Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers with the Stanford University School of Medicine found in a study sponsored by Apple and released Saturday that the company’s smartwatches can detect irregular heart rhythms.

Of the approximately 400,000 participants using Apple Watches in the eight-month study, 0.5 percent, or about 2,000 people, were sent irregular heart rhythm notifications.

“The results of the Apple Heart Study highlight the potential role that innovative digital technology can play in creating more predictive and preventive health care,” Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, said in a statement.

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As many labs have established, Dr. Zaghloul’s team knew that our episodic memories are controlled by neurons in at least two different parts of the brain, but they did not know exactly how the cells worked together to retrieve memories. Based on a growing of body of evidence, they suspected that the short, high frequency electrical waves seen in ripples may somehow be involved. For instance, two earlier patient studies suggested that ripples may be important for solidifying memories during sleep.

A sound, a smell, a word can all flood our minds with memories of past experiences. In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that split seconds before we recall these events tiny electrical waves, called ripples, may flow through key parts of our brains that help store our memories, setting the stage for successful retrieval.

“We showed for the first time that ripples may be the neural substrates through which the human brain successfully recalls memories,” said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science. “These results help us understand how the brain processes the details of our past waking experiences or episodic memories.”

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There are certainly a whole host of technological hurdles to overcome before humans successfully travel to Mars, or beyond, but research is also pointing to a growing assortment of fundamental health challenges that astronauts may face from long stretches of time in space. A recent NASA-funded study has found dormant viruses can reactivate in the human body during spaceflight, presenting yet another physiological problem for scientists to solve before we journey out into deep space.

Using roundworms, one of Earth’s simplest animals, Rice University bioscientists have found the first direct link between a diet with too little vitamin B12 and an increased risk of infection by two potentially deadly pathogens.

Despite their simplicity, 1-millimeter-long nematodes called Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) share an important limitation with humans: They cannot make B12 and must get all they need from their diet. In a study published today in PLOS Genetics, researchers from the lab of Rice biochemist and cancer researcher Natasha Kirienko describe how a B12-deficient diet harms C. elegans’ health at a cellular level, reducing the worms’ ability to metabolize branched-chain amino acids (BCAA). The research showed that the reduced ability to break down BCAAs led to a toxic buildup of partially metabolized BCAA byproducts that damaged mitochondrial health.

Researchers studied the health of two populations of worms, one with a diet sufficient in B12 and another that got too little B12 from its diet. Like the second population of worms, at least 10 percent of U.S. adults get too little B12 in their diet, a risk that increases with age.

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Typhus and other infectious illnesses hit homeless communities.

• By Anna Gorman, Kaiser Health News on March 15, 2019

We are learning more about fungal infection and neurological diseases. Recently we learned of gingival diseases and Alzheimer’s. My wonder is how plants such as Moringa in one’s diet, that have antifungal properties, can help.

Fungal infections are emerging as a major medical challenge, and a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has developed a mouse model to study the short-term consequences of fungal infection in the brain.

The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications the unexpected finding that the common yeast Candida albicans, a type of fungus, can cross the blood-brain barrier and trigger an inflammatory response that results in the formation of granuloma-type structures and temporary mild memory impairments in mice. Interestingly, the granulomas share features with plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease, supporting future studies on the long-term neurological consequences of sustained C. albicans infection.

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Adding health data to huge pedigree could be a powerful research tool.