Lifeboat Foundation

Many post COVID victims have heart issues. This is why:

A new study has discovered how the SARS-CoV-2 virus attacks and damages the heart, answering a long-standing question about mysterious heart conditions following COVID-19 infection. The results could have large implications on how to effectively treat severe infections and develop new therapies for preventing long-term damage.

Throughout the pandemic, people with severe COVID-19 infection have often displayed symptoms of heart distress. Those with underlying heart conditions are at a greater risk of severe illness if they catch it, and reports of abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmia) in previously healthy patients with acute COVID-19 have been common.

Continue reading “We Finally Know Why COVID-19 Damages The Heart” »

Saving Lives; Changing Minds — Dr. Emanuele Capobianco, MD, Director for Health and Care, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Dr. Emanuele Capobianco, MD, MPH, is the Director for Health and Care at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), where he leads the IFRC Global Health and Care Team and provides strategic and operational support to 192 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies around the world in the areas of community health, emergency health and water/sanitation. He currently also leads the IFRC global response to COVID19 and the IFRC response to the Ebola outbreaks in DRC.

Continue reading “Dr Emanuele Capobianco, MD, Director, Health And Care, Int Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies — IFRC” »

The hack exposed feeds showing the insides of offices, hospitals and businesses, including Tesla.

Electric stimulation may be able to help blood vessels carry white blood cells and oxygen to wounds, speeding healing, a new study suggests.

The study, published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Lab on a Chip, found that steady electrical stimulation generates increased permeability across blood vessels, providing new insight into the ways new blood vessels might grow.

The electrical stimulation provided a constant voltage with an accompanying electric current in the presence of fluid flow. The findings indicate that stimulation increases permeability of the blood vessel—an important characteristic that can help wound-healing substances in the blood reach injuries more efficiently.

As the world fights the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, another group of dangerous pathogens looms in the background. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been growing for years and appears to be getting worse. If COVID-19 taught us one thing, it’s that governments should be prepared for more global public health crises, and that includes finding new ways to combat rogue bacteria that are becoming resistant to commonly used drugs.

In contrast to the current pandemic, viruses may be be the heroes of the next epidemic rather than the villains. Scientists have shown that viruses could be great weapons against bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

I am a biotechnology and policy expert focused on understanding how personal genetic and biological information can improve human health. Every person interacts intimately with a unique assortment of viruses and bacteria, and by deciphering these complex relationships we can better treat infectious diseases caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells (HSCs) residing in our bone marrow produce all of our blood cells, including key immune cells that protect us from bacteria and viruses. As we age, our HSCs become less efficient and less able to make healthy new blood cells. In a study published online today in Nature, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that this reduction in HSC efficiency is caused in part by the deterioration of chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA), the housekeeping process that removes damaged proteins and other waste materials that interfere with cells’ ability to function.

“While the aging of HSCs in our bone marrow is inevitable, the good news is that it may be reversible,” said co-study leader Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., professor of developmental and molecular biology, of anatomy and structural biology, and of medicine, and the Robert and Renée Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases at Einstein. “Our studies in mice suggest that drugs we’ve developed at Einstein can activate CMA and potentially restore the vitality of HSCs in older people.”

In the new study, researchers instead aimed to reduce the amount of Nav1.7 that cells make in the first place. Bioengineer Ana Moreno and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, modified the “molecular scissors” of the gene editor CRISPR. Changes to the cutting enzyme Cas9 caused it to bind to DNA that makes Nav1.7 without slicing it, effectively preventing the Nav1.7 protein from being made. The researchers enhanced this silencing effect by hitching Cas9 to a repressor, another protein that inhibits gene expression.

The researchers tested the Cas9 approach—and a similar approach using another gene-editing protein known as a zinc finger—in mice given the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel, which can cause chronic nerve pain in cancer patients. The team measured pain by poking the animals’ paws with a thin nylon filament. Paclitaxel prompted mice to withdraw from gentler pokes, indicating that a normally nonpainful stimulus had become painful. But 1 month after an injection of the gene-silencing treatment into their spinal fluid, rodents responded much like mice that had never gotten paclitaxel, whereas untreated rodents remained hypersensitive, the team reports today in.

The approach could also prevent pain when given before paw injections of either the inflammation-causing compound carrageenan or a molecule called BzATP that increases pain sensitivity. And treated mice behaved no differently from untreated ones when their opposite paw—not inflamed by carrageenan—was exposed to a hot surface. That’s an encouraging initial sign that the injection didn’t silence Nav1.7 so completely that it creates a dangerous numbness to all pain, Moreno says. Behavioral tests so far haven’t turned up evidence of potentially concerning side effects; the injections didn’t appear to alter the animals’ movement, cognition, or anxiety levels.

Summary: Study identified 300 “hub genes” that appear to control separate gene networks in brain tissue samples. The SAMD3 gene appears to be a master regulator to control the activity of many of the gene hubs and the genes the hubs control.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center.

UT Southwestern scientists have identified key genes involved in brain waves that are pivotal for encoding memories. The findings, published online this week in Nature Neuroscience, could eventually be used to develop novel therapies for people with memory loss disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

“This is a fascinating study of gut microbiome in older adulthood,” wrote Barbara Bendlin from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “While the investigators did not look at brain health or cognitive outcomes, it’s interesting to see that they found that healthy aging was accompanied by gut microbiomes that became increasingly more unique to each person starting in middle age. This type of divergence is also observed in brain aging.” (Full comment below.)

Past studies have shown that the gut microbiome undergoes rapid changes in the first three years of life, followed by a longer period of relative stability, then more change once again in later years (Yatsunenko et al., 2012; O’Toole and Jeffery, 2015). Research has also found that centenarians have fewer of the gut microbes commonly seen in younger, healthy people. Instead, they live with an increasingly rarefied microbiota (Kim et al., 2019). This suggests that gut microbiomes become increasingly personalized as people get older, but little is known about how these gut profiles affect the aging process or longevity.

To find out, first author Tomasz Wilmanski and colleagues analyzed gut microbiomes, personal traits, and clinical data from more than 9000 people 18 to 101 years old. They came from three independent cohorts. One was a group of 3653 people aged 18 to 87 who had signed up with Arivale, a now-defunct scientific wellness company co-founded by systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood and Price. Arivale provided personalized wellness coaching by collecting and analyzing data on participants’ genomes and other systems, including their gut microbiomes. Hood founded the Institute for Systems Biology.