Category: Health Problems

Detecting patterns is an important part of how humans learn and make decisions. Now, researchers have seen what is happening in people’s brains as they first find patterns in information they are presented. Findings showed that the brain processes pattern learning in a different way from another common way that people learn, called probabilistic learning.

An antifungal medication, commonly prescribed for toenail infections, could help eliminate dormant cells within bowel tumours, according to new research funded by Cancer Research UK and published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine today. Researchers at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute have shown in laboratory studies in mice, that itraconazole effectively halts the growth

(HealthDay)—Mini-dose glucagon (MDG) is an effective approach for preventing exercise-induced hypoglycemia in patients with type 1 diabetes, according to a study published online May 18 in Diabetes Care. Michael R. Rickels, M.D., from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and colleagues aimed to determine whether MDG given subcutaneously pre-exercise could prevent glucose lowering and compared

Building on two decades of research, investigators at UT Southwestern have determined that “cellular housekeeping” can extend the lifespan and healthspan of mammals. A study jointly led by Drs. Salwa Sebti and Álvaro Fernández, postdoctoral researchers in the Center for Autophagy Research, found that mice with persistently increased levels of autophagy—the process a cell uses

(HealthDay)—In 2015, 35.5 percent of adult stroke survivors used outpatient rehabilitation, up from 31.2 percent in 2013, according to research published in the May 25 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Carma Ayala, Ph.D., from the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed 2013 and 2015 data

Staying mentally sharp—that’s aging Americans’ highest priority, according to the National Council on Aging. While thousands of clinical trials suggest that exercising the body can protect or improve brain health as we age, few studies provide practical prescriptive guidance for how much and what kind of exercise. Now, an exhaustive systematic review of 4,600 clinical

Have you ever been on a diet and wished that spinach excited your tastebuds? Or that chocolate left you cold? Neuroscientists said Wednesday they have discovered how to manipulate the brain to make sweet things off-putting, and bitter ones nice. But only in mice, for now. Mooting promise for an obesity treatment, researchers in the

Our immune system’s arsenal of defenses usually protects us from cancer. But sometimes, cancer cells overwhelm or evade this elaborate defense system. In the lab of biochemist and immunologist Christoph Rader, Ph.D., associate professor at The Scripps Research Institute in Florida, scientists have engineered a new type of anti-cancer antibody, one intended to enhance nature’s

Researchers in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering are combining audio and art to provide better, standardized ways of simulating and understanding medical imaging of brain aneurysms. Currently, if a patient comes into a medical clinic with an unruptured brain aneurysm, a clinician’s decision to operate or leave it depends on

So much for, “See? That wasn’t so bad.” If your child thinks the needle is going to hurt, that expectation ensures it’s going to hurt. That’s the finding of first-of-its-kind research from UC Riverside psychologist Kalina Michalska. For the first time, researchers have looked at how expectation influences pain experience in children. “We know that

Less fatigue and better recovery of cognitive abilities such as learning and memory. These may be the results of growth hormone treatment after a stroke, an experimental study of mice published in the journal Stroke suggests. “We hope that this work can pave the way for clinical studies involving the use of human growth hormone

Getting a new pharmaceutical from an idea in the chemistry lab to market takes many years and billions of dollars. Each year just several dozen new drugs are approved for use in the United States. Human “organs-on-chips” are leading a revolution in drug safety testing. These devices use human cells to model the structure and

In your body, blood stem cells produce approximately 10 billion new white blood cells, which are also known as immune cells, each and every day. Even more remarkably, if some of these blood stem cells fail to do their part, then other blood stem cells pick up their slack and overproduce whichever specific type of

A new anti-cancer drug may be effective against a wider range of cancers than previously thought. Using a mouse model and samples taken from cancer patients, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has shown that a new class of drugs known as SHP2 inhibitors is also effective against aggressive, hard-to-treat tumors such

A portable device common in optometrists’ offices may hold the key to faster diagnosis of schizophrenia, predicting relapse and symptom severity and assessing treatment effectiveness, a Rutgers University study finds. In the study, published in the May 2018 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, researchers used RETeval, a hand-held device developed to record electrical

The concept of survival of the fittest most often applies to the competition that occurs within and between animal species, but evolutionary pressures can be found elsewhere—even in a cancerous tumor. Cancer researchers have come to understand tumors not as lumps of identical cells, but rather as diverse, dynamic populations unto themselves. And, like individuals

Scientists report they have uncovered a previously overlooked connection between neurons in two distinct areas of the mammalian brain. The neurons, they say, control the sense of touch, and their experiments in mice offer insights into mapping brain circuitry that is responsible for normal and abnormal perception and movements linked to touch. Results of the

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists have developed a 3-D brain organoid that could have potential applications in drug discovery and disease modeling. This is the first engineered tissue equivalent to closely resemble normal human brain anatomy, containing all six major cell types found in normal organs including, neurons and immune cells. In

Early-life seizures prematurely switch on key synapses in the brain that may contribute to further neurodevelopmental delay in children with autism and other intellectual disabilities, suggests a new study from researchers at Penn Medicine published online in Cell Reports. Importantly, the study shows that an existing targeted therapy may keep those synapses “silent” after seizures

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remains relatively small. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports 56 people with confirmed, probable or suspected infections, including 25 deaths. But despite the modest numbers, other countries shouldn’t be complacent. It’s in everyone’s interest to help WHO and DRC bring this outbreak under control