What causes us to lose muscle strength as we age and how exercise can prevent it from happening has never been thoroughly understood, but McMaster University researchers have discovered a key protein required to maintain muscle mass and muscle strength during aging.

This important finding means new and existing drugs targeting the protein may potentially be used to preserve muscle function during aging.

"We found that the body's fuel gauge, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), is vital to slow muscle wasting with aging," said Gregory Steinberg, the study's senior author and professor of medicine at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. He is also co-director of MAC-Obesity, the Metabolism and Childhood Obesity Research Program at McMaster.

A large international analysis of 174,000 patients has shown conclusively that statin treatment reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease in women.

Caloric restriction in mice has been touted for accomplishing everything from increasing longevity to lowering cholesterol, but those animals are weaned on that from birth, and humans will go to jail trying it with their children.

It may be unnecessary - and the diet advice we have gotten for the last 30 years may be also. A new study found that a diet of high carbohydrates and low protein - the opposite of what has been recommended - improves insulin sensitivity and can provide benefits similar to those obtained with calorie restriction.

Should doctors recommend homeopathy? Sometimes placebos work, that is why placebo has an Effect named after it and, because they are inert, they can't do any harm. But when patients or taxpayers are coughing up money for it, the issue is more murky.

Peter Fisher, Director of Research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, says that of all the major forms of complementary medicine, homeopathy is the most misunderstood. He says how regular medicine reviews homeopathy is. For example, in a recent report by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council which stated that "there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective." 

The incidence of serious strep infections has risen dramatically in the last three decades, and this increase is largely attributed to the spread around the globe of a single strain of strep known as the invasive M1T1 clone.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and the University of Wollongong in Australia have discovered that, 30 years ago, a virus infected the strep bacteria – creating a deadly strain of “flesh-eating” bacteria that has evolved to produce serious human infections worldwide.

Population studies indicate that up to 90 percent of cases of autism and what are referred to as autism spectrum disorders have some genetic component, but only 10 percent of cases can be attributed to known genetic and chromosomal syndromes.

Since several of those conditions involve deletions or duplications of chromosomal segments – including an inherited deletion of a region of chromosome 15 – investigators have conducted a complete genome scan of samples from the Autism Genome Research Exchange, which contains DNA from families in which at least one child has autism or a related disorder.