The widely used anti-diabetic drug Metformin is able to boost the immune system and increase the potency of vaccines and cancer treatments, says a new study¹ published in the June 3 2009 issue of Nature. Researchers at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania made the discovery that metformin increases the efficiency of the immune system's T-cells.

Young female professional dancers and other young female athletes both face the same health risks when they don't eat enough to replace the calories they expend, and stop menstruating as a consequence, according to new research from The Medical College of Wisconsin.

"These two components of the female athlete tetrad put them at higher risk for the other two; the cardiovascular and bone density deficits of much older, postmenopausal women," says lead researcher Dr. Anne Hoch, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery.

Two blood proteins blood that could become important markers for long-term breast cancer survival have been identified by research out of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC)¹. The proteins, C-reactive protein (CRP) and serum amyloid A (SAA), are linked with chronic inflammation, known to contribute to cancer development and progression, according to the study in the May 18 2009 edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Two people have the same genetic disease. One of them goes blind in childhood, the other much later in life. It is a phenomenon that has intrigued researchers for years, and is a focus of the field of epigenetics, the study of changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence.

Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have uncovered something that may help explain how people not genetically predisposed to epilepsy develop the disorder.
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study⁽¹⁾ reports that a gene known to predispose people who inherit an active form of it to certain forms of epilepsy, can be "switched on" in mice that do not appear to have inherited the active form, and thus a genetic predisposition, to the condition.