Health and Medicine

Baseball fans might want to add a little more sauerkraut to their hot dogs: Researchers have identified compounds in the tangy topping, made from fermented cabbage, that may fight cancer. Their study will appear in the Oct. 23 print issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

The researchers found that the process of fermenting cabbage produces isothiocyanates, a class of comp

Women with low folic acid levels are at a significantly increased risk of having an early, naturally occurring termination of their pregnancy, according to an article in the October 16 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

According to background information in the article, both folate deficiency and folic acid supplements have been reported to increase the risk of spontaneous abortion, which refers to the naturally occurring termination of a pregnancy – end of th

Women seem to be less susceptible than men to stress and serious stress-related illnesses because of the protective properties of the sex hormone oestrogen, according to a recent study of nurses by the University of Greenwich.

The study indicates that oestrogen reduces the production of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline which, when secreted during long periods of stress, can cause major illnesses such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis.

The urine of 315 ma

A chemical cousin of anti-anxiety medications, such as Valium and Xanax, significantly reduces kidney inflammation in mice inbred to develop a disease resembling human systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of California-Berkeley have found.

Their research, described in the Oct. 16 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, also reveals the novel mechanism by which the compound works, a discovery that could lead to safer and mor

Patterns of proteins found in patients’ blood serum may help distinguish between prostate cancer and benign conditions, scientists from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute*. The technique, which relies on a simple test using a drop of blood, may be useful in deciding whether to perform a biopsy in men with elevated prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels.

Using a test that can analyze

A new study from Johns Hopkins finds that some patients diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) lack any of the more than 1,000 reported disease-causing mutations in the only known CF gene. Scheduled for presentation Oct. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics in Baltimore, the findings also recently appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The discovery may mean that another gene, as yet unidentified, is to blame for these cases, or perhaps these patients r