Category Health/Medical

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...

Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study by UCL researchers.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study builds on the team’s previous work*, which showed daily three-minute exposure to longwave deep red light ‘switched on’ energy producing mitochondria cells in the human retina, helping boost naturally declining vision.

For this latest study, scientists wanted to establish what effect a single three-minute exposure would have, while also using much lower energy levels than their previous studies...

In the human brain, the hormone insulin also acts on the most important neurotransmitter for the reward system, dopamine. This was shown by researchers from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) in Tübingen. Insulin lowers the dopamine level in a specific region of the brain (striatum *) that regulates reward processes and cognitive functions, among other things. This interaction can be an important driver of the brain’s regulation of glucose metabolism and eating behavior. The study has now been published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Worldwide, more and more people are developing obesity and type 2 diabetes. Studies show that the brain plays an important role in causing these diseases...

Loss of this gene affects daily behavior, disrupting ~24-hour sleep-wake cycles. Life is organized on a 24-hour schedule. Central to this regular rhythm is the circadian clock, timekeepers that are present in virtually every organ, tissue and cell type. When a clock goes awry, sleep disruption or a variety of diseases can result.

A recent Northwestern University discovery could help in understanding how this clock is linked to daily cycles. A team of neurobiologists has identified a new gene, called Tango10, that is critical for daily behavioral rhythms. This gene is involved in a molecular pathway by which the core circadian clock (the “gears”) controls the cellular output of the clock (the “hands”) to control daily sleep-wake cycles.

While the study was done using the fruit fl...