Biology & Medicine News and Discussions

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weatheriscool
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Children on trendy vegan diets are 1.2 inches SHORTER on average, with smaller and weaker bones, study warns
• The study involved 187 healthy five to ten-year-olds, including 52 vegans

•Vegan children averaged 1.2in shorter and had 4-6% lower bone mineral content

•They were also 3 times more likely to be deficient in vitamin B-12 than omnivores

ARE VEGAN DIETS SAFE FOR BABIES?

Around 3.5million people living in the UK are vegan – the equivalent of around seven per cent of the population, according to estimates.

And, as the diet has surged in popularity, more mothers are choosing to make their baby a vegan.

The NHS says babies and young children on a vegetarian or vegan diet can get the energy and most of the nutrients they need to grow and develop.

However, the plant-based diet is known to be low in key nutrients for babies, such as vitamin B12 - found milk and eggs, iron, calcium and zinc.

A vitamin B12 deficiency is a rare and treatable cause of failure to thrive and delayed development in infants, researchers wrote in the journal Pediatrics.

It can also lead to malnutrition and ‘irreversible damage’ to their nervous systems, experts at University College London once concluded.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... erage.html
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Trained viruses prove more effective at fighting antibiotic resistance
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-viruses-e ... tance.html
by Mario Aguilera, University of California - San Diego
The threat of antibiotic resistance rises as bacteria continue to evolve to foil even the most powerful modern drug treatments. By 2050, antibiotic resistant-bacteria threaten to claim more than 10 million lives as existing therapies prove ineffective.

Bacteriophage, or "phage," have become a new source of hope against growing antibiotic resistance. Ignored for decades by western science, phages have become the subject of increasing research attention due to their capability to infect and kill bacterial threats.

A new project led by University of California San Diego Biological Sciences graduate student Joshua Borin, a member of Associate Professor Justin Meyer's laboratory, has provided evidence that phages that undergo special evolutionary training increase their capacity to subdue bacteria. Like a boxer in training ahead of a title bout, pre-trained phages demonstrated they could delay the onset of bacterial resistance.

The study, which included contributions from researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel and the University of Texas at Austin, is published June 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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New drug-formulation method may lead to smaller pills
June 7, 2021

About 60 percent of drugs on the market have hydrophobic molecules as their active ingredients. These drugs, which are not soluble in water, can be difficult to formulate into tablets because they need to be broken down into very small crystals in order to be absorbed by the human body.

A team of MIT chemical engineers has now devised a simpler process for incorporating hydrophobic drugs into tablets or other drug formulations such as capsules and thin films. Their technique, which involves creating an emulsion of the drug and then crystallizing it, allows for a more powerful dose to be loaded per tablet.

"This is very important because if we can achieve high drug loading, it means that we can make smaller dosages that still achieve the same therapeutic effect. This can greatly improve patient compliance because they just need to take a very small drug and it's still very effective," says Liang-Hsun Chen, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the new study.

Patrick Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Advanced Materials.
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-drug-form ... pills.html
"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

-H.G Wells.
weatheriscool
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Unexpected discovery opens a new way to regulate blood pressure
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06- ... ssure.html
by University of Vermont
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is the leading modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and premature death worldwide. And key to treating patients with conditions ranging from chest pain to stroke is understanding the intricacies of how the cells around arteries and other blood vessels work to control blood pressure. While the importance of metals like potassium and calcium in this process are known, a new discovery about a critical and underappreciated role of another metal—zinc—offers a potential new pathway for therapies to treat hypertension.

The study results were published recently in Nature Communications.

All the body's functions depend on arteries channeling oxygen-rich blood—energy—to where it's needed, and smooth muscle cells within these vessels direct how fast or slow the blood gets to each destination. As smooth muscles contract, they narrow the artery and increase the blood pressure, and as the muscle relaxes, the artery expands and blood pressure falls. If the blood pressure is too low the blood flow will not be enough to sustain a person's body with oxygen and nutrients. If the blood pressure is too high, the blood vessels risk being damaged or even ruptured.
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Odds of sperm stem cell transplant restoring fertility are as random as a coin toss—until now
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06- ... plant.html
by Hiroshima University

The ability of stem cells to fix impaired functions of host tissues after transplantation has been a lifesaving breakthrough in treating previously incurable conditions. Much like a coin toss, however, the fate of the transplanted stem cells is unpredictable. They may choose self-renewal, grow into a different kind of tissue, or die.

Spermatogonial stem cells follow the same stochastic fate of unpredictability in outcomes. But a group of fertility scientists led by Hiroshima University's Yoshiaki Nakamura discovered a new method that has favorably flipped the odds and successfully reversed male infertility in mice—showing great promise for future applications in regenerating human sperm after cancer treatment and repopulating threatened and endangered species. Results of their study are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
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Scientists can predict which women will have serious pregnancy complications
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06- ... tions.html
by University of Cambridge

Women who will develop potentially life-threatening disorders during pregnancy can be identified early when hormone levels in the placenta are tested, a new study has shown.

Pregnancy disorders affect around one in ten pregnant women. Nearly all of the organ systems of the mother's body need to alter their function during pregnancy so that the baby can grow. If the mother's body cannot properly adapt to the growing baby this leads to major and common issues including fetal growth restriction, fetal over-growth, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia—a life-threatening high blood pressure in the mother.

Many of these complications lead to difficult labors for women with more medical intervention and lifelong issues for the baby including diabetes, heart issues and obesity.

Pregnancy disorders are usually diagnosed during the second or third trimester of gestation when they have often already had a serious impact on the health of the mother and baby. The current methods to diagnose pregnancy disorders are not sensitive or reliable enough to identify all at risk pregnancies.
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New technique yields potential treatment for a common cause of autism
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06- ... ommon.html
by Alice McCarthy, Children's Hospital Boston
Since 2008, we have known that the 16p11.2 chromosomal region is linked with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Now, researchers from Boston Children's have developed a new way to study the effects of 16p11.2 deletion in human neurons. In the process, they also found a potential treatment, possibly expanding the therapeutic options for this specific cause of ASD.

A common risk factor for ASD

Accounting for up to 1 percent of autism cases, deletions in 16p11.2—which includes 29 genes—occur in people who are missing a small amount of DNA on one copy of chromosome 16.

To better understand what happens in the brain cells of people with either deletions or additions of part of the 16p11.2 gene region, the researchers focused on a specific type called dopaminergic neurons. Defects in the dopaminergic system have been implicated in people with autism. Two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat irritability associated with autism act on the dopaminergic system.
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Team develops potential treatment for life-threatening microbial inflammation

by Vanderbilt University Medical Center
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06- ... obial.html
A cell-penetrating peptide developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center can prevent, in an animal model, the often-fatal septic shock that can result from bacterial and viral infections.

Their findings, published this week in Scientific Reports, could lead to a way to protect patients at highest risk for severe complications and death from out-of-control inflammatory responses to microbial infections, including COVID-19.

"Life-threatening microbial inflammation hits harder (in) patients with metabolic syndrome, a condition afflicting millions of people in the United States and worldwide," said the paper's corresponding author, Jacek Hawiger, MD, Ph.D., the Louise B. McGavock Chair in Medicine and Distinguished Professor of Medicine at VUMC.
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Low doses of 'laughing gas' could be fast, effective treatment for severe depression
A new study at the University of Chicago Medicine and Washington University found that a single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects. The study, published June 9 in Science Translational Medicine, also found that the effects lasted much longer than previously suspected, with some participants experiencing improvements for upwards of two weeks.

These results bolster the evidence that non-traditional treatments may be a viable option for patients whose depression is not responsive to typical antidepressant medications. It may also provide a rapidly effective treatment option for patients in crisis.

Often called "laughing gas," nitrous oxide is frequently used as an anesthetic that provides short-term pain relief in dentistry and surgery.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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