Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 986

Brain single-cell study reveals genes that may be involved in post-traumatic stress and major depressive disorders

An international team led by investigators at McLean Hospital has analyzed the genes expressed in approximately 575,000 individual cells from the brains of people with and without post-traumatic stress and major depressive disorders (PTSD and MDD), revealing new insights into the mechanisms behind the brain’s stress response in these conditions.

The findings, which are published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, could lead to novel markers of PTSD and MDD and well as new therapeutic targets.

Because studies have implicated the (DLPFC) region of the brain in PTSD and MDD, the scientists compared the expressed in cells in DLPFC samples collected postmortem from 11 individuals with PTSD, 10 with MDD, and 11 without either of these conditions with a replication dataset half the size. The researchers detected which genes were expressed by which cells—including eight different types of cells—through a technique called single-cell RNA sequencing.

Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decline in Aging

Scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered what they believe to be the central mechanism behind cognitive decline associated with normal aging.

“The mechanism involves the mis-regulation of a brain protein known as CaMKII which is crucial for memory and learning,” said the study’s co-senior author Ulli Bayer, PhD, professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “This study directly suggests specific pharmacological treatment strategies.”

The study was published today in the journal ‘Science Signaling.’

Crohn’s Disease: Scientists Say Bacteria in The Mouth May Be a Cause

Crohn’s disease affects four million people worldwide. The condition causes debilitating symptoms such as chronic fatigue, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, weight loss and malnutrition.

Once symptoms develop, Crohn’s is a lifelong condition – and while there are ways to manage symptoms during flare-ups, there’s currently no cure.

The exact causes of Crohn’s disease are unknown and are probably due to a number of complex and overlapping factors – such as genetics, environmental cues (such as smoking) and an immune system that’s overactive in the gut.

NIH-funded study explains link to increased cardiovascular risks for people with obstructive sleep apnea

Reduction in blood oxygen levels, largely attributed to blocked airways, emerges as a leading factor.

Researchers have found that people with obstructive sleep apnea have an increased cardiovascular risk due to reduced blood oxygen levels, largely explained by interrupted breathing. Obstructive sleep apnea has long been associated with increased risk of cardiovascular issues, including heart attack, stroke, and death, but the findings from this study, partially supported by the National Institutes of Health and published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, show the mechanism mostly responsible for the link.

“These findings will help better characterize high-risk versions of obstructive sleep apnea,” said Ali Azarbarzin, Ph.D., a study author and director of the Sleep Apnea Health Outcomes Research Group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. “We think that including a higher-risk version of obstructive sleep apnea in a randomized clinical trial would hopefully show that treating sleep apnea could help prevent future cardiovascular outcomes.”

Does AKI Beget Worsening CKD?

Whether episodes of acute kidney injury (AKI) lead to worsening chronic kidney disease (CKD) still is under debate, and some countries now incentivize stricter renal monitoring of patients following hospitalizations for AKI. U.S. researchers prospectively identified 433 adults with known CKD (defined as ≥50% increase in serum creatinine level) and examined whether those episodes contributed to worsening of CKD during 4 years of follow-up. Nearly all the episodes of AKI were stage 1 or 2 (i.e., the ratio of peak to nadir serum creatinine was less than 3).

After adjusting for an extensive set of potentially confounding variables, patients with stage 1 or stage 2 AKI did not have substantial decreases in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR; calculated using creatinine or using cystatin C level) or have substantially accelerated changes in eGFR over time.

These results suggest that in a patient with known CKD, an episode of AKI generally doesn’t affect the subsequent natural history of CKD. Whether more-severe AKI (stage 3 or stage 4) portends worse CKD outcomes could not be determined in this study due to small number of patients with such disease severity.

Machine learning enables discovery of DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters

DNA can do more than pass genetic code from one generation to the next. For nearly 20 years, scientists have known of the molecule’s ability to stabilize nanometer-sized clusters of silver atoms. Some of these structures glow visibly in red and green, making them useful in a variety of chemical and biosensing applications.

Stacy Copp, UCI assistant professor of materials science and engineering, wanted to see if the capabilities of these tiny fluorescent markers could be stretched even further—into the near-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum—to give bioscience researchers the power to see through living cells and even centimeters of biological tissue, opening doors to enhanced methods of disease detection and treatment.

“There is untapped potential to extend fluorescence by DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters into the near-infrared region,” she says. “The reason that’s so interesting is because our biological tissues and fluids are much more transparent to near-infrared light than to visible light.”

/* */