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POPSSchizophrenia: The Curse That's Almost a Blessing
A recent study may have found what kind of process goes awry in schizophrenic brains. Researchers found that DISC1 regulates the migration of new neurons in the adult brain. When the levels of DISC1 were reduced in mice during adult neurogenesis, the newborn neurons sped up and overshot their intended targets within the hippocampus, When the neurons finally reached their destinations, they forged an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells, a series of events that might give rise to the abnormal—and quite crippling—brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song, a Johns Hopkins neurologist who also worked on the study. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug that treats schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis. So what evolutionary advantage could schizophrenia-related genes bring to people who have some of the genes but not the disease? For now, this remains one of the many open questions.
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POPSSolving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees This is a fascinating story. It is not the life of bees which is fascinating, but the vast complexity and interconectedness of life it exposes. From humans to beehives to plants to microbes, fungi, viruses, genes, metagenomics and what not. All are partaking in one orchestrated intelligent whole. This is a must read
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POPSPotential Alzheimer's, Parkinson's Cure Found In Century-old Drug Also impressed is one of Dr. Atamna's co-authors, Bruce Ames, PhD, a senior scientist at Children's and world-renowned expert in nutrition and aging. "What we potentially have is a wonder drug." said Dr. Ames. "To find that such a common and inexpensive drug can be used to increase and prolong the quality of life by treating such serious diseases is truly exciting." Dr. Atamna's research is the first to show that low concentrations of the drug have the ability to slow cellular aging in cultured cells in the laboratory and in live mice. He believes methylene blue has the potential to become another commonplace low-cost treatment like aspirin, prescribed as a blood thinner for people with heart disorders.
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POPSAttacking Alzheimer's with Red Wine and Marijuana "Could people smoke marijuana to prevent Alzheimer's disease if the disease is in the family? We're not saying that, but it might actually work," he said. "What we are saying is it appears that a safe, legal substance that mimics those important properties of marijuana can work on receptors in the brain to prevent memory impairments in aging. So that's really hopeful."
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POPSOur Genome Changes Over Lifetime, And May Explain Many 'Late-onset' Diseases They found that in almost one-third of individuals, methylation changed over that 11-year span, but not all in the same direction. Some individuals gained total methylation in their DNA, while others lost. "What we saw was a detectable change over time, which showed us proof of the principle that an individual's epigenetics does change with age,"
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POPS World's Largest Disease Association Network In the great scheme of things, we can think that there are two ways to understand the things that surround us,” lead author César Hidalgo of Harvard University . “One is to try to understand what things are made of, i.e. take the objects that make up the world and break them up in order to study their components. The second way is to take the objects that make up the world and see how they relate to other objects, in what context they occur and how they are connected. Until now, medicine has concentrated most of its efforts in generating understanding by disaggregating their objects of study (diseases) into essential components (genes, proteins, pathways, organs). Here we show that it is in principle possible to characterize and understand diseases also by looking at their context, rather than their components
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