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Targeted beams of high-intensity radiation can shrink early-stage tumors with limited collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue. The addition of robotics and image guidance systems in recent years has made these stereotactic, or directed beam, radiosurgery systems an even more versatile weapon against cancer, attacking not only brain tumors (for which they were originally designed) but also other diseases virtually anywhere in the body. [More]



Cancer - Health - Brain tumor - Radiosurgery - Medicine

The perplexing condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) might be linked to infection with a retrovirus, report the authors of a new paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ). The association is not new, but the researchers reportedly asked the journal to delay publication of their study, which had been accepted in May, after the online publication of conflicting conclusions July 1 in Retrovirology . [More]



Chronic fatigue syndrome - Research - Retrovirus - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - Health

The perplexing condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) might be linked to infection with a retrovirus, report the authors of a new paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ). The association is not new, but the researchers reportedly asked the journal to delay publication of their study, which had been accepted in May, after the online publication of conflicting conclusions July 1 in Retrovirology . [More]



Chronic fatigue syndrome - Research - Retrovirus - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - Health

Ovarian cancer is relatively rare, ranking as the eighth-most frequent cancer, but it is the fifth-leading cause of cancer deaths among U.S. women. It is disproportionately deadly because ovarian tumors tend to flourish while producing few obvious symptoms. And no reliable methods exist to detect the cancer at early stages, when treatments are most effective. But this situation may soon change if researchers can extend the promise of a recent study, in which scientists detected ovarian cancer from blood samples with near 100 percent accuracy. [More]



Cancer - Ovarian cancer - Health - Conditions and Diseases - Gynecologic

One of the primary goals of genetics over the past decade has been to understand human health and disease in terms of differences in DNA from person to person. But even a relatively straightforward trait such as height has resisted attempts to reduce it to a particular combination of genes. In light of this shortcoming, some investigators see room for an increased focus on an alternative explanation for heritable traits: epigenetics, the molecular processes that control a gene’s potential to act. Evidence now suggests that epigenetics can lead to inherited forms of obesity and cancer.

The best-studied form of epigenetic regulation is methylation, the addition of clusters of atoms made of carbon and hydrogen (methyl groups) to DNA. Depending on where they are placed, methyl groups direct the cell to ignore any genes present in a stretch of DNA. During embryonic development, undifferentiated stem cells accumulate methyl groups and other epigenetic marks that funnel them into one of the three germ layers, each of which gives rise to a different set of adult tissues. In 2008 the National Institutes of Health launched the $190-million Roadmap Epigenomics Project with the goal of cataloguing the epigenetic marks in the major human cell types and tissues. The first results could come out later this year and confirm that different laboratories can get the same results from the same cells, says Arthur L. Beaudet of the Baylor College of Medicine, the project’s data hub. “One couldn’t automatically assume it would be so nice,” he says.

In a head-to-head competition held 10 years ago, scientists at the National Institutes of Health tested two promising new types of vaccine to see which might offer the strongest protection against one of the deadliest viruses on earth, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. One vaccine consisted of DNA rings called plasmids, each carrying a gene for one of five HIV proteins. Its goal was to get the recipient’s own cells to make the viral proteins in the hope they would provoke protective reactions by immune cells. Instead of plasmids, the second vaccine used another virus called an adenovirus as a carrier for a single HIV gene encoding a viral protein. The rationale for this combination was to employ a “safe” virus to catch the attention of immune cells while getting them to direct their responses against the HIV protein.

One of us (Weiner) had already been working on DNA vaccines for eight years and was hoping for a major demonstration of the plasmids’ ability to induce immunity against a dreaded pathogen. Instead the test results dealt a major blow to believers in this first generation of DNA vaccines. The DNA recipients displayed only weak immune responses to the five HIV proteins or no response at all, whereas recipients of the adenovirus-based vaccine had robust reactions. To academic and pharmaceutical company researchers, adenoviruses clearly looked like the stronger candidates to take forward in developing HIV vaccines.

Stress is frequently linked to verve disability and other ailments, but a new office suggests that the strains of living in crowded and challenging man environments mightiness mollify against cancer. Scientists develop that unaffectedly placing mice afflicted with cancer in a more complex living environment resulted in a never-to-be-forgotten reduction in tumor swelling. <!--



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Curiously, the cancer rate is 10 percent higher in the formerly larboard bust than in the Tory. This left-side diagonal holds accurately for both men and women and it also applies to the skin cancer melanoma. Researchers Örjan Hallberg of Hallberg Self-governing Enquire in Sweden and Ollie Johansson of The Karolinska Commence in Sweden, literature in the June children of the tabloid Pathophysiology , present a surprising reason that not on the other hand points to a common cause for both cancers, it may become your sleeping habits.



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On a night night in 1967, Reed Hayes stepped out onto the gangway during the uranium thickener tank. He was replacing a superficial bulb during the potter's field staff at the now-demolished Atlas uranium toughened in Moab, Utah. He stumbled, reached desperately for the security line, and grabbed nothing but air. A woman on the previous market forgot to cosy it.

"All of a startling I go plop!" Hayes recalled. "I go intelligible to the derriere. I'm in nitric acid, sulfuric acid, uranium yellowcake, and sardonic soda. If I hadn't been a belongings swimmer, I presumably would not pull someone's leg gotten out of there."

For those of you who like stories with simple plots and neat endings, I essential confess the untruth of the Good-natured Genome Outline isn't one of those. The history didn't reach its conclusion when we unveiled the beforehand plan of the human genetic blueprint at the Caucasian Disorderly conduct on June 26, 2000. Nor did it end on April 14, 2003, with the unfulfilment of a finished, hint sequence.



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