Vegetables – particularly green, leafy ones – will preserve the brain power if you eat three servings a day, new research shows. People who consumed two or more vegetables a day had a 35 to 40 percent decrease in the decline in thinking ability over six years. That’s the equivalent of being five years younger in age. The study results are published in the Oct. 24 issue of the journal Neurology.
In another important milestone, Glivec? (imatinib) has received US regulatory approval to help patients with five distinct and potentially life-threatening disorders, representing the first time that a regulatory authority has ever simultaneously approved one targeted medicine for so many disorders. With today’s decision, and in only five years, Glivec has now been approved in the US for seven diseases, including two solid tumors and five blood disorders with molecular targets known to be inhibited by the drug.
A team of scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has identified a human protein that helps varicella-zoster virus, the cause of both chickenpox and shingles, spread from cell to cell within the body.
For those who think that picking and eating apples this time of year is just for fun and for the great taste of America’s favorite fruit, you may want to think again. Apples and apple juice may be among the best foods that anyone could add to their diet, finds a collection of recent research studies, the latest of which was presented yesterday at the Society of Neuroscience annual conference in Atlanta. Researchers G. Bureau and M. Martinoli from the University of Quebec a Trois-Rivieres, found that quercetin (one of the antioxidants found abundantly in apples) was one of two compounds that helped to reduce cellular death that is caused by oxidation and inflammation of neurons.
When a patient arrives at an emergency room with symptoms of a stroke, doctors must act fast. But the crucial decisions that can prevent death or severe disability are harder to make without a neurologist, and not every hospital has one on call. Starting next month, however, 21 Michigan hospitals will have what is being touted as the next best thing: a robot on call.
A new U.S. study finds that marijuana may help slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers from Ohio State University in Columbus found that marijuana may contain compounds that can slow memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Surgery outperformed the use of stents in a French trial of patients who had warning symptoms of stroke because of blockage of the carotid arteries, the main blood vessels to the brain. Indeed, the trial was cut short “for reasons of both safety and futility,” said a report in the Oct. 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The incidence of stroke or death in the 30 days and six months after a procedure was about twice as high for patients given a stent, a tube-like device to keep an artery open, than for those who had the surgery called endarterectomy.
Impaired thinking may follow the onset or worsening of celiac disease, a common digestive disorder triggered by eating wheat products and other foods containing the protein gluten, as reported in the Archives of Neurology by Dr. Keith A. Josephs and colleagues from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, who studied 13 patients who experienced cognitive decline within 2 years of the onset or worsening of celiac disease.
The link between short sleep duration and obesity: We should recommend more sleep to prevent obesity. Soaring levels of obesity might be linked to children sleeping fewer hours at night than they used to, claims a researcher in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Certain types of brain cancer cells, called cancer stem cells, help brain tumors to buffer themselves against radiation treatment by activating a “repair switch” that enables them to continue to grow unchecked, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found.