Researchers from across the US, as part of the infantile spasms working group (ISWG), established guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of infantile spasms (IS).

The goal of the ISWG is to improve patient outcomes by creating protocols that educate pediatricians on early diagnosis and treatment options.

Infantile spasms - known also as west syndrome and named after William James West who provided the first account of the disease in his 1841 medical article - is a rare epileptic disorder that typically presents in infants between three and seven months of age.

Clinical trials using patients’ own immune cells to target tumors have yielded promising results. However, this approach usually works only if the patients also receive large doses of drugs designed to help immune cells multiply rapidly, and those drugs have life-threatening side effects.

Now a team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor. That way, the drugs reach only their intended targets, greatly reducing the risk to the patient.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Spectroscopy Laboratory are working on a noninvasive way to measure blood glucose levels using light, to minimize the pain and inconvenience of pricking the patients fingers for several times a day to draw blood for testing.

First envisioned by Michael Feld, the late MIT professor of physics and former director of the Spectroscopy Laboratory, the technique uses Raman spectroscopy, a method that identifies chemical compounds based on the frequency of vibrations of the bonds holding the molecule together.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that a kind of sugar molecule common to chimpanzees, gorillas and other mammals but not found in humans provokes a strong immune response in some people, likely worsening conditions in which chronic inflammation is a major issue.

This non-human sialic acid sugar is an ingredient in some biotechnology drugs, and may be limiting or undermining their therapeutic effectiveness in some patients, the scientists reported. However, they also propose a simple modification to the drug-making process that could solve the problem.

Results from a new study suggest that oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may yield additional benefit of protecting against the formation and rupture of brain aneurysms in women.

According to the lead author of the study, Dr. Michael Chen, neurointerventionalist at Rush University Medical Center, the retrospective, case-control study was initiated due to the observation that in the two largest brain aneurysm trials to date, cerebral aneurysms occurred most frequently in post-menopausal women.