Lifeboat Foundation

Chronological age has been typically used as a way to gauge how someone is aging, however this is a poor measure indeed. People tend to age at different rates due to a variety of reasons, environment, diet, diseases in earlier life, stress, exercise and lifestyle all play a role in how a person ages.

Clearly a better way to measure aging is needed if we are to accurately assess how someone is aging for the purposes of health monitoring and research. One way to do this is to use functional aging as a way to determine how someone is aging.

Functional aging is defined as a combination of the chronological, physiological, mental, and emotional ages of a person that give an overall measure of their rate of aging.

Researchers in the US have reported what they believe is a first-of-its-kind reversal of brain damage, after treating a drowned and resuscitated toddler with a combination of oxygen therapies.

The little girl, whose heart didn’t beat on her own for 2 hours after drowning, showed deep grey matter injury and cerebral atrophy with grey and white matter loss after the incident, and could no longer speak, walk, or respond to voices – but would uncontrollably squirm around and shake her head.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Reversed Brain Damage in a 2-Year-Old Girl Who Drowned in a Swimming Pool” »

Via The Surg)

Electric fields can be used to guide transplanted human neural stem cells — cells that can develop into various brain tissues — to repair brain damage in specific areas of the brain, scientists at the University of California, Davis have discovered.

It’s well known that electric fields can locally guide wound healing. Damaged tissues generate weak electric fields, and research by UC Davis Professor Min Zhao at the School of Medicine’s Institute for Regenerative Cures has previously shown how these electric fields can attract cells into wounds to heal them.

Continue reading “Neural stem cells steered by electric fields can repair brain damage” »

“Microglia play an important role in Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the central nervous system. Recent research has revealed that newly discovered Alzheimer’s-risk genes influence microglia behavior,” Jones said in an interview for a UCI press release. “Using these cells, we can understand the biology of these genes and test potential new therapies.”

A Renewable Method

Continue reading “A New Technique Transforms Human Skin Into Brain Cells” »

One afternoon in February 2011, Kelly Dwyer strapped on a pair of snowshoes and set out to hike a beaver pond trail near her home in Hooksett, New Hampshire. When the sun dropped below the horizon hours later, the 46-year-old environmental educator still hadn’t returned home. Her husband, David, was worried. Grabbing his cellphone and a flashlight, he told their two daughters he was going to look for Mom. As he made his way toward the pond, sweeping his flashlight beam across the darkening winter landscape, he called out for Kelly. That’s when he heard the moans.

Running toward them, David phoned their daughter Laura, 14, and told her to call 911. His flashlight beam soon settled on Kelly, submerged up to her neck in a hole of dark water in the ice. As David clutched her from behind to keep her head above water, Kelly slumped into unconsciousness. By the time rescue crews arrived, her body temperature was in the 60s and her pulse was almost too faint to register. Before she could reach the ambulance, Kelly’s heart stopped. The EMTs attempted CPR—a process doctors continued for three hours at a hospital in nearby Manchester. They warmed her frigid body. Nothing. Even defibrillation wouldn’t restart her heart. Kelly’s core temperature hovered in the 70s. David assumed he’d lost her for good.

The research team of Prof. Sonja Hofer at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, has discovered why our brain might be so good at perceiving edges and contours. Neurons that respond to different parts of elongated edges are connected and thus exchange information. This can make it easier for the brain to identify contours of objects. The results of the study are now published in the journal Nature.

Individual visual stimuli are not processed independently by our brain. Rather neurons exchange incoming information to form a coherent perceptual image from the myriad of visual details impinging on our eyes. How our visual perception arises from these interactions is still unclear. This is partly due to the fact that we still know relatively little about the rules that determine which neurons in the brain are connected to each other, and what information they exchange. The research team of Prof. Sonja Hofer at the Biozentrum, University Basel studies neuronal networks in the brain. She has now investigated in the mouse model what information individual neurons in the visual cortex receive from other neurons about the wider visual field.

The wonder of your gut: Experts explain why a healthy digestive system can trigger weight loss, fight depression, and ward off Parkinson’s.

• Jasenka Zubcevic works in Physiological Sciences, and Christopher Martynuik in Toxicology at the University of Florida
• They have been investigating how gut bacteria affect all other body parts
• Here they explain everything we know thus far about the gut

By Jasenka Zubcevic and Christopher Martynuik For The Conversation

Continue reading “How to hack your gut to ward off Parkinson’s and obesity” »

A new therapy for brain cancer.

A new type of cell that can seek and destroy brain cancer and then dispose of themselves has just been successfully tested in mice. The cells are able to home in on brain tumors and reduce them to between 2 to 5% of their original size[1].

This new approach could potentially give doctors a new weapon against aggressive cancers like brain cancer (glioblastoma), which normally kills in 12–15 months.

Continue reading “Reprogramming Cells to Seek and Destroy Brain Cancer” »