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End of sugar rationing boosted diabetes, hypertension rates years later

A strategy pioneered during the Cold War may prevent people from believing and sharing online falsehoods

Kate Starbird’s work at the Center for an Informed Public has made her the target of political attacks

National Academies report is latest to address concerns about how scientists rely on racial and ethnic categories

Simple ingredients could have formed first cell membranes

Both alcohol use disorder (AUD) and cognitive decline include disruption in the balance of excitation and inhibition in the cortex, but the potential role of alcohol use on excitation and inhibition on the aging brain is unclear. We examined the effect of moderate voluntary binge alcohol consumption on the aged, pre-disease neuronal environment by measuring intrinsic excitability and spontaneous neurotransmission on prefrontal cortical pyramidal (excitatory, glutamatergic) and non-pyramidal...

CONCLUSION: Considering the impact of frailty on the health and wellbeing of older people, researchers must consider developing and using frailty screening instruments that assess domains that are pertinent to the health and wellbeing of older people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Necroptosis is a regulated form of cell death that has been observed in Alzheimer's disease (AD) along with the classical pathological hallmark lesions of amyloid plaques and Tau neurofibrillary tangles. To understand the neurodegenerative process in AD, we studied the role of necroptosis in mouse models and primary mouse neurons. Using immunohistochemistry, we demonstrated activated necroptosis-related proteins in transgenic mice developing Tau pathology and in primary neurons from amyloid...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, and recent evidence suggests that pathogenesis may be in part mediated by inflammatory processes, the molecular and cellular architectures of which are largely unknown. To identify and characterize selectively vulnerable brain cell populations in PD, we performed single-nucleus transcriptomics and unbiased proteomics to profile the prefrontal cortex from postmortem human brains of six individuals with late-stage PD and six...

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are released by all cells and hold great promise as a class of biomarkers. This promise has led to increased interest in measuring EV proteins from both total EVs as well as brain-derived EVs in plasma. However, measuring cargo proteins in EVs has been challenging because EVs are present at low levels, and EV isolation methods are imperfect at separating EVs from free proteins. Thus, knowing whether a protein measured after EV isolation is truly inside EVs is...

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The female reproductive lifespan is highly dependent on egg quality, especially the presence of a normal number of chromosomes in an egg, known as euploidy. Mistakes in meiosis leading to egg aneuploidy are frequent in humans. Yet, knowledge of the precise genetic landscape that causes egg aneuploidy in women is limited, as phenotypic data on the frequency of human egg aneuploidy are difficult to obtain and therefore absent in public genetic datasets. Here, we identify genetic determinants of...

Proteins occurring in significantly high concentrations in cellular environments (over 100 mg/ml) and functioning in crowded cytoplasm, often face the prodigious challenges of aggregation which are the pathological hallmark of aging and are critically responsible for a wide spectrum of rising human diseases. Here, we combine a joint-venture of complementary wet-lab experiment and molecular simulation to discern the potential ability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as solubilizer of protein...

The overproduction of cells and subsequent production of debris is a universal principle of neurodevelopment. Here, we show an additional feature of the developing nervous system that causes neural debris-promoted by the sacrificial nature of embryonic microglia that irreversibly become phagocytic after clearing other neural debris. Described as long-lived, microglia colonize the embryonic brain and persist into adulthood. Using transgenic zebrafish to investigate the microglia debris during...

Blood-CNS barriers protect the CNS from circulating immune cells and damaging molecules. It is thought barrier integrity becomes disrupted with aging, contributing to impaired CNS function. Using genome-wide and targeted molecular approaches, we found aging affected expression of predominantly immune invasion and pericyte-related genes in CNS regions investigated, especially after middle age, with spinal cord being most impacted. We did not find significant perturbation of endothelial cell...

Gait speed is a robust health biomarker in older adults, correlating with the risk of physical and cognitive impairments, including dementia. Myelination plays a crucial role in neurotransmission and consequently affects various functions, yet the connection between myelination and motor functions such as gait speed is not well understood. Understanding this link could offer insights into diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative diseases that impair mobility. This study analyzed 437...

Sarcopenia, or pathological age-related loss of muscle strength and mass, contributes to physical function impairment in older adults. While current understanding of sarcopenia is centered mostly on neuromuscular mechanisms, mounting evidence supports that deficits at the level of the primary motor cortex (PMC) play a significant role. Despite the importance of the PMC to initiate movement, understanding of how age affects the excitability of layer V pyramidal neurons (LVPNs) of the PMC is...

Dietary restriction (DR) is a potent method to enhance lifespan and healthspan, but individual responses are influenced by genetic variations. Understanding how metabolism-related genetic differences impact longevity and healthspan are unclear. To investigate this, we used metabolites as markers to reveal how different genotypes respond to diet to influence longevity and healthspan traits. We analyzed data from Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP) strains raised under AL and DR conditions,...

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