Health and Medicine

French authors of a research letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET describe the preliminary success of transplanting muscle stem-cells from the thigh to the heart to restore damaged cardiac tissue after heart attack.

The procedure was done in a 72-year-old man and resulted in improved left-ventricular and overall heart function. After the man’s death 18 months later, the grafted post-infarction scar showed that the undifferentiated stem cells transplanted from his leg had evolved into we

Amphidinolides, a family of natural compounds that have shown promise as powerful antitumor agents, pose problems for cancer researchers because they are found in only minute amounts, and only in microscopic marine flatworms that live off the coasts of Japan and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Nature keeps a tight lock on its supply of amphidinolide.

Work by University of Illinois at Chicago chemistry professor Arun Ghosh may solve this problem. He’s successfully developed a way to synthesize

US fertility experts today (Thursday 6 February) published the first conclusive evidence that lead is linked to male infertility.

A report in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction[1] concludes that exposure to lead damages sperm function and may be a contributory cause of unexplained male infertility.[2]

The findings have led principal investigator Dr Susan Benoff to urge doctors to measure lead in seminal plasma when evaluating men from couples with unex

Dr. Tyler Jacks of MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Karen Cichowski of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues have discovered how neurofibromin, a key regulator of the ras oncogene, is, itself, regulated. This discovery has promising therapeutic implications for the treatment of neurofibromatosis type I (NF1), a common hereditary disease that results from mutations in the neurofibromin gene, as well as the ~30% of human tumors that have altered Ras a

The experiences of millions of people have proved that antidepressants work, but only with the advent of sophisticated imaging technology have scientists begun to learn exactly how the medications affect brain structures and circuits to bring relief from depression.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW Medical School recently added important new information to the growing body of knowledge. For the first time, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)–tech

When developing a treatment plan for cervical cancer, it is important to be able to determine a patient’s prognosis, ideally at the time of diagnosis. Existing methods to arrive at a prognosis can be time consuming, inaccurate and may require specialized software. Therefore, doctors from the Washington University School of Medicine developed – and validated – an accurate, reproducible and quick prognostic system.

The researchers created a grading scale to use in conjunction with a simp