January 16, 2015
(ABC News) – If you’re taking aspirin to prevent heart attack and stroke, there’s a chance you may not need to be popping the little white pills after all. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and several other health institutions … Read More
January 14, 2015
(Eurekalert) – A Northwestern University collaboration has developed a novel microfluidic device that allows for electroporation of stem cells during differentiation, making it possible to deliver molecules during this pivotal time in a cell’s life. This provides the conditions needed … Read More
January 14, 2015
(BBC) – Legal experts and the police said a law allowing assisted suicide in Scotland needed more clarity in order to remove the risk of someone being prosecuted. There is a “fine line” between assisting someone killing themselves and an … Read More
January 14, 2015
(Medscape) – The story of Dr Egbert, who has appealed the decision, is a twist on the nationwide debate about physician-assisted suicide, which is explicitly legal in Oregon, Washington, and Vermont. There, a physician is allowed under strict conditions to … Read More
January 13, 2015
(Boston Globe) – Today, Jensen, Sharei, and several other researchers from their laboratory have amped up their operations and are developing a simple tool that researchers — and, ultimately, practicing physicians — could use to conduct lab work on the … Read More
January 13, 2015
(The Epoch Times) – Late last year the Chinese Communist Party’s organ transplantation czar, Huang Jiefu, made an unusual proposal—that maybe in the future, Taiwanese patients would be able to have Chinese organs packed onto planes and flown to them … Read More
January 13, 2015
(NPR) – Americans, by and large, don’t seem all that worried about what happens to the information in their medical records. A NPR-Truven Health Analytics Health Poll found that data privacy didn’t appear to bother most respondents. Privacy worries ran … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Boston Globe) – The exchange highlights the roiling debate over privacy rights, with TV crews capturing the drama and pathos in hospital emergency rooms amid the most vulnerable patients. The issue is especially timely as network news crews are camped … Read More
January 12, 2015
(The Wall Street Journal) – At a time when the rising cost of medicines is causing consternation, an exclusive deal between Express Scripts, the nation’s largest pharmacy benefits manager, and AbbVie, a big drug maker, over a new hepatitis C … Read More
January 12, 2015
(The Telegraph) – A divorced couple are locked in a dispute about their terminally ill daughter’s care after the teenager’s mother demanded that she be allowed to die. Chantelle Lynch suffers from rare chromosome disorder Rett Syndrome, which has left … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Business Insider Australia) – Patients hoping to conceive through In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) are now free to store their frozen embryos for as long as needed thanks to a legislative change by NSW health. Under the old laws patients only … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Reuters) – A decade after giving birth, surrogate mothers don’t appear to suffer lasting mental health difficulties as a result of giving away the babies they delivered, a small study suggests. While previous research has found that depression and other … Read More
January 12, 2015
(New York Times) – The sudden flurry of activity has not yet produced a drug that improves hearing or silences ringing in the ears, but some companies are reporting hints of promise in early clinical trials. There is a huge … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Whitehouse.gov) – Up until last year, insurance companies could — and often did — charge women different premiums than men for the same coverage. As of January 1, 2014, the ACA prohibits this gender discrimination. In part because of improved … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Medical Xpress) – Why do some people develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while others who suffered the same ordeal do not? A new UCLA discovery may shed light on the answer. UCLA scientists have linked two gene variants to the … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Science) – It’s challenging enough to sustain any scientific study for a decade. Now Eric Horvitz, managing director of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington, is launching a project he wants to last a century. The One Hundred Year … Read More
January 12, 2015
(Phys.org) – Nanoparticles, extremely tiny particles measured in billionths of a meter, are increasingly everywhere, and especially in biomedical products. Their toxicity has been researched in general terms, but now a team of Israeli scientists has for the first time … Read More
January 9, 2015
(New Scientists) – But developing drugs is excruciatingly expensive – and increasingly so. The cost of bringing a new compound to the market is now around $2.5 billion, twice as much in real terms as it was a decade ago. … Read More
January 9, 2015
(Wired) – Ross Ulbricht is finally getting his day in court, 15 months after plainclothes FBI agents grabbed him in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library and accused him of running the billion-dollar online drug bazaar known … Read More
January 9, 2015
(Associated Press) – The World Health Organization says the two leading Ebola vaccines appear safe and will soon be tested in healthy volunteers in West Africa. After an expert meeting this week, WHO said there is now enough information to … Read More
January 9, 2015
(Medical Xpress) – New research at the University of Kent has identified karyomapping as a viable and cost-effective method of detecting a wide range of genetic diseases in IVF embryos. The current method, which involves the use of preimplantation genetic … Read More
January 9, 2015
(Slate) – Situations like these are some of the most ethically challenging in any hospital. In the ICU, our team sensed when someone might not make it out of the hospital—and most times we were right. In these instances, our … Read More
January 9, 2015
(New York Times) – The case argued here — along with others arising from the hundreds of abortion restrictions adopted by more than half of the states in recent years — poses issues that are likely to end up before … Read More
January 9, 2015
(Io9) – For the first time ever, researchers in New Zealand have shown that mitochondrial DNA can move between cells in an animal tumor. It’s an extraordinary finding that could lead to an entirely new field of synthetic biology and … Read More
January 9, 2015
(Yahoo! News) – Europe’s human rights court on Wednesday began hearing arguments on whether a man in a vegetative state should be taken off life support, in a case that has torn his family apart and ignited a fierce euthanasia … Read More
