Blog – Page 79

A new study shows how rising DNA methylation entropy with age may reveal deeper truths about your biological clock than ever before.

Cleveland Clinic researchers are working to improve the way we use evolutionary modeling to understand drug resistance. The study, published in Science Advances, uses a new type of evolutionary model called a “fitness seascape” to incorporate a patient’s dosage schedule into models that predict whether an infection will develop antibiotic resistance, and has found that inconsistent timing and missing early doses can lead to treatment failure.

A team led by Jacob Scott, MD, DPhil., including study first author Eshan King, an MD/Ph. D. student at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is refining models that determine recommended antibiotic doses by incorporating bacterial evolutionary dynamics.

“With the rise of ‘superbugs,’ or antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, the world is reaching a crisis point,” says Dr. Scott, the study’s senior author. “We’ve already seen from MRSA what can happen if a bacterium becomes antibiotic-resistant. We need to address the problem before it impacts our ability to use antibiotics in more routine aspects of medical care, like surgery or childbirth.”

This case-control study investigates if a regional homogeneity–magnetic resonance imaging cortical deficit pattern provides a more robust biomarker for major depressive disorder (MDD) than its structural counterpart and informs the underlying, regionally specific lower cerebral blood flow in this…