Potential medicine for musular atrophy identified - des-acyl ghrelin

September 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Even the most well-built people tend to loose their muscles and develop thinner arms and legs as they get older, and researchers in Nottingham have now explained why this happens. As age catches up, it becomes harder to keep our muscles healthy-they get smaller, which decreases strength and increases the likelihood of falls and fractures.

July 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of researchers led by Indian origin scientist has come up with a potential new treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, the second-leading cause of infant mortality in the world. Ravindra Singh, associate professor in biomedical sciences at Iowa State University's College of Veterinary Medicine said that more than 95 percent of the sufferers have a mutated or deleted gene called Survival Motor Neuron 1 (SMN1) that doesn't correctly do its job of creating functional SMN proteins.

July 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Space travellers, who stay for longer hours in zero gravity, suffer muscle loss rendering them unable to walk or even sit up on their return to Earth. Now, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have conducted the first human experiments by using a device intended to counteract this effect-a NASA centrifuge.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - British scientists claim to have identified a key element in the development of chronic asthma. Remodelling occurs when the small airways in the lungs of people change gradually with time as their lungs respond to the presence of particles such as dust, pollen and mould in the air they breathe.

May 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have now shown that skin cells can be coaxed to behave like muscle cells and muscle cells like skin cells. The fickleness of the cells, and the relative ease with which they make the switch, provide a glimpse into the genetic reprogramming that must occur for a cell to become something it's not.

April 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Grasping a glass or throwing a baseball could be an arduous task for the arm with over 30 muscles working in tandem. But now, researchers have found that stimulating groups of muscles instead of individual muscles could make it easier to control the limbs.

April 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Active young women who use oral contraceptives (OC) may be setting back their muscle gains, according to a study. 'We were surprised at the magnitude of differences in muscle gains between the two groups, with the non-OC women gaining more than 60 percent greater muscle mass than their OC counterpart,' the researchers said.

April 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at Albany Medical College claim to have identified a potential therapeutic target for melanoma. The team led by Dr Andrew Aplin, an associate professor of Cancer Biology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, has discovered a protein called Mcl-1 that plays a critical role in melanoma cell resistance to a form of apoptosis called anoikis.

April 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Club moss Lycopodium serratum is a flowerless plant whose potent brew of alkaloids, which could have anti-cancer properties and may combat memory loss, have drawn considerable scientific and medical interest. Now scientists have made one of the alkaloids in a lab, in quantity sufficient for use.

April 7th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Hollywood actor Rob Pattinson was left red-faced on the first day of filming for his forthcoming flick 'Twilight', after he suffered a muscle pull in his buttocks. Rob was required to lift heroine Kirsten Stewart in one of the scenes, when he pulled a muscle in his rear end.

April 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has suggested that astronauts need to modify their workouts to avoid extensive muscle loss during missions onboard the International Space Station (ISS). The research, sponsored by NASA, was conducted at Ball State University's Human Performance Laboratory (HPL), US.

March 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, a scientist has suggested that chimpanzees are four times stronger than humans because our nervous systems exert more control over our muscles, thus preventing great feats of strength. The research was done by evolutionary biologist Alan Walker, a professor at Penn State University.

March 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - Women in their eighties were unable to increase muscle mass even after a three-month weight lifting programme targeted at strengthening the thigh muscle, according to a new study. The results are surprising because previous studies have found that resistance training is capable of increasing muscle mass, even for people who are into their 70s.

March 27th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at the Pentagon have completed the first phase of their plan to regrow soldiers' limbs, by turning human skin into the equivalent of a blastema - a mass of undifferentiated cells that can develop into new body parts. Now, researchers are on to phase two: turning that cellular glop into a square inch of honest-to-goodness muscle tissue.

January 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - What keeps the spine healthy and erect? The key lies in how a deep muscle along the spinal column, called the multifidus muscle, is designed. These findings show how this poorly understood muscle plays a potentially important 'scaffolding' role, according to researchers from University of California San Diego School of Medicine (UCSDSM).