News by Subject Medicine & Health

In 1994, Chinese university student Zhu Ling began experiencing stomach pain, hair loss and partial paralysis. By the time doctors diagnosed Ling with thallium poisoning about four months later, she was in a coma. Two decades after the poisoning, Richard Ash--an associate research scientist in the University of Maryland's Department of Geology--used mass spectrometry to analyze several of Ling's hairs collected in 1994 and 1995 and established a timeline of her poisoning.

Genetically diverse bacterial strains that cause urinary tract infections differ in their ability to trigger protective immune responses in mice, potentially explaining why these infections frequently recur in many patients, according to a study published Dec. 13 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Thomas Hannan and Scott Hultgren of Washington University School of Medicine, and colleagues.

An international team of scientists led by institutes in Berlin and Jena, Germany, performed repeated lung lavage as a new approach for tuberculosis diagnosis in rhinoceros. Subsequent genetic tests reliably identified mycobacteria in the animals' respiratory fluids -- with minimal stress and risk for the rhinos. The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

A report in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics describes a new assay to assess copy number alterations that is cheaper, faster, reproducible, and requires less tissue than other diagnostic techniques and has the potential to significantly enhance prostate cancer evaluation.

A novel technique that uses mammography to determine the biological tissue composition of a tumor could help reduce unnecessary breast biopsies, according to a new study.