Uncovering the link to combating muscle atrophy caused by aging and immobility

The loss of muscle mass, or muscle atrophy, is a relatively common condition in today’s aging and increasingly sedentary societies. While the disuse of muscles is the most frequent catalyst for muscle atrophy, there are several other possible causes, including chronic diseases, injury, and exposure to low-gravity environments, such as spaceships. Despite being a prevalent condition, its underlying mechanisms are complex and not entirely understood.

Pay-for-performance programs may only exacerbate pre-existing disparities, analysis finds

Racial and ethnic minorities in the United States experience higher rates of chronic disease and premature death compared to their white counterparts. For example, Black individuals in the U.S. experience worse health outcomes for acute medical conditions, in part because the care of Black adults is highly concentrated at a limited set of U.S. hospitals, which tend to be under-resourced and operate on thin financial margins.

Nutritional acquired immunodeficiency (N-AIDS) found to be the leading driver of the TB pandemic

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading infectious killer worldwide, with 10.6 million cases and 1.6 million deaths in 2021 alone. One in five incident TB cases were attributable to malnutrition, more than double the number attributed to HIV/AIDS. Like HIV/AIDS, malnutrition is a cause of secondary immunodeficiency, known as nutritionally acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (N-AIDS). However, N-AIDS remains the neglected cousin of HIV/AIDS in global TB elimination efforts.

BrainSwarming, blockchain, and bioethics: Applying engineering techniques to problems in health care and biomedicine

Researchers from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) and the University of Oxford have successfully demonstrated how problem-solving techniques used in engineering, known as Innovation Enhancing Techniques, can be adapted and used to improve creativity in problem-solving when it comes to abstract problems faced in health care and biomedicine.