The five most-read stories this week on Scope were:
Study: Pregnancy causes surprising changes in how the immune system responds to the flu: New Stanford research shows that immune cells from pregnant women are strongly activated by influenza, which may explain the increased risk of flu complications in pregnancy.
Free online Stanford course examines medical education in the new millennium: At this year’s Stanford Medicine X, executive director Larry Chu, MD, announced the launch of the Medicine X Academy. As part of the academy, a massive open online course (MOOC) course titled “Medical Education in the New Millennium” began this week.
Exercise and your brain: Stanford research highlighted on NIH Director’s blog: In a blog entry, Francis Collins, MD, director of the National Institutes of Health, discussed research by Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, who studies stem cells in muscle and longevity, and Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, who studies the immune system’s impact on the brain.
Treating an infection to prevent a cancer: H. pylori and stomach cancer: In a Viewpoint piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Stanford infectious disease specialist Julie Parsonnet, MD, and her co-authors discuss the link between gastric cancer and chronic infections of Helicobacter pylori.
Discovery may help predict how many days it will take for individual surgery patients to bounce back: Researchers here found that they could predict how well a patient would recover from surgery, based on the activity of a specific set of immune cells. Their work was published in Science Translational Medicine.
And still going strong – the most popular post from the past:
The mystery surrounding lung-transplant survival rates: A 2012 article in the San Francisco Chronicle offered a look at the challenges facing lung transplant patients and explored why a significant number don’t live beyond the five-year mark, despite improvements in survival rates.
