Finding that clearance of fluid in mice brains is lower in sleep and anaesthesia runs counter to dominant view in neuroscience

The restorative effect of a good night’s rest is widely recognised and the popular scientific explanation has been that the brain washes out toxins during sleep.

However, new findings suggest this theory, which has become a dominant view in neuroscience, could be wrong. The study found that the clearance and movement of fluid in the brains of mice was, in fact, markedly reduced during sleep and anaesthesia.

“It sounded like a Nobel prize-winning idea,” said Prof Nick Franks, a professor of biophysics and anaesthetics at Imperial College London, and co-lead of the study.

“If you are sleep-deprived, countless things go wrong – you don’t remember things clearly, hand-eye coordination is poor,” he added. “The idea that your brain is doing this basic housekeeping during sleep just seems to make sense.”

However, there was only indirect evidence that the brain’s waste-removal system ramps up activity during sleep, Franks said.

In the latest study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers used a fluorescent dye to study the brains of mice. This allowed them to see how quickly the dye moved from fluid-filled cavities, called the ventricles, to other brain regions and enabled them to measure the rate of clearance of the dye from the brain directly.

Common infections will kill millions if drug resistance through misuse of antibiotics is not curbed, says England’s ex-chief medical officer

The Covid-19 pandemic will “look minor” compared with what humanity faces from the growing number of superbugs resistant to current drugs, Prof Dame Sally Davies, England’s former chief medical officer, has warned.

Davies, who is now the UK’s special envoy on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), lost her goddaughter two years ago to an infection that could not be treated.

She paints a bleak picture of what could happen if the world fails to tackle the problem within the next decade, warning that the issue is “more acute” than climate change. Drug-resistant infections already kill at least 1.2 million people a year.

“It looks like a lot of people with untreatable infections, and we would have to move to isolating people who were untreatable in order not to infect their families and communities. So it’s a really disastrous picture. It would make some of Covid look minor,” said Davies, who is also the first female master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The variant, called KP.2, now makes up the largest share of new infections in the U.S.

Disease experts anticipate a small uptick in Covid cases this summer, as a new variant spreads. 

The KP.2 variant represents 28% of Covid infections in the U.S., up from just 6% in mid-April, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

KP.2 became dominant at the end of April — meaning it accounts for the largest share of new cases — outpacing the JN.1 variant, which took over in the winter.

The first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died nearly two months after he underwent the procedure, his family and the hospital that performed the surgery said Saturday.

Richard “Rick” Slayman had the transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in March at the age of 62. Surgeons said they believed the pig kidney would last for at least two years. 

The transplant team at Massachusetts General Hospital said in a statement it was deeply saddened by Slayman’s passing and offered condolences to his family. They said they didn’t have any indication that he died as a result of the transplant.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15508914

Exclusive: Biden to put tariffs on China medical supplies - sources

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report Thursday about three cases of infections apparently linked to stem-cell treatments American patients received in Mexico. 

The CDC issued the report Thursday on infections of Non-Tuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM), which it described as “difficult-to-treat” and “intrinsically drug-resistant” and “rapidly growing.” 

All three patients detected at two Colorado hospitals remain in treatment. The infections were apparently acquired during stem-cell injections carried out at two different clinics in the Mexican border state of Baja California located 167 miles (269 km) apart. 

In the past, Americans and Mexicans have been infected apparently because some doctors in Mexico were taking multiple doses of anesthetics from a single vial due to shortages or other problems, though it was not clear if that was a possible cause in the most recent outbreak reported Thursday.

A Canadian study has found that refraining from social media for a week can have a positive impact on one's body image. Online beauty ideals are most harmful to young women who try to achieve unhealthy body shapes.

For many young people on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, it's hard to escape the beauty ideals and standards that are circulating, and these trends can be dangerous. At the moment, what seems to be "in" are a slim waist, round buttocks, and skinny legs.

Ten years ago, the "thigh gap" was all the rage. This is a space between the inner thighs that remains visible when women stand upright with their feet touching. Also known as "legging legs," its proponents argue that anyone can achieve the look — with enough dieting and exercise.

Though for most women with a healthy body weight it is considered dangerous to aspire to having a thigh gap, not everybody seems aware of this.

…

Research has consistently shown that social media can have an impact on users' self-esteem. A recent study by York University in the Canadian city of Toronto explored the effects of taking a break from social media for a short period of time. It found that the self-esteem and body images of women who stopped using social networks for just one week were significantly improved.

Researchers saw a sharp increase among teenagers but noted that the overall number of cases in that age group are very low.

Colorectal cancer rates have been rising for decades among people too young for routine screening, new research finds.

Routine screening is recommended every 10 years starting at age 45; the new study focused on rates of the disease in children and adults ages 10 to 44, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cases of colorectal cancer were on the rise in all age groups, the researchers found.

“It means that there is a trend,” said Dr. Islam Mohamed, an internal medicine resident physician at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who led the research. “We don’t know what to make of it yet, it could be lifestyle factors or genetics, but there is a trend.”

Alzheimer’s disease may be inherited more often than previously known, according to a new study that paints a clearer picture of a gene long known to be linked to the common form of dementia.

The authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, say that this might even be considered a distinct, inherited form of the disease and that different approaches to testing and treatment may be needed.

Among people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, researchers recognize familial forms of the disease and sporadic cases. Most cases are thought to be sporadic, which develop later in life. Familial forms, caused by mutations in any of three genes, tend to strike earlier and are known to be rare, accounting for about 2% of all Alzheimer’s diagnoses, or about 1 in 50 cases.

Under the new paradigm, 1 in 6 cases of Alzheimer’s would be considered to be inherited, or familial.

While no psychedelic-based therapy has been approved yet in the U.S., Lykos Therapeutics studied MDMA, more commonly called ecstacy or molly, in two late-stage studies.

The Food and Drug Administration's panel of independent advisers will on June 4 deliberate whether they should recommend approval for the first MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, Lykos Therapeutics said on Monday.

This would be the first FDA panel of outside experts to review a potential new PTSD treatment in 25 years.

PTSD is a disorder caused by very stressful events and can significantly disrupt patients’ lives.

Decades of studies has shown that psychoactive ingredients, whether derived from cannabis, LSD or magic mushrooms, have long captivated mental health researchers in their quest for treatments.

Regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer should start younger, at age 40, according to an influential U.S. task force. Women ages 40 to 74 should get screened every other year, the group said.

Previously, the task force had said women could choose to start breast cancer screening as young as 40, with a stronger recommendation that they get the exams every two years from age 50 through 74.

The announcement Tuesday from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force makes official a draft recommendation announced last year. The recommendations were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Children and adolescents diagnosed with high blood pressure have double the risk of major cardiovascular problems as adults, a new study that followed them into their 20s and 30s reports. 

It’s another example of a serious disease striking people at younger ages than in previous generations and should serve as a call to action for routine blood pressure screening in primary care, Rahul Chanchlani, the senior author of the new study, told STAT. 

“These are those children where a physician actually took the blood pressure and labeled them with hypertension. Imagine the vast majority of the pediatric population where they’re not even checking blood pressure,” said Chanchlani, associate professor of pediatric nephrology at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ont. Citing hypertension’s reputation as a “silent killer,” he said, “The majority of these children or adults have no signs or symptoms, so unless you check it, you’re going to miss it.”

The new paper, appearing Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, delves into outcomes from diagnosed hypertension, tracking more than 25,000 Canadian young people who were 3 to 17 years old when the study started in 1996, comparing them to more than 128,000 children and adolescents without known high blood pressure. Based on medical records and adjusted for possibly confounding factors, they found that by 2021, hypertension diagnosed in childhood was associated with a higher likelihood (6% vs. 3%) of having a stroke, being hospitalized for a heart attack or unstable angina, and developing congestive heart failure.

Researchers say experimental shot is step towards goal of creating vaccines before a pandemic has started

Scientists have created a vaccine that has the potential to protect against a broad range of coronaviruses, including varieties that are not yet even known about.

The experimental shot, which has been tested in mice, marks a change in strategy towards “proactive vaccinology”, where vaccines are designed and readied for manufacture before a potentially pandemic virus emerges.

The vaccine is made by attaching harmless proteins from different coronaviruses to minuscule nanoparticles that are then injected to prime the body’s defences to fight the viruses should they ever invade.

Because the vaccine trains the immune system to target proteins that are shared across many different types of coronavirus, the protection it induces is extremely broad, making it effective against known and unknown viruses in the same family.

Products sold in Europe, Japan and South Korea offer more protection from the sun. In the U.S., the key ingredients aren't FDA-approved.

When dermatologist Dr. Adewole “Ade” Adamson sees people spritzing sunscreen as if it’s cologne at the pool where he lives in Austin, Texas, he wants to intervene. “My wife says I shouldn’t,” he said, “even though most people rarely use enough sunscreen.”

At issue is not just whether people are using enough sunscreen, but what ingredients are in it.

The Food and Drug Administration’s ability to approve the chemical filters in sunscreens that are sold in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that requires sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world. So Americans are not likely to get those better sunscreens — which block the ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer and lead to wrinkles — in time for this summer, or even the next.

Sunscreen makers say that requirement is unfair because companies including BASF Corp. and L’Oréal, which make the newer sunscreen chemicals, submitted safety data on sunscreen chemicals to the European Union authorities some 20 years ago.

A new report on the first human bird flu case tied to the outbreak in cows in the United States suggests that the Texas man may be the first detected case of the H5N1 virus transmitting from a mammal to a person.

Nearly 900 people in 23 countries have been infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus since it started spreading from Southeast Asia in late 2003. But previous human cases were all linked to transmission from infected birds, typically domestic poultry.

The report, published Friday by the New England Journal of Medicine, details the unidentified man’s symptoms and his possible route of infection. It was written by scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and the Texas Tech University Bioterrorism Response Laboratory in Lubbock.

How the man became infected cannot be proven; while the cattle on the farm where he worked reportedly suffered from a decline in milk and other symptoms seen in herds that have tested positive for H5N1, no animal testing at that farm was undertaken. The authors noted, though, that nearby farms where dairy cows experienced the same symptoms tested positive for the virus.

LOS ANGELES/CHICAGO, May 2 (Reuters) - U.S. sellers of raw milk appear undeterred by federal health warnings for consumers to avoid drinking unpasteurized milk in light of a bird flu outbreak that has affected dairy herds in nine states and sickened at least one dairy farm worker.

Thirty of the 50 U.S. states permit the sale of raw milk, which accounts for less than 1% percent of U.S. milk sales. A nationwide survey of pasteurized milk - heated to kill pathogens - found avian flu virus particles in about 20% of samples tested.

Many raw milk drinkers share a deep skepticism of public health officials, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which also battled political polarization and misinformation during and after the COVID pandemic.