2014 Australian Transplant Games comes to Melbourne

Photo source:
australiantransplantgames.com

The 2014 Australian Transplant Games are set to be held in Melbourne over eight days in September. With more than 21 competitive sports and 10 special events, the 2014 games will be Australia's largest single event promoting tissue donation.

August 31 - De Castella Run for Mental Health 2014

MAPrc now has a generous donor who will match every dollar raised up to $30,000.  You could help them with the De Castella Run for Mental Health 2014 (Sunday 31 August), in the following ways:

1. Register as a runner
2. Fundraise by creating a fundraising account
3. Sponsor a runner
4. Donate to MAPrc

This year funds raised will go towards establishing a new PhD scholarship at the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre (MAPrc). The selected recipient will join the team of clinicians, researchers and post graduate students to help mend minds by conducting a series of high quality clinical research projects under the direct supervision of MAPrc Director, Professor Jayashri Kulkarni

Participants sought: Anxiety in perimenopausal women - what factors increase it?

Women have double the risk of developing mood disturbances compared to men and perimenopause is the time of greatest vulnerability of developing mood disturbances such as anxiety. The aim of this study is to investigate factors that increase the risk of anxiety during perimenopause. If you are interested in taking part in this study for either the mood disturbance or control group, please contact Cindy Zahrany: cgzah1@student.monash.edu or Emmy Gavrilidis: 9076 6913 or emmy.gavrilidis@monash.edu

Goat’s milk moisturizer induces goat’s cheese allergic reaction

Image: Jinx!

"Food is meant to be eaten, not rubbed into inflamed skin," says Professor Robyn O'Hehir. A woman has experienced a life-threatening allergic reaction after eating goat’s cheese, which Alfred-based researchers say was triggered through repeated use of a moisturiser containing goat's milk. The case study, published this week in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, pinpoints goat’s milk as the offending ingredient, and highlights the argument for skin care preparations to be bland and to avoid "agents capable of sensitisation, especially foods."

What the Rubber Hand Illusion can tell us about Body Dysmorphic Disorder

Image: Vanderbilt
University

Evidence from past research suggests that behaviours and characteristics related to body dissatisfaction may be associated with greater instability of perceptual body image, possibly due to problems in the integration of body-related multisensory information. A MAPrc team investigated whether people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a condition characterised by body image disturbances, demonstrated enhanced susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which arises as a result of multisensory (i.e. touch and vision) integration processes when a rubber hand and the participant's hidden real hand are stimulated in synchrony.

Sharon Lewin on the Lancet seminar paper overviewing HIV infection

Prof Sharon Lewin video

Prof Gary Maartens, Prof Connie Celum and Prof Sharon Lewin, Department of Infectious Diseases, have published a seminar article in The Lancet, "HIV infection: epidemiology, pathogenesis, treatment, and prevention". Sharon gives an overview of the article, including her own area of pathogenesis, covering recent developments in immune activation and vaccine development. "No-one clears HIV spontaneously", she says, which is a very unusual feature for a virus. Treatments are now investigating latency, or how to 'wake up' dormant virus hidden within cells. #HIV also causes low level inflammation from immune activation, which contributes to chronic disease development. See The Lancet abstract. Also see 24/06/2014 Monash story.

Recent publications: Medicine, surgery, anaesthesia, cancer, neuroscience

Dworkin S, Simkin J, Darido C, Partridge DD, Georgy SR, Caddy J, Wilanowski T, Lieschke GJ, Doggett K, Heath JK, Jane SM. Grainyhead-like 3 regulation of endothelin-1 in the pharyngeal endoderm is critical for growth and development of the craniofacial skeleton. Mech Dev. 2014 Jun 7. pii: S0925-4773(14)00029-X. doi: 10.1016/j.mod.2014.05.005. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24915580.

Lewis PM, Smielewski P, Rosenfeld JV, Pickard JD, Czosnyka M. A Continuous Correlation Between Intracranial Pressure and Cerebral Blood Flow Velocity Reflects Cerebral Autoregulation Impairment During Intracranial Pressure Plateau Waves. Neurocrit Care. 2014 May 28. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 24865272 full text.

Myles PS. Antifibrinolytics, aspirin and cardiac surgery: evidence, guidelines and implications for current research. Anaesth Intensive Care. 2014 May;42(3):293-7. PubMed PMID: 24847551

Myles PS. Untangling the triple low: causal inference in anesthesia research. Anesthesiology. 2014 Jul;121(1):1-3. doi: 10.1097/ALN.0000000000000282. PubMed PMID: 24936917

Oehme D, Goldschlager T, Ghosh P, Jenkin G, Rosenfeld JV. Concern over the use of recombinant bone morphogenetic protein in spinal fusion surgery: are stem cells an alternative? ANZ J Surg. 2014 May;84(5):302-3. PubMed PMID: 24877230

Szmulewicz DJ, McLean CA, Rodriguez ML, Chancellor AM, Mossman S, Lamont D, Roberts L, Storey E, Halmagyi GM. Dorsal root ganglionopathy is responsible for the sensory impairment in CANVAS. Neurology. 2014 Apr 22;82(16):1410-5. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000000352. Epub 2014 Mar 28. PubMed PMID: 24682971

Tremblay CS, Curtis DJ. The clonal evolution of leukemic stem cells in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Curr Opin Hematol. 2014 Jul;21(4):320-5. doi: 10.1097/MOH.0000000000000058. PubMed PMID: 24857886