Nutrition And Balanced Diet

Clinicians at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have successfully demonstrated an improved technique for blood stem cell transplantations in children that shows promise for those most likely to fail standard therapy for leukemia. The St. Jude technique allows blood stem cells to come from parents or unmatched adult siblings; and it avoids the aggressive, toxic therapys that commonly must accompany the transplant. This allows the majority of patients with leukemia or non-malignant blood disorders to receive a transplant, as per Gregory Hale, M.D., St. Jude Bone Marrow Transplantation Division interim chief. A report on this work appears in the prepublication edition of the British Journal of Haematology........

After all these years, mom was right. She knew broccoli was good for you, she just didn't know it was this good. "Everyone knows broccoli is good for you and that it contains compounds known to lessen the occurrence of some types of cancer. We want to know how these compounds work and what their specific targets may be," says Janet V. Cross, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine........

University of Chicago chemists have shown for the first time how to use a simple laboratory model consisting of only a few chemical reactions to predict when and where blood clotting will occur. The researchers used microfluidics, a technique that allowed them to probe blood clotting on surfaces that mimic vascular damage on the micron scale, a unit of measurement much narrower than the diameter of a human hair........

Scientists at Rush University Medical Center found prescription pain medicine (PPM) abuse is a rapidly growing problem with surprising and often unpredictable distribution patterns. The research was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Anesthesiologists in Chicago, October 13, 2006........

Scientists in the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Caribbean Primate Research Center have discovered a key mechanism by which the Filoviruses, Ebola and Marburg, cause disease. The identification of an amino acid sequence in Filoviruses that results in the rapid depression of immunological response is described in the December 2006 issue of The FASEB Journal. Using this information, scientists can begin to develop new drugs to stop these devastating diseases........

Soot particles spewing from the exhaust of diesel trucks constitute a major contributor to the alarmingly high rates of asthma symptoms among school-aged children in the South Bronx, as per the results of a five-year study by scientists at New York University's School of Medicine and Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service........

Older women on hormone treatment are more sensitive to negative events, confirming speculation that age-related estrogen loss affects the brain's ability to process emotion, an Oregon Health and Science University study shows. But that sensitivity to negative emotional events, such as viewing a photograph of a dead person, doesn't necessarily mean women taking estrogen remember those events any better........

Dreams have been interpreted in a number of different ways through the ages: as messages from the gods, repressed sexual fantasies..... or, based on an evolutionist approach that emerged around the turn of the millennium, as a mechanism that helps us to prepare survival strategies in the face of danger........

Feeding babies alcoholic milk may help to protect against some food allergies. Kefir, a traditional fermented drink, is consumed in Eastern Europe as a health food, and is often used to wean babies, as it is easily digested. Food allergy prevalence is particularly high in children under the age of three, with around 5-8% of infants at risk. Currently the only therapy is avoidance of the problematic food........

People addicted to cocaine have an impaired ability to perceive rewards and exercise control due to disruptions in the brain's reward and control circuits, as per a series of brain-mapping studies and neuropsychological tests conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory........