Public Health
Exercise can slow or prevent the development of macular degeneration and may benefit other common causes of vision loss, such as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, new research suggests.
The new study from the School of Medicine found that exercise reduced the harmful overgrowth of blood vessels in the eyes of lab mice by up to 45%. This tangle of blood vessels is a key contributor to macular degeneration and several other eye diseases.
Release date: 30 Jun 2020
Researchers from the University of Houston, in collaboration with others, have designed a “catch and kill” air filter that can trap the virus responsible for COVID-19, killing it instantly.
Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, collaborated with Monzer Hourani, CEO of Medistar, a Houston-based medical real estate development firm, and other researchers to design the filter, which is described in a paper published in Materials Today Physics.
The researchers reported that virus tests at the Galveston National Laboratory found 99.8% of the novel SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was killed in a single pass through a filter made from commercially available nickel foam heated to 200 degrees Centigrade, or about 392 degrees Fahrenheit. It also killed 99.9% of the anthrax spores in testing at the national lab, which is run by the University of Texas Medical Branch.
Release date: 5 July 2020
Source: University of Houston
Asthma symptoms are known to be strongly linked to the body’s internal clock, but this is the first study to look at how individual sleep preferences influence asthma risk in teenagers.
Researchers say the study reinforces the importance of sleep timing for teenagers and opens up a new channel of research in to how sleep affects teenagers’ respiratory health.
Release date: 5 July 2020
Source: ٍEureklalert
Hearing is widely thought to be the last sense to go in the dying process. Now UBC researchers have evidence that some people may still be able to hear while in an unresponsive state at the end of their life.
This research, published recently in Scientific Reports, is the first to investigate hearing in humans when they are close to death.
Release date: 8 July 2020
Source: University of British Columbia
A study of COVID-19 in the quarantined Italian town of Vò, where most of the population was tested, reveals the importance of asymptomatic cases. Read more in Nature.
Release date: 30 Jun 2020
Source: Imperial College London
A new study from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business finds that our mental health and mortality have a strong correlation with the amount of autonomy we have at our job, our workload and job demands, and our cognitive ability to deal with those demands. Read more in Journal of Applied Psychology .
Release date: 19 May 2020
Source: Indiana University
Epidemiological researchers have published research finding every day a city delayed implementing social distancing measures after the appearance of a first case added 2.4 days to the length of the outbreak.
Release date: 1 June 2020
Source: University of Texas at Austin
The virus that causes COVID-19 uses a receptor known as ACE2, found on the surface of certain cells in the human body, to enter its victims. Now, Mount Sinai researchers have found that children have lower levels of ACE2 gene expression than adults, which may explain children’s lower risk of COVID-19 infection and mortality. Gene expression is a measure of how much a gene is transcribed.
Release date: 22 May 2020
Source: Mount Sinai School of Medicine
A large observational study suggests that treatment with the antimalarial drug chloroquine or its analogue hydroxychloroquine (taken with or without the antibiotics azithromycin or clarithromycin) offers no benefit for patients with COVID-19. The study analyzed data from nearly 15,000 patients with COVID-19 receiving a combination of any of the four drug regimens and 81,000 controls.
Release date: 22 May 2020
Source: The Lancet
Women who drink two or three cups of coffee a day have been found to have lower total body and abdominal fat than those who drink less, according to a new study published in The Journal of Nutrition.
Release date: 14 May 2020
Source: Anglia Ruskin University