Posts in category: Uncategorized

Medical cannabis treatment may be associated with improvements in health-related quality of life for patients with a range of health conditions, according to a case series study published online May 9 in JAMA Network Open.

The intravenous delivery of immune-modulating cells may someday slow the expansion of bulges in the aorta, known as abdominal aortic aneurysms. A second study found evidence that a COVID-19 infection may promote the enlargement of these dangerous bulges. These preliminary studies were presented at the American Heart Association’s Vascular Discovery: From Genes to Medicine Scientific Sessions 2023. The meeting, held May 10–13, 2023, in Boston, is a premier global exchange of the latest advances in new and emerging scientific research in arteriosclerosis, thrombosis, vascular biology, peripheral vascular disease, vascular surgery and functional genomics.

In a pilot study carried out at the University of Eastern Finland, the use of background music was found to reduce dental students’ stress and improve their performance during preclinical tooth preparation exercises. The results were published in Journal of Dental Education.

Humans encounter innumerable pathogenic bacteria, viruses and other microbes in their day-to-day activities. While infections from some pathogens can be easily cleared by the innate immune system, others can evade this first line of defense and require the highly specific responses of the adaptive immune system. Vaccines are also able to activate the adaptive immune system to create “memory” conferring long-lasting immunity specific to the pathogen. However, research demonstrates that protective immunity developed naturally and through vaccination may weaken over time.

A free vending machine that dispenses the overdose-reversal drug naloxone was unveiled this week at Santa Clara University, the first such campus resource in the San Francisco Bay Area, school officials said.

It’s easy to characterize conspiracy theorists as people who will believe just about anything. However, it’s not true that conspiracy theorists commonly believe contradictory conspiracies, such as the claim that Diana, Princess of Wales, did not die in a car accident but instead both was murdered and is still alive after faking her own death. That kind of thinking appears to be nothing more than a statistical artifact, according to Jan-Willem van Prooijen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) in an interview about his research published in in Psychological Science.

In February 2023, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned people against using EzriCare eye drops because bottles of the product had been linked to drug-resistant bacterial infections causing vision loss and even death. But tainted bottles had been causing problems long before then.

By studying the unusual ability of bats to host viruses without significant illness, scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have discovered a protein that could unlock new strategies for fighting inflammatory diseases in humans.

Uyen To, MD, assistant professor of medicine (digestive diseases) and transplant hepatologist, discusses how she first became interested in studying Wilson disease, the wide spectrum of symptoms caused by the rare condition, and what’s next in this fascinating field of research.

Van Andel Institute scientists have pinpointed how a specific gene mutation triggers an inflammatory cascade that may drive development of treatment-resistant cancers.