Health – Things Are Good

HIV Vaccine Showing Promising Results

There are lots of teams trying to create a vaccine for HIV and they are all making valuable progress. HIV is the virus that turns into AIDS which is a life altering diagnosis. Treatments for people with HIV/AIDS have improved greatly over the decades but a vaccine would be the greatest step forward. This new vaccine works at the cellular level to help the body fight off HIV by boosting B cells. Modern science truly is impressive!

The new vaccine works by intervening in a process called B cell maturation. B cells make antibodies. Like many immune cells, B cells have an early “naive” stage before they are ready to make antibodies. B cells start to mature once they get the signal that a pathogen, such as a virus, is trying to attack. B cells see pieces of that pathogen’s molecular structure and start producing antibodies that can bind to that structure and halt infection.

It can take a little while for B cells to find the right “bullseye” on a pathogen. But B cells keep trying. As they mature, B cells tweak their antibody production, refining antibody structures to bind to a pathogen in just the right, vulnerable spots.

Scientists describe B cell development as a training process or bootcamp. In most cases, the body is left with a well-honed B cell army.

HIV is hard to beat because it doesn’t give B cells a chance to develop effective antibodies. The first problem is that HIV disguises itself from the immune system. The virus is wrapped in an ever-shifting cloak of sugar molecules, called glycans. This lets HIV sneak undetected past human cells, which are also covered in glycans.

Ditching Gas Stoves as Good as Using Drugs for Asthmatics

cooking prep

Having asthma is tough as you may too often feel short of breath, and the solution to many asthma symptoms are prescription drugs. The drugs generally help the body open airways and allow the asthmatic person to breathe normally agin.
It’s been proven that air pollutants increase the stress put on asthmatic individuals and lead to increase asthma rates in the population at large. It’s also known that gas stoves produce a ton of indoor pollution. Put those two things together and now you get a good question: if gas stoves are removed from homes with people with asthma then will their condition improve? The answer is yes!

Indeed, if you get rid of gas stoves then you could see improvements as good as, or exceeding, certain drugs used to treat asthma.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Each person was assessed for four weeks before the gas cooking replacement, and for four weeks afterwards, including scoring their asthma using an internationally recognised scale of zero to six.

The average asthma score improved from 2.6 to 1.5, on a scale where a change of 0.5 is considered to be clinically significant. This included fewer hospital visits and fewer days off school or work for asthma flare-ups. They also found less wheezing, less use of reliver inhalers and fewer people saying that their asthma had woken them during the night.

Air pollution was measured in 44 of the homes. On average, nitrogen dioxide dropped 70%.

Stay Young By Enjoying Art

Who doesn’t like art? If you find yourself answering “me” to that question then perhaps you should check out different galleries. Recent research has shown that people who regularly engage with art and feel something about it tend to age slower. Even engaging with art all east once a month show a 3% decrease in aging speed. Neat!

Stay young, enjoy art, live life.

“These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level,” said Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author and the head of University College London’s social biobehavioral research group, told The Guardian. “They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise.”

The study was conducted among 3,356 adults between 2010 and 2012, and included survey data and blood tests. Individuals’ rate of aging was assessed according to epigenetic clocks, which are analytic methods that track age-related changes to DNA and can be used to estimate biological age, which may differ from a person’s chronological age.

A Human on a Bicycle: Incredibly Efficient

Graph showing how efficient a human travelling on a bicycle is, more efficient than a horse

With the recent Israeli and American attack on Iran the price of oil has shot up and shows no signs of going back down. This seems like a good time to remind people that a bicycle is the most efficient form of human-powered transportation. Indeed, the graph above is an update to a popular graph showing efficient transportation, but grouped into the animal kingdoms. Save gas, save money, and get fit by riding a bike this summer.

Travel involves two main expenditures of energy: fighting gravity and propelling yourself forward. Most terrestrial animals must expend energy first to stand up, then to take each step forward. (Longer-legged land creatures tend to be more efficient because they get more distance out of each step, which explains why mice are so inefficient.) Flying animals, though, can move forward cheaply by gliding through the air, carried more by currents than by their own power. Swimming animals can similarly glide through water while letting their natural buoyancy minimize the need to fight gravity.

Successful Treatment for Huntington’s Disease

nurses walking in a hallway

Huntington’s disease is a neurological disease that combines dementia and motor neurone issues, making for a very unpleasant experience. Historically, people suffering from Huntington’s disease had low prospects for living their lives as they normally did and a shorter lifespan. A UK team has developed a very interesting solution to treat Huntington’s disease by injecting modified viruses directly into the brain, the really cool thing is that these little viruses then block the ability of Huntington’s disease to spread. It’s a novel and very 21st century approach and good news not only for people who may get Huntington’s but also for related neurological diseases.

It starts with a safe virus that has been altered to contain a specially designed sequence of DNA.

This is infused deep into the brain using real-time MRI scanning to guide a microcatheter to two brain regions – the caudate nucleus and the putamen. This takes 12 to 18 hours of neurosurgery.

The virus then acts like a microscopic postman – delivering the new piece of DNA inside brain cells, where it becomes active.

This turns the neurons into a factory for making the therapy to avert their own death.

The cells produce a small fragment of genetic material (called microRNA) that is designed to intercept and disable the instructions (called messenger RNA) being sent from the cells’ DNA for building mutant huntingtin.

This results in lower levels of mutant huntingtin in the brain.