Connecting Research and Experts with Journalists

• share
• favorite_border

Along with defending against pathogens, the body’s innate immune system helps to protect the stability of our genomes in unexpected ways — ways that have important implications for the development of cancer, researchers at MSK are discovering.

• share
• favorite_border

For patients facing a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, a compassionate approach to care can be transformative. Yet, a new study published in Healthcare reveals that palliative care, a service focused on enhancing the quality of life for those with serious illnesses, remains significantly underutilized among pancreatic cancer patients in the United States.

• share
• favorite_border

A study by researchers at Saint Louis University shows that only one in eight patients with heart failure in the United States receive palliative care consultations within five years of diagnosis. The study also highlighted significant racial and geographic disparities. Black people were 15% less likely to receive palliative care compared to their white counterparts.

• share
• favorite_border

Capsaicin, the compound in chili peppers which gives them their spicy taste, may become a source of new, natural drugs for the hard-to-treat Mesothelioma type of cancer.

• share
• favorite_border

Professor Vincent Denault shows that legal decisions by Australian judges have used myths about “body language” to assess the credibility of witnesses.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have identified 16 genes that breast cancer cells use to survive in the bloodstream after they’ve escaped the low-oxygen regions of a tumor. Each is a potential therapeutic target to stop cancer recurrence, and one – MUC1 – is already in clinical trials.

• share
• favorite_border

In APL Bioengineering, researchers employed analysis tools and machine learning algorithms to identify two genes linked to rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis that could serve as diagnostic tools and potential targets for treatments. Drawing from a large database of genetic information, they gathered dozens of sequenced genomes from people with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis to look for any similarities, using recently developed computational methods to narrow down their search. They identified genes ATXN2L and MMP14 as significantly associated with the progression of both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis.

• share
• favorite_border

In this week’s Chaos, researchers used an electrophysiological computer model of the heart’s electrical circuits to examine the effect of the applied voltage field in multiple fibrillation-defibrillation scenarios. They discovered far less energy is needed than is currently used in state-of-the-art defibrillation techniques. The authors applied an adjoint optimization method and discovered adjusting the duration and the smooth variation in time of the voltage supplied by defibrillation devices is a more efficient mechanism that reduces the energy needed to stop fibrillation by three orders of magnitude.

• share
• favorite_border

Human activities have led to the pollution of some of the remotest places in the world, a new study shows.

• share
• favorite_border

A large study co-led by Kori Flower, MD, MS, MPH, division chief of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine demonstrates that combining text messaging with in-person clinic counseling reduces obesity in the first two years of life.