April 12, 2023 By Jim Hammerand Leave a Comment FacebookTwitterLinkedIn New ethylene oxide rules from the EPA would reduce EtO emissions from commercial sterilizers by 80%, the agency said. The EPA this week proposed new regulations for companies that sterilize medical devices with EtO, following up on last week’s proposal for new EtO rules on chemical plants that make or store the sterilant. EtO is the most common method of medical device sterilization, used for around half of the 40 billion devices sterilized each year in the U.S. For some devices, there’s no alternative to EtO because gamma ray and electron beam sterilization can only be used on certain materials. FAQ: What is electron beam sterilization? But health risks for sterilization plant workers and neighbors have the EPA, FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) working together to reduce those risks without reducing sterilization capacity. “OSHA’s mission is to ...
Marcia Frellick April 17, 2023 People diagnosed with influenza are six times more likely to have a heart attack within the first week that they test positive for the influenza virus than they are in the year before or the year after, a new study indicates. This work, led by Annemarijn de Boer, PhD, with the Julius Center for Life Sciences and Primary Care, UMC Utrecht in Utrecht, the Netherlands, comes 5 years after a 2018 study by Canadian researchers found a similar strong connection between flu and heart attack in people hospitalized for heart attacks. Annemarijn de Boer, PhD The current findings will be presented by de Boer at the at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 18. de Boer’s team explains that the connection between influenza and heart attack lies in the influenza virus’s ability to increase the stickiness or clotting of blood. ...
In a recent study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers assessed the impact of consuming dietary flavanols on the likelihood of developing frailty. Frailty affects 10% to 15% of older persons and is causally associated with various age-related physiological changes. The need for research in the prevention and treatment of frailty is highlighted by the absence of effective therapies for frailty. Identifying risk factors associated with frailty is crucial for creating interventions that can delay, undo, or prevent its onset. A meta-analysis of several studies found that following a healthy dietary pattern may reduce the risk of frailty onset by 50% to 70%. Flavonoids have the potential to reduce inflammation and frailty development by mitigating the accumulation of oxidative stress and targeting the reduction of age-related senescent cells. About the study In the present study, researchers investigated the relationship between dietary flavonoids, including their subclasses ...
Amblyopia, sometimes called lazy eye, is a common vision problem in children and babies, and it’s typically been treated by having the child wear a patch on the stronger eye, with the goal of improving sight for the weaker eye. Recent research has suggested that treatments that require the two eyes to work together might help those with amblyopia recover better. Other research has shown that appropriately timed sleep can help neural networks in the brain repair or restructure themselves, particularly in children, says University of Michigan researcher Sara Aton. Aton’s lab looked at the two research questions in concert, and found that visual stimuli presented to both eyes, rather than the weaker eye alone, helped mice with amblyopia experience a more complete recovery of their visual function. For even better results, the mice had to be allowed to sleep right after their enriched visual experience. The team’s ...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is how we visualize soft, watery tissue that is hard to image with X-rays. But while an MRI provides good enough resolution to spot a brain tumor, it needs to be a lot sharper to visualize microscopic details within the brain that reveal its organization. In a decades-long technical tour de force lead by Duke’s Center for In Vivo Microscopy with colleagues at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University, researchers took up the gauntlet and improved the resolution of MRI leading to the sharpest images ever captured of a mouse brain. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first MRI, the researchers generated scans of a mouse brain that are dramatically crisper than a typical clinical MRI for humans, the scientific equivalent of going from a pixelated 8-bit graphic to the hyper-realistic detail of a Chuck Close painting. A single ...
Researchers at UC Davis are the first to report how a specific type of brain cells, known as oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, transfer cell material to neurons in the mouse brain. Their work provides evidence of a coordinated nuclear interaction between these cells and neurons. The study was published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. “This novel concept of material transfer to neurons opens new possibilities for understanding brain maturation and finding treatments for neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease,” said corresponding author Olga Chechneva. Chechneva is an assistant project scientist at UC Davis Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and independent principal investigator in the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine at Shriners Children’s Northern California. What are oligodendrocyte-lineage cells? Oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, also called oligodendroglia, are a type of glial cells found in the central nervous system. From birth onward, these glial cells arise to support neural ...
Gobbling up too many refined wheat and rice products, along with eating too few whole grains, is fueling the growth of new cases of type 2 diabetes worldwide, according to a new study that models data through 2018. “Our study suggests poor carbohydrate quality is a leading driver of diet-attributable type 2 diabetes globally,” says senior author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University and professor of medicine at Tufts School of Medicine in Boston, in a statement. Another key factor: People are eating far too much red and processed meats, such as bacon, sausage, salami and the like, the study said. Those three factors — eating too few whole grains and too many processed grains and meats — were the primary drivers of over 14 million new cases of type 2 diabetes in 2018, according to the study, which was published Monday in the ...
Normal aging is associated with progressive cognitive decline. But can we train our brain to delay this process? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), HES-SO Geneva and EPFL has discovered that practicing and listening to music can alter cognitive decline in healthy seniors by stimulating the production of grey matter. To achieve these results, the researchers followed over 100 retired people who had never practiced music before. They were enrolled in piano and music awareness training for six months. These results open new prospects for the support of healthy ageing. They are reported in NeuroImage: Reports. Throughout our lives, our brain remodels itself. Brain morphology and connections change according to the environment and the experiences, for instance when we learn new skills or overcome the consequences of a stroke. However, as we age, this ”brain plasticity” decreases. The brain also loses grey matter, where our precious neurons ...
Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Apr 17 2023 A regimen of pre-surgical immunotherapy and chemotherapy followed by post-surgical immunotherapy significantly improved event-free survival (EFS) and pathologic complete response (pCR) rates compared to chemotherapy alone for patients with operable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to Phase III trial results presented today by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2023. The AEGEAN trial evaluated durvalumab given perioperatively, meaning therapy is given both before and after surgery. Participants on the trial received either pre-surgical (neoadjuvant) durvalumab and platinum-based chemotherapy followed by post-surgical (adjuvant) durvalumab or neoadjuvant placebo and chemotherapy followed by adjuvant placebo. These represent the first data presented on the benefits of perioperative immunotherapy for resectable NSCLC and adds to the growing evidence supporting the benefits of both neoadjuvant and adjuvant immunotherapy for these patients. Our goal is to increase cures for lung cancer. ...
Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Apr 17 2023 Normal aging is associated with progressive cognitive decline. But can we train our brain to delay this process? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), HES-SO Geneva and EPFL has discovered that practicing and listening to music can alter cognitive decline in healthy seniors by stimulating the production of grey matter. To achieve these results, the researchers followed over 100 retired people who had never practiced music before. They were enrolled in piano and music awareness training for six months. These results open new prospects for the support of healthy ageing. They are reported in NeuroImage: Reports. Throughout our lives, our brain remodels itself. Brain morphology and connections change according to the environment and the experiences, for instance when we learn new skills or overcome the consequences of a stroke. However, as we age, this ”brain plasticity” decreases. The brain also loses grey ...
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