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What Controls Stickiness Of Chromosomal Glue
The researchers, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Angelika Amon, published their findings online May 3, 2006, in the journal Nature. Amon and her colleagues are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Most cells in the human body - all those other than sperm and eggs - contain 23 pairs of chromosomes. These cells divide through mitosis, a process that creates daughter cells with the same complement of chromosome pairs as the parent. Sperm and egg cells, conversely, must contain only half the chromosomes of their parent cells, so that the normal chromosome number will be restored when the sperm and egg unite during fertilization. To achieve this, they are produced through meiosis.
Gluelike protein complexes called cohesins, which hold the members of a chromosome pair together until just the right moment during cell division, are central to both processes. Bound together by cohesins, chromosome pairs must organize themselves in preparation for cell division before they can be released.........
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Antidepressant Drug May Help Depression In Diabetics
"That's important not only because people with diabetes will feel better if we can control their depression. It's also key to helping manage blood sugar," says Patrick J. Lustman, Ph.D., principal investigator and professor of psychiatry. "As depression improves, glucose levels also tend to improve".
Eventhough depression affects about 5 percent of the general population, the rate is about 25 percent for patients with diabetes. Lustman's team previously demonstrated that therapy with antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy is an effective way to treat depression in patients with diabetes, but often depression would quickly redevelop.
"As we better understand depression, it's clear that for a number of patients, it is a chronic and recurring disease," Lustman says. "That appears to be particularly true for patients with diabetes compared to those otherwise free of medical illness".
Eventhough they knew that short-term therapy with antidepressants was helpful with mood and with control of blood glucose, Lustman's team didn't know whether the drug could prevent the recurrence of depression in patients with diabetes. He also didn't know what would happen to glucose levels in the months following successful depression treatment.........
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Balancing Male Fertility And Disease Resistance
Dr. Wang and his colleagues characterized a new disease resistance (R) gene in rice, xa13, whose expression tips the balance between fertility and pathogen defense. The recessive xa13 allele provides resistance to bacterial leaf blight, the most devastating bacterial plant disease in the world. While expression of the dominant Xa13 allele makes plants more susceptible to disease, it also promotes pollen development. This surprising positive effect of Xa13 on plant fertility helps explain how an apparently detrimental allele has remained in the plant's gene pool.
Dr. Wang is confident that "the finding of multiple roles played by the same gene provided new perspective on relationships between the processes of disease resistance and sexual reproductive development, which will greatly influence our way of thinking in future studies."........
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Impact Of Genetics And Exposure To Secondhand Smoke
If those children also have a variation in at least one of four genes responsible for metabolizing nicotine, their risk may increase even more because nicotine might stay in the body longer and do more damage, an interdisciplinary research team says.
Scientists will study 585 children age 15-20 who have a parent, grandparent or both with essential high blood pressure and/or a heart attack by age 55.
"What I hope to take away from this is more information for parents and caregivers - to be able to share with them information about the risk of future disease that their behavior places on their child," says Dr. Martha Tingen, a nurse researcher at the Georgia Prevention Institute and principal investigator on the $220,000 National Institute of Nursing Research grant.
Scientists will look for adverse clinical cardiovascular measures, including reduced ability of arteries to dilate; the blood encountering increased resistance as it travels through vessels; higher blood pressure; and an increase in the size of the pumping chamber of the heart - a result of pumping against elevated pressure.........
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minimally Invasive Approach For Herniated Disks
Much like the aging face, the taut disks that cushion the spinal column, enabling us to twist and bend, become less elastic over time.
The loss can mean gelatinous disk innards start bulging out, pressing on nearby nerves and causing pain in the lower back and legs, says Dr. Jeffrey A. Stone, chief of the Section of Interventional Neuroradiology at the Medical College of Georgia.
"What happens is over time, just because we stand upright and put a lot of abuse on our spines, the disks go through the aging process. So as you get 35 or 40, simple trauma, even a twisting motion like tennis or golf, sometimes will stretch it and sometimes you will get a tear in the disk's outer covering called the annulus," says Dr. Stone, who likens that cover to a leather sack.
"The tear itself can be painful," he says. Worse, the gelatinous nucleus can shift, resulting in bulges, or even break free and migrate into the spinal canal.
The good news is that today a number of painful bulges can be treated without even an incision, says Dr. Stone, who will give an update on percutaneous diskectomy May 2 during the 44th annual meeting of the American Society of Neuroradiology in San Diego.
This latest approach to treating disk herniation uses X-ray to guide insertion of a needle through skin and muscle directly into the offending disk and eliminate the portion of the bulging nucleus that is causing pain, Dr. Stone says. Patients receive local pain relief at the injection site and enough anesthesia to relax but remain awake so they can report any pain they experience. After accessing the disk, the puncturing stylet is removed so the needle then functions as a cannula through which devices are inserted to vaporize or suction out excess gelatinous substance. "The goal is to reduce the pressure and inflammatory factors in the disk with a minimal amount of removal," says Dr. Stone.........
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Heart Risks From Vioxx Happen Much Earlier Than Believed
A quarter of patients who suffered a heart attack while taking Vioxx did so within the first two weeks of their first Vioxx prescription, says Prof. Levesque, of Queen's Department of Community Health and Epidemiology. "This demonstrates that cardiovascular risks from taking Vioxx may occur much earlier than previously believed".
Conducted with McGill University researchers James Brophy and Bin Zhang, the findings will be published on-line May 2 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
"Our previous study on COX-2 inhibitors, which included Vioxx and Celebrex, evaluated whether there was an increased risk of heart attack while taking these medications; the answer was yes for Vioxx," explains Prof. Levesque. In the current study, funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the pattern of cardiovascular risk in Quebec seniors was assessed over a three-year period.
The additional cardiovascular risk actually decreased with longer duration of use, suggesting that the period of highest susceptibility for most people taking Vioxx may occur earlier than previously believed. The study also documents that cardiovascular risk returns to normal within one month of stopping the drug.........
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More Effective Influenza Vaccine
Robert Belshe, M.D.
The results point to a new way of looking at how to best protect very young children from various influenza strains, said Robert Belshe, M.D., a Saint Louis University researcher who is presenting the results today.
"We tested this needle-free vaccine in more than 8,000 children at 249 sites in 16 countries," said Dr. Belshe, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. "We discovered that the intranasal vaccine was significantly more effective in protecting these children against influenza infection than the injectable flu shot. This is particularly significant because this age group is among the most vulnerable to flu infection, and they tend to spread influenza around to other family members."
The data indicate that the intranasal vaccine candidate, known as CAIV-T (Cold Adapted Influenza Vaccine Trivalent), was 55 percent more effective than the injectable vaccine in reducing influenza-like illness in children.
This is the largest head-to-head influenza vaccine study ever conducted. The trial included nearly 8,500 children, with about half receiving the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved injectable and the other half receiving the nasal spray influenza vaccine.........
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Insights Into The Impact Of Injury On Cartilage Cells
Tissue damage typically stimulates an influx of leukocytes, white blood cells known for promoting tissue regeneration and healing--to tissue protecting organs. However leukocytes can be a double edged sword. In the May 2006 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/arthritis), scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and the Michael E DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston, Texas, present the results of a study to test the hypothesis that leukocytes extend the zone of damage and cell death in cartilage after an acute injury.
The research team began with a collection of dog bones--the hind knee joints of 24 fresh young adult cadaver canines. Within one hour after death, each bone was subjected to impact injury with a metal weight, determined sufficient to cause cartilage damage without shattering the bone. A comparable collection of cadaver canine bones was preserved to serve as controls. All of the knee joints were cultured with blood leukocytes from the same dogCartilage biopsies were taken at various intervals between 12 hours and 7 days.........
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New Hope For Alzheimer's Patients
For years, doctors have encouraged people to consume foods such as fish that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids because they appear to improve memory and other brain functions.
The MIT research suggests that a cocktail therapy of omega-3 fatty acids and two other compounds normally present in the blood, could delay the cognitive decline seen in Alzheimer's disease, which afflicts an estimated 4 million to 5 million Americans.
"It's been enormously frustrating to have so little to offer people that have (Alzheimer's) disease," said Richard Wurtman, the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Professor of Neuropharmacology at MIT, who led the research team. The study appears in the May 9 issue of Brain Research.
Wurtman will present the research at the International Academy of Nutrition and Aging 2006 Symposium on Nutrition and Alzheimer's Disease/Cognitive Decline in Chicago on Tuesday, May 2.
The three compounds in the therapy cocktail - omega-3 fatty acids, uridine and choline - are all needed by brain neurons to make phospholipids, the primary component of cell membranes.
After adding those supplements to the diets of gerbils, the scientists observed a dramatic increase in the amount of membranes that form brain cell synapses, where messages between cells are relayed. Damage in brain synapses is believed to cause the dementia that characterizes Alzheimer's disease.........
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Researchers Identify Intelligence Gene
Anil Malhotra, MD, and Katherine Burdick, PhD Adam Cooper, RBP North Shore-LIJ Studios
"A robust body of evidence suggests that cognitive abilities, especially intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors. Existing data already suggests that dysbindin may influence cognition," said Katherine Burdick, PhD, the study's primary author. "We looked at several DNA sequence variations within the dysbindin gene and found one of them to be significantly associated with lower general cognitive ability in carriers of the risk variant compared with non-carriers in two independent groups."
The study involved 213 unrelated Caucasian patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 126 unrelated healthy Caucasian volunteers. The scientists measured cognitive performance in all subjects. They then analyzed participants' DNA samples. The scientists specifically examined six DNA sequence variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), in the dysbindin gene and found that one specific pattern of SNPs, known as a haplotype, was associated with general cognitive ability: Cognition was significantly impaired in carriers of the risk variant in both the schizophrenia group and the healthy volunteers as compared with the non-carriers.........
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