| Steroids help reverse rapid bone loss tied to rib fractures |
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| Wednesday, February 06, 2013 | |
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New research in animals triggered by a combination of serendipity and counterintuitive thinking could point the way to treating fractures caused by rapid bone loss in people, including patients with metastatic cancers.
New research in animals triggered by a combination of serendipity and counterintuitive thinking could point the way to treating fractures caused by rapid bone loss in people, including patients with metastatic cancers. A series of studies at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine found that steroid drugs, known for inducing bone loss with prolonged use, actually help suppress a molecule that’s key to the rapid bone loss process. A report of the new findings appears online Feb. 5, 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE. |
CAROLINA IN THE NEWS
With exposure to babies, rodent dads’ brains, like moms’, become wired for nurtureThe Washington Post
...Sue Carter, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent her career studying prairie voles: “Sometimes they midwife the birth. They grab the baby and start licking it before it’s even out of the membrane it’s born in.” Carter’s studies, like Lambert’s, have found that virgin male prairie voles, when exposed to pups, experience a surge of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, the so-called “love” hormones that encourage social bonding, much as mothers do.