coax, femur. Osteo- , osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, melanoma, bone-thinning, menopause

Evolution can really hurt

The same skeletal changes that allowed humans to walk upright make us vulnerable to knee osteoarthritis as we age.

進化真的很傷人

允許人類直立行走的相同骨骼變化使我們隨著年齡的增長更容易患膝骨關節炎。

6,000-Year-Old Knee Joints Suggest Osteoarthritis Isn't Just Wear And Tear

Even after a Harvard team took into account differences in age and weight among ancient specimens and knee joints today, they found that modern humans tend to have more osteoarthritis.

Crews found a 4-foot-long femur bone that experts have confirmed came from a mammoth, a prehistoric species that went extinct at least 10,000 years ago.

Ancient mammoth bones discovered under Oregon State's stadium

An expansion project at Oregon State University’s Reser Stadium has uncovered ancient mammoth bones under the football field’s end zone.

PBS.ORG

'China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation'

By XINRAN
Reviewed by JOSHUA HAMMER

A Chinese journalist coaxes reminiscences out of Cultural Revolution survivors.

NEWS ANALYSIS
No Cold War, but Big Chill
By STEVEN LEE MYERS Russia’s Georgian offensive shattered the strategy of three U.S. administrations to coax Russia into an alliance with the West.

Scientists Identify Two Genes Raising the Risk of Osteoporosis
LONDON, April 29 (Reuters) - British researchers have identified two common genetic mutations that increase the risk of osteoporosis and related bone fractures, according to a study released on Tuesday.

These changes were present in 20 percent of the people studied and highlight the potential role of screening for the bone-thinning disease that mainly affects women after menopause, they said in the journal Lancet.

menopause 
noun [U] (INFORMAL the change (of life)) ━━ n. （the ～） 月経閉止（期）, 更年期.
the time in a woman's life when she gradually stops having periods:
Most women go through UK the menopause/US menopause between the ages of 40 and 50.

menopausal
adjective
menopausal women/symptoms

coax
verb [T]
to persuade someone gently to do something or go somewhere, by being kind and patient, or by appearing to be:
Perhaps you could coax your father into taking you to the station.
He has some information I want, so I'm going to try to coax it out of him over a drink.
A mother was coaxing her reluctant child into the water.
a coaxing voice

coaxing [U]
A bit of gentle coaxing is all that's required and he'll come, I'm sure.
v., coaxed, coax·ing, coax·es. v.tr.

1. To persuade or try to persuade by pleading or flattery; cajole.
2. To obtain by persistent persuasion: coaxed the secret out of the child.
3. Obsolete. To caress; fondle.
4. To move to or adjust toward a desired end: “A far more promising approach to treating advanced melanoma is to coax the immune system to recognize melanoma cells as deadly” (Natalie Angier).

v.intr.
To use persuasion or inducement.

[Obsolete cokes, to fool, from cokes, fool.]

coaxer coax'er n.
coaxingly coax'ing·ly adv.
co·ax² (kō'ăks, kō-ăks')
n. Informal.
A coaxial cable.

melanoma

Malignant melanoma is a type of cancer arising from the melanocyte cells of the skin. The melanocytes are cells in the skin that produce the pigment melanin. Malignant melanoma develops when the melanocytes no longer respond to normal control mechanisms of cellular growth and are capable of invasion locally or spread to other organs in the body (metastasis), where again they invade and compromise the function of that organ.

変化《複》melanomas ; melanomata 文節mel・a・no・ma

• 名 《医》黒色腫｛こくしょくしゅ｝

os・te・o・po・ro・sis

━━ n. 【医】骨粗鬆(そしょう)症.


There are signs that high consumption of produce may improve bone
health, helping stave off osteoporosis. One recent study, also
published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found an
association between high fruit and vegetable intake and bone mineral
density in boys and girls ages 16 to 18, and a similar association
involving fruit intake in women ages 60 to 83. Vitamin C and other
antioxidants in fruit may play a role, the study's authors concluded.

Osteo- (prefix): Combining form meaning bone. From the Greek "osteon", bone. Appears for instance in osteoarthritis, osteochondroma osteodystrophy, osteogenesis, osteomyelitis, osteopathy, osteopetrosis, osteoporosis, osteosarcoma, etc.
骨質（前綴）：結合形意骨。從希臘的“骨”，骨。出現如骨關節炎，骨軟骨瘤性骨病，骨，骨髓炎，骨療法，骨硬化，骨質疏鬆症，骨肉瘤等。

最近一年爬樓梯時，膝蓋開始會疼痛，顯然已有Osteoarthritis (OA；退化性關節炎)之症狀

骨關節炎（英語：osteoarthritis，縮寫為OA）是一種以關節軟骨退行性變和繼發性骨質增生為特性的慢性關節疾病。多見於中老年人，女性多於男性。好發於負重較大的膝關節、髖關節、腰骶部脊柱關節（Lumbosacral joint）及第一蹠趾關節（First MIP joints）等部位，以及手部的遠端手指間關節（Interphalangeal joints of the hand/DIP joint）、遠端腳趾間關節（Interphalangeal joints of foot/DIP joint）、近端手指間關節（Interphalangeal joints of the hand/PIP joint）。該病亦稱為骨關節病、退行性關節炎、增生行關節炎、退化性關節炎、骨性關節炎等。隨著人口的老化以及肥胖比率上升，骨關節炎的盛行率將會提高。

Bear Bones

What Hibernating Bears
Can Teach Us About Osteoporosis

By IVAN ORANSKY
January 9, 2008

See Corrections & Amplifications item below.

While hiking in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, Seth Donahue ran into quite a few bears. The lumbering omnivores filled Dr. Donahue, a biomedical engineer, with curiosity rather than fear.

Why don't bears suffer from osteoporosis during hibernation, he asked himself during one wilderness encounter nearly a decade ago? Even a few weeks of inactivity for humans, and most animals, are enough to soften and weaken bones. But bears snooze as much as six months a year and wake up robust and ready to rumble.

Dr. Donahue, now 39 and a professor at Michigan Technological University, figured there might be a substance in bears that helps keep their bones strong. If he could find it, he might also find better treatments for osteoporosis in humans.

RELATED LINKS

Information about Donahue and his lab: http://www.biomed.mtu.edu/swdonahu/

Scientific papers by Donahue:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=PureSearch&db=pubmed&term=donahue_sw

Osteoporosis affects tens of millions of Americans, and drugs to treat the disease represent a multibillion-dollar market. But most of the medicines don't restore bone -- they only slow its deterioration.

Dr. Donahue found that bears have a uniquely potent form of a substance called parathyroid hormone, which helps maintain bones. The ursine version of the substance spurs bone growth when it normally wouldn't occur, offsetting the deterioration that one would expect for a bear snoozing away in the woods.

Dr. Donahue's group has sequenced the gene for the bear parathyroid hormone and has had a small amount of it made synthetically. He's applied for a government grant to fund the lab's efforts to insert the gene into bacteria and coax them to produce the substance.

But how do you get a hormone sample from a bear in the first place? Very carefully. At first, Dr. Donahue relied on a colleague at Virginia Tech for blood samples taken from a half-dozen bears tracked with radio tags.

Even hibernating bears need to be anesthetized before a needle is inserted to draw their blood, or they might awaken, distorting the results and putting the researchers at risk. "It's not like rats where you can get 100 animals and bring them into the lab and do whatever you want with them," Dr. Donahue said.

Later, he teamed up with Washington State University's Charles Robbins, who was studying changes in the hearts of hibernating bears. Dr. Robbins had a group of black bears raised in captivity that were comfortable around humans and were used to having tests performed. That gave Dr. Donahue's lab an easier way to get blood samples.

Seth Donahue and a student examine a black bear femur.

Despite the hurdles, Dr. Donahue, it turns out, wasn't the first scientist to be curious about bear bones. In 1990, a Boise, Idaho, orthopedic surgeon named Tim Floyd captured a few bears, anesthetized them and biopsied a large bone in their hips.

Dr. Floyd's findings were provocative, Dr. Donahue said, because they suggested that bears didn't lose bone during hibernation. Dr. Floyd entered private practice and didn't pursue his findings. But when he learned of Dr. Donahue's work, Dr. Floyd kicked in some of his own money to keep it rolling. Dr. Donahue also receives support from the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Universities Commercialization Initiative.

Dr. Donahue published his first results in 2003 when he was doing post-doctoral research at Penn State University. The results were perplexing because they seemed to suggest that bears were actually losing bone during hibernation. "At that point my hopes weren't as high, but I was still interested," Dr. Donahue said.

He kept at it, and published a paper later in 2003, after he had moved to Michigan Tech, showing that bone growth in hibernating bears was equal to the rate of loss. After the bears wake up in the spring, the bone grows even more rapidly.

Washing mouse bone cells with blood taken from bears in different seasons supported the idea that the winter samples had boosted bone formation, according to another paper he published in 2006.

Dr. Donahue's research on bears has advanced far enough toward a treatment for humans to capture commercial interest. Apjohn Group, a company founded by former Pharmacia & Upjohn executives in Kalamazoo, Mich., has an agreement with Michigan Tech to commercialize Dr. Donahue's technology. To do that, they've created a company called Aursos, a name derived from ursos, Latin for bears.

Apjohn's Ron Shebuski, who once studied snake venom and vampire bat saliva as a researcher at Merck, praised Dr. Donahue's elegant and sometimes risky work on parathyroid hormone in bears. "Seth is just a maniac on this stuff," he said.

Most available osteoporosis drugs, such as Merck's Fosamax, slow the breakdown of bone, but they don't do much to build it up. An exception is Eli Lilly's Forteo, a shortened version of the human parathyroid hormone, with about $500 million in sales. Forteo can build bone, but the drug, taken in a daily injection, carries a black-box warning about cancer risks because of tumors found in rats treated with the medicine.

Dr. Donahue, now on sabbatical in Ireland, says his lab just finished treating some rats with a synthetic version of human parathyroid hormone -- not unlike Forteo -- and others with bear parathyroid hormone to see which did a better job building up bone. Next up are studies in female rats whose ovaries have been removed, creating a menopause-like condition.

Dr. Donahue is unlikely to see any bears while in Ireland; they're extinct there. But he did admit to taking an interest in the bones of one that died thousands of years ago in an Irish cave. Meanwhile, despite his hiking inspiration, when it comes to his research, he laughs: "Nearly 10 years later, I haven't been out in the field once."

Corrections & Amplifications: The initial version of this column incorrectly stated that drug maker Pfizer founded Apjohn. Pfizer bought Pharmacia, previously called Pharmacia & Upjohn, in 2003. Apjohn Group was founded in 2001.


股骨（Os femoris或者簡為Femur）是人體最長最粗壯的長骨。股骨位於四肢動物的下肢（或後肢）深面。