Publications by authors named "Christopher G Hill"

Elevated blood pressure affects a great part of the elderly population and is the leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease. New approaches have been taken in the fight against this growing problem, in the form of diets (Mediterranean, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) and intermittent fasting). Recent research has shown the promising results regarding diets and their effect on the prevention and improvement of elevated blood pressure.

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MicroRNAs have emerged in recent years as important regulators of cell function in both normal and diseased cells. MiRNAs coordinately regulate large suites of target genes by mRNA degradation and/or translational inhibition. The mRNA target specificities of miRNAs in animals are primarily encoded within a 7 nt "seed region" mapping to positions 2-8 at the molecule's 5' end.

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Background: Documented changes in levels of microRNAs (miRNA) in a variety of diseases including cancer are leading to their development as early indicators of disease, and as a potential new class of therapeutic agents. A significant hurdle to the rational application of miRNAs as therapeutics is our current inability to reliably predict the range of molecular and cellular consequences of perturbations in the levels of specific miRNAs on targeted cells. While the direct gene (mRNA) targets of individual miRNAs can be computationally predicted with reasonable degrees of accuracy, reliable predictions of the indirect molecular effects of perturbations in miRNA levels remain a major challenge in molecular systems biology.

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Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small RNAs that have been linked to a number of diseases including cancer. The potential application of miRNAs in the diagnostics and therapeutics of ovarian and other cancers is an area of intense interest. A current challenge is the inability to accurately predict the functional consequences of exogenous modulations in the levels of potentially therapeutic miRNAs.

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Objective: Ovarian cancer (OC) is the most lethal of all gynecological malignancies primarily due to the sloughing-off of highly metastatic cells from primary tumors and their subsequent spread throughout the peritoneal cavity. Since the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of OC cells located at the periphery of primary tumors is essential to this process, molecular interventions that can block EMT are of potential clinical significance. Members of the miR200 family of microRNAs have been implicated in EMT in other cancers.

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