Category Health/Medical

University of Illinois Beckman Institute postdoctoral researcher Agnieszka Burzynska and her colleagues analyzed the brain and cognition of Olga Kotelko, a 93-year-old track-and-field athlete. Burzynska is now a professor at Colorado State University. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

1st glimpse of potential effects of Exercise on the brains and cognitive abilities of the ‘oldest old.’ In the summer of 2012, Olga Kotelko, a 93-year-old Canadian track-and-field athlete with more than 30 world records in her age group, submitted to an in-depth analysis of her brain.

A retired teacher and mother of two, Kotelko started her athletic career late in life: slow-pitch softball at age 65, and at 77 switched to track-and-field events...

Some of the most precise human data yet on whether cutting carbs or fat has the most benefits for losing body fat has been presented by US National Institutes of Health. The researchers show how, contrary to popular claims, restricting dietary fat can lead to greater body fat loss than carb restriction, even though a low-carb diet reduces insulin and increases fat burning.

Since 2003, Kevin Hall, PhD—a physicist turned metabolism researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases—has been using data from dozens of controlled feeding studies conducted over decades of nutrition research to build mathematical models of how different nutrients affect human metabolism and body weight...

Prev Histopathology (H&E) of (A) healthy (non-transplanted) pig liver, (B) baboon liver 31 days after allotransplantation, and (C–F) WT pig liver after pig-to-baboon xenotransplantation. Credit: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/14014/1/Genetically-Engineered_Pig.pdf

22 people die each day while waiting for a transplant and 10 minutes someone is added to the national transplant waiting list. #Revivicor is producing genetically engineered pigs to provide #human-compatible #cells. This would be relevant for organs and tissues for use in transplant surgery, ie #xenografts.

Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review said the team has done nothing less than “shattering records in xenotransplantation, or between-species organ transplants...

Panel of 5 serum microRNAs could lead to accurate, early diagnosis of NSCLC in ethnically diverse patients

Early-stage Non-small-cell Lung Cancer is asymptomatic and difficult to detect since no blood test for NSCLC is currently available. In a new study, researchers identified a panel of five serum microRNAs as the potential biomarker for NSCLC diagnosis.

MiRNAs are a family of small, single-stranded non-coding RNAs that are critical regulators of numerous diseases, and their expression patterns have the potential to diagnose various types of cancer. This is the first multiethnic, multicentric, single-blind global analysis of miRNA expression patterns of NSCLC patients in four independent cohorts from five centers in both China and America...