News by Subject Medicine & Health

Severe infections leading to hospitalizations during childhood are associated with lower school achievement in adolescence, reports a study in the July issue of The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal (PIDJ). The official journal of The European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases, PIDJ is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

It was previously thought that the T cell would concentrate the receptors at certain points in order to achieve the highest possible sensitivity. As a current publication by the biophysics research group at TU Wien shows, T cells are actually programmed to react as quickly as possible, and therefore their receptors are arranged at random.

A new study published in Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology shows that eczema symptoms can have a profoundly negative impact on quality of life for those who suffer -- even worse than for those with common chronic illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the efficacy of probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics often fail to report potential harms. Without safety data, experts warn that they cannot broadly conclude that these interventions are safe. The findings are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

A study shows that the expression of PI3Kγ protein increases during infection by T. cruzi, an essential response in avoiding excessive inflammation and controlling parasitemia. Heart tissue analyses involving human patients who developed cardiopathy in the disease's chronic stage also provided results. The next challenge is to devise treatment for Chagas using molecules capable of modulating the cellular signaling pathway mediated by PI3Kγ.

When it comes to diagnosing a condition in which the plasma cells that normally make antibodies to protect us instead become cancerous, it may be better to look at the urine as well as the serum of our blood for answers, pathologists say.

A study has newly identified an immune trigger of some fibrotic diseases and an experimental compound to treat it. Fibrosis -- a progressive scarring and hardening of internal organs -- is estimated to cause 35 to 40 percent of deaths in the world.

A new study evaluates data from more than 1,500 cancer programs across the country to determine the effectiveness of checkpoint blockade immunotherapies, finding that these therapies provided significant improvements in overall survival for patients with melanoma brain metastases.