Category Health/Medical

An international research team focused on aging reports that urolithin A at 1,000 mg per day shifted human immune profiles toward a more naive-like, less exhausted CD8+ state and increased fatty acid oxidation capacity, with additional functional gains.

Urolithin A is a metabolite produced by gut bacteria after breaking down ellagic acid from certain foods, such as pomegranates and walnuts. While produced naturally through microbial digestion, it is in much smaller quantities than available as a supplement or used in the study.

Aging bodies face reduced production of mature T cells, shrinking naive T cell pools and chronic low-grade inflammation...

AI uncovers how a severed bond between two gut proteins sparks Crohn’s disease, and how restoring it could heal inflammation. UC San Diego researchers combined artificial intelligence with molecular biology to unravel how immune cells in the gut decide between inflammation and healing, a process gone awry in Crohn’s disease...

Long-term melatonin use may secretly strain the heart—raising the risk of failure, hospitalization, and death. Long-term melatonin use for sleep problems may come with unexpected heart dangers. Researchers found that chronic users were almost twice as likely to die and 3.5 times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure. Though melatonin is widely regarded as harmless, experts now urge caution with extended use.

Key Research Findings

A large review of health data from more than 130,000 adults with insomnia found that people who took melatonin for a year or longer were more likely to develop heart failure, be hospitalized for the condition, or die from any cause compared to those who didn’t take the supplement.
While the study cannot prove that melatonin directly causes t...

Around the globe, heart disease remains one of the top causes of death. Once patients begin to suffer from serious heart problems, like heart attacks and heart failure, the heart muscles become damaged and are difficult to treat and repair. Although many therapies have been developed to treat symptoms, full recovery to a pre-disease state has been essentially impossible. This is due to a lack of regeneration ability in adult human heart cells. Studies using stem cells or progenitor cells for repair have demonstrated limited efficacy in clinical trials, thus far.

However, there may be new hope for these patients...