Category Health/Medical

This graphic depicts the numbers and function of glia and neurons in the aging human brain. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Lilach Soreq.

The difference between an old brain and a young brain isn’t so much the number of neurons but the presence and function of supporting cells, glia. Researchers who examined postmortem brain samples from 480 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 106 found that the state of someone’s glia is so consistent through the years that it can be used to predict someone’s age. The work lays the foundation to better understand glia’s role in late-in-life brain disease.

“We extensively characterized aging-altered gene expression changes across 10 human brain regions and found that, in fact, glial cells experience bigger changes than neurons,” says Jernej Ule...

Microglia cells (green spider shapes). Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton

Cells in the brain responsible for detecting and fixing minor damage renew themselves more quickly than previously thought, new research has shown. A study, led by the University of Southampton shows that the turnover of Microglia, is 10X faster, allowing the whole population of Microglia cells to be renewed several times during a lifetime.

“Microglia are constantly scanning the brain to find and fix issues — you could call them the housekeepers of the brain,” said Dr Diego Gomez-Nicola, of the University of Southampton, who supervised the study. “We previously thought that microglia would renew themselves so slowly that a whole lifetime would not suffice to renew the whole population...

Tumor cells have decreased ability to metabolize H2O2: Implications for pharmacological ascorbate in cancer therapy

Low levels of catalase enzyme make cancer cells vulnerable to high-dose vitamin C. Vitamin C has a patchy history as a cancer therapy, but researchers at the University of Iowa believe that is because it has often been used in a way that guarantees failure. Most vitamin C therapies involve taking the substance orally. However, the UI scientists have shown that giving vitamin C ntravenously – bypassing normal gut metabolism and excretion – creates blood levels that are 100 – 500 times higher than levels seen with oral ingestion. It is this super-high concentration in the blood that is crucial to vitamin C’s ability to attack cancer cells.

Earlier work by UI redox biology expe...

CDK4/6 inhibition inhibits cancer metastasis.

Breast cancer metastasis, the process by which cancer spreads, may be prevented through the new use of a class of drugs already approved by the FDA. Mayo Clinic researchers have identified that a key drug target, CDK4/6, regulates a cancer metastasis protein, SNAIL, and drugs that inhibit CDK 4/6 could prevent the spread of triple-negative breast cancer. CDK4/6 inhibitors are approved for treating estrogen positive breast cancer, but not triple-negative breast cancer.

For this study, Dr. Lou and his colleagues focused on triple-negative breast cancer, which is difficult to treat, because it does not exhibit receptors for estrogen, progesterone or the HER-2/neu gene, which are targets for many current breast cancer treatments...