Lifeboat Foundation

New York is in the midst of an outbreak of measles, a childhood disease that shouldn’t really exist in the U.S. any longer. On Tuesday, NBC News reported, New York health officials said the state has seen more than 100 cases of the vaccine-preventable disease since last September—a tally not seen in decades. The majority of these cases have happened among the unvaccinated.

Measles is a highly infectious disease that can be spread with a simple cough or sneeze. Its flu-like symptoms are usually followed by a distinctive, splotchy red rash that runs down from head to feet. And though most people recover without incident after a week’s time, measles can rarely cause more serious complications like hearing loss, permanent brain damage, and even death. These risks are more likely in the very young; measles can also cause birth problems in children whose mothers contract it while pregnant.

A drug to fight ageing may finally be on the horizon after the first trial in humans showed ‘impressive’ results.

For many years scientists have known that an accumulation of senescent cells in the body is linked to ageing symptoms such as frailty and arthritis, as well as diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Senescent cells — also known as zombie cells — are not completely dead so are not cleared out by the body, but are too damaged to repair tissue or carry out normal functions. Unable to repair itself or clear out the waste, the body gradually deteriorates.

Continue reading “Drug to clear ‘zombie cells’ from body could be first anti-ageing treatment after ’impressive‘ human trial” »

While our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy.

The irrationality of how we think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually respond with “fine” or “good.” But if someone followed up about a specific event — “How did you feel about the big meeting with your boss today?” — suddenly, we refine our “good” or “fine” responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent.

In less than a few sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re “good” but feel awful about how the meeting went. How then could we be “good” overall? Bias, experience, knowledge, and context all consciously and unconsciously form a confluence that drives every decision we make and emotion we express. Human behavior is not easy to anticipate, and probability theory often fails in its predictions of it.

Continue reading “Your Brain Isn’t a Computer — It’s a Quantum Field” »

We take a somewhat humorous look at the messaging and the comfort stories people tell themselves to distract themselves from seeing why age-related diseases and dying from them is a problem that needs solving.

Here’s what might be considered a paradox: right now, the Facebook page of Death Cafe—a place where you go to talk about death—is a rather lively place, whereas pages about life extension are comparatively rather dead places. This screenshot shows the activity of a Death Cafe post:

Continue reading “Mental Candy Is Also Unhealthy” »

Bottle feeding infants is associated with left-handedness, according to a new study.

The study finds that the prevalence of left-handedness is lower among breastfed infants as compared to bottle-fed infants. The researchers identified this finding in about 60,000 mother-infant pairs and they accounted for known risk factors for handedness.

The results provide further insight into the development of complex brain functions which ultimately determine which side of the batter box the infant likely will choose.

The drug already provides short-term benefits to people with ALS.

Intracranial hemorrhage can be a devastating complication associated with needle biopsies of the brain. Hemorrhage can occur to vessels located adjacent to the biopsy needle as tissue is aspirated into the needle and removed. No intraoperative technology exists to reliably identify blood vessels that are at risk of damage. To address this problem, we developed an “imaging needle” that can visualize nearby blood vessels in real time. The imaging needle contains a miniaturized optical coherence tomography probe that allows differentiation of blood flow and tissue. In 11 patients, we were able to intraoperatively detect blood vessels (diameter, 500 μm) with a sensitivity of 91.2% and a specificity of 97.7%. This is the first reported use of an optical coherence tomography needle probe in human brain in vivo. These results suggest that imaging needles may serve as a valuable tool in a range of neurosurgical needle interventions.

Stereotactic brain biopsies are a minimally invasive procedure used to obtain samples of intracranial tissue for diagnostic purposes, most commonly related to brain tumors. Approximately 80,000 new cases of primary brain tumor are diagnosed, and 14,000 brain biopsies are performed each year in the United States (1, 2). Hemorrhage is the most frequent and devastating complication associated with this procedure. Perioperative hemorrhage is associated with rates of transient and permanent morbidity of 1.7 to 8.5% and 1.4 to 4.8%, respectively, and mortality rates of 0.6 to 2.8% (3–7).

The standard clinical practice is to identify blood vessels at risk of injury on preoperative imaging, using either contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or x-ray computed tomography. Frameless stereotactic navigation techniques, guided by preoperative imaging, are then used to direct the biopsy needle trajectory to sample the target lesion, while avoiding vasculature or eloquent brain tissue (8).

Two Nature papers show that it is possible to make T cells that target some of the few neoantigens expressed by glioblastomas and that T- cell responses can be boosted in cancers. This News & Views discusses the findings.

Clinical trials reveal that personalized vaccines can boost immune-cell responses to brain tumours that don’t usually respond to immunotherapy. The findings also point to how to improve such treatments. Personalized vaccines boost immune responses targeting brain tumours.

In a new #Stanford study explaining the cellular mechanisms behind cognitive impairment from chemotherapy, scientists have demonstrated that a widely used chemotherapy drug, #methotrexate, causes a complex set of problems in three major cell types within the brain’s white matter. The study also identifies a potential remedy.

In a new study explaining the cellular mechanisms behind cognitive impairment from chemotherapy, scientists have demonstrated that a widely used chemotherapy drug, methotrexate, causes a complex set of problems in three major cell types within the brain’s white matter. The study also identifies a potential remedy.