Health and Medicine

Researchers from the University of Chicago have identified a gene defect that causes the development of leukemia in children with Down syndrome. The discovery, scheduled for Advance Online Publication on Nature Genetics’s website on 12 August, could speed diagnosis and provide a new target for therapy.

Children with Down syndrome are 10 to 20 times as likely as unaffected children to develop leukemia. They most commonly develop a type known as acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL), wh

Two articles in the latest issue of Critical Care reveal how intensive care therapy may be beneficial in the short but not in the long term. Being treated in intensive care units may help critically ill patients survive but the quality of life – if they survive – is often severely impaired. It is unclear whether this impairment is a complication of the illness or a complication of therapy.

Many intensive care doctors believe the battle has been won once a patient leaves the intensive care u

Injecting a patient’s bone-marrow cells into their legs could help repair damaged circulatory systems in those with limb ischaemia, suggest authors of a trial in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.

Lower limb ischaemia is due to narrowing of the arteries and is a common condition, which if left untreated can lead to gangrene, amputation, and sometimes death. The disorder is usually associated with chronic peripheral arterial disease and can result in severe leg pain at rest and walking, as well

Findings from a Research Letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET provide support for the idea that children who grow up on farms have fewer allergies because they are exposed to more microbes than other children.

Farmers’ children are known to be less prone to allergies than children who do not grow up on farms, but the exact reason is not known. Previous work has shown a circumstantial link between exposure to bacteria and reduced allergy; Dr Roger Lauener and colleagues from Zurich Unive

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria has become a serious public-health concern, and, accordingly, scientists are investigating new classes of antimicrobials for their efficacy against disease-causing bacteria. One developing area of study involves antimicrobial peptides derived from insects. Recent studies have identified the protein target in bacteria of these antimicrobial peptides and suggested that the peptides are not toxic to mammalian cells including those of humans, rai

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have located two genes that give hepatitis A virus (HAV) its virulent properties. The team, led by Suzanne Emerson, Ph.D., also has discovered that deliberately weakened HAV can quickly revert to its naturally occurring, infection-causing form. To be published in the September 1 issue of Journal of Virology, and appearing online this week, these findings indicate that making an improved vaccine for HAV will be a very dif