All About Cancer!

New method can wipe out cancer cells in the bloodstream

A new way to potentially stop cancer cells from spreading and moving throughout the bloodstream has been discovered by researchers at Cornell University. By attaching a protein to white blood cells, biomedical engineers at Cornell University have demonstrated the annihilation of metastasizing cancer cells moving through the bloodstream. The study, “TRAIL-Coated Leukocytes that Kill Cancer Cells in the Circulation,” is published in the 6th January......

Pennsylvania State Court Rejects The “Any-Breath” / “Every Exposure” Theory On Appeal Of A $14.5 Million Verdict In Welder’s Mesothelioma Death Case

In the Nelson v. Airco Welders Supply case an individual who worked as a welder at a steel plant for 33 years was exposed to various asbestos-containing products. A couple of years after leaving the steel plant this worker was diagnosed with mesothelioma and, unfortunately, he died about one year later.His death came before this asbestos-mesothelioma lawsuit trial was heard by a jury, which returned a verdict in the amount of $14.5 million for the plaintiffs, the deceased worker’s survivors.At trial the plaintiffs’ expert testified that “every exposure must be considered a cause of the disease”......

More Lawsuits Being Filed For People With Lung Cancer Who Worked With Or Around Asbestos-Containing Products Years Ago

In November 2012 we wrote this article, “Asbestos Lung Cancer Cases: Number Of Filed Lawsuits Increasing Across The U.S.”Now, a year later, we get confirmation there is a growing number of lawsuits concerning lung cancer related to asbestos exposure from this November 2013 report found at the Business Insurance website, “Asbestos, environmental insurance claim losses up 12% in 2012: Best”:Asbestos and environmental insurance claim losses increased in 2012 due to a rising number of asbestos-related lung cancer lawsuits, A.M. Best Co. Inc. said Monday.The Oldwick, N.J.-based rating......

National Institute For Occupational Safety And Health (NIOSH) Study About Deaths From Mesosthelioma And Asbestosis Published In January 2014 Medical Journal

From the Abstract for this recently published 2014 article about the loss of life attributable to asbestosis and malignant mesothelioma, “Diseases attributable to asbestos exposure: Years of potential life lost, United States, 1999-2010?, we get these sobering facts about the number of years lost to asbestos cancer and and asbestos disease in the US:BACKGROUND:Although asbestos use has been restricted in recent decades, asbestos-associated deaths continue to occur in the United States.OBJECTIVES:We evaluated premature mortality and loss of potentially productive years of life attributable to......

Surgical Procedure Is Good Treatment Option For Patients With Certain Type Of Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma (MPM) According To New Medical Study

The following comes from a December 2013 news article, “Chest wall resection effective for recurrent mesothelioma”, about some recent medical research findings published in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery:Salvage chest wall resection could lengthen survival in patients with isolated chest wall recurrence of malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM), research indicates.MPM is an aggressive malignancy with a poor prognosis and few effective treatment options, the researchers note. But in their study, 47 patients who underwent chest wall resection for recurrence a median of 16.1......

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Reaffirms That Legal Causation In A Mesothelioma Lawsuit May Not Be Proven On The Basis Of Theory That Even Minimal Exposure To Asbestos Can Cause Mesothelioma

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New Report On Insurance Companies That Delay Payments In Asbestos Suits, And What This Has To Do With The Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency (FACT) Act

An October 2013 Scripps News article, “Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries deny, delay asbestos, hazard claims, suits, insiders allege”, by investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt, revealed this disturbing news about how some insurance companies have intentionally delayed or denied insurance claims for victims of asbestos exposure:Scripps interviewed over 20 sources –- some confidential –reviewed dozens of lawsuits and spoke with former insiders, who all allege that Berkshire-owned companies that handle its asbestos and pollution policies — National Indemnity Co. and Resolute Management Inc. — wrongfully......

From Australia, Possible New Malignant Mesothelioma Medical Treatment Development Reported In Late 2013

We recently found this Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) News report, “‘Ray of hope’ for sufferers of asbestos disease mesothelioma”, which indicates there may be a new treatment for future mesothelioma victims. From this November 2013 report:A new treatment for the asbestos-related disease, mesothelioma, is offering a ray of hope to victims of the deadly cancer, researchers say.The Asbestos Diseases Research Institute in Sydney has published the results of laboratory testing of a novel genetic treatment in the international Journal Oncology.The treatment uses bacterial mini cells which......

More Apparent Litigation Misconduct By Georgia Pacific In Mesothelioma And Asbestos Lawsuits Is The Topic Of New Report By The Center For Public Integrity

The well-known asbestos defendant Georgia Pacific is the subject of a second recent investigative report concerning what appears to be “questionable” medical and legal tactics as regards seeking to avoid liability in asbestos-mesothelioma cases.Just a month ago we posted here this story “Asbestos Defendant Georgia Pacific: The Potential Legal ‘Crime-Fraud’ Situation Involving Professor Ken Donaldson And GP In-house Litigation Counsel” about a disturbing legal situation in some asbestos lawsuits that involve Georgia Pacific as a defendant.Now, from an October 2013 article by Jim Morris for The......

Federal Court Bankruptcy Judge George Hodges Gives Asbestos Defendant Garlock What They Wanted And More, Which Is Unfortunate For Mesothelioma Victims

Last summer we were monitoring a bankruptcy estimation trial for the former asbestos company Garlock Sealing Technologies in Charlotte, North Carolina and being presided over by federal bankruptcy judge George Hodges.This Garlock Chapter 11 case is In re Garlock Sealing Technologies LLC, 10-bk-31607, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Western District of North Carolina (Charlotte).And on January 10, 2014 Judge Hodges issued his ruling which was fully in favor of Garlock as reported in this Bloomberg article published on the InsuranceJournal.com website, “EnPro’s Garlock Wins Trial on Asbestos Liability;......

The “Every Exposure” Theory As Used By Plaintiff’s Expert In Dixon v. Ford Motor Asbestos-Mesothelioma Case Is Approved By Maryland Supreme Court

Recently, the Maryland Supreme Court ruled that an expert may testify that “every exposure to asbestos is a substantial contributing cause” of mesothelioma in Dixon v. Ford Motor Co., 433 Md. 137 (2013).At the trial of this Dixon lawsuit it was alleged that a woman who died of malignant mesothelioma was exposed to asbestos by two means, one direct and one indirect (or so-called “secondhand exposure”). First, the plaintiff claimed that the decedent’s husband used a drywall joint compound allegedly manufactured by Georgia-Pacific in a repair project at their home. In addition, plaintiff contended......

Jan 10, 2014 Tim Povtak A future cancer treatment may have emerged with the recent discovery that bromelain, a pineapple extract, can improve the effectiveness of cisplatin chemotherapy on peritoneal mesothelioma tumor cells. Bromelain is an enzyme found in the stem and the juice of a pineapple. It has been part of the natural, alternative medicine culture for many years, dating back centuries in Central and South America. The......

Dietary supplements: do any work for atopic dermatitis?

Eczema is a skin condition characterised by an itchy, red rash, which affects 5% to 20% of people worldwide. There is no cure, but many treatments can help improve the skin's condition, making life easier. In those for whom these treatments do not work well or who fear their long-term effects, there is often a belief that either something in their diet, or something missing in their diet, is making their eczema worse.This review looked at the following dietary supplements (products which add ingredients to a diet): fish oil, zinc, selenium, vitamin D, vitamin E, pyridoxine (vitamin B6), sea buckthorn......

Anxiety disorders are very common and difficult to deal with. The term “anxiety disorders” covers many conditions, including panic and phobias.One option for treating anxiety disorders is self-help based on therapy principles. Using a book or a website to help, a person tackles the kinds of exercises that would be used in therapy, but they do it on their own, perhaps with some email or phone support from a therapist.Researchers from Cardiff University......

Physiotherapy and Parkinson's Disease

In spite of various medical and surgical treatments for Parkinson's disease (PD), patients gradually develop significant physical problems. Physiotherapists aim to enable people with PD to maintain their maximum level of mobility, activity, and independence by monitoring their condition and targeting appropriate treatment. A range of approaches to movement rehabilitation are used, which aim to enhance quality of life by maximising physical ability and minimising problems related to Parkinson's over the whole course of the disease.Only randomised controlled trials were included in this review.......

Milnacipran and fibromyalgia symptoms

The aim of this review was to assess how effective milnacipran is for treating chronic neuropathic pain or fibromyalgia. We identified no studies using milnacipran in neuropathic pain, but five studies in fibromyalgia satisfied the inclusion criteria. Fibromyalgia is a complex pain syndrome, defined as widespread pain for longer than three months; the original diagnostic criteria involved pain on palpation at 11 or more of a number of specified tender points (Wolfe 1990), with later criteria including both widespread pain and symptom severity (Wolfe 2010). The studies included over 4000 participants......

When the body gets its energy mostly from fats instead of carbohydrates, it produces substances called ketones. Although it is not clear why, a ketogene-producing diet (“ketogenic”) can reduce the number of seizures in some people with epilepsy.The Atkins diet is a modified ketogenic diet. With Atkins, people eat twice as much fat as carbs. A full ketogenic diet is more severe: the ratio is four times as much fat. That is very hard to stick with......

Quitting smoking

When people stop smoking they experience cravings to smoke and unpleasant mood changes. Nicotine receptor partial agonists aim to reduce withdrawal symptoms and smoking satisfaction. Two recent trials of cytisine (937 people) confirm that it can be an effective and affordable treatment for smoking cessation. Quit rates were low, however, at around 9% in the treatment groups. The rate might be boosted in future studies by longer treatment and more intensive or extended counselling.A single trial of dianicline did not detect any benefit over placebo in helping smokers to quit. This drug is no longer......

Planned change in bacterial strain-level information management

Please be aware that there is an upcoming change (January 2014) in how NCBI manages organism strain information. Due to significant increases in the volume of strain-specific sequencing, we are changing our management of strain information.Next generation sequencing has already changed the way microbial genomes are being used. The scope of microbial sequencing projects has shifted from a single isolate representing an organism to multi-isolate and multi-species projects representing microbial communities. Consequently, in the first nine months of 2013 the sequences of more than 6000 prokaryotic......

BLAST+ 2.2.29 now available

Stand-alone BLAST version 2.2.29+ is now available for download from the FTP site. BLAST 2.2.29+ provides a number of important improvements and bug fixes. Some improvements include improved blastn batch query performance, source releases build optimized multi-thread binaries by default, and improved multithreading by better dividing the BLAST database among threads. The BLAST Release notes lists more upgrades and fixes.View the original article h......

Sequence Viewer has been updated

NCBI Sequence Viewer provides a graphical view of sequences and color-coded annotations on regions of sequence stored in the Nucleotide and Protein databases. Sequence Viewer has recently been updated and now has better loading and management of uploaded custom tracks, improved naming of downloaded files including sequence ranges and file extensions, and easier embedding in external Web sites.A full list of new features, improvements and fixes is available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/sviewer/release-notes/View the original article h......

The Short Read Archive (SRA) now contains more than 2 petabases of high-throughput sequence data. One petabase of data is open access, while the rest are sequences from 40,000 individuals who have participated in human clinical studies catalogued in dbGaP.View the original article h......

NCBI Insights blog: A Librarian's Guide to NCBI - an intensive training course for medical librarians to be offered April 2014

The NCBI in partnership with the National Library of Medicine Training Center (NTC) will offer the Librarian’s Guide to NCBI course on the NIH campus in April 2014. This will be the second presentation of the course; it was previously offered in the spring of 2013 (NCBI Insights April 11 and May 6, 2013). After the course, we will post lecture slides and hands-on practical exercises on the education area of the NCBI FTP site and video tutorials of the course lectures will be available on the NCBI YouTube channel. Materials from the 2013 course are available, as well as lecture videos for the......

VAST+ is a new tool designed to identify macromolecules that have similar 3-dimensional structures with an emphasis on finding similar macromolecular complexes. The similarities are calculated using purely geometric criteria without regard to sequence similarity, and therefore can identify distant homologs.This new tool is built upon the original Vector Alignment Search Tool (VAST) and expands the capabilities of that program by taking into account......

PMCID - PMID - Manuscript ID - DOI Converter Upgraded

We have upgraded the PMCID - PMID - Manuscript ID - DOI Converter. The updated ID Converter API allows you to convert IDs for publications referenced in PubMed and PMC.The ID Converter tool allows you to convert IDs for publications referenced in PubMed and PMC. You can also cross-reference Open Access NIH Manuscript Submission IDs (NIHMS) and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) often used by publishers. For example, these identifiers refer to the same publication:PMCID: PMC3702208PMID: 24288678NIHMS: NIHMS518180DOI: 10.1007/s00213-013-3057-1This tool uses an underlying web service, which......

New SNP data available for several organisms!

AppId is over the quotaAppId is over the quota New SNP data (build 139) is now available on the web and in FTP files for several organisms, including gorilla, horse, dog, sheep, rabbit, opossum, platypus, wild turkey, zebra finch, tomato, grape and aspergillus.View the original article h......

Update on PubMed Commons' comments in the early pilot phase

AppId is over the quotaAppId is over the quota PubMed Commons is a new system that enables researchers to share their opinions about scientific publications indexed in the PubMed database. Participation in PubMed Commons requires users with My NCBI accounts to join before they can view or add comments.As of November 1, 2013, there are about 1,000 people signed up in the Commons and in just four days of public access the amount of comments on PubMed records doubled to over 200.Approximately a third of the first ~200 comments included critique or pointed to other studies or reviews with the......

New human genome assembly (GRCh38) released!

On December 24th, the Genome Reference Consortium (GRC) submitted a new assembly for the human genome (GRCh38) to GenBank. These data are now available in the Assembly database with accession GCA_000001405.15and are also available on the FTP site. Please note the GRC provides these assemblies as unannotated sequences.Now that the GRC sequences are available in GenBank, our Reference Sequence (RefSeq) Genome Annotation Group has downloaded these sequences and has begun processing them using our eukaryotic annotation pipeline. These resulting human chromosome sequences will......

NCBI Insights blog post: Saved Searches and E-mail Alerts

As part of the My NCBI service, PubMed and other Entrez databases allow users to save searches and then receive regular e-mail alerts about new records retrieved by that search. Please see the new NCBI Insights blog post for details about setting up these searches and alerts.For more information, see the following:View the original article h......

NCBI Video: Submitting manuscripts on NIHMS

NCBI’s latest YouTube video takes you through the manuscript submission process on the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS), step-by-step. NIHMS enables publishers, authors, and principal investigators to submit manuscripts for processing and archiving in PubMed Central.View the original article h......

New NCBI Handbook chapters: Eukaryotic and prokaryotic genome annotation pipelines

In order to increase the utility of genomic information, we provide gene annotation and other features on Reference Sequence (RefSeq) genome records. Genome annotation is a multi-step process that includes prediction of protein-coding genes, as well as other functional genome units such as structural RNAs, tRNAs, small RNAs, pseudogenes, control regions, direct and inverted repeats, insertion sequences, transposons, and other mobile elements.Depending upon the genome, the identification of key genomic features and their locations on RefSeq genome records are provided by outside sources (the submitter’s......

New NCBI Insights Blog Post: Joining PubMed Commons - A step-by-step guide

AppId is over the quotaAppId is over the quota PubMed Commons is a new system that enables researchers to share their opinions about scientific publications indexed in the PubMed database. Participation in PubMed Commons requires users with My NCBI accounts to join before they can view or add comments. A new NCBI Insights Blog post describes how to join PubMed Commons.For more information, please see:PubMed Commons Homepage"Joining PubMed Commons: A Step-by-step Guide"View the original article h......

Brigham and Women's Physician Resource Center: Mesothelioma: Extrapleural Pneumonectomy

Please click the link below to watch the video on Mesothelioma Extrapleural Pneumonectomy. Brigham and Women's Physician Resource Center: Mesothelioma: Extrapleural Pneumonect......

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