Scope is an award-winning medical blog produced by a team of writers at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Each of us is carrying about 100 trillion microbes in our gut. They’re tiny and squirmy, but if you could line them all up end to end and convince them to stand still, they’d reach to the moon. What are all those bugs doing in our gut? What happens when they aren’t doing it? What …Read More
As if they didn’t have enough to worry about, people with coronary artery disease — the industrialized world’s number-one killer — are more vulnerable to getting shingles, an excruciatingly painful skin rash, than people without it are. But why this connection should exist has been a mystery until now. Shingles, whose incidence increases exponentially after …Read More
I first began ruminating on what would eventually become my just-published Stanford Medicine magazine article, “Two Minds: The Cognitive Differences between Men and Women,” in 2013, when I attended an on-campus symposium on the question of whether any such differences exist. Numerous interviews and seminars and many dozens of slowly digested research reports later, the answer is clear. An excerpt from …Read More
Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, is an inquisitive neuroscientist, innovative bioengineer and practicing psychiatrist. In his push to determine which neural circuits are jamming up to cause serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and depression, Deisseroth has been struck by enlightenment twice: He has pioneered not just one but two uniquely productive research technologies that have …Read More
One in every 200 people in the developed world suffer from an inflammatory autoimmune condition called psoriatic arthritis. For too many of these people, standard drugs don’t work well or stop working well after initial success. But a new study published in The Lancet suggests that relief may be on the way. While superficially similar in several respects …Read More
Leprosy begins with a bacterial infection and, after five to 20 symptom-free years, can end in severe nerve, skin, vision and respiratory-tract damage and limb amputations. Treatable and in decline today, this scourge has plagued humanity for many thousands of years and still persists in Southeast Asia and India. Modern human beings arrived in Southeast …Read More
This striking image captures nerve cells (in green) migrating from one region of the human forebrain into another region — in laboratory glassware. This process recapitulates what’s been believed to occur in a developing fetus, but has never previously been viewed in real time. The seeds of autism, schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders are planted during …Read More
In a mouse study published today in Cell, Stanford microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, PhD, and his colleagues have been able to simultaneously visualize multiple bacterial strains in lab mice’s gut by making them express unique combinations of fluorescent proteins. This approach lets researchers pinpoint the location of bacteria in the gut based on the rainbow of colors they’re …Read More
Human umbilical cord blood can rejuvenate learning and memory in older mice, according to a study led by Stanford neuroscientists Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, and Joe Castellano, PhD. The study, published in Nature, comes out of the same lab that in 2014 gave us the story I’ll paraphrase as “young blood recharges old mice’s brains,” which not …Read More
Try it. Breathe slowly and smoothly. A pervasive sense of calm descends. Now breathe rapidly and frenetically. Tension mounts. Why is that? It’s a question that has never been answered by science… until now… in mice. A study published in Science today describes how researchers led by Stanford molecular biologist Mark Krasnow, MD, PhD, identified a handful of nerve …Read More
