High troponin levels may account for mental stress ischemia in cardiac patients.

Some people with heart disease experience a restriction of blood flow to the heart in response to psychological stress. Usually silent (not painful), the temporary restriction in blood flow, called ischemia, is an indicator of greater mortality risk.

Cardiologists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered that people in this group tend to have higher levels of troponin -- a protein whose presence in the blood that is a sign of recent damage to the heart muscle-- all the time, independently of whether they are experiencing stress or chest pain at that moment.

The results are scheduled for presentation by cardiology research fellow Muhammad Hammadah, MD at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago on April 3, as part of the Young Investigator Awards competition. Hammadah works with Arshed Quyyumi, MD, and Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute.

"Elevated troponin levels in patients with coronary artery disease may be a sign that they are experiencing repeated ischemic events in everyday life, with either psychological or physical triggers," Hammadah says.

Video source: High troponin levels may account for mental stress ischemia in cardiac patients.

Sourse: newsmedia.tasnimnews

New nanoparticle 'cluster bombs' could make chemotherapy less toxic.

Chemotherapy is one of the key weapons in our fight against cancer, but it comes with a whole host of unwanted side effects and damage to the surrounding, healthy areas of the body. So an international team of researchers has come up with what they think could be a much less toxic way of delivering the treatment, and it's based around 'cluster bombs' of nanoparticles.

The new procedure is designed to improve the delivery of the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. It works using tiny nanoparticles, just 100 nanometres wide, which are loaded with drugs and transported to the tumor site through blood vessels. Once they reach their destination, the acidic environment around the cancer cells causes them to break up into 5-nanometre-wide particles, which can then move inside the tumor cells.

At this point, the cisplatin can do its work from inside the tumor cells, damaging the cancerous DNA to effectively kill them off. To give you some idea of the scale, you can fit a million nanometres inside a millimetre.

In tests on lab mice, the teams from Emory University in the US and the University of Science and Technology of China found that the concentration of cisplatin that reached the tumors was seven times higher than normal. And if more of the drug is reaching its intended target, that means less of it is leaking out into the rest of the body, so unwanted side effects are reduced.

Video source: New nanoparticle 'cluster bombs' could make chemotherapy less toxic.

Source: Jovan Vitanovski/Shutterstock

HIV life cycle: How HIV infects a cell and replicates itself using reve...

HIV life cycle -- how HIV infects a cell and replicates itself using reverse transcriptase and the host's cellular machinery.

From the 2007 Holiday Lectures. AIDS -- Evolution and Epidemic.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, HHMI's BioInteractive Animations.

Video source: http://tinyurl.com/khx39v6

Metabolic Diseases Could be Promoted by 'Unhealthy' Microbiomes.

Trillions of bacteria surround us, permeate us, and bind our bodies together. They affect our immune systems and our brains, they shift and change with our diet, and some researchers suspect that these microbial multitudes may be an important link between our modern lifestyle and ongoing epidemics of diseases such as asthma, obesity, and diabetes.

Leading microbiome researchers recently came to UC San Francisco to share the newest insights about how improving our relationship with our bodies’ microbial ecosystems could be the next big breakthrough in treating metabolic disease. One major theme of the symposium – hosted by theUniversity of California Sugar, Stress, Environment, and Weight (SSEW) Center – was the question of whether the troubling modern epidemic of metabolic disease may arise in part because our civilization has not been kind to our microbes.

“In Western industrialized nations, we have dramatically changed our interaction with microbes in last several decades,” said Susan Lynch, PhD, who studies links between the microbiome and chronic inflammatory diseases at UCSF. “Particularly in urbanized areas, we have less contact with the soil and with animals. We have changed our diets dramatically and waged war on our microbes with antibiotics.”

Read more: Metabolic Diseases Could be Promoted by 'Unhealthy' Microbiomes.

Source: ucsf.edu

Novel Blood Test Diagnoses Alzheimer's At Early Stage.

A blood test has been developed that may potentially facilitate detection of Alzheimer's disease at an early stage and it is based on an immuno-chemical analysis using an infrared sensor. 

A major problem of Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis is the fact that, by the time the first clinical symptoms appear, massive irreversible damage to the brain has already occurred and at that point, symptomatic treatment is the only available option.

Scientists at the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) and their colleagues analyzed the secondary structure of Amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptide in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood plasma of 141 patients which was measured with an immuno-infrared-sensor. The sensor's surface is coated with highly specific antibodies which extract biomarkers for Alzheimer's from the blood or the CSF, taken from the lower part of the back. The infrared sensor analyses of the biomarkers showed pathological changes, which can take place more than 15 years before any clinical symptoms appear.

Read more: Novel Blood Test Diagnoses Alzheimer's At Early Stage.

Source: slideshare, labmedica

Anemia

Anemia is a condition characterized by an inadequate amount of red blood cells, which are produced in your bone marrow. Red blood cells contain hemoglobin, a substance that picks up oxygen from your lungs, carries it throughout your body, and gives it to your cells. Your cells need oxygen to perform the basic functions that generate energy and keep you alive. In addition, hemoglobin picks up some of the carbon dioxide given off by your cells and returns it to the lungs, where it is exhaled when you breathe out. Without enough red blood cells to transport oxygen to your cells and carbon dioxide away from your cells, your body functions at a less than optimal level.

There are many causes of anemia, which can be broadly grouped into three categories:

Blood Loss

If you are bleeding heavily, you will rapidly become anemic and may develop severe symptoms including shock. Slower leakage of blood that you are unaware of, such as bleeding from a stomach ulcer or from colon cancer , can also exceed your bone marrow’s ability to replace blood supplies, eventually resulting in anemia.

Failure to Make Enough Normal Red Blood Cells or Hemoglobin

Dietary intake of iron, folic acid, and vitamin B 12 are necessary for red blood cell formation. Deficiencies of these nutrients can impair bone marrow function, thus reducing production of adequate numbers of red blood cells. In addition, cancers, certain drugs and toxins, allergic reactions to medicines, and chronic illness can cripple the bone marrow so that it makes defective or insufficient red blood cells. Hereditary defects, such as sickle cell disease , also may lead to anemia. When the bone marrow fails completely the condition is known as aplastic anemia.

Read more: Anemia

Source: Nucleus Medical Media

Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing

Clinical Chemistry is pleased to present the Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing, a series of educational articles on how to design and write scientific research papers for publication. These articles will help authors, educators, researchers, training program directors, and other professionals write more clearly and effectively, thereby improving their chances for success. We encourage educators and training program directors to use them as a teaching aid, and provide a link to them on their own Web sites.

These articles are easy to read and humorous at times, yet are full of useful information and examples to illustrate important points. Because the articles will benefit anyone interested in scientific writing, we are making them available not only to subscribers, but to all scientists. Translations into Chinese and Spanish are available. We welcome your feedback and suggestions regarding aspects of the writing process about which you would like to learn more.

Read more: Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing

Source: 123rf

Your viruses could reveal your travel history, and much more.

The genomes of two distinct strains of the virus that causes the common lip cold sore, herpes simplex virus type 1, have been identified within an individual person --an achievement that could be useful to forensic scientists for tracing a person's history. The research also opens the door to understanding how a patient's viruses influence the course of disease.

Most people harbor HSV-1, frequently as a strain acquired from their mothers shortly after birth and carried for the rest of their lives. The new discovery was made with the help of a volunteer from the United States. The research revealed that one strain of the HSV-1 virus harbored by this individual is of a European/North American variety and the other is an Asian variety -- likely acquired during the volunteer's military service in the Korean War in the 1950s.

"It's possible that more people have their life history documented at the molecular level in the HSV-1 strains they carry," said Derek Gatherer, a lecturer in the Division of Biomedical and Life Sciences at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and a member of the research team, which also includes scientists at Georgia State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Princeton University.

Read more: Your viruses could reveal your travel history, and much more.

This is a reconstruction of a herpes simplex virus capsid, based on data from electron microscopy studies.

Source: sciencedaily

Human Myocardium is Bioengineered on Native Heart ‘Scaffold’.

Heart cells have been successfully grown in a human heart stripped of all cellular components by scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Using detergent, scientists removed all cells and human leukocyte antigens from 73 human hearts. The ‘matrix’ of the heart was then repopulated with pluripotent stem cells induced to differentiate into cardiac muscle. The scientists behind the work hope to create cardiac muscle to repair damaged tissue.

Professor Jacques Guyette, from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and lead author of this study, said: “Regenerating a whole heart is most certainly a long-term goal that is several years away, so we are currently working on engineering a functional myocardial patch that could replace cardiac tissue damaged due a heart attack or heart failure.”

In 2008, Dr Harold Ott, also from the MGH, developed a procedure to strip all cells from organs, leaving just the ‘scaffolding’ behind. To date, his technique has been used on hearts, lungs, livers, pancreases and kidneys.

MicroRNA molecules were used to reprogramme adult skin cells to created induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). It is hoped this method, as well as being more efficient, will be less likely to encounter regulatory issues.

Read more: Human Myocardium is Bioengineered on Native Heart ‘Scaffold’.

Source: labnews; thedailybeast

Your baby's Sex may be determined by ancient viral genes.

It's a boy! Or maybe it's a girl, but either way, new research suggests that the sex of mouse babies, and perhaps the sex of human babies, may be influenced by a newfound way to deactivate ancient viral genes that have been embedded in mammal genomes for more than a million years.

In the research, the scientists looked at viral DNA that is active in the mouse genome. Viral DNA can become part of an animal's genome when a kind of virus called a retrovirus infects a cell, and slips its genes into the DNA of host cells. (The most notorious retrovirus is HIV, the virus behind AIDS.)

If a retrovirus infects a sperm or egg cell — and that sperm or egg is involved in fertilization and becomes part of a person — all of the person's cells will have the viral DNA, and they will pass it on to their descendants. Hence, people and animals today carry in their cells the genetic remnants of viruses that invaded the genomes of their ancestors.

Read more: Your baby's Sex may be determined by ancient viral genes.

Source: Credit: EKS/Shutterstock