Category: Health

A proposal by a UW-Madison biochemist to create “stealth” drugs that hide inside cells until activated by a pathogen has received a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Biochemist Ron Raines and his research group were awarded the funding through the foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.

Do you ever find yourself yawning in response to another person’s yawn? Some say it seems to happen often and claim there is scientific proof behind the theory that yawns are contagious.

Often times, yawns are a sign of fatigue or boredom. But the true meaning of why people yawn has stumped researchers.

“What a yawn is good for, we don’t really know,” said Mary Klink, associate director of University of Wisconsin Health’s Wisconsin Sleep.

Wisconsin residents that participate in funding breast cancer research and awareness may not know that the Madison area is home to many scientists who rely on the support donated by others

One of the young scientists working here is engaged in cancer research. His team’s lab is a place few get to see, but he said the public should know how their fundraising support might have helped him make a huge discovery.

The statistics show that one in eight people will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

It can be difficult to identify — it’s not something that can be done with a simple blood test, brain scan or routine physical. People need to find a doctor who has experience in identifying Alzheimer’s disease.

But experts said that often what people think is Alzheimer’s disease could be something else.

“When someone comes into our clinic, what we’re trying to see is what’s causing their memory problems, or if they have memory problems at all,” said Dr. Cindy Carlsson, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

The first-born children of older parents are three times more likely to have autism than their siblings or those born to younger parents, according to a new federally-funded study.

This is the largest study to look at the issue of parental age and its role in the developmental disability, said the author, Maureen Durkin, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and a Marquette University researcher are winners of three grants totaling $70,000 from the Wisconsin Women’s Health Foundation.

The three women will be honored at a luncheon on Tuesday at the Italian Community Center in Milwaukee.

October 26, 1988. The Los Angeles Dodgers just won the World Series. Michael Dukakis is about to lose the presidential election. And in Madison, Kelly Cotter receives a bone marrow transplant from her kid brother, Adam, that she hopes will save her life. The Capital Times puts her story on the front page: “Tough hurdle for 12-year-old athlete.”

…in the 20 years since her diagnosis, she has become a leading advocate for cancer research, not just locally but nationally. In 2002, she completed her law degree at UW and became director of legislative affairs for the National Childhood Cancer Foundation. Earlier this year, she helped lobby Congress to pass the Conquer Childhood Cancer Act, which will devote $150 million to research over the next five years. UW Hospital will honor her for her work over the years at an event Monday.

MADISON, Wis. — The bad economy is impacting people’s indulgence in some bad habits such as smoking.

The University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention said the group most affected by the rise in cigarette prices and the tough economy is teenagers.

The center said many smokers react in stages, initially going from brand-name cigarettes to generics and, in some cases, cutting back all together.

A team of researchers from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health has identified a breakdown in the brain’s control tower for obesity — a snarl in a complex molecular messaging system that regulates the body’s food intake and weight.

In a study published Thursday in the Oct. 3 issue of Cell, researchers led by Dongsheng Cai, an assistant professor of physiology, honed in on a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. Smaller than a grape, this tiny structure is charged with a mighty mission: the regulation and control of the body’s metabolism.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Overeating makes the brain go haywire, prompting a cascade of damage that may cause diabetes, heart disease and other ills, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

Eating too much appears to activate a usually dormant immune system pathway in the brain, sending out immune cells to attack and destroy invaders that are not there, Dongsheng Cai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found.

The discovery of another way in which the body appears to control how much it eats could shed fresh light on obesity.

US researchers said poor diets may trigger a signalling system which prompts the body to consume even more.

The latest “pathway” under investigation, by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is normally associated with the immune system, and inflammation, one of the body’s defence systems.

Dear Editor:

….How much alcohol should a pregnant woman consume? The only safe amount is none. That $5 million to study monkeys should have been used to actually help people. Let’s stop wasting our limited resources on arcane scientific research that helps no one but the scientist banking the federal grant.

Dawn Kubly, Cambridge

Youngsters close to the age of three who develop wheezing with the virus have a 30-fold risk of becoming asthmatic by the time they turn six.

The older the toddlers are when they catch the virus, the greater their chance of developing the condition, which is called Rhinovirus, according to the research.

Around 5 million people in Britain, including more than 1m children, suffer from asthma.

Daniel Jackson, from the University of Wisconsin, who led the team which carried out the study, said that the Rhinovirus was a “significant predictor” that children would go on to become asthmatic.

The armed forces and cigarettes have a long history, going back to World War II. That’s when Ancel Keys, a scientist who spent his career studying the relationship between diet and disease, helped the Cig2 military develop an adequate meal suitable for combat. Named K-rations, after Keys, the meal considered sound at the time contained bacon, canned cheese and dextrose tablets. For relaxation, the military threw in gum and cigarettes, triggering massive nicotine addiction in young GIs.

The post-war tragedy unfolded over decades as smoking by WWII veterans led to a nine-fold increase in lung cancer deaths by 1980.

Cigarettes are no longer freebies in field K-rations, but the nicotine addiction rate in the military is still sky high, according to a news release put out by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.