Sex: Why bother? Evolutionary mysteries probed at UH
...and more harmful mutations makes you progressively worse off." For example, if a single harmful mutation lowers fitness by 5 percent on average, then successive mutations are expected to lead to a progressive decline in 5 percent steps if the mutations don't interact with each other. Negative epistasis,...Tropical fires add injury to biodiversity insult
El-Nio events are both worse and more frequent than before, perhaps due to global warming. The major event in 1997-1998 burned an area in Borneo larger than Switzerland. Besides causing massive air pollution throughout Southeast Asia, more than a hundred butterfly species were ...Women pregnant with girls experience more severe asthma symptoms
...rying a female fetus are more likely to experience worse asthma symptoms than asthmatic women carrying a male fetus, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in the February issue of American Journal of Epidemiology. "This is one of the first and largest studies to investigate the effect of fetal sex...Growth hormone, obesity can trigger sleep apnea in some kids
... got better but not all of them. The ones that got worse tended to be school age. Some of them were just entering school and then they were coming home with upper-respiratory infections. "The combination of starting growth hormone, still having weak muscle tone, having an illness and/or being obese tends t...JCI table of contents: January 4, 2006
... growth and function in humans, have significantly worse heart problems if fed a soy diet, when compared to mice fed a soy-free (milk proteinbased) diet. This is the first study to provide evidence that an environmental influence in this case diet can affect the heart. It will also force researchers to r...Study links progressive aphasia syndrome to prion gene
...rstanding speech, and these problems gradually get worse over time. People with PPA also may develop diffi...ell death. The proteins may work either better or worse depending on which gene variants people inherit. Any of the proteins' normal activities could be i...Nutrient pollution causes a long-term effect on Chesapeake Bay ecosystem
...able resources." These trends have been made even worse by declines in oyster beds, caused by overfishing and disease. The oyster was considered one of the Bay's dominant bottom feeders consuming vast amounts of algae. Extensive tidal marshes, which serve as effective nutrient buffers, are now being los...JCI table of contents: November 23 2005
...old flu infections make unrelated viral infections worse Childhood infection with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is often asymptomatic, while the same infection in adolescents and adults causes infectious mononucleosis (IM). Liisa Selin and colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Medical School now sho...Deleted genes help predict outcome in a children's cancer
...oma," he said. He added that the survival rate was worse when the loss of material was unbalanced on chromo...q LOH and the 1p36 LOH were independent markers of worse outcome for patients, regardless of other prognostic clues. For instance, unbalanced 11q LOH occurs ...Gene at heart of bad outcomes in high blood pressure patients
...nd may explain why some hypertensive patients fare worse than others - even if they take the same medicatio... the various genes that lead to some people having worse outcomes than others when they have hypertension." Genes likely determine nearly half one's risk of ...Scientists engineer mice to mimic Alzheimer's therapy
...ide release. "We can stop the disease from getting worse in these mice, but we can't reverse it," said David Borchelt, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida. "Although it is possible that human brains repair damage better than mouse brains, the stud......nt cycle, the EGFR*1 haplotype was associated with worse survival. Additionally, an association was seen between the EGFR haplotype*1 and shorter progression free survival, although the significance of this result is borderline....Teens with deletion syndrome confirm gene's role in psychosis
...one of two common versions of the suspect gene had worse symptoms. They were more prone to cognitive decline, psychosis and frontal lobe tissue loss by late adolescence, when schizophrenia symptoms begin to emerge, found the study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Inst...Asthmatic cats may be allergic to humans, say vets
...ned: "Cats with feline asthma syndrome can be made worse by living in a household where people smoke, or where there are other potential allergens or irritants. We find that bringing asthmatic cats into the hospital here and removing them from the standard 'triggers' like dust and smoke can improve their c...To stem disease, keep cats indoors, stop feeding strays, scientist urges
...iew, McAllister noted a long list of maladies made worse by toxoplasma infection in people with suppressed immunity, and he cited a growing list of studies that link problems in people whose immune systems are not impaired. Among the latter problems are fever, enlarged lymph nodes, weakness and debilitatio...Secrets to antibody's success against West Nile Virus surprise scientists
...from binding to host cells actually turn out to be worse at treating infection? The key may lie in a theory known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection, which has been observed in test tube studies of dengue virus and may be important to the onset of dengue hemorrhagic fever. This theory s...Survival of heart patients on beta-blockers varies greatly with genetic variation
...patients or if genotype alone is responsible for a worse outcome." Beta-adrenergic receptors in the sympathetic nervous system respond to adrenaline, but beta-blocker drugs block this interaction, slowing the heartbeat and lowering blood pressure to relieve stress on the heart. They also block impulses tha...Sugar helps control cell division
...ight," says Slawson. "The longer they survive, the worse it gets." On the other hand, cells that had higher than normal amounts of the enzyme that removes the sugar from proteins ended up with nuclei that didn't look right under a powerful microscope. Instead of being disseminated fairly uniformly through ...Mental declines can be reversed - report shows
...le often describe their memory skills as being far worse than they actually are, and this type of attitude can start a vicious cycle," Foth said. "These people won't enroll in a class that might be beneficial to them because they believe they wouldn't be good at it. We have to protect against that."......f winning or placing second or third were markedly worse for horses with an EIPH of grade two or higher. Th...lso aren't sure if the disorder gets progressively worse in a horse that develops a less severe grade. While most racehorses in North America are given a dru...