Lifeboat Foundation

Lewy body disease ranks as the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, following Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that attacks the brain, causing a decline in mental ability that worsens over time. It is the most common form of dementia and accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. There is no current cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but there are medications that can help ease the symptoms.

Scientists have successfully used nanotechnology to develop a 3D scaffold that supports the growth of healthy retinal cells, a breakthrough that could revolutionize the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Utilizing electrospinning technology, researchers created a scaffold that, when treated with the steroid fluocinolone acetonide, enhances the resilience and growth of retinal pigment epithelial cells, potentially aiding in the development of ocular tissue for transplantation.

Scientists have discovered a way to use nanotechnology to create a 3D ‘scaffold’ to grow cells from the retina. This breakthrough could lead to innovative approaches for treating a common source of blindness.

Researchers, led by Professor Barbara Pierscionek from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), have been working on a way to successfully grow retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells that stay healthy and viable for up to 150 days. RPE cells sit just outside the neural part of the retina and, when damaged, can cause vision to deteriorate.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Don’t worry about your hips or knees as you age. Arthritis in those joints isn’t inevitable. Keep doing the activities you enjoy. Those hopeful words come from Rafael Sierra, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon at Mayo Clinic specializing in hip and knee reconstruction. Dr. Sierra says there is no need to curtail your activities out of fear that you’ll wear out those joints as you age and need joint replacement.

However, certain conditions, such as birth defects and anatomical issues, may predispose a person to have hip or knee problems. Untreated, hip dysplasia and hip impingement are leading causes of hip replacement in people under 50. Having bowlegs, knock knees — or other structural issues — can hasten the need for knee replacement.

“But it’s not like the rest of us have to be worried and say, ‘OK, at age 50, maybe I should have my hips or knees examined by a doctor,’” Dr. Sierra says. “In general, your body — your musculoskeletal system — will let you know when you have issues.”

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have discovered that radiation therapy combined with two types of immunotherapy—one that boosts T cells, and another that boosts dendritic cells—can control tumors in preclinical models of triple negative breast cancer, a cancer type that’s typically resistant to immunotherapy alone. Immunotherapy activates the body’s own immune system to fight cancer but isn’t effective for difficult-to-treat “cold” tumors, like this.

The findings were published Aug. 24 in Nature Communications. Though radiation therapy has previously been combined with T-cell boosting immunotherapy, it rarely succeeds in eliminating cold tumors. The new, preclinical study found that activating another type of immune cell called a dendritic cell, in addition to the other two approaches, produced a synergistic effect that elicited tumor regression.

“I think this is quite exciting,” said principal investigator Dr. Sandra Demaria, professor of radiation oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine and pathologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, who conducted the research under the auspices of the Department of Radiation Oncology. “There is so much room for improvement to provide more effective therapeutic options, especially for patients with cold tumors.”

Using their new scaffold with cryo-EM, the UCLA-led team saw the atomic structure of KRAS when it was connected to a drug being studied for lung cancer treatment. This showed that their method can help understand how drugs interact with proteins like KRAS, potentially leading to better medicines.

Castells-Graells said, “The potential applications for the new advance don’t stop with cancer drugs. ” Our modular scaffold can be assembled in any configuration to capture and hold all small protein molecules.”

The UCLA-led team’s essential improvement to cryo-EM technology represents a significant milestone in structural biology and scientific imaging. Their achievement in visualizing small therapeutic protein targets at 3 Å resolution is a testament to the power of innovation and collaboration in pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery. This breakthrough promises to revolutionize drug development and our understanding of complex biological systems, further solidifying Cryo-EM’s place as an invaluable tool in modern research.

Early detection of illnesses such as prostate cancer is key to treatment and a possible cure. Find out what you need to know and why you shouldn’t wait.

How well that translation occurs remains to be seen while the patient learns and adapts to the new system. “The implant procedures involving the Onward ARC-IM and Clinatec BCI went smoothly,” Dr. Bloch said in an press release. “We are now working with the patient to use this cutting-edge innovation to recover movement of his arms, hands, and fingers. We look forward to sharing more information in due course.”

“If the therapy continues to show promise, it is possible it could reach patients by the end of the decade,” Onward CEO Dave Marver said in a statement to Engadget. “It is important to note that we do not expect people with spinal cord injury to wait that long for Onward to commercialize an impactful therapy — we hope to commercialize our external spinal cord stimulation solution, ARC-EX Therapy, to restore hand and arm function in the second half of 2024.”

Onward Medical among a quickly expanding field of BCI-based startups working to apply the fledgling technology to a variety of medical maladies. Those applications include loss of limb and self-regulatory function due to stroke, traumatic brain or spinal cord injury, physical rehabilitation from those same injuries, as well as a critical means of communication for people living with Locked-In Syndrome.

Risk for community-onset C. difficile infection varies widely with choice of antibiotic.

The rising incidence of hospital-and community-acquired Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) reinforces the need for more-effective prevention. Researchers performed a retrospective case-control study to examine relative risk for community-acquired CDI (CA-CDI) in patients receiving different oral antibiotics. Using administrative claims databases from 2001–2021 that included commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid records, they matched each CA-CDI case with five control patients for a total of 159,404 cases and 797,020 controls.

For cases occurring within 30 days of antibiotic exposure, the highest risk for CA-CDI occurred with clindamycin (adjusted odds ratio, 25.4) and the lowest with minocycline (AOR, 0.79; the only 1 of 27 oral antibiotics with an AOR 1.0). Other high-risk antibiotics were cefixime (AOR, 12.0), cefdinir (11.0), cefuroxime (9.6), cefpodoxime (9.2), amoxicillin-clavulanate (8.5), and ciprofloxacin (6.8). Older beta-lactams were lower risk (penicillin AOR, 1.8; amoxicillin, 2.0; cephalexin, 2.9; cefadroxil, 2.8). The lowest-risk antibiotic classes were the macrolides, sulfonamides, and tetracyclines. For all antibiotic classes, different agents had discernible differences in AOR for CA-CDI. A sensitivity analysis assessing relative risk for CA-CDI over multiple exposure periods up to 180 days found that the relative hierarchy of risk for the different antibiotics remained the same for each exposure period, and that overall risk progressively declined with time.

The authors acknowledge multiple limitations of their analysis, including use of administrative claims data to identify CA-CDI and outpatient claims data to identify antibiotic exposure and lack of information on inpatient antibiotic usage. Still, the large study population allowed for a more-precise definition of relative risk than in prior studies, not only showing a wide variation among beta-lactam antibiotics but also indicating that the risk associated with fluoroquinolone antibiotics falls between that of the older and newer cephalosporin classes.

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Cognitive decline is a growing public health concern that affects millions of people around the world. Amid an aging population, strategies that help prevent or mitigate cognitive deterioration become increasingly relevant to support healthy aging and maintaining independence for longer. Studies in the field of neuroscience applied to architecture (neuroarchitecture) have shown that the physical environment, both internal and external, public and private, plays a fundamental role in this aspect [1]. In this sense, architects and urban planners can direct their projects to create solutions that significantly contribute to this objective.

The human brain is a very plastic organ. In other words, it transforms functionally and structurally according to how it is stimulated. Although this plasticity is much more intense during the development period, it continues to exist throughout our lives [2,3]. Therefore, keeping the brain stimulated during adulthood and aging is key to keeping cognition functioning at its best. In this context, recent studies indicate that certain stimuli help in the development of a cognitive reserve [4]. This, in turn, is the brain’s resilience capacity, which helps it to remain functional even throughout aging and even when some neurodegenerative diseases arise [5].