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Category: biotech/medical – Page 967

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Today, with the rampant spread of cybercrime, there is a tremendous amount of work being done to protect our computer networks — to secure our bits and bytes. At the same time, however, there is not nearly enough work being done to secure our atoms — namely, the hard physical infrastructure that runs the world economy.

Nations are now teeming with operational technology (OT) platforms that have essentially computerized their entire physical infrastructures, whether it’s buildings and bridges, trains and automobiles or the industrial equipment and assembly lines that keep economies humming. But the notion that a hospital bed can be hacked — or a plane or a bridge — is still a very new concept. We need to start taking such threats very seriously because they can cause catastrophic damage.

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Summary: A new study links daily eating to mortality risk. Those over 40 who eat one meal a day have a higher mortality risk. Those who skip breakfast are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease-associated death, and those who eat meals less than 4.5 hours apart have increased mortality risks.

Source: Elsevier.

Eating only one meal per day is associated with an increased risk of mortality in American adults 40 years old and older, according to a new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

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The finding could have implications on drug development beyond neuroscience.

A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen has found that V-ATPase, an enzyme thought to be a key component of brain function, switches off randomly, even for hours at a time. This discovery has the potential to change our understanding of how our brain functions, according to a press release.

V-ATPase is an enzyme that can break down ATP molecules, the cell’s energy currency, as they pump protons across cellular membranes.

Evgenil Kovalev/iStock.

Continue reading “A key enzyme in brain function shuts off randomly, study reveals” | >

It could actually be cheaper than other treatment options.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved a new drug Hemgenix, to be used in patients with hemophilia B, a blood clotting disorder. Since the condition is rare, it will be used only in a small group of patients worldwide.

Motortion/iStock.

Since Hemophilia patients lack enough clotting factor, so they are at risk of complications of prolonged bleeding that can also affect joints, internal organs, and the brain, an FDA document said. Treatment for such individuals constitutes intravenous infusions of clotting Factor IX to prevent bleeding episodes, which must be conducted over the patient’s lifetime.

Continue reading “FDA just approved the world’s most expensive drug that costs .5 million” | >

The first blood test to diagnose inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) could be in use in as little as a year, following the discovery of a molecular signal in the blood by Queen Mary University of London researchers. The research, published today in the journal Circulation, offers hope of a quick and cheap way of diagnosing the condition.

Myocarditis is a difficult condition to diagnose. Symptoms include a temperature, fatigue, chest pain and shortness of breath, which can all be easily mistaken for other conditions. The gold standard method for diagnosis is a biopsy, an expensive, invasive, and risky procedure which can sometimes still miss signs of the condition. It’s estimated that one young person dies suddenly every week in the UK due to previously undiagnosed myocarditis.

Now, a team of researchers led by BHF Professor Federica Marelli-Berg at Queen Mary University of London have found that the presence of T-cells—a type of white cell—expressing a molecule called cMet in the blood strongly indicates that a person has myocarditis. They say that cMet-expressing T cells levels could be detected through a routine blood test that could cost less than £50 with results available within hours.

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LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say measles immunization has dropped significantly since the coronavirus pandemic began, resulting in a record high of nearly 40 million children missing a vaccine dose last year.

In a report issued Wednesday, the WHO and the CDC said millions of children were now susceptible to measles, among the world’s most contagious diseases. In 2021, officials said there were about 9 million measles infections and 128,000 deaths worldwide.

The WHO and CDC said continued drops in vaccination, weak disease surveillance and delayed response plans due to COVID-19, in addition to ongoing outbreaks in more than 20 countries, mean that “measles is an imminent threat in every region of the world.”

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A research group led by 2014 Nobel laureate Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University’s Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability (IMaSS) in central Japan, in collaboration with Asahi Kasei Corporation, has successfully conducted the world’s first room-temperature continuous-wave lasing of a deep-ultraviolet laser diode (wavelengths down to UV-C region).

These results, published in Applied Physics Letters, represent a step toward the widespread use of a technology with the potential for a wide range of applications, including and medicine.

Since they were introduced in the 1960s, and after decades of research and development, successful commercialization of laser diodes (LDs) was finally achieved for a number of applications with wavelengths ranging from infrared to blue-violet. Examples of this technology include optical communications devices with infrared LDs and Blu-ray discs using blue-violet LDs.

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Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have identified the bacteria most commonly found in severe oral infections. Few such studies have been done before, and the team now hopes that the study can provide deeper insight into the association between oral bacteria and other diseases. The study is published in Microbiology Spectrum.

Previous studies have demonstrated clear links between and , such as cancer, , diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. However, there have been few identifying which occur in infected oral-and maxillofacial regions. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now analyzed samples collected between 2010 and 2020 at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden from patients with severe oral infections and produced a list of the most common bacteria.

This was a collaborative study that was performed by Professor Margaret Sällberg Chen and adjunct Professor Volkan Özenci’s research groups.

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