http://www.physorg.com/health-news/ en-us PhysOrg.com provides the latest news on health, medicine, medicine technology and health sciences. If you're among the hundreds of thousands of Americans with clogged kidney arteries, you might want to consider trying medicines before rushing into angioplasty to open them up. The pricey procedure is no more effective and carries surprisingly big risks, a study found. http://www.physorg.com/news177186990.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:00:02 EST news177186990 (AP) -- Federal health officials now say that 4,000 or more Americans likely have died from swine flu - about four times the estimate they've been using. http://www.physorg.com/news177186728.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:50:01 EST news177186728 A study appearing in Science Translational Medicine puts scientists one step closer to clinical trials to test a gene delivery strategy to improve muscle mass and function in patients with certain degenerative muscle disorders. http://www.physorg.com/news177186395.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:40:02 EST news177186395 Doctors in northern Peru have removed almost a kilogram of nails, coins and scrap metal from a man's stomach, a surgeon that operated on him said Wednesday. http://www.physorg.com/news177186771.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:33:16 EST news177186771 Slowing the growth in U.S. health care spending will most likely require adoption of an array of strategies as well as an improved approach to moving promising strategies into widespread use, according to a new analysis by the RAND Corporation. http://www.physorg.com/news177186304.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:25:52 EST news177186304 A team led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has found a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that rebuilds telomeres - the tip ends of chromosomes. The findings appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.physorg.com/news177186096.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:22:39 EST news177186096 (AP) -- Analysis of a dozen published studies testing possible new uses for a Pfizer Inc. epilepsy drug found that reporting of the results was often fudged, indicating the medicine worked better than internal company documents showed. http://www.physorg.com/news177184811.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:00:46 EST news177184811 (PhysOrg.com) -- Switching from a low-fat, plant-based diet to one high in fat and sugar alters the collection of microbes living in the gut in less than a day, with obesity-linked microbes suddenly thriving, according to new research at the School of Medicine. The study was based on transplants of human intestinal microbes into germ-free mice. http://www.physorg.com/news177180865.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:40:01 EST news177180865 Predicting the side-effects of a drug is not simple task. The human body has more than 1,500 molecules that are known to be involved in various diseases, and often a drug designed to hit one of these targets will also hit others that have similar structures, causing unintended consequences. http://www.physorg.com/news177183252.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:37:10 EST news177183252 In a new survey of physicians who treat breast cancer patients, only one-third said they had good access to trained medical interpreters or telephone language-interpretation systems when they needed it. Poor access to interpreters can compromise physician-patient communication that is critically important in cancer care. http://www.physorg.com/news177182071.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:14:57 EST news177182071 (PhysOrg.com) -- The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has awarded University of Rochester Medical Center researchers $2.5 million to investigate the impact of psychological interventions on attacks of psoriasis and the intensity of the disease. http://www.physorg.com/news177180535.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:49:30 EST news177180535 A new miniature, hand-held microscope may allow more precise removal of brain tumors and an easier recognition of tumor locations during surgery. http://www.physorg.com/news177178774.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:30:03 EST news177178774 Scientists have devised an innovative way to disarm a key protein considered to be "undruggable," meaning that all previous efforts to develop a drug against it have failed. Their discovery, published in the November 12 issue of Nature, lays the foundation for a new kind of therapy aimed directly at a critical human protein - one of a few thousand so-called transcription factors - that could someday be used to treat a variety of diseases, especially multiple types of cancer. http://www.physorg.com/news177168648.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:20:01 EST news177168648 (PhysOrg.com) -- If humans are genetically related to chimps, why did our brains develop the innate ability for language and speech while theirs did not? http://www.physorg.com/news177168331.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:26:18 EST news177168331 College athletes who use performance-enhancing substances may be at heightened risk of misusing alcohol and using recreational drugs as well, according to new research in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. http://www.physorg.com/news177165486.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:10:03 EST news177165486 The vast majority of school-aged children can focus on the voice of a teacher amid the cacophony of the typical classroom thanks to a brain that automatically focuses on relevant, predictable and repeating auditory information, according to new research from Northwestern University. http://www.physorg.com/news177165357.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:10:01 EST news177165357 (AP) -- As federal regulators take their first tentative steps toward policing the wild west of medical information online, pharmaceutical companies are pressing their case to market drugs via Google, Twitter and other Web sites. http://www.physorg.com/news177165326.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:50:03 EST news177165326 (AP) -- Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published by UNICEF Wednesday before a three-day international summit on the problem of world hunger. http://www.physorg.com/news177165766.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:43:20 EST news177165766 A new study reveals that a previously undiscovered mouse gene reduces the two major pathological perturbations commonly associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The research, published by Cell Press in the November 12 issue of the journal Neuron, finds that the novel gene interacts with a key cellular enzyme previously linked with AD pathology, thereby uncovering a new strategy for treating this devastating disorder. http://www.physorg.com/news177164957.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:30:03 EST news177164957 Researchers at Uppsala University, in collaboration with colleagues in Sweden and abroad, have identified an entirely new mechanism by which a specific protein in the body inhibits formation of new blood vessels. Inhibiting the formation of new blood vessels is an important aspect of, for example, cancer treatment. The study is published in the November issue of the journal Molecular Cancer Research. http://www.physorg.com/news177155301.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:20:01 EST news177155301 An important, ground-breaking initiative is unfolding in the global critical care community in response to the H1N1 pandemic. http://www.physorg.com/news177156409.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:20:01 EST news177156409 Catheter-directed therapy or catheter-directed thrombolysis -- an interventional radiology treatment that uses targeted image-guided drug delivery with specially designed catheters to dissolve dangerous blood clots in the lungs -- saves lives and should be considered a first-line treatment option for massive pulmonary embolism, note researchers in the November Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology. http://www.physorg.com/news177155285.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:10:02 EST news177155285 British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline has announced that US regulators have approved its swine flu vaccine for adults in the United States. http://www.physorg.com/news177154938.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:01 EST news177154938 A Kansas State University study has shown that when preparing frozen foods, adolescents are less likely than adults to wash their hands and are more susceptible to cross-contaminating raw foods while cooking. http://www.physorg.com/news177154983.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:43:40 EST news177154983 (PhysOrg.com) -- Professor Robert Weiss has found that when two particular genes are inhibited, cancer cells are destroyed at a greater rate. The study is published in the Nov. 9 issue of PNAS. http://www.physorg.com/news177151857.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:00:01 EST news177151857 Do you speak English as a second language well, but still have trouble understanding movies with unfamiliar accents, such as Brad Pitt's southern accent in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds? In a new study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, Holger Mitterer (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) and James McQueen (MPI and Radboud University Nijmegen) show how you can improve your second-language listening ability by watching the movie with subtitles -as long as these subtitles are in the same language as the film. Subtitles in one's native language, the default in some European countries, may actually be counter-productive to learning to understand foreign speech. http://www.physorg.com/news177139830.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:40:02 EST news177139830 As African nations are poised to undergo the highest increase in the rate of tobacco use among developing countries, nearly 90 percent of people on the continent remain without meaningful protection from secondhand smoke, according to a new report released at a regional cancer conference today. http://www.physorg.com/news177139590.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:27:21 EST news177139590 High levels of workplace exposure to Bisphenol-A may increase the risk of reduced sexual function in men, according to a Kaiser Permanente study appearing in the journal Human Reproduction. http://www.physorg.com/news177138050.html Medicine & Health Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:06:35 EST news177138050 (PhysOrg.com) -- Hours of analysing snoring sounds have paid off for a group of researchers from The University of Queensland and Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital. http://www.physorg.com/news177103046.html Medicine & Health Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:20:05 EST news177103046 Depression must be understood on both a biological and psychological level, says Robert Sapolsky. http://www.physorg.com/news177102087.html Medicine & Health Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:30:02 EST news177102087