Peer support offers promise as an effective, low-cost tool for fighting depression, a new study by the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University of Michigan Health System finds.
Programs in which patients and volunteers share information were …
Older individuals, who constitute a rapidly growing population in the United States, account for a disproportionate share of health care utilization and cost.
Yet more than half of clinical trials exclude people based on their age or age-related …
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Provisions of new federal health care reforms will move the country toward a primary care medical home for patients, but the nation may not have enough primary care doctors to handle the workload, according to a study by the Un…
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In the 15 minutes a primary care doctor typically has with a patient, she’s expected to diagnose the current ailment, help manage ongoing health issues and provide preventive care. In this setting, confronting all but the most …
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Millions of Americans struggling with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis are one step closer to a cure with the release of the first National Psoriasis Victor Henschel BioBank DNA samples for use in research at the University of M…
Chances are you or someone you know is battling with a nasty cold right now. The cold bug is definitely biting its way into work places and schools all across the country, forcing millions of people to stay home. Catching a cold isn’t cheap. A new study published in the February 24th edition of Archives of Internal Medicine reports that the cost to the U.S. economy is $40 billion a year – substantially more than other conditions such as asthma, heart failure and emphysema.
An ongoing national shortage of a vaccine that prevents meningitis and pneumonia in children has left doctors scrambling to provide even the minimum number of shots, and has exposed gaps in the nation’s “patchwork” vaccine system, the first-ever in-depth study of the problem finds.
The quest for a fashion model’s figure leads many girls and women to a cycle of weight loss and weight gain called yo-yo dieting. Some women never succeed in achieving or maintaining their desired weight, although some do. Researchers at the VA/Ann Arbor Healthcare System and the University of Michigan Health System are cautioning all women who yo-yo diet. Those who gain and/or lose at least 10 pounds in a yearlong period at least five times over a lifetime may be setting themselves up for heart problems after menopause.
Alefacept, a specially designed molecule that blocks a specific immune-system reaction involved in the painful skin condition psoriasis, was approved for marketing today under the name Amevive. Biogen, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., will market the drug. Alefacept traces its roots to research done at the U-M in the mid-1990s by a team led by former dermatology faculty member Kevin D. Cooper, M.D. The University and Biogen share the patent on the engineered molecule with Cooper, who is now chair of dermatology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Despite widespread warnings about the potential risk of drinking alcohol during pregnancy, fifteen percent of pregnant women in a newly published study said they had drunk alcohol at least once during their pregnancies. And although most of those women reported on an anonymous survey that they’d had less than one drink a week, some acknowledged drinking more than that on a regular basis, or said they’d had at least one binge of five or more drinks at once.
New research results strongly suggest that cocaine bites the hand that feeds it, in essence, by harming or even killing the very brain cells that trigger the “high” that cocaine users feel. This most comprehensive description yet of cocaine-induced damage to key cells in the human brain’s dopamine “pleasure center” may help explain many aspects of cocaine addiction, and perhaps aid the development of anti-addiction drugs. It also could help scientists understand other disorders involving the same brain cells, including depression.
The process that makes fireflies glow bright in the summer night can also shed light on how well new medicines work, showing immediately whether the drugs are effective at killing cells or causing other effects. That’s the conclusion of a team of scientists who report that they have inserted the gene for a firefly’s glow-producing molecule into mice with cancer, and kept it from producing its telltale beacon of light until the cells started to die in response to cancer treatment.