The regenerative capacity of skin starts declining with age, but the exact mechanism of why this happens is still unknown. Researchers from Japan have recently identified a mechanism to explain why this happens and potentially how it can be fixed. The study results were published in the Journal of Cell Biology. Researchers from Tokyo Medical […]
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral challenges. There is often nothing about how people with ASD look that sets them apart from other people, but people with ASD may communicate, interact, behave, and learn in ways that are different from most other people. The learning, […]
What is the Western Diet? The Western Pattern Diet is a modern-day style diet that mostly contains high amounts of processed foods, red meat, high-fat dairy products, high-sugar foods, and pre-packaged foods, that increase the risk of chronic illness. This diet is “rich in red meat, dairy products, processed and artificially sweetened foods, and salt, […]
Reduced caloric intake without malnutrition is the oldest known life span–extending intervention. Laboratory studies throughout the 20th century established and confirmed the benefits of caloric restriction (CR) in multiple model systems. CR not only increased life span across evolutionarily distant organisms but also reduced age-associated disease burden and functional decline in these studies. Epidemiological data […]
Ketamine is an N-methyl-d-Aspartate receptor agonist with well-established safety and efficacy as an analgesic and anesthetic. Since it was developed in 1964, largely as a replacement for phencyclidine, it has been used primarily in veterinary and pediatric anesthesia, but in recent years it has also been used in psychiatry after reports of its rapid-acting antidepressant […]
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) targets the immune system and weakens people’s defense against many infections and some types of cancer that people with healthy immune systems can fight off. As the virus destroys and impairs the function of immune cells, infected individuals gradually become immunodeficient. Immune function is typically measured by CD4 cell count. […]
Stem cell therapy promotes tissue regeneration and wound healing. Efforts have been made to prime stem cells to enhance their regenerative abilities. Certain marijuana components, namely the non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD) and psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) are defined as immunomodulators. Migration and differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are known to be involved in various regenerative processes […]
Pain is a normal defense mechanism that alerts the body of potential damage to prevent further injury. A painful stimulus causes sensitivity, which triggers the transmission of pain signals, via afferent sensory nerve fibers, to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and up into the brain. Pain information then travels from the brain through […]
What is Parkinson’s Disease? Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common progressive neurodegeneration disorder and the second most common neurodegenerative disease after AD, with a prevalence of approximately 1% in people over 60 years of age in industrialized countries. PD is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement. Symptoms start gradually, sometimes starting with a […]
What is a virus ‘strain’? When scientists use the word strain, they are referring to a genetically distinct virus lineage, distinguishable by one or more mutations from another strain. Strains may or may not be biologically (functionally) distinguishable from one another and some virologists use the term strain only for the former. Two strains would […]