February 10, 2008, 10:28 PM CT

Difference Between Abstract And Concrete Jungle

The Big Apple, a densely populated metropolis of more than 8.2 million people in the 332 square miles of blocks, boroughs and buildings, could have been named metaphorically by outsiders as a fertile land of opportunity. New York City, in other words, can be considered concretely as a geographical location with a large population, but it also can be viewed symbolically as the gateway to America.

While both of these descriptions are accurate, they are based on an individual's perception of, and even physical distance from, the city. Princeton psychology expert Daniel Oppenheimer and graduate student Adam Alter argue that people tend to perceive objects as being more abstract when those stimuli are difficult to process mentally, known as cognitive disfluency, or are physically further away.

"But a stimulus does not need to be in Los Angeles for a New Yorker to construe it abstractly," explained Alter. "When a stimulus feels far away, even when it isn't actually far away, it also might seem more abstract." This psychological distance to which the author refers can be manipulated using a vague stimulus, such as an italicized font. In the first study of the series, the psychology experts already had shown that italicized and other disfluent fonts prompted the sensation of psychological distance......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

February 7, 2008, 9:38 PM CT

Kidney's Ability To Clean Its Own Filters Likely Causes Disease

The kidney actively cleans its most selective filter to keep it from clogging with blood proteins, researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reveal in a new study.

Scientists showed that breakdown of this self-cleaning feature can make kidneys more vulnerable to dysfunction and disease.

"We speculate that defects of this clearance mechanism can leave things on the filter that can damage it," says senior author Andrey Shaw, M.D., Emil R. Unanue Professor of Immunobiology in Pathology and Immunology. "This could include autoimmune antibodies that mistakenly target the body's own tissues like those that occur in the disease lupus."

The study appears in the Jan. 22 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Despite extensive knowledge of the structure of the kidney, several scientific controversies linger over how the organ does its complicated and essential job of filtering wastes from the blood for disposal without simultaneously discarding too much water or key blood proteins in the urine. Understanding how these tricky tasks are accomplished is essential to developing new therapys for kidney disease and renal failure, which are among the top ten causes of death in the United States.

Like a number of mechanical filtering systems, the kidney passes the blood through a series of progressively finer screens. After passing through a structure known as the glomerular basement membrane (GBM), fluid and serum proteins must finally pass through the most selective filter of the kidney, which is comprised of specialized epithelial cells called podocytes. These cells form a web-like barrier to the passage of large serum proteins into the urine......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

February 7, 2008, 9:20 PM CT

New Treatment Approach For Niemann-pick Disease

An unexpected finding turned out to be a clue leading scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to propose a new therapy approach for Niemann-Pick disease, a rare, deadly neurodegenerative disorder.

To overcome the genetic defect in Niemann-Pick disease, the scientists suggest that chemical compounds could potentially "chaperone" mutant protein molecules through the cell's quality control machinery. And they believe the approach also could be useful for more common diseases - such as cystic fibrosis - that stem from a similar type of defect.

Their findings are reported in advance online publication in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Daniel S. Ory, M.D., associate professor of medicine, and his colleagues in the Center for Cardiovascular Research originally began to study Niemann-Pick type C disease because of its link to cholesterol metabolism - the genetic abnormality at the root of the disease serves as a tool for investigating how cholesterol moves about in cells.

Niemann-Pick type C, the rarest form of Niemann-Pick disease, commonly affects school-aged children, but the disease may occur at any time from early infancy to adulthood. Symptoms may include unsteadiness of gait, clumsiness, slurred speech, learning difficulties, progressive intellectual decline, seizures and tremors. Niemann-Pick type C disease is fatal, and no life-extending therapy exists......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

February 6, 2008, 10:23 PM CT

Significantly higher success rates with artificial insemination

In future a new method could help some couples who are childless against their will. The microscopic procedure significantly improves the success rate of 'ICSI' (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). This was discovered by researchers at the University of Bonn together with colleagues from China and industrial partners in a study of 124 women. Up to now, the desire to have a child is only fulfilled for every third couple that decides to have ICSI. In a study the artificial insemination method was twice as successful. The researchers have now published their data in the journal 'Reproductive BioMedicine'. (Online version available at http://www.rbmonline.com/Article/3161).

For a number of couples ICSI is the last resort in their attempt to have a child. 'The method is recommended if the man produces too few sperm cells,' the Bonn reproductive biologist Dr. Markus Montag explains. Doctors can in most cases still extract individual functioning sperm cells from testicular tissue, which they then inject into the ovum. The partner must take hormone preparations before an ICSI. They result in several ova maturing in the ovaries, normally it is only one ovum per month.

'We inject a sperm into every one of these cells,' Markus Montag explains. 'Then it takes more than 26 hours until the plasmosomes of the ovum and sperm cell fuse and an embryo forms. In this time frame we have to decide which of the fertilised ova to insert into the uterus. The reason for this is that the German law for the protection of embryos lays down that only a maximum of three fertilised ova are allowed to be implanted per attempt. 'We even restrict ourselves to only two, in order to exclude the possibility of births of triplets,' Markus Montag explains. With pregnancies involving multiple births there is an increased risk of miscarriages and malformations......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

February 6, 2008, 8:44 PM CT

Research on gene and radiation therapy for prostate cancer

Henry Ford Hospital is embarking on an expanded major clinical trial involving the use of gene treatment in combination with radiation treatment, to determine if the combined therapy is more effective than radiation treatment alone for patients with intermediate risk prostate cancer.

The clinical trial is part of a $9 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) awarded to Henry Ford to study the effectiveness of gene treatment to treat prostate cancer.

As part of this research grant we have had encouraging results involving two smaller clinical studies, says Svend Freytag, Ph.D., division head of Research, Radiation Oncology, Henry Ford Hospital.

Dr. Freytag, along with Benjamin Movsas, M.D., chair of Radiation Oncology and Hans Stricker, M.D., vice chair of Urology at Henry Ford Hospital are the studys key researchers.

Because of the results from the prior trials, NCI approved a phase III trial involving 280 patients with prostate cancer over a three-year period. A phase III trial is the final stage in a study to determine if the therapy being studied should become the standard therapy.

Currently radiation treatment (without the gene treatment) or surgical removal of the prostate is the standard therapy for patients with localized prostate cancer, with similar cure rates. Prostate Cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for men as per the American Cancer Society......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

February 6, 2008, 8:22 PM CT

Electronic personal health record and hypertension

Whether patients with an electronic handle on their health are more successful at beating one of the nation's leading chronic diseases is under study.

The study, funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, will give hundreds of patients with high blood pressure an electronic personal health record that enables them to post their blood pressure, weight, even what they eat in their medical record and e-mail their physicians when needed.

"From a chronic illness standpoint, the literature is pretty clear: The more involved and engaged I am in managing my own illness, the better my outcome," says Patricia Sodomka, director of the Medical College of Georgia Center for Patient and Family Centered Care, senior vice president for patient and family centered care for MCG Health, Inc. and principal investigator on the $1.2 million grant. "It just makes common sense".

MCG scientists will work with hypertensive patients in the family medicine and internal medicine practices at MCGHealth to see if the electronic personal health record enhances patient involvement.

"Our first measure is patient activation; if having ready access to information about yourself and to your doctor makes you more activated as a patient and if you are more activated, does it lower your blood pressure," says Dr. Peggy Wagner, research director for the MCG Department of Family Medicine and study co-investigator......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

February 4, 2008, 9:49 PM CT

Screening for domestic violence woefully weak

Even though federal welfare-reform legislation calls for case workers to screen for domestic violence and most states have agreed to implement this requirement, just 9 percent of women applying for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families were screened for domestic violence, as per data from a University of Washington study.

An analysis of 782 transcripts of in-person interviews between case workers and clients in four states by scientists from the UWs School of Social Work also showed that just slightly more than 1 percent of the women actually received effective screening that resulted in them revealing that they were victims of domestic violence.

This is not about bad case workers. This lack of screening is an institutional problem that existed across states, across different welfare offices and different workers, said lead author Taryn Lindhorst, a UW associate professor of social work. Policy makers have placed the focus in assistance programs on getting women into the workforce and off of welfare rolls. Unfortunately, even in situations of great potential harm to women and their children, welfare offices do not effectively identify these women or help them access needed resources in the agency and community.

For poor women, the welfare office is a place that could contribute to their safety and that of their children, but the offices largely dont provide help, despite a legislative mandate to screen and provide services for victims of domestic violence, she said......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

January 31, 2008, 11:02 PM CT

Range of drugs cheaper and more available

A new study reported in the February 2008 print edition of The FASEB Journal (www.fasebj.org) describes a scientific advance that should reduce the cost and increase the availability of a wide range of drugs. In the report, University of Pennsylvania scientists describe how they used gene treatment to reduce the time it takes to breed large animals capable of producing therapeutic proteins in their milk, such as insulin or those that fight cancer. This represents a significant milestone in drug development, as current methods involve cloning, which takes more time and generally costs more.

Having an easier way to harness natures power to produce large quantities of specific proteins in milk could increase the availability of drugs for people who could otherwise not afford these therapys, said Ina Dobrinski, one of the scientists on the study.

The study also is significant because it may also be a new way to eliminate diseases in future generations of animals, such as those used for livestock. Heres why: To get the goats to produce specific proteins, the scientists used radiation to kill a portion of a male goats germ cells (the cells that produce sperm). Then they used a modified adeno-associated virus (a well studied and tolerated gene treatment vector) to insert a gene in the remaining cells. Once the new gene took hold in the germ cells, a predictable number of female offspring produced the desired protein in their milk. The advance is immediately valuable for pharmaceutical development and biology research, but a similar approach could be used to bolster the food supply by eliminating inherited disorders in animals over several generations. It is also possible that once perfected, this technique could eliminate disease genes in humans over several generations, assuming ethical concerns can be resolved adequately......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

January 28, 2008, 10:36 PM CT

Regular marijuana use increases risk of hepatitis

Patients with chronic hepatitis C (HCV) infection should not use marijuana (cannabis) daily, as per a research studypublished in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. Scientists observed that HCV patients who used cannabis daily were at significantly higher risk of moderate to severe liver fibrosis, or tissue scarring. Additionally, patients with moderate to heavy alcohol use combined with regular cannabis use experienced an even greater risk of liver fibrosis. The recommendation to avoid cannabis is particularly important in patients who are coinfected with HCV/HIV since the progression of fibrosis is already greater in these patients.

Hepatitis C is a major public health concern and the number of patients developing complications of chronic disease is on the rise, as per Norah Terrault, MD, MPH, from the University of California, San Francisco and lead investigator of the study. It is essential that we identify risk factors that can be modified to prevent and/or lessen the progression of HCV to fibrosis, cirrhosis and even liver cancer. These complications of chronic HCV infection will significantly contribute to the overall burden of liver disease in the U.S. and will continue to increase in the next decade......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

January 28, 2008, 5:18 AM CT

Notch-ing glucose into place

A novel gene called rumi regulates Notch signaling by adding a glucose molecule to the part of the Notch protein that extends outside a cell, said scientists from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Stony Brook University in New York in a report that appears today in the journal Cell.

Cellular signaling governed by the Notch protein determines cell fate determination and differentiation.

The complete loss of rumi causes a temperature-dependent defect in Notch signaling, an unusual phenomenon said Dr. Hugo Bellen, professor of molecular and human genetics at BCM and director of the program in developmental biology. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Bellen and colleagues discovered the genes effect on bristles in the fruit fly. These bristles are external sensory organs that can be easily screened for changes involved in Notch signaling. Indeed, loss of Notch signaling causes loss of these external sensory organs. Fruit flies that lack the rumi protein have a higher than normal density of bristles on the thorax, indicating a subtle loss of Notch activity. However, at 25 degrees C, the bristles are lost, which suggests a severe loss of Notch signaling.

The activity of the Notch receptor needs to be inactivated in one cell to allow it to become different from the other daughter cell, and this process is used reiteratively in a number of consecutive cell divisions. For example, if Notch is activated inappropriately in cells of the blood lineage, it will cause leukemia in humans, said Bellen......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source