Hepatic vein thrombosis following liver resection
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Patients undergoing liver surgery have long been considered to be at low risk of venous thromboembolism. However, pulmonary embolism has recently emerged as an increasingly frequent and potentially fatal complication following liver resections.
A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The authors shed a new light on this discrepancy by reporting two patients who developed thrombi in their hepatic veins following hepatectomy.
The report indicated that thrombosis may occur in hepatic veins after liver resection as a result of intra- or postoperative local injury. This would explain why pulmonary emboli have been observed in the absence of peripheral deep vein thrombosis. This hazard should be taken into account when performing extensive coagulation of the raw surface of the liver when a major hepatic vein is exposed.
Genetic clues to compulsive, self-injurious behavior in rare childhood disorder
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Research from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine provides new clues for the compulsive behavior and cognitive defects associated with a rare childhood neurological disease called Lesch-Nyhan Disease (LND). Two pathways found to be defective in LND are known to be associated with other neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s and Parknson’s diseases, suggesting common causes of cognitive and behavioral defects in these neurological disorders.
The research is published on-line today in the PLoS ONE.
“This study is important because it opens completely new and unexpected areas of research into the genetic cause of compulsive and self-injurious behavior in Lesch-Nyhan disease,” said principal investigator Theodore Friedmann, MD, professor of pediatrics at UCSD’s Center for Neural Circuit and Behavior and Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, a research and teaching affiliate of the UCSD School of Medicine.
Fast growth, low defense—plants facing a dilemma
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Plants are attacked by a multitude of insects and mammals. As defense against these herbivores they developed complex defense mechanisms over the course of evolution: spines, thorns, leaf hairs and a number of toxic chemical substances. For decades it has been controversially discussed whether the production of defense traits incurs costs to the plants. Now, using a new method the ecologists and plant biologists of the University of Zürich together with their American colleagues demonstrate these costs accurately in a Proceedings of the Royal Society article.
For their study, the researchers planted different «knockout»-mutants of the same genotype of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. They then harvested a subset of these plants in evenly distributed intervals to measure the biomass growth over the whole plant life. «Mutants with suppressed defense mechanisms showed an increased growth rate» Tobias Züst explains the result of his study. But the faster growth comes at an added cost: aphids reproduce faster on these plants than on slow growing plants with intact defense mechanisms. This is a result of the fact that fast growing plants provide more resources to the herbivore than slow growing plants in the same amount of time.
The study shows that natural resistance is often not compatible with fast growth. This finding is of great importance for agricultural crops: These crops have been selected for high yield and as a consequence have very low natural resistance to herbivores, consequentially requiring high input of insecticides.
IU-led “Growing Our Own” report offers solutions to address decline in U.S. dental faculty
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A new report by an Indiana University School of Dentistry department chair with researchers from six other U.S. dental schools is calling for quick and creative solutions to address the growing scarcity of full-time faculty members within the nation’s dental school programs.
The report cites widening pay gaps between private practice dentists and clinical professors at dental schools as one factor in fewer dentists committing to careers in teaching. Clinical faculty also report being overwhelmed and burned out by the workload demands of teaching, clinical, research and administrative responsibilities. Published in the January edition of the Journal of Dental Education, the paper calls for the development of mandatory mentoring programs, among other recommendations, to help reverse the trend.
“We feel it is essential that mentoring programs be considered mandatory within dental schools if this trend toward a major crisis in dentistry is to be reversed as rapidly as possible,” said Dr. Vanchit John, chairman of the IU School of Dentistry’s Department of Periodontics and Allied Dental Programs and the lead author of the report. “Clinical faculty shortages could be characterized as the most critical challenge confronting dentistry.”
Gene study shows way to help save orangutans
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Orangutans are notoriously slow and gentle, and a study of their DNA shows they have evolved in a similar way, researchers reported on Wednesday.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, could help conservationists do a better job of saving the endangered great apes and might provide insights into human health.
“In terms of evolution, the orangutan genome is quite special among great apes in that it has been extraordinarily stable over the past 15 million years,” Richard Wilson of Washington University in St. Louis, the genomics expert who oversaw the study, said in a statement.
Americans oppose yanking healthcare law funds: poll
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Most Americans do not want Congress to block funding for various new healthcare measures even as the nation remains split on the sweeping overhaul passed last year, a poll published on Tuesday found.
More than half of those surveyed—62 percent—said they did not approve of lawmakers cutting off funds needed to implement changes, which range from new rules for health insurance companies to tax credits for small businesses and state grants.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives this month passed legislation that would repeal the healthcare reform law signed by President Barack Obama last year, but the Senate is not expected to act on that bill. House Republicans say they now will try to disrupt the flow of money needed to implement the law.
Heart disease costs to triple in U.S. by 2030: report
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The costs of heart disease in the United States will triple between now and 2030, to more than $800 billion a year, a report commissioned by the American Heart Association predicted on Monday.
Treating high blood pressure will be the most expensive part of the cost, rising to $389 billion by 2030, the report projects, with overall heart disease rising by 10 percent by then.
The report is bad news for the United States, which already has the highest per capita healthcare costs in the developed world and is struggling to lower expenses. Last week the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to repeal President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform, in part, they said, because it did not cut costs.
Genetic sequencing alone doesn’t offer a true picture of human disease
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Despite what you might have heard, genetic sequencing alone is not enough to understand human disease. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have shown that functional tests are absolutely necessary to understand the biological relevance of the results of sequencing studies as they relate to disease, using a suite of diseases known as the ciliopathies which can cause patients to have many different traits.
“Right now the paradigm is to sequence a number of patients and see what may be there in terms of variants,” said Nicholas Katsanis, Ph.D. “The key finding of this study says that this approach is important, but not sufficient. If you really want to be able to penetrate, you must have a robust way to test the functional relevance of mutations you find in patients. For a person at risk of type 2 diabetes, schizophrenia or atherosclerosis, getting their genome sequenced is not enough – you have to functionally interpret the data to get a sense of what might happen to the particular patient.”
“This is the message to people doing medical genomics,” said lead author Erica Davis, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Duke Department of Pediatrics, who works in the Duke Center for Human Disease Modeling. “We have to know the extent to which gene variants in question are detrimental – how do they affect individual cells or organs and what is the result on human development or disease? Every patient has his or her own set of genetic variants, and most of these will not be found at sufficient frequency in the general population so that anyone could make a clear medical statement about their case.”
Study of nutrition, Alzheimer’s links hampered by research approach
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Research is trying to determine whether Alzheimer’s disease might be slowed or prevented with nutritional approaches, but a new study suggests those efforts could be improved by use of nutrient “biomarkers” to objectively assess the nutrient status of elderly people at risk for dementia.
The traditional approach, which primarily relies on self-reported dietary surveys, asks people to remember what they have eaten. Such surveys don’t consider two common problems in elderly populations – the effect that memory impairment has on recall of their diet, or digestive issues that could affect the absorption of nutrients.
This issue is of particular concern, experts say, because age is the primary risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, and the upcoming wave of baby boomers and people 85 years and older will soon place many more people at risk for dementia.
Cell binding discovery brings hope to those with skin and heart problems
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A University of Manchester scientist has revealed the mechanism that binds skin cells tightly together, which he believes will lead to new treatments for painful and debilitating skin diseases and also lethal heart defects.
Professor David Garrod, in the Faculty of Life Sciences, has found that the glue molecules bind only to similar glue molecules on other cells, making a very tough, resilient structure. Further investigation on why the molecules bind so specifically could lead to the development of clinical applications.
Professor Garrod, whose Medical Research Council-funded work is paper of the week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) tomorrow (Friday), said: “Our skin is made up of three different layers, the outermost of which is the epidermis. This layer is only about 1/10th of a millimetre thick yet it is tough enough to protect us from the outside environment and withstand the wear and tear of everyday life.
Thousands protest in Berlin over dioxin scandal
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Thousands of German protesters marched in Berlin on Saturday to demand a change in farming methods and vent their anger at a food scandal in which cancer-causing dioxin was found in some eggs, poultry and pork.
The scandal, caused by contaminated animal feed, has outraged consumers, triggered international health alerts and hit sales of German eggs and meat.
Organizers said 22,000 people took part in the demonstration, entitled “We are sick of it. No to genetic engineering, animal factories and dumping exports.” Onlookers put the turnout at close to 10,000.
Strong social ties benefit breast cancer patients
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Breast cancer patients who have a strong social support system in the first year after diagnosis are less likely to die or have a recurrence of cancer, according to new research from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) and the Shanghai Institute of Preventive Medicine. The study, led by first author Meira Epplein, Ph.D., assistant professor of Medicine at VICC, was published in a recent edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Patients in the study were enrolled in the Shanghai Breast Cancer Survivor Study, a large, population-based review of female breast cancer survivors in China, which Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Shanghai Institute of Preventive Medicine have carried out since 2002 under the leadership of principal investigator Xiao Ou Shu, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Medicine at VICC, and senior author of the study.
From 2002 to 2004, a total of 2,230 breast cancer survivors completed a quality of life survey six months after diagnosis and a majority responded to a follow-up survey 36 months after diagnosis. The women were asked about physical issues like sleep, eating and pain, psychological well-being, social support and material well-being. The answers were converted to an overall quality of life score.
Genes map study finds clues to pancreatic cancer
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xperts in the genetics of cancer said on Thursday they have found out why some people can live for years with the same kind of rare pancreatic cancer that affects Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
They identified new genes that, when mutated in a certain way, appear to cause a relatively less harmful form of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
Patients with these mutations lived twice as long as those whose tumors carried other mutations, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore report in the journal Science.
Minimum alcohol price levels planned by coalition
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Ministers have unveiled plans to set a minimum price for alcohol in England and Wales.
They say banning shops and bars from selling drinks for less than the tax paid on them will cut crime and set a “base price” for the first time.
It works out at 38p for a can of weak lager and £10.71 for a litre of vodka.
Killer paper for next-generation food packaging
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Scientists are reporting development and successful lab tests of “killer paper,” a material intended for use as a new food packaging material that helps preserve foods by fighting the bacteria that cause spoilage. The paper, described in ACS’ journal, Langmuir, contains a coating of silver nanoparticles, which are powerful anti-bacterial agents.
Aharon Gedanken and colleagues note that silver already finds wide use as a bacteria fighter in certain medicinal ointments, kitchen and bathroom surfaces, and even odor-resistant socks. Recently, scientists have been exploring the use of silver nanoparticles — each 1/50,000 the width of a human hair — as germ-fighting coatings for plastics, fabrics, and metals. Nanoparticles, which have a longer-lasting effect than larger silver particles, could help overcome the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, in which bacteria develop the ability to shrug-off existing antibiotics. Paper coated with silver nanoparticles could provide an alternative to common food preservation methods such as radiation, heat treatment, and low temperature storage, they note. However, producing “killer paper” suitable for commercial use has proven difficult.
The scientists describe development of an effective, long-lasting method for depositing silver nanoparticles on the surface of paper that involves ultrasound, or the use of high frequency sound waves.
