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The days leading up to a woman’s first mammogram can be intimidating. The screening, after all, has one purpose: to detect early signs of breast cancer. But it’s a crucial test, says Michigan Medicine radiologist Kate Klein, M.D., FACR. And it often finds no abnormalities: About 2 to 6 screenings in 1,000 test […]

With its unmistakable thick, scaly, white-and-red patches, psoriasis is a relatively common chronic skin condition that can lead to a greatly reduced quality of life. And about 30 percent of people with psoriasis go on to develop psoriatic arthritis, a painful joint inflammation that can lead to long-lasting joint damage. […]

Whether or how much the gut microbiome contributes to diseases ranging from inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer to Parkinson’s disease and diabetes was the central question scientists explored at Harvard Medical School recently as they sought to unravel some of the mysteries behind the human microbiome—a relatively unexplored frontier […]

Immune checkpoint therapy has transformed the way certain cancers are treated, but could a similar approach hold promise for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s? In a review article published in the issue of Nature Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School investigators based at Massachusetts General Hospital have proposed that targeting immune […]

The mechanisms that regulate our bodies and keep us healthy are complicated, involving critical molecular components that are still poorly understood. The prestigious journal Nature Communications has published recent research on this topic by a team led by Dr. El Bachir Affar, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine […]

She immune system is often framed as the part of our bodies responsible for fighting infection. But a key part of immunity involves restraining that battle-ready immune cell army so its artillery is only trained upon true threats. This element of immune regulation—and how it can go awry in cancer […]

You’re experiencing jaundice, abdominal pain or constipation. And by then, you may be too late. Pancreatic cancer symptoms often arrive after the cancer has already spread, making the disease one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in the U.S. However, a team of researchers believes that targeting how blood […]

One afternoon in July, deep within the labyrinthine halls of the Medical Sciences Building at UC San Francisco’s hilltop campus on Parnassus Avenue, the laboratory of Alex Marson, MD, PhD, is buzzing. Doors clap. Gloves snap. Keyboards clack. Cells incubate in nutrient baths the color of Kool-Aid while machines resembling […]

As a wrestler at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, Adam Kuchnia lost a lot of pounds so he could compete in a particular weight class. And that didn’t always lead to the best nutritional choices. “I started to notice how good and bad nutrition felt when I was competing and the outcomes […]

DNA-damaging agents, or “DDAs,” make up the most widely used group of cancer drugs. Yet their therapeutic success has been curtailed by drug resistance—either present in cancer cells from the disease onset or arising during treatment. Now, biologists at the University of California San Diego have discovered a new way […]

Led by UCLA bioengineer, researchers design delivery system to guide drugs directly to cancer cells ‘hiding’ in bone marrow. Researchers led by a UCLA bioengineer have developed a therapy — based on two types of cells joined into a single unit — that could help strengthen existing treatments for acute […]

A new Florida State University College of Medicine study involving data from 12,000 participants collected over 10 years confirms the heavy toll that loneliness can take on your health: It increases your risk of dementia by 40 percent. The risk is across the board, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity or […]