Health and Medicine

Workplace alcohol use and impairment directly affects an estimated 15 percent of the U.S. workforce, or 19.2 million workers, according to a recent study conducted at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) and reported in the current issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.

For diabetes patients, who can't produce their own insulin, human stem cell-based transplants that produce insulin would be a major breakthrough. But current laboratory methods of culturing human stem cells result in very limited quantities, far short of the quantities necessary for therapeutic applications. For that reason, Emmanouhl (Manolis) Tzanakakis, Ph.D., is striving to boost the numbers of stem cells produced in the laboratory, expanding the pool of cells that eventually can be differentiated into insulin-producing cells.

Being hospitalized can be a traumatic experience, especially for older persons. Hospitals are noisy, disorienting, full of strangers and infections often spread among patients. Now a new study has shown that for older persons with certain acute conditions, hospital-level care can be provided at home for less money and with fewer clinical complications than in-hospital care.

A growing number of women are overweight or obese when they become pregnant, a condition that is risky to both mother and baby, a new study conducted by researchers at the University at Buffalo has shown.

Michelle Lynn Niescierenko, of Rochester, a third-year medical student in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has been awarded a $10,000 American Medical Association Foundation National Scholarship to help offset the cost of her medical education.

Finding compounds that bind to and inhibit an RNA sequence -- as a potential new approach to designing disease treatments -- is still very much a trial-and-error process, involving the tedious screening of millions of molecules against a single RNA sequence. Now, a University at Buffalo medicinal chemist is hoping to change that.

Early in 2006, researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) will be going into the field with a study designed to translate alcoholism research findings into the "real world" of community-based substance abuse treatment clinics.

Dermatologists seem to agree that something in milk and dairy products may be linked to teen-age acne. But is it hormones and "bioactive molecules," as a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology suggested, or is there something else? University at Buffalo dermatologist Harvey Arbesman, M.D., says there could be something else: Iodine.

Researchers in the Center for Research in Cardiovascular Medicine at the University at Buffalo have received $1.85 million from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study the role of abnormal cardiac sympathetic nerve function in sudden cardiac death.

One of the first studies to determine whether antioxidant vitamin and mineral supplements should be taken during radiation therapy is set to begin in the University at Buffalo's School of Nursing.