SUMMARY Treating a mouse model of multiple sclerosis with the pregnancy hormone estriol reversed the breakdown of myelin in the brain’s cortex, a key region affected in multiple sclerosis, according to a new UCLA Health study. BACKGROUND In multiple sclerosis, inflammation spurs the immune system to strip away the protective myelin coating around nerve fibers in the brain’s cortex, hampering electrical signals sent and received by the brain. Atrophy of the cortex in MS patients is associated with permanent worsening of disability, such as cognitive decline, visual impairment, weakness and sensory loss. No currently available treatments ...

INDIANAPOLIS — Researchers at the School of Science at IUPUI will lead two grants totaling $11.7 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to fund research on discovering a drug treatment for hydrocephalus, a condition commonly associated with complications from traumatic brain injury that causes cerebrospinal fluid to accumulate in the brain. Using funds from a $7.8 million Department of Defense Focused Program grant, Bonnie Blazer-Yost and Teri Belecky-Adams, both professors in the Department of Biology, will team up with scientists from Johns Hopkins University to test the effectiveness of treatments for three types of hydrocephalus — genetic, ...

NEW ORLEANS – Ochsner Health is pleased to announce Tiffany Murdock as the organization’s next system vice president and chief nursing officer (CNO), effective later this summer. In this leadership role, Murdock will set the strategy and vision for the organization’s nursing practice and lead the organization’s more than 9,000 nurses. Murdock joins Ochsner’s leadership team after eight years at Singing River Health System, where she has served since 2022 as Singing River’s first female chief executive officer (CEO). Murdock ...

An Indiana University researcher is investigating critical geochemical processes that trap carbon dioxide in rock to better predict the potential for atmospheric carbon removal and storage at scale. Chen Zhu, a globally recognized geologist and professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, has been awarded $736,000 from the National Science Foundation to solve long-standing gaps in scientists’ understanding of CO2-water-rock interactions that naturally remove carbon dioxide from the ...

For many materials critical to supply chains that will help enable America’s decarbonization transition, resources are limited. Traditional mining is fraught with challenges, so advancing clean energy depends on finding new ways to reliably access critical materials.      Promoting national security and economic competitiveness will require America’s researchers to find new ways to obtain the materials that we need for many technologies. These include batteries, magnets in electric motors, catalysts, nuclear reactors ...

In a collaboration with Groningen University, Professor Jørgen Kjems and his research group at Aarhus University have achieved a remarkable breakthrough in developing tiny nano-sized pores that can contribute to better possibilities for, among other things, detecting diseases at an earlier stage. Their work, recently published in the scientific journal ACS Nano, shows a new innovative method for finding specific proteins in complex biological fluids, such as blood, without having to label the proteins chemically. The research is an important milestone in nanopore technology, and could revolutionise medical diagnostics. Nanopores are ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New research suggests that people who maintained healthy sexual and intimate lives early in the pandemic used sex as a coping mechanism to enhance their relationship with their partners, explore new sexual activities and in an array of other ways to adapt to the restrictions, stress and the changes in their daily lives. One year into the pandemic, Liza Berdychevsky, a professor of recreation, sport and tourism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, conducted an online survey of 675 people to explore the differences between people whose sex lives had fizzled and those whose sex lives had flourished. The sample ...

“[...] here we reveal a link between short telomere length in ATII cells and post-viral lung fibrosis outcome in post-COVID-19 patients.” BUFFALO, NY- June 15, 2023 – A new research paper was published on the cover of Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 11, entitled, “Short telomeres in alveolar type II cells associate with lung fibrosis in post COVID-19 patients with cancer.” The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The severity of COVID-19 increases with each decade of life, ...

June 15, 2023 --New research at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health examined changes in binge drinking after the implementation of recreational cannabis laws. Analysis of national survey data from Americans aged 12 and older showed that past-month binge drinking increased overall among people aged 31 and over from 2008 to 2019. At the same time, binge drinking declined overall among people aged 12-30. The results are published online in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The most substantial declines in binge drinking were observed ...

TORONTO, CANADA, June 15, 2023 - Researchers have long known that moderate exercise has a beneficial impact on the body’s response to inflammation, but what’s been less understood is why. New research coming out of York University done on a mouse model suggests that the answers may lie at the production level of macrophages — white blood cells responsible for killing off infections, healing injury and otherwise acting as first responders in the body.   “Much like if you train your muscles through ...

Climate change in current times has created problems for humans such as wildfires and reduced growing seasons for staple crops, spilling over into economic effects. Many researchers predict, and have observed in published literature, an increase in interpersonal violence and homicides when temperatures increase. Violence during climatic change has evidence in history. University of California, Davis, researchers said they have have found a pattern of increased violence during climatic change in the south central Andes between A.D. 470 and 1500. During that time, which includes the Medieval Climatic ...

URBANA, Ill. — Bioenergy crops such as miscanthus and switchgrass provide several environmental benefits, but low returns and profit risks are barriers for investment by farmers. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows that carbon mitigation payments could increase net returns and reduce income risk, potentially enticing more farmers to grow these crops. “We were interested in looking at the returns to farmers and the risks to farm income of adopting bioenergy crops compared to conventional corn and soybean crops. We ...

Dr. Iliyan D. Iliev, an associate professor of immunology in medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, co-director of the Microbiome Core and a member of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) at Weill Cornell Medicine, is the lead investigator on a grant to Weill Cornell Medicine from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to target pathogenic fungi in patients with Crohn’s disease. Dr. Iliev teamed up with Dr. Randy Longman, ...

Every year, sun glare contributes to around 3,000 crashes in the United States. FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers are helping to mitigate this problem by examining what drivers are likely to do when faced with sun glare. Their work was published in Transportation Research Record. “We want drivers to be safer on the road,” said study co-author Eren Ozguven, director of the Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response Center. “At certain times of day, the sun can be blinding, so as scientists and engineers, we want to find solutions.” The first step is to understand where problems are most likely to occur. ...

Nearly one in three people globally unknowingly carries Golden staph, or Staphylococcus aureus, in their nose or on their skin. While the bacterium is harmless to most, it can lead to serious infection and even death if it enters the bloodstream through a cut, surgical wound or catheter. The major breakthrough, led by the University of Melbourne’s Dr Abdou Hachani, a Senior Researcher at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), published in the online medical journal eLife, was made possible by a new state-of-the-art ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The Ontong Java Plateau, a volcanically-formed underwater plateau located in the Pacific Ocean north of the Solomon Islands, is younger and its eruption was more protracted than previously thought, new research led by Oregon State University suggests. The findings, just published in Science, also cast doubt on long-held assumptions that the formation of the plateau, which is roughly the size of Alaska, was the cause of a global deposit of black shale throughout the world’s oceans. “This type of shale is formed when there is very limited oxygen in the ocean. This layer was formed about 120 million years ago and can be found preserved ...

Prenatal exposure to chemicals called phthalates, which are used in hundreds of products, may lead to hormonal changes in females that could affect their future fertility, suggests a study in mice being presented Thursday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill. The study found female mouse embryos exposed to phthalates during gestation had lower testosterone levels than those not exposed to the chemicals. Immediately after birth, female mice exposed to phthalates during gestation had lower levels of the hormone estradiol than those not exposed. “These changes in hormone levels ...

BOSTON – Because of the opioid crisis, physicians are less likely to administer opioids to help manage patients’ pain, even in the operating room. A recent analysis in JAMA Surgery that was conducted by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of Mass General Brigham, indicates that overly restricting use of opioids during surgery may be doing more harm than good. For the study, researchers analyzed information on 61,249 adults who had surgery at MGH from 2016–2020. Patients administered more of the ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – HaoSheng Sun, Ph.D., assistant professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, has been named to the inaugural class of Freeman Hrabowski scholars by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The 31 new scholars from 22 U.S. institutions are all outstanding early career faculty in science who have the potential to become leaders in their research fields, as well as advance diversity, equity and inclusion through their mentorship and understanding of the experiences of trainees from races and ethnicities that are underrepresented in U.S. ...

CHICAGO—Not having reliable access to food has a significant relationship with metabolic syndrome, a condition that increases risk for diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, in Latinx females of reproductive age, according to a study presented Friday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill. “Because of the significant association identified between low food security and metabolic syndrome in reproductive-aged Latinx females, there is potential to reduce cardiovascular, metabolic and reproductive adverse outcomes through improved ...

CHICAGO—Body mass index (BMI) is not a complete measure of metabolic health, and a high proportion of U.S. adults with normal BMI still have obesity, according to research being presented Friday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill. The latest research highlights the importance of including what percentage of the body is fat, muscle, bone, and water, and how much fat is in the abdomen vs. the thighs to fully understand drivers for cardio-metabolic disease. “We show that there are racial/ethnic differences in body ...

Breast cancer medications, called aromatase inhibitors, may lessen the effect of weight loss drugs, according to a new study being presented Friday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill. The study found that weight loss medications are less effective in breast cancer survivors who are treated with aromatase inhibitors, compared with women without a history of breast cancer who are not taking aromatase inhibitors. Aromatase inhibitors are used to treat some types of breast cancer or to keep it from coming back. They may also be used to help prevent breast cancer in some women who are ...

Children and teenagers who use continuous glucose monitors (CGM) to manage diabetes often fail to use the appropriate alarm settings to alert to dangerously low or harmful high blood sugar levels, according to a study being presented Thursday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill. This variability makes the monitors less useful in tracking glucose levels. Children with diabetes employ a large range of CGM alarm settings and cutoffs, many of which differ significantly from recommended values. ...

To enjoy the scent of morning coffee and freshly baked cookies or to perceive the warning smell of something burning, the brain needs two types of cells, neurons and astrocytes, to work closely with each other. Research has shown a great deal of the changes that occur in neurons during olfactory, or smell, perception, but what are the astrocyte responses and how they contribute to the sensory experience remains unclear. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions report in the journal Science the responses of astrocytes to olfactory stimulation, revealing ...

As the body ages, organ function progressively declines and the risk for a wide range of diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, increases. Understanding how the body ages is an intense area of research as it will potentially illuminate ways to promote healthy aging. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco, Genentech, Inc. and collaborating institutions are breaking a path in that direction. They report in the journal Science, the first Aging Fly Cell Atlas (AFCA), ...