Category Health/Medical

The discovery could lead to game-changing new treatments for metabolic diseases. Eliminating old, dysfunctional cells in human fat also alleviates signs of diabetes, researchers from UConn Health report. The discovery could lead to new treatments for Type 2 diabetes and other metabolic diseases.

The cells in your body are constantly renewing themselves, with older cells aging and dying as new ones are being born. But sometimes that process goes awry. Occasionally damaged cells linger. Called senescent cells, they hang around, acting as a bad influence on other cells nearby...

A decline in metabolism and endurance of skeletal muscle is commonly observed in obese patients, but the underlying mechanism is not well-understood. A research team led by Dr. Chi Bun Chan, Assistant Professor from School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), uncovers a new mechanism to explain how obesity jeopardizes the functions of skeletal muscle and provides a potential treatment against the disease. The research findings have recently been published in the journal Autophagy.

Obesity is a metabolic disorder with increasing prevalence in modern society...

New highly sensitive quantum sensors for the brain may in the future be able to identify brain diseases such as dementia, ALS and Parkinson’s, by spotting a slowing in the speed at which signals travel across the brain. The research findings from a paper led by University of Sussex quantum physicists are published in Scientific Reports journal.

The quantum scanners being developed by the scientists can detect the magnetic fields generated when neurons fire. Measuring moment-to-moment changes in the brain, they track the speed at which signals move across the brain...

New study shows there may be a way to help even more psoriasis patients. About 7.5 million Americans suffer from psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that shows up as patches of red, inflamed skin and painful, scaly rashes. Although there are effective treatments for psoriasis, not everyone responds to these therapies — and for many, the relief is temporary.

“These therapies don’t reduce disease by 100 percent, and they don’t cure the disease” says La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Professor Michael Croft, Ph.D. “And if you take patients off those drugs, the disease almost always comes back.”

Now Croft and his team in LJI’s Center for Autoimmunity and Inflammation have discovered how a key protein called TWEAK damages skin cells in psoriasis patients...