News

Overall antibiotic use was not curbed by giving physicians the results of biomarker tests in patients with suspected lower respiratory tract infections, according to findings from the Procalcitonin Antibiotic Consensus Trial (ProACT).

A new algorithm developed by UCLA researchers more accurately predicts which people will survive heart failure, and for how long, whether or not they receive a heart transplant. The algorithm would allow doctors to make more personalized assessments of people who are awaiting heart transplants, which in turn could enable health care providers to make better use of limited life-saving resources and potentially reduce health care costs.

The new test can rapidly screen a drop of blood for biomarkers of pancreatic cancer, and provide results in less than an hour.

Researchers at MIT’s Little Devices Lab have developed a set of modular blocks that can be put together in different ways to produce diagnostic devices. These “plug-and-play” devices, which require little expertise to assemble, can test blood glucose levels in diabetic patients or detect viral infection, among other functions.

WHO has published its first Essential Diagnostics List, a catalogue of the tests needed to diagnose the most common conditions as well as a number of global priority diseases.

Scientists create new software able to identify and measure the severity of small vessel disease, one of the commonest causes of stroke and dementia.

A team of scientists has found that in the colorectal tumors they examined, invasive cancers are born to be bad, and this tendency can potentially be identified at early diagnosis.

Asymptomatic carriers of malaria infect many people every year. An international team of researchers is working toward a way to identify malaria patients including infected individuals who show no malaria symptoms.

A team found that rather than fighting to resist Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the body’s tolerance to it is the key mechanism for preventing the spread of the infection. More surprisingly, they found that having excessive levels of T cells, which are known as soldiers of our immune system, could cause more harm than good.

Cancer researchers have measured systematically how efficient molecules are at suppressing the activity of a protein associated with prostate and other cancers. The molecules could eventually be developed into new anti-cancer drugs.