Category Health/Medical

A common and widely used chemical may be fueling the rise of the world’s fastest growing brain condition—Parkinson’s disease. For the past 100 years, trichloroethylene (TCE) has been used to decaffeinate coffee, degrease metal, and dry clean clothes. It contaminates the Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune, 15 toxic Superfund sites in Silicon Valley, and up to one-third of groundwater in the U.S. TCE causes cancer, is linked to miscarriages and congenital heart disease, and is associated with a 500% increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.

In a hypothesis paper in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, an international team of researchers—including University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) neurologists Ray Dorsey, MD, Ruth Schneider, MD, and Karl Kiebur...

Brigham researchers studying how and why certain cell types proliferate in the gut found that xanthine, which is found in coffee, tea and chocolate, may play a role in Th17 differentiation. Insights may help investigators better understand gut health and the development of conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.

The gut is home to a cast of microbes that influence health and disease. Some types of microorganisms are thought to contribute to the development of inflammatory conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but the exact cascade of events that leads from microbes to immune cells to disease remains mysterious.

A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital explores exactly what lead...

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how healthy bacteria can escape the intestine, travel to lymph nodes and cancerous tumors elsewhere in the body, and boost the effectiveness of certain immunotherapy drugs...

Scientists working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough in understanding what goes wrong in our bodies during the progression of inflammatory diseases and – in doing so – unearthed a potential new therapeutic target.

The scientists have found that an enzyme called Fumarate Hydratase is repressed in macrophages, a frontline inflammatory cell type implicated in a range of diseases including Lupus, Arthritis, Sepsis and COVID-19.

Professor Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity is the lead author of the research article that has just been published in leading international journal, Nature. He said:

“No-one has made a link from Fumarate Hydratase to infla...