With the help of babies and more than 5,000 of their diapers, Emory University researchers have developed an accurate, noninvasive method to determine estrogen levels in infants.
The method, previously used in nonhuman primates, will allow re…
CHICAGO (November 1, 2010) — According to a report published in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, a grant-funded program tailored to provide advanced minimally invasive surgery skills to young, underrepresented …
A team of researchers has found that drugs commonly used to anesthetize children can cause brain damage and long-term learning and memory disturbances in infant rats. The researchers report their findings in the Feb. 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. “We frequently perform surgical procedures on children, including premature infants, and those procedures have become increasingly more complex and take longer to perform,” says the study’s lead author Vesna Jevtovic-Todorovic, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Virginia Health System. “That means many pediatric patients are being exposed to anesthetic drugs more frequently and for longer periods of time. Our results would suggest that might be problematic.”
Rearrangements of the mixed lineage leukemia gene, MLL, are associated with aggressive leukemias in both children and adults. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have found that one portion of the MLL protein is an enzyme that “edits” the so-called histone code, a series of modifications to proteins associated with DNA that influence how and when certain genes are turned on and off. Their findings are presented in the November issue of Molecular Cell.