A review of the studies on the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) found that it is an accurate predictor of survival of patients with a variety of liver diseases, is particularly useful in allocating organs for liver transplants, and can also be used to help determine the course of treatment in certain cases. However, it is possible to improve the accuracy of the model and efforts at refining will continue.

Cancer can be wily, and those who treat the disease have amassed a wide array of weapons with which to fight it and kill tumors. Radiation therapy and various forms of chemotherapy were all thought to be separate but equal treatments.

Each year 170,000 people around the world die of this type of meningitis, according to the World Health Organization, WHO. Bacterial meningitis, as the disease is called, can even spark epidemics: in Africa 250,000 people were affected in a matter of weeks in the late 1990s. Without treatment, mortality among those who contract the disease is 85-90 percent, with treatment some 10-15 percent. Patients also run a high risk of serious disability after recovery.

A study involving eight patients suggests that multiple low-energy treatments with a plasma skin regeneration tool may help to reduce wrinkles and improve facial appearance with minimal healing time, according to an article in the February issue of Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Cancer cells are sick, but they keep growing because they don't react to internal signals urging them to die. Now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found an efficient way to get a messenger into cancer cells that forces them to respond to death signals. And they did it using one of the most sinister pathogens around - HIV.

While human changes to the environment cause conservation biologists to worry about species extinction, Yale biologists are reversing the logic by trying to trap viruses in habitats that force their extinction, according to a report in Ecology Letters.

Research by scientists at UCL (University College London) has clearly demonstrated for the first time the structure and function of a gene crucial to the regulation of blood pressure. The discovery could be important in the search for new treatments for illnesses such as heart disease, the UK's biggest killer.

Although several medications are available to help children maintain asthma control, clinical trials directly comparing them have not been conducted. In fact, current recommendations in national and international asthma guidelines are based either on studies of single treatments compared to a placebo in children or on comparison studies in adults.

A scientific breakthrough at Rice University could lead to the first treatment that prevents the build-up of deadly scar tissue in a broad class of diseases that account for an estimated 45 percent of U.S. deaths each year.