Health and Medicine

Repeat bypass operations might soon be a thing of the past, thanks to new research by a team at St George`s Hospital Medical School in Tooting, London. The origins of diseased cells in vein grafts that form following heart bypass operations have been found for the first time using a new model. The discovery by Professor Xu and colleagues is published today in the journal, Circulation Research.

Every week around 15 people have heart bypass operations in St George`s Hospital alone. In each c

People with insulin-treated diabetes may soon be freed from the restrictive diet and regimented lifestyle usually associated with the condition

A study, funded by Diabetes UK and published in the British Medical Journal on Saturday 5 October 2002 [BMJ Volume 325] shows that a new flexible method of treating diabetes in the UK provides substantial benefits for quality of life without increasing health risk.

“DAFNE really does give the freedom to eat what you like, when you lik

Training patients with diabetes to adjust their insulin doses to match their food choices, improves diabetes control and quality of life, finds a study in this week’s BMJ.

This approach has been developed in Germany, but has not been widely adopted elsewhere. Patients in the UK often have impaired quality of life and a high risk of diabetic complications. Researchers in Sheffield, London and North Tyneside set out to test this approach in the UK with the dose adjustment for normal eating (DA

In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi African and European researchers have launched an ambitious international `information mobilisation`-project to disclose the existing knowledge of useful plants of Tropical Africa. The PROTA Project (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa) has been prepared by Wageningen University (the Netherlands), Agropolis in Montpellier (France), Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (United Kingdom) and six African institutes: Makerere University (Uganda), FORIG (Ghana), NHBGM (Malawi), PBZT (M

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Harvard University and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation have found a way to use a relatively new but readily available technology to quickly detect markers in the DNA of the most deadly type of malaria pathogen.

The technology could enable scientists and public health workers to identify the particular strain of malaria during an outbreak and determine if it is drug resistant or not.

“One of the reason

For Karen Pressley, Duke’s new Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Center revealed critical details of her heart that could enable her to have an angioplasty.

Physicians at her home medical center in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. were reluctant to perform a heart procedure on 55-year-old Pressley because conventional techniques could not determine the extent of possible heart muscle death from a recent silent heart attack. So Pressley was referred to Duke University Medical Center, where cardiologi