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<p>UCSF cognitive neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley has used functional brain imaging and EEG studies to discover that older adults fare worse than younger adults at remembering following distractions. He hopes to improve their performance with cognitive training, using a newly developed video game.</p>
<p>As part of his push for the National Institutes of Health to focus more on translational medicine, Director Francis Collins recently toured one of UCSF’s world-class centers of innovation, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) at Mission Bay.</p>
Researchers at UCSF and in Michigan, North Carolina and Spain have discovered how genetic mutations cause a number of rare human diseases, which include Meckel syndrome, Joubert syndrome and several other disorders.
<p>Having developed an algorithm that discovered a large quantity of drug-producing bacteria in and on humans, Fischbach has turned his lab’s attention to studying their populations and interactions with each other. This, he posits, can greatly influence a person’s overall health and disease.</p>
<p>Swallowing pills means medication must face the challenge of surviving the harsh environment of the digestive tract. As a result, people must take larger doses than they need. Using micro and nano-fabrication techniques developed by the computer chip industry, Desai’s lab is creating tiny devices that take multiple drugs directly to where they are needed, using less medication, minimizing side effects and making the process safer for the patient. </p>
<p>Many researchers are finding that by the time a patient seeks treatment for symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, it’s often too late for the available drugs to have an effect. Boxer’s lab is studying very precise eye tracking methods to gauge mental fitness and identify cognitive decline decades before the first symptoms appear.</p>
<p>With years of sleep research under her belt, Lee has recently focused on helping parents — especially new and expecting mothers — get enough sleep. From these studies, Lee has found worrisome correlations between sleep deprivation during pregnancy and increased instances of Cesarean operations and length of labor. By educating families about proper sleep hygiene, she hopes to promote healthier home environments for mothers and babies.</p>
<p>By understanding the underlying biological processes that allow teeth to continuously grow in rodents and other mammals, Klein’s research aims to apply those principles to regenerative medicine in humans. Klein predicts that one day patients will be able to replace their own lost teeth with living, biological replicas instead of the prosthetics oral surgeons implant today.</p>
<p>By mapping neurons and neuron circuitry during movement, Sabes’ lab hopes to one day to be able to print this information back into the brain. If feasible, such therapy could offer new hope to stroke victims whose brains are unable to recover on their own.</p>
<p>Each year, scores of soldiers wounded by explosives suffer from debilitating nerve injuries that render their arms and legs useless. Kim’s research, performed at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco Veterans Affairs hospital, has led to development of artificial nerve grafts to accelerate healing of these injuries.</p>
<p>In the era of prostate cancer screening, mortality rates have fallen 40 percent. The price of that has been over-diagnosis and over-treatment, something the current health care system cannot sustain. One of the major goals of Cooperberg’s research is to develop better risk assessment tools and instruments that can give the patient and doctor more confidence that the patient’s cancer will not progress.</p>
Stem cell transplantation may hold the promise to treating many diseases before birth such as sickle cell anemia and muscular dystrophy. But first, researchers need to overcome many barriers, including rejection of stem cell transplants by the fetus. MacKenzie’s lab recently discovered that mothers’ T cells are responsible for rejecting the grafts and that this rejection may be avoided by using stem cells from the mother.
<p>For doctors confronting the AIDS epidemic, past ambitions always boiled down to two main goals: prevention, or finding ways to protect people not yet exposed to HIV, through vaccines, safe sex education or other means; and treatment, or discovering effective drugs and providing them to people with HIV/AIDS, helping them live longer.</p>
<p>Doctors and other health care professionals packed into San Francisco General Hospital’s Carr Auditorium for the June 7 medical grand rounds, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first AIDS report to the US Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention.</p>
A 10-month study of healthy honey bees by UCSF scientists has identified four new viruses that infect bees, while revealing that each of the viruses or bacteria previously linked to colony collapse is present in healthy hives as well.
<p>As one of the preeminent biomedical education and health sciences research institutions in the world, UCSF emerged early as a pioneer in the fight against AIDS. Today, three decades later, UCSF is working on multiple fronts to prevent, treat and stop the spread of the disease that has killed 33 million people worldwide.</p>
In the first major study exploring the connection between vitamin D and multiple sclerosis in African Americans, a team of scientists at UCSF has discovered that vitamin D levels in the blood are lower in African Americans who have the disease, compared to African Americans who do not.
<p>Experts at UCSF and Caltech are pushing the boundaries of creative problem solving to address important clinical problems with the hope that the talent pool at both institutions, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit, will advance health care innovation.</p>
Targeting a protein that leukemia cells use to stay alive may be the key to fighting drug-resistant leukemia, a discovery that may make cancer drugs more powerful and help doctors formulate drug cocktails to cure more children of leukemia, a team led by UCSF researchers reports.
<p>Rates of deadly skin cancers are climbing among girls and young women. Researchers discover that the increase may be linked to sun exposure among the well-off.</p>
<p>Yervoy, a new cancer drug that has been approved for the treatment of late-stage melanoma – and that is being used to treat other cancers in ongoing clinical trials – is based on a strategy for boosting the immune response developed and tested by scientists from UCSF and UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>Scientists are making great strides in figuring out how the human brain develops, which are leading to novel ideas about the causes of a range of brain disorders, and are raising hopes for the regeneration of tissue that is lost in diseases such as Alzheimer’s. </p>
Men and women had starkly different immune system responses to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, with men showing no response and women showing a strong response, in two studies by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">More than two decades after a pivotal clinical trial of a drug was used to treat multiple sclerosis, researchers are reporting a surprising discovery: the people who received interferon in the trial, as opposed to a placebo, were only about half as likely to have died in years since.</span></p>
By asking a group of older adults to analyze videos of other people conversing -- some talking truthfully, some insincerely -- a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco has determined which areas of the brain govern a person's ability to detect sarcasm and lies.
Scientists at UCSF have pinpointed a reason older adults have a harder time multitasking than younger adults: they have more difficulty switching between tasks at the level of brain networks.