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Study Reveals a Turning Point When Men’s Heart Attack Risk Accelerates

Screening at an earlier age can help identify risk factors sooner, enabling preventive strategies that reduce long-term risk.

Screening for heart attack risk should be happening earlier for men, according to a new study that found the risk of cardiovascular disease starts climbing when men are in their mid-30s – significantly earlier than a similar trend is seen in women.

The US-based researchers behind the study followed the health of 5,112 people for an average of around 34 years. As the participants were healthy and aged 18–30 when the study started in the mid-1980s, the researchers could chart cases of cardiovascular disease (including strokes and heart failure) over time.

According to the data, 35 is the critical age when disparities between male and female cardiovascular disease risk start to appear. Most of the difference is driven by coronary heart disease (CHD), the most common cause of heart attacks, where fatty deposits clog up arteries, blocking blood flow.

Newly identified RNA molecule may drive cancer patient survival

In a recent study, researchers at the Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health) identify a novel RNA molecule that plays a crucial role in preserving the integrity of a key cellular structure, the nucleolus. Their findings also suggest this molecule may influence patient survival in certain blood cancers. The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Machine learning accelerates plasma mirror design for high-power lasers

Plasma mirrors capable of withstanding the intensity of powerful lasers are being designed through an emerging machine learning framework. Researchers in Physics and Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde have pooled their knowledge of lasers and artificial intelligence to produce a technology that can dramatically reduce the time it takes to design advanced optical components for lasers—and could pave the way for new discoveries in science.

High-power lasers can be used to develop tools for health care, manufacturing and nuclear fusion. However, these are becoming large and expensive due to the size of their optical components, which is currently necessary to keep the laser beam intensity low enough not to damage them. As the peak power of lasers increases, the diameters of mirrors and other optical components will need to rise from approximately one meter to more than 10 meters. These would weigh several tons, making them difficult and expensive to manufacture.

Scientists Identified a New Blood Group After a 50-Year Mystery

It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort.

A pregnant woman’s blood sample taken in 1972 was mysteriously missing a surface molecule found on all other known red blood cells at the time.

More than 50 years later, that strange absence finally led researchers from the UK and Israel to describe a new blood group system in humans. The team published a paper on the discovery in 2024.

“It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients,” hematologist Louise Tilley from the UK National Health Service said in September 2024, after nearly 2 decades of personally researching this bloody quirk.

New method predicts asthma attacks up to five years in advance

“One of the biggest challenges in treating asthma is that we currently have no effective way to tell which patient is going to have a severe attack in the near future,” says the senior author. “Our findings solve a critical unmet need. By measuring the balance between specific sphingolipids and steroids in the blood, we can identify high-risk patients with 90 per cent accuracy, allowing clinicians to intervene before an attack occurs.”

The team discovered that while individual metabolite levels provided some insight, the ratio between sphingolipids and steroids was the most powerful predictor of future health. ScienceMission sciencenewshighlights.

Researchers have identified a new method to predict asthma exacerbations with a high degree of accuracy. The study is published in Nature Communications.

Asthma is one of the world’s most common chronic diseases, affecting over 500 million people. Asthma exacerbations – commonly known as asthma attacks – are a major cause of disease morbidity and healthcare costs. Despite the prevalence of asthma, clinicians currently lack reliable biomarkers to identify which patients are at high risk for future attacks. Current methods often fail to distinguish between stable patients and those prone to severe exacerbations.

The study analysed data from three large asthma cohorts totalling over 2,500 participants, backed by decades of electronic medical records. Researchers used a high throughput approach called metabolomics to measures small molecules in the blood of individuals with asthma. They identified an important relationship between two classes of metabolites, sphingolipids and steroids, and asthma control. Specifically, they identified that sphingolipid to steroid ratios could predict exacerbation risk over a 5-year period. In some cases, the model could differentiate the time-to-first exacerbation between high-and low-risk groups by nearly a full year.

Epistasis study uncovers genetic interactions linked to heart disease

Euan Ashley’s lab explores the intricate interactions of gene variants. Tiny “typos,” or genetic mutations, can sneak into segments of DNA. Many of these are harmless, but some can cause health problems. Two or more genes can team up and change the outcome of a physical or molecular trait. This phenomenon, known as epistasis, occurs through complex interactions between genes that are functionally related—such as those that support protein creation.

Identifying these group dynamics provides crucial clues to how genetic diseases manifest and should be treated. But they’re not easily detected and often fly under the radar.

To help root out these connections, Ashley, MB ChB, DPhil, professor of genetics and of biomedical data science, and a team of scientists, including co-corresponding author Bin Yu, Ph.D., a professor of statistics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed computational techniques to identify and understand the hidden ways epistasis influences inherited diseases.

How can we better invest in people’s prosperity, health, skills and jobs? Davos 2026

‘People’, whether it’s for the benefit they bring to growth or the challenge they pose to the balance sheet, always feature on the Annual Meeting’s agenda.

This year, geopolitics dominated the headlines, but a quieter conversation about the investment in people persisted, reflecting a shared recognition that human well-being and human capital is the key to economic resilience.

Scientists discover how to reactivate cancer’s molecular “kill switch”

(Farmington, Conn. – March 13, 2025) – Alternative RNA splicing is like a movie editor cutting and rearranging scenes from the same footage to create different versions of a film. By selecting which scenes to keep and which to leave out, the editor can produce a drama, a comedy, or even a thriller—all from the same raw material. Similarly, cells splice RNA in different ways to produce a variety of proteins from a single gene, fine-tuning their function based on need. However, when cancer rewrites the script, this process goes awry, fueling tumor growth and survival.

In a recent study reported in the Feb. 15 issue of Nature Communications, scientists from The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) and UConn Health not only show how cancer hijacks this tightly regulated splicing and rearranging of RNA but also introduce a potential therapeutic strategy that could slow or even shrink aggressive and hard-to-treat tumors. This discovery could transform how we treat aggressive cancers like triple-negative breast cancer and certain brain tumors, where current treatment options are limited.

At the heart of this work, led by Olga Anczuków, an associate professor at JAX and co-program leader at the NCI-designated JAX Cancer Center, are tiny genetic elements called poison exons, nature’s own “off switch” for protein production. When these exons are included in an RNA message, they trigger its destruction before a protein can be made—preventing harmful cellular activity. In healthy cells, poison exons regulate the levels of key proteins, keeping the genetic machinery in check. But in cancer, this safety mechanism often fails.

Fecal transplant capsules show promising results in clinical trials for multiple types of cancer

Fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) can dramatically improve cancer treatment, suggest two groundbreaking studies published in the Nature Medicine journal. The first study shows that the toxic side effects of drugs to treat kidney cancer could be eliminated with FMT. The second study suggests FMT is effective in improving the response to immunotherapy in patients with lung cancer and melanoma.

The findings represent a giant step forward in using FMT capsules—developed at Lawson Research Institute (Lawson) of St. Joseph’s Health Care London and used in clinical trials at London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute (LHSCRI) and Centre de recherche du Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CRCHUM)—for safe and effective cancer treatment.

A Phase I clinical trial was conducted by scientists at LHSCRI and Lawson to determine if FMT is safe when combined with an immunotherapy drug to treat kidney cancer. The team found that customized FMT may help reduce toxic side effects from immunotherapy. The clinical trial involved 20 patients at the Verspeeten Family Cancer Centre at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC).

Electronic informed consent in research on rare diseases sees strong participant interest

Research on rare diagnoses and the development of precision medicine depend on patients being able to share their health data in a secure and ethical manner. The research study, published in Scientific Reports, in which a digital platform was developed to collect electronic informed consent, shows that many participants want to contribute to research and appreciate the digital solution, but also that the technology needs further development.

A digital consent platform was tested at three centers in Sweden, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Lund. More than 2,200 individuals who had previously undergone whole-genome sequencing were invited to give consent electronically for research and data sharing.

For those who lacked an electronic identity verification system, or who preferred traditional methods, paper-based consent was also available. As a comparison, a national patient cohort within Undiagnosed Diseases Network Sweden (UDN Sweden) was studied, where recruitment took place in close collaboration with patient organizations.

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