Forget editing embryos. We’re nearly ready to use CRISPR to change DNA inside our own bodies to treat many disorders, from hepatitis B to muscular dystrophy.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,641
Want to live longer? Here’s one way.
Summary: One in four Americans with type 2 diabetes doesn’t know they have the disease. Walking around with untreated diabetes more than doubles your risk of stroke, heart attack, and early death. Add years to your life by knowing your status, and then managing the condition. Type 2 diabetes can be treated with inexpensive tablets. This article provides a two-minute online assessment, which shows if you are at risk.
Today, one in eight adult Americans has diabetes, according to the latest report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Amazingly, one in four of them doesn’t know they have the disease. Walking around with untreated diabetes more than doubles your risk of severe health complications, including stroke, heart attack, and early death. You can add years to your life by managing type 2 diabetes, a disease which can be treated with inexpensive tablets.
Minimize the health-harming effects of type 2 diabetes by getting tested and treated early. This article provides ADA guidelines as to who should get tested for type 2 diabetes. Additionally, you can assess your risk of having diabetes using the free online assessment included in this article.
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By treating one of the root causes of aging – senescent cells – a new class of drugs, known as senolytics, has the potential to treat a wide range of age-related diseases rather than the traditional approach of dealing with them one at a time.
Today we are going to take a look at what senescent cells are, how they contribute to age-related diseases and a new review by the Mayo Clinic that shows what we can do about this problem. We all age, but the research suggests that we may not have to suffer from age-related ill health.
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A great initiative by Laura Katrin Weston one of our amazing volunteers. She is supporting research fundraising using the wonderful artwork she produces at Black Cat Studios.
Black Cat Studios is a small private recording, music production and art studio in Leicestershire, UK, providing a range of services for musicians, broadcasters, and game developers. It is really great to see the community starting to use their talents and passions outside of longevity to help support research. All proceeds will go to Lifespan.io and we will use them to support cutting-edge medical research projects such as MouseAge.
Laura will be producing artwork based on 31 themes all with a longevity or transhumanist flavor to them based on this list:
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This year we want to continue this tradition by doing something special, making a video to showcase you, our community, as it is only with your outstanding help that we have been able to accomplish so much in such a short period of time.
To learn more visit our website today: https://www.leafscience.org/longevity-month-2017-tell-us-your-story/
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Tattoos are fast becoming more than just a means of self-expression: soon they could be used for more practical applications, like tracking blood alcohol levels or turning the skin into a touchscreen. Now, a team from Harvard and MIT has developed a smart ink that could make for tattoos that monitor biometrics like glucose levels, and change color as a result.
Currently, bodily biomarkers can be monitored through a wardrobe-load of wearables, but they usually need batteries for power and wireless communication systems to transmit data. Using biosensitive inks (bio-inks), the Harvard and MIT design is self-contained, and since it works on simple chemical reactions it doesn’t require power for any data processing or transmission.
The inks interact with the body’s interstitial fluid, which transfers nutrients into cells and carries waste out of them. The fluid works closely with blood plasma, meaning it acts as a decent indicator of the chemical concentrations in the blood at a given time.
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Bacillus probiotics health benefits have been until now quite poorly studied in the elderly population. This study aimed to assess the effects of Bacillus subtilis CU1 consumption on immune stimulation and resistance to common infectious disease (CID) episodes in healthy free-living seniors.
One hundred subjects aged 60–74 were included in this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-arms study. Subjects consumed either the placebo or the probiotic (2.10B. subtilis CU1 spores daily) by short periodical courses of 10 days intermittently, alternating 18-day course of break. This scheme was repeated 4 times during the study. Symptoms of gastrointestinal and upper/lower respiratory tract infections were recorded daily by the subjects throughout the study (4 months). Blood, saliva and stool samples were collected in a predefined subset of the first forty-four subjects enrolled in the study. B. subtilis CU1 supplementation did not statistically significantly decrease the mean number of days of reported CID symptoms over the 4-month of study (probiotic group: 5.1 (7.0) d, placebo group: 6.6 (7.3) d, P = 0.2015). However, in the subset of forty-four randomized subjects providing biological samples, we showed that consumption of B.
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To reduce the damage to his brain and organs, Brooks was rushed to the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Lance Becker and his team cooled the young man’s core temperature to below 90 degrees Fahrenheit—a process called “induced hypothermia.” This is often done to cardiac arrest patients, either by injecting them with a cold saline solution or placing ice packs on them to increase their chances of complete recovery.
The dose of cold saved his life. Brooks had no brain damage, a remarkable feat that has led doctors to explore more ways to use induced hypothermia in emergency settings.
Now Dr. Sam Tisherman and his team at the University of Maryland, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, plan to put 10 patients into a more severe form of hypothermia than what Brooks got, something known as “suspended animation.” They’ll flush their bodies with a cold fluid, cooling (and therefore preserving) tissue. The experimental trial, known as emergency preservation and resuscitation for cardiac arrest from trauma ( EPR-CAT), is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, and it is the first time doctors are harnessing profound hypothermia (pushing body temperatures to as low as 50 degrees) to save lives.
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Chinese scientists used an adapted version of a controversial gene-editing technique to correct a disease-causing mutation in human embryos, a medical first cautiously hailed by other experts Thursday.
The team used a so-called “base editor”—an adaptation of the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipping tool—to correct a single, mutated “letter” among about three billion in the intricate coding of the human genome.
The targeted mutation can cause humans to be born with beta-Thalassaemia, a potentially fatal genetic blood disorder.
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