Links Between Maternal Cardiovascular Disease and the Health of Offspring.

Maternal cardiovascular disease (CVD) during pregnancy is on the rise worldwide, as both more women with congenital heart disease are reaching childbearing age, and conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are becoming more prevalent. However, the extent to which maternal CVD influences offspring health, as a neonate and later in childhood and adolescence, remains to be fully understood. The thrifty phenotype hypothesis, by which a fetus adapts to maternal and placental changes to survive a nutrient-starved environment, may provide an answer to the mechanism of maternal CVD and its impact on the offspring.

Comparing methods of performing geographically targeted rural health surveillance.

Background: Worsening socioeconomic conditions in rural America have been fueling increases in chronic disease and poor health. The goal of this study was to identify cost-effective methods of deploying geographically targeted health surveys in rural areas, which often have limited resources. These health surveys were administered in New York's rural Sullivan County, which has some of the poorest health outcomes in the entire state.

Preclinical Metrics Correlate With Drug Activity in Phase II Trials of Targeted Therapies for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.

Novel oncology drugs often fail to progress from preclinical experiments to FDA approval. Therefore, determining which preclinical or clinical factors associate with drug activity could accelerate development of effective therapies. We investigated whether preclinical metrics and patient characteristics are associated with objective response rate (ORR) in phase II clinical trials of targeted therapies for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Combination of Rapamycin and Resveratrol for Treatment of Bladder Cancer.

Loss of TSC1 function, a crucial negative regulator of mTOR signaling, is a common alteration in bladder cancer. Mutations in other members of the PI3K pathway, leading to mTOR activation, are also found in bladder cancer. This provides rationale for targeting mTOR for treatment of bladder cancer characterized by TSC1 mutations and/or mTOR activation.