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Category: health – Page 237

New data from Children’s National Hospital shows parental experience with a number of social determinants of health can ultimately impact brain development in utero, something researchers said should suggest future community health intervention among pregnant people. The data, published in JAMA Network Open, specifically found poorer brain development in fetuses among pregnant people with low socioeconomic status (SES), low educational attainment, and limited employment opportunity.

New data from Children’s National Hospital has found that social determinants of health like income, education, and occupation can impact fetal brain development, following that child into life.

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“Our study has revealed 64 percent of the world’s arable land is at risk of pesticide pollution. This is important because the wider scientific literature has found that pesticide pollution can have adverse impacts on human health and the environment,” said Dr. Tang.

There is concern that overuse of pesticides will tip the balance, destabilize ecosystems and degrade the quality of water sources that humans and animals rely on to survive.

The future outlook

Global pesticide use is expected to increase as the global population heads towards an expected 8.5 billion by 2030.

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Following on from the video last week all about mTOR, this week I have got one on AMPK. This is yet another protein that has an enzymatic role in the cellular energy systems that keeps us all alive and well, and it performs a natural balancing act with mTOR. As with all the systems in our body, a natural balance is essential for harmony, do we feast or fast, do we exercise hard or relax and meditate, do we sleep as many hours as possible or as few as we can get by on, should our body concentrate on growth or repair? It can all seem like a mine field, so it is often good to start with the essentials to make sure you have a good grasp of what they are, before you venture out of your depth. Hopefully this video will help shed some light these areas so you can find the right routine to help you strike a balance.

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Univ. of Toronto Researcher: “I did not realize quite how bad [the lack of reproducibility and poor quality in research papers] was.”

Many areas of science have been facing a reproducibility crisis over the past two years, and machine learning and AI are no exception. That has been highlighted by recent efforts to identify papers with results that are reproducible and those that are not.

Two new analyses put the spotlight on machine learning in health research, where lack of reproducibility and poor quality is especially alarming. “If a doctor is using machine learning or an artificial intelligence tool to aid in patient care, and that tool does not perform up to the standards reported during the research process, then that could risk harm to the patient, and it could generally lower the quality of care,” says Marzyeh Ghassemi of the University of Toronto.

In a paper describing her team’s analysis of 511 other papers, Ghassemi’s team reported that machine learning papers in healthcare were reproducible far less often than in other machine learning subfields. The group’s findings were published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine. And in a systematic review published in Nature Machine Intelligence, 85 percent of studies using machine learning to detect COVID-19 in chest scans failed a reproducibility and quality check, and none of the models was near ready for use in clinics, the authors say.

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Didn’t watch the video.

Prof David R. Liu, Professor at Harvard University, the Broad Institute, and HHMI was interviewed by the Sheeky Science Show. In the interview, they discussed how to make precise genome editing safe & efficient using the latest CRISPR tech advances in base editing and prime editing and taking it to the clinic (e.g Beam Therapeutics). They talked about the next frontier, epigenome editing.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Clinic and IBM have entered a 10-year partnership that will install a quantum computer — which can handle large amounts of data at lightning speeds — at the Clinic next year to speed up medical innovations.

The Discovery Accelerator, a joint Clinic-IBM center, will feature artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud data storage and quantum computing technologies. A hybrid cloud is a data storage technology that allows for faster storage and analysis of large amounts of data.

The partnership will allow Clinic researchers to use the advanced tech in its new Global Center for Pathogen Research and Human Health for research into genomics, population health, clinical applications, and chemical and drug discovery.

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Sleep deprivation causes an inflammatory response that results in negative health outcomes.

Summary: Study sheds light on DNA methylation related to sleep deprivation in those with shift-work disorder.

Source: University of Helsinki

Long-term sleep deprivation is detrimental to health, increasing the risk of psychiatric and somatic disorders, such as depression and cardiovascular diseases. And yet, little is known about the molecular biological mechanisms set in motion by sleep deprivation which underlie related adverse health effects.

In a recently published study, the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the Finnair airline investigated dynamic changes to DNA methylation in shift workers. DNA methylation denotes epigenetic regulation that modifies gene function and regulates gene activity without changing the sequence of bases in the DNA.

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In autism, male-female imbalance is especially pronounced. Boys are as much as four times more likely to have some form of autism and are also more likely to have severe symptoms.

HAMILTON, ON, March 3, 2021 — Evolutionary forces drive a glaring gender imbalance in the occurrence of many health conditions, including autism, a team of genetics researchers has concluded.

The human genome has evolved to favour the inheritance of very different characteristics in males and females, which in turn makes men more vulnerable to a host of physical and mental health conditions, say the researchers responsible for a new paper published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution.

Their analysis shows that while there are certain conditions that occur only in women (cervical cancer and ovarian cancer, for example), or much more frequently in women (such as multiple sclerosis), men are more prone to medical conditions overall and, as a result, on average die sooner than women.

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In the study, the researchers found that when AML cells were exposed to chemotherapy, a subset of the cells went into a state of hibernation, or senescence, while at the same time assuming a condition that looked very much like inflammation. They looked similar to cells that have undergone an injury and need to promote wound healing—shutting down the majority of their functions while recruiting immune cells to nurse them back to health.

Cancer cells can dodge chemotherapy by entering a state that bears similarity to certain kinds of senescence, a type of “active hibernation” that enables them to weather the stress induced by aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, according to a new study by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine. These findings have implications for developing new drug combinations that could block senescence and make chemotherapy more effective.

In a study published Jan. 26 in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the investigators reported that this biologic process could help explain why cancers so often recur after treatment. The research was done in both organoids and mouse models made from patients’ samples of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) tumors. The findings were also verified by looking at samples from AML patients that were collected throughout the course of treatment and relapse.

“Acute myeloid leukemia can be put into remission with , but it almost always comes back, and when it does it’s incurable,” said senior author Dr. Ari M. Melnick, the Gebroe Family Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. “A longstanding question in the field has been, ‘Why can’t you get rid of all the cancer cells?’ A similar question can be posed for many other types of aggressive cancer in addition to AML.”

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Stress may improve intelligence. That does not mean you should desire problems.

Summary: People who experience fewer stressors in daily life report better emotional stability, moods, and overall health. However, those who are less stressed score lower on cognitive tests than those who experience daily stressors. Those who are stress-free are also less likely to give emotional support or experience positive things happening throughout the day.

Source: Penn State

Stress is a universal human experience that almost everyone deals with from time to time. But a new study found that not only do some people report feeling no stress at all, but that there may be downsides to not experiencing stress.

The researchers found that people who reported experiencing no stressors were more likely to experience better daily well-being and fewer chronic health conditions. However, they were also more likely to have lower cognitive function, as well.

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