I Thought I Had A Headache. It Turned Out To Be Herpes (HSV-1) — In My Brain.
The author during her stay at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was treated for encephalitis in 2015. “I do not remember this day,” she writes. Courtesy of Brigid Ward On Oct. 28, 2015, I left my high school teaching job early because I thought I had the flu. I had been […]
Opinion | ‘Everybody Is a Little Bit Anxious’: What We Heard This Week
“Everybody is a little bit anxious, and they are watching this.” — William Schaffner, MD, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, on a study showing mammal-to-mammal transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza on a mink farm in Spain. “We know that alcohol-based hand sanitizer kills more bugs than hand-washing removes.” — Janet Glowicz, PhD, […]
Impact of ‘hyper-palatable’ foods across four diets
If losing weight was among your 2023 resolutions, findings by researchers from the University of Kansas and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may provide clearer guidance about the food you put on your plate. Using previous study data, researchers sought to determine what characteristics of meals were important for determining how many calories were […]
Opinion | ‘It’s a Word Calculator on Steroids’: What We Heard This Week
“It’s a word calculator on steroids.” — Daniel Chow, MD, MBA, of the University of California Irvine, on large language models like ChatGPT being used to plagiarize scientific research. “It’s like gold. This is the reality. It’s crazy.” — Jody Dushay, MD, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, on diabetes patients’ difficulty getting […]
Discovery of metabolic switch could lead to targeted treatment of obesity, cancer
An Iowa State University research team has discovered a method for modifying the function of an enzyme crucial to fat production, which could lead to more effective treatments for childhood obesity and cancer. While the research was in fruit fly larvae, being able to speed up or slow down lipid metabolism could have significant implications […]
Why obesity is more dangerous for men: Building blocks of blood vessels found to be associated with inflammation and disease processes in male mice
A newly published study from York University sheds light on the biological underpinnings in sex differences in obesity-related disease, with researchers observing “striking” differences in the cells that build blood vessels in the fatty tissue of male versus female mice. Men are more likely than women to develop conditions associated with obesity such as cardiovascular […]
Opinion | ‘It Appears All the Cylinders Are Firing Within His Brain’: What We Heard This Week
“It appears that all the cylinders are firing within his brain.” — Timothy Pritts, MD, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where NFL safety Damar Hamlin was treated after he collapsed on the field during a Monday Night Football game. “All of a sudden, this guy in a pink dress came up next […]
Genetic effect on the response to treatment for obesity
Collaborative research between University of Galway and Brunel University London has found that patients with severe and complicated obesity respond differently to a dietary weight loss programme based on their genes. The GERONIMO project studied patients attending the obesity clinic at Galway University Hospital who were undergoing an intensive short-term programme of medically supervised dietary […]
Some guts are better than others at harvesting energy
New research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that a portion of the Danish population has a composition of gut microbes that, on average, extracts more energy from food than do the microbes in the guts of their fellow Danes. The research is a step towards understanding why some people gain more weight than others, […]
Opinion | ‘Is This an Underestimate of the Harm?’: What We Heard This Week
“Is this an underestimate of the harm?” — Martin J. Landray, PhD, of the University of Oxford in England, on preprint data from the RECOVERY trial showing higher corticosteroid doses raised the risk of death in non-ventilated COVID-19 patients with hypoxia. “I was talking to some other doctors about it online, and there was a […]