A little-known chronic lung disease is silently emerging as a growing public health threat in the U.S. and around the world. Nontuberculous mycobacteria—a group of 200 known environmental bacteria found in soil and water, including household plumbing—can cause chronic, tuberculosis-like lung infections. NTM lung disease afflicts as many as 300,000 Americans a year.
Somewhere in the world, a woman over 50 will have fractured a bone by the time you finish reading this sentence due to osteoporosis, a silent bone disease that can weaken the structural integrity of the skeletal system and a person’s quality of life. The disease weakens bones and makes them more likely to break because of reduced bone mineral density and bone mass, and it affects an estimated 75 million people across Europe, the USA, and Japan.
Safety-driven design eliminates laser-drilling debris and holds hole diameter at 2.0 microns
People with atrial fibrillation have signs of the condition in their retinas that can be detected as early as four years before diagnosis, according to a new study led by University College London (UCL) and Moorfields researchers.
A research team led by UCF College of Medicine assistant professor Hung Nguyen is examining an understudied molecule within T cells as a pathway to treatments for cancers, infections and autoimmune disorders.
An elevated PSA level in the blood may indicate prostate cancer but does not allow for a definitive diagnosis. Where there is a corresponding suspicion, a tissue sample is usually taken from the prostate. A study by the Medical University of Vienna now shows that a specialized form of imaging—known as PSMA-PET/CT—could provide important additional information even before such a biopsy is carried out.
Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia and increases the risk of conditions such as stroke and heart failure. An established treatment is catheter ablation, in which physicians use thin catheters to create small scars in heart tissue to block the electrical signals that cause the arrhythmia. Despite treatment, many patients with the more difficult-to-treat form, persistent atrial fibrillation, experience recurrence.
When it comes to priorities in life, oxygen tops the list. Humans can go weeks without food and days without water. Take away the ability to breathe, however, and the clock starts ticking within minutes as the brain begins shutting down. But the life-giving gas does even more heavy lifting than you might think.
An experimental drug has been shown to improve symptoms, exercise capacity and heart failure status in patients with an inherited heart disease, according to a pair of newly published studies.
Scientists have long believed that large stretches of our genetic material, known as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), help regulate genes but do not produce proteins. A new study by Stav Zok and Professor Michal Linial from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests that this picture is incomplete.