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Category: biotech/medical – Page 10

Surprise Discovery About Sugar in The Brain Could Help Fight Alzheimer’s

Stores of glucose in the brain could play a much more significant role in the pathological degeneration of neurons than scientists realized, opening the way to new treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s is a tauopathy; a condition characterized by harmful build-ups of tau proteins inside neurons. It’s not clear, however, if these build-ups are a cause or a consequence of the disease. A new study now adds important detail by revealing significant interactions between tau and glucose in its stored form of glycogen.

Led by a team from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in the US, the research sheds new light on the functions of glycogen in the brain. Before now, it’s only been regarded as an energy backup for the liver and the muscles.

Massive study detects AI fingerprints in millions of scientific papers

Chances are that you have unknowingly encountered compelling online content that was created, either wholly or in part, by some version of a Large Language Model (LLM). As these AI resources, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, become more proficient at generating near-human-quality writing, it has become more difficult to distinguish between purely human writing from content that was either modified or entirely generated by LLMs.

This spike in questionable authorship has raised concerns in the that AI-generated content has been quietly creeping into peer-reviewed publications.

To shed light on just how widespread LLM content is in , a team of U.S. and German researchers analyzed more than 15 million biomedical abstracts on PubMed to determine if LLMs have had a detectable impact on specific word choices in journal articles.

First-Line Therapy For Advanced Non–Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

This systematic review with meta-analysis synthesizes available data from recent studies evaluating the effectiveness of immunotherapy and targeted therapy combinations in patients with non–clear cell renal cell carcinomas.

First large-scale stem cell bank enables worldwide studies on genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting about 10% of people over the age of 65 and one third of people aged 85 and above. Besides environmental factors, the genes have a strong influence on whether or not a person develops AD during their lifetime.

Through genome sequencing of DNA from large groups of healthy people and people with AD, some naturally occurring small changes in the DNA, known as genetic variants, were found to be more frequent in AD patients than in healthy people.

As more and more of these AD-associated genetic “risk” variants are discovered, it is now possible to calculate a person’s individual polygenic risk score (PRS), meaning the likelihood of the person developing AD, with high accuracy.

Neuroscientist: Brain Surgery Can Create “Two Conscious Entities”

Christof’s idea that split brain patients have split consciousness doesn’t really make sense and doesn’t correspond to the evidence. Consciousness is metaphysically simple — that is, my thoughts and sense of self can’t be split with a knife like the brain or a material thing can be split. What would it mean to say that I have “split” consciousness? Instead of Mike, there would be Mike and Joe, which wouldn’t be “split,” it would just be two people.

A category error

‘Split consciousness’ is an oxymoron, a category error. Consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be split, and there’s no evidence that one person can ever become two people. It’s science fiction, not science.

Clinical test predicts best rheumatoid arthritis treatment on first try

1 in 100 people in Britain today live with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Unlike osteoarthritis (OA), RA is caused not by wear and tear but by the body’s immune system attacking its own joints. RA can strike quickly at any age—but is most common for people aged 40–60.

Biological therapies are the leading treatment. Clinicians use engineered proteins made from living cells to slow the disease by targeting the specific parts of the immune system that are going rogue. Over the past 20 years they have led to major improvements in helping patients to live with RA.

However, different patients will react differently to different biological therapies depending upon their genetics. This means individual therapies have a failure rate of approximately 40%.