Male sex hormones and their receptors may be involved in the development and progression of bladder cancer, according to a study in mice.Men have a considerably higher incidence of bladder cancer than women, though the reasons remain a mystery. Bladder cancer has been linked to exposure to cigarette smoke and industrial chemicals, but it was not previously considered to be influenced by male sex hormones, called androgens.Chawnshang Chang, Ph.D. [click link for full article]

Testicular cancer survivors have a slightly higher risk of dying of noncancer causes than the general population. Men who received chemotherapy after 1974 are at particularly high risk.Although survival rates for men with testicular cancer have greatly improved, some physicians worry that the treatments for testicular cancer could increase patients’ risk for other health problems, such as second cancers, heart disease, and infertility.Sophie Fossa, M.D., Ph.D. [click link for full article]

Women who initiate hormone therapy closer to menopause tend to have a reduced risk of coronary heart disease compared to women who begin treatment further from menopause, but researchers did not find this reduced risk was statistically significant, according to a study in the April 4 issue of JAMA.Studies examining the effects of the use of postmenopausal hormone therapy on coronary heart disease (CHD) have yielded mixed results, depending on the type of study conducted. [click link for full article]

An herbal extract, forskolin, which is currently sold as an aid for allergy or fat loss treatment, may be beneficial for patients with bladder infections when taken in combination with antibiotics, say researchers from Duke, University, USA. You can read about this new researcher in the journal Nature Medicine.The majority of infections of the bladder are caused by Escherichia coli (E. coli). [click link for full article]

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered a new way by which common mutants of a critical human tumor-suppressing gene can promote tumor progression, a finding which may explain why some cancer treatments targeting human cancers with these mutants have proven ineffective. [click link for full article]

Endoscopic variceal ligation is cost-effective relative to beta-blockers for the prevention of variceal bleeding in cirrhotic patients if quality of life-years are considered. If only life-years are considered, then endoscopic variceal ligation is not cost-effective. These findings are published in the April issue of Hepatology, the official journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [click link for full article]

Researchers have called for a national database to be set up to identify major complications arising from epidural pain relief after a small number of serious problems were identified during a six-year UK study, according to the April issue of Anaesthesia.They discovered that 12 of the 8,100 people studied developed major complications after receiving epidural pain relief following an operation. [click link for full article]

Flavonoids. You’ve heard of them — the good-for-your-health compounds found in plants that we enjoy in red wine, dark chocolate, green tea and citrus fruits. Mother Nature is an ace at making them, producing different ones by the thousands, but no chemist has figured out a good way to synthesize a special class of these chemicals in the laboratory. Until now. [click link for full article]

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has been designated one of six Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the National Institutes of Health.NIAID will award $23 million per year for seven years to establish the consortium of centers, which includes St. Jude, according to Robert Webster, Ph.D. [click link for full article]

While nicotine is highly addictive, researchers have also shown the drug to enhance learning and memory-a property that has launched efforts to develop nicotine-like drugs to treat cognitive deficits in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.A key problem in designing such drugs has been that little was known about the detailed mechanism by which nicotine exerts its learning-enhancing effects. [click link for full article]