“What are we painting today?”
The question followed me as I walked down the hallway. Some 15 minutes before we were scheduled to start, there were already a dozen children crammed into the activity room to begin our weekly art session. More were coming. (more…)
Two Yale doctors are using herbs, prescriptions, counseling and lifestyle advice to treat problems many women have been embarrassed to talk about—and improving their quality of life.
Noa Benjamini’s natural optimism didn’t flag when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. “I knew it was treatable,” she recalls. She was recovering from surgery when she got her first hot flash. “That’s when I cried,” she says. Suddenly Benjamini saw herself careening toward old age. “I thought I’d shrivel up,” she says. (more…)
A diabetes researcher’s take on dietary sugar
With all the talk these days about fructose, glucose, sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar in general, it can be hard for a health-conscious person to sort out the truth.
“A lot of people are putting out their ideas as established fact,” says diabetes researcher and endocrinologist John Bantle, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. “It’s hard to find the actual facts and then to interpret them.”
Bottom line: Too much sugar is bad, if only for the excess calories. But the story isn’t quite so simple. (more…)
Playing football or running for at least three hours a week could help teenagers counteract the potential damage to their bone health caused by prolonged spells of sitting.
An international team, including an expert from the University of Exeter, has found evidence that adolescents who spend long periods engaged in certain sedentary activities are more likely to have low bone mineral content in parts of the body where it can be an indicator of the risk of developing osteoporosis.
The team found that studying put girls at particular risk, while for boys leisure internet use posed the greatest threat. Scientists found that participating in at least three hours of certain sports could significantly reduce the threat in girls. The study found evidence of the benefits of high-intensity sports where the participant is on their feet, such as football, basketball, netball or running. (more…)
A recent finding by medical geneticists sheds new light on how facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy develops and how it might be treated. More commonly known as FSHD, the devastating disease affects both men and women. (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Health professionals may soon have a new method of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, one that is noninvasive and inexpensive, and, in early testing, has proved to be effective more than 90 percent of the time. (more…)
Scientists have discovered a rare genetic mutation that increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The international team, led by researchers at the UCL Institute of Neurology, studied data from more than 25,000 people and found a link between a rare variant of the TREM2 gene – which is known to play a role in the immune system – and a higher risk of Alzheimer’s. (more…)
Molecular ‘tweezers’ break up toxic aggregations of proteins in mouse model
Last March, researchers at UCLA reported the development of a molecular compound called CLR01 that prevented toxic proteins associated with Parkinson’s disease from binding together and killing the brain’s neurons.
Building on those findings, they have now turned their attention to Alzheimer’s disease, which is thought to be caused by a similar toxic aggregation or clumping, but with different proteins, especially amyloid-beta and tau. (more…)
