أن يكون طبيب قلب بارز في بريطانيا العظمى فهذا إنجاز كبير لا يحلم به أحد، وأن يحقق إنجازات طبية كبيرة في مجاله ويجري أكثر من عشرين ألف عملية قلب فهذا شيء من المستحيل في عقول الناس الذين لا يعرفون إنجازاته الإنسانية الواضحة، والأكثر من ذلك انه أنشأ مركزاً طبياً في بلده ليعالج الأطفال والكبار ويجري العمليات الصعبة مع فريقه الطبي حتى أصبح مقصد الجميع ممن يعانون من امراض القلب على اختلافها.

This Is Only a Test: Rorschach Blots Rocking the Web

Submitted by NoraDrenaline on Thu, 30/07/2009 - 10:45am.

Ever take the inkblot test—or at least see one administered on TV (like in any "Law & Order" episode)? If so, then you know that there are no right or wrong answers on a Rorschach test, but responses do provide insight to the test-taker's state of mind.

And yet, a controversy about the posting of 10 Rorschach inkblots on Wikipedia is rocking the scientific community, according to The New York Times. In addition to the blots themselves, the Wikipedia entry also includes the most common interpretations of what these blots look like—the old bison vs. butterfly vs. moth.

Taking the Test
The Rorschach test—a series of ink blots shown to patients, who are then asked to explain what they see—is named after Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. Five of the blots are black-and-white, two are black, white, and red, and the last three are in pretty colors. (Or not pretty, depending on your view.)

The test-taker is evaluated on 100 variables, which will show what he/she truly feels deep inside—not just separating psychotic thinking from "normal" thought. One Rorschach FAQ site describes it as asking "How does someone view and organize the world around them?"

One nonprofit parenting site, SPARC, explains that it's not only what patients say in describing what they see, but also what "hand gestures and body movements" they make. (Interestingly, SPARC precedes its lengthy description of the whole process with a disclaimer, posted "after repeated letters from dozens of outraged psychologists and psychiatrists.")

Illuminating or Cheating?
Is the test's public availability stimulating free debate, or enabling test-takers to "cheat"? Depends on how you look at it:

• From the Wiki view: Supporters say it's informative—and searches on Yahoo! for "rorschach" have popped up 111% in the past week.

British girl's heart heals itself after transplant

Submitted by NoraDrenaline on Wed, 15/07/2009 - 12:51am.

LONDON – British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart.

After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark's faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: it healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.

But she also had a price to pay: the drugs Clark took to prevent her body from rejecting the donated heart led to malignant cancer that required chemotherapy.

Details of Clark's revolutionary transplant and follow-up care were published online Tuesday in the medical journal Lancet.

"This shows that the heart can indeed repair itself if given the opportunity," said Dr. Douglas Zipes, a past president of the American College of Cardiology. Zipes was not linked to Clark's treatment or to the Lancet paper. "The heart apparently has major regenerative powers, and it is now key to find out how they work."

In 1994, when Clark was eight months old, she developed severe heart failure and doctors put her on a waiting list to get a new heart. But Clark's heart difficulties caused problems with her lungs, meaning she also needed a lung transplant.

To avoid doing a risky heart and lung transplant, doctors decided to try something completely different.

Sir Magdi Yacoub of Imperial College London, one of the world's top heart surgeons, said that if Clark's heart was given a time-out, it might be able to recover on its own. So in 1995 Yacoub and others grafted a donor heart from a 5-month-old directly onto Clark's own heart.

After four and a half years, both hearts were working fine, so Yacoub and colleagues decided not to take out the extra heart.

WHO to stop using term 'swine flu' to protect pigs

Submitted by NoraDrenaline on Fri, 01/05/2009 - 9:12am.

GENEVA – The World Health Organization announced Thursday it will would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. The policy shift came a day after Egypt began slaughtering thousands of pigs in a misguided effort to prevent swine flu.

WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the U.N. food agency had expressed concerns that the term "swine flu" was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to ban pork products and order the slaughter of pigs.

"Rather than calling this swine flu ... we're going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A," Thompson said.

The swine flu virus originated in pigs, and has genes from human, bird and pig viruses. Scientists don't know exactly how it jumped to humans. In the current outbreak, WHO says the virus is being spread from human to human, not from contact with infected pigs.

Egypt began slaughtering its roughly 300,000 pigs Wednesday even though experts said swine flu is not linked to pigs and not spread by eating pork. Angry farmers protested the government decree.

In Paris, the World Organization for Animal Health said Thursday "there is no evidence of infection in pigs, nor of humans acquiring infection directly from pigs."

Killing pigs "will not help to guard against public or animal health risks" presented by the virus and "is inappropriate," the group said in a statement.

China, Russia, Ukraine and other nations have banned pork exports from Mexico and parts of the United States, blaming swine flu fears.

Most in the Muslim world consider pigs unclean animals and do not eat pork because of religious restrictions. The farmers in Egypt raise the pigs for consumption by the country's Christian minority.

March 3, 2009:Male factor infertility have increased risk for development of testicular cancer

Submitted by M.R.T. on Mon, 13/04/2009 - 1:33am.

March 3, 2009 — Men with male factor infertility have an increased risk for the subsequent development of testicular cancer, according to the results of a study reported in the February 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"The risk of testicular cancer is thought to be higher among men seeking infertility treatment compared with the general population," write Thomas J. Walsh, MD, MS, from University of California–San Francisco and colleagues. "Confirmation of this risk in a large US cohort of at-risk patients is lacking. This study explored the association between male infertility and subsequent development of testicular cancer in a US-based cohort."

Circumcision May Reduce Incidence of HIV, HSV-2, HPV Infection

Submitted by Dr.bisho on Sat, 28/03/2009 - 1:06pm.

March 25, 2009 — Male circumcision significantly reduced the incidence of HIV and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) infection and the prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, suggesting potential public health benefits, according to the results of a randomized controlled trial reported in the March 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Low Creatinine Levels Linked to Diabetes

Submitted by Amal M.D. on Tue, 24/03/2009 - 7:56pm.

March 13, 2009 — Lower serum levels of creatinine are associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a brief report in the March issue of Diabetes Care.

The authors note that creatinine in serum is a direct indicator of total muscle mass. "Although skeletal muscle is one of the major targets of insulin," write Dr. Tomoshige Hayashi, from Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, Japan, and colleagues, "to our knowledge, no prospective study has investigated the association between total skeletal muscle mass and type 2 diabetes."

The current investigation included 8570 men in the Kansai Healthcare Study, an ongoing project examining risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases. The participants were between 40 and 55 years of age and nondiabetic at entry.

Incident diabetes was diagnosed if fasting glucose levels reached 126 mg/dL or higher or if treatment with an oral hypoglycemic agent or insulin was initiated.

After 4 years of follow-up, 877 men were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. "The multiple-adjusted odds ratio for those who had serum creatinine between 0.40 and 0.60 mg/dL was 1.91 compared with those who had levels between 0.71 and 0.80 mg/dL," the investigators report.

They conjecture that, because resistance training is known to cause muscular hypertrophy, it might be worth exploring whether such training could increase creatinine levels and thereby cut the risk of diabetes.

Diabetes Care. 2009;32:424-426.

Reuters Health Information 2009. © 2009 Reuters Ltd.

Clinical Context

NEWS: [21-03-2009] - Gene 'has key schizophrenia role'

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sat, 21/03/2009 - 12:17pm.

Two studies have pinpointed a single gene as key to the development and treatment of schizophrenia.

A US team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute found that a mutated version of the DISC1 gene disrupts the growth and development of brain cells.

And a team from the University of Edinburgh showed that the gene affects how patients respond to treatment.

Both studies, published in the journals PLoS One and Cell, raise hopes of more effective treatment for schizophrenia.

The condition is a common form of mental illness, affecting up to 1% of adults worldwide.

Symptoms tend to appear in late adolescence or early adulthood, and can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and depression.

The US team showed that DISC1 plays a key role in normal brain development and the growth of individual neurons. However, carrying the wrong version of the gene can make this process go awry.

Working on mice, they showed that DISC1 was active, both in cells taken from embryos and in brain stem cells taken from adult mice.

When DISC1 levels were reduced in adult mice their brain cells failed to divide, and the animals developed symptoms mimicking schizophrenia in humans.

Further tests showed that DISC1 acts like lithium, a drug commonly prescribed as mood stabiliser to patients with mental illness, inhibiting the action of a key chemical in the brain.

When mice with depressed levels of DISC1 were treated with this chemical, their symptoms began to improve.

Lead researcher Dr Li-Heui Tsai said: "We need to get a handle on the genetics of schizophrenia, but now we know how DISC1 probably contributes to the disorder, which is a big step."

Impact on treatment

The Edinburgh researchers analysed data generated by the Human Genome Project, set up to decode the complete genetic blueprint of humans.

They showed DISC1 affects a number of other genes current medications are designed to target.

NEWS: [11-03-2009] - Hot weather a migraine 'trigger'

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Wed, 11/03/2009 - 4:12pm.

A hot day can spell bad news for migraine sufferers, increasing their risk of an attack the next day, US research suggests.

The risk went up by 7.5% for every five degree Celsius increase in temperature revealed the study of more than 7,000 patients, published in Neurology.

The same applied to people who suffer from non-migraine headaches too.

NEWS: [11-03-2009] - Nano-treatment to torpedo cancer

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Wed, 11/03/2009 - 4:09pm.

Nanotechnology has been used for the first time to destroy cancer cells with a highly targeted package of "tumour busting" genes.

The technique, which leaves healthy cells unaffected, could potentially offer hope to people with hard-to-treat cancers where surgery is not possible.

Although it has only been tested in mice so far, the researchers hope for human trials in two years.

The UK study is published online by the journal Cancer Research.

The genes were wrapped up in microscopic nano-particles which were taken up by cancer cells, but not their healthy neighbours.

Once inside, the genes stimulated production of a protein which destroys the cancer.

The researchers say the technology could potentially be particularly relevant for people with cancers that are inoperable because they are close to vital organs.

They hope it will eventually also be used to treat cancer that has spread.

'Exciting step'

Lead researcher Dr Andreas Schatzlein, from the School of Pharmacy in London, said: "Gene therapy has a great potential to create safe and effective cancer treatments but getting the genes into cancer cells remains one of the big challenges in this area.

"This is the first time that nanoparticles have been shown to target tumours in such a selective way, and this is an exciting step forward in the field.

"Once inside the cell, the gene enclosed in the particle recognises the cancerous environment and switches on. The result is toxic, but only to the offending cells, leaving healthy tissue unaffected.

"We hope this therapy will be used to treat cancer patients in clinical trials in a couple of years."

Traditional chemotherapy indiscriminately kills cells in the affected area of the body, which can cause side effects like fatigue, hair loss or nausea.

It is hoped that gene therapy will have fewer associated side effects by targeting cancer cells.

NEWS: [26-02-2009] - Rapid HIV evolution avoids attack

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Fri, 27/02/2009 - 12:22am.

HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system, an international study has shown.

The Nature study highlights just how tough it could be to develop a vaccine that keeps pace with the changing nature of the virus.

The researchers showed HIV was able to adapt rapidly to counter human genes controlling immune system molecules that can target it for destruction.

NEWS: [25-02-2009] - Long WORKING hours link to dementia risk

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Wed, 25/02/2009 - 11:27pm.

Long working hours may raise the risk of mental decline and possibly dementia, research suggests.

The Finnish-led study was based on analysis of 2,214 middle-aged British civil servants.

It found that those working more than 55 hours a week had poorer mental skills than those who worked a standard working week.

The American Journal of Epidemiology study found hard workers had problems with short-term memory and word recall.

Lead researcher Dr Marianna Virtanen, from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, said: "The disadvantages of overtime work should be taken seriously."

It is not known why working long hours might have an adverse effect on the brain.

However, the researchers say key factors could include increased sleeping problems, depression, an unhealthy lifestyle and a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, possibly linked to stress.

The civil servants who took part in the study took five different tests of their mental function, once between 1997 and 1999, and again between 2002 and 2004.

Those doing the most overtime recorded lower scores in two of the five tests, assessing reasoning and vocabulary.

Cumulative effect
The effects were cumulative, the longer the working week was the worse the test results were.

Employees with long working hours also had shorter sleeping hours, reported more symptoms of depression and used more alcohol than those with normal working hours.

Professor Mika Kivimäki, who also worked on the study, said "We will go on with this study question in the future.

"It is particularly important to examine whether the effects are long-lasting and whether long working hours predict more serious conditions such as dementia."

NEWS: [25-02-2009] - Vitamin D may protect against common cold

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Wed, 25/02/2009 - 11:06pm.

Vitamin D may protect people -- especially those with asthma and other chronic lung conditions -- from colds and other respiratory tract infections, according to the largest study to date to look at the link.

Unlike other vitamins, a deficiency of vitamin D (which is known as the sunshine vitamin because sun exposure triggers production in the body) is quite common in the United States -- particularly in winter.

At least 50 percent of people in the new study, which included nearly 19,000 people 12 and older, had levels that suggested less-than-optimal protection against respiratory tract infections, according to the report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"People think that if they have a good, balanced diet that they will get enough vitamin D, and that's actually not true," said Dr. Michal Melamed, an assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "Unless you eat a lot of fish and drink a lot of milk, you can't get enough vitamin D from diet."

In the study, Dr. Adit Ginde of the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston found that people who had low blood levels of vitamin D were more likely to report having had a recent cold than those with higher amounts. What's more, the risk of a recent cold or other respiratory infection seemed to rise as vitamin D levels dropped.

Overall, 24 percent of people with the lowest levels (under 10 ng/ml) had had a recent cold, compared with 20 percent of those with slightly higher levels (10 to 29 ng/ml) and 17 percent of those with the highest levels (30 ng/ml or more).

The link was even stronger in people with asthma, who had about six-fold greater risk of colds with low vitamin D, and in those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, who had a two- to three-fold greater risk.

NEWS: [07-02-2009] - Papa John's founder warns against eating too much pizza

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sat, 07/02/2009 - 2:53pm.

The founder of one of America's largest pizza chains has offered unexpected advice to his customers to limit themselves to only one or two slices.

During an interview on BBC's Radio Four program in the United Kingdom, John Schnatter, said, "you can't eat five or six slices."

He was responding to a question from presenter Adam Shaw about whether he was concerned about the impact of the British government's anti-obesity drive on pizza sales.

"No. Pizza's actually healthy for you if you don't eat too much of it," Schnatter replied, adding, "You can't eat five or six slices but if you eat one or two slices it's very nutritious."

The pizza chain boss had just finished telling BBC listeners that the UK market was a "huge priority for Papa John's International."

The company has 118 outlets in the United Kingdom, its second biggest market outside the U.S. after China.

Sales in the UK jumped 60% on Monday alone after heavy snowfalls were estimated to have encouraged around one in five workers to stay at home.

Schnatter is in the United Kingdom for the annual franchisee conference, a marketing tool to encourage more small business owners to buy into the Papa John's brand.

While it's impossible to know whether his comments have dissuaded anyone from investing in the company, BBC presenter Shaw suggested shareholders might take issue with his suggestion.

"I'm not sure your investors would want to hear you tell people don't eat too much of our pizzas," he laughed before thanking Schnatter for his time.

Schnatter opened his first shop in 1985, after selling his beloved Camaro to buy his first pizza oven. There are now more than 3000 restaurants worldwide.

NEWS: [07-02-2009] - Doctor loses license in live-birth abortion case

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sat, 07/02/2009 - 2:05pm.

A doctor's license was revoked Friday in the case of a teenager who planned to have an abortion but instead gave birth to a baby she says was killed when clinic staffers put it into a plastic bag and threw it in the trash.

The doctor, Pierre Jean-Jacques Renelique, also is the subject of a criminal investigation. Renelique was not present when the baby was born, but the Florida Medical Board upheld Department of Health allegations that he falsified medical records, inappropriately delegated tasks to unlicensed personnel and committed malpractice.

Joseph Harrison, the attorney representing Renelique at the license revocation hearing in Tampa, said Renelique has not decided whether to appeal.

The state attorney's office, meanwhile, said its criminal investigation into the incident is ongoing and no charges have been filed. A fetus born alive cannot be put to death even if its mother intended to have an abortion, police said when the incident occurred in 2006.

The baby's mother, Sycloria Williams, sued Renelique, the clinic and its staff in January, seeking damages.

She alleges in her suit that "she witnessed the murder of her daughter" and said she "sustained severe emotional distress, shock and psychic trauma which have resulted in discernible bodily injury."

"This is not about a pot of gold," said Tom Pennekamp, her attorney. "What this is about is right and wrong and making a statement, making sure it doesn't happen to other young women."

According to the suit, Williams, then 18, discovered while being treated for a fall that she was 23 weeks pregnant. She went to a clinic to get an abortion on the morning of July 20, 2006, after receiving medication and instructions the previous day.

NEWS: [31-01-2009] - Tadpoles may hold cancer clue

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sat, 31/01/2009 - 12:05pm.

"Tadpoles could hold the key to developing effective skin cancer drugs according to researchers at the University of East Anglia.

The scientists have identified a compound which blocks the movement of the pigment cells that give the tadpoles their distinctive markings.

It is the uncontrolled movement of pigment cells that causes skin cancer in both humans and frogs.

The next step, the researchers say, is to test the compound in other animals.

The man-made compound, NSC 84093, was chosen out of a list of 3,000 which were screened to see if they affected the pigment cells.
It produced a distinct change in the colour markings on the tadpoles at very low concentrations.

The continuous stripe along the back of a wild tadpole was replaced by a pattern of individual blocks of colour.

The study is published in the journal, Chemistry & Biology.

Grant Wheeler, a developmental biologist and lead researcher at the University of East Anglia, said: "Forty of the compounds gave us an interesting difference which we wanted to follow up."

"The reason we were able to look at so many compounds was because it's very easy to look at the embryos and see the colour change."

"The pigment cells are interesting for a number of reasons.

"The first is that the place where they develop is not where they end up - they move through the embryo in a process called cell migration."

Invasive melanomas : when melanoma cells migrate through the body to the organs and cause secondary tumours that the disease becomes deadly.

Melanomas are one of the most dangerous forms of skin cancer because they are highly invasive and resistant to treatment.

Scientists hope that if they can block this process they can halt the cancer.

The compound in this study works by inhibiting matrix metaloproteinases (MMP) which are expressed by melanoma tumours in both humans and frogs.

NEWS: [31-01-2009] - Study: Men's brains fight food urges better

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sat, 31/01/2009 - 11:53am.

When presented with a juicy cheeseburger, cinnamon bun, or other tempting treat, women may have a tougher time reining in their desire to eat when they are on a diet than their equally hungry male counterparts.

In a new brain-scan study, researchers flashed tasty food in front of men and women who hadn't eaten anything in at least 17 hours. Both were told to fight their hunger, but only men showed a drop in activity in brain regions involved in emotion and motivation.

Men may have better tools for appetite control, which may help explain why women are more likely to be obese than men and have a tougher time dieting, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Something happens in the brains of men which does not happen in the brains of women. It's quite amazing," said Paul A. M. Smeets, of the Image Sciences Institute at the University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

"[The findings] suggest that in real life there might be a difference in how good men and women are at suppressing this kind of desire," said Smeets, who studies hunger and satiety using brain imaging, but was not involved with the current research.

Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and his colleagues used positron emission tomography, or PET scans, to observe brain activity in 23 normal-weight (or, at most, slightly overweight) people -- 13 women and 10 men. They asked the volunteers to choose their favorite food from a list that included fried chicken, lasagna, barbecued ribs, ice cream, or pizza.

Then, 17 to 19 hours after their last meal, the volunteers had a brain scan while they looked at one of their favorites. Study participants could smell the food as well as see it (the researchers warmed it up to waft fumes throughout the room), and also were given a taste with a cotton swab placed on their tongue.

NEWS: [31-01-2009] - Why your brain can't always make good decisions

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sat, 31/01/2009 - 11:49am.

We all make bad decisions sometimes. In some contexts, to a certain extent, psychologists know why.

Much research on the subject was done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for their models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways. Kahneman is now professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Tversky died in 1996.

But other researchers are working on showing that, when it comes to more basic judgments, we're not so bad.

Research in the current issue of the journal Neuron offers a mathematical model for how people make decisions about visual stimuli on a computer screen. They found that humans make accurate judgments about cues they can see.

"We're discovering that humans aren't so stupid after all," said Alexandre Pouget, co-author of the study and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in New York.

Participants were asked to look at moving dots on a screen. Many of the dots moved randomly, but some moved in one clear direction. Researchers found that people very quickly realized which way the non-random dots were going.

The work complements that of Kahneman and Tversky in that it shows humans are good at lower-level, nonlinguistic tasks, while perhaps not so good at higher-level probability problems involving words, he said.

"In simple perceptual decisions -- you have a visual stimulus on the screen and you have to make decisions about it -- it looks like you do accumulate the evidence optimally, given that uncertainty," Pouget said.

Psychologists believe the human mind has two systems for decision-making: intuitive and reasoning. The intuitive system is emotional, fast, automatic but slow-learning, while the reasoning system is emotionally-neutral, slow, controlled, and rule-governed. Neither, of course, is always right, but there are certain simple problems that reveal flaws in intuition.

NEWS: [27-01-2009] - Octuplets' births surprise California doctors

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Tue, 27/01/2009 - 1:26pm.

A woman in California delivered what may be the nation's second live-born set of octuplets on Monday morning, surprising doctors who expected seven babies.

The six boys and two girls -- ranging in weight from 1 pound 8 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces -- were generally doing well in incubators following their Caesarean-section delivery at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower, California, doctors said.

Three of the babies need breathing assistance, but otherwise the eight don't appear to have serious problems, doctors said at a news conference Monday evening.

"It was a truly amazing delivery," said Dr. Karen Maples, chief of the hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department.

Doctors initially believed the mother -- whom they did not identify -- was pregnant with seven fetuses. The woman was 23 weeks pregnant when she was hospitalized seven weeks ago and ordered to bed rest.

Over a seven-week period, a team of 46 physicians, nurses and other staff prepared for the births. When they started the delivery Monday -- more than nine weeks before the babies would be full term -- they were in for a surprise.

"After we got to Baby G, we were surprised by the discovery of a Baby H," Maples said.

Getting the number correct with ultrasounds before delivery is difficult with so many babies, said Dr. Harold Henry, the hospital's chief of fetal medicine.

"It is quite easy to miss a baby when you're expecting seven," Henry said.

The hospital said the woman didn't want her personal information released to the news media, and it would not answer questions about whether she'd had fertility treatments.

Preliminary research indicates this is the second set of live-born octuplets in the United States, according to the hospital.

NEWS: [23-01-2009] - FDA approves human embryonic stem cell study

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Fri, 23/01/2009 - 11:33am.

Federal regulators have cleared the way for the first human trials of human embryonic stem-cell research, authorizing researchers to test whether the cells are safe to use in spinal injury patients, the company behind the trials announced Friday.

The tests could begin by summer, said Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of the Geron Corporation. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the trials, which will use human stem cells authorized for research by then-President George W. Bush in 2001.

The patients will be those with the most severe spinal cord injuries, called complete spinal cord injuries.

"A complete spinal cord injury has no hope of recovery below the injury," Okarma told CNN. "This is significant because it's the first clinical trial of a human embryonic-based product."

The primary purpose of the trial will be to see whether injecting these cells into patients is safe, but Okarma said researchers will also look for any signs of recovery. Scientists will monitor the patients for a year after the injections to see if they are regaining any function below the injured point.

"If there is any movement below the injury, they will measure that and record it," he said.

The trials will involve eight to 10 patients who are completely paralyzed below the third to tenth vertebra, and who sustained their spinal cord injury within seven to 14 days. The tests will use stem cells cultured from embryos left over in fertility clinics, which otherwise would have been discarded.

Using the stem cells, researchers have developed cells called oligodendrocytes, which are precursors to nerve cells and which produce a protective layer around nerve cells known as myelin. Researchers will inject these nerve cells directly into the part of the spine where the injury occurred.

NEWS: [19-01-2009] - Stem cell eye surgery to be tried

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Mon, 19/01/2009 - 2:31pm.

A new surgical treatment offering hope to patients with corneal blindness is to be trialled in Scotland.

Doctors in Edinburgh and Glasgow will work together using an innovative technique involving adult stem cells.

About 20 patients will take part in the initial tests, using cells cultivated before being transplanted onto the surface of the cornea.

Millions of people worldwide suffer from corneal blindness, 80% of whom are elderly.

Stem cells are a source of great scientific interest as a result of their ability to renew and multiply indefinitely, potentially regenerating entire organs from only a few cells.

Unlike the more controversial embryonic stem cell research, the technique takes stem cells from dead adult donors.

The trial is being led by Prof Bal Dhillon at the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion in Edinburgh, working with the Gartnavel General Hospital in Glasgow.

Prof Dhillon said: "This study is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and it is exciting to be involved in such groundbreaking work.

"I probably see two or three new cases of corneal disease every month. On a larger scale, it's a significant problem."

The trial will hope to emulate the success of a similar study in the US in September last year.

In trials at the University of Pennsylvania, subjects with inherited blindness experienced dramatic improvements in vision after a corrective gene was injected into the eye.

NEWS: [18-01-2009] - Why So Many Minds Think Alike

Submitted by Dreamcatcher on Sun, 18/01/2009 - 7:54pm.

You're in a room with 10 other people who seem to agree on something, but you hold the opposite view. Do you say something? Or do you just go along with the others?

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images.

A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the "oops area" becomes extra active, while the "reward area" slows down, making us think we are too different.

"We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment," said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.

Participants, all female, had to rate 222 faces based on physical beauty on a scale from 1 to 8. Afterwards, researchers told each participant either that the average score was higher or that it was lower than her rating. Some participants were told the average rating was equal to her rating. The researchers then chatted with the participant before suddenly asking the participant to do the rating again. Most subjects changed their opinion toward the average.

The two leading theories of conformity are that people look to the group because they're unsure of what to do, and that people go along with the norm because they are afraid of being different, said Dr. Gregory Berns, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Berns' research, which he describes in the book "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently," found that brain mechanisms associated with fear and anxiety do play a part in situations where a person feels his or her opinion goes against the grain.