Category Health/Medical

An MIT-led research team reversed age-related endurance loss in mice by treating them with a compound that promotes new blood vessel growth.

Activating proteins linked to longevity may help to increase endurance and combat frailty in the elderly. As we get older, our endurance declines, in part because our blood vessels lose some of their capacity to deliver oxygen and nutrients to muscle tissue. An MIT-led research team has now found that it can reverse this age-related endurance loss in mice by treating them with a compound that promotes new blood vessel growth. The compound, which re-activates longevity-linked proteins called sirtuins, promotes the growth of blood vessels and muscle, boosting the endurance of elderly mice by up to 80%.

If the findings translate to humans, this restorati...

A tissue section 14 days post-wounding shows hair follicles regenerating at center of the wound. Regrowing hair follicles is one of the biggest challenges in the field of wound healing. Image courtesy of the Disease Biophysics Group/Harvard University

Nanofiber dressings heal wounds, promote regeneration. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing and improve tissue regeneration. The two different types of nanofiber dressings, described in separate papers, use naturally-occurring proteins in plants and animals to promote healing and regrow tissue.

“Our fiber manufacturing system was developed specifically fo...

More than 135,500 cases of cancer a year in the UK could be prevented through lifestyle changes, according to new figures from a Cancer Research UK landmark study published today.* This equates to 37.7% of all cancers diagnosed each year in the UK – rising to 41.5% in Scotland.

The latest figures, calculated from 2015 cancer data, found that smoking remains the biggest preventable cause of cancer despite the continued decline in smoking rates. Tobacco smoke caused around 32,200 cases of cancer in men (17.7% of all male cancer cases) and around 22,000 (12.4%) in women in 2015, according to the research published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Excess weight is the second biggest preventable cause of cancer. Around 22,800 (6...

Normal and cancerous pancreatic tissue. The blue background represents the cells that produce digestive juices supplied by the pancreas to the gut, and the red dots—seen only in the cancerous pancreas—represent the bacteria found to be a thousand times more abundant than normal.

Antibiotics may make immunotherapy more effective against pancreatic cancer. The population of bacteria in the pancreas increases more than a thousand fold in patients with pancreatic cancer, and becomes dominated by species that prevent the immune system from attacking tumor cells. These are the findings of a study conducted in mice and in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), a form of cancer that is usually fatal within two years...