Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Sarita A. Mohanty, MD, MPH, MBA (https://www.thescanfoundation.org/about/board-of-directors/sarita-a-mohanty/), serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of The SCAN Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the United States focused on improving the quality of health and life for older adults. Its mission is to advance a coordinated and easily navigated system of high-quality services for older adults that preserve dignity and independence.

The SCAN Foundation was created as an independent charitable organization in April 2008 through a $205 Million one-time contribution from the not-for-profit SCAN Health Plan, a not-for-profit, Medicare Advantage based in Long Beach, California.

Continue reading “Dr Sarita A. Mohanty — The SCAN Foundation — Improving The Quality Of Health & Life For Older Adults” »

How we got to where we are today, and where we go from here. Featuring Dr. Daniel Monti (Director — Marcus Institute of Integrative Health) and leading neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg (DMT: The Spirit Molecule), we get a fresh perspective on the effects of stress. Thanks to a new study from the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, there is now compelling evidence that this breakthrough intervention can help people to alleviate their emotional stress, as well as deeper insight into this exciting topic.

https://stresseddoc.com/

Two groundbreaking studies recently published in the journals Nature and Genome Medicine found genetic signatures that explain ethnic disparities in the severity of prostate cancer, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa.

By genetically analyzing prostate cancer tumors from Australian, Brazilian, and South African donors, the team developed a new prostate cancer taxonomy (classification scheme) and cancer drivers that not only distinguish patients based on their genetic ancestry but also predict which cancers are likely to become life-threatening, a task that is currently difficult.

“Our understanding of prostate cancer has been severely limited by a research focus on Western populations,” said senior author Professor Vanessa Hayes, genomicist and Petre Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health in Australia. “Being of African descent, or from Africa, more than doubles a man’s risk for lethal prostate cancer. While genomics holds a critical key to unraveling contributing genetic and non-genetic factors, data for Africa has till now, been lacking.”

In July, particle physicists in the US completed the Snowmass process—a decadal community planning exercise that forges a vision of scientific priorities and future facilities. Organized by the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, this year’s Snowmass meetings considered a range of plans including neutrino experiments and muon colliders. One new idea that generated buzz was the Cool Copper Collider (or C³ for short). This proposal calls for accelerating particles with conventional, or “normal-conducting,” radio frequency (RF) cavities—as opposed to the superconducting RF cavities used in modern colliders. This “retro” design could potentially achieve 500 GeV collision energies with an 8-km-long linear collider, making it significantly smaller and presumably less expensive than a comparable superconducting design.

The goal of the C³ project would be to operate as a Higgs factory, which—in particle-physics parlance—is a collider that smashes together electrons and their antimatter partners, called positrons, at energies above 250 GeV. Such a facility would make loads of Higgs bosons with less of the mess that comes from smashing protons and antiprotons together—as is done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. A Higgs factory would give more precise measurements than the LHC of the couplings between Higgs bosons and other particles, potentially uncovering small discrepancies that could lead to new theories of particle physics. “I think the Higgs is the most interesting particle that’s out there,” says Emilio Nanni from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. “And we should absolutely build a machine that’s dedicated to studying it with as much precision as possible.”

But an outsider might wonder why another Higgs-factory proposal is being added to the particle-physics menu. A similar factory design—the International Linear Collider (ILC)—has been in the works for years, but that project is presently stalled, as the Japanese government has not yet confirmed its support for building the facility in Japan. Waiting in the wings are several other large particle-physics proposals, including CERN’s Future Circular Collider and China’s Circular Electron Positron Collider.

Summary: Boosting omega-3 fatty acid intake helps to preserve brain health and improve cognition in middle age, a new study reports. For those with the Alzheimer’s associated APOE4 gene, omega-3 fatty acid intake was associated with greater hippocampal volume and less small vessel disease.

Source: UT San Antonio.

Eating cold-water fish and other sources of omega-3 fatty acids may preserve brain health and enhance cognition in middle age, new evidence indicates.

A multidisciplinary team from two Johns Hopkins University institutions, including neurotoxicologists and virologists from the Bloomberg School of Public Health and infectious disease specialists from the school of medicine, has found that organoids (tiny tissue cultures made from human cells that simulate whole organs) known as “mini-brains” can be infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

The results, which suggest that the virus can infect human brain cells, were published online June 26, 2020, in the journal ALTEX: Alternatives to Animal Experimentation.

Early reports from Wuhan, China, the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, have suggested that 36% of patients with the disease show neurological symptoms, but it has been unclear whether or not the virus infects human brain cells. In their study, the Johns Hopkins researchers demonstrated that certain human neurons express a receptor, ACE2, which is the same one that the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses to enter the lungs. Therefore, they surmised, ACE2 also might provide access to the brain.

AI-enabled imaging of the retina’s network of veins and arteries can accurately predict cardiovascular disease and death, without the need for blood tests or blood pressure measurement, finds research published online in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

As such, it paves the way for a highly effective, non-invasive screening test for people at medium to high risk of circulatory disease that doesn’t have to be done in a clinic, suggest the researchers.

Circulatory diseases, including cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, heart failure and stroke, are major causes of ill health and death worldwide, accounting for 1 in 4 UK deaths alone.

Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker (https://nancybrinker.com/) is Founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (https://www.komen.org/) and Co-Founder of the Promise Fund of Florida (https://www.promisefundofflorida.org/).

Amb. Brinker is a three-time Ambassador and New York Times best-selling author who is regarded as the leader of the global breast cancer movement. Her journey began with a promise to her dying sister, Susan G. Komen, that she would do everything possible to end the shame, pain, fear, and hopelessness caused by this disease. In one generation, the organization that bears Susan’s name has changed the world.

Continue reading “Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker — Leading A Global Movement To End Breast Cancer” »

Ground-breaking research at Tel Aviv University successfully eradicated glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer. The researchers achieved the result by developing a strategy based on their finding of two crucial mechanisms in the brain that promote tumor growth and survival: one shields cancer cells from the immune system, while the other provides the energy needed for rapid tumor growth. The research discovered that astrocytes, which are brain cells, regulate both methods, and that when they aren’t there, tumor cells die and are eliminated.

Rita Perelroizen, a Ph.D. student, served as the study’s lead researcher. She collaborated with Professor Eytan Ruppin of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and was supervised by Dr. Lior Mayo of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv. The study was recently published in the journal Brain and was highlighted with scientific commentary.