DOCTORS have reconnected a 12-year-old boy’s skull to his body after he suffered “internal decapitation” in a freak car accident.
Medics in Jerusalem, Israel, say they performed the “extremely rare” operation on Suleiman Hassan after a car knocked him off his bike.
His skull broke off the top vertebrae in his spine in the hit in June, effectively separating his head from his body with just skin and muscles keeping it in place.
Adults with a diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome are 39% more likely to develop HF during 10 years of follow-up, especially amyloidosis, compared with those without a carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosis, researchers reported.
“The increased rate of HF among patients with carpal tunnel syndrome requires attention because HF is a common disease associated with high mortality,” Mark Luedde, MD, from Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and Cardiology Joint Practice in Bremerhaven, Germany, and colleagues wrote in JAMA Network Open. “Early diagnosis of HF is a key to successful treatment, particularly for [transthyretin] cardiac amyloidosis, which has been associated with carpal tunnel syndrome in a recent study.”
In a retrospective study, Luedde and colleagues analyzed data from 81,898 adults from 1,284 general practices in Germany with an initial diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome from 2005 to 2020, using the Disease Analyzer database. The mean age of patients was 53 years and 66.7% were women. Researchers used propensity-score matching to match patients without carpal tunnel syndrome to those with carpal tunnel syndrome. The main outcome was the initial diagnosis of HF up to 10 years after the index date of carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosis. As a negative control, researchers analyzed the association of carpal tunnel syndrome with cancer.
Researchers led by Leipzig University have found a application in oncology for the scientific field of Physics of Cancer. This is a milestone for the new research field, proving its clinical relevance for the first time. Based on tissue and cell mechanics and using machine learning, the team developed a marker for cancer cell motility in digital pathology.
The marker delivers new information about breast tumors that will improve the ability to predict the risk of metastasis, even after a decade has passed. The researchers have just published their new findings in the journal Physical Review X.
In a retrospective study of 1,380 female breast cancer patients, conducted in close collaboration with Professor Axel Niendorf from the Pathologie Hamburg-West institute, doctoral researcher Pablo Gottheil from the research group led by Professor Josef Alfons Käs at Leipzig University found that a collective transition of cancer cells to motility, known in specialist circles as “unjamming,” significantly increases the risk of distant metastases.
Lymphoma is often thought of as a cancer of lymph nodes, but it’s actually a cancer of the lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are white blood cells that manage inflammation in the body.
Chronic inflammation can sometimes lead to a lymphoma known as marginal zone lymphoma.
Marginal zone lymphoma is a rare, slow-growing B-cell lymphoma. Because it’s so rare, marginal zone lymphoma is often treated like other subtypes of B-cell lymphomas, and new treatment options are often explored through clinical trials that group marginal zone lymphoma with other B-cell lymphoma subtypes.
Summary: A new study suggests that ChatGPT’s healthcare-related responses are hard to distinguish from those provided by human healthcare providers.
The study, involving 392 participants, presented a mix of responses from both ChatGPT and humans, finding participants correctly identified the chatbot and provider responses with similar accuracy.
However, the level of trust varied based on the complexity of the health-related task, with administrative tasks and preventive care being more trusted than diagnostic and treatment advice.
Research led by Sichuan University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, has revealed genetic mechanisms that could prolong healthy aging. In the paper, titled “Partial inhibition of class III PI3K VPS-34 ameliorates motor aging and prolongs health span,” published in PLOS Biology, the team details the methods they used to narrow down the potential genomic pathways to a single gene that could be critical to extending healthy human longevity.
With a combination of genetic manipulation, behavioral assays, microscopy techniques, and electrophysiology, the researchers investigated the role of VPS-34 in motor aging. These methods allowed the researchers to gain insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying motor aging and the effects of VPS-34 inhibition on motor function, synaptic transmission, and muscle integrity.
According to the authors, increased life expectancy in recent decades has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in health span. Aging is characterized by the decline of multiple organs and tissues and motor aging, in particular, leads to frailty, loss of motor independence, and other age-related issues. Identifying mechanisms for therapeutics to delay motor aging is crucial for promoting healthy aging.
Prosthetics moved by thoughts. Targeted treatments for aggressive brain cancer. Soldiers with enhanced vision or bionic ears.
These powerful technologies sound like science fiction, but they’re becoming possible thanks to nanoparticles.
And, as with any great power, there comes great responsibility.
University of Copenhagen researchers have invented a “quantum drum” that can measure pressure, a gas leak, heat, magnetism and a host of other things with extreme precision. It can even scan the shape of a single virus. The invention has now been adapted to work at room temperature and may be finding its way into our phones.
Humans have tried to measure the world around them since ancient times. Now, researchers are using the laws of quantum physics to develop one of the most sensitive measuring devices the world has ever seen. One day, it may even be yours. With two innovative solutions, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have found a way to get quantum technology into our pockets.
The heart of the apparatus could be called a “quantum drum”: It is a thin membrane that vibrates like a drum skin, but with so small an amplitude that the laws of quantum physics are needed to describe what’s happening. In other words, it’s vibrating really fast. This means the drum can be used as an ultra-precise measuring device—a quantum supersensor.
A team of nearly 100 scientists recently mapped the cell-type taxonomy in the macaque cortex and revealed the relationship between cell-type composition and various primate brain regions by using the self-developed spatial transcriptome sequencing technology Stereo-seq and snRNA-seq technology, which provides a molecular and cellular basis for further investigation into neural circuits.
The study was published in Cell.
Primates have a vast number of neurons that form complex and intricate neural circuits supporting advanced cognition and behavior. Disruptions in these cells and circuits can lead to various brain disorders. Understanding the composition and spatial distribution of cells in the brain, as well as the relationships between them, is a fundamental question in neuroscience, comparable to the periodic table in chemistry, the world map in geographic discoveries, or the DNA base sequence discovered through human genome sequencing.
To enjoy the scent of morning coffee and freshly baked cookies or to perceive the warning smell of something burning, the brain needs two types of cells, neurons and astrocytes, to work closely with each other. Research has shown a great deal of the changes that occur in neurons during olfactory, or smell, perception, but what are the astrocyte responses and how they contribute to the sensory experience remains unclear.
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions report in the journal Science the responses of astrocytes to olfactory stimulation, revealing a new mechanism that is required to maintain astrocyte-neuron communication and process olfactory sensation.
“Previous studies have shown that under natural conditions in a living animal, olfactory stimulation of the brain activates neurons first, which changes the genes these neurons express to be able to mediate the olfactory sensation,” said first author Dr. Debosmita Sardar, a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Benjamin Deneen’s lab at Baylor. “In this study, we investigated what occurred to astrocytes following neural activity during olfactory stimulation and uncovered changes that had not been described before.”