Category: Health Problems

Black infants may have higher cardiac arrest rates

A multi-year review of all pediatric emergency response records in Houston found that Black infants comprised a significantly larger proportion of cardiac arrests than expected, more than four times more cases than in non-Hispanic White children, according to preliminary research to be presented in Chicago at the American Heart Association’s Resuscitation Science Symposium 2018, an

Improved rescue kits for people with diabetes, hypoglycemia

Being with someone who has diabetes and needs immediate care to avoid a coma can be a frightening situation. Even worse, current products and injection kits to help in those emergencies can be complicated to use. Now Purdue University researchers are working on a solution similar to common EpiPen devices that could help diabetic patients

Muscle-building proteins hold clues to ALS, muscle degeneration

Toxic protein assemblies, or “amyloids,” long considered to be key drivers in many neuromuscular diseases, also play a beneficial role in the development of healthy muscle tissue, University of Colorado Boulder researchers have found. “Ours is the first study to show that amyloid-like structures not only exist in healthy skeletal muscle during regeneration, but are

Relapsed leukemia flies under immune system’s radar

Patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive cancer of the blood, often are treated with stem cell transplantation, in which a compatible donor’s blood-forming cells are transplanted into a patient. The donor’s immune cells then attack and kill the leukemia cells. But even if this treatment initially is successful, many patients experience a recurrence

A fully human system to cultivate skin cells for grafting

Breakthrough study to culture human skin cells called keratinocytes to produce skin grafts has been published by a team of researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School and the Singapore General Hospital (SGH). This method is the first to use a specific type of tissue-proteins known as laminins, found in the human body, to create a safer

Functional regeneration of tendons using scaffolds developed via microarchitectural engineering

The underlying structure-function relationship of living tissues depends on structural and hierarchical anisotropy. Clinical exploitation of the interplay between cells and their immediate microenvironment has rarely used macroscale, three-dimensional (3-D) constructs. Biomechanical robustness is an important biomimetic factor that is compromised during biofabrication, limiting the relevance of such scaffolds in translational medicine. In a recent

Michael Phelps champions the fight against depression

Michael Phelps. Photo: Talkspace (HealthDay)—Swimmer extraordinaire Michael Phelps has won 28 Olympic medals—23 of them gold. Yet, despite all those medals and the accolades that came with them, Phelps has struggled with depression and anxiety. In 2014, it got so bad that he locked himself in his bedroom and stayed there for days. “During those

New diagnostic technique accounts for patient resilience

Medical diagnoses mostly focus on resolving isolated issues. But fixing one problem may create others, and even invoke an overall health collapse. Scientists now report a new approach to assess the risks of such collapse in humans and other animals using data from wearable sensors. Staying alive requires resilience, the capacity to bounce back from

Pneumococcal vaccine recs cause confusion among docs

(HealthDay)—While primary care physicians overwhelmingly recommend pneumococcal vaccines, there is a gap in their knowledge of how to implement related vaccine recommendations, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Laura P. Hurley, M.D., M.P.H., from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, and colleagues conducted

Mouse and human skin cells produce melanin on a 48-hour cycle

Researchers have discovered that mouse skin and skin cells from humans produce pigmentation in response to sunlight on a 48-hour cycle. They observed that exposing skin to ultraviolet light every 2 days yielded darker pigmentation with less radiation damage than daily exposure. The findings appear October 25 in the journal Molecular Cell. “The damaging effects

Probiotics are not always ‘good bacteria’

The first study investigating the mechanism of how a disease develops using human organ-on-a-chip technology has been successfully completed by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin. Researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering were able to shed light on a part of the human body—the digestive system—where many questions remain unanswered. Using their