Focus: Hidden - North Carolina

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During the holidays, the variety and complexity of foods served by friends and relatives can present landmines for people with food allergies.

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Approximately 34 percent of children in the United States do not receive all doses of vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) by age 2, according to a new study by researchers at RTI Health Solutions, a business unit of RTI International.

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Researchers from the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore (Duke-NUS) and Duke Medicine have identified a potential treatment strategy for an often-fatal inherited glycogen storage disease.

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Imagine you have a bone injury but you heal slowly. Instead of forming bone, you could form fat. UNC researchers may have found a way to tip the scale in favor of bone. They used cytochalasin D, a naturally occurring substance, to alter gene expression in stem cells to force them to become bone.

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UNC Charlotte has reached an agreement with Sealed Air Corp. to lease temporary research and development space and office space at the University’s PORTAL building.

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An RTI International and Elon University analysis of more than 50,000 residential real estate transactions shows that prices for homes assigned to traditional calendars were up to 2 percent higher than similar homes that switched to multi-track year round calendars.

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Being bullied in childhood has been associated with increased risk for anxiety, depression and even eating disorders. But according to new research, it’s not only the victims who could be at risk psychologically, but also the bullies themselves.

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Approximately 12 million people in the United States experience diagnostic errors annually, but it is time for a change, according to researchers at RTI International, the Baylor College of Medicine and Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

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Wake Forest University is among a group of two dozen colleges, universities and public interest organizations that today collectively announced $18 million in commitments to support and improve academic research about women and girls of color.

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Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found new evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo.

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Heart patients who had undergone an angioplasty procedure that opened only some blocked arteries tended to have a resolution of their chest pain, making it unnecessary to add another medication to treat the symptom, according to a study led by the Duke Clinical Research Institute.

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A UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center-led study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology identified a group of women with HER-2 positive breast cancer who could benefit from less intensive targeted treatment.

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Scientists at the University of North Carolina and UC-San Francisco created a general tool to probe the activity of orphan receptors, illuminating their roles in behavior and making them accessible for drug discovery for the first time.

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Despite efforts to increase gender diversity in cardiology, major differences in job characteristics and pay persist between men and women who treat heart patients, according to a Duke Medicine-led study presented at the annual American Heart Association meeting.

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Studies have demonstrated how just a few sessions of binge drinking during adolescence can knock out neurons (shown in blue arch) in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory core.

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Used alone, a cell phone app that tracks exercise, calories and weight loss goals is, on average, not enough to create meaningful weight loss in young adults, according to new research from Duke Medicine.

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New findings from an international team of researchers suggest that business leaders who oversee teams need to find a middle ground in how they treat team members – or risk hurting overall team performance.

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In-home test kits, coupled with patient education, help parents reduce allergen levels in their homes, according to scientists from the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found that parents may become more motivated to participate in allergen reduction interventions, when they can actually see results for themselves.

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An evaluation of a statewide shaken baby prevention effort found that the number of calls to a nurse advice line from North Carolina parents who called because of a crying baby were reduced in the first 2 years after the intervention was implemented in 2007. However, the study did not find a statistically significant reduction in the number of abusive head trauma (AHT) or “shaken baby” cases in North Carolina during the same period.

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Wake Forest University biology professors and students use tomatoes from campus garden to teach high schools students about genetic diversity.

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Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center today announced Robert J. “Bob” Gfeller Jr. will assume additional responsibility at the medical center. Adding to his role as executive director for the Childress Institute for Pediatric Trauma (CIPT), Gfeller was named Vice President of Communications, Marketing & Media and Chief Marketing Officer, effective October 27.

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Researchers at Duke Medicine have discovered that rhesus monkeys can, in fact, transmit Cytomegalovirus (CMV) across the placenta to their unborn offspring. This finding, reported online October 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, establishes the first primate model that researchers can use to study mother-to-fetus CMV infections and spur development of potential vaccine approaches.

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A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that vitamin D and calcium supplements do not reduce the risk of colorectal adenomas, which are benign tumors that can evolve into colorectal cancer.

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Lowering systolic blood pressure below the currently recommended target can reduce the risk of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), the most common complication of high blood pressure, according to new research.

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Drug-resistant E. coli infections are on the rise in community hospitals, where more than half of U.S. patients receive their health care, according to a new study from Duke Medicine.

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“Organs-on-a-chip” have become vital for biomedical research, as researchers seek alternatives to animal models for drug discovery and testing. The new grant will fund a technology that represents a major step forward for the field, overcoming limitations that have mired other efforts.

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Treatment patterns for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) have shifted since the 1990s, with more U.S. women opting for lumpectomy in combination with radiation rather than single-breast mastectomy, according to a study lead by Duke Cancer Institute researchers. But the researchers also found an increased tendency for women to seek removal of both breasts, despite their analysis that cancer survival rates remained similar regardless of the form of treatment.

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The Cancer Genome Atlas Network of researchers analyzed hundreds of breast cancer samples to reveal genetic drivers of invasive lobular carcinoma, the second most commonly diagnosed invasive form of breast cancer.

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A new phase of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (BCERP), focused on prevention, is being launched at the National Institutes of Health. Grant-funded researchers will now work across scientific disciplines, involve new racially and ethnically diverse communities, and expand the study of risk factors that precede breast cancer, such as breast density.

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A new analysis led by researchers at the UNC School of Medicine identified “illogical thoughts” as most predictive of schizophrenia risk. Surprisingly, perceptual disturbances – the forerunners of hallucinations – are not predictive.

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Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center today announced the creation of a Technology Development Program, a $15 million program to develop the ideas, discoveries and inventions of the faculty and staff of the Medical Center into life science technologies having the potential to benefit patients in the community and worldwide.

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In a hospital, what you can’t see could hurt you. Healthcare facilities continue to battle drug-resistant organisms such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) that loiter on surfaces even after patient rooms have been cleaned and can cause new, sometimes-deadly infections. But a new study from Duke Medicine has found that using a combination of chemicals and UV light to clean patient rooms cut transmission of four major superbugs by a cumulative 30 percent among a specific group of patients -- those who stay overnight in a room where someone with a known positive culture or infection of a drug-resistant organism had previously been treated.

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City Startup Labs (CSL) is establishing a Center of Excellence for Entrepreneurial Competency, Innovation and Leadership (CoE) at UNC Charlotte, in association with Ventureprise, a campus-based venture development organization.

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Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine found that people with anorexia nervosa have very different microbial communities inside their guts compared to healthy individuals and that this bacterial imbalance is associated with some of the psychological symptoms related to the eating disorder.

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A UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher and his partners describe the design and engineering of the new bioluminescent imaging tool called the “LumiFluor” in a study published in the journal Cancer Research.

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Tick tock. Tick tock. A team of scientists from Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore (Duke-NUS) and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have discovered a molecular switch that regulates the body’s circadian clock and allows it to keep time. This switch could be a potential drug target to treat circadian rhythm disorders caused by jet lag, shift work or metabolic disorders.

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A UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher is a co-investigator with Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based InSilixa Inc. for the development of a rapid oral HPV test.

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A new study led by researchers in the UNC Department of Pediatrics finds a direct correlation between more severe forms of obesity in children and related risk factors for developing heart disease and diabetes—particularly in boys.

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More than 3 million children in the United States who are severely obese may be at a higher risk of developing heart disease and diabetes than overweight children, according to a new study by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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New National Institutes of Health study on blood pressure management could help reduce cardiovascular disease and save lives, questions on the data and its implementation remain, according to one UNC Charlotte expert.

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If you have two faulty copies of the CFTR gene, you will have cystic fibrosis. But the severity of your disease will depend partly on many other genes. Now, researchers report that five regions of the human genome are home to the genetic variations that play major roles in disease severity.

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Scientists at Duke Medicine are using transparent fish to watch in real time as Cryptococcal meningitis takes over the brain. The resulting images are worthy of a sci-fi movie teaser, but could be valuable in disrupting the real, crippling brain infection that kills more than 600,000 people worldwide each year.

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A unique molecule developed at Duke Medicine, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and MacroGenics, Inc., is able to bind HIV-infected cells to the immune system’s killer T cells. It could become a key part of a shock-and-kill strategy being developed in the hope of one day clearing HIV infection.

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Public and private entities that fund biomedical research face difficult choices on how to allocate a finite level of capital, and scientists often take risks in selecting research topics multiple times in their academic careers. UNC Charlotte data scientist Lixia Yao, in a recently published article in Nature Biotechnology titled “Health ROI as a Measure of Misalignment of Biomedical Needs and Resources,” suggests a better method for those funding agencies and scientists.