Health and Medicine

Early results of North American trials of chemotherapy drug oxaliplatin

For patients with bowel cancer that has spread to other organs despite treatment there has been little hope until now. However, early results of trials in North America of a chemotherapy drug called oxaliplatin, given in conjunction with two standard drugs, 5-FU and leucovorin, delay tumour progression by 70% compared with the control component of the study. There is also a significant improvement in the symptoms

Work stress is associated with a doubling of the risk of death from heart disease, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.

Researchers followed 812 healthy employees (545 men, 267 women) of a company in Finland for an average of 25 years. They gathered data on stress, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and body mass index by questionnaire, interviews, and clinical examinations. Cardiovascular deaths were calculated using the national mortality register.

They found that job strain (high w

Scientists from the McKusick-Nathans Institute for Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins may have discovered why a rare genetic disease is more common in children born to older fathers. The disease, Apert syndrome, leads to webbed fingers and early fusion of the skull bones and must be corrected by surgery.

While Apert syndrome itself affects only 1 in 160,000 births, the scientists believe their findings could extend to many of the 20 or so other genetic conditions similarly linked to older fa

Ageing does not only affect the way we look from outside; the microbiota living in our gut also changes with age. The intestinal microbiota of infants is quite well identified, but only 8% of the microbes in elderly people can be characterised at the moment.

We all carry inside us millions of mostly beneficial bacteria that help us manage our diet successfully and maintain our health, although we seldom realise it. So far, the composition of our microbiota is still an area that we know rathe

Elderly people who suffer from depression can take the edge off faster by using a drug called mirtazapine, which appears to work more quickly compared to rival drugs. These results come from a study by researchers at Stanford University Medical Center who compared two drugs in an eight-week trial. Although both drugs treated the depression, mirtazapine began working sooner and eased the patient’s anxiety – a common effect of depression in elderly people.

“There’s a sense that we n

Heat-denatured p24 Antigen Tests Can Cut Cost of HIV Progression Monitoring

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, have identified a test for monitoring the progression of HIV in the early stages of the disease that is less expensive than current tests used to monitor the progression of HIV. The test, called HIV-1 protein 24 (p24) antigen, predicts disease progression as well as CD4 lymphocyte count and HIV-1 RNA v