The NYT has a great article today about 61 year old Diana Nyad who is planning on swimming 60 hours straight with no sleep from Cuba to Key West. It’s a trek this record-holder attempted at age 28, but failed. She is trying again 30 plus years later and says she is stronger this time [...]

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Here is an article from Reuters reporting on Aubrey de Grey’s lecture at Britain’s Royal Institution academy of science.

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From Science Daily: A yet unidentified component of coffee interacts with the beverage’s caffeine, which could be a surprising reason why daily coffee intake protects against Alzheimer’s disease. A new Alzheimer’s mouse study by researchers at the University of South Florida found that this interaction boosts blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems [...]

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This is a fantastic article. At a time when Congress is debating a bloated $850 billion health care bill, doctors in India have come up with ways to make heart surgery cheaper, with potentially better recovery rates. According to the piece, like Henry Ford before him, Indian Doctor Devi Shetty has “used high volumes to [...]

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“I could make a mouse that has your liver. That’s incredibly valuable,” said stem cell researcher Stephen A. Duncan (at the Medical College of Wisconsin). That’s an impressive claim, and it’s based on newly released data from his lab that shows the ability to turn human skin cells into liver cells. Read the full story [...]

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From the NYT: “A team at the Broad Institute, a Harvard-M.I.T. collaborative for genomics research, has devised a way of screening for drugs that attack cancer stem cells but leave ordinary cells unharmed. The Broad team, lead by Piyush B. Gupta, screened some 16,000 chemicals, including all known chemotherapeutic agents approved by the F.D.A. The [...]

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Here’s the paper everyone has been buzzing about for the last few days (press release). Monkeys who ate a lower calorie, yet nutritious diet, lived longer than those who ate more. These results were expected, and it will be interesting to see how the monkeys fare over the next decade or so. More news stories [...]

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There are two stories in the headlines today that both look poised to cut health costs. First, is the announcement of a technique to see if someone has cancer just by testing his or her blood. This new research comes out of Stanford University and was published in the Journal Nature Medicine. If researchers can [...]

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The NYT reports today that “A new DNA test for the virus that causes cervical cancer does so much better than current methods that some gynecologists hope it will eventually replace the Pap smear in wealthy countries and cruder tests in poor ones.” The study was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and [...]

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This is a great article by Joe Nocera of the New York Times on the effectiveness of bringing a business mindset to disease research. He interviews Michael J. Fox and Andy Grove on how the best ways to run a foundation.

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A study by Dr. Dean Ornish and his team showed that lifestyle changes including diet, exercise, and stress management techniques made a difference in telomerase levels. “Telomerase repairs and lengthens telomeres, which are DNA-protein complexes at the end of chromosomes that directly affect how quickly cells age. As telomeres become shorter and their structural integrity [...]

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Here’s the story from Wired. “With the help of gene therapy, two people who once were blind now can see.[...] Cideciyan’s study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of three simultaneous trials of gene therapy for Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis, also known as LCA.”

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Finally, a scientific excuse for academics: A Université Laval research team has demonstrated that intellectual work induces a substantial increase in calorie intake. The details of this discovery, which could go some way to explaining the current obesity epidemic, are published in the most recent issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

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From the Associated Press: “Alabama, pushed to second in national obesity rankings by deep-fried Southern favorites, is cracking down on state workers who are too fat. The state has given its 37,527 employees a year to start getting fit — or they’ll pay $25 a month for insurance that otherwise is free.”

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This article says it could happen. I doubt it (for a variety of reasons: technology being one of them), but it’s definitely a wake up call. So, stop surfing the Internet and GO WORK OUT NOW!

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Dr. Dean Ornish, head of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, CA, and his team showed that changing diet and exercise led to changes in what genes were switched on or off. Reuters reports that “the activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and [...]

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Here’s an interesting article in the SF Chronicle about medical tourism. According to the article, ” No official statistics are kept on how many Americans travel overseas for medical care, but one estimate places the number at 150,000 in 2006.” Hip replacement in India, anyone?

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A study by Steven Zeisel, M.D., Ph.D. Nutritionist of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has apparently shown that “Pregnant women who get sufficient levels of the nutrient choline in their diet may have offspring with a higher IQ as a baby, better verbal skills as a child and better memory in old [...]

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