Low dose aspirin lowers the occurrence of new venous blood clots - and represents a reasonable treatment option for patients who are not candidates for long-term anticoagulant drugs, such as warfarin, according to a new study published in current issue of Circulation.

Acute pancreatitis involves the pancreas digesting itself resulting in severe abdominal pain, vomiting and systemic inflammation. Every year in the UK around 20,000 patients are diagnosed with the disease resulting in 1000 deaths. There is no immediate cure and treatment is restricted to intravenous fluid and nutritional support.

Experts writing in the Cell Press journal Trends in Molecular Medicine on August 20th call for an end to clinical trials of "highly implausible treatments" such as homeopathy and reiki. Over the last two decades, such complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments have been embraced in medical academia despite budget constraints and the fact that they rest on dubious science, they say.

Hugely popular non-steroidal anti-inflammation drugs like aspirin, naproxen and ibuprofen all work by inhibiting or killing an enzyme called cyclooxygenase - a key catalyst in production of hormone-like lipid compounds called prostaglandins that are linked to a variety of ailments, from headaches and arthritis to menstrual cramps and wound sepsis.

New findings published in the journal Cancer Research reveal that some postmenopausal overweight breast cancer patients who use common anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen have significantly lower breast cancer recurrence rates. Researchers from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin began by examining blood serum from CTRC breast cancer patients, said CTRC oncologist Andrew Brenner, M.D., Ph.D.

A cure for a range of blood disorders and immune diseases is in sight, according to scientists who have unravelled the mystery of stem cell generation. The Australian study, led by researchers at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, is published in Nature. It identifies for the first time mechanisms in the body that trigger hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) production.

Osteoporosis drugs known as bisphosphonates may not protect women from breast cancer as had been thought, according to a new study led by researchers at UC San Francisco (UCSF). The drugs' protective effect was widely assumed after several observational studies showed that women who took them were less likely to get breast cancer.