Posts in category: Uncategorized

By means of experiments in mice, researchers have made discoveries about the mechanisms involved in dental pulp inflammation and root apex damage that pave the way for a search for medications that can be used to inhibit the bone loss due to endodontic infection (in dental pulp, the soft tissue inside teeth).

Moody, withdrawn, down. These words are often used by parents of teens. And young people may say they feel so “depressed” about upcoming exams, or that the world is “just so depressing” these days.

At the beginning of 1882, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche received a machine called the “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball,” a nifty little gadget covered with keys. The thinker’s eyesight had been getting worse, to the point where he could no longer write by hand. In March of the same year he was able to continue writing thanks to this new instrument.

Researchers have used CRISPR gene editing, stem cells and human neurons to study the impact of a gene that is commonly mutated in autism. This new study, published today in The American Journal of Human Genetics, ties mutations in the gene CHD8 with a broad spectrum of molecular and cellular defects in human cortical neurons.

In what was very big news for global health, this week the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended a new vaccine for the prevention of malaria in children, called R21/Matrix-M.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have created a unique, cell-by-cell atlas of the amygdala, a small structure deep within the brain that plays a crucial role in controlling emotional responses to drugs. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, helped the researchers identify a potential new treatment for cocaine addiction, a disease that is poorly understood at the molecular level and has virtually no approved pharmacological treatments.

A combined team of psychiatrists and brain researchers from the University of Toronto and Québec Mental Health Institute in the Canada, working with a colleague from the National Research Council’s Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, in Italy, has found that neurological problems associated with early life adversity (ELA) can be passed down at least three generations in mice.

Researchers from the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, along with colleagues at Cambridge University and Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, have shown the potential of a new gene therapy approach to silence human sensory neurons (nerve cells) as a means of treating persistent pain. Many current drugs for chronic pain are highly addictive, which makes it important to discover new alternatives.

Scientists have discovered new insights into how our brain stores episodic memories—a type of long-term, conscious memory of a previous experience—that could be critical to the development of new neuroprosthetic devices to help patients with memory problems, like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

A research project studying how best to implement “back to basics” clinical and laboratory care in public hospitals in three African countries has halved the number of deaths from HIV-linked meningitis. The results are reported in The Lancet HIV.