In the pantheon of scariest things, my generation used to worry about getting vaporized in a nuclear attack. As we got older and the Cold War waned, we worried a little more about things like getting shot at or getting cancer. But not too many of us have been worrying about bacterial infections. Perhaps we ought to, because we’ve been living in a brief paradise — barely more than half a century — where we can get a shot or take a pill to cure ourselves of what used to be humanity’s worst horror.

Adding computed tomographic angiography (CTA) findings on coronary plaque extent to those on plaque presence and severity can greatly improve CAD risk evaluations, suggests a retrospective cohort study [1]

In it, whether or not coronary disease seen at CTA was deemed obstructive-that is, included a stenosis of at least 50% severity-adding data on CAD extent (number of diseased coronary segments) further stratified risk of CV death or nonfatal MI over several years, according to a report published online February 18, 2014 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging.

With antibiotic resistant infections on the rise and a scarce pipeline of novel drugs to combat them, researchers at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) are pursuing entirely new approaches to meet the challenge of drug-resistant infections by taming microbes rather than killing them. 

A promising new therapy has – for the first time – reduced damage to the brain that can be caused by Sanfilippo B (MPS IIIB), a rare and devastating genetic disease, Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) researchers reported today in a presentation at the Lysosomal Disease Network’s 10th Annual WORLD Symposium™.

With very few treatment options available to fight deadly mucormycosis infections, a new Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) study holds hope for adding to the arsenal of therapies physicians have to combat an increasingly common infection afflicting people with weakened immune systems.