Osaka-based Marukan Co., Ltd., the maker of a new range of nutritional cat food with AIM protein to prevent kidney disease, wants to help extend the lives of cats to 30 years.
Learn more about a protein-enriched cat food aiming to help cats live longer.
A stroke happens when blood flow is lost to part of the brain. Your brain cells cannot get the oxygen and nutrients they need from blood, and they start to die in a few minutes. This can cause lasting brain damage, long-term disability, or even death.
A stroke can occur when an obstruction such as a blood clot travels from another part of the body and lodges inside an artery in the brain.
When an arterial wall becomes damaged, various types of emboli, or obstructions, can form. Emboli can be made up of various substances such as platelets, elements in the blood that help it clot, blood clots that form elsewhere and pass to the damaged area, cholesterol, or a combination of things.
Continue reading “Stroke — Health Video: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia” »
Headquartered in Oxford, UK, MitoRx is working on orally delivered mitochondrial protective therapeutics targeting mitochondrial dysfunction linked to the progression of conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Huntington’s disease, along with other neurodegenerative diseases. The company says the new funding will be allocated towards its preclinical work in Huntington’s disease, activating its first neurodegenerative disease program, and exploring research collaborations and partnerships.
MitoRx anticipates delivering preclinical results in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, and COPD next year.
“Interim results in our Duchenne program demonstrate that our muscle-penetrative lead asset preserves strength in oxidative muscle, and confirms mitochondrial modulation,” said Dr Christine Charman, Chief Development Officer at MitoRx. “These results will be presented at the Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinical and Scientific Conference in Orlando during March 2024.”
Artificial intelligence tools hold promise for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to the interpretation of medical images. However, a new study finds these AI tools are more vulnerable than previously thought to targeted attacks that effectively force AI systems to make bad decisions.
At issue are so-called “adversarial attacks,” in which someone manipulates the data being fed into an AI system in order to confuse it. For example, someone might know that putting a specific type of sticker at a specific spot on a stop sign could effectively make the stop sign invisible to an AI system. Or a hacker could install code on an X-ray machine that alters the image data in a way that causes an AI system to make inaccurate diagnoses.
“For the most part, you can make all sorts of changes to a stop sign, and an AI that has been trained to identify stop signs will still know it’s a stop sign,” says Tianfu Wu, co-author of a paper on the new work and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “However, if the AI has a vulnerability, and an attacker knows the vulnerability, the attacker could take advantage of the vulnerability and cause an accident.”
Worldwide, more than one billion people are obese. Obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers. But permanently losing weight isn’t easy: complex interactions between body systems such as gut physiology, hormones, and the brain are known to work against it. One method for weight loss is intermittent energy restriction (IER), where days of relative fasting alternate with days of eating normally.
“Here we show that an IER diet changes the human brain-gut-microbiome axis. The observed changes in the gut microbiome and in the activity in addition-related brain regions during and after weight loss are highly dynamic and coupled over time,” said last author Dr. Qiang Zeng, a researcher at the Health Management Institute of the PLA General Hospital in Beijing. The study has been published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.
The authors used metagenomics on stool samples, blood measurements, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study changes in the composition of the gut microbiome, physiological parameters and serum composition, and brain activity in 25 obese Chinese women and men on an IER diet. Participants were on average 27 years old, with a BMI between 28 and 45.
Armed with gene technologies and CAR-Ts, scientists are attempting to eliminate viruses that escape immune detection and lurk in tissues for years.
Progression independent of relapse activity (PIRA) has been increasingly recognized in people with multiple sclerosis (MS; NEJM JW Neurol May 24 2022 and JAMA Neurol 2022; 79:682). To learn more about PIRA, investigators used data from the Italian MS Register on 16,130 patients with relapsing-remitting MS, including 1,383 with pediatric-onset MS (POMS; median age at onset, 16), 14,113 with adult-onset MS (AOMS; median age at onset, 29), and 634 with late-onset MS (LOMS; median age at onset, 52).
Compared with patients with POMS, patients with LOMS had the highest incidence of PIRA (hazard ratio
These authors provide data supporting the notion that MS pathophysiology is different between patients with PIRA and those with relapse-associated worsening. While relapse-associated worsening seems to increase gradually and reach a plateau, PIRA begins in the 20s and continues to increase. PIRA encompasses accumulating neurodegenerative processes, supporting the concept that a subset of patients experience progression even within the relapsing-remitting phase of the disease.
People may be more than two times likelier to develop schizophrenia-related disorders if they owned cats during childhood than if they didn’t:
Living with cats as a child has once again been linked to mental health disorders, because our furry friends apparently can’t catch a break.
In a new meta-analysis published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, Australian researchers identified 17 studies between 1980 and 2023 that seemed to associate cat ownership in childhood with schizophrenia-related disorders — a sample size narrowed down from a whopping 1,915 studies that dealt with cats during that 43-year time period.
Continue reading “Childhood Cat Exposure Once Again Linked to Schizophrenia” »
Researchers have come one step closer to answering why, in some patients, a type of lymphoma changes from indolent to aggressive, and in particular, they are closer to identifying which patients are at high risk of this change happening.
Part of the answer lies in the protein expression in the tumor, explains Associate Professor Maja Ludvigsen from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University. Maja is one of the authors of a new study on the subject, which has just been published in the journal Blood Advances.
Follicular lymphoma is an incurable lymphoma. But unlike many other cancers, it is not always aggressive from the start. This means that patients with the disease have to live with the uncertainty of when—and how—the cancer will develop. It also means frequent visits to the hospital to monitor any acute developments.
Self-propelled nanoparticles could potentially advance drug delivery and lab-on-a-chip systems — but they are prone to go rogue with random, directionless movements. Now, an international team of researchers has developed an approach to rein in the synthetic particles.
Led by Igor Aronson, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry and Mathematics at Penn State, the team redesigned the nanoparticles into a propeller shape to better control their movements and increase their functionality. They published their results in the journal Small (“Multifunctional Chiral Chemically-Powered Micropropellers for Cargo Transport and Manipulation”).
A propeller-shaped nanoparticle spins counterclockwise, triggered by a chemical reaction with hydrogen peroxide, followed by an upward movement, triggered by a magnetic field. The optimized shape of these particles allows researchers to better control the nanoparticles’ movements and to pick up and move cargo particles. (Video: Active Biomaterials Lab)
