Studies and Analyses

People retiring in the next decade or so will live considerably healthier, more active and longer lives than their predecessors. But according to research by James Banks and colleagues, many are drastically underestimating the chances of their retirement lasting at least 10 years – and hence may not be saving ‘enough`.

The first results of Banks et al’s study of people’s expected longevity – which draw on data gathered in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and are published in ESRC’s

In a series of studies in breast cancer patients, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have confirmed the presence of “chemobrain” after chemotherapy treatment – but they also discovered that a significant portion of patients have cognitive declines even before chemotherapy. The studies, the latest of which is reported June 21 in the online edition of the journal Cancer, are the first to document such pretreatment losses in patients with non-metastatic breast c

Scientists have induced a movement disorder in rats that closely resembles Parkinson’s disease in humans. The study, published June 21, 2004, in the online edition of the Annals of Neurology, suggests that natural toxins found in the environment could contribute to the development of this debilitating movement disorder. The full study will be available via Wiley InterScience.

The compounds, called proteasome inhibitors, can be produced by bacteria and fungi. Man-made proteasome inhibitors

“AIDS is now the leading cause of death in military and police forces in some African countries, accounting for more than half of in-service mortality,” write Ugboga Nwokoji and Ademola Ajuwon in the Open Access journal BMC Public Health today. They believe that secrecy about AIDS-related deaths, and multiple sex partnering in the Nigerian navy could be helping to fuel the HIV epidemic in Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country.

Their survey of 480 Nigerian naval personnel revealed that

Early and accurate detection of oncological disease is critical to the treatment and, ultimately, survival of patients suffering from cancer. In an effort to determine the accuracy of an integrated PET/CT scanner with more traditional diagnostic imaging methods for whole-body, malignant tumors, researchers in Essen, Germany, compared the imaging results of the integrated FDG-PET/CT with CT images alone, PET images alone, and CT and PET images viewed side-by-side.

The scientists theorized

Advances in the study of the salmonella bacteria, being undertaken at the Pamplona Institute of Agrobiotechnology and Natural Resources and led by professor Iñigo Lasa Uzcudun of the Public University of Navarre, have been recognised in the principal international magazine in the field of Microbiology, Molecular Microbiology, at a congress held recently in the German city of Heidelberg.

The Navarre researchers are analysing the role that a new family of Salmonella typhimurium proteins pl