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Keeping Blood Pressure Down Can Help Lower Dementia Risk : Shots — Health News A new public health campaign says controlling high blood pressure is among the best ways to keep your brain sharp. The neurologist in charge aims to lead by example.

Summer Heat Waves Can Slow Our Thinking : Shots — Health News Hot weather can influence cognitive performance, according to new research. Young adults living in non-air-conditioned dorms during a heat wave performed worse on math and attention tests.

Groundbreaking research shows that neurological health depends as much on signals sent by the body’s large, leg muscles to the brain as it does on directives from the brain to the muscles. Published today in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the study fundamentally alters brain and nervous system medicine — giving doctors new clues as to why patients with motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy and other neurological diseases often rapidly decline when their movement becomes limited.

“Our study supports the notion that people who are unable to do load-bearing exercises — such as patients who are bed-ridden, or even astronauts on extended travel — not only lose muscle mass, but their body chemistry is altered at the cellular level and even their nervous system is adversely impacted,” says Dr. Raffaella Adami from the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy.

The study involved restricting mice from using their hind legs, but not their front legs, over a period of 28 days. The mice continued to eat and groom normally and did not exhibit stress. At the end of the trial, the researchers examined an area of the brain called the sub-ventricular zone, which in many mammals has the role of maintaining nerve cell health. It is also the area where neural stem cells produce new neurons.

Continue reading “Leg Exercise is Critical to Brain and Nervous System Health” »

“DATA SLAVERY.” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. Yet if the job of the artist is to anticipate the Zeitgeist, Ms Morone was dead on: this year the world has discovered that something is rotten in the data economy. Since it emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired data on 87m Facebook users in underhand ways, voices calling for a rethink of the handling of online personal data have only grown louder. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for a price to be put on personal data, asking researchers to come up with solutions.

Human lungs are coated with a substance called surfactant which allows us to breathe easily. When lung surfactant is missing or depleted, which can happen with premature birth or lung injury, breathing becomes difficult. In a collaborative study between Lawson Health Research Institute and Stanford University, scientists have developed and tested a new synthetic surfactant that could lead to improved treatments for lung disease and injury.

Lung surfactant is made up of lipids and proteins which help lower tension on the lung’s surface, reducing the amount of effort needed to take a breath. The proteins, called surfactant-associated proteins, are very difficult to create in a laboratory and so the surfactant most commonly used in medicine is obtained from animal lungs.

London, Ontario has a rich legacy in surfactant research and innovation. Dr. Fred Possmayer, a scientist at Lawson and Western University, pioneered the technique used to purify and sterilize lung surfactant extracted from cows. Called bovine lipid extract surfactant (BLES), the therapeutic is made in London, Ontario and used by nearly all neonatal intensive care units in Canada to treat premature babies with respiratory distress.

Continue reading “Synthetic surfactant could ease breathing for patients with lung disease and injury” »

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology can now assess a person’s intelligence in moments with nothing more than a brain scan and an AI algorithm, university officials announced this summer.

Caltech researchers led by Ralph Adolphs, PhD, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology and chair of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, said in a recent study that they, alongside colleagues at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno, were successfully able to predict IQ in hundreds of patients from fMRI scans of resting-state brain activity. The work is pending publication in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Adolphs and his team collected data from nearly 900 men and women for their research, all of whom were part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-driven Human Connectome Project. The researchers trained their machine learning algorithm on the complexities of the human brain by feeding the brain scans and intelligence scores of these hundreds of patients into the algorithm—something that took very little effort on the patients’ end.

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About 40 percent of all the energy consumed by buildings worldwide is used for space heating and cooling. With the warming climate as well as growing populations and rising standards of living—especially in hot, humid regions of the developing world—the level of cooling and dehumidification needed to ensure comfort and protect human health is predicted to rise precipitously, pushing up global energy demand.

Much discussion is now focusing on replacing the greenhouse gases frequently used as refrigerants in today’s air conditioners. But another pressing concern is that most existing systems are extremely energy-inefficient.

“The main reason they’re inefficient is that they have two tasks to perform,” says Leslie Norford, the George Macomber (1948) Professor in Construction Management in the Department of Architecture. “They need to lower temperature and remove moisture, and doing both those things together takes a lot of extra energy.”

Sexually transmitted infections can be worrisome and embarrassing, but with a few notable exceptions, most of them are quite treatable these days. Unfortunately, a new one may be on the rise. British public health officials say that Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterial infection known as MGen for short, could soon become immune to antibiotics. If this happens, the bacterium would become what’s known as a superbug, the growing class of bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotic drugs.

The bacterium, which can live in humans’ urinary and genital tracts, is transmitted through sexual intercourse. Women infected with the bacterium can experience pelvic inflammation and cervical inflammation, while men can experience inflammation of the urethra. An infected patient would feel these symptoms, generally speaking, as pain. Perhaps most disconcertingly, though, sometimes the infection will not cause any noticeable symptoms, meaning that an infected person can transmit it without even realizing that they’re doing so. If the infection is left untreated for too long, it can cause female patients to become sterile.

In response to the emerging threat posed by MGen, the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV on Sunday issued its draft guidelines for dealing with MGen. The organization also warned that antibiotic-resistant MGen could become much more prevalent in the coming years.

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The BUGS that REVERSE Damage