Medical Bulletin 19/April/2023

Here are the top medical news for the day:

Vitamin D may play a role in prostate cancer disparities: Study

New research from Cedars-Sinai Cancer suggests that vitamin D deficiency could be the reason African American men experience more aggressive prostate cancer at a younger age compared with European American men. The multi-institutional study, published today in Cancer Research Communications, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), could pave the way for revised nutritional guidelines.

While previous research has investigated vitamin D in the context of health disparities, this is the first study to look at its functions in a genome-wide manner in African American versus European American men.

Reference:

Moray Campbell et al,African American Prostate Cancer Displays Quantitatively Distinct Vitamin D Reptor Cistrome-transcriptome Relationships Regulated by BAZ1A,Cancer Research Communications

Most-accurate tools to research deadliest blood cancer created

AML is a fast-growing cancer with only a 29 percent survival rate. It has often already spread widely in the bone marrow and blood by the time it’s first discovered in a patient, so being able to study the cancer, it’s progression, and its response to drugs in accurate and viable cell lines is crucial.

Tisch Cancer Center scientists have developed unique models of the deadliest blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), creating a transformative resource to study this cancer and eventually its drug response and drug resistance. The models were described in a late-breaking abstract at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research and simultaneously published in Blood Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Reference:

Eirini Papapetrou et al,THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL / MOUNT SINAI SCHOOL OF MEDICINE,Blood Cancer Discovery

Some arthritis flare-ups may be linked with gum diseases

Recent findings, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that breaches in damaged gums allow bacteria in the mouth to seep into the bloodstream, activating an immune response that ultimately pivots to target the body’s own proteins and causes arthritis flare-ups.

“If oral bacteria are getting in and repeatedly triggering immune responses relevant to rheumatoid arthritis, that could make it harder to treat,” says Dana Orange, a professor of clinical investigation in the laboratory of Robert B. Darnell at The Rockefeller University. “When doctors encounter arthritis patients who do not respond to treatment, it would be worth it to make sure they aren’t missing an underlying gum disease, which is quite treatable.”

Reference:

Oral mucosal breaks trigger anti-citrullinated bacterial and human protein antibody responses in rheumatoid arthritis,Science Translational Medicine,doi 10.1126/scitranslmed.abq8476

 

Study finds two brain networks to be activated while reading

Two distinct networks in the brain are activated, when a person reads a sentence, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a study at UTHealth Houston.

The study, led by Oscar Woolnough, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and Nitin Tandon, MD, professor and chair ad interim of the department in the medical school, was published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Reference:

Oscar Woolnough et al,Spatiotemporally Distributed Frontotemporal Networks for Sentence Reading,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.