With inhaler in hand, Dr. Cheng Yuet went over every detail to make sure the patient understood how the drug would control their COPD symptoms. Dr. Yuet is proving what a difference it makes when pharmacists are integrated into the health care team. As part of an innovative model being used at UNT Health Science Center, Dr. Yuet and three other pharmacists manage the care of patients with chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes and hypertension.

Patients with cancer should receive a tailored exercise prescription to protect their heart, reports a paper published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

Cardiovascular diseases are common side effects in patients with cancer.

In the West, the number of people challenging scientific authority has been growing in past decades. This has, among other things, led to a decline in the support for mass vaccination programmes and to an increase in alternative forms of treatment. In China, however, activists are defending modern medical science and criticising Traditional Chinese Medicine, which hospitals are obliged to offer to patients on an equal footing with modern medical care.

For more than a decade, scientist Stephen Albert Johnston and his team at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have pooled their energies into an often scoffed-at, high-risk, high-reward goal in medicine: to develop a universal vaccine to prevent cancer.

Certain fungi move from the gut to the pancreas, expand their population more than a thousand-fold, and encourage pancreatic cancer growth, a new study finds. Published online in Nature October 2, the study is the first to offer strong evidence that the mycobiome - the local mix of fungal species in the pancreas - can trigger changes that turn normal cells into pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma or PDA.

University of California, Irvine biologists blazing new approaches to studying Alzheimer's have made a major finding on combating inflammation linked to the disease. The School of Biological Sciences researchers' discovery about the role of a protein called TOM-1 heralds a shift toward examining the molecular underpinnings of Alzheimer's processes. Their paper has just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Genome-wide association studies have uncovered more than 500 genetic variants linked to heart function, everything from heart rate to irregular rhythms that can lead to stroke, heart failure or other complications. But since most of these variations fall into areas of the genome that don't encode proteins, exactly how they influence heart function has remained unclear.