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Researchers in Boston are on the verge of what they say is a major advancement in lung cancer screening: Artificial intelligence that can detect early signs of the disease years before doctors would find it on a CT scan.

The new AI tool, called Sybil, was developed by scientists at the Mass General Cancer Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In one study, it was shown to accurately predict whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next year 86% to 94% of the time.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends that adults at risk for lung cancer get a low-dose CT scan to screen for the disease annually.

In a recent study published in the journal Maturitas, researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to compare the risk of cardiovascular events in women with and without endometriosis.

Study: Endometriosis and cardiovascular disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Image Credit: Bangkok Click Studio / Shutterstock.

Apart from autoimmune disorders, polycystic ovary syndrome, depression, and premature menopause, there are pregnancy-associated risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, such as gestational diabetes, pregnancy-related hypertensive disorders, placental abruption, preterm delivery, and pregnancy loss. Women experience a higher mortality rate due to cardiovascular diseases, and while the treatment methods are the same for men and women, the presentation, symptoms, diagnosis, risk factors, and response to treatment differ for women.

For centuries, it has been suspected that the full moon has a mysterious impact on human behavior. Now, recent research conducted by psychiatrists at the Indiana University School of Medicine has discovered that there is a correlation between the full moon and an increase in suicide deaths.

“We wanted to analyze the hypothesis that suicides are increased during the period around full moons and determine if high-risk patients should be followed more closely during those times,” said Alexander Niculescu, MD, Ph.D.

Niculescu and his colleagues analyzed data from the Marion County coroner’s office covering suicides that occurred from 2012 to 2016. The results showed a marked increase in suicide deaths during the week of the full moon, with a particularly pronounced rise among individuals over the age of 55. The team also observed that suicides were most likely to occur in the afternoon, between 3 and 4 p.m., and that the month of September was also a peak time.

Background: Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women worldwide. Advances in the early diagnosis and treatment of cancer in the last decade have progressively decreased the cancer mortality rate, and in recent years, immunotherapy has emerged as a relevant tool against cancer. HER2+ and triple-negative breast cancers (TNBCs) are considered more immunogenic and suitable for this kind of treatment due to the higher rate of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression. In TNBC, genetic aberrations further favor immunogenicity due to more neo-antigens in cancer cells. Methods: This review summarizes the principal ongoing conventional and investigational immunotherapies in breast cancer. Particularly, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) and their use alone or combined with DNA damage repair inhibitors (DDRis) are described.

In a recent study published in the journal Eurosurveillance, researchers examine antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and their mobility in Bifidobacteriales and Lactobacillales species through the use of a unified bioinformatic pipeline to isolate these bacteria from food and probiotic sources.

Study: A survey on antimicrobial resistance genes of frequently used probiotic bacteria, 1901 to 2022. Image Credit: MilletStudio / Shutterstock.com.

Identifying potential sources of AMR is important, as it is one of the key threats to the treatment of multiple communicable diseases worldwide in both humans and animals. Excessive antimicrobial use (AMU) has contributed to a surge in AMR rates worldwide; however, despite mitigation measures to decrease AMU, excessive antibiotic use by animals and humans remains a common practice in many nations.

More than 37 million American adults are living with kidney disease and most don’t know it. “There are a number of physical signs of kidney disease, but sometimes people attribute them to other conditions. Also, those with kidney disease tend not to experience symptoms until the very late stages, when the kidneys are failing or when there are large amounts of protein in the urine. This is one of the reasons why only 10% of people with chronic kidney disease know that they have it,” says Dr. Joseph Vassalotti, Chief Medical Officer at the National Kidney Foundation.

While the only way to know for sure if you have kidney disease is to get tested, Dr. Vassalotti shares 10 possible signs you may have kidney disease. If you’re at risk for kidney disease due to high blood pressure, diabetes, a family history of kidney failure or if you’re older than age 60, it’s important to get tested annually for kidney disease. Be sure to mention any symptoms you’re experiencing to your healthcare practitioner.

What is antibiotic resistance? What is the global clinical antibacterial pipeline? What is the global preclinical antibacterial pipeline? Institutions associated with preclinical drug development Preclinical projects Trends in the preclinical antibacterial pipeline References Further reading.

The global preclinical antibacterial pipeline refers to innovative antibacterial candidate drugs that are under development with the aim of effectively eliminating newly emerged and pre-existing priority pathogens.

Antibacterial medicines or antibiotics treat bacterial infections in humans, animals, and plants. However, bacteria may eventually develop resistance against antibiotics-mediated killing by acquiring genetic mutations. Although antibiotic resistance occurs naturally, misuse or overuse of antibiotics can significantly escalate the process.

Many cancer therapies do not produce the hoped-for results. A common reason for this is that the tumors develop resistance to the medications. This is the case, for example, with alpelisib, a drug that has been approved for use in Switzerland for the past few years as a treatment for advanced breast cancer.

A research group at the Department of Biomedicine of the University of Basel has now discovered that the loss of the neurofibromin 1 (NF1) gene leads to a reduced response to alpelisib. The researchers also found that the dietary supplement N-acetylcysteine restores the sensitivity of cancer cells to this treatment. The findings have been published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine on April 11.

At the moment, patients with advanced and metastatic breast cancer lack effective treatment options. The PI3K signaling pathway is often overactive in breast cancer due to mutations promoting tumor development. The approval of the PI3K inhibitor Alpelisib was therefore keenly anticipated.

The remarkable physicochemical properties of the natural nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, define modern biology at the molecular level and are widely believed to have been central to life’s origins. However, their ability to form repositories of information as well as functional structures such as ligands (aptamers) and catalysts (ribozymes/DNAzymes) is not unique. A range of nonnatural alternatives, collectively termed xeno nucleic acids (XNAs), are also capable of supporting genetic information storage and propagation as well as evolution. This gives rise to a new field of “synthetic genetics,” which seeks to expand the nucleic acid chemical toolbox for applications in both biotechnology and molecular medicine. In this review, we outline XNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase engineering as a key enabling technology and summarize the application of “synthetic genetics” to the development of aptamers, enzymes, and nanostructures.

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