Health and Medicine

Elderly people who eat fish or seafood at least once a week are at lower risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.

Using data from a large ageing study, a team of French researchers set out to test whether there was a relation between consumption of fish (rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids) or meat (rich in saturated fatty acids) and risk of dementia.

The study involved 1,674 people aged 68 and over without dementia and liv

Raul Hernandez was no stranger to sports activity, and was active in Little League by the time he was 10 years old. But one day while running a short race at school, Raul experienced an intense burning sensation in his feet that turned his world upside down. From that day forward, he would experience severe pain in his feet any time he engaged in physical activity or, strangely, when the weather was hot or it rained. The situation worsened when the pain spread to his hands. His doctors, however, were

High blood pressure treatment with a calcium channel antagonist slowed progression of atherosclerosis, the disease process responsible for heart attacks and strokes, better than a beta blocker, according to a rapid track report posted online this week in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Rapid track articles are released online early because Circulation editors believe the work has major clinical impact or represents important basic science discoveries.

The development of drugs to combat some of the world’s most serious parasitic diseases is a step nearer with the discovery of a widely-shared gene that helps parasites to invade host cells.

The new understanding of the gene’s role in the single-celled parasite Toxoplasma gondii gives scientists a target to block that could stop the parasite literally in its tracks.

In experiments reported today in the journal Science, researchers at Imperial College London and the Univer

A project which aims to make laboratory-grown leukaemia cells change form and then be used to prime a patient’s own immune system to kill off malignant cells has begun in Edinburgh. If successful, the study could give clinicians a way of destroying residual leukaemic cells which are undetectable by microscope. The findings could be helpful in the treatment of acute myeloblastic leukaemia (AML), one of the most common forms of leukaemia in adults.

Although about 70% of patients with AML achie

Drugs to protect the brains of Alzeimer’s patients could result from new finding.

Duke University Medical Center researchers have discovered that a seemingly mild “insult” to the brain could sensitize neurons to attack by immune system proteins that are otherwise protective.

The finding could explain why sufferers of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases significantly worsen following such insults. According to the scientists, such minimal “excitotoxic insult