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The TAU researchers, led by Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu from the Department of Psychology's Neuroimmunology Research Unit, discovered that a transfusion of "young" blood –– blood which has been stored for less than 9 days –– increased the odds of survival in animals challenged with two types of cancer. This finding, reported in the journal Anesthesiology, may solve an age-old mystery as to why some blood transfusions during cancer-related surgeries may lead to an increased recurrence of cancer and others do not.
Despite the regular onslaught of mixed messages from those in scientific research land, I still take a multivitamin most days. (Thanks, Mom, for starting me off young with those delicious Flinstone Kids niblets of nutrition.)
Placebo effect? I don't know. I do know that I feel better when I remember to take my multivitamin, iron and vitamin D supplements, and the occasional fish oil horse pill. But will it help me in the long run with any aspect of my health?
They say this will improve the prospects of bringing drugs to the market more quickly at less cost, as well as accelerating progress in other forms of therapy, notably the use of stem cells in regenerative medicine.
ROCKVILLE, Maryland, December 19 /PRNewswire/ --
Neuralstem, Inc. (NYSE Alternext US: CUR) announced this morning that it has filed an Investigational New Drug (IND) application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin a clinical trial to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).
Apparently, the fabled laboratory mouse — from which we have learned so much about how the immune system works — can teach us only so much about how we humans get sick.
Davis, director of the Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, proposes that the current mouse-centered, small-laboratory approach be supplemented by a broad, industrial-scale "systems biology" approach akin to the one that unraveled the human genome.
An international research team has conducted the first detailed analysis of deaths during expeditions to the summit of Mt. Everest. They identified factors that appear to be associated with a greater risk of death, particularly symptoms of high-altitude cerebral edema and published their results in the British Medical Journal.

The study analyzed the birth and medical records of more than 95,000 children and their mothers in Tennessee to determine whether date of birth in relationship to the peak in winter respiratory viruses posed a higher risk for developing early childhood asthma. They found that while having clinically significant bronchiolitis at any age during infancy was associated with an increased risk of childhood asthma, for autumn babies, that risk was the greatest.
Need excellent boots? W. L. Gore&Associates is the way to go. Guitar strings? Yep, they make those too. Medical devices, electronics and now researchers at Rush University Medical Center are even using a small, soft-patch device made of a Gore-tex-type material to close a common hole found in the heart called a patent foramen ovale (PFO) in order to prevent recurrent strokes and transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) in adults.
The randomized, multinational clinical research trial may determine if repairing a PFO using this device, also known as the GORE HELEX Septal Occluder, is more effective in preventing strokes than medical management alone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted approval to use the device for PFO closures.Enter the injectable fake-bake. Melanotan is an analogue of the naturally occurring alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone and induces melanogenesis (note: do not confused melanotan with melatonin, a hormone associated with circadian rhythms). For those willing to inject themselves with an experimental drug, melanotan seems to provide said risk-takers with a tan sans sun or tanning bed exposure.
Their findings were presented Nov. 12 at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions conference in New Orleans.
"This is one of the strongest predictors of new-onset heart failure we've been able to find, and it holds up even when you control for other biomarkers and risk factors including high blood pressure and diabetes," says Javed Butler, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine and director of heart failure research at Emory University School of Medicine.
And the public is often right. For example, a 1994 headline in the San Francisco Chronicle announced “Hormones cut women’s risk of heart disease” but by 2001 that optimistic report was reversed as evidenced by a Washington Post article titled, “Hormones don’t protect women from heart disease.”





