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A.
Quality of Life for Younger Women After Breast Cancer
Narrator: This is Science Today. Younger women diagnosed with breast cancer may be more likely than older women to have lower quality of life years after diagnosis. Dr. Patricia Ganz of UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center, led a multi-ethnic study of nearly six hundred women who were age fifty or younger when they were first diagnosed with breast cancer.
Ganz: While physical functioning was very good and normal across all of the subgroups in terms of youngest to oldest, for emotional functioning, the youngest women – that is women who were 25 to 34 at their diagnosis – there was still a substantial amount of ongoing distress.
Narrator: Ganz says that's probably because many such young women feel invulnerable to such a serious, life-threatening illness in the prime of their lives. Ganz says this study may help doctors.
Ganz: Instead of just saying, oh, you should be better, you're just not taking things well. I think this kind of data puts things in perspective that this is a pretty common finding and she's not unusual.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
A Brain Transport System Defect Linked to Huntington's Disease
Narrator: This is Science Today. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have linked a defective protein in Huntington's Disease to gridlock in the transportation system that moves vital protein cargoes within the brain, eventually leading to neuron cell death. Professor Lawrence Goldstein led the study.
Goldstein: With respect to the question of what is the normal function of the Huntington protein as it is called, that protein is required for normal transport in neuronal transport pathways. So that when you remove that protein, you have a lot of cargoes that stall or stop on their way to the correct location.
Narrator: This so-called traffic jam can cause Huntington's Disease patients to suffer from psychiatric changes, cognitive difficulties, and uncontrolled movements.
Goldstein: And so it's desperately important that we broaden our understanding of how things malfunction in these diseases and then try to capitalize on that knowledge to develop therapies.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
A Better Understanding of Bacterial Meningitis in Infants
Narrator: This is Science Today. In the first comprehensive analysis of the response of the blood-brain barrier to a bacterial pathogen, Dr. Victor Nizet of the University of California, San Diego, exposed an experimental blood-brain barrier to the pathogen Group B streptococcus, which is the leading cause of bacterial meningitis in newborn infants.
Nizet: We found that on exposure to Group B Strep , a very small subset, about 80 genes, were turned on in response to the bacterial pathogen. And this pattern of gene activation helped us to explain how the blood-brain barrier provides a first line of defense against bacterial infection, because when the blood-brain barrier recognizes the presence of the bacteria, it activates a coordinated set of genes, which all work together to recruit white blood cells to the site of infection and to stimulate the marrow to produce more white blood cells.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
A One-Time Nuisance Now a Treasure
Narrator: This is Science Today. A marine organism once considered a nuisance may be crucial in the development of future cancer drugs. Researcher Margo Haygood of the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography says the culprit behind this scientific irony is the bryozoan – a sea animal that looks like a plant, but is actually a colonial animal – meaning, it has many small individuals that all live together.
Haygood: Bryozoans commonly live on bottoms of boats. And in fact, most of the research funding that's been spent on studying this organism has been spent on trying to get rid of it – to make the Navy ships go faster. It grows on piers, it grows on rocks under water. It's a very well known organism.
Narrator: It wasn't until the 1960s that a group began to screen these invertebrates for anticancer activity and since then, there's been a great deal of research on the chemical compounds found in this animal called bryostatins, which hold tremendous promise in treating a variety of cancers.
Haygood: The benefit to society is to make this treasure chest of drugs available.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Using Non-Invasive Methods to Understand the Brain
Narrator: This is Science Today. Magnetic resonance imaging and another method called magnetic resonance spectroscopy have been helping researchers non-invasively study the brain to better understand its functioning in a variety of circumstances. Dieter Meyerhoff, a radiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has been using these methods to study how the brain is affected by alcohol abuse and recovery from alcohol.
Meyerhoff: We're also looking at how alcohol itself interacts with the damage that is done by either HIV infection or substance abuse.
Narrator: Overall, Meyerhoff says the big question they're asking is how substance abuse affects the brain and how does it interact with other problems.
Meyerhoff: And that is a big problem doing what we call pure alcohol research – finding patients who have abused nothing else than alcohol. There is a lot of other abuse occurring at the same time and very often, there are many other disorders that we need to rule out if we want to look at the pure effects of alcohol.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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