Brain, Mind, and Neurofeedback: The Next 100 Years
Archives
All entries, chronologically...
Adding a variety of vegetables to one’s diet may help decrease the chance of getting lung cancer, and adding a variety of fruits and vegetables may decrease the risk of squamous cell lung cancer, especially among smokers. Study results are published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
One of the most difficult aspects of working at the nanoscale is actually seeing the object being worked on. Biological structures like viruses, which are smaller than the wavelength of light, are invisible to standard optical microscopes and difficult to capture in their native form with other imaging techniques. A multidisciplinary research group at UCLA has now teamed up to not only visualize a virus but to use the results to adapt the virus so that it can deliver medication instead of disease.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the problem is amyloid-β, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of amyloid-β have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. A new breakthrough from the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, however, suggests that treatments modeled on the blockbuster cancer drug Gleevec could be the solution. The findings are reported in the September 2 issue of the journal Nature.
Clinical trials using patients’ own immune cells to target tumors have yielded promising results. However, this approach usually works only if the patients also receive large doses of drugs designed to help immune cells multiply rapidly, and those drugs have life-threatening side effects. Now a team of MIT engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor.
We all want that summer glow that comes from a day at the beach, but taking in the rays can have long-term implications for our health. Now Dr. Niva Shapira of Tel Aviv University’s School of Health Professions suggests a way to make fun in the sun safer – and it is all in our food. The results of this study were recently published in Nutrition Reviews.
Pancreatic cancers use the sugar fructose, very common in the Western diet, to activate a key cellular pathway that drives cell division, helping the cancer grow more quickly, a study by researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found. Although it is widely known that cancers use glucose, a simple sugar, to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between fructose and cancer proliferation, said the study’s senior author, Dr. Anthony Heaney, an associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery and a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher.
Adjusting the alcohol tax in Florida to account for inflation since 1983 would prevent 600 to 800 deaths each year in that state from diseases caused by chronic heavy alcohol use, according to a new study from the University of Florida. The Florida legislature last increased alcohol taxes in 1983. The research is published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research (ACER).
The effects of smoking cigarettes on gene activity have been investigated in the largest study of its kind. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Medical Genomics studied white blood cells taken from 1,240 people to identify 323 unique genes whose expression levels were significantly correlated with smoking behavior. Check the end of this report for a link to download this open access study.
Resveratrol – found in red wine, grapes, blueberries, peanuts and other plants – stops out-of-control blood vessel growth in the eye, according to vision researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The discovery has implications for preserving vision in blinding eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, the leading [...]
A new study led by a Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researcher shows that millions of cancer survivors are forgoing needed medical care because of concerns about cost. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study raises the concern that the long-term health and well-being of cancer [...]
Despite hopes that higher blood levels of vitamin D might reduce cancer risk, a large study finds no protective effect against non-Hodgkin lymphoma or cancer of the endometrium, esophagus, stomach, kidney, ovary, or pancreas. In this study, carried out by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and [...]
In healthcare, less money doesn’t always mean less service. The 2005 Medicare Modernization Act, which substantially reduced Medicare payments to physicians for administering outpatient chemotherapy drugs, has had a somewhat paradoxical effect. Rather than resulting in fewer treatments, as one might expect, a new study finds that the Act has actually increased chemotherapy treatment rates [...]
Recent Comments