Scientists claim to have identified a gene which is linked to 70 per cent of hard - to - treat breast cancers that are resistant to hormone therapies.

The research, published in the 'Nature' journal, used a new technique which tested hundreds of genes at once, rather than one at a time.

The scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research said there was "a lot of potential for significant impact" if drugs could be developed.

In fact, they used small, disruptive, snippets of genetic material which can turn off genes. They injected cancerous cells with the snippets to investigate which genes were necessary for tumour formation and growth.

They found that the gene - PHGDH - was highly active, far more than usual, in 70 per cent of tumours which did not respond to hormone therapies, the 'BBC' reported.

Over expression of the gene results in the chemistry of a cancerous cell changing and is involved in the production of an amino acid - serine.

The hope is that by identifying the gene which leads to some breast cancers, a drug can be developed which interferes with its activity.

"There is a lot of potential for a significant impact if a therapy targeting the serine pathway were found to be effective.

"However, as we do not treat any patients in our study, or develop any chemical inhibitors of the pathway, it would be very premature to predict the response in the general population," lead scientist Dr Richard Possemato said.

Older adults who get very little vitamin C in their diets may have an increased risk of developing cataracts, a study in India finds.

Cataracts are a clouding of the eye's lens that commonly cause vision problems in older people. Some studies, but not all, have found that people with higher intakes of antioxidants, including vitamin C, may have a lower risk of developing the condition.

But those studies have been done in Western countries and not in lower-income countries like India, where people's vitamin C levels tend to be very low and rates of cataract are particularly high.

For the new study, researchers evaluated more than 5,600 Indian adults age 60 and up for cataracts. They also interviewed them about their diets and lifestyle habits, and measured their blood levels of vitamin C.

Overall, nearly 73 percent of the study participants were found to have cataracts. But that risk dipped as vitamin C blood levels and vitamin C intake rose.

In the roughly one-quarter of older adults with the highest vitamin C levels, the risk of cataract was 39 percent lower than in people with the lowest levels of the nutrient. That was with factors like income, smoking habits, high blood pressure and diabetes taken into account.

But vitamin C levels were generally very low. More than half of the study participants were deficient, and the bottom 30 percent of the group had vitamin C concentrations below the level of detection (2 micromoles per liter).

Anything below 11 micromoles per liter is considered a vitamin C deficiency.

Even in the group with the highest vitamin C levels, the typical amount was just 38 micromoles per liter. By comparison, in cataract studies in Europe and the U.S., the "high-C" groups have had levels of 70 micromoles or higher.

The findings, reported in the journal Ophthalmology, do not prove that adequate vitamin C protects against cataracts.

But it's biologically plausible, said senior researcher Astrid E. Fletcher, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK.

Vitamin C is an antioxidant, which means it helps protect body cells from damage caused by so-called oxidative stress.

"Laboratory and animal studies show vitamin C plays a very important part in defending the lens of the eye against oxidative stress," Fletcher explained in an email.

"The eye is particularly vulnerable to oxidative stress as the 'seeing' organ of the body," she added. "Light is essential for vision but light is also very damaging. The lens absorbs ultraviolet radiation, a major source of oxidative stress."

But that biological plausibility does not mean that older adults should load up on vitamin C supplements to ward off cataracts.

Fletcher said the current findings have relevance primarily for India, where people's vitamin C levels are generally low. They might also have implications for other lower-income countries, she added, but those studies have not been done yet.

In Western countries, studies have come to conflicting conclusions as to whether people with high vitamin C intakes have a lower cataract risk.

What's more, clinical trials that have tested high doses of vitamin C and other antioxidants for preventing cataracts have failed to show a benefit.

One reason, Fletcher noted, may be that well-nourished people in high-income countries already have fairly high vitamin C levels, and an extra dose from a pill has little benefit to offer. Vitamin C is water-soluble, and excess amounts are quickly excreted from the body.

Another possibility, according to Fletcher, is that taking a few nutrients in pill form simply does not mimic the effects of a good diet.

Foods high in vitamin C include citrus fruits like oranges and grapefruit, green and red peppers, kiwifruit, strawberries, broccoli and tomatoes. In the U.S., the official recommendation is for men to get 90 milligrams of vitamin C per day, while women should get 75 milligrams.

In this study, most older Indian adults were getting well below that.

If extra vitamin C was shown to lower cataract risk in India, the benefits could be substantial.
"India has the highest burden of blindness in the world," Fletcher said, "and the main cause is cataract."

Indirubin, a herbal compound used in traditional Chinese remedies might beat deadly brain tumours.

Indirubin is derived from the Indigo plant, an active ingredient in the Dang Gui Long Hui Wan formula that is used to treat chronic myeloid leukemia.

Researchers from the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Centre (OSUCCC) discovered indirubin, a compound that blocks migration of glioblastoma cells and endothelial cells, halting them from forming cancerous blood vessels.

(The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels).

Glioblastomas affect about 18,500 Americans annually and kill nearly 13,000 of them yearly. It is the most common and lethal form of the brain cancer malignancy, with an average survival of 15 months after diagnosis, the journal Cancer Research reports.

"We have pretty good methods to stop glioblastoma from growing in the human brain, but these therapies fail because tumour cells migrate from the original site and grow elsewhere in the brain," says co-principal investigator E. Antonio Chiocca, professor in neurological surgery at Ohio.

"Our findings suggest that Indirubin offers a novel therapeutic strategy for these tumours that simultaneously targets tumour invasion and angiogenesis," Chiocca says, according to an Ohio statement.

Angiogenesis is the process involving the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing vessels.

A first-aid kit found on a 2,000-year-old shipwreck has revealed how ancient physicians concocted medicines to treat sailors for dysentery and other ailments, a media report said Sunday.

The kit contains pills made of ground-up vegetables, herbs and plants such as celery, carrots, and chestnuts and was so well sealed that they miraculously survived being under water for over two millennia, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

All ingredients were referred to in classical medical texts. The wooden chest also contains extracts of parsley, nasturtium, radish, yarrow and hibiscus, it said.

They were found in 136 tin-lined wooden vials on a 50 feet-long trading ship which was wrecked around 130 B.C. off the coast of Tuscany.

Scientists believe they would have been used to treat gastrointestinal complaints suffered by sailors such as dysentery and diarrhoea, according to the report.

"The plants and vegetables were probably crushed with a mortar and pestle - we could still see the fibres in the tablets. They also contained clay, which even today is used to treat gastrointestinal problems," Telegraph quoted Alain Touwaide, from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington DC, as saying.

The pills are the oldest known archaeological remains of ancient pharmaceuticals. They would have been taken with a mouthful of wine or water, or may have been dissolved and smeared on the skin to treat inflammation and cuts.

Historians believe the presence of the medicine chest suggests that the ship may have had a doctor on board, or at least someone trained in rudimentary first aid.

The vessel was transporting amphorae of wine, glassware, ceramics and oil lamps when it sank in 60 feet of water between the Italian mainland and the island of Elbe, the report said.

The discovery showed that medical knowledge contained in ancient Greek texts was being put into practise in the Roman Empire, the report said quoting Touwaide.

The ship was discovered off the port of Piombino in 1974 and the wooden medicine box was found in 1989, but it is only now that scientists have been able to use DNA sequencing technology to analyze the contents of the pills.

Researchers have explained why children become "doves" - cautious and submissive when confronting new environments, or "hawks" - bold and assertive in unfamiliar settings.

Researchers say these basic temperamental patterns are linked to opposite hormonal responses to stress - differences that may provide children with advantages for navigating threatening environments.

"Divergent reactions - both behaviourally and chemically - may be an evolutionary response to stress," Patrick Davies, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and the lead author of the study, said.

"These biological reactions may have provided our human ancestors with adaptive survival advantages. For example, dovish compliance may work better under some challenging family conditions, while hawkish aggression could be an asset in others," he stated.

This evolutionary perspective, says Davies, provides an important counterpoint to the prevailing idea in psychology that "there is one healthy way of being and that all behaviours are either adaptive or maladaptive".

Co-author Melissa Sturge-Apple agreed: "When it comes to healthy psychological behaviour, one size does not fit all."

The study was published online July 8, 2011, in Development and Psychopathology. (ANI)