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Clinical analysis of blood samples from almost 3,000 infants showed that at least 1 in 200 individuals in the general public harbor mitochondrial DNA mutations that may lead to disease.

The anemia of chronic disease may be a beneficial, adaptive response to the underlying disease, rather than a negative effect of the illness, postulates an analysis article in CMAJ.

A new report on severe sporting injuries among high school and college athletes shows cheerleading appears to account for a larger proportion of all such injuries than previously thought.

Researchers have discovered a central molecular switch in fruit fly embryos that opens new avenues for studying the causes of birth defects and cancer in humans. Scientists have determined the switch to be a main tuning mechanism for instructing cells whether to form sensory nerves or blood cells in different parts of the body.

Patients who use proton pump inhibitors for seven or more years to treat reflux, peptic ulcers and other conditions are at greater risk of osteoporosis-related fractures, according to this large observational study published in CMAJ.

A type of positron emission tomography scanning may be useful in a noninvasive assessment of the formation of Alzheimer's disease-related plaques in the brain, according to small study posted online today that will appear in the October 2008 print issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Some obese individuals do not appear to have an increased risk for heart disease, while some normal-weight individuals experience a cluster of heart risks, according to two reports in the August 11/25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins are reporting what is believed to be the most conclusive evidence to date that inadequate levels of vitamin D, obtained from milk, fortified cereals and exposure to sunlight, lead to substantially increased risk of death.

People who suffer from cardiovascular diseases at advanced ages may have reason to suspect that the cause of their illness lies far away ... around the date of their birth. A team of European researchers reports that if economic conditions at the time of birth were bad, then this leads to a higher risk of cardiovascular mortality much later in life.

Researchers have uncovered the role of a family of enzymes in the mutation of benign or less aggressive tumors into more aggressive, potentially fatal, cancers in the human body.