Category Health/Medical

A Novel Waste Removal Factor Treats Brain Hemorrhage

Vassileios Stratoulias and Mikko Airavaara.
Vassileios Stratoulias and Mikko Airavaara at the BrainRepair laboratory, University of Helsinki.

University of Helsinki and Taiwanese researchers have found a new way to remove waste from the brain after haemorrhage.

Intracerebral haemorrhage, and bleeding into the brain tissue, is a devastating neurological condition affecting millions of people annually. It has a high mortality rate, while survivors are affected by long-term neurological deficits. No medication has been found to support brain recovery following hemorrhage.

In an international collaboration, researchers from the Brain Repair laboratory, University of Helsinki, together with their Taiwanese colleagues investigated whether a protein called cerebral dopamine neurotrophic factor (CDNF) has potential as a treatment ...

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New Research establishes How and Why Western Diets High in Sugar and Fat cause Liver Disease

fatty sugary food

Research is unlocking how the food we eat contributes to an epidemic of chronic liver disease. New research from the University of Missouri School of Medicine has established a link between western diets high in fat and sugar and the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, the leading cause of chronic liver disease.

The research, based in the Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building at MU, has identified the western diet-induced microbial and metabolic contributors to liver disease, advancing our understanding of the gut-liver axis, and in turn the development of dietary and microbial interventions for this global health threat.

“We’re just beginning to understand how food and gut microbiota interact to produce metabolites that contribute to the development of liver...

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Memories could be lost if Two Key Brain Regions Fail to Sync together, study finds

Neurons brain cells

Learning, remembering something, and recalling memories is supported by multiple separate groups of neurons connected inside and across key regions in the brain. If these neural assemblies fail to sync together at the right time, the memories are lost, a new study led by the universities of Bristol and Heidelberg has found.

How do you keep track of what to do next? What happens in the brain when your mind goes blank? Short-term memory relies on two key brain regions: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. The researchers set out to establish how these brain regions interact with one another as memories are formed, maintained and recalled at the level of specific groups of neurons. The study, published in Current Biology, also wanted to understand why memory sometimes fails.

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Common Dry Cleaning Chemical linked to Parkinson’s

dry cleaning
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

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...

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