Category: Disease Discoveries
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New Imaging Technique Can Diagnose Common Heart Condition
The technique, used to measure blood flow in the heart and vessels, can also diagnose bicuspid aortic valve, a common congenital abnormality, and may lead to better prediction of complications.
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Heart Disease Warning Signs Appear as Early as 18
Elevated blood pressure as young as age 18 is a warning sign of cardiovascular disease developing later in life and the time to begin prevention. That’s decades earlier than clinicians and patients generally start thinking about heart disease risk.
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Rheumatoid Arthritis Finding May Lead to New Treatment Options
The discovery of an enzyme that is highly activated in cells from the joint fluid of rheumatoid arthritis patients may provide a new therapeutic target for the 1 million Americans affected by the disease.
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Scientists Focus on Synaptic Development in Fragile X Syndrome
Anis Contractor, PhD, associate professor in Physiology, recently published findings on what causes delays in synaptic and neuronal development in the cortex, hallmarks of fragile X syndrome, the most common known cause of autism.
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Iron May be at Heart of Cancer Drug’s Cardiotoxicity Effect
Hossein Ardehali, MD, PhD, has discovered that doxorubicin, an effective and commonly used anticancer drug, is causing an accumulation of iron inside of a cell’s mitochondria, resulting in heart damage.
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Heart Attack Damage Slashed with Microparticle Therapy
After a heart attack, much of the damage to the heart muscle is caused by inflammatory cells that rush to the scene of the oxygen-starved tissue. But the damage is slashed in half when microparticles are injected into the blood stream within 24 hours of the attack, according to preclinical research.
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Enhanced Prognoses Could Help Lymphoma Patients
Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed a new prognostic tool for clinicians treating patients with large B-cell lymphoma. The predictive scale enhances the widely used International Prognostic Index.
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Scientist Uncovers Selective Cell Death in Ataxia
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, a discovery by Marco Martina, MD, PhD, associate professor in Physiology, sheds new light on the selective vulnerability of cell types in preclinical models of ataxia.
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Collaboration Will Investigate Genetics of Dengue Virus
Variations in DNA sequence may have a significant impact on how humans respond to dengue virus. A group of scientists from Nicaragua, the University of California-Berkeley and Feinberg will seek to uncover genetic variants that make certain people more susceptible to life-threatening forms of the infection.
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Identifying Signaling Pathways in Breast Cancer
Second-year medical student Chaitanya Medicherla explores the effects of immune cells on cancer development as part of his Area of Scholarly Concentration research project.
