Nature Medicine
St. Louis, March 20, 2009 -- Detectives on television shows often spray crime scenes with a compound called luminol to make blood glow. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have applied the same compound to much smaller crime scenes: sites where the immune system attacks the body's own tissues.
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) have found that a key enzyme involved in absorbing fat may also be a key to reducing it. The enzyme, acyl CoA: monoacylglycerol acyltransferase 2 or Mgat2 is found in the intestines and plays an important part in the uptake of dietary fat by catalyzing a critical step in making triglyceride, a kind of fat.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A class of Alzheimer's disease drugs currently studied in clinical trials appears to reduce damage caused by traumatic brain injury in animals, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center report in an upcoming advance online publication of Nature Medicine.
A breakthrough strategy to improve the effectiveness of the only tuberculosis vaccine approved for humans provided superior protection against the deadly disease in a pre-clinical test, report scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in Nature Medicine's Advance Online Publication March 1.
Distributed around the body, dendritic cells act as the security alarms of the immune system. After sensing the presence of intruders, dendritic cells can transmit the alarm to white blood cells or tell them to relax, depending on the signals they send out.
New research suggests vaccines that specifically target HIV in the initial stages of infection before it becomes a rapidly replicating, system-wide infection - may be a successful approach in limiting the spread of the disease.
Memory loss, cognitive impairment, brain cell degeneration and cell death were prevented or reversed in several animal models after treatment with a naturally occurring protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).
The best treatment doctors currently have for stroke can accelerate the death of brain cells in addition to dissolving blood clots, researchers report in the journal Nature Medicine. But they also found good news: Another drug currently used to treat patients with severe sepsis counters the harmful effects, offering the possibility that a combination of two already-approved drugs might offer a powerful new stroke treatment that would give doctors a bigger window of time to treat patients.
ATP, the vital energy source that keeps our body's cells alive, runs amok at the site of a spinal cord injury, pouring into the area around the wound and killing the cells that normally allow us to move, scientists report in the cover story of the August issue of Nature Medicine. The finding that ATP is a culprit in causing the devastating damage of spinal cord injury is unexpected. Doctors have known that initial trauma to the spinal cord is exacerbated by a cascade of molecular events over the first few hours that permanently worsen the paralysis for patients. But the finding that high levels of ATP kill healthy cells in nearby regions of the spinal cord that were otherwise uninjured is surprising and marks one of the first times that high levels of ATP have been identified as a cause of injury in the body.
A new study by gene therapy scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may lead to an effective long-term treatment for preventing seizures associated with a common form of epilepsy. The study appears this week in the Internet edition of the journal Nature Medicine and will appear in the Aug. 1 print edition of the journal. The research provides an important foundation for the development of new gene therapies to treat focal seizure disorders, the authors said.
A gene known for its ability to form blood vessels has been found to be a key player in a chromosomal abnormality that causes potentially devastating birth defects in the heart and throughout the body. In a study published in the February 2003 issue of Nature Medicine, a group of collaborators from across the globe reports that abnormalities in vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF, is a cause of DiGeorge syndrome. The syndrome can cause a wide range of heart defects, many of which are vascular in nature, as well as problems with the thymus and parathyroid gland, craniofacial abnormalities and mental retardation.
Much like guided missiles that sense the heat of a plane?s engine, sperm are guided to the fertilization site by temperature, reports a study published in the current issue of Nature Medicine. The site where the egg lies is slightly warmer than the place where the sperm make a pause in their journey through the female genital tract. Sperm cells are apparently guided by this temperature difference in their navigation. Such a temperature-driven mechanism was previously known to exist in microorganisms and worms, but the Weizmann study for the first time has provided evidence for its existence in sperm cells.
Exposing rats to low levels of carbon monoxide (CO) prior to aorta transplantation prevents arteriosclerosis associated with chronic organ rejection and can also suppress stenosis after balloon-angioplasty-induced carotid artery injury, according to a study published in the Feb. 1 edition of Nature Medicine. The article is published online today.
"These findings demonstrate a significant protective role for CO in vascular injury and support its use as a therapeutic agent," according to study author Leo Otterbein, Ph.D., research assistant professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, division of pulmonary and critical care medicine.
Instead of searching for a kidney donor, a new study suggests, one might be able to grow a new kidney. A team headed by Prof. Yair Reisner of the Weizmann Institute of Science has induced human stem cell tissue to grow into functional kidneys, and have accomplished the same with porcine stem cell tissue. Published in Nature Medicine, the method could lead to a promising solution to the severe shortage of kidney donors.
Scientists have developed a rapid new blood test which may help predict the likelihood of a heart attack. The research published in Nature Medicine shows how a new science called Metabonomics can be used to test for coronary artery disease, using minimally invasive procedures. The test, which only needs a few drops of blood, measures the magnetic properties of molecules in blood using high frequency radio waves, which are then analysed using an advanced computer programme capable of detecting abnormal patterns of signals associated with heart disease.
