Category: Health

{Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a first-of-its-kind nanoparticle vaccine immunotherapy that targets several different cancer types.}

The nanovaccine consists of tumor antigens — tumor proteins that can be recognized by the immune system — inside a synthetic polymer nanoparticle. Nanoparticle vaccines deliver minuscule particulates that stimulate the immune system to mount an immune response. The goal is to help people’s own bodies fight cancer.

“What is unique about our design is the simplicity of the single-polymer composition that can precisely deliver tumor antigens to immune cells while stimulating innate immunity. These actions result in safe and robust production of tumor-specific T cells that kill cancer cells,” said Dr. Jinming Gao, a Professor of Pharmacology and Otolaryngology in UT Southwestern’s Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A study outlining this research, published online in Nature Nanotechnology, reported that the nanovaccine had anti-tumor efficacy in multiple tumor types in mice.

The research was a collaboration between the laboratories of study senior authors Dr. Gao and Dr. Zhijian “James” Chen, Professor of Molecular Biology and Director of the Center for Inflammation Research. The Center was established in 2015 to study how the body senses infection and to develop approaches to exploit this knowledge to create new treatments for infection, immune disorders, and autoimmunity.

Typical vaccines require immune cells to pick up tumor antigens in a “depot system” and then travel to the lymphoid organs for T cell activation, Dr. Gao said. Instead, nanoparticle vaccines can travel directly to the body’s lymph nodes to activate tumor-specific immune responses.

“For nanoparticle vaccines to work, they must deliver antigens to proper cellular compartments within specialized immune cells called antigen-presenting cells and stimulate innate immunity,” said Dr. Chen, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and holder of the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science. “Our nanovaccine did all of those things.”

In this case, the experimental UTSW nanovaccine works by activating an adaptor protein called STING, which in turn stimulates the body’s immune defense system to ward off cancer.

The scientists examined a variety of tumor models in mice: melanoma, colorectal cancer, and HPV-related cancers of the cervix, head, neck, and anogenital regions. In most cases, the nanovaccine slowed tumor growth and extended the animals’ lives.

Other vaccine technologies have been used in cancer immunotherapy. However, they are usually complex — consisting of live bacteria or multiplex biological stimulants, Dr. Gao said. This complexity can make production costly and, in some cases, lead to immune-related toxicities in patients.

With the emergence of new nanotechnology tools and increased understanding of polymeric drug delivery, Dr. Gao said, the field of nanoparticle vaccines has grown and attracted intense interest from academia and industry in the past decade.

“Recent advances in understanding innate and adaptive immunity have also led to more collaborations between immunologists and nanotechnologists,” said Dr. Chen. “These partnerships are critical in propelling the rapid development of new generations of nanovaccines.”

The investigative team is now working with physicians at UT Southwestern to explore clinical testing of the STING-activating nanovaccines for a variety of cancer indications. Combining nanovaccines with radiation or other immunotherapy strategies such as “checkpoint inhibition” can further augment their anti-tumor effectiveness.

Source:Science Daily

{Your Saturday Salsa club or Introductory Italian class might be even better for you than you thought.}

According to Sandia National Laboratories cognitive scientist Mike Trumbo, learning a language or an instrument or going dancing is the best way to keep your brain keen despite the ravages of time. Not only do you enhance your cognition but you also learn a skill and have fun.

Several commercial enterprises have claimed you can get cognitive benefits from brain training games intended to enhance working memory. Working memory is the amount of information you can hold and manipulate in your mind at one time, said cognitive scientist Laura Matzen. However, a burgeoning body of research shows working memory training games don’t provide the benefits claimed. A study by Trumbo, Matzen and six colleagues published in Memory and Cognition shows evidence that working memory training actually impairs other kinds of memory.

On the other hand, studies have shown that learning another language can help school-age children do better in math and can delay the onset of dementia in older adults. Also going dancing regularly is the best protection against dementia compared to 16 different leisure activities, such as doing crossword puzzles and bicycling. Playing board games and practicing a musical instrument are the next best activities for keeping the mind sharp. Dancing is probably so effective because it combines cognitive exertion, physical exercise and social interaction, said Trumbo.

New research from Sandia published in Neuropsychologia shows that working memory training combined with a kind of noninvasive brain stimulation can lead to cognitive improvement under certain conditions. Improving working memory or cognitive strategies could be very valuable for training people faster and more efficiently.

“The idea for why brain stimulation might work when training falls short is because you’re directly influencing brain plasticity in the regions that are relevant to working memory task performance. If you’re improving connectivity in a brain region involved in working memory, then you should get transfer to other tasks to the extent that they rely on that same brain region,” said Trumbo. “Whereas when you’re having people do tasks in the absence of brain stimulation, it’s not clear if you’re getting this general improvement in working memory brain areas. You might be getting very selective, task kind of improvements.”

Matzen cautioned that research using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to improve cognitive performance is relatively new, and the field has produced mixed results. More research is needed to understand how best to use this technology.

Neurons that fire together wire together

Using more than 70 volunteers divided into six groups, the researchers used different combinations of working memory training with transcranial direct current stimulation. Then they assessed the volunteers’ performance on working memory tests and a test of problem-solving ability.

Using electrodes placed on the scalp and powered by a 9-volt battery, a tDCS unit delivers weak constant current through the skull to the brain tissue below. According to Trumbo, most people feel some mild tingling, itching or heat under the electrode for the first few minutes. There are well-established safety guidelines for tDCS research, ensuring that the procedure is safe and comfortable for participants and this research was approved by Sandia’s Human Studies Board and the University of New Mexico’s Institutional Review Board. There are commercial tDCS devices already on the market.

Researchers think tDCS makes neurons a little bit more likely to fire, which can help speed up the formation of neuronal connections and thus learning, said Matzen. Though the exact mechanisms aren’t well understood, its potential is. According to studies, tDCS can help volunteers remember people’s names, is better than caffeine at keeping Air Force personnel awake and may even help fight depression.

Brain stimulation and brain training: better together?

In the Sandia-led study, the volunteers played verbal or spatial memory training games for 30 minutes while receiving stimulation to the left or right forehead. That part of the brain is called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and is involved in working memory and reasoning. Since the right hemisphere is involved in spatial tasks and the left hemisphere is involved in verbal tasks, the researchers thought volunteers who received stimulation on the right side while training on spatial tasks would improve on spatial tests and those who received stimulation on the left side while training on verbal tasks would improve on verbal tests.

The verbal task involved remembering if a letter had appeared three letters back in a string of letters, for instance A-C-B-A-D. The spatial task was similar but involved remembering the sequence that blocks appear in a grid.

As expected, the spatial/right group got better at the spatial test but not verbal or reasoning tests. The spatial/left group performed about the same as the volunteers that received mock stimulation. The verbal/left group got better at the verbal test but not spatial or reasoning tests.

However, the results from the verbal/right group were surprising, said Trumbo. This group got better at the trained task — remembering strings of letters — as well as the closely related task — remembering the sequence of boxes in a grid. They also improved on a reasoning test. The sample size was small, with only 12 volunteers, but the improvements were statistically significant, said Matzen.

One explanation Trumbo offered is that the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is particularly involved in strategy use during tasks. By stimulating the right side during the verbal task, the volunteers might get better at using a strategy. The tDCS improves the connections of these neurons, which leads to enhanced ability to use this strategy, even on other tasks.

He added, “We did not explicitly collect data related to strategy use, so it is kind of an open question. I’d really like to do some follow-up work.”

If tDCS can reliably enhance working memory or cognitive strategies, it could be very useful for training people faster and more efficiently. Matzen said, “This could benefit many mission areas at Sandia where people must learn complex tools and systems. Reducing training time and improving cognitive performance would have substantial benefits to overall system performance.”

Source:Science Daily

{A collaborative study between researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has found evidence implying that alcoholism may have different effects on the reward system in the brains of women than it does in men.}

In their paper published in Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging, the team reports that reward system structures are larger in alcoholic women than in nonalcoholic women, and their report confirmed earlier studies that found the same structures were smaller in alcoholic men than in nonalcoholic men. The study, which enrolled currently abstinent individuals with a history of long-term alcohol use disorder, also found a negative association between the length of sobriety and the size of the fluid-filled ventricles in the center of the brain, suggesting possible recovery of the overall brain from the effects of alcoholism

“Until now, little has been known about the volume of the reward regions in alcoholic women, since all previous studies have been done in men,” says co-author Gordon Harris, PhD, of the 3D Imaging Service and the Center for Morphometric Analysis in the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH. “Our findings suggest that it might be helpful to consider gender-specific approaches to treatment for alcoholism.”

The brain’s reward system is a group of structures — including the amygdala and the hippocampus — that reinforce beneficial experiences, are involved in memory and complex decision-making and have been implicated in the development of substance use disorders. Since there are known difference between the psychological and behavioral profiles of women and men with alcoholism — women tend toward having higher levels of anxiety, while men are more likely to exhibit anti-social characteristics — the current study was designed to investigate whether the alcoholism-associated reward system differences previously observed in men would also be seen in women.

The study enrolled 60 participants with histories of long-term alcoholism — 30 women and 30 men — and an equivalent group of nonalcoholic volunteers. The alcoholic participants had been abstinent for time periods ranging from four weeks to 38 years. Participants completed detailed medical histories and neuropsychological assessments with the BUSM researchers before having MRI brain scans at the Martinos Center that were analyzed both in terms of the total brain and of the structures in the reward network.

Replicating the results of earlier studies, the average sizes of reward region structures of alcoholic men were 4.1 percent smaller than those of nonalcoholic men, but the average sizes of the same structures were 4.4 percent larger in alcoholic than in nonalcoholic women. While factors such as the duration and intensity of heavy drinking appeared to reinforce these gender-specific effects, the research team notes that the current study cannot determine whether these differences preceded or resulted from the development of alcoholism. Among participants with alcoholism — both women and men — each year of sobriety was associated with a 1.8 percent decrease in the size of the ventricles, suggesting recovery from the damaging effects of alcoholism on the brain.

“We’re planning to take a more detailed look at the impact of factors such as the severity of drinking and the length of sobriety on specific brain structure, and hope to investigate whether the imaging differences seen in this and previous studies are associated with gender-based differences in motivational and emotional functions,” says co-author Marlene Oscar-Berman, PhD, a professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Anatomy & Neurobiology at BUSM.

Source:Science Daily

{Both sugary, diet drinks correlated with accelerated brain aging}

Americans love sugar. Together we consumed nearly 11 million metric tons of it in 2016, according to the US Department of Agriculture, much of it in the form of sugar-sweetened beverages like sports drinks and soda.

Now, new research suggests that excess sugar — especially the fructose in sugary drinks — might damage your brain. Researchers using data from the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) found that people who drink sugary beverages frequently are more likely to have poorer memory, smaller overall brain volume, and a significantly smaller hippocampus — an area of the brain important for learning and memory.

But before you chuck your sweet tea and reach for a diet soda, there’s more: a follow-up study found that people who drank diet soda daily were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia when compared to those who did not.

Researchers are quick to point out that these findings, which appear separately in the journals Alzheimer’s & Dementia and Stroke, demonstrate correlation but not cause-and-effect. While researchers caution against over-consuming either diet soda or sugary drinks, more research is needed to determine how — or if — these drinks actually damage the brain, and how much damage may be caused by underlying vascular disease or diabetes.

“These studies are not the be-all and end-all, but it’s strong data and a very strong suggestion,” says Sudha Seshadri, a professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine (MED) and a faculty member at BU’s Alzheimer’s Disease Center, who is senior author on both papers. “It looks like there is not very much of an upside to having sugary drinks, and substituting the sugar with artificial sweeteners doesn’t seem to help.”

“Maybe good old-fashioned water is something we need to get used to,” she adds.

Matthew Pase, a fellow in the MED neurology department and an investigator at the FHS who is corresponding author on both papers, says that excess sugar has long been associated with cardiovascular and metabolic diseases like obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes, but little is known about its long-term effects on the human brain. He chose to study sugary drinks as a way of examining overall sugar consumption. “It’s difficult to measure overall sugar intake in the diet,” he says, “so we used sugary beverages as a proxy.”

For the first study, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia on March 5, 2017, researchers examined data, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and cognitive testing results, from about 4,000 people enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study’s Offspring and Third-Generation cohorts. (These are the children and grandchildren of the original FHS volunteers enrolled in 1948.) The researchers looked at people who consumed more than two sugary drinks a day of any type — soda, fruit juice, and other soft drinks — or more than three per week of soda alone. Among that “high intake” group, they found multiple signs of accelerated brain aging, including smaller overall brain volume, poorer episodic memory, and a shrunken hippocampus, all risk factors for early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers also found that higher intake of diet soda — at least one per day — was associated with smaller brain volume.

In the second study, published in Stroke on April 20, 2017, the researchers, using data only from the older Offspring cohort, looked specifically at whether participants had suffered a stroke or been diagnosed with dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. After measuring volunteers’ beverage intake at three points over seven years, the researchers then monitored the volunteers for 10 years, looking for evidence of stroke in 2,888 people over age 45, and dementia in 1,484 participants over age 60. Here they found, surprisingly, no correlation between sugary beverage intake and stroke or dementia. However, they found that people who drank at least one diet soda per day were almost three times as likely to develop stroke and dementia.

Although the researchers took age, smoking, diet quality, and other factors into account, they could not completely control for preexisting conditions like diabetes, which may have developed over the course of the study and is a known risk factor for dementia. Diabetics, as a group, drink more diet soda on average, as a way to limit their sugar consumption, and some of the correlation between diet soda intake and dementia may be due to diabetes, as well as other vascular risk factors. However, such preexisting conditions cannot wholly explain the new findings.

“It was somewhat surprising that diet soda consumption led to these outcomes,” says Pase, noting that while prior studies have linked diet soda intake to stroke risk, the link with dementia was not previously known. He adds that the studies did not differentiate between types of artificial sweeteners and did not account for other possible sources of artificial sweeteners. He says that scientists have put forth various hypotheses about how artificial sweeteners may cause harm, from transforming gut bacteria to altering the brain’s perception of “sweet,” but “we need more work to figure out the underlying mechanisms.”

Source:Science Daily

{People who consume low-fat milk and yogurt, rather than whole-fat dairy products, are less likely to have depression, according to researchers in Japan and China.}

Dairy consumption has long been linked to a wide range of physical health benefits, but its effect on emotional health has remained unclear. Now, a new study published in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology reveals that people who consume low-fat dairy products may be less prone to depression

Professor Ryoichi Nagatomi of Tohoku University and colleagues in Japan and China investigated the association between whole and low-fat dairy consumption and depressive symptoms such as exhaustion, sadness, anxiety, helplessness and hopelessness. This is the first study to consider different components of dairy products (whole fat and low fat) and the occurrence of depression.

The study involved 1,159 Japanese adults between the ages of 19 and 83. There were 897 men and 262 women, of which 31.2% and 31.7% respectively, were depressed.

The researchers asked the participants in a questionnaire how often they consumed whole- or low-fat milk or yogurt. Depressive symptoms were evaluated using the self-rating depression scale, which consists of 20 questions and is a tool to distinguish people with and without depression.

The result showed that people who consumed low-fat dairy products between one and four times a week are less depressed. The correlation remained even after considering other critical factors such as age, sex, health status, nutrition status and life style.

The study found no association between whole-fat milk consumption and depressive symptoms. The researchers speculate that this is because trans-fatty acid contained in whole fat milk, which is associated with depression, cancelled out the anti-depressive effect of another milk component, tryptophan.

The researchers note that since this was a cross-sectional study that analyzed a population at a single point in time, it could not explain what actually caused such outcomes. Other dairy products, such as cheese and butter, were not included in the study. It is also unclear whether milk or yogurt had a stronger influence. Further studies are necessary to confirm and clarify the causality of the findings.

Source:Science Daily

{The type of pillowcase you use can have an effect on how quickly your face ages. This is according to skincare expert Laura Lynch.}

According to Daily Mail, Lynch revealed sleeping on cotton pillowcases could be adding years to your looks.

Lying face-down into your pillow or on the side could also cause ageing.

Lynch suggests opting for silk pillowcases.

“Cotton doesn’t allow for the skin to slide so it catches the skin, pulling it into a position and it doesn’t really allow the skin to bounce back to its natural form,” Lynch said as quoted on Daily Mail.

“Silk is a natural fibre, it’s hypoallergenic, it allows for the skin to breathe and it allows the skin to slide over the surface.

“So it doesn’t pull at the skin and therefore prevents these wrinkles from occurring.”

Lynch also warned against sleeping face-down into the pillow or on the side as it causes ageing.

“If you’re creasing your face constantly against your pillow, you could also be causing a permanent wrinkle,” Lynch added.

“If you’re a side sleeper or a tummy sleeper, you can definitely find that those positions would cause creases or lines to form on your skin.

“Even though they may disappear couple of hours after you wake up in the morning, overtime, they can cause the development of lines and wrinkles.”

Source:Elcrema

{Cutting out certain amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — from the diet of mice slows tumor growth and prolongs survival, according to new research published in Nature.}

Researchers at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute and the University of Glasgow found that removing two non-essential amino acids — serine and glycine — from the diet of mice slowed the development of lymphoma and intestinal cancer.

The researchers also found that the special diet made some cancer cells more susceptible to chemicals in cells called reactive oxygen species.

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy boost levels of these chemicals in the cells, so this research suggests a specially formulated diet could make conventional cancer treatments more effective.

The next stage would be to set up clinical trials with cancer patients to assess the feasibility and safety of such a treatment.

Dr Oliver Maddocks, a Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Glasgow, said: “Our findings suggest that restricting specific amino acids through a controlled diet plan could be an additional part of treatment for some cancer patients in future, helping to make other treatments more effective.

Professor Karen Vousden, Cancer Research UK’s chief scientist and study co-author said: “This kind of restricted diet would be a short term measure and must be carefully controlled and monitored by doctors for safety. Our diet is complex and protein — the main source of all amino acids — is vital for our health and well-being. This means that patients cannot safely cut out these specific amino acids simply by following some form of home-made diet.”

Amino acids are the building blocks that cells need to make proteins. While healthy cells are able to make sufficient serine and glycine, cancer cells are much more dependent on getting these vital amino acids from the diet.

However, the study also found that the diet was less effective in tumors with an activated Kras gene, such as most pancreatic cancer, because the faulty gene boosted the ability of the cancer cells to make their own serine and glycine. This could help to select which tumors could be best targeted by diet therapy.

Dr Emma Smith, science communication manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “This is a really interesting look at how cutting off the supply of nutrients essential to cancer cell growth and division could help restrain tumors.

“The next steps are clinical trials in people to see if giving a specialised diet that lacks these amino acids is safe and helps slow tumor growth as seen in mice. We’d also need to work out which patients are most likely to benefit, depending on the characteristics of their cancer.”

Source:Science Daily

{Your teeth are important to your mouth, and a toothache will only just remind you why your teeth are important and why you ought to take proper care of them.}

These are some important rules you must not ignore.

{{1. Brush your teeth at least twice daily }}

This is a tip that’s taught from elementary school, and brushing your teeth at least twice daily will help reduce the impact of bacteria on the teeth.

Remember to brush thoroughly in an up and down motion.

{{2. Don’t brush too hard }}

Scrubbing your teeth vigorously can damage your gumline, lead to toothache and is even a waste of time, as all the teeth need is a gentle up and down motion across the surface.

{{3. Avoid caffeinated rinks }}

Food acids can cause severe damage to the teeth in the long run. Try as much as possible to limit your intake of sugary foods, tea, coffee and soda. Try as much as possible to use a straw.

{{4. Use a toothpaste that contains fluoride }}

Fluoridated toothpaste are the best for your teeth, as they help harden the tooth enamel and reduce the risk of decay.

{{5. Avoid using your teeth as a tool }}

A lot of people use their teeth as a bottle opener, a nail cutter and to do all manner of things. This is very harmful to the teeth, and avoid chewing ice blocks as well; the temperature is too extreme for your teeth.

6. Don’t fail to visit your dentist regularly for checkups, especially when you notice pains or anything strange.

If you want your teeth to serve you well till old age, then you must take care of it from your young age.

Source:Elcrema