Answer to Case 529
Answer to Parasite Case of the Week 529: Pollen grainsCongratulations to everyone who wrote in with the correct answer. Most of you recognized this as some type of artifact, with only a few suggesting that these might be helminth eggs. As Old One mentioned, " These structures superficially resemble ascarid eggs. Size, and surface texture would help with differentiation.Toxocara canisis 80-85 micrometers in greatest dimension with a golfball pitted surface texture.T. catis 65-70 micrometers it also has the golfball pitting but smaller and less distinct then that ofT. canis.Baylisascaris procyonisis 63-88 u and has a gr...
Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites - January 28, 2019 Category: Parasitology Source Type: blogs
Salicylates as an Autophagy Based Approach to Modestly Slow Aging in Nematodes
A sizable fraction of the many methods demonstrated to slow aging and increase longevity in nematode worms involve increased levels of autophagy. This collection of cellular maintenance and recycling mechanisms becomes more active following any sort of cellular stress, from heat to toxicity to lack of nutrients. Life span in short lived species is highly plastic in response to environmental circumstances; any minor stress can produce a net benefit. This can make it somewhat challenging to determine whether any particular approach shown to slow aging is in fact acting directly or indirectly via the controlling mechanisms of...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 20, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Answer to Case 509
Answer:Dirofilariasp.; most likelyD. repensbased on the presentation, geographic exposure, and morphology of the microfilariae in blood.Idzi and his group recently published this case in EID; you can read about all of the important diagnostic details such as the length of the adult worm, its cuticle, and the morphology of the microfilariae HERE.Here a just a few important points from this case:1.Not all round worms removed from the eye areLoa loa.While loiasis is the ocular roundworm infection that most physicians are familiar with, human dirofilariasis is an emerging infection that should be considered whenever ...
Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites - September 3, 2018 Category: Parasitology Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 4th 2018
Fight Aging! provides a weekly digest of news and commentary for thousands of subscribers interested in the latest longevity science: progress towards the medical control of aging in order to prevent age-related frailty, suffering, and disease, as well as improvements in the present understanding of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to extending healthy life. Expect to see summaries of recent advances in medical research, news from the scientific community, advocacy and fundraising initiatives to help speed work on the repair and reversal of aging, links to online resources, and much more.
This content is...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 3, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Beclin-1 Mutant Mice Live 10% Longer Due to Enhanced Autophagy
Autophagy is the name given to a collection of cellular housekeeping processes responsible for recycling damaged or unwanted proteins and cellular structures, preventing them from causing further harm within the cell. Many of the methods of modestly slowing aging in laboratory species are observed to involve increased levels of autophagy. For some, such as calorie restriction, there is evidence to demonstrate that functional autophagy is required for aging to be slowed.
Researchers have long been interested in developing pharmaceutical means to enhance autophagy as a form of therapy. This is arguably even more the c...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 31, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 235
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Just when you thought your brain could unwind on a Friday, you realise that it would rather be challenged with some good old fashioned medical trivia FFFF…introducing Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 235 and infectious diseases / animal theme.
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Question 1:
What tropical disease will give you Leopard or Lizard skin?
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
expand(document.getElementById('ddet2101796915...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - April 26, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Frivolous Friday Five bull neck diphtheria Elephantiasis leonine facies leopard skin leprosy lion facies lizard skin lymphatic filariasis marasmus monkey facies onchocerciasis Source Type: blogs
Answer to Case 479
Answer:Ascaris lumbricoides,adult femaleThe identification of this roundworm is based on its large size, tapered head and characteristic trilobate (3) " lips " :This worm can be further identified as a female based on its straight rather than coiled tail. Ali also astutely noted the presence of a " vulvar waist " - a narrowing at the junction on the anterior and middle thirds of the body, which also indicates that it is a female. Kamran was unable to express any eggs out of the worm; if found, the presence of eggs would also have confirmed the female gender. The size (30 cm) falls within the range of both male and female w...
Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites - January 29, 2018 Category: Parasitology Source Type: blogs
A Class of Calorie Restriction Mimetic Targeting NRF2
NRF2, or SKN-1 in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, is one of the many coordinating stress response genes activated by calorie restriction or a range of other forms of mild cellular stress. Part of the way in which this results in improved health and extended life span in a range of species is through activating cellular protection and repair mechanisms. Researchers are interested in ways to recapture this reaction to stress via pharmaceuticals rather than diet, and so are working their way through the drug databases in search of prospects. The results here are an example of the sort of thing they are looking for: ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 21, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
The SENS Research Foundation Comments on Calico's Research into Apparent Rejuvenation in Oocytes
This study adds substantial insight to a body of work on nematode (and later frog) oocyte biology sparked by a discovery made by French scientists in 2010 and prior work in yeast and in mouse embryos. However, there is nothing here that can be exploited for developing anti-aging therapies.
The real finding of the paper is better captured by its own title than the newspaper headlines: "A lysosomal switch triggers proteostasis renewal in the immortal C. elegans germ lineage." The key word in there is not "immortal," but "renewal" - renewal of "proteostasis," the somewhat equivocal concept of the young cell's dynamic m...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 14, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 20th 2017
This study cohort is a healthy subset of the EpiPath cohort, excluding all participants with acute or chronic diseases. With a mediation analysis we examined whether CMV titers may account for immunosenescence observed in ELA.
In this study, we have shown that ELA is associated with higher levels of T cell senescence in healthy participants. Not only did we find a higher number of senescent cells (CD57+), these cells also expressed higher levels of CD57, a cell surface marker for senescence, and were more cytotoxic in ELA compared to controls. Control participants with high CMV titers showed a higher number of senes...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 19, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Mild Mitochondrial Stress Found to Prevent Some of the Age-Related Declines in Cellular Maintenance in Nematodes
Hormesis is a near ubiquitous phenomenon in living organisms and their component parts: a little damage, a short or mild exposure to damaging circumstances, can result in a net benefit to health and longevity. Cells respond to damage or stress by increasing their self-repair efforts for some period of time, maintaining their function more effectively than would otherwise have been the case. At the high level, the outcomes of hormesis have been measured for a wide variety of stresses and systems, from individual cells to entire organisms. At the low level of specific biochemical processes and interaction of components insid...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 17, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, September 25th 2017
Fight Aging! provides a weekly digest of news and commentary for thousands of subscribers interested in the latest longevity science: progress towards the medical control of aging in order to prevent age-related frailty, suffering, and disease, as well as improvements in the present understanding of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to extending healthy life. Expect to see summaries of recent advances in medical research, news from the scientific community, advocacy and fundraising initiatives to help speed work on the repair and reversal of aging, links to online resources, and much more.
This content is...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 24, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
An Introduction to DAF-16 and FOXO in the Context of Aging and Longevity
In the early 1990s Cynthia Kenyon and others produced the first C. elegans nematode worms to exhibit significantly extended longevity through a single gene mutation, in daf-2, the nematode version of the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) receptor, and went on to map the relevant nearby biochemical landscape of these mutants. It is perhaps overly simplistic to mark this as the dividing line between a research mainstream whose members believed aging to be an intractably complex process, and a research mainstream increasingly interested in slowing aging through adjustment of metabolism, but that is the story as it is commo...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 20, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Protein Synthesis Differences in Progeria Suggest Changes in the Nucleolus as a Potential Biomarker of Aging
Researchers here note changes in the nucleolus in both old cells and cells from progeria patients, and suggest that these changes may be characteristic enough in normal aging to serve as a biomarker to assess biological age. There is great interest in the research community in establishing a low-cost, reliable biomarker of this nature, as it would considerably speed up the assessment of potential rejuvenation therapies, those that address the root causes of aging. Currently it is an expensive and time-consuming process, as studies must run long enough to observe the results of a treatment upon mortality rates.
Proge...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 31, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
