All of the patients received their first liver transplant between 1988 and 2005. The patients’ survival time was measured until death, the last known follow-up date, or retransplantation.

Overall, 31 of the 62 patients age 70 and older and 345 of the 864 younger patients died during the study period. After one year, 73.3 percent of older patients and 79.4 percent of younger patients were alive. After 10 years, 39.7 percent of older patients and 45.2 percent of younger patients were alive.

According to the researchers, that means they found “no statistically significant difference in survival in the first 10 years after transplantation” between the two groups of patients.

“The longest-surviving patient was 88 years old at 15 years after transplantation. One-year adjusted survival of septuagenarians in the most recent surgical period, 2001 to 2005, was 94.4 percent,” the team noted.

The researchers also analyzed 26 variables to determine which ones might predict patient death. They identified four: preoperative hospitalization; prolonged period of cold storage between liver removal and transplantation; cirrhosis caused by hepatitis C and alcohol; and an increasing model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score, a measure of disease severity.

Being 70 or older was not an independent predictor of death, the authors said.

“In conclusion, biological and physiological variables may play a more important role than advanced age in predicting poor survival after liver transplantation,” the UCLA team wrote. “Measures of physiological age and risk of complications should be used in the evaluation process of elderly transplant candidates. Age by itself should not be used to limit liver transplantation.”

The study is published in the August issue of the journal Archives of Surgery.

The study was published in the Sept. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research.

“Estrogen binds to estrogen receptors and triggers a cascade of events including gene regulation,” study leader Dr. Ronald Weigel, professor and head of surgery at the university’s college of medicine, said in a prepared statement.

“We found that elimination of TFAP2C from the cell causes all of those cascades that we associate with estrogen to go away,” he said. “The treated cancer cells were not able to respond to estrogen by any normal pathway.”

Silencing TFAP2C inhibited tumor growth in mice. It also halted expression of another estrogen receptor called GPR30, found at the cancer cell membrane.

“Targeting this gene may be a better way to develop drugs to treat hormone-responsive breast cancers, because it targets multiple different pathways,” Weigel said.

For the first four weeks of the study, the men received no treatment. They were then randomly assigned to receive Cialis or a placebo for 12 weeks. The men, who averaged 38 years of age, were instructed to take the drug/placebo as needed before sexual activity, with a maximum of one dose daily.

After the 12-week treatment period, all the men filled out a questionnaire to assess erectile dysfunction. Men who took the drug had an average score of 22.6 (mild ED), while those who took the placebo had an average score of 13.6 (moderate ED).

On average, men who took Cialis were 75.4 percent successful when attempting penetration and 47.6 percent successful when attempting intercourse, compared with 41.1 percent and 16.8 percent, respectively, for men who took the placebo.

The most common side effects among the men who took Cialis were headache (8.5 percent) and urinary tract infection (7.7 percent).

The study, funded by Cialis’ maker Lilly ICOS LLC, was posted online Sept. 10 and is expected to be published in the November print issue of the journal Archives of Neurology.

Gray matter contains the bulk of the brains cell’s and the billions of connections among the cells. Loss of gray matter in patients with schizophrenia has been linked to social withdrawal and progressive deterioration in cognition and emotion–which are among the least responsive symptoms to medications.

To see if antipsychotic drugs could slow the initial brain changes in new patients, Dr. Lieberman and colleagues at 14 sites in North America and Europe measured brain volume and cognitive changes in 263 first-episode schizophrenia patients and 58 non-schizophrenic volunteers over a two-year period. Half of the patients received the atypical antipsychotic Zyprexa (olanzapine) and the other half took the conventional antipsychotic haloperidol. Dr. Lieberman initiated the study when he was professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, which also coordinated the research.

The study found that, on average, haloperidol-treated patients lost about two percent of their gray matter, or about 12 cubic centimeters. No changes were detected in the olanzapine-treated patients and the normal volunteers. Patients who lost gray matter, particularly in the frontal lobe of the brain, also had greater problems with cognitive functioning, as measured by tests of verbal fluency, verbal learning and memory.

Schizophrenia has always been known as a disease that causes progressive worsening of symptoms and deterioration in function, but only in the last 10 years have researchers found that the brains of schizophrenics are also progressively deteriorating.

“People used to think that the deterioration was inevitable, but now we’re thinking that if you can prevent the acute episodes of psychosis in schizophrenia you can actually stop the loss of gray matter,” Dr. Lieberman says.

“It also gives us hope that we will be able to completely forestall the disease in the future by intervening before psychosis even begins,” Dr. Lieberman adds. “In three to five years, we should have ways to identify which adolescents will become schizophrenic, and we can then begin to test the preventative power of treatments.”

Instead, wearing the patch just three to four hours a day over a period of three months may do the trick to improve sight, the new study suggests.

“Lengthy durations of daily patching, which are incredibly burdensome on the child and their parents, are clinically unnecessary,” said study co-author Merrick J. Moseley, a senior lecturer in the Department of Optometry and Visual Science at City University in London, England.

His team reported its findings in the Sept. 13 online edition of the British Medical Journal.

Lazy eye, or amblyopia, is caused by a disturbance to the vision pathways between the eyes and the brain, and is associated with blurred vision or crossed eyes. Studies have shown that patching can improve vision.

Although prior findings have found that patch use 12 hours a day is no better than six hours a day, many doctors have continued to prescribe more than six hours of patching daily.

To find out how well patching worked, Moseley’s team studied 80 3- to 8-year-olds with amblyopia. The children were told to wear a patch for either six or 12 hours a day. The youngsters were also electronically monitored to see how long they actually wore their eye patch.

The team found that children prescribed six hours of eye patching a day did just as well as those prescribed 12 hours a day. “Moreover, monitoring showed that children wear their patches only for about half the time that they are prescribed,” Moseley said.

“Children who actually patched 3 to 6 hours each day did just as well as those who patched 6 to 12 hours each day,” Moseley said. However, “those who patched under 3 hours a day did significantly less well than the rest,” he added.

In addition, the researchers found that children under 4 years of age require significantly less patching than those over 4 years. “The findings did not vary depending on the type of amblyopia — anisometropic, strabismic or combined,” Moseley said.

“Patching is not better beyond 3 to 4 hours a day, particularly in the case of young children,” Moseley said. “The findings should signal the end of the treatment strategy wherein children are prescribed lengthy patching regimens such as ‘all waking hours,’ which have previously found favor among many clinicians.”

“This study is an eye opener,” added Dr. Daniel J. Salchow, an assistant professor of ophthalmology and visual science and director of pediatric ophthalmology at Yale University School of Medicine. “The paper really tells you what you get for a dose of patching,” he said.

“We know how to treat amblyopia,” Salchow said. One of the biggest problems in treating lazy eye is getting children and parents to use the patch for the prescribed time, he noted. “But those who keep the patch on longer improve faster,” he said.

Salchow said that he usually prescribes six hours a day or less of patching. “Unless it’s a very strong amblyopia, very seldom do I prescribe 12 hours,” he said.

But it’s up to parents to make sure their child wears the patch, Salchow said. “If a parent says ‘it’s so hard for me to have the child wear the patch,’ often the results we see are disappointing,” he said.

Patients “should be hopeful,” said study co-author Morten A. Karsdal, head of pharmacology at Nordic Bioscience, a biotech company that is studying the drug’s prospects as an arthritis treatment.

However, testing in humans won’t end for another three years, and there’s no guarantee that the drug will work as well in humans as in rats.

The study is published in the August issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.

Osteoarthritis affects an estimated 10 percent of Americans, and 80 percent of those over 55; women are especially vulnerable.

Hips and knees can be especially susceptible, said Dr. J.C. Gallagher, director of the Bone Metabolism Unit at Creighton University Medical School in Omaha, Neb. “For many, pain on exercise is the major problem. As a result, they stop exercising, and this leads to an increase in body weight which increases the ‘load’ on the joints and worsens the arthritis.”

There are numerous treatments to relieve osteoarthritis pain but none to stop the wear and tear on the bone, joints and cartilage.

Karsdal said it is important to treat both loss of bone and loss of cartilage, the elastic tissue that helps bones tolerate moving against each other. “When bone turnover increases after menopause, due to lower estrogen production, a secondary effect is seen on cartilage, more cartilage is lost,” Karsdal said. “Ideally, all drugs that may be developed for osteoarthritis will be able to affect both bone and cartilage, as both are in disequilibrium in osteoarthritis.”

In the new study, researchers removed the ovaries of female rats, turning them into rough equivalents of postmenopausal women — at least when it comes to their skeletons.

Some of the rats received calcitonin or estrogen, while some got nothing; a separate group of rats had no ovary operation.

The researchers found that calcitonin worked better than estrogen at preventing joint deterioration.

“The suggestion from this work is that estrogen deficiency after menopause is important,” said Gallagher, who’s familiar with the study findings.

Calcitonin is currently available as a nasal spray and an injection, although those forms haven’t been investigated as possible osteoarthritis treatments, Karsdal said. In the United States, doctors can use approved drugs for “off-label” uses that are not recommended.

The oral form, which was tested in the study, is not on the market.

The next step in research is to investigate whether calcitonin could bring the development of osteoarthritis to a halt, Karsdal said. Two ongoing studies in humans should hopefully “provide a novel and effective treatment for osteoarthritis,” although they won’t be finished for three years, Karsdal said.

“Cancer mortality varies a great deal for all cancers by individual level of education,” said study co-author Elizabeth Ward, the American Cancer Society’s director of cancer surveillance. “If we could get everyone’s cancer mortality to the level we see among the best educated, it would make a huge impact on cancer in the United States.”

Education is tied to socioeconomic status and access to medical care, Ward noted. The new study finding makes it clear that many of the factors that influence cancer mortality are preventable, she said.

“They are preventable by social policies — things we can change, such as smoking prevention, access to cancer screening and opportunities to good nutrition and physical activity,” Ward said.

In the study, Ward and her colleagues used data from death certificates and the U.S. Census Bureau to look at the associations between education level and death rates from lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer. The researchers collected data on 137,708 cancer deaths from 2001 involving black and white men and women between the ages of 25 and 64.

The researchers found that more education was associated with lower death rates from cancer among all race and gender groups. The greatest difference was found between people with 12 or fewer years of education and those with more than 12 years of schooling, Ward’s team found.

Compared with those with the lowest levels of education, those with the highest levels of education cut their risk of dying from cancer. For the highest educated white men, the risk was cut by 48 percent, for white women it was cut by 76 percent as it was for black men, and the most educated black women had a 43 percent lower risk of dying from cancer, the researchers reported.

This difference in cancer deaths is most likely due to a relationship between education and other factors directly associated with risks of developing and dying from cancer, such as smoking, cancer screening, and access to health care, the researchers speculated.

Although cancer death rates were higher among blacks than whites with the same level of education, they were almost the same for black and white men with zero to eight years of education, the researchers said.

“The difference between blacks and whites is most certainly due to socioeconomic conditions and access to care,” Ward said.

Sholom Wacholder, an epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute and author of an accompanying editorial in the journal, thinks the study findings account for some — but not all — cancer disparity rates between blacks and whites.

“I asked myself if I could use this data to figure out the difference between blacks and whites in cancer mortality,” said Wacholder. “And the answer is that it is probably not possible.”

The problem is that there are too many unanswered questions, Wacholder said. “We can’t answer the question whether additional education by itself is the explanation or whether people with access to education have lower cancer mortality beyond the effect of education,” he said.

The team found that two cell-signaling proteins, called Nox1 and Nox2, appear to play an important role in the progression of an inherited form of ALS. Deleting either Nox1 or Nox2 from mice with this inherited form of ALS significantly increased the rodents’ life span.

The deletion of Nox2 had the most impact — nearly doubling the life span of the mice and significantly increasing the time from disease onset to death (survival index). This is the first study to identify a single gene that affects survival index in animals with ALS, the researchers said.

The study is in the Sept. 13 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“The findings provide encouraging data that there are new potential therapeutic targets in ALS,” research team leader John Engelhardt, professor and head of anatomy and cell biology, said in a prepared statement.

“Whether our findings will bear out in humans still has to be evaluated, but our results suggest that inhibiting Nox proteins might significantly enhance survival in ALS,” he said.

All of the patients received their first liver transplant between 1988 and 2005. The patients’ survival time was measured until death, the last known follow-up date, or retransplantation.

Overall, 31 of the 62 patients age 70 and older and 345 of the 864 younger patients died during the study period. After one year, 73.3 percent of older patients and 79.4 percent of younger patients were alive. After 10 years, 39.7 percent of older patients and 45.2 percent of younger patients were alive.

According to the researchers, that means they found “no statistically significant difference in survival in the first 10 years after transplantation” between the two groups of patients.

“The longest-surviving patient was 88 years old at 15 years after transplantation. One-year adjusted survival of septuagenarians in the most recent surgical period, 2001 to 2005, was 94.4 percent,” the team noted.

The researchers also analyzed 26 variables to determine which ones might predict patient death. They identified four: preoperative hospitalization; prolonged period of cold storage between liver removal and transplantation; cirrhosis caused by hepatitis C and alcohol; and an increasing model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score, a measure of disease severity.

Being 70 or older was not an independent predictor of death, the authors said.

“In conclusion, biological and physiological variables may play a more important role than advanced age in predicting poor survival after liver transplantation,” the UCLA team wrote. “Measures of physiological age and risk of complications should be used in the evaluation process of elderly transplant candidates. Age by itself should not be used to limit liver transplantation.”

The study is published in the August issue of the journal Archives of Surgery.

The findings were presented July 7 at the annual European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Lugano, Switzerland.

“It doesn’t replicate in normal, healthy cells, so our hope is that it will help fight cancers without causing side effects in the rest of the body,” Dr. Axel Mescheder, vice president of clinical research and development for MediGene, said in a prepared statement. MediGene is a German biotech company based in Munich.

Mescheder reported safety and efficacy results and described the case of a patient whose liver tumors appeared to be reduced six months after treatment with the virus.

Seven leading cancer centers in the United States are participating in the study.

Almost 40 percent of patients with colorectal cancer die, because cancer spreads to other parts of the body, particularly the liver. The results reported by Mescheder follow testing in the lab and in animals where the virus was shown to be effective at killing colorectal cancer and liver cancer cells.

In 2003, over 73,000 men and almost 71,000 women were diagnosed with colorectal cancer in the United States. That year, close to 28,000 men and 28,000 women died from the disease, which is the second leading cancer killer.