all physiology stories

Study provides first physiological evidence that insulin is critical for blood vessel formation

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:24:49 -0400

For people with type 2 diabetes, the death rate from a first heart attack is two to three times the death rate of patients without the disease. Similarly, patients with diabetes and ischemic (reduced blood flow) heart disease have a much higher mortality rate than the general population.

Chlamydia pneumoniae may contribute to heart attacks, strokes

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:26:34 -0400

Murat Kalayoglu of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Peter Libby of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Gerald Byrne of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center searched MEDLINE and considered online resources, texts, meeting abstracts, and expert opinion for the association between Chlamydia pneumoniae and atherosclerosis. They included five types of studies and extracted diagnostic, pathophysiologic, and therapeutic information from the selected literature. "Atherosclerosis causes approximately half of all adult deaths in the Western hemisphere and continues to be a major health problem worldwide," Kalayoglu, the lead author, said. "Traditional risk factors such as elevated cholesterol clearly contribute to these cardiovascular diseases, but leave some 40 percent of cases unexplained. Recent appreciation of atherosclerosis as a chronic, inflammatory disease has rekindled efforts to examine the role that infectious agents may play in atherogenesis." Their analysis of the data suggests that Chlamydia pneumoniae, which causes "walking pneumonia," may contribute to atherosclerosis, also known as hardening of the arteries, and its complications, such as heart attack and stroke.

First domino falls in research on sense of touch

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:10:35 -0400

Unlike the other four senses, touch is ubiquitous, involving sensory terminals dispersed over the outside and on the inside of the body. This system encodes a variety of sensations in addition to touch, such as pain, vibration, pressure, stretch, itch, texture, and temperature. The system is sensitive to certain chemical states like painful tissue acidity, the result of inflammation or infection. Touch also underlies the brain's sense of where parts of the body are positioned at any given moment, crucial to motor control. Research reported in April 2001 focuses on an ion channel in mammals that appears to mediate the sense of touch. It is the first molecule identified in the macromolecular complex that converts touch stimuli to a neural signal.