Scope is an award-winning medical blog produced by a team of writers at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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
Memory athletes — individuals with the remarkable ability to, say, memorize the order of entire decks of cards in mere seconds — invariably have a trick up their sleeve. It’s a trick you can learn. And as you do, your brain will rewire itself to more closely resemble those of the memory athletes. “Training normal humans to be memory athletes …Read More
Treating viral infections with a “one drug, one bug” approach can be quite successful, as in the case of hepatitis C. A concerted effort generated several approved — and extremely effective — antiviral treatments for that disease. But it also took more than 10 years of research and ran up costs exceeding $2 billion, says Stanford virologist and drug …Read More
Millions of people are living with paralysis in the United States alone. Sometimes their paralysis comes gradually, as occurs in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Sometimes it arrives suddenly, as it did for Dennis Degray. In a news release about an astonishing new study published in eLife, I wrote: Now 64, Degray …Read More
Typhoid fever, caused by a strain of the bacterial pathogen Salmonella, is thought to have wiped out one-third of the population of Athens in 430 B.C. and continues to afflict millions of people worldwide. These days, the industrialized world’s familiarity with Salmonella comes about much more often through contact with one of its many non-typhoid-causing strains, in the form of severe …Read More
Many patients with cancer are now treated with “checkpoint inhibitors.” These new drugs release molecular brakes that ordinarily keep immune cells from running amok and damaging healthy tissues. But when these brakes lock up, they prevent the immune system from killing tissues that need killing — tumors, for example. Always notoriously wily, cancer cells can learn how to paralyze the immune …Read More
The stomach is one of the human body’s most extreme environments, pumping out about 1.5 liters of strong acid daily. So it’s no wonder that omeprazole (Prilosec) and similar compounds known as proton-pump inhibitors (or PPIs), which block stomach-acid production, rank among the world’s most commonly used drugs. Stanford microbiologist Manuel Amieva, MD, tells me annual …Read More
The causes of Alzheimer’s disease remain obscure, although a new study provides a helpful clue. A long-reigning theory (to wit, that the accumulation of gummy protein aggregates in the brain is responsible for the observed neurodegeneration occurring in this disorder) has faltered, as one costly clinical trial after another focusing on ameliorating the disease by eliminating these aggregates has …Read More
Judging from the very terms used to designate brain research — neuroscience, neurology, neurobiology — you might figure nerve cells (or neurons, as brain scientists like to call them) are the only cells in the brain worth knowing about or, indeed, the only cells resident in that organ. Not true. In fact, neurons account for a measly …Read More
