Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
People with a variant copy of the TREM2 gene have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, but researchers are only beginning to understand why.
A Genentech study has uncovered details of how a type of immune cell helps the brain get rid of the tiny amyloid-beta aggregates that can clump together to form the plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's. The researchers, reporting July 20 in Neuron, found that TREM2 mutations can derail the immune cell's plaque-clearing activity, as can two other genes already known to increase a person's risk for Alzheimer's: APOE and APOJ (known as clusterin).
"I think we're only scratching the surface of what TREM2 does," said Morgan Sheng, a senior author of the paper and Vice-President of Neuroscience at Genentech.
Scampering across the salt pans of Tunisia on their spindly legs, desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) have a single-minded mission: locate food and get it back to the nest. Normally, individual raiders bear a tasty morsel in their mandibles and navigate home along the most direct return route, regardless of how tortuous the outbound journey was. However, their determination is often tested to the extreme when the robust animals stumble upon a particularly large piece of food - such as a dead spider or locust. Undaunted, the scavenger simply drags the feast backwards: 'They are really awesome', chuckles Matthias Wittlinger from the University of Ulm, Germany. However, how do the insects navigate while reversing? 'All the cues are from the other direction', says Wittlinger.
Patients suffering from liver cirrhosis often die of life-threatening bacterial infections. In these patients the immune cells are unable to eliminate the bacterial infections. Scientist at the University of Bonn and TU Munich have now discovered that type I IFN released by immune cells due to increased migration of gut bacteria into the cirrhotic liver incapacitate the immune system. Based on their findings, such life-threatening infections can be contained by strengthening the immune response alone -- without antibiotics. The results have now appeared in the journal Gut.
Philadelphia, PA, July 19, 2016 - A new report in Biological Psychiatry reports that brain alterations in infants at risk for autism may be widespread and affect multiple systems, in contrast to the widely held assumption of impairment specifically in social brain networks.
Autism is diagnosed based on impairments in social and communication behaviors. These symptoms tend to emerge in the second year of life, but identifying abnormalities in early infancy could help researchers understand how autism develops and potentially allow clinicians to predict the disorder before it emerges.
The number of new cases of men suffering from metastatic prostate cancer has risen significantly in a decade's time, and is 72 percent greater in the year 2013 compared to 2004. This increase is especially worrying among men aged between 55 and 69 years old - the age group thought to benefit most from prostate cancer screening and early definitive treatment. These are some of the findings of a study published in Springer Nature's journal Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases. According to authors Adam Weiner and Edward Schaeffer of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in the US, the research highlights a continued need to refine prostate cancer screening and treatment in the United States.
Today, a negative correlation is observed in the amount of rainfall in north-western Africa and north-western Europe. If a humid winter climate prevails in north-western Europe, the climate in north-western Africa is dry. Due to melting ice sheets, this correlation was reversed in the early Holocene period; this resulted in both regions being humid respectively dry at the same time. Radical climate change occurred. The researchers have published their report in the current edition of Nature Geoscience.
Climate determined by opposing atmospheric pressures
No one knows for sure how they got there. But the discovery that bacteria that normally live in the gut can be detected in the lungs of critically ill people and animals could mean a lot for intensive care patients.
Today, scientists are reporting that they found gut bacteria in the deepest reaches of failing lungs -- an environment where they normally aren't found and can't survive. The more severe the patients' critical illness, the more their usual lung bacteria were outnumbered by the misplaced gut bugs.
(PHILADELPHIA) - Over 90 percent of prostate cancers are detected at a curable stage, with men more likely to die of other diseases than from this cancer. Although patients with localized, low-risk prostate cancer have treatment options: active surveillance, also called watchful waiting, in which the cancer is monitored periodically to detect any changes, or active treatment with surgery and radiation. This choice is challenging, because medical science cannot reliably identify those men who are at risk for developing aggressive disease and may benefit from active treatment. Nonetheless, most men diagnosed with localized, low-risk prostate cancer choose active treatment.
A disabled African penguin at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut has gotten a new boot, thanks to 3-D printing and some middle school students. Yellow/Purple (AKA “Purps”), a resident of Mystic Aquarium’s endangered African penguin colony, was left with a nonfunctional flexor tendon in her ankle following a fight with another penguin. In an initial effort to immobilize, support and protect the site of injury, veterinarians at Mystic Aquarium fashioned a boot for Purps from moldable plastic material. While adequate, the animal care team at Mystic Aquarium knew there were more modern solutions available for the boot that would not only be more durable and less cumbersome for the small bird, but also would require less time than handcrafting a boot.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health graduate student Sara G. Rasmussen, from their Department of Environmental Health Sciences, says that people with asthma who live near bigger or larger numbers of active hydraulic fracturing (fracking) natural gas wells are 1.5 to four times likelier to have asthma attacks than those who live farther away.
Chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR T cells) are a promising immunotherapy approach to cancer treatment in which a patient's own immune cells attack tumors by targeting an identifying marker, or antigen, that is displayed at high levels on cancerous cells. However, CAR T cells that target a single antigen have had mixed results in clinical trials, which may be due to ongoing variability in the antigens that tumors display. In this month's issue of the JCI, a team led by Nabil Ahmed at Baylor College of Medicine demonstrated that CAR T cells that were engineered to target two different tumor antigens were more effective at controlling tumors in an animal model than typical CAR T cells, which target a single antigen.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently become concerned about e-cigarette use yet scarcely mention that cigarette uptake has plummeted.
Cigarettes are the killer, not nicotine, but nicotine is what historically turned smoking into what the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) deems a pediatric disease. Like caffeine, nicotine is addictive. If you smoked caffeine in a cigarette, it would be incredibly toxic whereas nicotine itself is relatively harmless. And because the CDC has overreacted to e-cigarettes, they become a cool rebellious thing for teems, just like cigarettes once were.
