherapy System only one dose is required.
"This single dose is given at the same time as surgery, eliminating the need for numerous hospital visits.
"Regular radiotherapy typically requires numerous doses over a three week period - although some people may receive it for longer - and is performed weeks or months after surgery or chemotherapy.
Researchers from Temple University School of Medicine have discovered how to permanently extricate HIV-1 from human cells, possibly avoiding the need for lifelong drug treatment. Though in its very early stages, this may prove to be a critical step in permanently defeating the disease.
At the closing ceremony of the AIDS 2014 conference last week in Melbourne, Australia, many of the speakers, including longtime AIDS researcher and International AIDS Society Presidential Award winner Eric Goosby, told of how utterly terrifying the disease seemed 30 years ago. That fear has not left. However as the medical community and wider community has learned more about the disease, the resolution to fight it and destroy it by 2030 according to UNAIDS has only become stronger. Hope now sits beside abject fear. Temple Universitys new discovery may yet be cause for greater hope. One of the main issues in the treatment of HIV-1 is not simply that it is expensive, but that antiretroviral therapy can only stay the illness, not destroy it. Many ARVs also have terrible side effects and they can speed up diseases more commonly associated with aging. They also may cause problems related to co-infections, such as Hepatitis C, where liver degradation is sped up by antiretroviral treatments.
Added to this is that HIV is a tricky and tenacious disease: it becomes part of a patients DNA making it nigh impossible to eradicate.
A new system developed by the Toumaz Group may hold the key to improving the level of life-saving attention received by patients, providing two-minute updates on their vital signs 24 hours a day with the use of a comfortable, wireless sensor pad. The equipment, known as SensiumVitals, is claimed to be so portable and convenient that it could even be used in the future to provide hospital-level observation to individuals in the comfort of their own homes.
The SensiumVitals system takes the form of a compact, single-use sensor pad, that when placed on the patient's chest, feeds regular updates on the their vital signs to hospital staff. According to the Toumaz Group, this will allow medical professionals to monitor the well-being of their patients in a more comprehensive and efficient manner. The system should also have the effect of creating a more relaxed atmosphere for nurses working a ward, allowing them to be more focused on the patient at hand, safe in the knowledge that their other patients are under near-constant observation.
A new fitness device claims it will make heart rate monitoring easier than ever. The PulseOn is a wrist-worn device with an optical heart rate sensor and an accompanying mobile app to store and present data. Gizmag took it for a spin to see if its claim would stand up.
We should start by saying that the PulseOn heart rate monitor is still very much in beta – and it shows. When the final device is shipped, the company tells us that its screen will be better, metallic finishings will be polished, the quality of the strap material will be improved, the overall quality and feel of the device will be better, the software will be more stable, additional features will be added, the battery life will be improved and data about distance and speed will be shown on the display.
