Regular use of a common type of medication, such as aspirin and ibuprofen, significantly improves survival for a third or more patients with head and neck cancer, a new study led by UC San Francisco has found. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, improved the overall five-year survival rate from 25% to 78% for patients whose cancer contained a specific altered gene, known as PIK3CA, the researchers reported.
Using a tool first used for strep throat in horses, Houston Methodist researchers unveiled the secret life of flesh-eating bacteria and learned how it causes severe disease while living deep within muscle. The team focused on necrotizing myositis, a devastating human infection with a very high mortality rate. Caused by group A streptococcus, this flesh-eating disease attacks the muscle, resulting in death up to 50 percent of the time and often leaves survivors with severe deformities and missing limbs.
A hormone found in the blood that's commonly linked to heart disease also might signal when someone is more likely to grow weaker or lose their ability to balance before they're 70. People in their early 60s with higher-than-normal levels of brain natriuretic peptide, or BNP, walked slower and were less able to raise themselves from a chair and balance on one leg up to nine years later, according to a study by British researchers published Tuesday in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
For the first time, neoadjuvant chemotherapy has been shown to improve survival in patients with resectable pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). The finding comes from a Japanese study, which used perioperative chemotherapy with neoadjuvant gemcitabine and S-1 (Taiho Pharmaceutical), as well as adjuvant S-1.
Apple and Johnson & Johnson are teaming up on a study to determine whether the latest Apple Watch, in conjunction with an app from the pharmaceutical company, can accelerate the diagnosis of a leading cause of stroke.
Severe traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of death and disability in children leaving 61% of survivors with a lifelong disability, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
Malaria vaccines lose their effectiveness in the short term. A new vaccine approach to protecting people from malaria is offering promising results against the parasite that impacted 219 million people, leading to 435,000 deaths. About 1,700 cases of malaria are diagnosed in the United States each year, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
Prions can infect both humans and animals, causing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, mad cow disease in cattle, and chronic wasting disease in elk and deer. The infectious, misfolded protein particles often go undetected as they destroy brain tissue, causing memory loss, mobility issues, and ultimately death. Preclinical detection of prions has proven difficult, but new research suggests skin samples hold early signs of prion disease that precede neurologic symptoms.
The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, discovered by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in August 2008, has been one of the most productive sites of the 21st century for fossils of early human ancestors or hominins.
An innovative computer program could be a big help for food safety professionals working to keep production facilities free of food-borne pathogens. Cornell University scientists have developed a computer program, Environmental Monitoring With an Agent-Based Model of Listeria, to simulate the most probable locations in a processing facility where the deadly food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes might be found.
Researchers have developed a highly innovative new enzyme biomarker test that has the potential to indicate diseases and bacterial contamination saving time, money and possibly lives.
Hospital readmissions of patients within six months of suffering a firearm injury cost taxpayers, private insurers and uninsured families an average of $86 million a year from 2010 through 2015, according to new estimates from Stanford University School of Medicine researchers.