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Category: biotech/medical – Page 316

Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest’s undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child’s immune system, according to an experiment in Finland.

When daycare workers rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth (such as dwarf heather and blueberries), and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of the young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time.

Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile, and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centers in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days.

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MIT researchers have developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation, delivered by a fiber about the thickness of a human hair.

Deep brain stimulation, by implanted electrodes that deliver electrical pulses to the brain, is often used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, the electrodes used for this treatment can eventually corrode and accumulate scar tissue, requiring them to be removed.

MIT researchers have now developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation, delivered by a fiber about the thickness of a human hair. In a study of mice, they showed that this stimulation can trigger neurons to release dopamine, in a part of the brain that is often targeted in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

“By using ultrasonography, we can create a new way of stimulating neurons to fire in the deep brain,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and the senior author of the new study. “This device is thinner than a hair fiber, so there will be negligible tissue damage, and it is easy for us to navigate this device in the deep brain.”

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Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed an executive order to make cutting-edge gene and cell therapies more affordable and accessible. The order’s primary focus is on treatments for sickle cell disease, a condition that disproportionately affects Black Americans.

Addressing Cost Barriers to Innovation

The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) will spearhead efforts to develop new payment models for these transformative but expensive treatments. A newly formed Advisory Council will recommend creating sustainable financing structures, emphasizing models that reward positive health outcomes.

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In a study appearing in Nature, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reconstructed the evolutionary history and global spread of malaria over the past 5,500 years, identifying trade, warfare, and colonialism as major catalysts for its dispersal.

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The CRISPR-Cas9 system has revolutionised gene-editing, but cutting DNA isn’t all it can do. From turning gene expression on and off to fluorescently tagging particular sequences, this animation explores some of the exciting possibilities of CRISPR.

Download a poster on ‘The expanding CRISPR toolbox’ here: https://www.nature.com/posters/crispr…

Produced with support from Dharmacon: https://www.dharmacon.com.

Nature has full responsibility for all editorial content, including Nature Video content. This content is editorially independent of sponsors.

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Diagnosing dementia early gives us more time to put precautions in place and to study exactly how the condition progresses – and a new method for predicting conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease is promising up to nine years of advance warning.

The method, developed by a team from the Queen Mary University of London in the UK and Monash University in Australia, involves a neurobiological model that analyzes brain scans captured by functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

In tests, the model was more than 80 percent accurate at predicting the development of dementia. That has huge potential in terms of early diagnosis, and it also addresses another challenge: the large number of people with dementia who don’t get diagnosed at all.

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Some breast cancer survivors are at higher risk for cardiovascular disease following certain treatments. A new study is one of the first to provide evidence that may inform long-term and age-specific monitoring for these adverse outcomes. Researchers observed that breast cancer survivors treated with anthracyclines, a type of chemotherapy, and/or trastuzumab, a targeted cancer therapy, had an increased long-term risk of cardiovascular disease, specifically cardiomyopathy/heart failure, compared to women who did not receive chemotherapy. This study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on May 8, 2024, and was selected for the journal’s Early Career Investigator Research Section.

It is well established that certain breast cancer treatments, such as anthracycline and trastuzumab, can lead to heart damage, which contributes to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. However, current guidelines only recommend short-term cardiovascular surveillance up to two years after anthracycline and trastuzumab treatment because of a lack of evidence regarding long-term risks. Jacqueline B. Vo, Ph.D., R.N., M.P.H., assistant clinical investigator in the Radiation Epidemiology Branch (REB), led a team of researchers from REB, the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and Kaiser Permanente, to explore whether patients could benefit from long-term surveillance. Their analysis included over 10,000 breast cancer survivors in the NCI-Kaiser Permanente Breast Cancer Survivors Cohort with up to 24 years of follow up.

They found that breast cancer survivors, especially those diagnosed at younger ages, had higher risks of cardiovascular disease and could benefit from long-term cardiovascular follow-up. Specifically, risk of cardiomyopathy/heart failure were highest 10+ years after breast cancer diagnosis. Women who were diagnosed prior to age 55 had the highest risks for cardiomyopathy/heart failure, which was nearly three times higher compared to women the same age who did not receive chemotherapy. One reason for the higher risk of cardiomyopathy/heart failure among women diagnosed with breast cancer at younger ages is that this group is more likely to be diagnosed with more aggressive and/or advanced tumors, which are more likely to be treated with anthracyclines and at higher doses. These results highlight the importance of extending current treatment-specific clinical guidelines for cardiovascular surveillance to include longer follow-up and focus on high-risk patients such as younger women.

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