Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Nature, NYU, Pancreatic / 17.03.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Aristotelis Tsirigos, Ph.D. Professor of Medicine and Pathology Co-director, Precision Medicine Director, Applied Bioinformatics LaboratoriesNew York University School of Medicine MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal types of cancer with only 12% of patients surviving more than 5 years after diagnosis. One of the main reasons behind the dismal prognosis is the complexity of the tumor. Pancreatic cancer cells are very heterogenous and interact with different types of non-malignant cells in what is known as the tumor microenvironment. (more…)
Author Interviews, Nature, Nutrition, Orthopedics, Pediatrics / 20.04.2021

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Efrat Monsonego Ornan, Ph.D  Head of School of Nutritional Sciences Institute of Biochemistry and Nutrition The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment The Hebrew University of Jerusalem MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Food supplies in recent decades have been dominated by heavily processed, ready-to-eat products. Essentially, 75% of all world food sales are of processed foods. Over the past 30 years, children’s ultra-processed food intake has increased markedly, with 50% of the children in the US consuming these foods. Only in the US does UPF comprise 58% of energy intake, of which 90% is derived from added sugars. This reflects children’s excessive consumption of food and drink that are high in fat and refined sugars but do not provide appropriate levels of the proteins, vitamins and minerals required for growth. The negative health outcomes of excessive consumption of Ultra-processed food are well known, include obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes, and considered as the current world epidemic; the fact that children, during their postnatal development period (birth to adolescent), are the target of the Ultra-processed food industry is very disturbing in terms of public health. Bone development and growth are the characteristic phenomena of the childhood period. Yet, in spite of the huge importance of nutrition to bone development, the impact of Ultra-processed food consumption on skeleton development during childhood has never been studied directly, and this was the purpose of our study. To this end, we used young rats which are an excellent pre-clinical model for growth and fed them with either the recommended diet for their age or  a diet comprised of a typical Ultra-processed meal (a roll, hamburger, tomatoes, lettuce, ketchup and French fries) and a caloric soft drink.   (more…)
Author Interviews, Environmental Risks, Genetic Research, Nature / 27.07.2016

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dalton Conley PhD Department of Sociology Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08644 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: An increasing number of nationally representative social science surveys are now genotyping respondents. The Health and Retirement Study, which follows a representative group of Americans 50 and older since 1992, genotyped its subjects in 2006 and 2010. The range of birth cohorts allowed us to see if genetic effects increased or decreased across the middle half of the twentieth century for a number of outcomes. We found that for height and weight, genetics increased in importance, but for heart disease and education, genes became less important. (more…)