Category Health/Medical

Re-engineered device offers clinically accurate eye scans at a fraction of the cost. Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a low-cost, portable optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner that promises to bring the vision-saving technology to underserved regions throughout the United States and abroad.

Thanks to a redesigned, 3D-printed spectrometer, the scanner is 15 times lighter and smaller than current commercial systems and is made from parts costing less than a tenth the retail price of commercial systems – all without sacrificing imaging quality.

In its first cl...

Researchers have found a consistent cholesterol-lowering effect for soy protein, with pooled data from dozens of clinical trials that span the last two decades. The study calls into question the US Food and Drug Administration’s current proposal to revoke the health claim for soy protein and heart disease.

“At no time since the original claim for soy as a reducer of serum cholesterol has its ability been in question,” says David Jenkins, professor of nutritional sciences and of medicine at U of T. “It’s been consistent since 1999. The data have not changed.”

The researchers showed a reduction from soy in both total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which can damage the heart...

Synthetic bacterial memory circuits enable microbial diagnostics for sensing biomolecules in the gut...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied which genes are expressed in overactive immune cells in mice with asthma-like inflammation of the airways. Their results, which are published in the journal Immunity, suggest that the synthesis and breakdown of fats plays an important part in the process.

In asthma, the immune system is overactive, causing inflammation in the lungs and symptoms such as coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. The Th2 cell plays a vital part in asthma-related inflammation, but the rarity of these cells and a lack of sensitivity technology has made these cells hard to study in any detail.

Resear...