Category Health/Medical

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine have produced a stem cell model that demonstrates a potential route of entry of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, into the human brain.

The findings are published in the July 9, 2021 online issue of Nature Medicine.

“Clinical and epidemiological observations suggest that the brain can become involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection,” said senior author Joseph Gleeson, MD, Rady Professor of Neuroscience at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of n...

Keeping your brain active in old age has always been a smart idea, but a new study suggests that reading, writing letters and playing card games or puzzles in later life may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia by up to five years. The research is published in the July 14, 2021, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“The good news is that it’s never too late to start doing the kinds of inexpensive, accessible activities we looked at in our study,” said study author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “Our findings suggest it may be beneficial to start doing these things, even in your 80s, to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia.”

The study looked at 1,978 people with an average age of 80 who di...

One in four new breast cancers and one in five colon cancers in Canada attributed to alcohol. A new study from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), published in the journal Lancet Oncology, has found an association between alcohol and a substantially higher risk of several forms of cancer, including breast, colon, and oral cancers. Increased risk was evident even among light to moderate drinkers (up to two drinks a day), who represented 1 in 7 of all new cancers in 2020 and more than 100,000 cases worldwide.

In Canada, alcohol use was linked to 7,000 new cases of cancer in 2020, including 24 per cent of breast cancer cases, 20 per cent of colon cancers, 15 per cent of rectal cancers, and 13 per cent of oral and liver cancers.

A diet rich in fermented foods enhances the diversity of gut microbes and decreases molecular signs of inflammation, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine.

In a clinical trial, 36 healthy adults were randomly assigned to a 10-week diet that included either fermented or high-fiber foods. The two diets resulted in different effects on the gut microbiome and the immune system.

Eating foods such as yogurt, kefir, fermented cottage cheese, kimchi and other fermented vegetables, vegetable brine drinks, and kombucha tea led to an increase in overall microbial diversity, with st...