As populations age, the prevalence of sarcopenia—a progressive loss of muscle mass and function—has become an increasingly urgent public health concern. Sarcopenia increases the risk of falls and frailty, reduces the quality of life for older adults, and heightens the likelihood of requiring long-term care. Preventing sarcopenia is, therefore, crucial for alleviating this healthcare burden.   A pioneering study conducted by researchers from Juntendo University in Japan sheds light ...

An enzyme called EZH2 has an unexpected role in driving aggressive tumor growth in treatment-resistant prostate cancers, according to a new study by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine. The results could potentially lead to new therapies for patients with limited options and add to the significant progress the teams have made in understanding how advanced prostate cancer develops resistance to treatments that target androgen receptors. Prostate cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death in men, claiming over 30,000 lives annually in the United States. While most prostate cancers initially respond ...

CHICAGO – Nov. 20, 2024 – Northwestern Medicine, West Health, and the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute have announced a new collaboration that will make accessing care to evidence-based mental health services faster and easier for primary care patients across Northwestern Medicine. This $8.6 million multi-year initiative from West Health will establish the Northwestern Medicine West Health Accelerator, which will provide access to comprehensive psychiatric services for primary care practices throughout Northwestern Medicine, expanding access to mental health ...

This research introduces a novel method for inferring DNA methylation patterns in non-skeletal tissues from ancient specimens, providing new insights into human evolution. As DNA methylation is a key marker of gene expression, this work allows scientists to explore changes in gene activity in the brain and other tissues that are typically absent from the fossil record. The team applied their method to the brain, offering a deeper understanding of the evolutionary processes that shaped human brain and neural functions. The findings ...

A team of researchers at the University of California San Diego has developed a new and improved wearable ultrasound patch for continuous and noninvasive blood pressure monitoring. Their work marks a major milestone, as the device is the first wearable ultrasound blood pressure sensor to undergo rigorous and comprehensive clinical validation on over 100 patients.  The technology, published on Nov. 20 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, has the potential to improve the quality of cardiovascular health monitoring in the clinic ...

Spin-out ChromaTwist has won a prestigious Innovate UK Smart grant to co-fund a £0.5m project.  The funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, covers 70% of the cost of a project that will take ChromaTwist’s novel dyes to the next level in terms of enhanced brightness and staining indices, to make cells and cellular structures stand out more clearly during bio-imaging.  The funding also allows ChromaTwist, which is raising funds, to push on with technical development and prepare for scale-up and ...

In the article published today in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, new evidence suggests how supermassive black holes, with masses of several billion times that of our Sun, formed so rapidly in less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The study, led by researchers of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), analyses a sample of 21 quasars, among the most distant ever discovered, observed in the X-rays band by the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes. The results suggest that the supermassive black holes ...

Are student-teacher relationships critical to early childhood education? With roughly 33 million students enrolled in public elementary school education throughout the United States, (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022), there is an acute need to more comprehensively understand the ways in which children’s development can be promoted through student-teacher relationships.   In a new Child Development study, researchers at The Ohio State University and University of Pennsylvania explored the significance of student-teacher relationships between kindergarten and third grade. Using the Early Childhood ...

After the June 2022 US Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to ban abortion, women of childbearing age in states where abortion became illegal reported increased rates of anxiety. That’s according to a new study published in Contemporary Economic Policy. The study relied on data from the Household Pulse Survey, a monthly online survey by the United States Census Bureau in collaboration with other federal agencies that gathers a vast array of data on representative samples of American adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Investigators analyzed information on ...

In a study published in Ecological Entomology, a journal from the Royal Entomological Society, researchers assessed whether a shortage of natural meadows in urban spaces for pollinating insects might be addressed by creating meadows where wildflowers are planted or sown among grasses. The research, which was conducted in Warsaw, Poland, showed no difference in the composition of insect-pollinated plants between these two meadow types. There was also no difference between the meadow types concerning the species richness of butterflies, bees, and hoverflies. The number of butterflies ...

Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is one of the leading causes of newborn mortality and morbidity worldwide, and lowering the baby’s body temperature—called therapeutic hypothermia—is often used as a treatment. A review in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology highlights additional therapies for HIE that are being tested with and without concomitant therapeutic hypothermia. Neonatal HIE is characterized by neurological dysfunction resulting from inadequate oxygen and blood flow to the brain near the time of birth. Therapeutic hypothermia is an established therapy in ...

New research in FEBS Open Bio reveals insights into the venom of two of the most venomous fish species on earth: the estuarine stonefish (Synanceia horrida) and the reef stonefish (Synanceia verrucosa), which are typically found in the warm and shallow regions of the Indo-Pacific region, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. Through multiple analytical techniques, investigators discovered the presence of three neurotransmitters new to stonefish venom, namely gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), choline, and 0-acetylcholine. Although these molecules ...

Through a 20-year experiment, investigators have shown how different trees adjust their strategies for acquiring nutrients through their roots as soil warms with climate change. The research, which is published in Global Change Biology, included trees that associate with different fungi that help roots absorb nutrients. Measurements showed that when exposed to warmer soils, oak trees associated with ectomycorrhizal fungi reduce interactions with soil microbes while increasing fine root exploration, whereas maple trees that associate with arbuscular mycorrhizal largely maintain ...

Research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society has identified several community-level factors that may increase people’s risk of experiencing cognitive impairment. In the study of 2,830 dementia-free US individuals aged 65+ years, 23.2% of participants were categorized as having mild cognitive impairment. People who lived in areas with higher neighborhood disadvantage, higher air pollution, higher homicide rate, and less greenspace had elevated odds of having mild cognitive impairment. Completing schooling in a Southern US state was also associated with a greater likelihood of ...

LOS ANGELES, California, USA, 20 November 2024 – In a comprehensive Genomic Press Interview, Professor Helen Lavretsky reveals how her pioneering work in integrative psychiatry is transforming approaches to mental health and aging. The interview, featured in the peer-reviewed medical research journal Brain Medicine (doi: 10.61373/bm024k.0130), offers unique insights into the evolution of integrative medicine from scientific skepticism to evidence-based acceptance. Professor Lavretsky, current President of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (2022-25), has successfully merged conventional ...

A stay in space exerts extreme pressures on the human body. Astronauts’ bodies and brains are impacted by radiation, altered gravity, challenging working conditions, and sleep loss – all of which could compromise cognitive functioning. At the same time, they are required to perform complex tasks, and minor mistakes can have devastating consequences. Little is known, however, about whether astronauts’ cognitive performance changes while in space. Now, working with 25 astronauts who spent an average of six month on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers in the US have examined changes in a wide range of cognitive performance domains. ...

Larger pay increases and better benefits could help keep K-12 teachers in the teacher workforce, finds a new, nationally representative RAND survey.     U.S. teachers reported modest pay increases between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, only $2,000 on average and well below their desired increase of $16,000. Black teachers and teachers in states where collective bargaining is prohibited reported they received the smallest pay increases.     “Teachers who received larger pay increases also said they were less likely to intend to leave the profession,” ...

Early development of an embryo is solely supported by maternally deposited RNAs and proteins until its own genome is activated through a process called zygotic genome activation (ZGA). Recent research by Chinese scientists has revealed novel molecular mechanisms by which HIRA acts in concert with dPCIF1 to establish a totipotent chromatin and facilitate orderly zygotic genome activation in the early embryos of Drosophila. Results of the study were published in PNAS on Nov. 14 as “HIRA and dPCIF1 coordinately establish totipotent chromatin and control orderly ZGA in Drosophila embryos.” The ...

Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse patient urine samples and predict when symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will flare up according to a study published today (Wednesday) in ERJ Open Research [1].   The patients taking part in the study carried out a simple daily dipstick test on their urine and sent their results to researchers using their mobile phones.   Using AI to analyse the results, researchers were able to ‘forecast’ a deterioration in symptoms one week in advance. ...

Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has traced how this cosmic structure grew over the past 11 billion years, providing the most precise test to date of gravity at very large scales.  DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the Department of Energy’s ...

A University of Texas at Dallas physicist and his international colleagues in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration are engaged in a multiyear data-gathering mission to try to answer one of the most puzzling observations in astrophysics: Why does the expansion of the universe appear to be accelerating?    Competing theories have attempted to explain this observation. One is that dark energy is somehow pushing galaxies apart. A second theory posits that gravity, the attractive force that in local environments like the solar system draws objects together, works differently at large cosmological scales and needs to be modified to explain cosmic ...

A new report from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre reveals Western Australia’s startup and innovation ecosystem requires targeted reforms and investment to unlock its full potential, calling for improvements in talent development, gender diversity and access to capital and infrastructure to support a more diversified economy.   The report, titled ‘Dare to Venture: Startups and the innovation ecosystem in Western Australia’, highlights WA’s strengths in mining, ...

Des Plaines, IL – A new study exploring the use of cranial accelerometry (CA) headsets for the prehospital detection of large-vessel occlusion (LVO) strokes has been published in a recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM).  LVO strokes, which represent one-third of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) cases in the United States, are responsible for two-thirds of poststroke dependence and 90% of poststroke mortality. The introduction of endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) over the past decade has significantly advanced the management of LVO strokes, emphasizing ...

High cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with better cognitive performance and lower risk of dementia long term, including in people with a genetic predisposition to dementia, show the findings of a study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.   Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is the capacity of the circulatory and respiratory systems to supply oxygen to muscles and declines increasingly with age as skeletal muscle is lost. CRF declines by around  3% to 6% per decade when people are in their 20s and 30s, but this accelerates to more than 20% per decade by the time people reach their 70s. Low CRF is a strong predictor of cardiovascular ...

The number and type of microbes present in the saliva of pregnant women differ according to whether they are experiencing life stress and symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), finds a study published in the open access journal BMJ Mental Health. Although several studies have shown links between the diversity of microbes in the gastrointestinal tract and stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mothers, no previous study has looked at the association between the type and number of microorganisms in the mouth and throat—oral microbiome—and ...