Family With a Risk of Cancer Tries to Change Its Destiny; A Controversial Procedure Lets Couples Select Embryos Free of a Genetic Mutation

Family With a Risk of Cancer Tries to Change Its Destiny

A Controversial Procedure Lets Couples Select Embryos Free of a Genetic Mutation

BONNIE ROCHMAN

Feb. 17, 2014 6:01 p.m. ET

Katie Dowdy of Castle Pines, Colo., with daughters, Reagan, left, and Mackenzie. She had her embryos tested to try to reduce risk of passing on her BRCA gene mutation. Alicia Lawrence

To shield any future children from the fear she harbors of getting breast cancer, Katie Dowdy underwent a controversial procedure to select embryos of hers that were free of a genetic mutation linked to the disease. Read more of this post

Itching: More Than Skin-Deep; Long overshadowed by pain in terms of research and treatment, chronic itching is getting a serious look beyond just throwing antihistamines at it.

Itching: More Than Skin-Deep

By DENISE GRADYFEB. 17, 2014

The experiment was not for the squirmish. Volunteers were made to itch like crazy on one arm, but not allowed to scratch. Then they were whisked into anM.R.I. scanner to see what parts of their brains lit up when they itched, when researchers scratched them and when they were finally allowed to scratch themselves.

Read more of this post

Are S’pore public hospitals on track to meet future healthcare needs?

Are S’pore public hospitals on track to meet future healthcare needs?

By Sara Grosse 
POSTED: 16 Feb 2014 01:03
By 2020, there will be six new public hospitals, which are part of the Health Ministry’s plan to boost infrastructure to deal with the rise in demand for healthcare services.

SINGAPORE: By 2020, there will be six new public hospitals, which are part of the Health Ministry’s plan to boost infrastructure to deal with the rise in demand for healthcare services. Read more of this post

Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms; A 25-year study involving 90,000 women has found that the breast-cancer screenings did not lower the death rate from the disease and had harms

Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms

By GINA KOLATAFEB. 11, 2014

One of the largest and most meticulous studies of mammography ever done, involving 90,000 women and lasting a quarter-century, has added powerful new doubts about the value of the screening test for women of any age. Read more of this post

Fever rising: There are reasons to hope that the latest biotech boom will not be followed by another bust

Fever rising: There are reasons to hope that the latest biotech boom will not be followed by another bust

Feb 15th 2014 | From the print edition

AS INVESTORS and executives crammed into a New York ballroom for a conference held this week by the Biotechnology Industry Organisation, the mood was jittery. The previous week eight biotech firms had launched initial public offerings in America, together raising more than $500m. In a discussion panel on whether the industry’s latest boom will last, a prominent investor, Oleg Nodelman, joked that he still had suitcases of cash for any firm that wanted it. Read more of this post

As World’s Kids Get Fatter, Doctors Turn to the Knife; Obesity rates are soaring in Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states, leading to a boom in bariatric surgery on children

As World’s Kids Get Fatter, Doctors Turn to the Knife

Obesity rates are soaring in Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states, leading to a boom in bariatric surgery on children.

SHIRLEY S. WANG

Feb. 14, 2014 10:32 p.m. ET

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia— Daifailluh al-Bugami was just a year old when his parents noticed that his lips turned blue as he slept at night. It was his weight, doctors said, putting pressure on his delicate airways. Read more of this post

Cancer: A better way to understand metastasis

Cancer: A better way to understand metastasis

Feb 15th 2014 | From the print edition

THE most insidious thing about cancer is its tendency to spread. A lone primary tumour can be tackled by knife or radiation beam, as well as drugs, with a reasonable hope of success. But once it has metastasised, and spread secondary cancers around a patient’s body, such treatments are much less likely to be effective for any length of time. Stopping metastasis would thus be a great achievement. And a device created by Matteo Moretti of the Galeazzi Orthopaedic Institute, in Milan, and Roger Kamm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, may be a step towards that goal. Their invention, which they describe in Biomaterials, is a lab-on-a-chip that mimics the metastasis of breast cancer into bone marrow. Read more of this post

An old tonic for today’s drugstores; Customers who have quaffed the elixirs of health and happiness tend to return

February 13, 2014 4:36 pm

An old tonic for today’s drugstores

By Gary Silverman in New York

Customers who have quaffed the elixirs of health and happiness tend to return

These are exciting times in the US pharmacy sector. To use a technical term, I would say the Joe Klein way is coming back into style.

Klein, who died close to a dozen years ago in Florida at the age of 93, is hardly a household name in the US. In fact, the only reason I heard of him was because he was my mother’s father. Read more of this post

Apprehensive, Many Doctors Shift to Jobs With Salaries

Apprehensive, Many Doctors Shift to Jobs With Salaries

By ELISABETH ROSENTHALFEB. 13, 2014

American physicians, worried about changes in the health care market, are streaming into salaried jobs with hospitals. Though the shift from private practice has been most pronounced in primary care, specialists are following.

Last year, 64 percent of job offers filled through Merritt Hawkins, one of the nation’s leading physician placement firms, involved hospital employment, compared with only 11 percent in 2004. The firm anticipates a rise to 75 percent in the next two years. Read more of this post

NUS develops screening tool able to diagnose cancer immediately

NUS develops screening tool able to diagnose cancer immediately

By Reshma Ailmchandani

POSTED: 10 Feb 2014 22:09

National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a new tool that is able to diagnose cancerous and even pre-cancerous tissues immediately during endoscopy. Read more of this post

US Biotech IPO fever stokes bubble fears

Last updated: February 9, 2014 1:35 pm

US Biotech IPO fever stokes bubble fears

By Arash Massoudi in New York and Andrew Ward in London

The fastest start to a year for US biotechinitial public offerings is stoking fears of a bubble amid concerns investors are taking risks on companies at the earliest stage of medical research.

Another eight biotech companies raised a combined $502m in US listings last week, setting a weekly record for the sector and continuing a boom that has seen the Nasdaq biotech index rise more than two-thirds in the past year. Read more of this post

The Path to Reading a Newborn’s DNA Map: As technology becomes more sophisticated, genomic sequencing will inevitably expand into the world of newborns. The process has both medical and ethical implications

The Path to Reading a Newborn’s DNA Map

By ANNE EISENBERGFEB. 8, 2014

What if laboratories could run comprehensive DNA tests on infants at birth, spotting important variations in their genomes that might indicate future medical problems? Should parents be told of each variation, even if any risk is still unclear? Would they even want to know? Read more of this post

CVS chief shakes up business model of US pharmacies

February 7, 2014 4:48 pm

CVS chief shakes up business model of US pharmacies

By Anjli Raval and Shannon Bond in New York

Chief executive of CVS Caremark Larry Merlo

For Larry Merlo the decision to stop selling cigarettes at US pharmacy chain CVS Caremark was not just about business. “My father was a smoker and died of cancer at the young age of 57,” said the former pharmacist, who rose through the ranks to become chief executive of the company. Read more of this post

Gene therapy: Ingenious; Fixing a body’s broken genes is becoming possible

Gene therapy: Ingenious; Fixing a body’s broken genes is becoming possible

Feb 8th 2014 | New York | From the print edition

IT SOUNDS like science fiction, and for years it seemed as though it was just that: fiction. But the idea of gene therapy—introducing copies of healthy genes into people who lack them, to treat disease—is at last looking as if it may become science fact. Read more of this post

Guidelines urge women to monitor stroke risks more closely than men; Guidelines urge women to monitor stroke risks more closely than men

Guidelines urge women to monitor stroke risks more closely than men

By Lena H. Sun, Friday, February 7, 5:00 AM

Women of all ages should pay more attention to the risk of stroke than the average man, watching their blood pressure carefully before they think about taking birth-control pills or getting pregnant, according to a new set of prevention guidelines released Thursday. Read more of this post

A Catalog of Cancer Genes That’s Done, or Just a Start; As the Cancer Genome Atlas project, started in 2005, comes to an end, scientists are debating where cancer research should go next

A Catalog of Cancer Genes That’s Done, or Just a Start

FEB. 6, 2014

Carl Zimmer

Cancer is a disease of genes gone wrong. When certain genes mutate, they make cells behave in odd ways. The cells divide swiftly, they hide from the immune systemthat could kill them and they gain the nourishment they need to develop into tumors. Read more of this post

New China bird flu a reminder of mutant virus risk

New China bird flu a reminder of mutant virus risk

Tue, Feb 4 2014

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – The death of a woman in China from a strain of bird flu previously unknown in humans is a reminder of the ever-present potential pandemic threat from mutating animal viruses, scientists said on Wednesday. Read more of this post

A Cure for Hospital Design

Strategies to Keep Patients and Their Visitors From Getting Lost

LAURA LANDRO

Updated Feb. 3, 2014 11:47 p.m. ET

A Cure for Hospital Design; It’s a problem when patients and visitors continually struggle to navigate the maze of the modern medical complex. Hospitals borrow strategies from airports and shopping malls Read more of this post

Limited human-to-human bird flu transmission possible: China

Limited human-to-human bird flu transmission possible: China

Staff Reporter 

2014-01-28

Limited, single human-to-human transmission of the H7N9 bird flu cannot yet be ruled out, according to a newly issued plan for human H7N9 infection diagnosis and treatment from China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission. Read more of this post

We can’t beat cancer with drugs alone; prevention crucial: WHO

We can’t beat cancer with drugs alone; prevention crucial: WHO

10:04am EST

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – Governments must make better use of vaccines and preventative public health policies in the fight against cancer as treatment alone cannot stem the disease, a World Health Organization (WHO) agency said on Monday. Read more of this post

Escape from the Chronic Pain Trap: More than 100 million American adults live with chronic pain-most of them women. What will it take to bring them relief?

Escape from the Chronic Pain Trap

More than 100 million American adults live with chronic pain—most of them women. What will it take to bring them relief?

In a conversation with Gary Rosen, Judy Foreman, author of “A Nation in Pain,” discusses America’s chronic pain epidemic and why women suffer disproportionately.

JUDY FOREMAN

Jan. 31, 2014 9:09 p.m. ET

Several years ago, my neck suddenly went bonkers—bone spurs and a long-lurking arthritic problem probably exacerbated by too many hours spent hunching over a new laptop. On a subjective scale of zero to 10 (unfortunately, there is no simple objective test for pain), even the slightest wrong move—turning my head too fast or picking up a pen from the floor—would send my pain zooming from a zero to a gasping 10. Read more of this post

We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer; Overused CT scans are exposing patients to dangerous levels of radiation

We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer

By RITA F. REDBERG and REBECCA SMITH-BINDMANJAN. 30, 2014

DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment,cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death. Read more of this post

Scientists hail breakthrough in embryonic-like stem cells

Scientists hail breakthrough in embryonic-like stem cells

Thu, Jan 30 2014

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) – In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a simple way to reprogram mature animal cells back into an embryonic-like state that allows them to generate many types of tissue. Read more of this post

Home blood pressure monitoring may find hidden risk

Home blood pressure monitoring may find hidden risk

2:50pm EST

By Shereen Jegtvig

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People with normal blood pressure at the doctor’s office but high blood pressure at other times may have a doubled risk of heart attacks and strokes, according to new research reviews. Read more of this post

A Bit of Stress Yields Stem-Cell Surprise; New Way of Forming Stem Cells From Specialized Cells Could Be Safer, More Ethical

A Bit of Stress Yields Stem-Cell Surprise

New Way of Forming Stem Cells From Specialized Cells Could Be Safer, More Ethical

GAUTAM NAIK 

Updated Jan. 29, 2014 5:55 p.m. ET

Researchers have transformed specialized cells into an embryonic-like state simply by stressing them out a bit—an unexpected finding that may one day offer an easier route for treating diseases with patient-specific stem cells. Read more of this post

Drug company launches global hunt for ‘superhumans’; A pharmaceutical company hopes that finding people with extraordinary characteristics could lead to new medicines

Drug company launches global hunt for ‘superhumans’

A pharmaceutical company hopes that finding people with extraordinary characteristics could lead to new medicines

By Denise Roland

1:41PM GMT 28 Jan 2014

A drug maker has enlisted the help of the general public to track down people with extraordinary characteristics whose genetic make-up could form the basis of new medicines. Read more of this post