Patients who receive a liver transplant due to alcoholic liver disease need to demonstrate periods of abstinence and often attend addiction treatment before transplantation. However, alcohol use disorders can recur, as can other diseases requiring t…
New research by Israeli fertility experts has challenged current medical opinion, which holds that refraining from sex for up to a week at least is beneficial for men prior to undergoing some types of fertility treatment. Doctors and scientists from Soroka University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, tested over 7,200 semen samples for semen volume, sperm concentration and shape, and the percentage and total count of motile (active and moving) sperm. The samples were from around 6,000 men being investigated or treated for infertility who had abstained from sex for periods up to two weeks.
Millions of Americans suffer from major depression each year, and most are not getting proper treatment for this debilitating disorder, according to a two-year nationwide study reported in the June 18 Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, led by researchers from Harvard Medical School, found high rates of major depressive episodes (MDE) in all segments of the U.S. population. The researchers measured the severity and duration of depression in more than 9,000 Americans 18 years or older and looked at MDE’s effect on daily activities and treatment received, if any.
A new anti-herpes agent derived from a common herb effectively treats and prevents the disease in animals. Researchers from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia present their data today at the 103rd General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
Two commonly prescribed epilepsy drugs have varied cognitive side effects on patients, report doctors from Georgetown University Medical Center. Their findings are published in the May 13 issue of the journal Neurology. In a double-blind, randomized study, researchers looked at 2 drugs, valproate–released in 1978 for the treatment of epileptic seizures, and topiramate, approved by the FDA in late 1996. Each drug was added to carbamazepine, a standard epilepsy treatment, and then given to patients with epilepsy. The cognitive effects on those patients taking topiramate were slightly, although noticeably, worse than those taking the older valproate for a subset of patients.
A research team led by The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has tested a novel “viral smart bomb” therapy that can completely eradicate brain tumors in mice, while leaving normal brain tissue alone. The therapy, known as Delta-24-RGD, is thought to be the first treatment for malignant glioma, the deadliest form of brain cancer. It is a new-generation “replication-competent oncolytic” adenovirus therapy ?? defined as a therapeutic virus that can spread, wavelike, throughout a tumor, infecting and killing cancer cells. There is no adequate treatment for these deadly brain cancers and, before this study, few experimental therapies tested in animals have shown much improvement.
The United States has a higher prevalence and lower treatment rate of serious mental illness than a number of other developed countries, according to a study published in a special edition on international health care in the May/June issue of the policy journal Health Affairs. Treatment was also to be more strongly related to the ability to pay and less to need for care in the United States than the other countries. The study analyzed data from community surveys with more than 22,000 respondents in Canada, Chile, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. All these countries, except the United States, have universal health insurance.
A significant breakthrough by scientists at Cardiff University and the University of Edinburgh will enable new drugs to be developed, which could prevent bowel cancer. Researchers led by Professor Adrian Bird at Edinburgh and Professor Alan Clarke at Cardiff have discovered a gene, called MBD2, which is essential for bowel cancer cells to grow, but is dispensable in normal cells. The findings of the research, funded in part by the Wellcome Trust and published in the journal Nature Genetics, raise the possibility that drugs which inactivate MBD2 could prevent human bowel cancer without harming normal cells.
Stroke patients will be welcoming the news of a discovery by a University of Alberta scientist that may have significant future implications for treatment of the disease. Dr. Fred Colbourne, from the Faculty of Science, has shown that a novel rehabilitation regimen has proven remarkably effective in promoting recovery in hemorrhagic stroke–or ruptured blood vessels–in rats.
A new non-invasive therapy for liver cancer patients who cannot be helped by surgery or organ transplantation is being evaluated by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine. The Phase I clinical trial at the IU Cancer Center uses extracranial stereotactic radioablation (SRA) as a potential new treatment for hepatocelluar carcinoma, a cancer that originates in the liver, or for liver metastasis from other sites.
UK scientists have made a major scientific advance by establishing proof of principle that the development of prion disease can be prevented in mice using monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). The work lays the foundation for further research to explore the potential of mAbs to treat specific prion diseases such as CJD and vCJD. The work is published today (6 March 2003) in Nature.
A compound developed by British scientists early in World War II as a treatment against chemical weapons has value against today’s threat of bioterrorism, according to Indiana University School of Medicine researchers at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Researchers studying British Anti-Lewisite provide an overview of its historical uses, development and clinical implications today of the heavy metal chelating agent, detailed in the March issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine. BAL is a medical therapy to remove metal poisonings from the body.