Longevity drugs for our canine companions are moving closer to reality. They also raise questions about what it might mean to succeed.
The brain-computer interface (BCI) space continues to rise in notoriety, and a number of players are throwing their hats in the ring.
Such technologies could enable users to control a computer with their brain, or even go beyond that. Countless immobile people someday could control a mouse cursor, keyboard, mobile device/tablet, wheelchair or prosthetic device by only thinking.
Big names have already established their presence in the space. Elon Musk’s Neuralink continues to make headway, while Bill Gates-and Jeff Bezos-backed Synchron has an innovative catheter-delivered implant. Blackrock Neurotech, which has a next-generation BCI, has been implanting its Utah Array in patients since 2004.
The brings you the true stories and experiences from radical remission survivors and the healers and doctors who have helped them overcome a dire prognosis. These episodes are full of stories of hope and inspiration for anyone living with a life-changing diagnosis.
New research at ACR Convergence 2023, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, demonstrates that CAR-T cell therapy could lead to sustained suppression of autoantibodies in treatment-resistant lupus while maintaining a robust response to vaccines.
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE, lupus) is a complex autoimmune disease marked by the production of autoantibodies to nucleic acid DNA and nuclear protein autoantigens and is associated with dysfunctional B cells. It mainly affects women and is more common and severe in people who are Black, Hispanic, or Asian. Lupus can lead to a wide range of systemic problems varying in severity, including skin, kidney, lung, joints, and heart disease and complications during pregnancy.
The disease often requires life-long treatment with immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory drugs, and a considerable number of patients don’t respond to them. One theoretical option for these patients is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, which is successfully used to treat refractory blood cancers by destroying malignant cells.
Design Cells / iStock.
The tool can correct genetic errors, control gene activity, and potentially treat diseases like cancer. However, its use raises ethical concerns regarding altering human genes and embryos.
GPT-4 for radiology.
As the benefits of AI in healthcare continue to emerge, we investigate GPT-4’s potential in radiology. Learn about research exploring GPT-4’s potential in assisting report structuring, classifying diseases, and generating comprehensive findings summaries:
Life expectancy and healthy aging in mice can be determined by a protein present in some cells of the immune system, according to a study published in the journal Cell Reports. When this protein—known as the CD300f immune receptor—is absent, animal models have a shorter life expectancy and suffer from pathologies associated with cognitive decline and premature aging, especially in females.
“Our study indicates that alterations in immune system cells, for instance, in macrophages and microglia, can determine the healthy aging degree in mice,” notes Hugo Peluffo, leader of this study and member of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Institute of Neurosciences (UBneuro) of the University of Barcelona.
Understanding how the CD300f immune receptor —and the myeloid cells of the immune system—can determine by themselves the onset rate of aging-associated pathologies, “will help to better understand this process, and it will contribute to the design of strategies to regulate its action. For instance, using the immune receptor CD300f as a target in biomedicine,” notes the expert. “Also, our team has previously shown that some variants of the CD300f immune receptor could be useful as biomarkers in patients.”
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A ransomware attack has prompted a healthcare chain that operates 30 hospitals in six states to divert patients from at least some of its emergency rooms to other hospitals, while putting certain elective procedures on pause, the company announced.
In a statement Monday, Ardent Health Services said the attack occurred Nov. 23 and the company took its network offline, suspending user access to its information technology applications, including the software used to document patient care.
The Nashville, Tennessee-based company said it cannot yet confirm the extent of any patient health or financial information that has been compromised. Ardent says it reported the issue to law enforcement and retained third-party forensic and threat intelligence advisors, while working with cybersecurity specialists to restore IT functions as quickly as possible. There’s no timeline yet on when the problems will be resolved.
A new ingestible capsule can monitor vital signs from within the patient’s GI tract. The sensor could be used for less intrusive monitoring of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, or for detecting opioid overdoses.
Diagnosing sleep disorders such as sleep apnea usually requires a patient to spend the night in a sleep lab, hooked up to a variety of sensors and monitors. Researchers from MIT, Celero Systems, and West Virginia University hope to make that process less intrusive, using an ingestible capsule they developed that can monitor vital signs from within the patient’s GI tract.
The capsule, which is about the size of a multivitamin, uses an accelerometer to measure the patient’s breathing rate and heart rate. In addition to diagnosing sleep apnea, the device could also be useful for detecting opioid overdoses in people at high risk, the researchers say.
New research suggests that biological age, as indicated by DNA methylation, more significantly impacts cognitive abilities like memory and processing speed than chronological age. This finding could reshape our understanding of aging and cognitive health.
