cancer tagged posts

Telomeres glow at the end of chromosomes. Credit: Hesed Padilla-Nash and Thomas Ried of the NIH

New method may speed understanding of short telomere diseases and cancer and the new method they used to find it should speed discovery of other proteins and processes that determine telomere length. “We’ve known for a long time that telomerase doesn’t tell the whole story of why chromosomes’ telomeres are a given length, but with the tools we had, it was difficult to figure out which proteins were responsible for getting telomerase to do its work,” saysProf. Carol Greider, Ph.D (winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of telomerase.)

Figuring out exactly what’s needed to lengthen telomeres has broad health implications as shortened telomeres have been implicat...

The gene Prkci promotes the generation of differentiated cells (red). However if Prkci activity is reduced or absent, neural stem cells (green) are promoted. Credit: In Kyoung Mah

When it comes to stem cells, too much of a good thing isn’t wonderful: producing too many new stem cells may lead to cancer; producing too few inhibits the repair and maintenance of the body. Medical researchers now describe a key gene in maintaining this critical balance between producing too many and too few stem cells.

Prkci is the gene influences whether stem cells self-renew to produce more stem cells, or differentiate into more specialized cell types, such as blood or nerves. In their experiments, the team grew mouse embryonic stem cells, which lacked Prkci, into embryo-like structures in the laboratory...

Preventive strategies, targeting diet, drugs, body chemistry, mental health, pre-existing disease, and lifestyle may help to stave off dementia. This could be particularly important, given that, as yet, there is no cure, they say. The researchers wanted to look at the factors associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease in a bid to determine the degree to which these might be modified and so potentially reduce overall risk.

They trawled key research databases, looking for relevant studies published in English from 1968 up to July 2014. Out of almost 17,000 studies, 323, covering 93 different potential risk factors and more than 5000 people, were suitable for inclusion in the analysis...