Health and Medicine

In a series of studies designed to define the role of dietary macronutrients in the initiation of arterial inflammation that predisposes a person to atherosclerosis, University at Buffalo researchers have found that a high intake of glucose, or eating a high-fat, high-calorie fast-food meal causes an increase in the blood's inflammatory components.

A drug used widely as an insulin sensitizer appears also to have a significant anti-inflammatory effect in diabetics, a property that could make it useful in helping to prevent heart disease in these patients, a study by endocrinologists at the University at Buffalo has found.

Contrary to its revolutionary promise as a gender-free zone, cyberculture, women cyberspace pioneers argue, reproduces the power dynamics of sexist and racist practices and has a mythology that perpetuates inequality. They speak their minds in "Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture" (MIT Press, 2002), a groundbreaking collection of theoretical and fictional writing co-edited by UB librarian Austin Booth.

The goal of the massive international project being coordinated at the University at Buffalo is no less than to produce a critical investigation of a major author's creative processes unparalleled in the history of literary scholarship. It involves the annotation, cross-referencing and publication in print and on DVD of the content of the 60 handwritten notebooks assembled by James Joyce and scores of assistants during the 16 years it took the author to write his masterwork, "Finnegans Wake."

Researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., have found that when fathers recover from substance abuse, their children exhibit significant improvements in psychosocial functioning.

If the men and women of the U.S. Army's 402nd Civil Affairs Battalion depart for their next trouble spot with toothaches, it will be through no fault of the School of Dental Medicine at the University at Buffalo. The UB dental school is offering first-priority, at-cost dental services to the soldiers in the unit as it prepares for possible mobilization. The collaboration is the first such between a dental school and an Army Reserve special operations unit, and, if successful, could be used as a model for dental support to Reserve battalions across the country.

Niagara Hospice and the University at Buffalo's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences have formed a partnership, believed to be only the second of its kind in the United States, that will place both institutions at the forefront of research and instruction in hospice and palliative care.

Computer scientists at the University at Buffalo have provided the first peer-reviewed scientific validation that each person's handwriting is individual, according to a paper that will be published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in July.

A study of data from more than 26,000 U.S. hospitals covering outcomes of 38 million patients has shown that people treated in private for-profit hospitals in the U.S. have a greater risk of dying than those cared for in private not-for-profit hospitals.

Seneca Nation historian and "bioneer" John Mohawk, co-director of the University at Buffalo Center for the Americas, is up to his knees in heirloom corn. He is a staunch advocate of the slow-food movement, a worldwide effort to safeguard and promote the use of traditional, unprocessed foods that digest very slowly, which means they are a lot better for you than the foods that populate the average American diet.