Damaris Christensen

All Stories by Damaris Christensen

  1. Health & Medicine

    Tracking signs of memory loss

    A new imaging agent may allow researchers to detect the plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's disease before symptoms are present, when therapies may be most effective.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Ulcer bug linked to stroke

    Potent strains of an ulcer-causing bacterium may also trigger strokes.

  9. Health & Medicine

    Breast-feeding has protective bonus

    Breast-feeding appears to help ward off breast cancer.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Gender differences in weight loss

    Men and women gain weight differently and may lose it differently, too.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Method could boost diabetes therapy

    Allowing insulin-producing islets to grow in close contact with each other during cell culture may increase the chance of successful transplant into diabetic people.

  12. 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.