Science and Health News

Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are not the same. They affect different regions of the brain and have distinct genetic and environmental risk factors. But at the biochemical level, these two neurodegenerative diseases start to look similar. That's how Emory scientists led by Keqiang Ye, PhD, landed on a potential drug target for Parkinson's.

The connection between slowed walking speed and declining mental acuity appears to arise in the right hippocampus, a finger-shaped region buried deep in the brain at ear-level, according to a 14-year study conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

Researchers found an RNA species identifying critically short telomeres

Whole genome sequencing involves the analysis of all three billion pairs of letters in an individual’s DNA and has been hailed as a technology that will usher in a new era of predicting and preventing disease. However, the use of genome sequencing in healthy individuals is controversial because no one fully understands how many patients carry variants that put them at risk for rare genetic conditions and how they, and their doctors, will respond to learning about these risks.

Researchers have identified gut microbiota that interact with brain regions associated with mood and behavior. This may be the first time that behavioral and neurobiological differences associated with microbial composition in healthy humans have been identified.

Important pieces of the puzzle to understand what drives diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are still missing today. One crucial obstacle for researchers is that it is impossible to examine a living brain cell in someone who is affected by the disease. With the help of a new method for cell conversion, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have found a way to produce diseased, aging brain cells on a large scale in a cell culture dish.

Today I'll point out the latest paper in a debate over whether there are limits to human life span. As everyone in the audience here is no doubt aware, human life expectancy is gently trending upward.

New data on cause of death suggest the link is mediated by risk factors such as smoking