New free-to-read collection shares research on the Southwest Asian and North African region

May 4, 2023, Cleveland: Cleveland Clinic has been designated a Rare Disease Center of Excellence by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD). The new Cleveland Clinic Center for Rare Diseases is one of 40 U.S. academic medical centers selected to join the first-of-it-kind national network dedicated to diagnosing, treating and researching all rare diseases. The NORD Rare Disease Centers of Excellence program provides a much-needed national infrastructure to help accelerate advancements for rare diseases. The network of medical institutions, led by NORD, is designed to improve rare disease patient care by connecting patients to appropriate specialists regardless of disease ...

Nearly 90 percent of patients with an aggressive subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma had their cancer go into remission in a small phase 2 clinical trial testing a treatment aimed at making chemotherapy more effective, according to Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators. The clinical trial, whose results were published May 4 in Blood, included 17 patients with a type of blood cancer called peripheral T-cell lymphoma with T-follicular helper phenotype (PTCL-TFH), also known as angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. Fifteen of them (88.2 percent) had complete ...

· No evidence of cytokine storm in critically ill patients with COVID-19  · Nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary bacterial pneumonia · Crucial to find and aggressively treat secondary bacterial pneumonia in ICU patients CHICAGO --- Secondary bacterial infection of the lung (pneumonia) was extremely common in patients with COVID-19, affecting almost half the patients who required support from mechanical ventilation. By applying machine learning to medical record data, scientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine found that secondary bacterial pneumonia that does not resolve was a key ...

New York (May 4, 2023) — Today, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) released the 2023 update to the AGS Beers Criteria® for Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults (DOI: 10.1111/jgs.18372). The AGS Beers Criteria® serves as a comprehensive list of medications that older people should potentially avoid or consider using with caution because they often present unnecessary risks for this population. Given that, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, United States (NCHSUS), more than 88% of older people use at least one prescription and more than 66% use ...

Continents are part of what makes Earth uniquely habitable for life among the planets of the solar system, yet surprisingly little is understood about what gave rise to these huge pieces of the planet’s crust and their special properties. New research from Elizabeth Cottrell, research geologist and curator of rocks at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and lead study author Megan Holycross, formerly a Peter Buck Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow at the museum and now an assistant professor at Cornell University, deepens the understanding of Earth’s crust by testing ...

The North Pacific “Garbage Patch” is home to an abundance of floating sea creatures, as well as the plastic waste it has become famous for, according to a study by Rebecca Helm from Georgetown University, US, and colleagues, publishing April 27th in the open access journal PLOS Biology. There are five main oceanic gyres — vortexes of water where multiple ocean currents meet — of which the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) is the largest. It is also known as the North Pacific “Garbage Patch”, because converging ocean currents have concentrated large amounts ...

Cholesterol and phytosterol are sterols, fatty compounds essential for many biological processes such as the functioning of cell membranes. Up to now, it has been assumed that phytosterols are characteristic for plants, and cholesterol for animals, and that only plants can make phytosterols, while animals typically make cholesterol. Dolma Michellod, Nicole Dubilier and Manuel Liebeke from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, were therefore surprised when they discovered that a small marine worm called Olavius ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – New research led by an Oregon State University scientist begins to unravel the role dust plays in nourishing global ocean ecosystems while helping regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Researchers have long known that phytoplankton – plantlike organisms that live in the upper part of the ocean and are the foundation of the marine food web – rely on dust from land-based sources for key nutrients. But the extent and magnitude of the impact of the dust – ...

Huge swarms of migratory locusts take on the proportions of natural disasters and threaten the food supply of millions of people, especially in Africa and Asia.  As the eighth of the ten biblical plagues, the Book of Moses in the Old Testament already describes how swarms of locusts darkened the sky and ate up everything that grew in the fields and on the trees.  Scientists suspect that cannibalism among locusts contributes to their swarming behavior, and swarms therefore constantly move ...

Swarming migratory locusts – which threaten food security across the globe – avoid being eaten by other locusts by producing a smelly pheromone called phenylacetonitrile (PAN), according to a new study. The discovery of an anticannibalistic signaling pathway in locusts could provide a target for locust management strategies since cannibalistic interactions among locusts have been implicated in creation of swarms, which are highly destructive. A wide range of species practice cannibalism, mostly to supplement nutrition. This has led to the evolution of ...