Weekly news from the realm of medicine

Episode 7 - The End of Life: A rather sombre end to the series, as we witness the eventual death from a fatal stomach cancer of the quite remarkable Herbie, and how his wonderful wife Hannelorre deals with it all. We also literally get to see a heart attack, and discover that death is actually a slow winding down effect - even when you stop ...

From New York - While over 62 million CT scans are done yearly in the US, there is some concern that the volume of studies being done, coupled with the radiation dose from the scans, may increase the risk of cancer. Researchers estimate that CT scanning accounts for 0.4% of cancers. However, given the dramatic rise in the use of CT scans, ...

UC San Francisco presents Mini Medical School. In this edition, join Elizabeth Blackburn from UCSF's Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Examine what bits of DNA dubbed telomeres tell us about cell division, and how solving this part of the molecular puzzle may help develop new tools to fight cancer and diseases of aging.

An interesting conference report from a new contributer to Ouroboros: ''The idea is this: some cells in the body proliferate too much or get too much DNA damage and undergo cell senescence. These cells cause aging, not because we run out of cells, but because these cells stick around indefinitely and poison the environment with nasty factors that ...

Medical researchers are learning a great deal about the age-related degeneration of human biochemistry by looking at the extreme edge cases and malfunctions - such as Li-Fraumeni syndrome in the case of increased cancer risk with advancing age: ''Li-Fraumeni was associated with inheritance of a mutated form of the p53 tumor suppressor gene, but we ...

SFGate.com looks at the work of Bruce Ames on the biochemistry of mild micronutrient deficiencies, long term health and longevity: ''For years, Ames kept his microscope focused narrowly on cancer and aging. Today, he's increasingly concerned with the cellular consequences of a diet short on vitamins and minerals. ... The relationship between diet ...

Ouroboros looks at that little piece of immortality that resides in all of us: ''The germ line (the cell lineage from which reproductive cells are derived) is replicatively immortal - distinct from the soma, where most cells capable of division have a strictly limited replicative capacity, if they're not entirely postmitotic. Why? ... ...

As reported by the New Scientist, work in lower animals continues to increase our understanding of the fundamental links between aging and cancer: ''The authors speculate that signalling pathways that control longevity may have coevolved with tumour-suppressive mechanisms. ... Intuitively it all makes sense. We see this nice, clear genetic link ...