Damaris Christensen

All Stories by Damaris Christensen

  1. Health & Medicine

    Treating one disease caused another

    Egypt's public health service inadvertently spread hepatitis C while treating patients for schistosomiasis, a common parasitic disease, with injections of antischistomal medications.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Antacids for asthma sufferers?

    People with asthma have more acidic lungs than do people who don't have the disease, a finding that may prompt the development of novel asthma treatments aimed at restoring the normal pH value of the lungs.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Gene expression helps classify cancers

    Using gene chips to study the activity of thousands of genes simultaneously, researchers showed that a common cancer of white blood cells—diffuse large B-cell lymphoma—is in fact two distinct diseases.

  4. Health & Medicine

    Is Snoring a DiZZZease?

    Snoring may trigger high blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease or stroke.

  5. Keeping Bugs from Pumping Drugs

    Researchers hope that attacking the machinery some microbes use to pump antimicrobial agents out of their cells may help deal with the increasing problem of drug resistance.

  6. Health & Medicine

    AIDS drugs may cause bone loss

    Using X rays to measure bone density in HIV-infected men, researchers find a possible link between bone loss and long-term use of protease inhibitors.

  7. Health & Medicine

    HIV may date back to the 1930s

    Genetic analysis of the AIDS virus suggests it first infected humans in the first third of the 20th century.

  8. Health & Medicine

    One more reason to worry

    A single dose of the AIDS drug nevirapine, given to mothers to help prevent them from infecting their children during birth, may be enough to prod the virus to develop drug resistance.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Lung cancer gene has gender bias

    The X chromosome's gastrin-releasing peptide receptor gene is turned on by nicotine to produce a protein that promotes lung cancer, a combination of factors that could explain why women are more susceptible to the disease than men are.

  10. Health & Medicine

    No worry that this secret will leak

    The recently discovered protein angiopoietin-1 appears to protect blood vessels from leaking, a finding with implications for research into diseases that involve swelling, such as arthritis and asthma.

  11. Health & Medicine

    NO News

    Preliminary research suggests that inhaled nitric oxide may offer a much-needed treatment for patients suffering from complications of sickle cell disease.

  12. Chemistry

    The World of Wine

    Improved analytical instruments and powerful computers are now enabling scientists to better determine a chemical fingerprint for products from different wine-producing regions.