3D-Printed Dentures Release Drug to Combat Infection
Researchers at the University at Buffalo have developed a method to rapidly 3D print dentures that contain an antifungal drug. The dentures can release the drug slowly over time, helping to combat fungal infections before they happen. The technique could also be useful for creating different drug-releasing medical implants, such as stents and prostheses.
Fungal infections, resulting in inflammation and pain in the mouth, affect nearly two thirds of denture wearers in the US. Current treatments include antiseptic mouthwashes and microwave disinfection of dentures. However, these techniques do not help to prevent infections ...
Source: Medgadget - April 27, 2018 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Dentistry Source Type: blogs
What Zombie Ants Are Teaching Us About Fungal Infections: Q & A with Entomologists David Hughes and Maridel Fredericksen
I can still remember that giddy feeling I had seven years ago, when I first read about the “zombie ant.” The story was gruesome and fascinating, and it was everywhere. Even friends and family who aren’t so interested in science knew the basics: in a tropical forest somewhere there’s a fungus that infects an ant and somehow takes control of the ant’s brain, forcing it to leave its colony, crawl up a big leaf, bite down and wait for the sweet relief of death. A grotesque stalk then sprouts from the poor creature’s head, from which fungal spores rain down to infect a new batch of ants.
A fungal fruiting b...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - February 21, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Chris Palmer Tags: Computers in Biology Cell Biology Cellular Processes Electron Microscopy Infection Source Type: blogs
Weird and Wild: Back Piercing and Langers’ Lines
A patient presented to the emergency department with a request to remove her back ring. Yes, that's right, her back ring. We were a bit confused at first by the piercing. The stud was placed in her back with no obvious way of removal. Our original thought was to send the patient to dermatology or even plastic surgery. The piercing certainly didn't qualify for emergency surgery or removal.A 23-year-old woman with a back piercing in the left lower back. The underlying skin condition is not infectious. This is a classic example of tinea versicolor, and is not related to the piercing. It is a common fungal infectio...
Source: The Procedural Pause - January 31, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 13th 2017
In conclusion, we have developed an effective PILs strategy to deliver the AUF1 plasmid to a specific target, and this system may be useful for the development of new anti-aging drugs.
Considering the Evidence for Vascular Amyloidosis as a Cause of Aging
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/11/considering-the-evidence-for-vascular-amyloidosis-as-a-cause-of-aging/
The balance of evidence for the aging of the cardiovascular system suggests the following view. It starts off in the blood vessels, with the accumulation of senescent cells and cross-links. Cross-links directly stiffen these tissues, while...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 12, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Geroscience Interviews Michael Fossel on the Subject of Telomeres and Aging
Geroscience recently published a long two part discussion with Michael Fossel. He is among the more prominent advocates for treating aging as a medical condition from the past few decades, and has written a couple of books on the topic. As a very brief summary of his views, I'd say he is fairly narrowly focused on telomerase therapies and telomere lengthening as a mode of treatment. This isn't because he sees telomere erosion, the reduction in average telomere length in tissues over the course of a life, to be a cause of aging. Rather he sees it as a convenient point of intervention that might at least partially reverse ma...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 9, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
Health Insurance Benefits Should Be Equitable, Not Necessarily Equal
As policy makers grapple with potentially undoing or modifying the largest expansion of health insurance in a generation, the cost and generosity of benefits hold center stage. Traditional underpinnings of insurance plans—premiums, deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance—frequently create barriers to the optimal use of these plans by consumers. They also can exacerbate inequities in health care, by inhibiting the use of services known to benefit health. Novel approaches to insurance plan design to produce a more equitable and efficient distribution of health care expenditures are warranted.
Following the princ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - May 22, 2017 Category: Health Management Authors: Betsy Q. Cliff, Michael Rozier and A. Mark Fendrick Tags: Costs and Spending Featured Health Equity Insurance and Coverage health insurance benefits insurance plan design value-based insurance design Source Type: blogs
LITFL Review 283
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Welcome to the 283rd LITFL Review! Your regular and reliable source for the highest highlights, sneakiest sneak peeks and loudest shout-outs from the webbed world of emergency medicine and critical care. Each week the LITFL team casts the spotlight on the blogosphere’s best and brightest and deliver a bite-sized chunk of FOAM.
The Most Fair Dinkum Ripper Beauts of the Week
An incredible and eye opening review of his visit to meet the team at Mitchell’s Plains in...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - May 21, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Anand Swaminathan Tags: LITFL review LITFL R/V Source Type: blogs
LITFL Review 283
LITFL: Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog
LITFL: Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Welcome to the 283rd LITFL Review! Your regular and reliable source for the highest highlights, sneakiest sneak peeks and loudest shout-outs from the webbed world of emergency medicine and critical care. Each week the LITFL team casts the spotlight on the blogosphere’s best and brightest and deliver a bite-sized chunk of FOAM.
The Most Fair Dinkum Ripper Beauts of the Week
An incredible and eye opening review of his visit to meet the team at Mitchell’s Plains in South...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - May 21, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Anand Swaminathan Tags: LITFL review Source Type: blogs
Infection and Inflammation in Neurodegenerative Conditions
Increased levels of chronic inflammation accompany aging, and this drives faster progression of a range of age-related conditions, spurring greater damage and loss of function in tissues. Researchers here ask to what degree this is due to opportunistic infections and a weakened immune system rather than being caused by the more general dysfunction and overactivation of the aged immune system that would occur even absent such infections, the state known as inflammaging. Like many such investigations, this serves to emphasize the need for effective means to rejuvenate the age-damaged immune system, such as through clearing a...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 9, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Wait for it
By Tim Lahey At 94, my patient V. was funny and flirtatious. Her French accent made even the name of her life-threatening fungal infection sound poetic. “DEE-seminated HEESTO-plasmo-sees,” she said, “Oaf the skin.” I smiled. I also admitted her to the hospital because our treatments were not working. I hoped intensified wound care and antibiotics […] (Source: blog.bioethics.net)
Source: blog.bioethics.net - September 13, 2016 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: reflectivemeded Tags: Health Care narrative medicine syndicated Source Type: blogs
Toe Nail Fungus: Understand What it is, How you Got it and How to Treat It
You're reading Toe Nail Fungus: Understand What it is, How you Got it and How to Treat It, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you're enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Sometimes referred as Onychomycosis, toenail fungus starts as a yellow or white spot at the tip of the nail and works its way under the nail bed.
The moist and dark environment of nail bed serves as a perfect breeding ground for the fungus.
It starts growing quickly into a colony of fungi that covers the entire nail or even other nails if not treated immediately. The nail may get thi...
Source: PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement - August 28, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dylan_moran Tags: Community Posts fungus treatment how to get rid of toe nail fungus pickthebrain self improvement Source Type: blogs
Proposing a Microbial Cause of Alzheimer's Disease, Again
The biochemistry of the brain is enormously complex and still poorly understood at the detail level. This is also true of the mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease. Treating Alzheimer's is, more or less, the unified banner under which the research community raises funds to map and catalog the brain. It is why so much funding pours into the study of this one condition in comparison to others. In the research mainstream it is expected that only with much greater understanding of neurobiology will effective therapies emerge. Since the molecular biology involved is so very complicated, there are many gaps into which new theories o...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 11, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Yeast versus fungus
There seems to be a lot of confusion with yeast and fungus. Both fungus and yeast belong to the taxonomic kingdom fungi. Yeast shares some similarity with the mushroom, which is a type of unicellular fungi. Hyphae are a constituent part of fungus. These are tube like structures forming many branches and covering many arenas. The fungus consists of 80,000 known species. A fungus lacks vascular tissue and chlorophyll. Since chlorophyll is not present in it, fungi cannot process their own meals through the process of photosynthesis. Also they lack the presence of vascular tissues and hence they have some limitations in the nu...
Source: Nursing Comments - December 6, 2015 Category: Nursing Authors: Stephanie Jewett, RN Tags: Advice/Education Caregiving General Public Nursing/Nursing Students Patients/Specific Diseases anti-fungal agents athlete's foot chlorophyll. fungal infection fungi fungus jock itch mushroom photosynthesis yeast yeast infecti Source Type: blogs
A Couple More Minority Theories on Alzheimer's Disease
Alzheimer's research is comparatively well funded, but the production of therapies based on the presently dominant amyloid hypothesis is proving to be a hard, slow grind. The most promising involve directing the immune system to break down amyloid-β or related proteins, but even this line of work is a litany of failed early stage trials at this point. Since theorizing and preliminary investigation of new theories is a lot cheaper than contributing to the messy and very complicated late stage development of potential amyloid clearance treatments, a lot of theorizing is taking place. This is human nature at work; any falter...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 22, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Designing Drugs That Kill Invasive Fungi Without Harming Humans
Invasive fungal infections kill more than 1 million worldwide people every year. Almost all of these deaths are due to fungi in one of these four groups. Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Invasive fungal infections—the kind that infect the bloodstream, lung and brain—are inordinately deadly. A big part of the problem is the lack of drugs that are both effective against the fungi and nontoxic to humans.
The situation might change in the future though, thanks to the work of a multidisciplinary research team led by chemist Martin Burke at the University of Illinois. For years, the team has focused on an...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - June 29, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Srivalli Subbaramaiah Tags: Chemistry and Biochemistry Pharmacology Drug Resistance Infection Medicines Source Type: blogs
