General

Pregnancy can be a time of anxious uncertainty, particularly if there are any risks of complications. The question always arises, from parents, grandparents, friends and others: “Will the baby be OK?” In cases where the baby has been exposed to opioids in the womb, the answer is unclear. As part […]

For people with polycystic kidney disease (PKD), life can be a never-ending cycle of symptoms: aches and pains, abdominal swelling, kidney stones, high blood pressure. The disease frequently leads, at worst, to a suite of major issues, including kidney failure, cysts in the liver and vascular problems, including strokes. PKD is a […]

You are what you eat — right down to the microbiome living in your gut. Diet can affect which microbes are in the intestinal tract, and research has shown that harmful gut microbiome changes can lead to illnesses such as heart disease, obesity and cancer. Today, scientists will report the […]

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) –– defined as a bump, blow or jolt to the head that disrupts normal brain function –– sent 2.5 million people in the U.S. to the emergency room in 2014, according to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, researchers report a […]

Researchers at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center provide the first concrete evidence for the long-held belief that sick mitochondria pollute the cells they’re supposed to be supplying with power. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involves a causal experiment to kick off a mitochondrial chain reaction that […]

Cancer immunotherapies have given patients with particularly intractable cancers new hope, but not everyone benefits. One such immunotherapy, known as CAR T-cell therapy, works only in about a third of the people who take it – and the reason may lie in the microbes residing in our guts. Over the […]

After a sports-related concussion, traditional recovery recommendations have previously called for weeks or months of rest, depending on the duration of a person’s symptoms. But Michael Popovich, M.D., M.P.H., a sports neurologist at Michigan NeuroSport, thinks this method could actually do more harm than good. Recent studies have suggested that regular, daily activities during […]

The development of new bone can be a multistep process: first, stem cells differentiate into cartilage cells. Next, the cartilage cells become bone cells. But that’s not all: the cells must experience some mechanical stresses during the transformation in order to transform efficiently from stem cells to bone cells. Researchers […]

Finding cure to cancer is a major goal for the scientific community. Although we’ve seen major advancements, the goal is still yet to be reached. Now scientists from the Victoria University of Wellington might have made a breakthrough in cancer drug development. Their versions of a natural compound could target […]

Children with a high genetic risk of developing type 1 diabetes have different gut microbiomes than children with a low risk, according to a new study. The results suggest that genetic risk can shape an individual’s response to environmental factors in the development of autoimmune diseases. Both hereditary and environmental […]

Former professional football players who have experienced concussion symptoms, including loss of consciousness, disorientation or nausea after a head injury, are more likely to report low testosterone and erectile dysfunction (ED), according to research published in JAMA Neurology. The research—based on a survey of more than 3,400 former NFL players […]

Help may be on the way for people who might lose contact with reality through a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia. People who may hear and see things that are not there could have symptoms of psychosis, better known as psychotic disorders. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found neurological […]

Exercise seems to endow a wealth of benefits, from the release of happiness-inducing hormones to higher physical fitness. New research shows it may provide a boost to the mind too. University of Iowa researchers have found that a single bout of exercise improves cognitive functions and working memory in some older […]

A new piece of a difficult puzzle — the nature of memory — fell into place this week with a hint at how brain cells change structure when they learn something. Interactions between three moving parts — a binding protein, a structural protein and calcium — are part of the […]

Organophosphates are among the most commonly used classes of pesticides in the United States, despite mounting evidence linking prenatal exposure to the chemicals to poorer cognition and behavior problems in children. A new study led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers is one of the first to use advanced brain […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Nourianz (istradefylline) tablets as an add-on treatment to levodopa/carbidopa in adult patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) experiencing “off” episodes. An “off” episode is a time when a patient’s medications are not working well, causing an increase in PD symptoms, such as tremor […]

We already know that screen time for children should be limited. Watching too much TV impedes their creative abilities and imagination and sitting for extensive periods of time with smartphones or tablets in their hands just make them lazy. But there is another negative – scientists studied more than 10,000 […]

The molecular mechanism used by many bacteria to kill neighboring cells has redundancy built into its genetic makeup, which could allow for the mechanism to be expressed in different environments, say researchers at Penn State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A paper online in the Journal of Bacteriology provides insights into the molecular mechanisms of competition […]

Researchers from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity College have shown in the largest study to date that lower levels of specific dietary vitamins and antioxidants are associated with frailty. Their findings have been published in the prestigious Journal of American Medical Directors Association. Frailty is a common chronic […]

Omega-3 fats have little or no effect on risk of Type 2 diabetes according to new research from the University of East Anglia. Increased consumption of omega 3 fats is widely promoted globally because of a common belief that it will protect against, or even reverse, conditions such as diabetes. […]

Tree-like branching structures are everywhere in the human body, from the bronchial system in the lungs to the spidering capillaries that supply blood to the extremities. Researchers have long worked to understand the cellular signaling needed to build these intricate structures, but new research suggests that simple physics may play […]

Environmental conditions influence our body mass index (BMI) by increasing or decreasing the effect of inherited genetic variations, University of Queenslandresearchers have discovered. A team led by Huanwei Wang and Professor Jian Yang from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience found the opposite for human height – that the genetic effects that influence it are very stable […]

Research into the self-destruction of cells in humans and plants could lead to treatments for neurodegenerative brain diseases and the development of disease-resistant plants. A study co-led by The University of Queensland’s Professor Bostjan Kobe identified the role certain proteins play in cellular suicide. “To sustain life, diverse organisms like humans and […]

Every day, people are exposed to myriad chemicals both natural and synthetic, some of which may affect human physical development. Testing them has proven challenging, but researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute have come up with a way. Using Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a soil roundworm, the researchers have shown that […]

A gene that can become mutated and cause a rare balance disorder also regulates the behavior of an enzyme that increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study by Harvard Medical School researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital published in Cell. This discovery may help to identify new […]

Even when taking in fewer calories and nutrients, humans and other mammals usually remain protected against infectious diseases they have already encountered.  This may be because memory T cells, which are located throughout the body and required to maintain immune responses to infectious agents, according to scientists at the National […]

Immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of cancer in the last decade, yet many tumors do not respond to these new therapies. A new genome-wide screen of 20,000 human genes in T cells have turned up several new candidates to unleash the immune system’s ability to attack a variety of tumor […]

Scientists from the University of California, Irvine School of Biological Sciences have discovered how to forestall Alzheimer’s disease in a laboratory setting, a finding that could one day help in devising targeted drugs that prevent it. The researchers found that by removing brain immune cells known as microglia from rodent […]

It was long believed the FMR1 premutation — an excessive number of trinucleotide repeats in the FMR1 gene — had no direct effect on the people who carry it. Until recently, the only recognized effect on the carriers of the flawed gene was the risk of having offspring with fragile […]

We are shaped by our environment and our genes. If your parents are tall, you are likely to grow tall yourself. On the other hand, if you eat a lot of junk food, you are also likely to grow fat. But how do the genetic and environmental factors interact? How […]