Latest University of Illinois at Chicago Stories

By Minkler, Meredith Hammel, Joy; Gill, Carol J; Magasi, Susan; Vasquez, Victoria Breckwich; Bristo, Marca; Coleman, Diane From 1997 to 2003, Illinois was spending approximately 80% of its long-term care budget on nursing homes and institutional care and was facing significant challenges to its long-term care delivery and the need to rebalance toward community-based supports for people with disabilities. A case-based program evaluation was done to analyze Moving Out of the Nursing Home to...

By Lin, Hsiang-Wen Pickard, A Simon; Mahady, Gail B; Popovich, Nicholas G Objectives. To describe the conceptual development of a measure for assessing pharmacist knowledge of herbal and dietary supplements. Methods. A standardized approach to constructing a multiple-choice competency examination following 8 pre-specified criteria (eg, specifying the target spectrum of herbal and dietary supplements) was used to create an item bank. The quality of each item was evaluated by 5 herbal and...

Reshaping of the DNA scaffolding that supports and controls the expression of genes in the brain may play a major role in the alcohol withdrawal symptoms, particularly anxiety, that make it so difficult for alcoholics to stop using alcohol.The finding is reported by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in the April 2 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.DNA can undergo changes in function without any changes in inheritance or coded...

Mercury is a large component of dental fillings, but it is not believed to pose immediate health risks in that form. When exposed to sulfate-reducing bacteria, however, mercury undergoes a chemical change and becomes methylated, making it a potent, ingestible neurotoxin.While the major source of neurotoxic mercury comes from coal-fired electric power plants, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at Urbana-Champaign say mercury entering drain water from dental clinics and...

A University of Illinois at Chicago scientist will lead a team testing a robotic probe in a polar-style, under-ice exploration that may have out-of-this world applications.But the team will keep to a venue that's much closer to home.Peter Doran, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at UIC, will lead the team Feb. 11-15 working in the icy waters of Lake Mendota off the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.They'll conduct an under-ice test of a NASA-funded robotic...

Using a nuclear magnetic resonance technique, University of Illinois at Chicago chemists have obtained the first molecular-level images of precursors of bundled fibrils that form the brain plaques seen in Alzheimer's disease. Untangling the molecular structure of these pre-fibril forms, which may be the key neurotoxins in Alzheimer's, may help identify targets for new drugs to combat many neurodegenerative diseases. Microscopic bundled fibrils made of proteins called amyloid-beta are presumed...

Wound healing is slow when an animal is stressed, but extra oxygen almost completely reverses the effect, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.In a study of laboratory mice, Phillip Marucha, professor of periodontics at the UIC College of Dentistry, and his colleagues found that psychological stress, brought on by confinement, delayed the closing of wounds by more than 45 percent. A range of cell and genetic changes accounted for the slow recovery. "The cells...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are unraveling the biochemical mechanism by which functional foods combat cancer. "Compounds like sulforaphane in broccoli and resveratrol in wine have been shown to prevent cancer," said Andrew Mesecar, associate professor of pharmaceutical biotechnology in the UIC College of Pharmacy. "They do that by signaling our bodies to ramp up the production of proteins capable of preventing damage to our DNA. "We now have a good...

Compounds found in raisins fight bacteria in the mouth that cause cavities and gum disease, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Our laboratory analyses showed that phytochemicals in this popular snack food suppressed the growth of oral bacteria associated with caries and gum disease," said Christine Wu, professor and associate dean for research at the UIC College of Dentistry and lead author of the study. Phytochemicals are compounds found in higher...