Health and Medicine

A new approach to cancer treatment that replaces a patient’s immune system with cancer-fighting cells can lead to tumor shrinkage, researchers report today in the journal Science*. The study demonstrates that immune cells, activated in the laboratory against patients’ tumors and then administered to those patients, can attack cancer cells in the body.

The experimental technique, known as adoptive transfer, has shown promising results in patients with metastatic melanoma who have not respond

Researchers from the University of Nottingham set out to determine whether people whose marital partners suffered with a certain condition such as depression, high blood pressure or asthma were at increased risk of suffering from the same disease.

Over 8,000 married couples aged between 30 and 74 years of age took part in the study. After adjustments were made for age, obesity and smoking status in both partners it was found that the partners of people with asthma, depression and peptic ulc

The Swedish Radiation Protection Authority has engaged two internationally well-known epidemiologists to review published epidemiological studies on the relationship between the use of cellular telephones and cancer risk. They are Dr. John D. Boice, Jr. and Dr. Joseph K. McLaughlin from the International Epidemiology Institute, USA.

In their review, no consistent evidence was observed for increased risk of brain cancer, meningioma, acoustic neurinoma, ocular melanoma, or salivary gland canc

Scientists are developing a method that could prevent lung infections in people who smoke, according to a paper presented today (Wednesday 18 September) at the Society for General Microbiology autumn meeting at Loughborough University.

“We’ve used a human tissue model to show how we can prevent Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) bacteria from invading cells in the lungs. These bacteria attach themselves to mucus and damaged tissue lining the lungs, and often cause infections in people with ex

A drug used to help control psychotic behavior in people with schizophrenia holds promise for controlling similar symptoms in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.

What sets this drug – called quetiapine – apart from its contemporary counterparts is its apparent lack of serious side effects, such as confusion, muscle stiffness and imbalance in the joints, said Douglas Scharre, a study co-author and an associate professor of clinical neurology at Ohio State Universit

The average person’s heart pumps about a gallon of blood per minute, a rate that can easily triple or quadruple during exercise.

The rapid flow of blood through the body is a major roadblock to the use of gene therapy to cure diseases. When injected into the blood, vector viruses – which carry corrective genes – tend to shoot past the target organ or tissue rather than sticking to it, like grains of sand moving past stones in a fast-flowing river.

Now, University of Florida g