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Leading Virologist Says To Expect The Unexpected With Influenza
World renowned virologist Professor Albert Osterhaus told participants at Europe"s largest conference on infectious diseases that the outbreak of influenza A H1N1 is without question the most important event of the past 40 years in human influenza. And he stressed that the current H1N1 threat is a serious one.
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Dry Mouth Linked To Prescription And Over The Counter Drugs
Approximately ninety-one percent of dentists say patients complaining about dry mouth are taking multiple medications, according to a nationwide member survey conducted by the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD). Dry mouth, or xerostomia, is caused by a decrease in salivary function. It affects approximately one in four Americans, placing more than 25 percent of people at risk for tooth decay. During the Academy of General Dentistry"s (AGD) 57th Annual Meeting & Exhibits in Baltimore, July 8-12, Cindy Kleiman, RDH, BS, will present a course, "Understanding the Oral-Systemic Connection: From Intensive Care to Long-term Care," in which she presents new information about dry mouth.
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Mutations Extending Lifespan Induce Expression Of Germline Genes In Somatic Cells
In the sense that organisms existing today are connected through a chain of life - through their parents, grandparents and other ancestors - almost a billion years back to the first animals of the pre-Cambrian era, an animal"s reproductive cells can be considered to be immortal. These germline cells generate their offspring"s somatic cells - other cells involved in all aspects of growth, metabolism and behavior, which have a set lifespan - and new germline cells that continue on, generation after generation.
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Research Identifies Network Of Altered Genes That Appear To Play Role In Development Of Brain Tumors

The interaction between a network of altered genes appears to play an important role in the development and progression of brain tumors, according to a study in the July 15 issue of JAMA. Malignant gliomas (brain tumors) are associated with disproportionately high illness and death and are among the most devastating of tumors. Particular genomic alterations are fundamental to both their formation and their malignant progression. "Chromosomal alterations presumably exert their tumor-promoting effect on glioma cells by modifying the expression or function of distinct genes, which map to those alterations, so as to deregulate growth factor signaling and survival pathways. For many chromosomal alterations, the biologically relevant target genes remain to be discovered," the authors write. Oncogenic research on brain tumors has focused on the tumor-promoting or tumor-suppressive function of target genes within individual chromosomal alterations. However, these alterations do not exist in isolation, nor do single genes account for gliomagenesis. Rather, there may be mechanistic links to genes at other, coincident alterations, according to background information in the article. Markus Bredel, M.D., Ph.D., of the Northwestern Brain Tumor Institute at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, and colleagues examined the relationships of tumor-promoting genes in gliomas. The study included genomic profiles and clinical profiles of 501 patients with gliomas (45 tumors in an initial discovery set collected between 2001 and 2004 and 456 tumors in validation sets made public between 2006 and 2008) from multiple academic centers in the United States and The Cancer Genome Atlas Pilot Project (TCGA). The analysis included the identification of genes with coincident genetic alterations, correlated gene dosage (the copy number for a specific gene determined by certain analytic approaches) and gene expression, and multiple functional interactions; and the association between those genes and patient survival. The researchers found: "The alteration of multiple networking genes by recurrent chromosomal aberrations in gliomas deregulates critical signaling pathways through multiple, cooperative mechanisms. These mutations, which are likely due to nonrandom selection of a distinct genetic landscape [a consistent pattern of chromosomal alterations] during gliomagenesis, are associated with patient prognosis." The authors add that the identification of such gene alterations in gliomas prompts evaluation of their potential as therapeutic targets. "The network context of a gene likely affects the efficacy of therapies that target its protein. The complexity of our landscape model helps explain the lack of therapeutic efficacy of strategies targeting single gene products." A multigene risk scoring model based on seven landscape genes was associated with the duration of overall survival in 189 glioblastoma patients from TCGA, an association that was confirmed in three additional malignant glioma patient populations. "The current work provides a network model and biological rationale for the selection of a nonrandom genetic landscape in human gliomas," the authors write. "A multigene predictor model incorporating 7 landscape genes demonstrates how molecular insights emerging from our integrative multidimensional analysis could translate into relevant clinical end points affecting the future management of gliomas." JAMA 2009;302[3]:261-275. Journal of the American Medical Association


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