News by Subject Medicine & Health

By drawing in a bit of sweat, a patch developed in the lab of Alberto Salleo can reveal how much cortisol a person is producing. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone but is involved in many important physiological functions.

A diet with calorie restriction two days per week was comparable to a diet with daily calorie restriction for glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Gestational diabetes may increase the risk of blood vessel dysfunction and heart disease in offspring by altering a smooth muscle protein responsible for blood vessel network formation. Understanding of the protein's function in fetal cells may improve early detection of disease in children. The study is published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology -- Cell Physiology.

Study conducted in Southern Hemisphere's subtropical zone detects correlation between drop in temperature and rise in deaths from stroke, especially among women and older people.

A global review involving almost 20 million people has shown that having diabetes significantly raises the risk of developing cancer, and for women the risk is even higher. Researchers from The George Institute for Global Health also found diabetes (type 1 and type 2) conferred an additional risk for women, compared to men, for leukaemia and cancers of the stomach, mouth and kidney, but less risk for liver cancer.

UC San Francisco researchers were recently surprised to discover fully formed gut and skin cells in the thymus, a lemon-sized organ that sits in front of the heart and is responsible for training the T cells of the immune system not to attack the body's own tissues. The finding, based on studies conducted in mice, could lead to better understanding of the drivers of autoimmune problems in humans, the authors say.

New study calls for human-based tools to unravel the pathogenesis of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The contribution of in silico, in vitro and pathways-based systems biology approaches to unraveling the pathogenesis of this disease are described, and how this human-relevant research can be used for anti-NASH drug development.