Lifeboat Foundation

Though it resembles a coral, root system, or some other kind of growth, the above photo actually depicts a six-inch-wide blood clot in the near-perfect form of the right bronchial tree of a human lung, the Atlantic reported on Thursday. Even more uncomfortable is the revelation that it was not removed by medical staff, but in fact coughed up by a patient who was suffering from heart failure.

The photo was released in late November as part of the New England Journal of Medicine’s Images in Clinical Medicine series. University of California at San Francisco doctors Gavitt A. Woodard and Georg M. Wieselthaler wrote that it came from their patient, a 36-year-old man who had long struggled with chronic heart failure. The patient reportedly had a medical history including “heart failure with an ejection fraction of 20%, bioprosthetic aortic-valve replacement for bicuspid aortic stenosis, endovascular stenting of an aortic aneurysm, and placement of a permanent pacemaker for complete heart block.” When the patient was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, they hooked him up to a pump designed to help circulate blood throughout the body:

An Impella ventricular assist device was placed for management of acute heart failure, and a continuous heparin infusion was initiated for systemic anticoagulation. During the next week, the patient had episodes of small-volume hemoptysis, increasing respiratory distress, and increasing use of supplemental oxygen (up to 20 liters delivered through a high-flow nasal cannula). During an extreme bout of coughing, the patient spontaneously expectorated an intact cast of the right bronchial tree.

Continue reading “A Heart Failure Patient Actually Coughed Up This Blood Clot Shaped Like a Lung Passage” »

Dawn is an inspirational marriage of technology and humanity.

The idea of a cancer vaccine is something researchers have been working on for over 50 years, but until recently they were never able to prove exactly how such a vaccine would work.

Now, a team of researchers at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at Université de Montréal has demonstrated that a vaccine can work. Not only that, it could become an extremely effective, non-invasive and cost-effective cancer-fighting tool.

The team’s work was published yesterday in Science Translational Medicine.

Continue reading “Major breakthrough in quest for cancer vaccine” »

A 4,900-year-old skeleton has turned the accepted story of the disease on its head.

Virginia Tech announced Thursday it will receive a record $50 million gift to support biomedical research, a landmark donation for the public university that will expand the influence of its academic health center in Roanoke.

The gift comes from the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust and from Heywood and Cynthia Fralin. It is twice as large as the previous record, a $25 million donation from Alice and Bill Goodwin for an engineering building that opened in 2014 on the university’s main campus in Blacksburg.

The new funding will help the university recruit and retain researchers, a spokesman said. A biomedical research institute will be named for the Fralin family and based within the Virginia Tech Carilion Academic Health Center.

Continue reading “Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis” »

And his team at Yale-NUS have recently completed a detailed set of studies looking at eleven of the most promising anti-aging single drugs, using nematode worms (C. elegans) as their model organism.

Drug synergy found to increase lifespan in worms

Even though testing the effects of single drugs on health and longevity in various organisms is challenging by itself, and testing multiple drugs and their synergistic effects can be a logistical and statistical nightmare, they found some surprising results, including up to a 96 percent increase in lifespan [1]. As they conclude in their new paper:

Neoliberalism slows down evolution! Just kidding…or am I? 🧐😁🤣🙈.

Like other organisms, bacteria constantly have to fight to survive in hostile living conditions. Together with colleagues in Finland, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön have discovered that bacteria adapt to their environment more slowly and less efficiently as soon as they are exposed to two stress factors rather than one. This is due to mutations in different genes. The slower rate of evolution led to smaller population sizes. This means that evolution can take divergent paths if an organism is exposed to several stress factors.

Bacteria rarely live alone; they are usually part of a community of species that is exposed to various stress factors. They can often react to these factors by adapting to new environmental conditions with astonishing speed. Antibiotics that enter soil and water via waste water and accumulate there in low concentrations can trigger the evolution of resistance in bacteria – even though these concentrations are so low that they inhibit bacterial growth only slightly or not at all. However, bacteria do not only have to fight antibiotics; they also have to deal with predators. This is why they often grow in large colonies that cannot be consumed by predatory organisms.

Continue reading “Double the stress slows down evolution” »

Starting on Thursday, the latest Apple Watch models will be able to take an ECG reading, a kind of heart-rate reading that doctors can use to diagnose heart conditions.

To activate the feature, you need the Apple Watch Series 4 and the latest version of WatchOS, which will be available for download on Thursday.

Apple made it easy to access the feature: turn on the app, hold your finger on the device’s crown for 30 seconds, and it will provide a heart rhythm reading that you can use to figure out whether you need to contact your doctor to get your heart checked out. It saves the reading in a PDF file that you can send to your doctor.

Continue reading “Apple’s highly anticipated heart monitoring feature is finally available for the Apple Watch” »

Slimy, hard-to-clean bacterial mats called biofilms cause problems ranging from medical infections to clogged drains and fouled industrial equipment. Now, researchers at Princeton have found a way to cleanly and completely peel off these notorious sludges.