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Combined hormone therapy appears to increase the risk that women will have abnormal mammograms and breast biopsies and may decrease the effectiveness of both methods for detecting breast cancer, according to a new report.

An experimental, combination vaccine against ebola and Marburg viruses using virus-like particles provides complete protection against infection in monkeys. Traditionally vaccines against viral diseases have consisted of whole viruses, either the one that causes the disease in a weakened or dead state (like the polio vaccine) or a genetically similar virus that does not usually cause disease but elicits a protective immune response. The problem with this approach is there is the risk, however small, of viral reactivation and infection.

Researchers in California report development of an anti-cancer 'warhead' that targets the acidic signature of tumor cells in much the same way that heat-seeking missiles seek and destroy military targets that emit heat. These acid-seeking substances are not toxic to healthy cells, and represent a new class of potentially safer, more effective anti-cancer drugs, they say.

Hormones produced by the heart eliminated human pancreatic cancer in more than three-quarters of the mice treated with the hormones and eliminated human breast cancer in two-thirds of the mice. The treatment has not yet been tried in humans, but clinical trials are in the planning stages.

A new study suggests that antidepressants only benefit some, very severely depressed patients. "New generation" antidepressants, such as fluoxetine (Prozac) are widely prescribed for the treatment of clinical depression. However some studies have suggested that these drugs do not help the majority of depressed people get better by very much. Researchers looked at whether a patient's response to antidepressant therapy depends on how badly depressed they are to start out with.

Researchers have demonstrated that living human nerve cells can be engineered into a network that could one day be used for transplants to repair damaged to the nervous system. They obtained human dorsal root ganglia neurons to engineer into transplantable nervous tissue.

Nursing home residents with advanced dementia are frequently prescribed antibiotic medications, especially during the two weeks before death. This practice raises concerns about the end-of-life care of individual patients dying with advanced dementia, as well as the emergence of antimicrobial resistance.

A PhD student has developed a new technique that could revolutionize stem cell treatment for Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury. He has used existing polymer-based biodegradable fibers, 100 times smaller than a human hair, and re-engineered them to create a unique 3-D scaffold that could potentially allow stem cells to repair damaged nerves in the human body more quickly and effectively. A combined process of electro-spinning and chemical treatment was used to customize the fiber structure, which can then be located within the body.

Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive?

Conventional wisdom holds that as the US population ages, the incidence of heart failure will continue to rise. A new study challenges part of that assumption, however, finding that heart failure is actually declining among the very elderly. Yet the number of heart failure cases overall continues to rise.