Acidity in the brain could hold the key to stroke treatment
Development of a new technique for detecting brain damage caused by stroke has been boosted up by a ?1m grant to scientists at The University of Manchester.
Professor Gareth Morris of the School of Chemistry and Professor Risto Kauppinen of the University of Birmingham are to lead the development of a new non-invasive technique which measures acidity (pH) in the brain.
A stroke is caused when part of the blood supply to the brain is cut off. This causes acidity in the brain to build up, leading to damage.
An Injury That Heals
Louis Pasteur said that “chance favors the prepared mind.” For Prof. Nava Dekel of the Weizmann Institute’s Biological Regulation Department, some completely unexpected results of biopsies performed on women with fertility problems have led to a new path of scientific discovery that may hold hope for women trying to conceive.
Dekel and a research team that includes Drs. Yael Kalma and Yulia Gnainsky, working in collaboration with Drs. Amichai Barash and Irit Granot of the Kaplan Medical Center, had been investigating a protein they suspected plays a role in the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus - a crucial and sometimes failure-prone process. The team took biopsies at several stages in the menstrual cycles of 12 women with long histories of fertility problems and unsuccessful IVF treatments to see if levels of this protein changed over the course of the cycle.
Indeed, the team’s research went according to plan and they found evidence pointing to the protein’s role. The surprise came soon after: Of the 12 women participating in the study, 11 became pregnant during the next round of IVF. The idea of biopsy incisions, basically small wounds, leading to such a positive outcome was counterintuitive, and Dekel realized something interesting was happening. She and her team repeated the biopsies, this time on a group of 45 volunteers, and compared the results to a control group of 89 women who did not undergo biopsy. The results were clear: The procedure doubled a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant.
Plasminogen activator inhibitor type 2 may play role in infection and dry eye
Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor Type 2 (PAI-2), a protein found in various cell types including the skin, has been discovered in the tissue covering the eye and may have future clinical implications in various pathologies of the ocular surface such as eye infection or dry eye, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University.
The researchers, led by Mina Massaro-Giordano, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania’s Scheie Eye Institute, and Marcella Macaluso, Ph.D., of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research at Temple University, published their study,
“Cytoplasmic and nuclear interaction between Rb family proteins and PAI-2: a physiological crosstalk in human corneal and conjunctival epithelial cells,” in Cell Death and Differentiation (http://www.nature.com/cdd).
WHO confirms six bird flu cases in Indonesia
The World Health Organization confirmed six more human cases of bird flu infections in Indonesia on Wednesday, including five members of a family whose case has triggered fears of human-to-human transmission.
“There are six confirmations. One from Surabaya and five from Medan. One from Medan is still alive,” said Sari Setiogi, the WHO’s Indonesia spokeswoman.
An outbreak of H5N1 bird flu involving up to eight members of a family at Medan in North Sumatra province has worried health agencies around the world but a Health Ministry official said on Wednesday it was not a case of human-to-human transmission.
Reduced Cabin Pressure, Oxygen Finds No Activation of Blood Clotting System
Researchers simulating conditions of reduced cabin pressure and reduced oxygen levels, such as may be encountered during an 8 hour airplane flight, found no increase in the activation of the blood clotting system among healthy individuals, according to a study in the May 17 issue of JAMA.
Venous thromboembolism (blood clots in vein) has been associated with long-haul air travel, but it has been unclear whether this is due to the effects of sitting for a long time, or whether there is a relationship with some other specific factor in the airplane environment, according to background information in the article. One hypothesis has been that hypoxia (reduced oxygen in the blood), associated with decreased cabin pressure that occurs at altitude, produces changes in blood that increases the risk for blood clots.
William D. Toff, M.D., of the University of Leicester, England, and colleagues conducted a study, from September 2003 to November 2005, to assess the effects of hypoxia in conditions similar to that which might be encountered during commercial air travel, on a variety of markers of activation of the hemostatic (blood clotting) system. The study included 73 healthy volunteers who spent 8 hours seated in a hypobaric (below normal pressure) chamber and were exposed to hypobaric hypoxia, similar to the conditions that would occur with reduced airplane cabin pressure at an altitude of about 8,000 feet. Blood was drawn before and after exposure to assess activation of factors associated with hemostasis (blood clotting). Similar measurements were taken of the volunteers who also spent 8 hours seated in a controlled environment equivalent to atmospheric conditions at ground level (normobaric exposure).
