Category Health/Medical

New Medicine can Create a New Life for Diabetes Patients—Without Needles

New medicine can create a new life for diabetes patients—without needles!
These capsules containing nano-carriers with insulin will be tested on humans in 2025. Credit: Nicholas Hunt

There are approximately 425 million people worldwide with diabetes. Approximately 75 million of these inject themselves with insulin daily. Now, they may soon have a new alternative to syringes or insulin pumps. Scientists have found a new way to supply the body with smart insulin.

The new insulin can be eaten by taking a capsule or, even better, within a piece of chocolate.

Inside these are tiny nano-carriers in which the insulin is encapsulated. The particles are 1/10,000th the width of a human hair and so small that you cannot even see them under a normal microscope.

“This way of taking insulin is more precise because it delivers the insulin rapidly to the areas of t...

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New Gut-Brain Circuits found for Sugar and Fat Cravings

Fat, sugar, and the combination of both (chocolate) navigate a gut-brain maze. The blue path represents the sugar route, the green path signifies the fat route, and the yellow path represents the combined impact of fats and sugars. Each path leads to the brain, but the combined route has a greater impact, triggering heightened dopamine release in the reward circuits, emphasizing the synergistic effect of fat-sugar combinations on neural responses. Image credit: Isadora Barga, de Lartigue lab

A new study has unraveled the internal neural wiring of separate fat and sugar craving pathways. However, combining these pathways overly triggers a desire to eat more than usual. Understanding why we overeat unhealthy foods has been a long-standing mystery...

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New Vaccine design uses Immunity against Influenza to offer Faster Protection against Emerging Pathogens

After COVID vaccination, it usually takes weeks for our bodies to develop protective antibody responses. Imagine, however, a vaccine that speeds up the production of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spreads COVID-19.

A research team led by Rong Hai, an associate professor of microbiology and plant pathology at the University of California, Riverside, has developed such a vaccine by using preexisting immunity to a separate virus (the influenza virus) to help kickstart the process of making antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.

“Any delay in the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 means there is some time when people are left poorly protected against the virus,” Hai said...

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SARS-CoV-2 can Infect Dopamine Neurons causing Senescence

SARS-CoV-2 can infect dopamine neurons causing senescence
Stained tissue from the midbrain of a COVID-19 patient shows DNA in the cells’ nuceli (blue), dopamine neurons (green) and phosphor-alpha-synuclein (red). Credit: Liuliu Yang

A new study reported that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, can infect dopamine neurons in the brain and trigger senescence—when a cell loses the ability to grow and divide. The researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggest that further research on this finding may shed light on the neurological symptoms associated with long COVID, such as brain fog, lethargy, and depression.

The findings, published in Cell Stem Cell on Jan...

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