Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the term used to describe the use of computers and technology to simulate intelligent behavior and critical thinking comparable to a human being. John McCarthy first described the term AI in 1956 as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.

This descriptive article gives a broad overview of AI in medicine, dealing with the terms and concepts as well as the current and future applications of AI. It aims to develop knowledge and familiarity of AI among primary care physicians.

PubMed and Google searches were performed using the key words ‘artificial intelligence’. Further references were obtained by cross-referencing the key articles.

More than half of all cardiovascular diseases worldwide have been found to be directly connected to five classic cardiovascular disease risk factors, with high blood pressure being the most significant factor related to heart attacks and strokes. Dr. Christie Ballantyne, professor of medicine, and Dr. Vijay Nambi, associate professor of medicine, both with Baylor College of Medicine, are co-authors along with a large group of scientists who make up the Global Cardiovascular Risk Consortium who recently published these findings in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The consortium, under the leadership of the University of Heart & Vascular Center of the Medical Center of Hamburg-Eppendorf and the German Center for Cardiovascular Research, used data from 112 studies consisting of 1.5 million people from 34 different countries.

The group reports that two conclusions can be made from these findings: The first, that more than half of all heart attacks and strokes can be prevented by understanding, treating or preventing the five classic risk factors: weight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and diabetes. The second, that the other half of heart attacks and strokes cannot be explained with these risk factors and more work and research is needed to find additional causes.

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

A badly defended security camera is an easy target for hackers, as there are tools for easily hacking internet protocol (IP) cameras, and research revealed the prevalent problem of unprotected security cameras.

According to Cybernews researchers, there are currently at least 8,373 real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) cameras exposed worldwide. Exposed cameras mean that anyone could find even the latest saved screenshots of what the cameras see, with some cameras being found on Google. Furthermore, many cameras are left with default access passwords like “admin”.

Gastrointestinal (GI) disorders account for about 10% of all consultations in primary care and have a major impact on quality of life and health care resources. Gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GERD), H. pylori infection, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), coeliac disease, antibiotic-associated diarrhea (ADA), infectious diarrhea, are some common GI disorders.

The efficacy of probiotics in preventing and treating gastrointestinal disorders has received considerable attention in recent years. This article will shed light on how probiotics are more or less effective in treating different gastrointestinal disorders.

Indian Burden and Factors Affecting GI Disorders The prevalence of self-reported gastrointestinal disorders in India is around 18%. Whereas the prevalence of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) ranges from 2.5% to 7.1% in most population-based studies in Asia.

Summary: A recent study illuminates the brain’s unique response to stress: releasing its own cannabinoid molecules akin to THC from cannabis plants.

Centered in the amygdala, these molecules counteract stress alarms originating from the hippocampus, an integral memory and emotion region. This hints at the body’s intrinsic mechanism for stress management.

Disruption in this system might escalate risks for stress-induced psychiatric conditions.

Malaria is one of the most widespread and devastating infectious diseases across the globe. This mosquito-borne parasitic disease killed approximately 619,000 people in 2021 alone, many of them children in Africa. In one of the deadliest forms of malaria, known as cerebral malaria, the patient experiences severe neurological symptoms, such as seizures and coma. Although only a small fraction of people who fall ill with malaria also experience cerebral malaria, the condition is lethal without treatment. Among hospitalized patients with the condition, death rates range between 15 and 20%. In a new paper, recently published in Science Translational Medicine, researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, and their colleagues studied children with cerebral malaria in Malawi to better understand the underlying causes of these devastating symptoms in the hope of developing improved treatments.

Researchers know that the symptoms of cerebral malaria are caused when the brain swells within the confines of the skull, eventually impinging upon the brainstem, which causes breathing to stop. However, researchers have been unsure how malaria infection leads to brain swelling. Some researchers hypothesized that the main cause was a weakening of the blood-brain barrier, which would allow fluid to seep into the brain and cause it to swell. Others speculated that the primary driver behind the swelling was inside the blood vessels themselves. Red blood cells infected with P. falciparum, the parasite which causes malaria, can become “sticky,” adhering to the walls of blood vessels. Partial blockages inside the cerebral veins could slow the flow of blood leaving the brain, causing the blood vessels themselves to become engorged and expand the brain from within.

To distinguish between these two hypotheses, NIAID researchers and their collaborators used non-invasive imaging techniques to study the flow of blood within the brains of 46 children who had been hospitalized for cerebral malaria at the Pediatric Research Ward of Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. As a comparison, they also studied 33 children with uncomplicated malaria and 26 healthy children from the local region. By using a light-based external monitoring tool (called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS) the researchers were able to measure the amount of hemoglobin in the children’s brains. They reasoned that if excess fluid was the cause of brain swelling, then the hemoglobin concentration would be low, due to dilution. Alternatively, if the blood vessels were engorged with blood, then the hemoglobin concentration would be high.

Commercial platforms for protein therapeutics are being built on academic research that has expanded the genetic code behind cell-based translation.

Antibiotic resistance is a major danger to public health that threatens to claim the lives of millions of people per year within the next few decades. Years of necessary administration and excessive application of antibiotics have selected for strains that are resistant to many of our currently available treatments. Due to the high costs and difficulty of developing new antibiotics, the emergence of resistant bacteria is outpacing the introduction of new drugs to fight them. To overcome this problem, many researchers are focusing on developing antibacterial therapeutic strategies that are “resistance-resistant”—regimens that slow or stall resistance development in the targeted pathogens. In this mini review, we outline major examples of novel resistance-resistant therapeutic strategies. We discuss the use of compounds that reduce mutagenesis and thereby decrease the likelihood of resistance emergence. Then, we examine the effectiveness of antibiotic cycling and evolutionary steering, in which a bacterial population is forced by one antibiotic toward susceptibility to another antibiotic. We also consider combination therapies that aim to sabotage defensive mechanisms and eliminate potentially resistant pathogens by combining two antibiotics or combining an antibiotic with other therapeutics, such as antibodies or phages. Finally, we highlight promising future directions in this field, including the potential of applying machine learning and personalized medicine to fight antibiotic resistance emergence and out-maneuver adaptive pathogens.

The use of antibiotics is central to the practice of modern medicine but is threatened by widespread antibiotic resistance (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S.), 2019). Antibiotics are a selective evolutionary pressure—they inhibit bacterial growth and viability, and antibiotic-treated bacteria are forced to either adapt and survive or succumb to treatment. The stress of antibiotic treatment can enhance bacterial mutagenesis leading to de novo resistance mutations (Figure 1A), promote the acquisition of horizontally transferred genetic elements that confer resistance, or trigger phenotypic responses that increase tolerance to drugs (Davies and Davies, 2010; Levin-Reisman et al., 2017; Bakkeren et al., 2019; Darby et al., 2022;). Additionally, antibiotic treatment can select for the proliferation of pre-existing mutants already in the population (Figure 1B).

A large team of scientists with a wide variety of backgrounds has joined together to suggest that a data-driven approach to search for life elsewhere in the universe should replace methods now in use. In their paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, the group explains how a data-driven approach could help prevent human-centered biases from overlooking potential signs of life.

Over the past few decades, scientists have become much more open to the possibility of discovering life in places other than on Earth. And because of that, more work has been done to find life—or at least signs of it. But, as the group on this new effort points out, most such approaches tend to expect that other forms of life will resemble those found on Earth. And that could be blinding scientists to signs of life that might be there but are being missed.

To overcome such a problem, the researchers suggest a more data-driven approach be used. They note that a lot of data have been obtained regarding various parts of the night sky. They also note that the data are in different formats. Some are radio wave graphs, while others describe the attributes of light emitted by a section of the sky, or even a given planet.