The Immune System
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Trial results have shown that a pH-balanced form of vitamin C, sodium ascorbate, effectively treats sepsis, the life-threatening complication from infection that claims 270,000 American lives every year. This treatment may not be far off use in hospitals.
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New research has for the first time shown how inflammation in early childhood can affect brain development, triggering epigenetic changes in brain regions linked to higher cognitive functions, and play a role in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders.
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Organ transplants save lives, but rejection is a key hurdle. Now scientists have demonstrated a potential new way to prime a recipient’s immune system to accept a transplanted organ, by first giving them an infusion of immune cells from the donor.
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Each year, more than 150,000 Americans are diagnosed with bowel cancer, or colorectal cancer, and the disease has a dire survival rate if surgery isn’t successful. Scientists now believe they have found one tiny molecule that could change all that.
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Hospital patients often pick up dangerous, hard to treat infections. An experimental vaccine given on arrival to hospital could protect against a range of drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, by activating a different arm of the immune system.
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Does early childhood exposure to a broad variety of bacteria make one less likely to develop allergies? A new animal study challenges this popular idea, finding diverse microbial exposure when young may have little effect on allergic immune responses.
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Researchers have found that, in older age, immune cells called killer T cells are replaced by less effective versions that struggle to fight viral invaders. The world-first discovery may lead to improved therapies tailored to different age groups.
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Around 1.6 million Americans live with inflammatory bowel disease, dealing with persistent and debilitating relapses. Scientists have identified how a specialized subset of T cells falter in flare-ups, and they may hold they key to long-term recovery.
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Even moderate exposure to nicotine-free vapor from e-cigarettes can literally stop the body's frontline immune cells in their tracks, reducing their ability to fight off foreign invaders, a new study has found.
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Chitin, which provides crucial exoskeletal structure and protection to soft-bodied arthropods such as crustaceans, spiders and insects, may have a surprising role in switching up human metabolism in the gut, helping to fight weight gain and obesity.
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Researchers have discovered that lung-based immune cells can be "trained" to remember a previously encountered pathogen, making them more efficient at clearing out the cellular debris that accumulates during infection and reducing inflammation.
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Multiple sclerosis sufferers can experience long periods of remission, but increasingly damaged nerves make relapses more frequent and severe. Scientists now believe, with a little molecular encouragement, those damaged nerves can heal themselves.
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