Brain infarction, or stroke, is caused by a blood clot blocking a blood vessel in the brain, which leads to interruption of blood flow and shortage of oxygen. Now a research group at Lund University, Sweden, has taken an important step towards a treatment for stroke using stem cells.
The group shows in a new study that induced pluripotent stem cells have developed to mature nerve cells at two months after transplantation into the stroke-injured cerebral cortex of rats. These nerve cells have established contact with other important structures in the brain. The transplantation gave rise to improvement of the animals

A team of researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have developed a prototype of a new imaging tool that may one day help to detect breast cancer early, when it is most treatable.
If effective, the new device, called a photoacoustic mammoscope, would represent an entirely new way of imaging the breast and detecting cancer. Instead of X-rays, which are used in traditional mammography, the photoacoustic breast mammoscope uses a combination of infrared light and ultrasound to create a 3-D map of the breast.
In the new technique, infrared light is delivered in billionth-of-a-second pulses to tissue, where it is scattered and absorbed. The high absorption of blood increases the temperature of blood vessels slightly, and this causes them to undergo a slight but rapid expansion. While imperceptible to the patient, this expansion generates detectable ultrasound waves that are used to form a 3-D map of the breast vasculature. Since cancer tumours have more blood vessels than the surrounding tissue, they are distinguishable in this image.
Currently the resolution of the images is not as fine as what can be obtained with existing breast imaging techniques like X-ray mammography and MRI. Future versions are expected to improve the resolution as well as add the capability to image using several different wavelengths of light at once, which is expected to improve detectability.
The Twente researchers, who belong to the Biomedical Photonic Imaging group run by Professor Wiendelt Steenbergen, have tested their prototype in the laboratory using phantoms

Diabetes Mellitus, a metabolic disorder that affects nearly 170 million people worldwide, is characterised by chronic hyperglycaemia that disrupts carbohydrate fat and protein metabolism resulting from defects in insulin secretion, insulin action or both. DM can cause long-term damage, dysfunction and even failure of various organs.
Patients with DM may develop corneal complications and delayed wound healing. This slow wound healing contributes to increased infections and the formation of bed sores and ulcers. Corneal complications include diabetic neuropathies and ocular complications that often lead to reduced vision or blindness.
A team of Wayne State University researchers recently developed several diabetic models to study impaired wound healing in diabetic corneas. Using a genome-wide cDNA array analysis, the group identified genes, their associated pathways and the networks affected by DM in corneal epithelial cells and their roles in wound closure. The findings may bring scientists one step closer to developing new treatments that may slow or thwart DM

A highly targeted cancer radiation therapy may offer a safe and effective treatment option for elderly pancreatic cancer patients unable to undergo surgery or combined chemotherapy and radiation therapy, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Called stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), the study finds patients lived, on average, six to seven months longer following treatment with minimal side-effects even when they had other severe comorbidities such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart disease and diabetes.

Two of the patients in the study lived nearly two years.

‘Elderly individuals, those ages 75 and older, account for approximately 40 percent of patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,’ says study lead author Raphael Yechieli, M.D., with the Department of Radiation Oncology at Henry Ford Hospital.

‘These patients are too ill to receive any other treatment, but with stereotactic body radiotherapy we

The benefits of hydroxyurea treatment in people with sickle cell disease are well known