Why are women predisposed to autoimmune rheumatic diseases?

In the current issue of Arthritis Research & Therapy, Jacqueline Oliver and Alan Silman explore the various factors that influence susceptibility to the major autoimmune connective tissue disorders, in search for an explanation for the high female-to-male predisposition ratio.

Autoimmune diseases of all organ sites and systems affect approximately 8% of the population, around 78% of whom are women.  The majority of studies into this female predominance have focused on examining the affect of hormonal fluctuations on disease risk.

Oliver and Silman provide a detailed review of these hormonal influences, as well as genetics and gender differences in lifestyle factors, focusing on rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and scleroderma. The authors convey the complexity of autoimmune disease susceptibility and the need for further studies to disentangle the many contributing factors.

Review   
Why are women predisposed to autoimmune rheumatic diseases?
Jacqueline E Oliver, Alan J Silman
Arthritis Research & Therapy 2009, 11:252 (26 October 2009)
[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]

The commissioned reviews published in Arthritis Research & Therapy's regular issues usually require a subscription for access, but a free 30-day trial is available. Moreover, recipients of the BioMed Central Update, in which Arthritis Research & Therapy features regularly, are provided with unique opportunities to freely access subscription review content published in BMC journals. Register for the Update here, or alternatively, recommend the journal to your librarian via the website.

Abigail Jones
Senior Assistant Editor - Arthritis Research & Therapy

Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 12:32    Comments (0)

Automated Experimentation - a new independent, open access journal

Automated Experimentation launched today, providing a new platform for biomedical and informatics researchers to revise, re-use and recombine their automated experimentation processes or protocols. With recent advances in engineering, laboratory robotics and informatics, the automation of experiments are becoming increasingly important for expediting large-scale research, particularly in areas such as systems biology and translational medicine.

“Our aim is to bring together the diverse forms of automated experimentation and, by studying them in an abstract but practical way, understand how they generalise across domains”, say Editors-in-Chief, Siu-Wai Leung, Dave Robertson and Dietlind Gerloff in their launch Editorial, concluding, “In this way we hope Automated Experimentation will promote new styles of computationally inspired experimental thinking.”

Please view the journal website to read the first three articles published in Automated Experimentation. If you would like to know when new articles are published in the journal, please sign up for article alerts

Posted by Anne Braae at 12:21    Comments (0)

Speedy diagnosis for mitochondrial disorders

A team led by Sihoun Hahn and Jay Shendure from Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington present a molecular diagnostic tool for mitochondrial disease in their article titled “Next generation sequence analysis for mitochondrial disorders”, recently published in Genome Medicine. This is the 100th article published in Genome Medicine, BioMed Central’s premier medical journal, since its launch in January 2009.

Next-generation sequencing technologies herald an era when personal genome information may be used to guide medical decisions. While complete genome sequences are not yet cost-effective for routine clinical use, methods which target specific genomic regions have already become practical for disease diagnosis.  

The method described by Hahn and colleagues uses array-based technology and genetic sequencing to screen patients’ DNA for variations in 362 genes which have been associated with mitochondrial disease or mitochondrial function. Thanks to its lower cost and faster turnaround, this approach could replace the protracted tests currently needed to determine some rare mitochondrial mutations and it may also lead to discovery of new mutations and genes which affect mitochondrial function.

Genome Medicine publishes high-quality genomic and post-genomic research that significantly advances our understanding and management of human health and disease.  Thanks to the active involvement of exceptional section editors and editorial board members, Genome Medicine has published a wide range of research articles, reviews, meeting reports and commentaries in the past ten months, and we look forward to continued growth and involvement with the research community.

Read the article by Hahn and colleagues, register for article updates and submit your next outstanding research manuscript to Genome Medicine.  For quick feedback on the suitability of your manuscript, we welcome presubmission enquiries.

Rebecca Furlong
Assistant Editor, Genome Medicine

Posted by Rebecca Furlong at 10:49    Comments (0)

Arthritis Research & Therapy's 10th anniversary issue published in full

This month Arthritis Research & Therapy (AR&T) published the final installment of its 10th anniversary issue, 'The Scientific Basis of Rheumatology: A Decade of Progress' - a comprehensive, up-to-date and freely available rheumatology reference work spanning more than 400 pages.

This special, four-part collection of 38 review articles - commissioned to celebrate AR&T's 10 years of publication and published over the past 12 months - has been written by an internationally recognised group of experts with the aim of providing clinicians and researchers with a detailed overview of the current status of basic, translational and clinical research in rheumatology. The articles outline the biologic processes underlying rheumatic diseases and analyse the most significant developments in specific rheumatic diseases from the past decade.

View the full table of contents on the journal website.

“The past 10 years have seen an explosion of new information in rheumatology research” said AR&T Editors-in-Chief, Peter E Lipsky and Ravinder N. Maini. “This collection produced for AR&T’s 10th anniversary will help readers around the world understand the nature of the new developments that not only should stimulate additional interdisciplinary research on unsolved problems but also foster the timely application of this new knowledge into better patient care.”

All articles in this collection have been freely available immediately on publication without a subscription, along with all editorials, letters and research articles published in the AR&T. Reviews in the regular journal issues published more than 6 months previously are also available to non-subscribers. A free 30-day online trial subscription is available via the website.

Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 11:58    Comments (0)

Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy publishes first research article

Persistence pays off, at least that is the message from Rountree et al. in the first research article published in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy.  This article, ‘Persistent treatment with cholinesterase inhibitors and/or memantine slows clinical progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD)’ reports their findings that persistent treatment had a positive impact on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression by multiple cognitive and functional outcome measures.

Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy publishes basic research with a translational focus, as well as looking at animal models of disease, biomarkers, clinical trials, and research into drug discovery and development. Although the primary focus is Alzheimer’s dementia, the scope will encompass translational research into other neurodegenerative diseases. 

The Editors-in-Chief of Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy are Professors Douglas Galasko, Todd Golde, and Gordon Wilcock, who are supported by an exceptional international Editorial Board.

Submit your next manuscript to Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy to join the pioneering authors who are publishing in this exciting journal. For more details about the journal, please visit the journal information page, or contact the editorial office. To keep up to date with the latest developments, news and articles being published in this exciting, please register to receive regular alerts.

Frances Mulvany
In-house Editor – Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy

Posted by Alison Cobb at 10:54    Comments (0)

Science and technology news in the developing world

There's been a lot of focus on internet technology in the developing world recently. In late August Zunia Knowledge Exchange published a report which provides a detailed mapping of best practice for the implementation of sustainable local broadband access network.

Last month the BBC's dot.life blog explored how technology is shaping the developing world. In this series entitled 'Africa gets connected', Rory Cellan-Jones toured East Africa where a handful of commercial and government projects have been racing to give Africa the bandwidth it needs.  

Meanwhile, in Central Africa, many countries are set to benefit from a $215 million World Bank backbone programme to provide reliable, high-speed, low-cost internet access to the region for the first time. Cameroon, Chad and the Central African Republic will take part in the initial phase.

Finally, in other technology news, Africa Gathering, a popular tech/Africa organisation, is holding an event in Nairobi on the 21st and 22nd December 2009. The organisers are now calling for papers.

Posted by Charlotte Webber at 17:39    Comments (0)

A new home for experimental stroke research

Today has seen the launch of Experimental & Translational Stroke Medicine, a journal dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of new knowledge in the field of experimental stroke research, with the aim of improving the quality of stroke research and facilitating the successful translation of novel treatment strategies into clinical practice.

Amongst the first articles to be published in the journal are detailed reviews on potential new drug candidates currently nearing the end of development such as the hematopoietic factors G-CSF (Minnerup et al), and EPO (Byts and Siren). A detailed review is given by Dr Linker and Dr Lee on recent MS models which are more clinically relevant than the established experimental autoimmune encephalitis. In addition, Dr Gee and colleagues provide clear-cut evidence regarding the possible detrimental effects of the mucosal administration of antigen in terms of autoimmunity.

With their primary aim being to improve the quality of research in this field and reduce translational failure from bench to beside, Editor-in-Chief Wolf-Rüdiger Schäbitz and Deputy Editor Christoph Kleinschnitz explain in their launch editorial how they believe that the open access format BMC offers "is ideally suited to rapidly and broadly disseminating novel findings and promoting fruitful discussion amongst active stroke researchers" and how they would like to “encourage the stroke community to make full use of this very welcome resource”.

For further information about the journal, please visit the journal’s website or view the instructions for authors if you would like to submit a manuscript.

Posted by Sally Robertson at 13:45    Comments (0)

A new method for next-generation re-sequencing of mouse chromosomes

A team led by David Adams from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and colleagues at the MRC Mammalian Genetics Unit and Case Western Reserve University demonstrate the application of next-generation sequencing to re-sequence whole mouse chromosomes for genetic studies in an article published today in Genome Biology.

Currently only a single mouse genome sequence is available – that of the mouse strain C57BL/6J. This sequence is rather different from the sequence of other mouse strains that are commonly used in genetic studies. In the Genome Biology article, assemblies of chromosome 17 from the A/J and CAST/Ei strains were constructed from high-throughput sequence data at a depth of at least 22X. AJ is a classical laboratory strain, which is closely related to the ‘reference’ C57BL/6J strain, while the CAST/Ei strain is highly divergent from the reference as it was derived from a wild isolate. The authors identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and structural variants in the chromosome 17 assemblies and also demonstrate how these sequences can be used to profile quantitative trait loci genes. New algorithms for identifying copy number variations (CNVs) and for SNP filtering, as well as an assembly algorithm are also presented.

The new approaches demonstrated here open the way for a new era of rodent functional genomics.

Read the article by Adams and colleagues in Genome Biology.

Posted by Emma Ralph at 15:49    Comments (0)

Women in clinical trials: A new commentary in BMC Medicine

In BMC Medicine this month, Jesse Berlin and Susan Ellenberg comment on the concerns, controversy and confounding issues surrounding the exclusion of women from clinical trials.

Traditionally, theoretical fears about gender differences in treatment effects and legitimate concerns of exposing fetuses to investigational drugs have surrounded the idea of involving women in clinical trials. Berlin and Ellenberg discuss how gender inequity in clinical research has been challenged, and highlight the broader issue of individual differences in biological factors, and genetic factors in particular, that may ultimately lead to a future of personalised medicine for everybody.

We look forward to hearing from our readers and authors about their thoughts on this polarising subject. For this and more why not sign up for article alerts from BMC Medicine?

Further, we hope that you will submit your high quality research to BMC Medicine. If you are unsure whether your research falls within our scope why not send us a pre-submission query.

Mick Aulakh

Assistant Editor, BMC Medicine

Posted by Mick Aulakh at 11:07    Comments (0)

Chinese Medicine invites submissions for two thematic series

Chinese Medicine is currently inviting research submissions to two forthcoming thematic article series:

• Ginseng and Notoginseng edited by Ricky NS Wong (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Karl WK Tsim (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
• The Semantic Web for Chinese Medicine edited by Kei Cheung (Yale University) and Huajun Chen (Zhejiang University)

Authors are invited to submit their latest research on either topic by the end of January 2010. 

Chinese Medicine, the official journal of the International Society for Chinese Medicine, aims to publish research across the whole field of chinese medicine .

Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 18:16    Comments (0)

Journal of Medical Case Reports and Cases Journal return to BioMed Central

BioMed Central is once again publishing the Journal of Medical Case Reports (JMCR) and Cases Journal. Since their inception both these journals, which currently provide over 2000 freely accessible case reports, have received widespread recognition and high quality submissions from across the medical community.  Through their innovative approach, both these journals make each individual patient's case a valuable addition to medical literature.

Journal of Medical Case Reports, edited by Professor Michael Kidd, has published many landmark clinical cases across all areas of medicine including cancer, ophthalmology, gastroenterology, infectious diseases and musculoskeletal disorders. These cases can often serve as early warning signals for the adverse effects of new medications, or the presentations of new and emerging diseases.

Cases Journal, which is edited by former BMJ Editor (and regular Guardian columnist) Richard Smith, will look to complete the scientific record for future generations by publishing any report that is understandable, ethical, authentic, and includes all information essential to its interpretation.

Over the past few years, authors have submitted case reports to these journals from countries as far afield as Nepal and Iran. This once again signifies the inherent value that case reports have to improving clinical practice globally and also the increasing power of the Internet to allow for the widespread sharing of knowledge and thus the advancement of the understanding and treatment of diseases.

Both journals are open for submission to medical professionals on case reports of medicine, and will undergo rapid peer review. To find out more on how to submit a case report, please take a look at our instructions for authors and our peer review policies. We also encourage patients to contribute to the case report by adding a ‘Patient’s perspective’.

Miriam Kingsley
In-house Editor - Journal of Medical Case Reports/Cases Journal

Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 17:17    Comments (0)

Three more BioMed Central journals indexed by Thomson Reuters

BMC Medical Ethics, Journal of Inflammation and Pediatric Rheumatology have all recently been accepted for indexing by Thomson Reuters and are on course to receive their first Impact Factors.

BMC Medical Ethics will receive its first impact factor in June 2012, and currently has an unofficial Impact Factor of 1.68. It is the 35th journal within the BMC-series to be accepted for tracking by Thomson Reuters.

Journal of Inflammation is due to receive its first Impact Factor in June 2011 and currently has an unofficial impact factor of 1.75.  The journal launched with BioMed Central in 2004 and recently affiliated with the British Inflammation Research Association (BIRAS).

Pediatric Rheumatology will receive its first Impact Factor in June 2012.  The journal transferred to BioMed Central in 2007, in its 5^th year of publication.

Full details on indexing of all BioMed Central journals is available from our website.

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 16:48    Comments (0)

Ockham’s broom and the disclosure of dirty secrets – New in Journal of Biology

No, not Ockham’s razor and the parsimony principle. Ockham’s broom, newer by some centuries, is an implement conceived by Sydney Brenner whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet, and now adopted by Journal of Biology as the umbrella title for a new series in which the inconvenient facts hitherto resolutely ignored by some subsection of biologists are confronted.

A notable example of the past operation of Ockham’s broom is in what Charlie Janeway memorably called the immunologist’s dirty little secret: briefly, you can get lymphocytes to produce antibodies against pretty well any defined chemical, but only if you inject something messier, usually at that time dried mycobacterium, along with them. Immunologists, focusing on the lymphocytes that produce the antibodies, disregarded the implications of the mycobacterial adjuvant until Janeway brilliantly exposed the now accepted reality that lymphocytes generally don’t respond to anything unless they are activated by more evolutionarily ancient phagocytic cells geared to the recognition of conserved features of pathogens.

Another example is the focus in the 1970s on viral causes of human cancer, inspired by insights from animal tumor viruses but that did not account for the vast preponderance of tumors of epithelia which viruses do not selectively infect.

The Ockham’s broom series will be eclectic and occasional, because interesting and appropriate topics crop up across all of biology but not every day: the first, by Bruce Mayer and colleagues, is on signaling complexes which they argue we must stop seeing as defined assemblages of interacting proteins in favour of the dynamic reality. A signaling complex is not a ribosome.

Posted by Miranda Robertson at 15:35    Comments (1)

BioMed Central opens new Stem Cell Gateway

BioMed Central has recently launched the Stem Cell Gateway, providing easy access to all the latest stem cell related research published across BioMed Central's journals. The Gateway complements our new journal  Stem Cell Research & Therapy - the major forum for translational research into stem cell therapies - which is now accepting submissions.

The Stem Cell Gateway includes research highlights, as well as profiles of authors in the field and an interactive map, AuthorMapper, which enables you to explore based on author locations and to discover wider relationships and find experts in your field.

Soon to be launched in early 2010, Stem Cell Research & Therapy is an international peer-reviewed journal and will publish open access research articles of outstanding quality. Please sign up on the Stem Cell Research & Therapy website to receive regular updates, and to read and submit original research articles.

Posted by Andrea Melendez at 15:03    Comments (0)

EvoDevo is now accepting submissions!

EvoDevo, a new open access journal on the hot topic of evolutionary developmental biology, is ready to accept submissions.

Topics of interest include comparative gene function and expression, homology and character evolution, comparative genomics, phylogenetics and palaeontology.

This soon-to-be launched BioMed Central journal is overseen by co-Editors-in-Chief Mark Q Martindale (University of Hawaii, USA) and Max Telford (University College London, UK), who are supported by an expert Editorial Board.

For more information on EvoDevo please visit the journal website or contact the Editorial Office. Why not register for updates keeping you abreast of any journal developments?

Submit your research to EvoDevo and take advantage of an efficient online submission process, a rapid, high quality peer-review service and high visibility. There are no extra charges or limits on the number of color figures or movies you wish to include.

Posted by Emma Pettengale at 12:41    Comments (0)