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Search Results for: label/inflammatory bowel disease

  • Leaky gut and wonky immune response might be double whammy leading to inflammatory bowel disease (in mice)

    A case of ulcerative colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease.Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Samir. A two-hit punch in the gut might explain why some people find themselves alone among their closest relatives in having inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The double gut punches come in the form of a compromised intestinal wall coupled with a poorly behaved immune system, say Emory researchers, whose work using mice was publishe…

    Authored by on September 13, 2012

  • Gluten sensitivity

    …d to choose from, as the gluten-free market continues to boom. References 1. Aziz, I., Hadjivassiliou, M., & Sanders, D.S. (2012). Does gluten sensitivity in the absence of coeliac disease exist?. British Medical Journal, 345, e7907. 2. Fasano, A. (2009, August). Surprises from Celiac Disease. Scientific American, 301(2), 54-61. 3. Junker, Y., Zeissig, S., Kim, S., Barisani, D, Wieser, H., Leffler, D., … Schuppan, D. (2012). Wheat amylase try…

    Authored by on March 15, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    ter all, that’s one of the reasons why scientists are trying to identify risk genes: to design better treatments for those disorders. [Image credit: DNA, public domain image from US govt. Image of Prozac, credit Tom Varco, CC 3.0 license.] [Siobhan Mitchell obtained a Neurobiology Ph.D. at the State University New York at Albany (SUNY Albany), followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Washington, Seattle. She currently works at the…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • What blinded Mary Ingalls?

    …isease from that era. Scarlet fever was considered one of the top four causes of blindness until at least 1910 even though doctors don’t understand how the fever might cause blindness. It also killed anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of those who fell ill with it. But there were three other top causes of blindness then: measles, meningitis and “other diseases of the head.” And the evidence from primary sources points to one of thes…

    Authored by on February 19, 2013

  • Colon Cancer Awareness Month: Get your ass screened. We mean it.

    …se risks can be known and for anyone to have appropriate screening either at the recommended age or in the presence of symptoms. Speaking of family, there is my own. My having been diagnosed with a precancerous growth at age 38 means that my first-degree relatives–siblings, parents, children–should have screening at least by that age and preferably years before. There is some understandable reluctance to have a colonoscopy. Outside o…

    Authored by on March 7, 2012

  • Are your children always on your mind? They may be IN your mind

    …women don’t carry a Y chromosome in their own cells (but some do; another post for another time). In this study, researchers examined postmortem brain tissue from 26 women who had no detectable neurological disease and 33 women who’d had Alzheimer’s disease; the women’s ages at death ranged from 32 to 101. They found that almost two thirds (37) of all of the women tested had evidence of the Y chromosome gene in their brai…

    Authored by on September 26, 2012

  • Miscarriage: When a beginning is not a beginning

    …cutoffs for what constitutes early fetal loss, very early fetal loss, and so on. So actual estimates of how much these factors influence fetal loss varies. The safest overall estimate for any given pregnancy is probably about 30%, though one study, even with conservative estimates of pregnancy and fetal loss puts it at 60% (Holman and Wood, 2001). This means, though, that for every two live births a woman has, she’ll have at least one miscarriage…

    Authored by on September 5, 2012

  • The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®

    …mbassador Nancy Brinker, awkwardly attempted to explain the decision, and yesterday, Handel resigned her position. (Whether she’ll receive a golden parachute remains unclear, but former CEO Hala Moddelmog received $277,864 in 2010, despite her resignation at the end of 2009.) The Planned Parenthood debacle brought renewed attention to other controversies that have hounded Komen in recent years—like its “lawsuits for the cure” program that spent n…

    Authored by on February 11, 2012

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …ll selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures. We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to be…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Pertussis: Get the vax or at least listen to why you should

    …. Just how bad are the numbers? Well, 2010 was the last five-year peak, which totaled 27,550 cases. It’s currently September of 2012, and the numbers last reported to the CDC were at 29,834, and that doesn’t even include over 3,700 cases in Minnesota that haven’t been officially reported to the CDC yet. These numbers, which include 14 deaths (primarily of babies under 3 months), may very well end up doubling the 2011 total of 18,719 if they conti…

    Authored by on October 10, 2012

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