Mike Dougherty American Heart Association Epidemiology and Prevention|Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2024, Abstract P192.

03/19/24 Editor’s note:

NEW ORLEANS, March 18, 2024 — Doctors have long prescribed exercise to improve and protect health. In the future, a pill may offer some of the same benefits as exercise. Now, researchers report on new compounds that appear capable of mimicking the physical boost of working out — at least within rodent cells. This discovery could lead to a new way to treat muscle atrophy and other medical conditions in people, including heart failure and neurodegenerative disease.

The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2024 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in person March 17–21; it features nearly 12,000 presentations on a range of science topics.

“We cannot replace exercise; exercise is important on all levels,” says Bahaa Elgendy, the project’s principal investigator who is presenting the work at the meeting. “If I can exercise, I should go ahead and get the physical activity. But there are so many cases in which a substitute is needed.”

A collaborative project to bring the promise of cell therapy to patients with a deadly form of brain cancer has shown dramatic results among the first patients to receive the novel treatment.

In a paper published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Mass General Cancer…

Cutting-edge therapy shrinks tumors in early glioblastoma trial.

Roger Guillemin identified the molecules in the brain that control the production of hormones in endocrine glands such as the pituitary and thyroid. His work led to a torrent of advances in neuroendocrinology, with far-reaching effects on studies of metabolism, reproduction and growth. For his discoveries on peptide-hormone production in the brain, Guillemin shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Yalow. He has died at the age of 100.

In the autumn of 1969, after analysing millions of sheep brains for more than a decade, Guillemin and his colleagues determined the structure of thyrotropin-releasing factor (TRF). This small peptide is produced in the hypothalamus, a small region at the base of the brain, and is transported to the anterior lobe of the nearby pituitary gland, where it triggers the release of the hormone thyrotropin. Thyrotropin, in turn, stimulates the thyroid gland to produce the hormone thyroxine, which regulates metabolic activity in nearly every tissue of the body. More than two dozen drugs use such hypothalamic hormones to treat endocrine disorders and cancers, and the worldwide market for these drugs is worth several billion dollars.

Guillemin was born in Dijon, France, and came of age at the end of the Second World War. He graduated from medical school in the University of Lyon, France, in 1949 and worked as a country doctor in the small commune of Saint-Seine-l’Abbaye in Burgundy. He found the work satisfying but intellectually limiting, noting that “in those days I could take care of all my patients with three prescriptions, including aspirin”. Fascinated by how the brain and pituitary gland control the body’s response to stress, he attended lectures in Paris by the Hungarian–Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye, after which Selye accepted Guillemin’s request to spend a year doing research in his laboratory at the University of Montreal, Canada.

Stimulating gamma brain waves may protect cancer patients from memory impairment and other cognitive effects of chemotherapy.

Patients undergoing chemotherapy often experience cognitive effects such as memory impairment and difficulty concentrating — a condition commonly known as “chemo brain.”

MIT…

A noninvasive treatment may help to counter “chemo brain” impairment often seen in chemotherapy patients: Exposure to light and sound with a frequency of 40 hertz protected brain cells from chemotherapy-induced damage in mice, MIT researchers found.

Scentists have uncovered a fascinating link between ancient viruses and the development of myelination, the biological process crucial for the advanced functioning of the nervous system in vertebrates, including humans.

Scientists discovered a gene, ‘RetroMyelin,’ from ancient viruses, essential for myelination in vertebrates, suggesting viral sequences in early vertebrate genomes were pivotal for developing complex brains. This breakthrough in Cell unravels how myelination evolved, highlighting its significance in vertebrate diversity.

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” While that may still be true, there’s a controversy simmering today about one of the ways doctors declare people to be dead.

Bioethicists, doctors and lawyers are weighing whether to redefine how someone should be declared dead. A change in criteria for brain death could have wide-ranging implications for patients’ care.

Studies show that humans have among the most precise and subtle awareness of both musical tonality and ‘beat’, or rhythm.

The evolution of beat perception likely unfolded gradually among primates, reaching its pinnacle in humans.

By Henkjan Honing & The MIT Press Reader

Aging typically affects the brain and a person’s cognition.

Japanese horseradish, or wasabi as it is more widely known, may help improve certain areas of cognitive function in older adults, a new study suggests.

Researchers have demonstrated a programmable nano-scale robot, made from a few strands of DNA, that’s capable of grabbing other snippets of DNA, and positioning them together to manufacture new UV-welded nano-machines – including copies of itself.

The robots, according to New Scientist, are created using just four strands of DNA, and measure just 100 nanometers across, so about a thousand of them could squeeze up into a line the width of a human hair.

The team, from New York University, the Ningbo Cixi Institute of Biomechanical Engineering, and The Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the robots surpass previous efforts, which were only able to assemble pieces into two-dimensional shapes. The new bots are able to use “multiple-axis precise folding and positioning” to “access the third dimension and more degrees of freedom.”