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Category: health – Page 140

Most stroke patients taking the anticoagulant warfarin were no more likely than those not on the medication to experience a brain bleed when undergoing a procedure to remove a blood clot, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report in a new study. The findings, published in JAMA, could help doctors better gauge the risk of endovascular thrombectomy (EVT), potentially expanding the pool of eligible patients for this mainstay stroke treatment.

Warfarin is a type of blood thinner commonly used to prevent stroke because of heart conditions such as atrial fibrillation. Although not very common, patients taking may still experience a stroke. In , it’s very possible that some physicians may withhold an endovascular thrombectomy because patients have been treated with warfarin before their strokes.

Our study could increase the number of patients for whom this lifesaving and function-saving surgery would be appropriate, said study leader Ying Xian, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neurology and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern. Dr. Xian is also Section Head of Research, Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases in the Department of Neurology at UTSW.

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The technology could eventually revolutionize health care. We’ve seen CRISPR start to be used experimentally to treat children with cancer, for example. It is being explored for lots of genetic diseases. And last year, a company used CRISPR to try to treat a woman with dangerously high cholesterol.

But CRISPR could also transform farming, including aquaculture. This week, I wrote about researchers who inserted an alligator gene into catfish. The idea isn’t to make these fish more alligator-like, but to make them more resistant to disease. It turns out that alligators have a particular talent for fighting off infections.

These gene-edited fish, pigs, and other animals could soon be on the menu.

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When a tapeworm sets up shop in the gut of an ant, it appears to pump antioxidants and other proteins into the creature’s bloodstream.

It’s still unclear what health effects these special proteins have, but there’s a real chance they are part of what helps infected ants stay young and yummy.

Hosting a parasitic tapeworm isn’t usually a desirable state. But the life of an infected ant known as Temnothorax nylanderi hits differently.

Suppose an ant of this species nibbles on some woodpecker poop as a young larva and contracts a tapeworm (Anomotaenia brevis). It could end up living three times longer than its peers, if not more, and it will rarely have to move a mandible.

Uninfected ants will do the worker’s chores, carry it around, feed it, and groom it for the rest of its days. These pampered ants barely leave the nest.

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A study of more than 8 million adults in Ontario, Canada suggests that even a modest loss of kidney function is associated with increased health risks. The study, published in The BMJ, could lead to better approaches to prevent chronic kidney disease and related conditions, particularly in younger adults.

“The dogma is that healthy, young adults don’t need to worry about unless it drops to around 50% of the normal level, but our research suggests that even a more modest 20–30% drop may have consequences and we may want to have earlier conversations about prevention and monitoring,” said senior author Dr. Manish Sood, senior scientist, nephrologist and Jindal Research Chair for the Prevention of Kidney Disease at The Ottawa Hospital and professor at the University of Ottawa.

The research team examined ICES health record data from 2008 to 2021 for every Ontario adult aged 18–65 who had at least one for kidney function, but no history of kidney disease. They found that 18% of those in the 18–39 age group had kidney function that was modestly below , but not low enough to be diagnosed with . Individuals in this “gray zone” faced a modestly increased risk of kidney failure, death and cardiovascular events such as heart attack.

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Four volunteers are about to enter a simulated Mars habitat where they’ll spend the next 378 days as part of ongoing preparations for the first crewed mission to the faraway planet.

The specially designed, enclosed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will host Alyssa Shannon, Ross Brockwell, Kelly Haston, and Nathan Jones from Sunday, June 25. The team’s experience spans science, engineering, and health, and each member will use their specific skills during their stay.

The mission will be the first of three one-year Mars surface simulations, called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog).

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Making the yogurt of the future requires a cast of 21st-century helpers: machine learning, gut science and even a mysterious artificial stomach.

At a new Danone facility near Paris, researchers feed dollops of yogurt into globular glass vessels and plastic tubes designed to mimic the human gut. Once the bacteria inside show they can survive the digestive juices, artificial intelligence is put to work to probe their potential health benefits.

To consumers bombarded with claims about the supposed power of probiotics, the goal may sound familiar: souped-up yogurt. But the owner of Activia and Actimel is betting technology can yield answers on which friendly bacteria work best and why, giving its products a scientific edge at a time when revenue is lagging and consumers are growing wary of .

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A new study shows how space travel may modify the gene expression in white blood cells (WBCs), which fight infections.

Beyond Earth, a less gravity environment poses a significant risk to the health of astronauts, particularly during longer-duration missions.

Understanding how the human body reacts to the space environment is crucial for the long term and designing countermeasures to protect astronauts’ health.

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People who owned black-and-white television sets until the 1980s didn’t know what they were missing until they got a color TV. A similar switch could happen in the world of genomics as researchers at the Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) have developed a technique called Genome Architecture Mapping (“GAM”) to peer into the genome and see it in glorious technicolor. GAM reveals information about the genome’s spatial architecture that is invisible to scientists using solely Hi-C, a workhorse tool developed in 2009 to study DNA interactions, reports a new study in Nature Methods by the Pombo lab.

“With a black-and-white TV, you can see the shapes but everything looks gray,” says Professor Ana Pombo, a and head of the Epigenetic Regulation and Chromatin Architecture lab. “But if you have a color TV and look at flowers, you realize that they are red, yellow and white and we were unaware of it. Similarly, there’s also information in the way the genome is folded in three-dimensions that we have not been aware of.”

Understanding DNA organization can reveal the basis of health and disease. Our cells pack a 2-meter-long genome into a roughly 10 micrometer-diameter nucleus. The packaging is done precisely so that regulatory DNA comes in contact with the right genes at the right times and turns them on and off. Changes to the three-dimensional configuration can disrupt this process and cause disease.

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