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Study of snake venom in mice reveals potential new strategy for relieving agony A snakebite may bring on a world of hurt, but a substance found in black mamba venom could actually relieve pain. The finding reveals a new possible approach for pain treatment, researchers report online October 3 in Nature. The black mamba, Dendroaspis polylepis polylepis, is one of the most lethal snakes on Earth. But a team of researchers in France found that compounds in the snake’s venom have the same pain-banishing effect on mice that morphine does. The compounds, called mambalgins, appear to work by blocking certain...

John B. Gurdon of the U.K. and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan shared this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in so-called cellular reprogramming, which has unleashed a wave of advances in everything from cloning to the possible treatment of diseases using stem cells.... It also allows scientists to create human embryonic stem cells without having to destroy human embryos, sidestepping an approach that has long been fraught with ethical controversies. Most important, perhaps, it has significantly advanced the prospect of using a patient's own mature cells to create fresh tissue and treat disease.

It may be possible to use a drug to prevent some of the lasting and crippling damage caused by a stroke, according to doctors in the US and Canada. A safety trial, published in the Lancet Neurology medical journal, suggested the chemical NA-1 was safe to use. The study on 185 people also hinted that patients given the drug developed fewer regions of damaged brain tissue. The Stroke Association said that it was promising, but needed more research. Tests in primates had suggested NA-1 prevented brain cells dying when a stroke starved them of oxygen.

Nicotinamide, commonly known as vitamin B3, may help the innate immune system kill antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, the so-called "superbugs". In lab work done with mice and human blood, researchers found high doses of the vitamin increased the ability of immune cells to kill the bacteria by 1,000 times.The discovery opens the door to a new arsenal of tools for dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, such as those caused by methicillin-resistant S. aureus or MRSA, that have killed thousands of people around the world. They are increasing in hospitals and nursing homes, and also rising in prisons, among athletes, people in...

In any given year, 7% of adults suffer from major depression, and at least 1 in 10 youth will reckon with the disorder at some point during their teenage years. But about 20% of these cases will not respond to current treatments; for those that do, relief may take weeks to months to come. There is one treatment, however, that works much faster: the anesthetic and “club drug” ketamine. It takes effect within hours. A single dose of ketamine produces relief of depression that has been shown in studies to last for up to 10 days; it also appears to...

Beta blockers may offer little against heart attack, stroke Commonly prescribed drugs called beta blockers fail to protect against heart attacks and strokes even while helping to control heart rate and blood pressure, researchers report in the Oct. 3 Journal of the American Medical Association. Beta blockers also didn’t lessen the odds of a heart-related death, in heart attack patients or others at risk, over a median follow-up of 44 months. The American Heart Association had previously discouraged the long-term use of beta blockers as a post–heart attack treatment beyond three years. The new findings further dim the prospects for...

Method raises hopes for routine whole-genome sequencing in neonatal intensive care. A faster DNA sequencing machine and streamlined analysis of the results can diagnose genetic disorders in days rather than weeks, as reported today in Science Translational Medicine1. Up to a third of the babies admitted to neonatal intensive care units have a genetic disease. Although symptoms may be severe, the genetic cause can be hard to pin down. Thousands of genetic diseases have been described, but relatively few tests are available, and even these may detect only the most common mutations. Whole-genome sequencing could test for many diseases at...

-excerpt- All received steroid injections, mostly for back pain, a fairly typical treatment.

In a move that could alter the way that breast cancers are treated, researchers have redefined the disease into four main classes and determined that one type of breast cancer has more in common with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer than other breast cancers. The finding that a form of breast cancer may be genetically similar to a type of ovarian cancer underscores a new way thinking about cancer that moves away from defining cancers by the organ of origin. The findings are the result of the largest and most comprehensive study of the genetics of breast cancer to...

Witnesses described the 17-year-old boy as "shaking, growling, foaming at the mouth." According to police reports, Elijah Stai was at a McDonald's with his friend when he began to feel ill. Soon after, he "started to smash his head against the ground" and began acting "possessed," according to a witness. Two hours later, he had stopped breathing

The era of laptop medicine is now upon us. Make that, laptop-computer medicine. Visit your physician and odds are that he will enter the examining room with his shiny new laptop in hand. The push for electronic records in the name of medical record portability and efficient record keeping is documented in the press, and the potential advantages appear convincing.

Omega-3 Fatty Acid Supplementation Not Associated With Lower Risk of Major Cardiovascular Disease Events In a study that included nearly 70,000 patients, supplementation with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids was not associated with a lower risk of all-cause death, cardiac death, sudden death, heart attack, or stroke, according to an analysis of previous studies published in the Sept. 12 issue of JAMA. "Treatment with marine-derived omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) for the prevention of major cardiovascular adverse outcomes has been supported by a number of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and refuted by others. Although their mechanism of action is not clear,...

Cost-cutting moves by medical device companies have resulted in the loss of more than 2,000 jobs over the past 2 months. Medical device companies are molting at a reptilian rate, shedding more than 2,000 jobs over the past 2 months as they look to slash costs across the board. Several of the med-tech companies that are scrapping jobs say the 2.3% medical device excise tax in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, slated to begin in January 2013. Others deny that the tax is the sole cause of their moves, saying it's a factor but not determinative. Seven medical...

A deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics has killed a seventh person at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Maryland.

As a recently-retired physician who is married to a nurse-midwife, my preparedness group looks to us as the post-TEOTWAWKI hospital and medical staff. Medical progress has been exponential and even just the last decade of scientific breakthroughs can equal a century of improvement in medical treatments, surgical techniques and pharmaceuticals. However, in the years (months?) ahead, the crumbling of the infrastructure and devolution of society in general will very likely throw us back to a medical system that existed in the 19th Century. Let’s take an example: When the U.S. was a young nation, the average woman could expect to...

Ron Strang lay helpless in the dirt as the hole in his leg was packed with gauze and swathed in bandages. The Marine sergeant was on foot patrol in Afghanistan's Helmand Province when an improvised explosive device tore through his left thigh, shredding his muscle and draining half his blood. "I'm sure I would've died without the quick actions of my fellow Marines," said Strang, 28, who endured more than a dozen surgeries and painful skin grafts to close the gaping wound. Though his skin eventually healed, Strang was left with half the quadriceps he once had. "I had to...

Heart attack survivors using certain painkillers are more likely to die or suffer another event People who have survived a heart attack seem to increase their risk of having another one, or of dying, by taking common painkillers called NSAIDs, a popular class of drugs that includes ibuprofen. The unsettling link between non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and heart attack risk is not new. The American Heart Association released guidelines in 2007 discouraging the use of any NSAIDs among people with a history of cardiovascular disease. Researchers in Denmark now bolster that link with the largest study to date of NSAID use...

It’s not exactly earth-shaking news that there’s a lot of waste in the U.S. health care system, but this item we came across still managed to stagger us: A report by the Institute of Medicine estimates that as much as $750 billion is wasted in the U.S. health care system each year. Three quarters of a trillion dollars. Every year. As the Wall Street Journal notes, that’s bigger than the Pentagon budget, amounting to roughly 5 percent of GDP. The report offers a familiar laundry list of problems. Unnecessary services are the leading driver of waste, but administrative expenses and...

Cristina Sanchez, a young biologist at Complutense University in Madrid, was studying cell metabolism when she noticed something peculiar. She had been screening brain cancer cells because they grow faster than normal cell lines and thus are useful for research purposes. But the cancer cells died each time they were exposed to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive ingredient of marijuana. Instead of gaining insight into how cells function, Sanchez had stumbled upon the anti-cancer properties of THC. In 1998, she reported in a European biochemistry journal that THC “induces apoptosis [cell death] in C6 glioma cells,” an aggressive form of...