In a new study, mice whose immune systems were trained against the microbial protein flagellin did not experience the usual detrimental effects of ingesting food additive emulsifiers, pointing to a potential new way to combat various chronic inflammatory diseases. Melissa Kordahi and Benoit Chassaing, Inserm researchers from the Institut Cochin and Université Paris Cité, France, and colleagues present these findings September 19th in the open access journal PLOS Biology. Dietary emulsifiers are substances added to processed food products to prevent mixed ingredients from separating. Prior research has suggested that eating certain emulsifiers ...

A new study shows the isolation and sequencing of more than a century-old RNA molecules from a Tasmanian tiger specimen preserved at room temperature in a museum collection. This resulted in the reconstruction of skin and skeletal muscle transcriptomes from an extinct species for the first time. The researchers note that their findings have relevant implications for international efforts to resurrect extinct species, including both the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth, as well as for studying pandemic RNA viruses. The Tasmanian ...

Life on a faraway planet — if it’s out there — might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe’s pantry, and only so many ways to mix them. A team led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has exploited those limitations to write a cookbook of hundreds of chemical recipes with the potential to give rise to life. Their ingredient list could focus the search for life elsewhere in the universe by pointing out the most likely conditions — planetary versions of mixing techniques, oven temperatures and baking times — for the recipes to come together. The process ...

Millions of women are turning to the social media platform TikTok for health advice related to gynecologic cancers, but the majority of that information is misleading or dramatically inaccurate, according to a new study published by The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute in the journal Gynecologic Oncology. Senior study author Laura Chambers, DO, says this highlights the power of social media to feed misinformation that could be ...

Alexandria, Virginia — The latest research and advances in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery will be presented in Nashville, Tennessee, during the AAO-HNSF 2023 Annual Meeting & OTO Experience, September 30 – October 4. From among the hundreds of research presentations submitted for the 2023 Annual Meeting, the Annual Meeting Program Committee (AMPC), comprised of physician members, selected 16 Scientific Oral Presentations as the Best of Orals, as well as an additional 40 Late-Breaking abstract submissions that were added to the Scientific Oral Presentation program to offer the latest and most ...

Researchers at the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative recently received grants totaling more than $7 million to build on an already impressive array of discoveries that Tufts’ teams have made to combat tick-borne diseases. While Lyme disease can often be successfully treated with antibiotics, 10-20% of patients experience persistent fatigue, joint pain, and mental impairments that last months or years. For some, it is never clear whether symptoms signal persistent infection, reinfection, or malfunction by the body’s immune system. Researchers ...

Researchers in the University of Delaware College of Health Sciences Department of Medical and Molecular Sciences are playing a pivotal role on the global health stage as they investigate the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the world. Centers for Disease Control statistics show that 79 million Americans have human papillomavirus (HPV). With 14 million new infections each year, 80% of women will get at least one type of HPV at some point in their lifetime, according to the Office on Women’s ...

WHAT: In response to the persistent health challenges of herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) and HSV-2, today the National Institutes of Health released the Strategic Plan for Herpes Simplex Virus Research. An NIH-wide HSV Working Group developed the plan, informed by feedback from more than 100 representatives of the research and advocacy communities and interested public stakeholders. The plan outlines an HSV research framework with four strategic priorities: improving fundamental knowledge of HSV biology, pathogenesis, and epidemiology; accelerating research to improve HSV diagnosis; improving strategies to treat HSV while seeking a curative therapeutic; and, advancing research ...

Findings from a nationwide, multicenter study led by Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggest that patients with COVID-19 have less chance of developing post-COVID conditions — commonly known as long COVID — if they receive early treatment with plasma from convalescent (recovered) COVID patients that contain antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The new research, first posted online today in mBio, a journal from the American Society for Microbiology, is a follow-up investigation to the 2021 clinical trial that showed convalescent plasma ...

Biomedical research aimed at improving human health is particularly reliant on publicly funded basic science, according to a new analysis boosted by artificial intelligence. “What we found is that even though research funded by the National Institutes of Health makes up 10% of published scientific literature, those published papers account for about 30% of the substantive research — the important contributions supporting even more new scientific findings — cited by further clinical research ...

Using engineered microbes as microscopic factories has given the world steady sources of life-saving drugs, revolutionized the food industry, and allowed us to make sustainable versions of valuable chemicals previously made from petroleum.  But behind each biomanufactured product on the market today is the investment of years of work and many millions of dollars in research and development funding. Berkeley Lab scientists want to help the burgeoning industry reach new heights by accelerating and streamlining the process of engineering microbes to produce important compounds with ...

There is a widening health disparity among Black, American Indian and Alaska Native adults exposed to gun violence, according to Rutgers researchers who say these communities have more mental and physical health issues because they witness or are victimized at a higher rate.   In a new study published in Health Affairs Scholar, 3,015 Black and 527 American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) adults residing in the United States were surveyed between April and May 2023. Participants were asked whether they were threatened with a firearm, shot with a firearm, had a family or friend shot with a firearm, or witnessed or heard about a shooting. The results found that these ...

Philadelphia, September 19, 2023 – According to a new study comparing patients with and without vitiligo in South Korea, patients with vitiligo were associated with a 25% decreased risk of mortality compared with controls. This suggests that vitiligo-associated autoimmunity may play a role in reducing morbidity and mortality. The results appear in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, published by Elsevier. Previous studies have documented a reduced risk of cancer in patients with vitiligo, however, there has been limited research on the relationship between vitiligo-associated autoimmunity and the risk of morbidity and mortality ...

A significant share of voters see the EU as less democratic than it really is and believe the European Commission can steamroll its member states, a new study shows. The research shows that key channels of legitimation in the EU are not well known by the citizens of large member states. Whether people see themselves only as citizens of their nation, or simultaneously as a European, is linked to what they believe about the EU. A substantial share of EU voters who took part in the study believed that the members of the European Parliament are not directly elected. Many assumed the European Parliament is unimportant for decision ...

A new study suggests that Escherichia coli and other disease-causing microbes are passing easily between humans and animals in Cambodia, a country where clean water, sanitation and hygienic controls are lacking in many regions. The continuous exchange, along with unregulated antibiotic use, leads to the emergence and spread of drug-resistant E. coli, the authors say. Maya Nadimpalli, a scientific collaborator at the Antibiotic Research Action Center at the George Washington University and her international colleagues, conducted the research in Phnom Penh, an urban area where humans and animals are often living in close proximity without clean water or other ...

In a study published in the journal Genes & Diseases, researchers from The Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University analyzed data from an extensive dataset comprising over 70,000 HBsAg-positive individuals at The Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University. They compared two groups: those achieving HBsAg seroclearance through NAs monotherapy (168 patients) and those through IFN monotherapy (30 patients). NAs monotherapy patients were older, with a higher proportion achieving HBsAg seroclearance during ...

A study in the journal Cell sheds new light on the evolution of neurons, focusing on the placozoans, a millimetre-sized marine animal. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona find evidence that specialized secretory cells found in these unique and ancient creatures may have given rise to neurons in more complex animals.  Placozoans are tiny animals, around the size of a large grain of sand, which graze on algae and microbes living on the surface of rocks and other substrates found in shallow, warm seas. The blob-like and pancake-shaped creatures are so simple that they live without any body parts or organs. These animals, thought to have ...

Curtin University researchers studying diamond-rich rocks from Western Australia’s Argyle volcano have identified the missing third key ingredient needed to bring valuable pink diamonds to the Earth’s surface where they can be mined, which could greatly help in the global hunt for new deposits. While it is known that for diamonds to form there needs to be carbon deep in the Earth, and for these diamonds to turn pink they must be subjected to forces from colliding tectonic plates, the new study has found the third ingredient needed for the presence of pink diamonds at surface ...

Virtual reality simulators can help learners improve their technical skills faster and with no risk to patients. In the field of neurosurgery, they allow medical students to practice complex operations before using a scalpel on a real patient. When combined with artificial intelligence, these tutoring systems can offer tailored feedback like a human instructor, identifying areas where the students need to improve and making suggestions on how to achieve expert performance.   A new study from the Neurosurgical Simulation and Artificial Intelligence Learning Centre at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) of McGill University, ...

Bottom Line: The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends screening for hypertensive disorders in pregnant persons with blood pressure measurements throughout pregnancy. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy are among the leading causes of maternal morbidity and mortality in the U.S. The rate has been increasing from approximately 500 cases per 10,000 deliveries in 1993 to 1,021 cases per 10,000 deliveries in 2016 to 2017. The USPSTF routinely makes recommendations about the effectiveness of preventive care services and this recommendation is consistent with its 2017 recommendation statement. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website ...

A team of Dana-Farber researchers has identified a potential new way to assess clinically valuable features of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), a form of kidney cancer, using image processing with deep learning. Their AI-based assessment tool evaluates two-dimensional pictures of a tumor sample on a pathology slide and identifies previously underappreciated features, such as tumor microheterogeneity, that could help predict whether a tumor will respond to immunotherapy. Their results suggest that ...

An international study has revealed strong associations between oral health and survival among people diagnosed with head and neck cancer. Specifically, better oral health, as evidenced by the number of natural teeth and dental visits prior to the time of diagnosis, was associated with increased survival. Importantly, those who had more frequent dental visits were more likely to have their cancer diagnosed at an earlier, and less deadly, stage of the disease than those who had few or no dental visits. The study, by researchers at UNC Lineberger ...

About The Study: The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that rehabilitation interventions in adults with post–COVID-19 condition are associated with improvements in functional exercise capacity, dyspnea, and quality of life, with a high probability of improvement compared with the current standard care. The certainty of evidence was moderate for functional exercise capacity and quality of life and low for other outcomes. Authors: Dimitra V. Pouliopoulou, M.Sc., of Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link ...

About The Study: In this study of 3,635 female participants in the U.S., premenstrual disorders (PMDs) were associated with increased risks of early menopause and moderate or severe vasomotor symptoms (VMS). PMDs may be indicative of underlying physiology linked to early menopause and VMS, suggesting a phenotype observable during the reproductive years that may allow clinicians to target women at risk of earlier menopause and subsequent health risks later in the life course. Authors: Yihui Yang, M.P.H., and Donghao Lu, M.D., Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden are the corresponding authors. To ...

Brigham researchers found that patients prescribed amoxicillin-clavulanate had higher rates of gastrointestinal symptoms and yeast infections than those prescribed amoxicillin Acute sinusitis is one of the most common causes for children to be put on antibiotic medications, with patients in the United States filing nearly 5 million antibiotic prescriptions every year to treat the condition. The drugs amoxicillin and amoxicillin-clavulanate make up most of those prescriptions, but there is a lack of consensus on which should be first-line ...