Lifeboat Foundation

A man who relied on a wheelchair for 10 years was able to walk and dance after receiving his stem cell transplant.

A common virus seems to be behind a puzzling condition that’s paralyzing children, but uncertainties remain.

A s the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.

The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.

Continue reading “The Main Suspect Behind an Ominous Spike in a Polio-Like Illness” »

Human organs may one day be grown in space.

Wonderful to see the continuing progress of Mr. Omar Flores, with the support of his lovely wife, actress Mayra Sierra, today on the Venga la Alegria (VLA) show on TV Azteca (http://www.aztecauno.com/vengalaalegria) — The importance of an integrated approach to curing spinal cord injury including family, physical therapists, and the medical team at Regenerage (https://regenerage.clinic/)

Other common names for the drugs include captopril, cilazapril and enalapri.

They work by reducing the activity of the angiotensin-converting enzyme, or ACE for short. By blocking this enzyme, the blood vessels relax and widen and blood pressure is lowered.

Continue reading “Blood pressure pills could raise risk of lung cancer, research finds” »

Nootropics or “Smart Drugs” have been credited with enhancing cognitive functions, including creativity. We dug into the research to find out if they really do.

The cerebellum can’t get no respect. Located inconveniently on the underside of the brain and initially thought to be limited to controlling movement, the cerebellum has long been treated like an afterthought by researchers studying higher brain functions.

But researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say overlooking the cerebellum is a mistake. Their findings, published Oct. 25 in Neuron, suggest that the cerebellum has a hand in every aspect of higher brain functions — not just movement, but attention, thinking, planning and decision-making.

“The biggest surprise to me was the discovery that 80 percent of the cerebellum is devoted to the smart stuff,” said senior author Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology, of occupational therapy and of pediatrics. “Everyone thought the cerebellum was about movement. If your cerebellum is damaged, you can’t move smoothly ­— your hand jerks around when you try to reach for something. Our research strongly suggests that just as the cerebellum serves as a quality check on movement, it also checks your thoughts as well — smoothing them out, correcting them, perfecting things.”

Continue reading “Mind’s quality control center found in long-ignored brain area” »

Drugs that target multiple aging pathways at once significantly extend the healthspan and lifespan of nematodes.

In a paper published in Developmental Cell, scientists from Yale University have demonstrated how targeting multiple pathways related to aging with different drug combinations can slow aging down and extend healthy lifespan in C. elegans [1].

Abstract

Continue reading “Treating Multiple Aging Pathways Simultaneously Extends Healthy Lifespan Of Nematodes” »

On the 23rd of this month, Dr. David Sinclair did an Ask Me Anything over at the Futurology subreddit in support of the NAD+ Mouse Project on Lifespan.io. There were a range of interesting questions from the community about his work in aging research, particularly the role of NAD+ in aging.

Dr. David A. Sinclair is a Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a co-joint Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of New South Wales. He is the co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging and a Senior Scholar of the Ellison Medical Foundation. He obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1995. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. with Dr. Leonard Guarente; there, he co-discovered a cause of aging for yeast as well as the role of Sir2 in epigenetic changes driven by genome instability.

More recently, he has been in the spotlight for his work with NAD+ precursors and their role in aging and has been helping to develop therapies that replace NAD+, which is lost with aging, in order to delay the diseases of old age. Below are a selection of questions and answers from the AMA, and we urge you to head over to Reddit Futurology to check out the other questions that people asked.

Continue reading “Dr. David Sinclair AMA” »