a healthy diet

A mother and infant in Malawi have the same repertoire of antibodies to  Plasmodium falciparum , the malaria parasite. That suggests that boosting the mother's immune response to malaria, as via vaccination, will result in better protection for the infant. The research is published August 23rd in  Clinical and Vaccine Immunology . A pregnant woman's antibodies pass from her blood across the placenta, into the fetus, thereby providing some protection against infection at birth. "In sub-Saharan Africa, protection against malaria infection is very important," said corresponding author Miriam K. Laufer, MD, MPH, Director, Division of Malaria Research, Institute for Global Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine. Malaria parasites do their damage when they invade the host's red blood cells. Each P. falciparum parasite has a handful of different surface antigens that it expresses on the surfaces of the blood cells that it has invaded. But collectively, ...

The discovery by Ayel Amiel, assistant professor at the University of Vermont in the Department of Medical Laboratory and Radiation Science, that dendritic cells have an internal source of glycogen is novel in that most research has focused on externally located glycogen stores. Credit: Sally McCay A surprising discovery that immune cells possess an internal warehouse of glycogen used to activate immune responses could help to increase immune activity in vaccines or suppress immune reactions in autoimmune disease or hyper-inflammatory conditions. Results of the new study in the journal  Cell Metabolism  show that the immune responses of dendritic cells are fueled by an intracellular storage of sugar as opposed to external sugar, where prior research has focused. The novel finding adds an important missing piece to the puzzle of how early immune responses are powered from a metabolic standpoint, and provides immunologists with a new area of focus in their on...

The taller you are, the more likely you may be to develop blood clots in the veins, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal  Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics. In a study of more than two million Swedish siblings, researchers found that the risk of venous thromboembolism -- a type of blood clot that starts in a vein -- was associated with height, with the lowest risk being in shorter participants. They also found: For men shorter than 5'3," the risk for venous thromboembolism dropped 65 percent when compared to the men 6'2" or taller. For women, shorter than 5'1" who were pregnant for the first time, the risk for venous thromboembolism dropped 69 percent, compared to women that were 6 feet or taller. "Height is not something we can do anything about," said lead researcher Bengt Zöller, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor at Lund University and Malmö University Hospital in Malmö, Sweden. "However, the heigh...

Practicing brief sessions of Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation can significantly improve brain function and energy levels, according to a new study from the University of Waterloo. The study found that practicing just 25 minutes of Hatha yoga or mindfulness meditation per day can boost the brain's executive functions, cognitive abilities linked to goal-directed behavior and the ability to control knee-jerk emotional responses, habitual thinking patterns and actions. "Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation both focus the brain's conscious processing power on a limited number of targets like breathing and posing, and also reduce processing of nonessential information," said Peter Hall, associate professor in the School of Public Health & Health Systems. "These two functions might have some positive carryover effect in the near- term following the session, such that people are able to focusmore easily on what they choose to attend to in everyday life....

Fruit flies' mitochondria (in green) at 10 days (top left), 28 days (top right) and 37 days old (both bottom images). At bottom right, the mitochondria have returned to a more youthful state after UCLA biologists increased the fly's level of a protein called Drp1. Credit: Nature Communications/Anil Rana UCLA biologists have developed an intervention that serves as a cellular time machine -- turning back the clock on a key component of aging. In a study on middle-aged fruit flies, the researchers substantially improved the animals' health while significantly slowing their aging. They believe the technique could eventually lead to a way to delay the onset of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease and other age-related diseases in humans. The approach focuses on mitochondria , the tiny power generators within cells that control the cells' growth and determine when they live and die. Mitochondria often be...

The researchers developed specialized software and combined it with a tablet computer that can measure writing speed, and a pen that can measure pressure on a page. They used the system to measure pen speed and pressure during a simple spiral sketching task in a sample of healthy volunteers and Parkinson's patients with different levels of disease severity. Credit: Courtesy of Dinesh Kumar and Ms. Poonam Zham of the 'Affordable diagnostics' group in RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Researchers in Australia asked volunteers to draw a spiral on a sheet of paper. By analyzing how long it took them to draw the spiral and how hard they pressed on the paper with the pen, the team could not only tell which volunteers had Parkinson's disease, they could also tell how severe it was. Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes shaking, muscle rigidity and difficulty with walking. Many treatment options for Parkinson's are only ef...