Medicine & Health

Elderly patients taking the commonly prescribed blood thinner warfarin experience an increased risk for osteoporosis-linked bone fractures, according to a study at the School of Medicine. The results suggest physicians should carefully monitor the bone health of patients placed on the medication and that their patients should take steps to decrease the risk of osteoporosis.

Doctors may soon be turning back the clock for some patients with complete atherosclerotic blockage of the carotid arteries, blood vessels in the neck that are important sources of blood for the brain.

The internal “skeleton” (in red) of cells is altered by exposure to high fat.Investigating the harmful health effects of excess fat, researchers at the School of Medicine have identified a protein that triggers death in mammalian cells overloaded with saturated fat. When the researchers halted production of the protein, the cells were able to thrive in ordinarily damaging amounts of saturated fat.

The ideal substance to prevent cancer would block tumor growth without causing unpleasant or dangerous side effects. Researchers at the School of Medicine now report that a compound related to vitamin A shows promise in preventing or slowing tumor growth in mice prone to lung cancer. The compound, called bexarotene, doesn’t cause the severe skin irritations that have limited the use of other vitamin A derivatives in cancer therapies.

Vegetables are a staple of calorie restriction diets.Eating a very low-calorie yet nutritionally balanced diet is good for your heart. Studying heart function in members of an organization called the Calorie Restriction Society, investigators at the School of Medicine found that their hearts functioned like the hearts of much younger people. The researchers report their findings in the Jan. 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In 2005, physicians in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the School of Medicine saw more than 1,500 cancer patients in their brachytherapy treatment rooms where implanted or injected radiation sources are used to treat cancer. That number was up five-fold from the fairly steady numbers of the late 1970s to the mid 1990s.

Physicians have come to understand that what we call breast cancer is really several — probably at least five — different diseases that need different treatments and have different outcomes. Now researchers at the School of Medicine and collaborating institutions in the United States and Canada plan to evaluate these breast cancer subtypes and determine the likely prognosis and most effective treatment for each.

An international team of researchers, led by investigators at the School of Medicine, are zeroing in on a gene that increases risk for Alzheimer’s disease. They have identified a region of chromosome 10 that appears to be involved in risk for the disease that currently affects an estimated 4.5 million Americans.

The thin, single-cell boundary where a tumor meets normal tissue is the most dangerous part of a cancer according to a new study by scientists at the School of Medicine. The researchers found that tumor cells bordering normal tissue receive signals that tell them to wander away from the tumor, allowing the cancer cells to establish deadly metastatic tumors elsewhere in the body.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Non-visual functions of the eye (week of Jan. 4) • Calorie restriction dieting (week of Jan. 11) • Alzheimer’s gene (week of Jan. 18) • Genes and side effects (week of Jan. 25)