At a cost of $38 billion a year, an estimated 5.3 million people are living with a permanent disability related to traumatic brain injury in the United States today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The physical, mental and financial toll of a TBI can be enormous, but new research from the […]
Intravenous injection of bone marrow derived stem cells (MSCs) in patients with spinal cord injuries led to significant improvement in motor functions, researchers from Yale University and Japan report Feb. 18 in the Journal of Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery. For more than half of the patients, substantial improvements in key functions—such as ability to walk, […]
A method that instructs immune system cells to help repair damaged tissues in the intestine has been developed by researchers at KU Leuven and Seoul National University. This opens the way for more effective treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. The study was carried out on humans and mice. When […]
PARP inhibitors are rapidly transforming the treatment of ovarian, breast, prostate and other types of cancer. To develop these drugs, researchers supported by Cancer Research UK had to decipher how blocking DNA repair could expose a weak point in the biology of cancer cells. In the early 1990s, Steve Jackson seemed to have his career […]
Babies who have life-saving surgery for congenital heart problems within the first month of life face a lifelong risk of chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure, according to new research led by University of Alberta pediatric specialists. “We know that kidneys, like all organs, have to last a lifetime,” said Catherine Morgan, associate professor […]
In a December 2019 study, a team of Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers demonstrated in mice that repair of bone fractures requires the generation, growth and spread of nerve cells, or neurons, throughout the injured area. This, they showed, partly relies on a protein known as nerve growth factor (NGF). Now, the researchers have dug deeper […]
The short-term acute inflammatory response triggered to mend injured cardiac tissue following a heart attack can lead to weakening of the heart’s pumping function if the inflammation remains active over the long-term. Heart failure associated with this unresolved chronic cardiac inflammation has become a leading cause of death in the U.S. and worldwide, yet little […]
Multiple sclerosis (MS), characterized by increasing muscle weakness and paralysis, has a number of treatments that help stall progression of the disease when used early on in the disease. But the current treatments can hardly reverse damage that has already occurred in brain cells called neurons. New research suggests that a compound found in the […]
