Health News

Circulating free DNA holds clues to cancer diagnosis and risk of relapse
Sunday, February 5, 2012 - 23:47

Dr Jacqueline Shaw, of the Department of Cancer Studies and Molecular Medicine at the University of Leicester, and colleagues at Imperial College have published the genomic analysis of circulating free DNA (cfDNA) in the blood of breast cancer patients in Genome Research.

Read more
Elevated Glucose Associated with Undetected Heart Damage
Sunday, February 5, 2012 - 17:57

A new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) injures the heart, even in patients without a history of heart disease or diabetes. Researchers found that elevated levels of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), a marker for chronic hyperglycemia and diabetes, were associated with minute levels of the protein troponin T (cTnT), a blood marker for heart damage.

Read more
What’s Best for Your Aging Brain?
Sunday, February 5, 2012 - 11:08

Conventional wisdom and popular science suggest many solutions to keeping our minds sharp as we age: medications, physical exercise, brain games. But which is truly best? In an article published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, USC Davis School of Gerontology professor Elizabeth M. Zelinski described findings from her National Institute on Aging-funded meta-analysis of 42 studies with 3,781 healthy older adults aged 55 and older.

Read more
Right Hand or Left? How the Brain Solves a Perceptual Puzzle
Saturday, February 4, 2012 - 06:33

When you see a picture of a hand, how do you know whether it’s a right or left hand? This “hand laterality” problem may seem obscure, but it reveals a lot about how the brain sorts out confusing perceptions. Now, a study which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the long-held consensus about how we solve this problem.

Read more
Whole exome sequencing identifies cause of metabolic disease
Saturday, February 4, 2012 - 00:42

Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine and Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute used “whole-exome sequencing” to find the mutations causing a glycosylation disorder in a boy born in 2004. Mutations in the gene (called DDOST) that is responsible for the boy’s disease had not been previously seen in other cases of glycosylation disorders.

Read more
Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience
Friday, February 3, 2012 - 23:40

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work 'Metaphors we live by', pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like "rough day") that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

Read more