Medical Bulletin 23/September/2022

Using the wrong mathematical formula to assess heartbeat rhythms may lead oncologists to inappropriately stop life-saving chemotherapy, according to research findings from UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center scientists.

Standardizing the mathematical formulas for measuring heartbeat rhythms with electrocardiograms, and avoiding one commonly used formula, could reduce this unintended outcome, the researchers reported.

Reference:

Daniel R. Richardson et al,Association of QTc Formula With the Clinical Management of Patients With Cancer,JAMA Oncology, DOI: 10.1001/jamaoncol.2022.4194

Those who have been infected with the virus are at increased risk of developing a range of neurological conditions in the first year after the infection, new research shows. Such complications include strokes, cognitive and memory problems, depression, anxiety and migraine headaches, according to a comprehensive analysis of federal health data.

The researchers examined brain health over a year-long period. Neurological conditions occurred in 7% more people with COVID-19 compared with those who had not been infected with the virus. Extrapolating this percentage based on the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., that translates to roughly 6.6 million people who have suffered brain impairments associated with the virus.

Reference:

Ziyad Al-Aly et al, Long-term Neurologic Outcomes of COVID-19,Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/s41591-022-02001-z

one way of preserving the aged characteristics of neurons is to make them directly from the patient's skin, without an iPSC intermediate. The researchers succeeded in turning skin cells from Parkinson's disease (PD) patients into so-called dopaminergic (DA) neurons, which are the type of neurons progressively lost in PD, by introducing a specific combination of neural-inducing genes into the skin cells.

In contrast to the PD cells generated from iPS cells, this process of generating DA neurons directly from the skin cells preserved the aged genetic, epigenetic, and metabolic characteristics of the donor age. When compared to aged DA neurons from healthy skin donors, neurons from PD patients featured PD-specific cellular defects, which now could be modelled for the first time from sporadic PD patients which lack a known genetic mutation.

Reference:

Janelle Drouin-Ouellet et al,Age-related pathological impairments in directly reprogrammed dopaminergic neurons derived from patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease,Stem Cell Reports, DOI: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2022.08.010