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Doctors Angry About BNP Campaign Tactics, UK
Correspondence and a linked Editorial in this week"s Lancet criticise the election tactics employed by the British National Party (BNP) prior to the recent European Elections.

Physician-Owned Hospitals Under Fire In Reform Bills, While One M.D. Moves Into Franchising
The mood in Washington to compromise with hospitals, pharmaceutical makers and physician groups is not extending to physician-owned specialty hospitals, Time reports. "Any health-reform package passed by Congress will likely deal a major blow to an upstart competitor of many hospitals. Buried in the 850-page House health-reform draft is a provision that could in effect ban further construction of doctor-owned, for-profit specialty hospitals and prohibit existing ones from expanding. ò€¦ Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus, who lead the body"s powerful Finance Committee, have been vocal critics of the doctor-owned specialty-hospital model and the industry expects similar language to be included in any upcoming Senate health-reform bill as well."
News of the day
Dartmouth Studies Influence Administration, Even In Choice Of Venue
When President Obama chose Green Bay, Wis., to talk about the need for health reform, he did so in part because the area has achieved a high level of quality, and compared with other parts of the country, succeeded in restraining health care costs, National Public Radio reports. "They"re certainly spending a lot less money, and they are providing care that is equal or better than the care that is provided in many other communities around the country," Elliot Fisher, a researcher at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice told NPR in an interview. NPR says: "Some of the research the administration is relying on comes from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice," which focuses on variations in health quality and costs around the country.
Endocrinology

Researchers Id Brain-Protecting Protein

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a novel protein that can protect brain cells by interrupting a naturally occurring "stress cascade" resulting in cell death. Reporting in the July 16 issue of the journal Neuron, the scientists say drugs mimicking the protein, nicknamed GOSPEL, have the potential to protect brain cells against a range of neurodegenerative conditions, including stroke and Alzheimer"s and Huntington"s diseases. "This work has potentially broad clinical implications," says senior author Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., director of molecular psychiatry. Sawa and his team, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon Snyder, M.D., and his team, conducted experiments showing that GOSPEL competes with a second protein when it tries to latch on to glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase or GAPDH, a multifunctional molecule. By binding to GAPDH itself, GOSPEL both prevents the cell death cascade and offers brain cells protection against potentially toxic agents. Sawa has spent more than a decade studying GADPH activity and its role in so-called oxidative-stress-induced cellular responses, including programmed cell death. That cascading process begins when various stressors such as injury or disease activate a complex enzyme, nitric oxide synthase, which then forms nitric oxide, a chemical that transmits signals between nerves but also is toxic to cells. Excess levels of nitric oxide cause GAPDH to undergo a chemical modification called S-nitrosylation that in turn lets it bind to another protein called Siah1. The combined GAPDH-Siah1 molecules then move into a cell"s nucleus, hijack key portions of its DNA and set off a chain of reactions leading to cell death. In the currently reported study, the researchers analyzed tissue samples from rats to identify the DNA coding for GOSPEL (which stands for GAPDH"s competitor Of Siah Protein Enhances Life) and found that the protein exists in tissues in the brain, heart, lung and skeletal muscle, though it is most widely expressed in neurons in the central nervous system. A series of laboratory experiments in mouse brain tissue found that S-nitrosylation is necessary to enable GOSPEL to bind to GAPDH; that GOSPEL competes with Siah for GAPDH binding; that GOSPEL prevents GAPDH from slipping into the cell nucleus; and that GOSPEL diminishes brain cell damage by preventing the binding of GAPDH and Siah. To determine whether GOSPEL"s neuroprotective actions were evident in live mice, the scientists used a benign virus to deliver either GOSPEL or an altered version of GOSPEL lacking the property to bind with GAPDH into the animals" brains. They then injected a neurotransmitter, NMDA, to induce and simulate other kinds of brain damage. The researchers found that NMDA-induced lesions in the brains of mice injected with GOSPEL were about 30 percent smaller than in those injected with the altered GOSPEL, showing that the neuroprotective influence of GOSPEL related to its ability to bind to GAPDH. The GOSPEL molecule was first available in the database of the Human Genome Project, Sawa says, but until now was designated as a genetic compound with no known properties. The work was supported by grants from the U.S. Public Health Service, the Stanley Medical Research Institute, NARSAD (the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression), the CHDI Foundation, and the S-R Foundation. Coauthors were Nilkantha Sen, Makoto R. Hara, Abdullah Shafique Ahmed, Matthew B. Cascio, Atsushi Kamiya, Jeffrey T. Ehmsen, Nishant Aggrawal, Lynda Hester, Sylvain Dore, and Solomon H. Snyder, M.D. Related Link: Dr. Sawa"s lab Johns Hopkins


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