Could organoid-driven computing be the future of AI power?
Category: biotech/medical – Page 58
This deadly brain disorder can develop a decade after you get the measles — and it just killed a child
A school-aged child in L.A. recently died after developing a rare neurological disease years after contracting the measles.
Authorities didn’t reveal many details about the case, except that the child was infected with measles as an infant, before they were eligible for the vaccine.
Measles is a respiratory disease that spreads easily from person to person. The first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is routinely recommended for kids between 12 and 15 months old. A second dose is given before kindergarten or first grade.
The Muscle-Brain Axis and Neurodegenerative Diseases: The Key Role of Mitochondria in Exercise-Induced Neuroprotection
Regular exercise is associated with pronounced health benefits. The molecular processes involved in physiological adaptations to exercise are best understood in skeletal muscle. Enhanced mitochondrial functions in muscle are central to exercise-induced adaptations. However, regular exercise also benefits the brain and is a major protective factor against neurodegenerative diseases, such as the most common age-related form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or the most common neurodegenerative motor disorder, Parkinson’s disease. While there is evidence that exercise induces signalling from skeletal muscle to the brain, the mechanistic understanding of the crosstalk along the muscle–brain axis is incompletely understood. Mitochondria in both organs, however, seem to be central players.
Scientists Train AI to Forecast Over 1,000 Diseases, Years in Advance
Scientists said Wednesday that they had created an AI model able to predict medical diagnoses years in advance, building on the same technology behind consumer chatbots like ChatGPT.
Based on a patient’s case history, the Delphi-2M AI “predicts the rates of more than 1,000 diseases” years into the future, the team from British, Danish, German and Swiss institutions wrote in a paper published in the journal Nature.
Researchers trained the model on data from Britain’s UK Biobank – a large-scale biomedical research database with details on about half a million participants.
Rapamycin linked to DNA damage resilience in aging human immune cells
University of Oxford-led research finds low-dose rapamycin functions as a genomic protector in aging human immune cells, lowering DNA damage.
The mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a central signaling pathway that regulates and coordinates cell growth, metabolism, and survival in response to environmental cues. It helps cells integrate signals from growth factors, nutrients, and stress to control whether they are in an anabolic (building up) or catabolic (breaking down) state.
Aging immune systems accumulate DNA damage linked to immunosenescence. Rapamycin is a drug that inhibits the mTOR pathway. Originally developed for organ transplantation to prevent immune rejection, previous research has found that, at non-immunosuppressive doses, rapamycin can mitigate cellular senescence.
Is Chronic Kidney Disease Due to Cadmium Exposure Inevitable and Can It Be Reversed?
Cadmium (Cd) is a metal with no nutritional value or physiological role. However, it is found in the body of most people because it is a contaminant of nearly all food types and is readily absorbed. The body burden of Cd is determined principally by its intestinal absorption rate as there is no mechanism for its elimination. Most acquired Cd accumulates within the kidney tubular cells, where its levels increase through to the age of 50 years but decline thereafter due to its release into the urine as the injured tubular cells die. This is associated with progressive kidney disease, which is signified by a sustained decline in the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and albuminuria. Generally, reductions in eGFR after Cd exposure are irreversible, and are likely to decline further towards kidney failure if exposure persists.
