Category Health/Medical

Credit: NASA JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata sits in the chin rest during an Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) session on ISS.

Many astronauts who come back from space experience poorer vision after flight, some even years after, and researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are working to see why. Brian Samuels, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology, and his fellow collaborators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University recently received a grant to study computational modeling as a method of determining why astronauts who are in space for extended periods of time are experiencing eye pathologies...

The amount of harmful nerve connections is significantly lower (far right, arrows) when treating with bumetanide after a prolonged convulsive seizure. Credit: Nazin Kourdougli

Prolonged epileptic seizures may cause serious problems that will continue for the rest of a patient’s life. As a result of a seizure, neural connections of the brain may be rewired in an incorrect way. This may result in seizures that are difficult to control with medication. Mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not entirely known, which makes current therapies ineffective in some patients...

Obstructive sleep apnea is caused by a narrowing of the airway that cuts off breathing, and people who are obese are at higher risk for the disorder. MIT researchers have discovered that a dietary supplement called yohimbine reverses the root cause of obstructive sleep apnea in an animal model. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Obstructive sleep apnea, which causes people to briefly stop breathing while asleep, affects an estimated 5% of the population, not including the many more who don’t even realize they suffer from the disorder. MIT researchers have discovered that a dietary supplement, yohimbine reverses the root cause of OSA in an animal model.

Yohimbine, a chemical derived from the bark of the African yohimbe tree, has a long history of use by humans as an aphrodisiac, ...

Anti-tumor Immunity Elicited by pSynConWT1-S (A) Mice were challenged with 106 mWT1-C1498 tumor cells injected subcutaneously and were vaccinated weekly starting 3 days post-tumor implant. Tumor measurements are reported in terms of tumor volume only for surviving mice until day 28. (B) Survival data from the tumor therapeutic challenge in (A). Vaccination with pSynConWT1-S extended survival in tumor-bearing mice. (C) Representative image of tumor size in naive or pSynConWT1-S vaccinated groups at day 14 post-mWT1-C1498 implantation. Error bars represent the average ± SEM.

Scientists at The Wistar Institute and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc...