Discover the Science of Health
The United States has one of the safest food supplies in the world. Nevertheless, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), foodborne disease causes approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths in the U.S. each year [1] — and that’s just an estimate based on data collected from the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), other surveillance networks and published studies.
It is difficult to find a school, camp or other facility catering to children these days that is not nut free. The prevalence of peanut allergies in preschool and school age children in the UK, the US and Canada is between 1.2 – 1.6%, which is about twice the rate at which it occurs in adults in these countries. Nut allergies, especially peanut allergies, are scary. And although they have been on the rise, no one really knows why. Researchers in Scotland recently reported in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology that mutations in the gene for filaggrin, a protein found in skin, are a “significant risk factor for peanut allergy” [1].
Researchers offer the first evidence that DNA damage can lead to the regulation of inflammatory responses, the body’s reaction to injury. The proteins involved in the regulation help protect the body from infection. The study, performed by scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), which is part of the National Institutes of Health, is one of the first studies to come out of the recently established NIEHS Clinical Research Unit (CRU).
Biomarker Bulletin is an occasionally recurring update of news focused on biomarkers aggregated at BiomarkerCommons.org. Biomarkers are physical, functional or biochemical indicators of normal physiological or disease processes. The individualization of disease management — personalized medicine — is dependent on developing biomarkers that promote specific clinical domains, including early detection, risk, diagnosis, prognosis and predicted response to therapy.
A roundup of five research studies on cancer biomarkers that were presented earlier this week at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 102nd Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida.
In the February edition of the journal Pharmacogenomics (Future Medicine), Greg Gibson from the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology provides a summary of talks and discussion from the Inaugural Australian Biomarker Discovery Conference (BDC 2010) held in Shoal Bay, Australia in December.
According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, plasma clusterin levels are significantly associated with prevalence and severity of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but not with incidence.
Sage Bionetworks has started projects to build advanced computational models of neurobiological disease through two ongoing partnerships with the CHDI Foundation and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
Late last month, NeoProteomics, a bioinformatics spinoff company from Case Western Reserve University, signed an exclusive option agreement to license technology from the university.
To combat the obesity epidemic, the National Institutes of Health is encouraging diverse scientific investigations through a new Strategic Plan for NIH Obesity Research.
More than one-third of adults in the United States and nearly 17 percent of the nation’s children are now obese, which increases a person’s chance of developing many health problems, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, and some cancers. Although American obesity rates leveled off in 2007, in 2008, obesity-related medical costs were an estimated $147 billion. Government, nonprofit and community groups, businesses, health care professionals, schools, families, and individuals are taking action to address this public health problem — and research can provide the foundation for these efforts.
