September 9, 2006, 5:41 AM CT
Hair loss oily skin and cancer.
Xiao-Jing Wang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine
A pathway through which a gene's over-expression causes skin stem cells to switch from creating hair follicles to creating sebaceous glands have been uncovered by Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University.
The discovery by the laboratory of Xiao-Jing Wang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery, OHSU School of Medicine, and member of the OHSU Cancer Institute, points to a new pathway that could some day be used as a therapeutic target for not only treating hair loss and oily skin, but prevent and treat cancer.
The study's results are published in the current issue of the journal Developmental Cell.
Epidermal stem cells give rise to the outer layer of the skin that serves as a barrier for the body, as well as follicles that produce hairs and sebaceous glands that produce lipid oil to lubricate the skin. In aged skin, a protein called Smad7 is overproduced, which triggers hair loss and sebaceous gland growth.
The Developmental Cell study is the first to definitively link Smad7 over-expression and the pathological changes that occur in aged skin.
"In humans, scientists and medical doctors documented the aging skin phenotype a long time ago, and the Smad7 over-expression in aged skin was reported a few years ago, but nobody knew whether these two events had any link," said Wang, who also serves in the OHSU departments of Cell and Developmental Biology, and Dermatology. "We found the mechanism that links these two together".........
Posted by: Jesmi24 Permalink Source
September 7, 2006, 9:12 PM CT
Army Of Cells To Repair Injury
To speed healing at sites of injury - such as heart muscle after a heart attack or brain tissue after a stroke - doctors would like to be able to hasten the formation of new blood vessels. One promising approach is to "mobilize" patients' blood vessel-forming cells, called angiogenic cells, so these cells can reach the injured area.
Recently, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis demonstrated that a drug called AMD3100 can mobilize angiogenic cells from bone marrow of human patients in a matter of hours instead of days, as was the case with a related agent called G-CSF.
Angiogenic cells reside mainly in the bone marrow, and when mobilized they can circulate in the bloodstream, homing to sites of injury and helping repair and regrow blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to tissues.
"Like AMD3100, G-CSF can bring these beneficial cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream, but with G-CSF you don't see an increase in angiogenic cells until the fourth day," says senior author Daniel C. Link, M.D., associate professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology. "In a patient who has had a heart attack, that may be too late. In fact, two clinical trials of G-SCF found the therapy doesn't improve recovery from heart attacks".........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
September 6, 2006, 10:03 PM CT
How Often Do You Apply Sunscreen?
How often do you apply sunscreen? If it's anything less than once every 2 hours, you might be better off not using any in the first place.
So says Kerry Hanson, a chemist at the University of California at Riverside. She and her colleagues exposed human skin samples grown in the lab to UV radiation while they were covered with three common.
UV filters found in sunscreens: benzophenone-3, octocrylene and octylmethoxycinnamate. After just 1 hour, they found each compound had sunk into the skin, meaning its protective effect was greatly reduced. Worse, Hanson's team found that the samples contained more reactive oxygen species (ROS) than skin exposed to UV with no sunscreen on it. ROS are free radicals that can damage skin cells and increase the risk of skin cancer (Free Radical Biology and Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j. freeradbiomed.2006.06.011).
The Skin Cancer Foundation in New York recommends that people go no more than 2 hours between reapplications of sunscreen. Our findings tend to support that, says Hanson.
It might actually be necessary to reapply even more often. One way of counteracting free radicals, Hanson says, might be to add antioxidants such as vitamins C and E to sunscreens. "In previous work, we've shown that antioxidants can help neutralise ROS in the skin," she says, though she has yet to perform the same experiment with sunscreen.........
Posted by: Jesmi24 Permalink Source
September 6, 2006, 9:45 PM CT
Severely Congested Sinuses
Eventhough it's unclear why it's so, researchers at Johns Hopkins have linked a gene that allows for the chemical breakdown of the tough, protective casing that houses insects and worms to the severe congestion and polyp formation typical of chronic sinusitis.
A team of Hopkins sinus experts has observed that the gene for the enzyme, acidic mammalian chitinase (AMCase), is up to 250 times more active in people with severe sinus inflammation that persists even after surgery when in comparison to patients in whom surgery is successful. Sinus surgery is commonly the therapy of last resort for those who do not respond to drug treatment. But nearly one in 10 of those treated see symptoms return within weeks or months after surgery fails to keep open the nasal passages, researchers say.
The Hopkins report, reported in the recent issue of the American Journal of Rhinology, is thought to bethe first to identify the enzyme's presence in the nose and confirm its link to sinusitis.
"This finding does not mean that there are actually parasites in the nose causing sinusitis, but our study does lend support to the concept that really severe and persistent sinusitis may be a case of a misplaced immune response directed against parasites that are not really there," says study lead author Andrew Lane, M.D., an associate professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of its rhinology and sinus surgery center.........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
September 6, 2006, 9:40 PM CT
Bacterial Muscle Infections more common
Scientists in Houston, Texas have found two bacterial muscle infections common in tropical countries becoming more frequent occurrences along with the emergence of community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA), as per a research studyreported in the Oct. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.
Staphylococcus aureus, or staph, is a common bacterium found on the skin or in the nose of a quarter to a third of all people. Commonly harmless, staph can cause skin infections such as pimples and boils and, less frequently, serious infections of surgical wounds or the bloodstream, and pneumonia. For years, infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus have been treated by inexpensive antibiotics in the penicillin and cephalosporin family.
Some years ago, strains resistant to these drugs, called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) appeared in hospitalized patients. Recently, however, newer forms of MRSA began to strike healthy people who have not been recently hospitalized or undergone invasive medical procedures. These community-acquired strains appear to be readily transmitted from person to person and can cause serious skin and soft tissue infections as well as invasive infections such as bone or joint infections or pneumonia. Failure by physicians to suspect this kind of drug-resistant staph can lead to therapy with the wrong antibiotic.........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
September 5, 2006, 7:54 PM CT
Epilepsy Breakthrough In the horizon
Scientists at MIT are in the process of developing a device that could detect and prevent epileptic seizures before they become debilitating.
Epilepsy affects about 50 million people worldwide, and while anticonvulsant medications can reduce the frequency of seizures, the drugs are ineffective for as a number of as one in three patients.
The new therapy builds on an existing therapy for epilepsy, the Cyberonics Inc. vagus nerve stimulator (VNS), which is often used in patients who do not respond to drugs. A defibrillator typically implanted under the patient's collar bone stimulates the left vagus nerve about every five minutes, which has been shown to help reduce the frequency and severity of seizures in a number of patients.
The MIT scientists and his colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) seek to improve the therapy by combining it with a detector that measures brain activity to predict when a seizure is about to occur. The new device would sense the oncoming seizure and then activate the VNS, in principle halting the seizure before it becomes manifest.
"Our contribution is the software that decides when to turn the stimulator on," said John Guttag, MIT's Dugald C. Jackson Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Guttag developed the system along with Ali Shoeb, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
September 5, 2006, 5:06 AM CT
Older Fathers More Likely To Have Autistic Children
Children of men age 40 and older have a significantly increased risk of having autism spectrum disorders compared with those whose fathers are younger than 30 years, according to an article in the recent issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Typically typically autism is characterized by social and language abnormalities and repetitive patterns of behavior, according to background information in the article. Autism and related conditions, known collectively as autism spectrum disorders, have become increasingly common, affecting 50 in every 10,000 children as compared with five in 10,000 two decades ago. This increase is partially due to higher levels of awareness and changes in diagnosis processes, but could also reflect an increase in incidence of autism, according to the authors. Older parental age has previously been linked to abnormalities in the brain development of children; however, few studies have effectively examined the effect of mothers' and especially fathers' ages on autism.
Abraham Reichenberg, Ph.D., of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and colleagues evaluated this association in children born during the 1980s in Israel. All men and three-fourths of the women born in these years were assessed by the draft board at age 17, during which time any psychiatric disorders were recorded. Dr. Reichenberg and colleagues obtained draft board information and the age of the father for 318,506 individuals; age of the mother was available for 132,271 of those.........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
September 4, 2006, 10:17 PM CT
Memories Of Disturbing Emotional Events
Psychology experts have long known that memories of disturbing emotional events - such as an act of violence or the unexpected death of a loved one - are more vivid and deeply imprinted in the brain than mundane recollections of everyday matters.
Probing deeper into how such memories form, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have observed that the mere anticipation of a fearful situation can fire up two memory-forming regions of the brain - even before the event has occurred.
That means the simple act of anticipation may play a surprisingly important role in how fresh the memory of a tough experience remains.
The findings of the brain-imaging study, which appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have important implications for the therapy of psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and social anxiety, which are often characterized by flashbacks and intrusive memories of upsetting events.
"The main motivation for this study was a clinical one, in terms of understanding and applying knowledge about memory so that we can better inform the therapy of disorders that have a large memory component, like PTSD," says lead author Kristen Mackiewicz, a graduate student at the University of Colorado who worked on the anticipation study while a student at UW-Madison.........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
September 4, 2006, 8:33 PM CT
Hygiene Fears In Food Industry
A major outbreak of E.coli 0157 poisoning in which 500 people were affected and 20 people died, seems to have led to improvements in the management of food risks in the retail and catering industries in Scotland, as per ESRC funded research at the London School of Economics.
A report from the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) says that an education campaign following the 1996 outbreak raised the profile of food safety and hygiene and brought home the importance of environmental health officers (EHOs) and the human costs of poor practices. Survey data also suggests that the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in Scotland is generally perceived to have better relations with the local food community than their counterparts in London.
The CARR study, which has been reported in Environmental Health Scotland, says that a number of managers in hotels, restaurants and food shops in the UK pay just as much attention to consumer fears and opinions as they do to rules and regulations, when it comes to evaluating food hygiene and safety risks.
'Most managers in the sample sense a general public awareness of food safety and food hygiene risks,' says CARR co-researcher, Clive Jones. 'They said safety concerns were more important to the consumer than value for money, labelling and other considerations such as GM or additive content, even though actual risks might not be very high.'.........
Posted by: Wilma Permalink Source
September 4, 2006, 8:18 PM CT
When It Comes To Treating Coronary Artery Disease
What do you want, surgery or medication? Looks like there is no clear choice. You may have to depend on your doctor's advice.
Research, conducted at the Heart Institute of the University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil, appears in the Sept. 5, 2006, edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
For the study, scientists evaluated data collected during the Medicine, Angioplasty or Surgery Study II (MASS II) to determine how physician-recommended care affected patient outcomes one year after therapy. All patients were diagnosed with severe coronary artery disease affecting at least two blood vessels but still not causing a loss of heart function. Coronary artery disease occurs when a buildup of cholesterol in the arteries prevents oxygen-rich blood from nourishing the heart muscle.
"We still currently do not know which is the best therapeutic option for patients with multivessel chronic coronary artery disease and a normal ventricular function," said Whady Hueb, MD, PhD, a heart specialist at the University of São Paulo Heart Institute (InCor). "I think our study offers additional information and reassurance for both doctors and patients that, at the end of the decision-making process, what the doctor and patient agree is the best option in most cases really is the best option".........
Posted by: Julia Permalink Source
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