December 28th, 2011 by HarvardHealth in Health Tips, Research
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When you sit quietly, your heart slips into the slower, steady pace known as your resting heart rate. A new study suggests that an increase in this rate over time may be a signal of heart trouble ahead.
Your heart rate changes from minute to minute. It depends on whether you are standing up or lying down, moving around or sitting still, stressed or relaxed. Your resting heart rate, though, tends to be stable from day to day. The usual range for resting heart rate is anywhere between 60 and 90 beats per minute. Above 90 is considered high.
Many factors influence resting heart rate. Genes play a role. Aging tends to speed it up. Regular exercise tends to slow it down. (In his prime, champion cyclist Lance Armstrong had a resting heart rate of just 32 beats per minute.) Stress, medications, and medical conditions also influence the heart rate.
In today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Norway report Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
December 19th, 2011 by Medgadget in Announcements, Research
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Over the past year our genetic understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and cancer has been accelerated by thousands of video gamers thanks to an online flash game called Phylo. Phylo is a video game created by Dr. Jérôme Waldispuhl of the McGill Centre for BioInformatics and collaborator Mathieu Blanchette. The game itself is a framework for solving the common problem of multiple sequence alignments in comparative genomics and leverages the visual problem solving skills of online gamers.
The Phylo website explains the background to game: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
December 4th, 2011 by Medgadget in Expert Interviews, Research
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Two months ago we reported on the first ovarian cancer surgeries performed with fluorescence guidance. As described in the Nature Medicine paper, the international team of researchers from The Netherlands, Germany, and Indiana used folate coupled to fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) to make ovarian cancer cells glow so they could be easily identified.
Now, in this week’s issue of Science Translational Medicine, another international team from Japan and Maryland reports their development of a spray-on probe that may provide even better sensitivity and fluorescent contrast than the folate-FITC counterpart. The editors of STM summarize this work well in the following note: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
December 1st, 2011 by MuinKhouryMDPhD in Opinion, Research
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In June 2011, the CDC Office of Public Health Genomics launched a community wide consultation process to develop priorities for the field of public health genomics in the next 5 years. This process was initiated as part of strategic visioning for integrating the emerging tools of genomics into practice and assuring the success of these new tools in improving population health. The process was conducted at a time of a widening gap between the rapid scientific advances in genomics and their impact on improving population health. The University of Michigan Center for Public Health and Community Genomics and Genetic Alliance spearheaded an effort to seek, collate and synthesize advice and recommendations from numerous stakeholders and constituents. The effort culminated in a workshop conducted on September 14, 2011 in Bethesda, Maryland. The results of the consultation, discussions and deliberations are summarized in a report published by the University of Michigan. Highlights of the recommendations are summarized here but readers should consult the full report. Some of the recommendations include:
To improve public health genomics education: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Genomics and Health Impact Blog*
November 28th, 2011 by Berci in Expert Interviews, Research
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The third edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine (PDF) was released a week ago and I had a chance to do an interview with Edward Abrahams, Ph.D. of the Personalized Medicine Coalition. The new edition is a primer that highlights the progress in the field of personalized medicine for policymakers, researchers, and business leaders.
- How many prominent examples of personalized medicine might we have next year?
It’s impossible for us to know how many prominent examples of personalized medicine products will be available a year from now, but we project that the rapid acceleration in the number of new products coming onto the market will continue. When we published the first edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine in 2006 – there were only 13 available products; when we published the second edition in 2009, there were 37 products available, and now, in 2011, there are 72.
- Sometimes lecturers use two numbers: 7 billion and 3 billion referring to the mass sequencing of everyone’s DNA in the world. When could it happen, what is your estimation? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
