Inside Duke Medicine
SOM Research Roundup: Better patient-care, one discovery at a time
posted January 20th, 2010
The latest research news from the School of Medicine.
Race, diabetes and prostate cancer
Obese white men who have both diabetes and prostate cancer have significantly worse outcomes following radical prostatectomy than do men without diabetes who undergo the same procedure, according to research appearing in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Many studies have shown that diabetes is associated with a lower risk of developing prostate cancer -- at least in white men -- but the effect of diabetes on outcomes after prostate cancer surgery has not been as clear.
“We found that diabetes was significantly associated with more aggressive disease in obese white men and less aggressive disease for all other subsets of men in our study,” says Stephen Freedland, M.D., associate professor of urology and pathology at the Duke Prostate Center and member of the Urology Section, Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham.
Duke researchers have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song.
Their research lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people whose auditory nerves are damaged and who must learn to speak without the benefit of hearing their own voices.
“This work is the first study to identify an auditory feedback pathway in the brain that is harnessed for learned vocal control,” said Richard Mooney, Ph.D., Duke professor of neurobiology and senior author of the study. The researchers also devised an elegant way to carefully alter the activity of these neurons to prove that they interact with the motor networks that control singing.
Compounds that help protect nerve cells discovered by Duke team
A team led by Dennis J. Thiele, Ph.D., Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology has found some compounds that improve a cell's ability to properly "fold" proteins and could lead to promising drugs for degenerative nerve diseases, including Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
Misfolded proteins neurons are a common factor in all of these diseases. The Duke team has identified many new chemicals that activate a master regulator to increase the supply of “protein chaperone” molecules that help fold proteins properly.