Questions surrounding the nature of asymptomatic cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been present since near the beginning of the pandemic. A recent meta-analysis explored what has been published on this question.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, meaning that brain cells will continuously die off as the illness persists. The brain cells that are mainly affected in Parkinson’s disease are ones that produce dopamine, a chemical in the brain that is known to be important in the control of the…
Parkinson’s disease currently affects over 10 million people worldwide, and in the United States approximately 60,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year. It is a disease in which the brain cells, or neurons, that produce dopamine progressively die off over time. For this reason, it is known as a…
Researchers found higher levels of mis-folded proteins in the appendix of Parkinson's patients compared to healthy controls. The researchers suggest that this finding of alpha-synuclein in the appendix may mean that misfolded alpha-synuclein can travel from the appendix to the brain as one of the potential mechanisms…
The blood-brain barrier protects our brains from infection and toxins, but also makes it harder to deliver medications for brain diseases. Canadian researchers use ultrasound to get around this problem.
Typhoid fever is an infection caused by a bacteria called Salmonella enterica typhi which, according to the CDC, affects about 22 million people every year. Many of those affected by the disease come from developing countries where there is poor sanitation and a lack of access to clean water. Symptoms of typhoid fever…
A landmark clinical trial was announced recently by researchers at Kyoto University. For the first time in history, this trial tests the use of stem cells for the treatment of a major degenerative brain disease: Parkinson’s disease. The significance of a trial like this should not be understated, as the therapeutic…
For most types of cancer, survival rates have steadily been improving since the 1970s as medical advancements have been made in both cancer diagnosis as well as in treatment. Some of the largest improvements seen have been in the most common cancer types such as prostate cancer, leukaemia, and female breast cancer.…
The story is all too familiar: promising effects are shown in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease – providing hope for patients, physicians, and researchers alike – only to move on to clinical trials and fail to show any beneficial effects in humans. The drugs intepirdine and solanezumab are recent…
A normal pregnancy usually lasts around 40 weeks, but births that occur before 37 weeks are defined as being premature. Premature births are associated with a wide range of problems in infant children, and generally, the shorter the term of a pregnancy, the greater the health problems there will be for the infant. In…