Health and Medicine

Children who live with several siblings or who go to nurseries have less hay fever, but more asthma as adults, suggests a large international study in Thorax.

The findings are based on interviews with over 18,500 adults aged 20 to 44 from 36 countries in Europe, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Blood samples were also taken from over 13,000 to measure levels of IgE, antibodies involved in the response to allergens such as house dust mite, cat, and grass.
Family size, access to

Promising animal test results that could lead to a vaccine to fight rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis (MS) and other autoimmune diseases were announced by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The vaccine reversed an arthritic-like disease in rats by mobilizing part of the immune system to protect joints under attack by other immune cells. The work was reported in two related papers in the September Journal of Immunology .

Autoimmune diseases, in which the immune

Treatment with a common diabetes drug effectively shrank these tumors in mice

While most cases of a hormonal disorder called Cushing’s Syndrome are caused by non-cancerous pituitary tumors that secrete too much of a particular hormone resulting in high cortisol levels, the disorder can ultimately lead to an early death for many patients whose tumors cannot be removed surgically.

Now, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center have found that pituitary tumors express an

A genetic variant that can explain the occurrence of a type of rheumatic disorder called SLE has been identified by a research team at Uppsala University, Sweden. The team, led by Associate Professor Marta Alarcón at the Rudbeck Laboratory, is presenting its finding in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature Genetics.

Nearly 6,000 predominantly young women are victims of systemic lupus erythematosus, SLE. The disease is partly genetic and causes damage to the skin and various organ

The outcome for some cancer patients can now be predicted much earlier by making the right choice of treatment based on a mathematical model rather than the current life-table method, which has been in use for over 20 years, according to research published today in the Institute of Physics Journal Physics in Medicine & Biology.

The paper`s author, Dr Richard Mould, explains that clinical trials usually try to establish which cancer treatment is more effective, A or B. Dr Mould has now desig

Scans show amplified pain signals in patients with back pain of unknown origin

Patients with lower back pain that can’t be traced to a specific physical cause may have abnormal pain-processing pathways in their brains, according to a new study led by University of Michigan researchers.

The effect, which as yet has no explanation, is similar to an altered pain perception effect in fibromyalgia patients recently reported by the same research team.

In fact, the study