Medicine

Why Facebook isn't making your eyeballs bleed

Facebook's frequent home page design changes are known to get momentary griping from users who say it's ugly, difficult to use, or hides their favorite features, but this is a new one: scores of ticked-off members go so far as to claim it's detrimental to their health.

That's what happened after Facebook on Wednesday made an unannounced tweak to its home page design, shrinking the font size that appears on users' "news feeds" of their friends' activity across the site. Facebook, in a statement, said it's "constantly testing new ways to make … Read more

Cleveland Clinic predicts top medical breakthrough of 2011

This week, at Cleveland Clinic's 2010 Medical Innovation Summit, the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2011 have been predicted, with the new brain imaging compound AV-45--which is poised to help early detection of Alzheimer's--taking the top spot.

Alzheimer's gets its name from German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer, who began lecturing in the early 1900s about the plaques and tangles he'd found in the post-mortem brain tissue of a 51-year-old patient.

To this day, diagnosing the disease while a patient is still alive is tricky, and there is still no cure. But there have been several breakthroughs … Read more

Want a prescription? 'X-ray' your genes first

You know that stern voice at the end of drug advertisements that runs through the list of possible side effects as quickly (and sometimes comically) as possible? "Possible side effects include nausea, anxiety, an erection that lasts more than four hours, and in rare cases, death."

This wide range of possibilities exists in large part because drugs and dosages have yet to be personalized, and while there are established standard reactions to those drugs and dosages, our bodies are ultimately genetically unique.

Enter the emerging realm of personalized medicine, a method that uses information about an individual to … Read more

Father: 'We are the drug dealers right now'

Nine middle school children were taken to a hospital in Bremerton, Wash., yesterday after taking drugs such as the painkiller Oxycontin that had been distributed by two boys but were prescribed to a parent.

None of the students were seriously harmed, but nearby Scott Depuy, whose son Ryan overdosed in 2008 on a mixture of painkillers, cough syrup, and anti-anxiety pills at the age of 17, decided it was time to talk to the press:

The drug dealers are in our houses now. We are the drug dealers right now. We're very good about locking up our firearms. People … Read more

Behold the strength of carbon nanotubes

New tests of carbon nanotubes--those tiny cylinders expected to revolutionize medicine, electronics, warfare, and more--reveal that, ounce-for-ounce, they are 117 times stronger than steel and 30 times stronger than Kevlar used in bicycle tires and bulletproof vests.

The nanotubes, roughly 50,000 of which add up to the width of an average strand of human hair, are already known for their strength. But this latest research, led by Stephen Cronin, electrical engineering assistant professor at the University of Southern California, tested individual carbon nanotubes of various lengths and widths by applying what is being rather unscientifically described as "… Read more

New database could speed up drug discovery

A new database and software, called ChIP Enrichment Analysis, or ChEA, is set to revolutionize how researchers identify drug targets and biomarkers, developers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York reported in today's issue of Bioinformatics.

The team says that until ChEA was developed, no centralized database integrated results from, for instance, ChIP-seq and ChIP-chip experiments (these are used to identify how "transcription factor" proteins might regulate all genes in humans and mice). Now this new computational method should help streamline how scientists analyze these gene expression experiments.

"Our program allows researchers to … Read more

Researchers work to develop prescription playlists

Prescription playlists may sound a bit out there, but even without all the findings in recent years that music can be good for the heart, the brain, and even the immune system, it should come as little surprise that it also affects mood.

Exactly how it does so is where things start to get interesting.

"The impact of a piece of music on a person goes so much further than thinking that a fast tempo can lift a mood and a slow one can bring it down," says audio engineering specialist Don Knox, who is leading a team … Read more

Are the days of kidney dialysis numbered?

There's no gentle way to put it. Chronic kidney failure is ugly and often deadly, and more people in the States are suffering from it every year, with increasing rates of diabetes and hypertension contributing to the problem.

What's more, the treatment that keeps many waiting for kidney transplants alive--dialysis--involves several sessions per week, at several hours per session, during which blood pumps through an external circuit for filtration to replace just 13 percent of kidney function, leaving many patients exhausted both physically and financially.

(The U.S. Renal Data System estimates that dialysis costs roughly $… Read more

New pump to deliver drugs via microneedle patch

We've written about microneedles before. For the past few years, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been working on a patch of tiny needles that can deliver drugs painlessly and easily.

But the molecules of many drugs are too large to be delivered transdermally (through the skin), which is how conventional patches work, and would not fit through these newer microneedles.

Researchers at Purdue University, however, have developed a new type of pump that should exert enough force to squeeze drugs through microneedle patches, thereby reducing the need (at least in some instances) for injection via those … Read more