Category Health/Medical

Scientists discover role immune system’s T cells play in regulating fat and muscle loss during infection in mice. Scientists discovered that 1) the wasting response to T. brucei infection in mice occurs in two phases, each regulated by different immune cells and 2) fat loss did not benefit the fight against infection, but muscle loss did. The findings inform the development of more effective therapeutics that spare people from wasting and increase our understanding of how wasting influences survival and morbidity across infections, cancers, chronic illnesses, and more.

Although infections can present with many different symptoms, one common symptom is the loss of fat and muscle, a proc...

Researchers at Monash University have designed a new co-training AI algorithm for medical imaging that can effectively mimic the process of seeking a second opinion.

Published recently in Nature Machine Intelligence, the research addressed the limited availability of human annotated, or labelled, medical images by using an adversarial, or competitive, learning approach against unlabelled data.

This research, by Monash University faculties of Engineering and IT, will advance the field of medical image analysis for radiologists and other health experts.

PhD candidate Himashi Peiris of the Faculty of Engineering, said the research design had set out to create a competition between the two components...

Shifting from a high-pressure mindset to a curious one improves people’s memory.

New research from Duke found that people who imagined being a thief scouting a virtual art museum in preparation for a heist were better at remembering the paintings they saw, compared to people who played the same computer game while imagining that they were executing the heist in-the-moment.

These subtle differences in motivation—urgent, immediate goal-seeking versus curious exploration for a future goal—have big potential for framing real-world challenges such as encouraging people to get a vaccine, prompting climate change action, and even treating psychiatric disorders.

The findings appeared online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alyssa Sinclair, Ph.D...

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have discovered a key driver of chronic inflammation that accelerates aging, a finding that could lead to longer, healthier lives and the possible prevention of age-related conditions such as deadly heart disease and devastating brain disorders.

The harmful inflammation is driven by improper calcium signaling in the mitochondria of certain immune cells, researchers found. Mitochondria are the power generators in all cells, and they rely heavily on calcium signaling.

The UVA Health res...