Category Health/Medical

As marijuana legalization spreads, better understanding of side effects is needed. Using marijuana raises stroke and heart failure risk even after accounting for demographic factors, other health conditions and lifestyle risk factors such as smoking and alcohol use, according to research scheduled for presentation at the American College of Cardiology’s 66th Annual Scientific Session. While previous marijuana research has focused mostly on pulmonary and psychiatric complications, the new study is one of only a handful to investigate cardiovascular outcomes.

The study drew data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, which includes the health records of patients admitted at more than 1,000 hospitals comprising about 20% of U.S. medical centers...

The illustration shows a minute fraction of a fly brain. The automated analysis partitions a three-dimensional image stack into individual nerve cells, depicted here with arbitrary colors. Twenty of such images side by side approximate the diameter of a human hair. Credit: Thorsten Beier, IWR

Precise knowledge of the connections in the brain – the links between all the nerve cells – is a prerequisite for better understanding this most complex of organs. Researchers from Heidelberg University have now developed a new algorithm that can extract this connectivity pattern with far greater precision than previously possible from microscopic images of the brain. Prof. Dr Fred Hamprecht expects such automated image data analysis to bring about great strides in the neurosciences...

A schematic representation of the experimental design. Credit: Image courtesy of Northwestern University

Procedure could potentially treat patients with injuries to the skull. A team repaired a hole in a mouse’s skull by regrowing “quality bone,” a breakthrough that could drastically improve the care of people who suffer severe trauma to the skull or face. The work by a joint team of Northwestern University and University of Chicago researchers showed that a potent combination of technologies was able to regenerate the skull bone with supporting blood vessels in just the discrete area needed without developing scar tissue – and more rapidly than with previous methods.

Injuries or defects in the skull or facial bones are very challenging to treat, often requiring the surgeon to graft bone f...

MC4R-dependent suppression of appetite by bone-derived lipocalin 2. Nature, 2017; DOI:

Scientists discover new mechanism that regulates food intake and blood sugar. Lipocalin 2 turns on neurons in the brain that have been previously linked to appetite suppression. The findings reveal a previously unknown mechanism for regulating the body’s energy balance and could lead to new targeted therapies for the treatment of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders.

“In recent years, studies at CUMC and elsewhere have shown that bone is an endocrine organ and produces hormones that affect brain development, glucose balance, kidney function, and male fertility,” says Stavroula Kousteni, PhD, associate professor of physiology and cellular biophysics (in medicine) at CUMC...