treatments | Common News Update

Jan142020 by adminNo Comments

Melanoma cells may develop new ‘skin’ to resist cancer treatments

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Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Researchers may have found how some skin cancer cells become resistant to currently available chemotherapy. In a study published Monday in the journal Cancer Cell, researchers from Queen Mary University of London describe how melanoma cells fight anti-cancer drugs by changing their internal skeleton, or cytoskeleton. The discovery could open up new treatment options to combat skin and other cancers that develop resistance to treatment, they say. "In a nutshell if you are a cancer cell, what does not kill you makes you stronger," lead author Victoria Sanz-Moreno, professor of cancer cell biology at Queen Mary, said in a statement. According to the Melanoma Research Alliance, melanoma is the most diagnosed cancer among 25- to 29-year-olds in the United States. An estimat...

Dec312019 by adminNo Comments

Brain response to pleasure, pain may inform new mental health treatments

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Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The human brain is naturally trained to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Now, a new study in mice has provided some clues into how these processes occur. The findings, published Tuesday in the journal Neuron, may improve understanding of the way the brain performs in people with certain mental health disorders. "Behavioral changes in people with depression or stress-induced anxiety may be caused by changes" in how the brain responds to positive and negative stimuli, said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory professor and study lead author Bo Li, in a press release. Li and his colleagues believe their work has revealed that different classes of neurons control positive and negative motivation and transmit opposing signals along a shared motivation-processing brain circuit. Ultimat...

May162019 by adminNo Comments

Cancer: Breakthrough treatments to target drug resistance

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The world's first drugs designed to stop cancer cells becoming resistant to treatment could be available within the next decade, scientists have said.A £75m investment to develop the drugs has been announced by the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR).Chief executive Prof Paul Workman said cancer's ability to adapt to drugs is the biggest challenge in treatment.The new drugs could make cancer a "manageable" disease in the long term and "more often curable", he said.Researchers say existing treatments such as chemotherapy sometimes fail because the deadliest cancer cells adapt and survive, causing the patient to relapse.Prof Workman said: "Cancer's ability to adapt, evolve and become drug resistant was the cause of the vast majority of deaths from the diseas...

Oct222018 by adminNo Comments

Machine learning may help identify ideal dementia treatments

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Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Machine learning may someday allow physicians to prescribe the best treatment for dementia, according to a study. Researchers devised and applied a new algorithm that can spot different patterns of progression in patients with a range of dementias in MRI scans, including Alzheimer's disease. The findings were published this month in the journal Nature Communications. "This new algorithm has the unique ability to reveal groups of patients with different variants of disease," Dr. Daniel Alexander, a professor in the University College London Center for Medical Image computing, said in a press release. "One key reason for the failure of drug trials in Alzheimer's disease is the broad mixture of very different patients they test; a treatment with a strong effect on a particul...

Aug12018 by adminNo Comments

Could a blood test lead to new treatments for depression?

Health

Depression is among the leading causes of disability worldwide, with more than 300 million people suffering from this mental illness, according to the World Health Organization. Despite how common depression is, scientists still have a lot to learn about it. Among what is known is that depression is not a single disease but a variety of feelings and behaviors that may have different underlying causes. “Depressive disorders can present differently in different people. What is known now is that depression affects not just the brain but the whole organism,”said Natalie Rasgon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. But a new study of which Rasgon is a senior author finds evidence of a possible biomarker for major depressive disorder, which c...