In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have used a urine test to identify and verify a patient's type of asthma. The study, which.
Credit: Mattias Ahlm
In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have used a urine test to identify and verify a patient s type of asthma. The study, which has been published in the
American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, lays the foundation for a more personalized diagnosis and may result in improved treatment of severe asthma in the future.
About 10 percent of the Swedish population suffers from asthma, a disease that has become increasingly widespread over the past 50 years, with annual global mortality of around 400,000 according to the World Health Organization. Asthma is characterized by chronic inflammation in the airways, which can result in symptoms including coughing, mucous formation and shortness of breath.
An important and still unanswered question is how new genes that cause antibiotic resistance arise. In a new study, Swedish and American researchers have shown how new genes that produce resistance can arise from completely random DNA sequences. The results have been published in the journal PLOS Genetics.
Academic who thought out of the box
The demise of this most gracious lady left most of us in Kandy, more specifically, the Faculty of Medicine at Peradeniya, with a singular sense of loss. She not only was an academic par excellence, but imbibed as she was of eastern culture, gave the medical school values that many generations of doctors, from this institute fondly remember and treasure.
Our paths crossed in 1963 -me, a medical student and she, a junior lecturer in Anatomy of a fledgling faculty, seeking a brand name. Her husband, Professor Tommy Wikramanayake had come earlier in 1962 as a founder member of the Department of Medical Biochemistry. The two, in time, were to commit of their time and energy to uplift the basic science departments of the faculty they had come to love to heights they have now come to hold, being some of the best in the country.