The symptoms of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD as it is more popularly known, may be reduced by half with deep brain stimulation, according to a pooled data analysis of the available data, which was recently published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, & Psychiatry.
According to the research, two-thirds of individuals who were affected saw a significant improvement after two years.
OCD is characterized by intrusive and persistent obsessive thoughts, as well as dysfunctional and ritualized behaviors. It is estimated that up to 3% of the population is affected by it.
He suffered both physical and mental long-term side effects.
In April of 2006, doctors from London University revealed a case study of what they believed at the time was the largest amount of ecstasy ever consumed by a single person. They published a case report of a British man named only Mr. A estimated to have taken around 40,000 pills of MDMA over nine years, the most amount known to anyone.
They reported that the man then suffered from prominent physical and mental health side effects, such as extreme memory problems, paranoia, hallucinations and depression, as well as painful muscle rigidity around his neck and jaw, which often prevented him from opening his mouth.
Fpm/iStock.
Now, a new interview with the British style magazine The Face has surfaced where Dr. Christos Kouimtsidis, a psychiatrist who coauthored the case study, explains why the man’s story is still so fascinating after all these years.
Researchers use the device to study heart attacks and hope to test new heart medications.
Researchers have developed a device that can mimic aspects of a heart attack with hopes of using the device to test and develop novel heart medications. The research team, from the University of Southern California Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering in the U.S., created the tool, which they call a “heart attack on a chip.”
The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
Understanding a heart attack through simulation
The device can simulate key components of a heart attack, also called a myocardial infarction, in a practical, structured system. Researchers hope it will one day serve as a place to test for new heart drugs.
“This enables us to more clearly understand how the heart is changing after a heart attack. From there, we and others can develop and test drugs that will be most effective for limiting the further degradation of heart tissue that can occur after a heart attack,” said Megan McCain, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. She also developed the device with postdoctoral researcher Megan Rexius-Hall.
For millennia, humans have been harnessing #microbes to produce everything from breads, to cheeses, to alcohol. Now these tiny organisms have produced another powerful revolution — the gene editing tool CRISPR. Rodolphe Barrangou, Ph.D., was working at the food company Danisco, where he was trying to produce yogurt lines resistant to contamination. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, he helped uncover what CRISPR was, how it worked, and why it could be so transformative.
Speaker Biography: Rodolphe Barrangou, Ph.D., studies beneficial microbes, focusing on the occurrence and diversity of lactic acid bacteria in fermented foods and as probiotics. Using functional genomics, he has focused on uncovering the genetic basis for health-promoting traits, including the ability to uptake and catabolize non-digestible carbohydrates. He spent 9 years at Danisco-DuPont, characterizing probiotics and starter cultures, and established the functional role of CRISPR-Cas as adaptive immune systems in bacteria. At NC State, he continues to study the molecular basis for their mechanism of action, as well as developing and applying CRISPR-based technologies for genotyping, building immunity and genome editing.
Producers: Sarah Goodwin, Rebecca Ellsworth. Cinematographer: Derek Reich. Editor: Rebecca Ellsworth\ Graphics: Chris George, Maggie Hubbard. Assistant Camera: Gray McClamrock. Drone aerials: Travis Jack. Supervising Editor: Regina Sobel. Field Producer: Meredith DeSalazar. Interview by: Adam Bolt. Associate Producer: Shelley Elizabeth Carter. Executive Producers: Shannon Behrman, Sarah Goodwin, Elliot Kirschner.
In 1992, scientists found drugs such as cocaine, hashish, and nicotine in some Egyptian mummies. These mummies came to be known as the “cocaine mummies.”
Traces of the drugs were found in the hair and skin of the mummies. Initially, scientists thought that this was a result of contamination and that perhaps improper techniques had been used to analyze the mummy.
Tumors are three-dimensional phenomena, but so far we have been using 2D imagery to scan and study them. With the advancement of virtual reality in recent years, professor and director at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute Greg Hannon saw an opportunity to advance cancer research by incorporating 3D imaging and VR technology.
In 2017, his IMAXT team (Imaging and Molecular Annotation of Xenografts and Tumors) received a £20 million grant from Cancer Grand Challenges to develop VR software that could map tumours at an unprecedented level of detail. In the last few years, the project welcomed interdisciplinary and international collaborations between scientists and artists who created and tested the technology on breast cancers.
The software, developed by Suil, will be available for researchers to use worldwide for academic, non-commercial research.
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CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene editing technology, is poised to have a profound impact on the fields of microbiology and medicine yet again.
A team led by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna and her longtime collaborator Jill Banfield has developed a clever tool to edit the genomes of bacteria-infecting viruses called bacteriophages using a rare form of CRISPR. The ability to easily engineer custom-designed phages —which has long eluded the research community —could help researchers control microbiomes without antibiotics or harsh chemicals, and treat dangerous drug-resistant infections. A paper describing the work was recently published in Nature Microbiology.
“Bacteriophages are some of the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth. Unlike prior approaches, this editing strategy works against the tremendous genetic diversity of bacteriophages,” said first author Benjamin Adler, a postdoctoral fellow in Doudna’s lab. “There are so many exciting directions here—discovery is literally at our fingertips.”
The Salton Sea, the body of water in Southern California’s Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley, is shrinking over time as the planet warms and exposing more lakebed and new sources of dust in the process. High levels of dust already plague the region, a situation likely to worsen as the sea continues to shrink due to climate change.
Not surprisingly, the communities surrounding the Salton Sea have high rates of childhood asthma (20–22.4%)—much higher than the California average of 14.5%.
A University of California-Riverside (UCR) mouse study, led by Dr. David Lo, a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, has found that dust collected at sites near the Salton Sea triggered lung neutrophil inflammation in mice. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cells that help fight infection.
