Lifeboat Foundation

If you think you’ve got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. That’s equivalent to fully circling the globe 16 times.

Halamka is chief information officer at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing emergency physician. In a talk at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine last week, Halamka shared what he sees as the biggest healthcare problems the world is facing, and the most promising technological solutions from a systems perspective.

“In traveling 400,000 miles you get to see lots of different cultures and lots of different people,” he said. “And the problems are really the same all over the world. Maybe the cultural context is different or the infrastructure is different, but the problems are very similar.”

Continue reading “5 Technologies Bringing Healthcare Systems into the Future” »

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.

The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, who have medical experts from around the nation on the writing committee, have released updated guidelines on managing cholesterol to minimize the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. The new guidelines advocate for more aggressive treatment with statin therapy and getting LDL cholesterol counts, commonly referred to as “bad cholesterol” to your target level –- in general, less than 100mg/dL; for those with risk factors, less than 70mg/dL.

The CDC is investigating another 162 suspected cases of the rare, non-contagious infection that has baffled doctors since 2014.

The number of children being stricken by a mysterious paralyzing condition continues to increase, federal officials say.

At least 252 cases of acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM, have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so far this year from 27 states, including 90 that have been confirmed through Nov. 9, the CDC reported Tuesday.

Most of the cases have occurred among children between the ages of 2 and 8.

Continue reading “Cases of mysterious paralyzing condition continue to increase, CDC says” »

Doctors use a lumbar MRI scan to examine a person’s lower spine for problems. An MRI scan uses magnetic fields and radio waves to create an image of the inside of a person’s body. It is a painless and low-risk procedure. Learn more here.

The US space agency believes it can put humans on the Red Planet within 25 years, but the technological and medical hurdles are immense. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.

Researchers from the Kapahi Lab at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have shown in a new study that increased intestinal permeability is caused by the age-related loss of epithelial cells that form the gut membrane [1].

As we age, the integrity of the gut membrane declines, and it becomes more permeable; this is known as “leaky gut” and is thought to contribute to the background of low-grade chronic inflammation known as inflammaging [2]. One emerging theory is that loss of gut membrane integrity is the origin of inflammaging, the place where age-related chronic inflammation begins. Inflammaging precedes many age-related diseases, including atherosclerosis, arthritis, hypertension, and cancer [3–5].

The new study suggests that caloric restriction, or caloric restriction mimetics, may help to prevent the increase of gut permeability in humans and has the potential to increase healthspan, which is the period of life we spend free from illness.

Continue reading “Calorie Restriction Slows Age-related Leaky Gut” »

Privacy advocates have raised concerns about patients’ data after Google said it would take control of its subsidiary DeepMind’s healthcare division.

Google, which acquired London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2014, said on Tuesday that the DeepMind Health brand, which uses NHS patient data, will cease to exist and the team behind its medical app Streams will join Google as part of Google Health.

It comes just months after DeepMind promised never to share data with the technology giant and an ethics board raised concerns over its independence.

Continue reading “Privacy concerns as Google absorbs DeepMind’s health division” »

Inspiration for game-changing science can seemingly come from anywhere. A moldy bacterial plate gave us the first antibiotic, penicillin. Zapping yeast with a platinum electrode led to a powerful chemotherapy drug, cisplatin.

For Dr. Andrew Pelling at the University of Ottawa, his radical idea came from a sci-fi cult classic called The Little Shop of Horrors. Specifically, he was intrigued by the movie’s main antagonist, a man-eating plant called Aubrey 2.

What you have here is a plant-like creature with mammalian features, said Pelling at the Exponential Medicine conference in San Diego last week. “So we started wondering: can we grow this in the lab?”

Continue reading “Ears Grown From Apples? The Promise of Plants for Engineering Human Tissue” »