Category Health/Medical

Clinical trial suggests low-dose atropine is effective myopia treatment. The results of a new clinical trial suggest that the first drug therapy to slow the progression of nearsightedness in kids could be on the horizon.

The three-year study found that a daily drop in each eye of a low dose of atropine, a drug used to dilate pupils, was better than a placebo at limiting eyeglass prescription changes and inhibiting elongation of the eye in nearsighted children aged 6 to 10.

That elongation leads to myopia, or nearsightedness, which starts in young kids and continues to get worse into the teen years before leve...

The body is pretty good at healing itself, though more severe wounds can require bandages or stitches. But researchers publishing in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a wound-healing ink that can actively encourage the body to heal by exposing the cut to immune-system vesicles. The ink can be spread into a cut of any shape using a 3D-printing pen, and in mice, the technology nearly completely repaired wounds in just 12 days.

When the skin is cut or torn, the body’s natural “construction crew” kicks in to fix it back up—clearing out any bacterial invaders, regrowing broken blo...

A large-scale study led by researchers at Columbia and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard is the first to establish that a diet low in flavanols—nutrients found in certain fruits and vegetables—drives age-related memory loss.

The study found that flavanol intake among older adults tracks with scores on tests designed to detect memory loss due to normal aging and that replenishing these bioactive dietary components in mildly flavanol-deficient adults over age 60 improves performance on these tests.

“The improvement among study participants with low-flavanol diets was substantial and raises the possibility of using flavanol-rich diets or supplements to improve cognitive function in older adults,” says Adam Brickman, Ph.D...

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a simple, low-cost clip that uses a smartphone’s camera and flash to monitor blood pressure at the user’s fingertip. The clip works with a custom smartphone app and currently costs about 80 cents to make. The researchers estimate that the cost could be as low as 10cents apiece when manufactured at scale.

The technology was published May 29 in Scientific Reports.

Researchers say it could help make regular blood pressure monitoring easy, affordable and accessible to people in resource-p...