In a collaborative study with the World Health Organization and seven other laboratories, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have compiled a list of 93 common mutations of the AIDS virus associated with drug resistance that will be used to track future resistance trends throughout the world.

Diagnosing and treating obstructive sleep apnea may soon become much less expensive and arduous, thanks to new research showing that a simplified program using experienced nurses, home ambulatory diagnosis and auto-titrating continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines to titrate CPAP pressures is not inferior to the traditional model which relies on specialist physicians and sleep studies.

The combination of two drugs produces a critical improvement in the treatment of certain brain tumours. This has been demonstrated by researchers at Bonn University working in co-operation with German and Swiss colleagues in a current study. They treated 39 patients who had been diagnosed with a so-called gliablastoma. The patients survived on average 23 months; with the standard therapy the mean would have been 14.6 months. Glioblastomas are the most aggressive and the commonest brain tumours. Left untreated, they prove fatal within just a few weeks. The study has been published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (doi: 10.1200/JCO.2008.19.2195).