Category Health/Medical

While investigating the FGF21-oxytocin-dopamine system, a mechanism that regulates sugar appetite, a team of researchers at Kyoto University noticed reports suggesting that the protein FGF21 may regulate alcohol ingestion.

The team’s original aim had been to address sugar appetite in lifestyle-related diseases, but since alcohol is a fermented product of sugar, they speculated that perhaps the body contains a system that recognizes both alcohol and sugar as the same entity.

Alcohol consumption and intervention challenges
Excessive alcohol consumption is a major global health issue, and effective countermeasures for prevention and treatment are limited...

X-ray tomography is a powerful tool that enables scientists and engineers to peer inside of objects in 3D, including computer chips and advanced battery materials, without performing anything invasive. It’s the same basic method behind medical CT scans.

Scientists or technicians capture X-ray images as an object is rotated, and then advanced software mathematically reconstructs the object’s 3D internal structure...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurological disease characterized by nerve damage and consequent impairments in vision, movement, balance and mental function. In MS, the immune system mistakenly starts attacking myelin, the protective sheath that surrounds axons (i.e., nerve fibers) in the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.

Macrophages, immune cells responsible for detecting damaged cells, germs or other debris in the central nervous system (CNS) and eliminating them, have been found to play a key role in MS...

A new study published in Nature Communications provides a framework for researching whether earlier, model-guided treatment intensification can meaningfully improve survival for patients with aggressive disease.

“Early decline in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) to very low levels is one of the strongest predictors of long-term survival in metastatic prostate cancer. However, clinicians currently have to wait up to six months after starting therapy to see whether a patient achieves this favorable response. For patients who do not respond well, this delay may allow the cancer to progress and become more resistant to treatment,” said Soumyajit Roy, MD, a radiation oncologist at UH Seidman Cancer Center and first author of the study.

Because existin...