science article medical research

Editor's Choice: Introducing the JAMA Summit

• Viewpoint Including Pregnant and Lactating Women in Clinical Research: Moving Beyond Legal Liability Margaret Foster Riley, JD

Just Published

• Manufacturer Payments to Cardiologists and Use of Devices Sanket S. Dhruva, MD, MHS; et al. Research Letter online first Sanket S. Dhruva, MD, MHS; et al.
• Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability Viktor H. Ahlqvist, PhD; et al. Original Investigation has active quiz Viktor H. Ahlqvist, PhD; et al.
• Single Ascending and Multiple-Dose Trial of Zerlasiran, a Short Interfering RNA Targeting Lipoprotein(a) Steven E. Nissen, MD; et al. Original Investigation online first Steven E. Nissen, MD; et al.
• Cardiac Function Before Sepsis and Clinical Outcomes Stuthi Iyer, MPH; et al. Research Letter online first Stuthi Iyer, MPH; et al.
• Cancer Stage Compared With Mortality as End Points in Randomized Clinical Trials of Cancer Screening Xiaoshuang Feng, PhD; et al. Original Investigation online first free access Xiaoshuang Feng, PhD; et al. Editorial
• Including Pregnant and Lactating Women in Clinical Research Margaret Foster Riley, JD Viewpoint online first free access Margaret Foster Riley, JD
• Trading Places, Becoming One Rafael Campo, MD, MA Editor's Note free access Rafael Campo, MD, MA
• Data Checks Before Registering Study Protocols for Health Care Database Analyses Shirley V. Wang, PhD; et al. Viewpoint online first free access Shirley V. Wang, PhD; et al.
• Late-Stage Cancer End Points to Speed Cancer Screening Clinical Trials—Not So Fast Peter B. Bach, MD, MAPP Editorial online first Peter B. Bach, MD, MAPP
• A Pragmatic Approach to Prostate Cancer Screening Jeffrey J. Tosoian, MD, MPH; et al. Editorial online first free access has multimedia Jeffrey J. Tosoian, MD, MPH; et al.
• Does This Patient Have Alcohol Use Disorder? Evan Wood, MD, PhD; et al. The Rational Clinical Examination has active quiz Evan Wood, MD, PhD; et al.
• Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Caroline H. Siegel, MD, MS; et al. Review online first has active quiz has multimedia Caroline H. Siegel, MD, MS; et al.
• Risk Assessment and Prevention of Falls in Older Community-Dwelling Adults Cathleen S. Colón-Emeric, MD, MHS; et al. Review online first has active quiz has multimedia Cathleen S. Colón-Emeric, MD, MHS; et al.
• Guidelines on Falls Prevention in Older Adults Peggy B. Leung, MD; et al. JAMA Clinical Guidelines Synopsis online first has active quiz has multimedia Peggy B. Leung, MD; et al.
• Review of Common Oral Conditions Eric T. Stoopler, DMD; et al. Review has active quiz has multimedia Eric T. Stoopler, DMD; et al.

Latest from the USPSTF

• USPSTF Recommendation: Primary Care Interventions to Prevent Child Maltreatment
• USPSTF Recommendation: Screening for Speech and Language Delay and Disorders
• USPSTF Recommendation: Screening and Preventive Interventions for Oral Health in Adults
• 40,126 Views Brain Waves Appear to Wash Out Waste During Sleep
• 30,084 Views Provision of Medications for Self-Managed Abortion Before and After the Dobbs Decision
• 28,195 Views Effect of Tirzepatide on Maintenance of Weight Reduction
• 26,987 Views Study Provides Insight Into ME/CFS
• 25,392 Views Industry Payments to US Physicians by Specialty and Product Type
• 24,611 Views Pharmacotherapy and Mortality in Individuals With ADHD
• 24,009 Views Prostate-Specific Antigen Screening and 15-Year Prostate Cancer Mortality
• 22,474 Views International Consensus Criteria for Pediatric Sepsis and Septic Shock
• 22,149 Views Questions Surround Blood Tests That Claim to Screen for Multiple Cancers
• 22,106 Views Stroke Risk After COVID-19 Bivalent Vaccination in US Older Adults
• 717 Citations Antibody Response to 2-Dose SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Series in Solid Organ Transplant Recipients
• 649 Citations Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology Using Mendelian Randomization
• 607 Citations Pancreatic Cancer
• 597 Citations Updated Guidance on the Reporting of Race and Ethnicity in Medical and Science Journals
• 588 Citations USPSTF Recommendation: Screening for Colorectal Cancer
• 511 Citations Effect of 2 Inactivated SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines on Symptomatic COVID-19 Infection in Adults
• 454 Citations The Leading Causes of Death in the US for 2020
• 444 Citations Effect of Intermediate- vs Standard-Dose Anticoagulation on Outcomes of Patients With COVID-19
• 440 Citations Association Between IL-6 Antagonists and Mortality Among Patients Hospitalized for COVID-19
• 408 Citations Association Between 3 Doses of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine and Symptomatic Infection Caused by Omicron and Delta Variants
• Register for email alerts with links to free full-text articles
• Access PDFs of free articles
• Manage your interests
• Save searches and receive search alerts

Subscribe or renew today

Every print subscription comes with full digital access

Science News

Health & medicine.

Teens are using an unregulated form of THC. Here’s what we know

The compound is called delta-8-THC and, like delta-9-THC in marijuana, comes from the cannabis plant and may hurt teens’ brains.

Immune cells’ intense reaction to the coronavirus may lead to pneumonia

A protein found in sweat may protect people from lyme disease, more stories in health & medicine.

Heat waves cause more illness and death in U.S. cities with fewer trees

There are usually fewer trees in neighborhoods with higher populations of people of color. Planting trees could save hundreds of lives every year.

Bird flu has infected a person after spreading to cows. Here’s what to know

H5N1 has wreaked havoc on birds around the globe and occasionally made the jump to mammals, including cows. The risk to people remains low.

A new study has linked microplastics to heart attacks and strokes. Here’s what we know 

Patients with microplastics in their arteries were 4.5 times more likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die within the next three years.

How patient-led research could speed up medical innovation

People with long COVID, ME/CFS and other chronic conditions are taking up science to find symptom relief and inspire new directions for professional scientists.

Here’s what distorted faces can look like to people with prosopometamorphopsia

A patient with an unusual variation of the condition helped researchers visualize the demonic distortions he sees when looking at human faces.

These are the chemicals that give teens pungent body odor

Steroids and high levels of carboxylic acids in teenagers’ body odor give off a mix of pleasant and acrid scents.

Brain fog is a debilitating symptom commonly reported by people with long COVID. Now, scientists have linked the symptom to leaky boundaries in the brain.

Long COVID brain fog may be due to damaged blood vessels in the brain

MRI scans of long COVID patients with brain fog suggest that the blood brain barrier may be leaky.

Don’t use unsterilized tap water to rinse your sinuses. It may carry brain-eating amoebas

Two new studies document rare cases in which people who rinsed sinuses with unsterilized tap got infected with brain-eating amoebas.

The U.S. now has a drug for severe frostbite. How does it work?

Iloprost has been shown to prevent the need to amputate frozen fingers and toes. It’s now approved for use to treat severe frostbite in the U.S.

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

Not a subscriber? Become one now .

Top Science News

Latest top headlines.

• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Brain Tumor
• Intelligence
• Molecular Biology
• Cell Biology
• Mental Health
• Alternative Medicine
• Consumer Electronics
• Oceanography
• Space Telescopes
• Space Exploration
• Space Missions
• Food and Agriculture
• New Species
• Evolutionary Biology
• Dolphins and Whales
• Connecting Lab-Grown Brain Cells
• How We Perceive Bitter Taste
• Friendly Pat On the Back: Free Throws
• A Welcome Hug Is Good for Your Health

Top Physical/Tech

• Next-Generation Digital Displays
• Tiny Plastic Particles Are Found Everywhere
• Unprecedented Behavior from Nearby Magnetar
• How the Moon Turned Itself Inside Out

Top Environment

• 3D Mouth of an Ancient Jawless Fish
• Do Odd Bones Belong to Gigantic Ichthyosaurs?
• Big-Eyed Marine Worm: Secret Language?
• Toothed Whale Echolocation and Jaw Muscles

Health News

Latest health headlines.

• Liver Disease
• Infectious Diseases
• Prostate Cancer
• Men's Health
• Human Biology
• Medical Topics
• Diet and Weight Loss
• Children's Health
• Medical Imaging
• Medical Devices
• Patient Education and Counseling
• Today's Healthcare
• Heart Disease
• Sleep Disorder Research
• Insomnia Research
• Gender Difference
• K-12 Education
• STEM Education
• Computer Modeling
• Mathematical Modeling
• Mathematics
• Breast Cancer
• Diseases and Conditions
• Consumer Behavior
• Racial Issues
• Alzheimer's Research

Health & Medicine

• Hepatitis B and D Virus Cell Entry Inhibitor
• Combating Drug-Resistant Prostate Cancer
• Promising Target for New RNA Therapeutics
• Obese and Overweight Children: Iron Deficiency

Mind & Brain

• AI Makes Retinal Imaging 100 Times Faster
• Chronic Limb Threatening Ischemia
• Sleep, Circadian Rhythms and Metabolism
• Evolving Attitudes of Gen X Toward Evolution

Living Well

• How to Prevent Toxic Answers from AI Chatbots
• AI-Assisted Breast-Cancer Screening
• Helping People Improve Self-Control
• Short-Term Incentives for Exercise Work

Physical/Tech News

Latest physical/tech headlines.

• Spintronics Research
• Spintronics
• Quantum Computers
• Organic Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Wearable Technology
• Extrasolar Planets
• Astrophysics
• Asteroids, Comets and Meteors
• Dark Matter
• Global Warming
• Telecommunications
• Computers and Internet

Matter & Energy

• When Light Makes Materials Magnetic
• Qubits: Evading Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• Assessing the Applicability of Reactions
• Waterproof 'E-Glove' Helps Scuba Divers Talk

Space & Time

• Assessing Liveability of Other Planets
• Neutron Stars and Elusive Dark Matter
• Inexplicable Flying Fox in Hydra Galaxy Cluster
• Climate Change Threatens Antarctic Meteorites

Computers & Math

• Curving Light for Better Wireless Communication
• Resistance-Free Electron Channels
• Understanding Neurons: Spike-Sorting Software
• Can Language Models Read the Genome?

Environment News

Latest environment headlines.

• Biochemistry Research
• Biotechnology
• Developmental Biology
• Endangered Plants
• Ecology Research
• Agriculture and Food
• Marine Biology
• Sustainability
• Environmental Issues
• Air Quality
• Air Pollution
• Energy and the Environment
• Renewable Energy
• Solar Energy
• Energy Technology
• Ancient Civilizations
• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Early Birds
• Bird Flu Research
• Biodiversity
• Geomagnetic Storms

Plants & Animals

• Cellular DNA Repair Mechanism
• Amazon's Orchid Bees and Deforestation
• Algae Shifts With Climate
• Microbial Plastic Factory for Quality Plastic

Earth & Climate

• Novel Spectrometer for Air Pollutant Analysis
• Microplastic 'Hotspots' in Open Waters
• More Efficient Organic Solar Cells
• Device Gathers, Stores Electricity

Fossils & Ruins

• Early Medieval Money Mystery Solved
• Birdfeeders Are for the Birds
• Humans Can Increase Biodiversity
• Tracing the Largest Solar Storm in Modern Times

Society/Education News

Latest society/education headlines.

• Health Policy
• Infant's Health
• Disaster Plan
• Social Issues
• Natural Disasters
• Environmental Policies
• Child Development
• Infant and Preschool Learning
• Language Acquisition
• Child Psychology
• Environmental Awareness
• Social Psychology
• Relationships
• Energy Issues
• Educational Psychology

Science & Society

• Parental Leave Policy and Premature Babies
• Social Media Use During Disasters
• Atmospheric, Economic Drivers of Air Pollution
• Are Lab-Grown Brain Tissues Ethical?

Education & Learning

• Talk to Your Baby: It Matters
• Exercise Habits in Youth, Good Health Later
• Universities Connected to Local Sustainability?
• Early Detection of Language Disorders Key

Business & Industry

• Active Workstations and Cognitive Performance
• Suppressing Boredom at Work Hurts Productivity
• Pairing Crypto Mining With Green Hydrogen
• Feeling Apathetic? There May Be Hope
• Device: Self-Healing Materials, Drug Delivery
• Feeling Insulted? How to Rid Yourself of Anger
• Pregnancy Accelerates Biological Aging
• What's Quieter Than a Fish? A School of Them

Trending Topics

Strange & offbeat, about this site.

ScienceDaily features breaking news about the latest discoveries in science, health, the environment, technology, and more -- from leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.

Visitors can browse more than 500 individual topics, grouped into 12 main sections (listed under the top navigational menu), covering: the medical sciences and health; physical sciences and technology; biological sciences and the environment; and social sciences, business and education. Headlines and summaries of relevant news stories are provided on each topic page.

Stories are posted daily, selected from press materials provided by hundreds of sources from around the world. Links to sources and relevant journal citations (where available) are included at the end of each post.

For more information about ScienceDaily, please consult the links listed at the bottom of each page.

Research articles

Efficacy of a single low dose of esketamine after childbirth for mothers with symptoms of prenatal depression: randomised clinical trial, glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist use and risk of thyroid cancer, use of progestogens and the risk of intracranial meningioma, delirium and incident dementia in hospital patients, derivation and external validation of a simple risk score for predicting severe acute kidney injury after intravenous cisplatin, quality and safety of artificial intelligence generated health information, large language models and the generation of health disinformation, 25 year trends in cancer incidence and mortality among adults in the uk, cervical pessary versus vaginal progesterone in women with a singleton pregnancy, comparison of prior authorization across insurers, diagnostic accuracy of magnetically guided capsule endoscopy with a detachable string for detecting oesophagogastric varices in adults with cirrhosis, ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes, added benefit and revenues of oncology drugs approved by the ema, exposure to air pollution and hospital admission for cardiovascular diseases, short term exposure to low level ambient fine particulate matter and natural cause, cardiovascular, and respiratory morbidity, optimal timing of influenza vaccination in young children, effect of exercise for depression, association of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease with cardiovascular disease and all cause death in patients with type 2 diabetes, duration of cpr and outcomes for adults with in-hospital cardiac arrest, clinical effectiveness of an online physical and mental health rehabilitation programme for post-covid-19 condition, atypia detected during breast screening and subsequent development of cancer, publishers’ and journals’ instructions to authors on use of generative ai in academic and scientific publishing, effectiveness of glp-1 receptor agonists on glycaemic control, body weight, and lipid profile for type 2 diabetes, neurological development in children born moderately or late preterm, invasive breast cancer and breast cancer death after non-screen detected ductal carcinoma in situ, all cause and cause specific mortality in obsessive-compulsive disorder, acute rehabilitation following traumatic anterior shoulder dislocation, perinatal depression and risk of mortality, undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in dsm-5-tr, effect of risk mitigation guidance opioid and stimulant dispensations on mortality and acute care visits, update to living systematic review on sars-cov-2 positivity in offspring and timing of mother-to-child transmission, perinatal depression and its health impact, christmas 2023: common healthcare related instruments subjected to magnetic attraction study, using autoregressive integrated moving average models for time series analysis of observational data, demand for morning after pill following new year holiday, christmas 2023: christmas recipes from the great british bake off, effect of a doctor working during the festive period on population health: experiment using doctor who episodes, christmas 2023: analysis of barbie medical and science career dolls, christmas 2023: effect of chair placement on physicians’ behavior and patients’ satisfaction, management of chronic pain secondary to temporomandibular disorders, christmas 2023: projecting complete redaction of clinical trial protocols, christmas 2023: a drug target for erectile dysfunction to help improve fertility, sexual activity, and wellbeing, christmas 2023: efficacy of cola ingestion for oesophageal food bolus impaction, conservative management versus laparoscopic cholecystectomy in adults with gallstone disease, social media use and health risk behaviours in young people, untreated cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 2 and cervical cancer, air pollution deaths attributable to fossil fuels, implementation of a high sensitivity cardiac troponin i assay and risk of myocardial infarction or death at five years, covid-19 vaccine effectiveness against post-covid-19 condition, association between patient-surgeon gender concordance and mortality after surgery, intravascular imaging guided versus coronary angiography guided percutaneous coronary intervention, treatment of lower urinary tract symptoms in men in primary care using a conservative intervention, autism intervention meta-analysis of early childhood studies, effectiveness of the live zoster vaccine during the 10 years following vaccination, effects of a multimodal intervention in primary care to reduce second line antibiotic prescriptions for urinary tract infections in women, pyrotinib versus placebo in combination with trastuzumab and docetaxel in patients with her2 positive metastatic breast cancer, association of dcis size and margin status with risk of developing breast cancer post-treatment, racial differences in low value care among older patients in the us, pharmaceutical industry payments and delivery of low value cancer drugs, rosuvastatin versus atorvastatin in adults with coronary artery disease, clinical effectiveness of septoplasty versus medical management for nasal airways obstruction, ultrasound guided lavage with corticosteroid injection versus sham lavage with and without corticosteroid injection for calcific tendinopathy of shoulder, early versus delayed antihypertensive treatment in patients with acute ischaemic stroke, mortality risks associated with floods in 761 communities worldwide, interactive effects of ambient fine particulate matter and ozone on daily mortality in 372 cities, association between changes in carbohydrate intake and long term weight changes, future-case control crossover analysis for adjusting bias in case crossover studies, association between recently raised anticholinergic burden and risk of acute cardiovascular events, suboptimal gestational weight gain and neonatal outcomes in low and middle income countries: individual participant data meta-analysis, efficacy and safety of an inactivated virus-particle vaccine for sars-cov-2, effect of invitation letter in language of origin on screening attendance: randomised controlled trial in breastscreen norway, visits by nurse practitioners and physician assistants in the usa, non-erosive gastro-oesophageal reflux disease and oesophageal adenocarcinoma, venous thromboembolism with use of hormonal contraception and nsaids, food additive emulsifiers and risk of cardiovascular disease, balancing risks and benefits of cannabis use, promoting activity, independence, and stability in early dementia and mild cognitive impairment, effect of home cook interventions for salt reduction in china, cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation, effect of a smartphone intervention among university students with unhealthy alcohol use, long term risk of death and readmission after hospital admission with covid-19 among older adults, mortality rates among patients successfully treated for hepatitis c, association between antenatal corticosteroids and risk of serious infection in children, the proportions of term or late preterm births after exposure to early antenatal corticosteroids, and outcomes, safety of ba.4-5 or ba.1 bivalent mrna booster vaccines, comparative effectiveness of booster vaccines among adults aged ≥50 years, third dose vaccine schedules against severe covid-19 during omicron predominance in nordic countries, private equity ownership and impacts on health outcomes, costs, and quality, healthcare disruption due to covid-19 and avoidable hospital admission, educational inequalities in mortality and their mediators among generations across four decades, prevalence and predictors of data and code sharing in the medical and health sciences, medicare eligibility and in-hospital treatment patterns and health outcomes for patients with trauma, therapeutic value of first versus supplemental indications of drugs in us and europe, hospital admissions linked to sars-cov-2 infection in children and adolescents, vitamin d supplementation and major cardiovascular events, menopausal hormone therapy and dementia, associations between modest reductions in kidney function and adverse outcomes in young adults, association between surgeon volume and patient outcomes after elective shoulder replacement surgery, risk prediction of covid-19 related death or hospital admission in adults testing positive for sars-cov-2, effectiveness of grace risk score in patients admitted to hospital with non-st elevation acute coronary syndrome, follow us on, content links.

• Collections
• Health in South Asia
• Women’s, children’s & adolescents’ health
• News and views
• BMJ Opinion
• Rapid responses
• Editorial staff
• BMJ in the USA
• BMJ in South Asia
• Submit your paper
• BMA members
• Subscribers
• Advertisers and sponsors

Explore BMJ

• Our company
• BMJ Careers
• BMJ Learning
• BMJ Masterclasses
• BMJ Journals
• BMJ Student
• Academic edition of The BMJ
• BMJ Best Practice
• The BMJ Awards
• Email alerts
• Activate subscription

Information

• Search by keyword
• Search by citation

Page 1 of 32

Correction: A novel HIF1α-STIL-FOXM1 axis regulates tumor metastasis

The original article was published in Journal of Biomedical Science 2022 29 :24

• View Full Text

Significance of hepatitis B virus capsid dephosphorylation via polymerase

It is generally believed that hepatitis B virus (HBV) core protein (HBc) dephosphorylation (de-P) is important for viral DNA synthesis and virion secretion. HBV polymerase contains four domains for terminal pr...

Association of TRAIL receptor with phosphatase SHP-1 enables repressing T cell receptor signaling and T cell activation through inactivating Lck

T cell receptor (TCR) signaling and T cell activation are tightly regulated by gatekeepers to maintain immune tolerance and avoid autoimmunity. The TRAIL receptor (TRAIL-R) is a TNF-family death receptor that ...

Improving CRISPR–Cas9 directed faithful transgene integration outcomes by reducing unwanted random DNA integration

The field of genome editing has been revolutionized by the development of an easily programmable editing tool, the CRISPR–Cas9. Despite its promise, off-target activity of Cas9 posed a great disadvantage for g...

A matter of new life and cell death: programmed cell death in the mammalian ovary

The mammalian ovary is a unique organ that displays a distinctive feature of cyclic changes throughout the entire reproductive period. The estrous/menstrual cycles are associated with drastic functional and mo...

Engineered extracellular vesicles carrying let-7a-5p for alleviating inflammation in acute lung injury

Acute lung injury (ALI) is a life-threatening respiratory condition characterized by severe inflammation and lung tissue damage, frequently causing rapid respiratory failure and long-term complications. The mi...

The rise of big data: deep sequencing-driven computational methods are transforming the landscape of synthetic antibody design

Synthetic antibodies (Abs) represent a category of artificial proteins capable of closely emulating the functions of natural Abs. Their in vitro production eliminates the need for an immunological response, st...

Tick-borne encephalitis virus transmitted singly and in duo with Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato and Anaplasma phagocytophilum bacteria by ticks as pathogens modifying lipid metabolism in human blood

Ticks are vectors of various pathogens, including tick-borne encephalitis virus causing TBE and bacteria such as Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato and Anaplasma phagocytophilum causing e.g. viral-bacterial co-infec...

Integration of transcription regulation and functional genomic data reveals lncRNA SNHG6’s role in hematopoietic differentiation and leukemia

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are pivotal players in cellular processes, and their unique cell-type specific expression patterns render them attractive biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Yet, the functional ...

Reduced interleukin-18 secretion by human monocytic cells in response to infections with hyper-virulent Streptococcus pyogenes

Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococcus, GAS) causes a variety of diseases ranging from mild superficial infections of the throat and skin to severe invasive infections, such as necrotizing soft tissue infe...

Metabolism-regulating non-coding RNAs in breast cancer: roles, mechanisms and clinical applications

Breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies that pose a serious threat to women's health. Reprogramming of energy metabolism is a major feature of the malignant transformation of breast cancer. Compar...

Genetic and pharmacologic p32-inhibition rescue CHCHD2-linked Parkinson’s disease phenotypes in vivo and in cell models

Mutations in CHCHD2 have been linked to Parkinson’s disease, however, their exact pathophysiologic roles are unclear. The p32 protein has been suggested to interact with CHCHD2, however, the physiological functio...

The role of pregnancy associated plasma protein-A in triple negative breast cancer: a promising target for achieving clinical benefits

Pregnancy associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A) plays an integral role in breast cancer (BC), especially triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). This subtype accounts for the most aggressive BC, possesses high tu...

Translational research on drug development and biomarker discovery for hepatocellular carcinoma

Translational research plays a key role in drug development and biomarker discovery for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, unique challenges exist in this field because of the limited availability of hum...

Germline mutations of homologous recombination genes and clinical outcomes in pancreatic cancer: a multicenter study in Taiwan

Cancer susceptibility germline mutations are associated with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). However, the hereditary status of PDAC and its impact on survival is largely unknown in the Asian population.

Rab37 mediates trafficking and membrane presentation of PD-1 to sustain T cell exhaustion in lung cancer

Programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) is an immune checkpoint receptor expressed on the surface of T cells. High expression of PD-1 leads to T-cell dysfunction in the tumor microenvironment (TME). However, th...

FLT3L-induced virtual memory CD8 T cells engage the immune system against tumors

Previous research in FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 ligands (FLT3L) has primarily focused on their potential to generate dendritic cells (DCs) from bone marrow progenitors, with a limited understanding of how thes...

Promising antibacterial efficacy of arenicin peptides against the emerging opportunistic pathogen Mycobacterium abscessus

Mycobacterium abscessus , a fast-growing non-tuberculous mycobacterium, is an emerging opportunistic pathogen responsible for chronic bronchopulmonary infections in people with respiratory diseases such as cystic ...

Targeting MDM2 in malignancies is a promising strategy for overcoming resistance to anticancer immunotherapy

MDM2 has been established as a biomarker indicating poor prognosis for individuals undergoing immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatment for different malignancies by various pancancer studies. Specifically, ...

Mechanisms and functions of SUMOylation in health and disease: a review focusing on immune cells

SUMOylation, which is a type of post-translational modification that involves covalent conjugation of small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) proteins to target substrates, regulates various important molecular a...

Hesperetin activates CISD2 to attenuate senescence in human keratinocytes from an older person and rejuvenates naturally aged skin in mice

CDGSH iron-sulfur domain-containing protein 2 (CISD2), a pro-longevity gene, mediates healthspan in mammals. CISD2 is down-regulated during aging. Furthermore, a persistently high level of CISD2 promotes longe...

Plectin plays a role in the migration and volume regulation of astrocytes: a potential biomarker of glioblastoma

The expression of aquaporin 4 (AQP4) and intermediate filament (IF) proteins is altered in malignant glioblastoma (GBM), yet the expression of the major IF-based cytolinker, plectin (PLEC), and its contributio...

Modelling the complex nature of the tumor microenvironment: 3D tumor spheroids as an evolving tool

Cancer remains a serious burden in society and while the pace in the development of novel and more effective therapeutics is increasing, testing platforms that faithfully mimic the tumor microenvironment are l...

TEM1/endosialin/CD248 promotes pathologic scarring and TGF-β activity through its receptor stability in dermal fibroblasts

Pathologic scars, including keloids and hypertrophic scars, represent a common form of exaggerated cutaneous scarring that is difficult to prevent or treat effectively. Additionally, the pathobiology of pathol...

Physiology and pharmacological targeting of phase separation

Liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) in biology describes a process by which proteins form membraneless condensates within a cellular compartment when conditions are met, including the concentration and postt...

Inactivation of pentraxin 3 suppresses M2-like macrophage activity and immunosuppression in colon cancer

The tumor microenvironment is characterized by inflammation-like and immunosuppression situations. Although cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) are among the major stromal cell types in various solid cancers,...

Engineered EVs with pathogen proteins: promising vaccine alternatives to LNP-mRNA vaccines

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are tiny, lipid membrane-bound structures that are released by most cells. They play a vital role in facilitating intercellular communication by delivering bioactive cargoes to rec...

Attenuation of neurovirulence of chikungunya virus by a single amino acid mutation in viral E2 envelope protein

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) has reemerged as a major public health concern, causing chikungunya fever with increasing cases and neurological complications.

Scaffold-based 3D cell culture models in cancer research

Three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures have emerged as valuable tools in cancer research, offering significant advantages over traditional two-dimensional (2D) cell culture systems. In 3D cell cultures, cancer c...

Therapeutic antibodies for the prevention and treatment of cancer

The developments of antibodies for cancer therapeutics have made remarkable success in recent years. There are multiple factors contributing to the success of the biological molecule including origin of the an...

Immune evasion in cell-based immunotherapy: unraveling challenges and novel strategies

Cell-based immunotherapies (CBIs), notably exemplified by chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T (CAR-T) cell therapy, have emerged as groundbreaking approaches for cancer therapy. Nevertheless, akin to ...

Exploring the relationship between metabolism and immune microenvironment in osteosarcoma based on metabolic pathways

Metabolic remodeling and changes in tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) in osteosarcoma are important factors affecting prognosis and treatment. However, the relationship between metabolism and TIME needs to ...

The synergism of cytosolic acidosis and reduced NAD + /NADH ratio is responsible for lactic acidosis-induced vascular smooth muscle cell impairment in sepsis

During sepsis, serve vascular dysfunctions lead to life-threatening multiple organ failure, due to vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) impairments, resulting in vasoplegia, hypotension and hypoperfusion. In ad...

Localization, traffic and function of Rab34 in adipocyte lipid and endocrine functions

Excessive lipid accumulation in the adipose tissue in obesity alters the endocrine and energy storage functions of adipocytes. Adipocyte lipid droplets represent key organelles coordinating lipid storage and m...

Nano-modified viruses prime the tumor microenvironment and promote the photodynamic virotherapy in liver cancer

As of 2020, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a form of liver cancer, stood as the third most prominent contributor to global cancer-related mortality. Combining immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) with other the...

A novel mucosal bivalent vaccine of EV-A71/EV-D68 adjuvanted with polysaccharides from Ganoderma lucidum protects mice against EV-A71 and EV-D68 lethal challenge

Human enteroviruses A71 (EV-A71) and D68 (EV-D68) are the suspected causative agents of hand-foot-and-mouth disease, aseptic meningitis, encephalitis, acute flaccid myelitis, and acute flaccid paralysis in chi...

A secreted form of chorismate mutase (Rv1885c) in Mycobacterium bovis BCG contributes to pathogenesis by inhibiting mitochondria-mediated apoptotic cell death of macrophages

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), and its pathogenicity is associated with its ability to evade the host defense system. The secretory form of the chorismate mutase of M. tub...

ARID1A loss activates MAPK signaling via DUSP4 downregulation

ARID1A , a tumor suppressor gene encoding BAF250, a protein participating in chromatin remodeling, is frequently mutated in endometrium-related malignancies, including ovarian or uterine clear cell carcinoma (CCC)...

SCEL regulates switches between pro-survival and apoptosis of the TNF-α/TNFR1/NF-κB/c-FLIP axis to control lung colonization of triple negative breast cancer

Patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (mTNBC) have a higher probability of developing visceral metastasis within 5 years after the initial diagnosis. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the p...

Butterflies in the gut: the interplay between intestinal microbiota and stress

Psychological stress is a global issue that affects at least one-third of the population worldwide and increases the risk of numerous psychiatric disorders. Accumulating evidence suggests that the gut and its ...

Spatiotemporal roles of AMPK in PARP-1- and autophagy-dependent retinal pigment epithelial cell death caused by UVA

Although stimulating autophagy caused by UV has been widely demonstrated in skin cells to exert cell protection, it remains unknown the cellular events in UVA-treated retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells.

The ‘speck’-tacular oversight of the NLRP3-pyroptosis pathway on gastrointestinal inflammatory diseases and tumorigenesis

The NLRP3 inflammasome is an intracellular sensor and an essential component of the innate immune system involved in danger recognition. An important hallmark of inflammasome activation is the formation of a s...

Complete spectrum of adverse events associated with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies have been approved by FDA to treat relapsed or refractory hematological malignancies. However, the adverse effects of CAR-T cell therapies are complex and can b...

Small interfering RNA (siRNA)-based therapeutic applications against viruses: principles, potential, and challenges

RNA has emerged as a revolutionary and important tool in the battle against emerging infectious diseases, with roles extending beyond its applications in vaccines, in which it is used in the response to the CO...

Human ACE2 protein is a molecular switch controlling the mode of SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (hACE2) is the receptor mediating severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. hACE2 expression is low in the lungs and is upregulated after SAR...

Crosstalk between mitochondrial biogenesis and mitophagy to maintain mitochondrial homeostasis

Mitochondrial mass and quality are tightly regulated by two essential and opposing mechanisms, mitochondrial biogenesis (mitobiogenesis) and mitophagy, in response to cellular energy needs and other cellular a...

Extracellular release in the quality control of the mammalian mitochondria

Mammalian cells release a wealth of materials to their surroundings. Emerging data suggest these materials can even be mitochondria with perturbed morphology and aberrant function. These dysfunctional mitochon...

mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics: an in-depth survey of current and upcoming clinical applications

mRNA-based drugs have tremendous potential as clinical treatments, however, a major challenge in realizing this drug class will promise to develop methods for safely delivering the bioactive agents with high e...

Clinical trials of new drugs for Alzheimer disease: a 2020–2023 update

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia, presenting a significant unmet medical need worldwide. The pathogenesis of AD involves various pathophysiological events, including the accumulation o...

Induced pluripotent stem cells: ex vivo models for human diseases due to mitochondrial DNA mutations

Mitochondria are essential organelles for cellular metabolism and physiology in eukaryotic cells. Human mitochondria have their own genome (mtDNA), which is maternally inherited with 37 genes, encoding 13 poly...

• Editorial Board
• Manuscript editing services
• Instructions for Editors
• Sign up for article alerts and news from this journal

Journal of Biomedical Science is supported by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) , Taiwan.

Annual Journal Metrics

2022 Citation Impact 11.0 - 2-year Impact Factor 10.9 - 5-year Impact Factor 2.367 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) 2.520 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

2023 Speed 14 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median) 107 days submission to accept (Median)

2023 Usage  1,698,723 downloads 3,813 Altmetric mentions 

• More about our metrics

Journal of Biomedical Science

ISSN: 1423-0127

• Submission enquiries: Access here and click Contact Us
• General enquiries: [email protected]

• April 10, 2024 | Can a Cup of Tea Keep COVID Away? Study Finds 99.9% Virus Reduction
• April 10, 2024 | Researchers Unveil Ultra-Efficient Tandem Organic Solar Cell With Unprecedented Efficiency
• April 10, 2024 | Startling: Disease-Spreading Blood-Sucking Flies Are Spreading Throughout Germany
• April 10, 2024 | Melting Away History: How Climate Change Is Erasing Our Cosmic Heritage
• April 10, 2024 | NASA’s NEOWISE Unveils Hidden Universe of Near-Earth Objects

Health News

SciTechDaily is your source for the latest health news and medical research articles from leading universities, institutes, and government organizations. We provide you with up-to-date information on a wide range of topics, from groundbreaking research and novel therapies to public health policies and preventive measures.

Our comprehensive coverage encompasses various medical fields, including genetics, neuroscience, mental health, nutrition, and more. By staying informed on the latest medical advancements, we empower you to take control of your health and well-being.

Learn more about the latest research into Antibiotics , Medicine , Cancer , Diet , Stem Cells , Nutrition , Immunobiology , Alzheimer’s , Psychiatry , Metabolism , Pregnancy , and Cardiology . Join us as we explore the future of healthcare and unravel the complexities of the human body.

Health April 10, 2024

Can a Cup of Tea Keep COVID Away? Study Finds 99.9% Virus Reduction

New research from the University of Georgia suggests that something as simple as a cup of tea can help in the fight against COVID-19. Tea…

Startling: Disease-Spreading Blood-Sucking Flies Are Spreading Throughout Germany

Previously Unknown Rogue Immune Key to Chronic Viral Infections Discovered

Unraveling the Rapid Aging Mystery Behind Early-Onset Cancers

Study Reveals Simple Diet Change Could Save 750,000 Lives per Year by 2050

Aspirin Withdrawal Unlocks Safer Recovery for Heart Patients

New Technique Can Quickly Detect Fentanyl and Other Opioids

Unlocking the Mysteries of Bacteria in Cancer Metastasis

Nature’s Betrayal: Unmasking Lead Lurking in Herbal Medicine

Health April 8, 2024

CDC Warns of Cow-to-Human Transmission of H5N1 Bird Flu in Texas

A Texas farm worker contracted H5N1 from dairy cattle, indicating a new route of transmission for the virus, which has a high mortality rate and…

How Do We Age? Breakthrough New Probe Sheds Light

New research helps to understand the aging process better and develop new strategies to reverse the degenerative processes associated with aging. A collaborative effort involving…

Teenage E-Cigarette Use Linked to Frequent Headaches

For children and teens, irregular meals such as skipped breakfasts are linked to an increased risk of frequent headaches, according to a new study recently…

Researchers Discover Possible Solutions To Reverse the Impact of Alzheimer’s Disease

New findings could be useful in treatment to untwist and degrade amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have…

Health April 7, 2024

Tanning’s Hidden Cost: Sun Exposure Can Disrupt Skin’s Microbiome

Researchers have shown that too much sun exposure negatively affects short-term diversity and composition of the skin’s bacterial make-up. Skin, the largest organ of the…

Harvard and MIT Scientists Discover Cholesterol-Busting Microbes in the Gut

Research identifies multiple types of bacteria that metabolize cholesterol in individuals with reduced cholesterol levels. Alterations in the gut microbiome are associated with a range…

Health April 6, 2024

Scientists Discover 17 New Genetic Variants Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease

A recent study utilized whole genome sequencing to accurately identify particular genes and genetic alterations within regions previously linked to Alzheimer’s disease, aiming to guide…

Scientists Discover New Fundamental Biological Mechanism That Could Lead to Novel Cancer Treatments

The lab of Yongchao C. Ma, PhD, at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago discovered a…

Scientists Have Discovered a “Powerhouse” Gene, Opening Doors to New Treatments for Kidney Disease

The gene WWP2 regulates the energy provided to cells that cause renal failure. Drugs can be developed to inhibit this gene to slow kidney damage….

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• J Glob Health
• PMC10401902

Revolutionising health care: Exploring the latest advances in medical sciences

Gehendra mahara.

1 Clinical Research Center, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, Guangdong, China

4 Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, Guangdong, China

Cuihong Tian

2 Center for Precision Health, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

3 Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, Guangdong, China

5 Department of Infection Control, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, Guangzhou, China

Photo: Human heart, anterior view, artificial valve, coronary bypass. Illustration by Patrick J. Lynch. Source: Flickr, free to use under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ ).

Recent years have seen a revolution in the domain of medical science, with ground-breaking discoveries changing health care as we once knew it [ 1 ]. These advances have considerably improved disease diagnosis, treatment, and management, improving patient outcomes and quality of life [ 2 - 5 ]. These innovations range from the creation of novel medications and treatments to the utilization of cutting-edge technologies. For instance, gene editing technologies like Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR-Cas9) have opened up new treatment options for genetic illnesses [ 6 ], while the development of mRNA vaccines has offered a desperately needed response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic [ 7 ]. Moreover, wearable technology and telemedicine have improved accessibility, convenience, and personalization of health care, whereas 3D printing and nanotechnology breakthroughs have made it possible to create individualized implants and drug delivery systems [ 8 - 10 ]. This article examines some of the most recent developments in medical research and how they might completely change health care delivery.

The selection process for identifying the latest advances in medical sciences for this article was as follows. We aimed to showcase ground-breaking developments with the potential to revolutionise health care practices and significantly impact patient outcomes. We extensively searched reputable scientific journals, conferences, and reports from recognized health care organisations and institutes. We included the novelty and significance of the advancements, their ability to address existing health care challenges, the level of scientific evidence supporting their efficacy, and their potential for widespread adoption and implementation. By utilizing this process, we ensured that the selected advancements represent diverse medical fields and have the capacity to drive significant advancements in patient care, diagnostics, treatment modalities, and health care delivery.

REGENERATIVE THERAPY TREATMENT

Regenerative medicine is a rapidly growing field that seeks to restore, replace, or regenerate damaged tissues and organs using a variety of approaches, including cell therapy, tissue engineering, and gene therapy [ 11 ]. This field has the potential to revolutionise the treatment of many diseases and injuries that are currently incurable or difficult to treat. For example, stem cell therapy has been shown to be effective in treating spinal cord injuries [ 12 ], with several studies reporting significant improvements in motor function and sensory perception [ 13 ]. Tissue engineering approaches are being developed to replace damaged or diseased organs using 3D printing, such as the liver, pancreas, and heart [ 11 , 14 ]. Gene therapy is being used to target genetic disorders, such as sickle cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis, with promising results [ 15 ]. The development of regenerative medicine has the potential to transform the treatment of many diseases and injuries, providing hope for patients with conditions that are currently considered untreatable [ 16 - 18 ].

DEVELOPMENT OF IMPLANTABLE ARTIFICIAL ORGANS

Various replacement or augmentation devices for organs, such as the eyes, kidneys, heart, muscle, liver, skin, and brain, have been developed due to the creation of implantable artificial organs [ 4 ]. Artificial organs can be developed from a number of substances, such as polymers and biological tissues, and are intended to mimic the shape and functionality of actual organs [ 19 ]. For instance, the Wearable Artificial Kidney (WAK) has promise for enhancing the quality of life for individuals with end-stage of renal illness [ 20 ]. The creation of artificial hearts ( Figure 1 ), such as the Total Artificial Heart (TAH), has the potential to extend the lives of patients awaiting heart transplants [ 21 - 23 ].

Artificial Intelligence, Brain. Image by Gerd Altmann. Source: Pixabay, free to use under Content License ( https://pixabay.com/service/license-summary/ ).

Furthermore, scientists are developing artificial muscles, liver tissue replicas, skin grafts, and brain implants. For instance, a study by Kolesky et al. [ 24 ] reported the successful implantation of a 3D-printed artificial skin graft. Additionally, a study by White [ 25 ] and Weng et al. [ 26 ] revealed the development of a 3D-printed muscle tissue construct [ 26 ]. Although the research into implantable artificial organs is still in its infancy, it has the potential to transform how organ failure is treated and enhance patient outcomes [ 4 ].

ADVANCEMENTS IN NANOTECHNOLOGY IN HEALTH SCIENCE

Another fast-expanding and highly promising area of use for nanotechnology is in the field of medicine. Drugs and other therapeutic substances can be delivered directly to a disease site using nanoparticles because they can target particular cells or tissues in the body [ 27 ]. This technology may improve the efficacy of therapies, lessen their negative effects, and potentially enable the treatment of previously incurable diseases [ 28 ].

Current developments in nanotechnology have demonstrated considerable promise for the medical field. A study by Foglizzo and Marchio [ 10 ] created a multifunctional nano platform that delivered chemotherapeutic medication and an immunomodulatory substance to tumour cells, increasing antitumor activity and minimizing adverse effects. Using nanotechnology, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agent that can specifically target and image pancreatic cancer cells was created [ 29 ]. Moreover, nanotechnology has demonstrated promise in the treatment of diseases like brain tumours that were previously incurable. A study by Chen et al. [ 30 ] created a nano platform that specifically targeted and delivered medications to brain tumour cells, improving survival rates in a mouse model. These recent developments show how nanotechnology has the potential to enhance therapeutic efficacy, lessen adverse effects, and broaden the scope of diseases that can be treated [ 31 , 32 ].

DEVELOPMENT OF CRISPR-Cas9 GENE EDITING TECHNOLOGY

A rapidly developing technique called gene editing could revolutionise medicine by enabling researchers to change cells' genetic makeup. CRISPR-Cas9, a promising method for gene editing, allows for accurate targeting and editing of particular regions of the genome [ 33 ]. Genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia, which were once thought to be incurable, could potentially be cured because of this technique [ 34 , 35 ]. Also, scientists are looking at its therapeutic potential for a number of illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and cancer [ 34 , 36 ].

Yet there are also moral questions raised by using gene editing on people, so it's important to use the technology sensibly and morally. Until the hazards and moral issues surrounding germline editing, which edits the genes that can be passed on to future generations, are better known, a group of scientists called for a moratorium on its clinical usage in 2019 [ 37 ].

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) FOR MEDICAL SCIENCE

Recent years have seen considerable advancements in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the health care industry. In order to find trends and forecast health outcomes, AI systems can evaluate enormous amounts of medical data, including images, test results, and patient records [ 38 ]. This may result in more accurate diagnosis, individualized treatment strategies, and effective patient monitoring.

The promise of AI in health care has been proved by a number of studies. For instance, Esteva et al. [ 39 ], created an AI model with skin cancer detection accuracy on par with dermatologists. Rajkomar et al. [ 40 ] use of machine learning to forecast patient mortality and hospital readmission rates may aid health care professionals in identifying patients who need more care. Moreover, Chung et al. [ 41 ], created an AI algorithm that could anticipate the onset of psychosis in individuals who had clinical high-risk signs.

Predicting the risk of cardiovascular illness using AI has also shown promise. For example, Khera et al. [ 42 ] developed a model using machine learning to identify patients with a high risk of developing heart disease, potentially allowing for early intervention and preventative measures.

Yet, there are also issues with using AI in health care that need to be resolved, such as the requirement for strong data protection and ethical concerns with the use of AI algorithms to clinical decision-making [ 43 ].

CHIMERIC ANTIGEN RECEPTOR (CAR) T-CELL THERAPY TO TREAT CANCER

Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that employs T cells to recognize and target cancer cells, depends heavily on genetically transformed T cells [ 44 ]. Recent studies have demonstrated that CAR T treatment is very effective in treating a range of lymphoma types, including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma [ 45 , 46 ].

Despite the positive outcomes, CAR T therapy has drawbacks, such as a high price and risk for toxicity. In order to increase the effectiveness and safety of CAR T treatment and broaden its use to treat additional cancer types, research is now being done by Ren et al. [ 47 ]. For instance, a recent study by Yang et al. [ 48 ] discovered that multiple myeloma, a kind of blood cancer, that has relapsed or become resistant to treatment, can be effectively treated with CAR T therapy that targets the B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA). Researchers are also investigating combination therapies, which couple CAR T therapy with additional medications, including checkpoint inhibitors, to enhance results [ 49 ].

DEVELOPMENT OF mRNA VACCINE

The development of mRNA vaccines has been a significant milestone in the fight against COVID-19 [ 50 ]. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines have demonstrated remarkable efficacy and safety profiles in preventing COVID-19 infection and its complications [ 7 , 51 , 52 ]. The mRNA technology used in these vaccines has several advantages over traditional vaccine production methods, including faster development and manufacturing times, lower production costs, and greater flexibility in responding to emerging viral variants [ 53 , 54 ].

Clinical trials of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have shown high levels of protection against COVID-19. A study by Polack et al. [ 55 ] found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95% in preventing COVID-19 infection, while a study by Baden et al. [ 56 ] reported a similar efficacy rate of 94.1% for the Moderna vaccine. Additionally, real-world data has confirmed the high effectiveness of mRNA vaccines in preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death caused by COVID-19 [ 57 ].

Another company that has been working on developing mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 is Novavax [ 58 ]. The company's vaccine candidate combines mRNA technology with nanoparticles to enhance the body's immune response [ 59 ]. In clinical trials, the vaccine demonstrated efficacy against both the original strain of COVID-19 and certain variants of the virus [ 60 ].

Companies such as Moderna and BioNTech are now exploring the potential of mRNA vaccines for a wide range of illnesses, including cancer and influenza [ 61 ]. The development of mRNA vaccines also holds promise for creating rapid responses to new and emerging infectious diseases, as the technology allows for quick adaptation to new viral strains [ 7 , 54 , 61 , 62 ].

Overall, the development of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 represents a significant breakthrough in vaccine technology, with potential implications for future disease prevention and treatment [ 53 ].

ADVANCES IN 3D PRINTING FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

The development of complex anatomical models, prostheses, implants, and drug delivery systems has been made possible by advances in 3D printing technology [ 8 ]. 3D printing has enabled the development of custom-made implants, reducing the need for invasive surgeries and improving patient outcomes. The successful implantation of 3D printed titanium-mesh implants for the repair of bone deformities was described in a study by Ma et al. [ 63 ]. Anatomical models that have been 3D printed have been proven to be useful for planning surgeries and advancing medical knowledge. The use of 3D printed models for surgical planning in complicated craniofacial patients was reported in a study by Charbe et al. [ 64 ]. The development of 3D printing technology has the potential to revolutionise the medical industry by enabling more individualized and efficient patient care [ 65 ].

TELEMEDICINE TO PROVIDE REMOTE CARE

Over the past few years, telemedicine – the use of technology to deliver medical treatments remotely – has grown in popularity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 66 ]. Telemedicine allows health care providers to offer virtual consultations, monitor patients remotely, and provide access to medical services in areas with limited health care resources [ 67 ]. Telemedicine was linked to better health care access and outcomes for patients with cardiovascular disease during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 9 ]. Telemedicine also has the potential to lower medical expenses and raise patient satisfaction. High levels of patient satisfaction with teleconsultations for dermatology services were observed in a study by Nicholson et al. [ 68 ]. Telemedicine use is anticipated to increase over the next few years, which might have a significant impact on how health care is delivered in the future [ 9 , 69 ].

VERTUAL REALITY IN MEDICAL TRAINING

Medical students can practice and hone their skills in a safe and controlled environment with the help of virtual reality (VR), which has grown in popularity in recent years [ 70 ]. Students can practice medical procedures and scenarios using VR technology, which helps them become more adept at diagnosing and treating patients [ 71 ]. According to a recent study by Yiasemidou et al. [ 72 ], medical students' performance and confidence improved when VR was used for surgical instruction. Moreover, using VR technology can replace animal or cadaveric models in training for less common medical operations. The effective use of VR technology in training for transesophageal echocardiography was described in a study by Arango et al. [ 73 ]. The use of VR in medical education has the potential to raise the standard of medical instruction and increase patient safety [ 74 ].

DEVELOPMENT OF WEARABLE DEVICES FOR HEALTH MONITORING

The development of wearable health monitoring technology has completely revolutionised how people track and manage their health [ 75 ]. Individuals can receive real-time feedback on their health state by using wearable devices, such as fitness trackers and smartwatches, which can gather data on physical activity, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, sleep habits, and other health markers [ 76 ]. These devices capture data that can be analysed to find trends and patterns that can provide important information about a person's general health and well-being [ 77 , 78 ]. According to research by Patel et al. [ 79 ], adult users of wearable technology had increases in physical activity and weight loss. Moreover, wearable technology can be used to monitor patients with chronic illnesses remotely, enabling health care professionals to monitor patient progress and take appropriate action as needed. According to a study by Gautam et al. [ 80 ], wearable devices are useful for remotely monitoring patients with heart failure [ 80 , 81 ]. By encouraging early disease identification and prevention, wearable health monitoring technology has the potential to enhance health outcomes and save health care costs [ 78 ].

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion, the most recent developments in medical science have the potential to completely revolutionise the way health care is provided and greatly enhance patient outcomes. With the advent of modern technologies like telemedicine, gene editing, and AI, doctors are now able to detect and treat illnesses more precisely and effectively. Moreover, the application of nanotechnology, 3D printing, and regenerative medicine is bringing about ground-breaking treatments for previously incurable diseases. The advances being made in medical science are genuinely astonishing and give hope for a healthier future, even though there are still obstacles to be addressed. In the years to come, we may anticipate even more interesting advances with ongoing innovation and investment.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of Prof Xuerui Tan, from Shantou University Medical College. Additionally, we extend our gratitude to the clinical research center team at the first affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College.

Funding: This work was funded by the Provincial Science and Technology Special Fund of Guangdong, China (2021123071-1).

Authorship contributions: GM and WW conceived the research idea. GM drafted the manuscript. CT and XX, collected information and reviewed the manuscript. WW, acting as the principal investigator, assisted in revising the manuscript. The final version of the manuscript was critically reviewed and approved by all authors.

Disclosure of interest: The authors have completed the ICMJE Disclosure of Interest Form (available upon request from the corresponding author) and disclose no relevant interests.

The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought

P atient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.

After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point – after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat – that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.

For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness. Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived.

Dying seemed like such an important area of research – we all do it, after all – that Borjigin assumed other scientists had already developed a thorough understanding of what happens to the brain in the process of death. But when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit. Among them was Patient One.

At the time Borjigin began her research into Patient One, the scientific understanding of death had reached an impasse. Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies. A handful of those patients even claimed to witness, from above, doctors’ attempts to resuscitate them. According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.

As remarkable as these near-death experiences sounded, they were consistent enough that some scientists began to believe there was truth to them: maybe people really did have minds or souls that existed separately from their living bodies. In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.

Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences. Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased. “We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?” wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world’s leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.

But by 2015, experiments such as Parnia’s had yielded ambiguous results, and the field of near-death studies was not much closer to understanding death than it had been when it was founded four decades earlier. That’s when Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.

“I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” Borjigin told me. “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”

F or all that science has learned about the workings of life, death remains among the most intractable of mysteries. “At times I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure,” the philosopher William James wrote in 1909.

The first time that the question Borjigin began asking in 2015 was posed – about what happens to the brain during death – was a quarter of a millennium earlier. Around 1740, a French military physician reviewed the case of a famous apothecary who, after a “malign fever” and several blood-lettings, fell unconscious and thought he had travelled to the Kingdom of the Blessed . The physician speculated that the apothecary’s experience had been caused by a surge of blood to the brain. But between that early report and the mid-20th century, scientific interest in near-death experiences remained sporadic.

In 1892, the Swiss climber and geologist Albert Heim collected the first systematic accounts of near-death experiences from 30 fellow climbers who had suffered near-fatal falls. In many cases, the climbers underwent a sudden review of their entire past, heard beautiful music, and “fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets”, Heim wrote. “Then consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at the moment of impact.” There were a few more attempts to do research in the early 20th century, but little progress was made in understanding near-death experiences scientifically. Then, in 1975, an American medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life.

In his book, Moody distilled the reports of 150 people who had had intense, life-altering experiences in the moments surrounding a cardiac arrest. Although the reports varied, he found that they often shared one or more common features or themes. The narrative arc of the most detailed of those reports – departing the body and travelling through a long tunnel, having an out-of-body experience, encountering spirits and a being of light, one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, and returning to the body from some outer limit – became so canonical that the art critic Robert Hughes could refer to it years later as “the familiar kitsch of near-death experience”. Moody’s book became an international bestseller.

In 1976, the New York Times reported on the burgeoning scientific interest in “life after death” and the “emerging field of thanatology”. The following year, Moody and several fellow thanatologists founded an organisation that became the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In 1981, they printed the inaugural issue of Vital Signs , a magazine for the general reader that was largely devoted to stories of near-death experiences. The following year they began producing the field’s first peer-reviewed journal, which became the Journal of Near-Death Studies . The field was growing, and taking on the trappings of scientific respectability. Reviewing its rise in 1988, the British Journal of Psychiatry captured the field’s animating spirit: “A grand hope has been expressed that, through NDE research, new insights can be gained into the ageless mystery of human mortality and its ultimate significance, and that, for the first time, empirical perspectives on the nature of death may be achieved.”

But near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine. As researchers, the spiritualists’ aim was to collect as many reports of near-death experience as possible, and to proselytise society about the reality of life after death. Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.

The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individual. Many of them were physicians and psychiatrists who had been deeply affected after hearing the near-death stories of patients they had treated in the ICU. Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.

Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain. (Indeed, many of the states reported by near-death experiencers can apparently be achieved by taking a hero’s dose of ketamine.) Their basic premise was: no functioning brain means no consciousness, and certainly no life after death. Their task, which Borjigin took up in 2015, was to discover what was happening during near-death experiences on a fundamentally physical level.

Slowly, the spiritualists left the field of research for the loftier domains of Christian talk radio, and the parapsychologists and physicalists started bringing near-death studies closer to the scientific mainstream. Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221. Those articles have appeared everywhere from the Canadian Urological Association Journal to the esteemed pages of The Lancet.

Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries. Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium who has done some of the best physicalist work on near-death experiences, hopes we will soon develop a new understanding of the relationship between the internal experience of consciousness and its outward manifestations, for example in coma patients. “We really are in a crucial moment where we have to disentangle consciousness from responsiveness, and maybe question every state that we consider unconscious,” she told me. Parnia, the resuscitation specialist, who studies the physical processes of dying but is also sympathetic to a parapsychological theory of consciousness, has a radically different take on what we are poised to find out. “I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

I f the field of near-death studies is at the threshold of new discoveries about consciousness and death, it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest. Lance Becker has been a leader in resuscitation science for more than 30 years. As a young doctor attempting to revive people through CPR in the mid-1980s, senior physicians would often step in to declare patients dead. “At a certain point, they would just say, ‘OK, that’s enough. Let’s stop. This is unsuccessful. Time of death: 1.37pm,’” he recalled recently. “And that would be the last thing. And one of the things running through my head as a young doctor was, ‘Well, what really happened at 1.37?’”

In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest. (It is different from a heart attack, in which there is a blockage in a heart that’s still pumping.) Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.

For almost all people at all times in history, cardiac arrest was basically the end of the line. That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques , and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.

As more and more people were resuscitated, scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.

It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care. In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time for the field,” Becker told me. “We’re discovering new drugs, we’re discovering new devices, and we’re discovering new things about the brain.”

T he brain – that’s the tricky part. In January 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was surging toward what would become its deadliest week on record, Netflix released a documentary series called Surviving Death . In the first episode, some of near-death studies’ most prominent parapsychologists presented the core of their arguments for why they believe near-death experiences show that consciousness exists independently of the brain. “When the heart stops, within 20 seconds or so, you get flatlining, which means no brain activity,” Bruce Greyson, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and one of the founding members of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, says in the documentary. “And yet,” he goes on to claim, “people have near-death experiences when they’ve been (quote) ‘flatlined’ for longer than that.”

That is a key tenet of the parapsychologists’ arguments: if there is consciousness without brain activity, then consciousness must dwell somewhere beyond the brain. Some of the parapsychologists speculate that it is a “non-local” force that pervades the universe, like electromagnetism. This force is received by the brain, but is not generated by it, the way a television receives a broadcast.

In order for this argument to hold, something else has to be true: near-death experiences have to happen during death, after the brain shuts down. To prove this, parapsychologists point to a number of rare but astounding cases known as “veridical” near-death experiences, in which patients seem to report details from the operating room that they might have known only if they had conscious awareness during the time that they were clinically dead. Dozens of such reports exist. One of the most famous is about a woman who apparently travelled so far outside her body that she was able to spot a shoe on a window ledge in another part of the hospital where she went into cardiac arrest; the shoe was later reportedly found by a nurse.

At the very least, Parnia and his colleagues have written, such phenomena are “inexplicable through current neuroscientific models”. Unfortunately for the parapsychologists, however, none of the reports of post-death awareness holds up to strict scientific scrutiny. “There are many claims of this kind, but in my long decades of research into out-of-body and near-death experiences I never met any convincing evidence that this is true,” Sue Blackmore, a well-known researcher into parapsychology who had her own near-death experience as a young woman in 1970, has written .

The case of the shoe, Blackmore pointed out, relied solely on the report of the nurse who claimed to have found it. That’s far from the standard of proof the scientific community would require to accept a result as radical as that consciousness can travel beyond the body and exist after death. In other cases, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors happened when their brains were shut down, as opposed to in the period before or after they supposedly “flatlined”. “So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,” Charlotte Martial, the University of Liège neuroscientist, told me.

The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?

P erhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.

In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.

“As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.

In those same periods of dying, different parts of Patient One’s brain were suddenly in close communication with each other. The most intense connections started immediately after her oxygen stopped, and lasted for nearly four minutes. There was another burst of connectivity more than five minutes and 20 seconds after she was taken off life support. In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irrevocably deeper into death, something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.

Those glimmers and flashes of something like life contradict the expectations of almost everyone working in the field of resuscitation science and near-death studies. The predominant belief – expressed by Greyson, the psychiatrist and co-founder of the International Association of Near Death Studies, in the Netflix series Surviving Death – was that as soon as oxygen stops going to the brain, neurological activity falls precipitously. Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.

Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life. Of course, Patient One did not recover, so no one can prove that the extraordinary happenings in her dying brain had experiential counterparts. Greyson and one of the other grandees of near-death studies, a Dutch cardiologist named Pim van Lommel, have asserted that Patient One’s brain activity can shed no light on near-death experiences because her heart hadn’t fully flatlined, but that is a self-defeating argument: there is no rigorous empirical evidence that near-death experiences occur in people whose hearts have completely stopped.

At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death. “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.

B orjigin believes that understanding the dying brain is one of the “holy grails” of neuroscience. “The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?” Although most people would take that result for granted, Borjigin thinks that, on a physical level, it actually makes little sense.

Borjigin hopes that understanding the neurophysiology of death can help us to reverse it. She already has brain activity data from dozens of deceased patients that she is waiting to analyse. But because of the paranormal stigma associated with near-death studies, she says, few research agencies want to grant her funding. “Consciousness is almost a dirty word amongst funders,” she added. “Hardcore scientists think research into it should belong to maybe theology, philosophy, but not in hardcore science. Other people ask, ‘What’s the use? The patients are gonna die anyway, so why study that process? There’s nothing you can do about it.’”

Evidence is already emerging that even total brain death may someday be reversible. In 2019, scientists at Yale University harvested the brains of pigs that had been decapitated in a commercial slaughterhouse four hours earlier. Then they perfused the brains for six hours with a special cocktail of drugs and synthetic blood. Astoundingly, some of the cells in the brains began to show metabolic activity again, and some of the synapses even began firing. The pigs’ brain scans didn’t show the widespread electrical activity that we typically associate with sentience or consciousness. But the fact that there was any activity at all suggests the frontiers of life may one day extend much, much farther into the realms of death than most scientists currently imagine.

Other serious avenues of research into near-death experience are ongoing. Martial and her colleagues at the University of Liège are working on many issues relating to near-death experiences. One is whether people with a history of trauma, or with more creative minds, tend to have such experiences at higher rates than the general population. Another is on the evolutionary biology of near-death experiences. Why, evolutionarily speaking, should we have such experiences at all? Martial and her colleagues speculate that it may be a form of the phenomenon known as thanatosis, in which creatures throughout the animal kingdom feign death to escape mortal dangers. Other researchers have proposed that the surge of electrical activity in the moments after cardiac arrest is just the final seizure of a dying brain, or have hypothesised that it’s a last-ditch attempt by the brain to restart itself, like jump-starting the engine on a car.

Meanwhile, in parts of the culture where enthusiasm is reserved not for scientific discovery in this world, but for absolution or benediction in the next, the spiritualists, along with sundry other kooks and grifters, are busily peddling their tales of the afterlife. Forget the proverbial tunnel of light: in America in particular, a pipeline of money has been discovered from death’s door, through Christian media, to the New York Times bestseller list and thence to the fawning, gullible armchairs of the nation’s daytime talk shows. First stop, paradise; next stop, Dr Oz.

But there is something that binds many of these people – the physicalists, the parapsychologists, the spiritualists – together. It is the hope that by transcending the current limits of science and of our bodies, we will achieve not a deeper understanding of death, but a longer and more profound experience of life. That, perhaps, is the real attraction of the near-death experience: it shows us what is possible not in the next world, but in this one.

• The long read
• Death and dying
• Consciousness
• Neuroscience

Most viewed

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts

Medical research articles within Scientific Reports

Editorial 10 April 2024 | Open Access

Current and future directions for research on hallucinations and delusions

Hallucinations and delusions can be symptoms of psychiatric illness, but more often—though less commonly known—are actually part of a healthy range of experiences found throughout the general population. The studies in this Special Collection paint a picture of the wide range of hallucinatory and delusional experiences across diverse populations, as well as comparative perspectives between clinical and non-clinical samples. In this editorial, I make three related points that are exemplified in the articles published here. First, that hallucinations and delusions are part of a normal distribution of human diversity; their mere presence does not indicate psychosis or psychiatric illness. Second, that the ubiquity of hallucinatory and delusional experiences across clinical and non-clinical populations suggests common cognitive and neural mechanisms. Finally, despite these commonalities, it is important to understand the difference between psychiatric symptoms and healthy experience. In summary, I conclude that it is important to investigate both common mechanisms and distinguishing factors to comprehensively elucidate these oft-misunderstood experiences. This Special Collection provides a showcase of the cutting-edge research that encompasses these objectives.

• Reshanne R. Reeder

Article 10 April 2024 | Open Access

Numerical subgrid Bi-cubic methods of partial differential equations in image segmentation

• Dongyung Kim

Reduction in limb-movement complexity at term-equivalent age is associated with motor developmental delay in very-preterm or very-low-birth-weight infants

• Myung Woo Park
• , Hyung-Ik Shin
•  &  Woo Hyung Lee

Effect of a novel mesh design and the sandblasting technique on the bond strength of computer-designed and three-dimension laser printed resin bonded bridges: an in vitro study

• Mariam Diab
• , Mawia Karkoutly
•  &  Jihad Abou Nassar

Ablation of Wnt signaling in bone marrow stromal cells overcomes microenvironment-mediated drug resistance in acute myeloid leukemia

• Hamenth Kumar Palani
• , Saravanan Ganesan
•  &  Vikram Mathews

Incidence of coronary heart disease among remote workers: a nationwide web-based cohort study

• Masayoshi Zaitsu
• , Tomohiro Ishimaru
•  &  Yoshihisa Fujino

Fetal and neonatal outcomes of posterior fossa anomalies: a retrospective cohort study

• Hanan Alsehli
• , Saeed Mastour Alshahrani
•  &  Duaa Baarmah

Remnant cholesterol and the risk of carotid plaque in hypertension: results from a community-based screening among old adults in Hangzhou, China

• , Haifeng Yang
•  &  Jue Xu

Intranasal administration of ceramide liposome suppresses allergic rhinitis by targeting CD300f in murine models

• , Kumi Izawa
•  &  Jiro Kitaura

Acceptability of COVID-19 booster vaccine in malaysia: a cross-sectional study

• Cheryl Minn Jee Khoo
• , Eve Zhi Qing Dea
•  &  Athirah Bakhtiar

Radiographic outcomes and non-union factor analysis in fragmentary segmental femoral shaft fractures (AO/OTA 32C3) treated with reamed antegrade nailing

• Won-Tae Cho
• , Jae Hoon Jang
•  &  Hoon-Sang Sohn

Clinical, socio-demographic, and parental correlates of early autism traits in a community cohort of toddlers

• Oliver Gale-Grant
• , Andrew Chew
•  &  Dafnis Batalle

Determinants associated with low dietary diversity among migrants to Morocco: a cross sectional study

• Firdaous Essayagh
• , Meriem Essayagh
•  &  Touria Essayagh

Article 09 April 2024 | Open Access

Chemical eye injuries: a 10 year retrospective review of acute presentations and clinical outcomes in Auckland, New Zealand

• Natalie E. Allen
• , Alexandra Z. Crawford
•  &  Jay J. Meyer

Associations between corneal curvature and other anterior segment biometrics in young myopic adults

• , Zijing Du
•  &  Yijun Hu

Comparison between accuracy of augmented reality computed tomography-based and portable augmented reality-based navigation systems for cup insertion in total hip arthroplasty

• Masahiro Hasegawa
• , Yohei Naito
•  &  Akihiro Sudo

Mitochondrial targeted catalase improves muscle strength following arteriovenous fistula creation in mice with chronic kidney disease

• Kyoungrae Kim
• , Brian Fazzone
•  &  Salvatore T. Scali

Oral versus intravenous antibiotic treatment of moderate-to-severe community-acquired pneumonia: a propensity score matched study

• Anna G. Kaal
• , Rick Roos
•  &  Cees van Nieuwkoop

Utility of accessible SARS-CoV-2 specific immunoassays in vaccinated adults with a history of advanced HIV infection

• Ludovica Ferrari
• , Alessandra Ruggiero
•  &  Elisabetta Teti

Predicting the complexity and mortality of polytrauma patients with machine learning models

• , Shen Wang
•  &  Wanjun Gu

In vitro activity of antibiotics potentially effective against difficult-to-treat strains of Gram-negative rods: retrospective study

• Gabriela Kroneislová
• , Jan Závora
•  &  Václava Adámková

Metabolomic profiling of cancer-related fatigue involved in cachexia and chemotherapy

• Yuki Okinaka
• , Susumu Kageyama
•  &  Yosky Kataoka

Identification of small molecules affecting the interaction between human hemoglobin and Staphylococcus aureus IsdB hemophore

• Monica Cozzi
• , Mariacristina Failla
•  &  Francesca Spyrakis

A new index for the outcome of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis

• , Yang Danyi
•  &  Chao Cheng

Article 08 April 2024 | Open Access

Analyzing the changing trend of corneal biomechanical properties under different influencing factors in T2DM patients

• , Zhiwu Lin
•  &  Tao Li

Outcomes of epiretinal proliferation embedding technique in the surgery for full-thickness macular hole

• Jaehwan Choi
• , Sang Jin Kim
•  &  Ki Young Son

Malaria risk mapping among children under five in Togo

• Gountante Kombate
• , Issouf Kone
•  &  Marianne A. B. van der Sande

Reliability and validity of handheld structured light scanners and a static stereophotogrammetry system in facial three-dimensional surface imaging

• J. A. M. Schipper
• , B. J. Merema
•  &  J. Kraeima

Evaluation of sensitivity and specificity of Kato-Katz and circulating cathodic antigen in terms of Schistosoma japonicum using latent class analysis

• Mugyeom Moon
• , Hannah W. Wu
•  &  Sangshin Park

Bone mineral density in adults with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita: a retrospective cohort analysis

• , R. Gastaldi
•  &  K. Dieterich

The laboratory parameters-derived CoLab score as an indicator of the host response in ICU COVID-19 patients decreases over time: a prospective cohort study

• Tom Schoenmakers
• , Mathie P. G. Leers
•  &  Andrea Peeters

Unveiling blood donation knowledge, attitude, and practices among 12,606 university students: a cross-sectional study across 16 countries

• Nael Kamel Eltewacy
• , Hossam Tharwat Ali
•  &  Mahmoud A. Ebada

Development and experimental validation of an energy metabolism-related gene signature for diagnosing of osteoporosis

•  &  Qian Wang

Concept-drifts adaptation for machine learning EEG epilepsy seizure prediction

• Edson David Pontes
• , Mauro Pinto
•  &  César Teixeira

A novel vector field analysis for quantitative structure changes after macular epiretinal membrane surgery

• Seok Hyun Bae
• , Sojung Go
•  &  Sang Jun Park

Secular changes in eruption of primary teeth in Chinese infants and young children from three national cross-sectional surveys

• Ya-qin Zhang
• , Xin-nan Zong
•  &  Hui Li

Tubulin alpha-1b chain was identified as a prognosis and immune biomarker in pan-cancer combing with experimental validation in breast cancer

• Yiyang Wang
• , Yongxiang Li
•  &  Chenming Guo

Polysacharide of Agaricus blazei gel mitigates bone necrosis in model of the jaws related to bisphosphonate via Wnt signaling

• Vanessa Costa de Sousa
• , Fátima Regina Nunes Sousa
•  &  Paula Goes

Effect of housing construction material on childhood acute respiratory infection: a hospital based case control study in Bangladesh

• Jhantu Bakchi
• , Rosul Ahmed Rasel
•  &  Mst. Rokshana Rabeya

Curcumin regulates autophagy through SIRT3-SOD2-ROS signaling pathway to improve quadriceps femoris muscle atrophy in KOA rat model

•  &  Mao-Yuan Wang

Article 07 April 2024 | Open Access

Application of PRI-E–a combined learning method in oral and maxillofacial oncology education

•  &  Bing Liu

Clinical effectiveness/child-patient and parent satisfaction of two topical fluoride treatments for caries: a randomised clinical trial

• Ilze Maldupa
• , Nicola Innes
•  &  Sergio E. Uribe

Essential and non-essential element concentrations in human milk samples and the assessment of infants’ exposure

• Agnieszka Bzikowska-Jura
• , Aleksandra Wesołowska
•  &  Piotr Jedziniak

Article 06 April 2024 | Open Access

Risk factors for liver dysfunction and their clinical importance after gastric cancer surgery

• Shutaro Sumiyoshi
• , Takeshi Kubota
•  &  Eigo Otsuji

Investigating cortical activity during cybersickness by fNIRS

• Sang Seok Yeo
• , Seo Yoon Park
•  &  Seong Ho Yun

Impairment of lung volume perception and breathing control in hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome

• Adrien Hakimi
• , Cyrille Bergoin
•  &  Patrick Mucci

Exploring alveolar recruitability using positive end-expiratory pressure in mice overexpressing TGF-β1: a structure–function analysis

• Franziska Roeder
• , Tina Röpke
•  &  Lars Knudsen

Intra-articular injection of miRNA-1 agomir, a novel chemically modified miRNA agonists alleviates osteoarthritis (OA) progression by downregulating Indian hedgehog in rats

• , Yangyang Gao
•  &  Xiaochun Wei

Article 05 April 2024 | Open Access

Expression levels and DNA methylation profiles of the growth gene SHOX in cartilage tissues and chondrocytes

• Atsushi Hattori
• , Atsuhito Seki
•  &  Maki Fukami

Association between changes in habitual stepping activity and cognition in older adults

• Myles W. O’Brien
• , Nick W. Bray
•  &  Said Mekari

Browse broader subjects

• Health sciences

Browse narrower subjects

• Drug development
• Epidemiology
• Experimental models of disease
• Genetics research
• Outcomes research
• Paediatric research
• Preclinical research
• Stem-cell research
• Clinical trial design
• Translational research

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Prestigious cancer research institute has retracted 7 studies amid controversy over errors

Seven studies from researchers at the prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have been retracted over the last two months after a scientist blogger alleged that images used in them had been manipulated or duplicated.

The retractions are the latest development in a monthslong controversy around research at the Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. 

The issue came to light after Sholto David, a microbiologist and volunteer science sleuth based in Wales, published a scathing post on his blog in January, alleging errors and manipulations of images across dozens of papers produced primarily by Dana-Farber researchers . The institute acknowledged errors and subsequently announced that it had requested six studies to be retracted and asked for corrections in 31 more papers. Dana-Farber also said, however, that a review process for errors had been underway before David’s post. 

Now, at least one more study has been retracted than Dana-Farber initially indicated, and David said he has discovered an additional 30 studies from authors affiliated with the institute that he believes contain errors or image manipulations and therefore deserve scrutiny.

The episode has imperiled the reputation of a major cancer research institute and raised questions about one high-profile researcher there, Kenneth Anderson, who is a senior author on six of the seven retracted studies. 

Anderson is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana-Farber. He did not respond to multiple emails or voicemails requesting comment. 

The retractions and new allegations add to a larger, ongoing debate in science about how to protect scientific integrity and reduce the incentives that could lead to misconduct or unintentional mistakes in research. 

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has moved relatively swiftly to seek retractions and corrections. 

“Dana-Farber is deeply committed to a culture of accountability and integrity, and as an academic research and clinical care organization we also prioritize transparency,” Dr. Barrett Rollins, the institute’s integrity research officer, said in a statement. “However, we are bound by federal regulations that apply to all academic medical centers funded by the National Institutes of Health among other federal agencies. Therefore, we cannot share details of internal review processes and will not comment on personnel issues.”

The retracted studies were originally published in two journals: One in the Journal of Immunology and six in Cancer Research. Six of the seven focused on multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that develops in plasma cells. Retraction notices indicate that Anderson agreed to the retractions of the papers he authored.

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and longtime image sleuth, reviewed several of the papers’ retraction statements and scientific images for NBC News and said the errors were serious. 

“The ones I’m looking at all have duplicated elements in the photos, where the photo itself has been manipulated,” she said, adding that these elements were “signs of misconduct.” 

Dr.  John Chute, who directs the division of hematology and cellular therapy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and has contributed to studies about multiple myeloma, said the papers were produced by pioneers in the field, including Anderson. 

“These are people I admire and respect,” he said. “Those were all high-impact papers, meaning they’re highly read and highly cited. By definition, they have had a broad impact on the field.” 

Chute said he did not know the authors personally but had followed their work for a long time.

“Those investigators are some of the leading people in the field of myeloma research and they have paved the way in terms of understanding our biology of the disease,” he said. “The papers they publish lead to all kinds of additional work in that direction. People follow those leads and industry pays attention to that stuff and drug development follows.”

The retractions offer additional evidence for what some science sleuths have been saying for years: The more you look for errors or image manipulation, the more you might find, even at the top levels of science. 

Scientific images in papers are typically used to present evidence of an experiment’s results. Commonly, they show cells or mice; other types of images show key findings like western blots — a laboratory method that identifies proteins — or bands of separated DNA molecules in gels. 

Science sleuths sometimes examine these images for irregular patterns that could indicate errors, duplications or manipulations. Some artificial intelligence companies are training computers to spot these kinds of problems, as well. 

Duplicated images could be a sign of sloppy lab work or data practices. Manipulated images — in which a researcher has modified an image heavily with photo editing tools — could indicate that images have been exaggerated, enhanced or altered in an unethical way that could change how other scientists interpret a study’s findings or scientific meaning. 

Top scientists at big research institutions often run sprawling laboratories with lots of junior scientists. Critics of science research and publishing systems allege that a lack of opportunities for young scientists, limited oversight and pressure to publish splashy papers that can advance careers could incentivize misconduct. 

These critics, along with many science sleuths, allege that errors or sloppiness are too common , that research organizations and authors often ignore concerns when they’re identified, and that the path from complaint to correction is sluggish. 

“When you look at the amount of retractions and poor peer review in research today, the question is, what has happened to the quality standards we used to think existed in research?” said Nick Steneck, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan and an expert on science integrity.

David told NBC News that he had shared some, but not all, of his concerns about additional image issues with Dana-Farber. He added that he had not identified any problems in four of the seven studies that have been retracted. 

“It’s good they’ve picked up stuff that wasn’t in the list,” he said. 

NBC News requested an updated tally of retractions and corrections, but Ellen Berlin, a spokeswoman for Dana-Farber, declined to provide a new list. She said that the numbers could shift and that the institute did not have control over the form, format or timing of corrections. 

“Any tally we give you today might be different tomorrow and will likely be different a week from now or a month from now,” Berlin said. “The point of sharing numbers with the public weeks ago was to make clear to the public that Dana-Farber had taken swift and decisive action with regard to the articles for which a Dana-Farber faculty member was primary author.” 

She added that Dana-Farber was encouraging journals to correct the scientific record as promptly as possible. 

Bik said it was unusual to see a highly regarded U.S. institution have multiple papers retracted. 

“I don’t think I’ve seen many of those,” she said. “In this case, there was a lot of public attention to it and it seems like they’re responding very quickly. It’s unusual, but how it should be.”

Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at [email protected].

There’s a powerful story behind every headline at Ohio State Health & Discovery. As one of the largest academic health centers and health sciences campuses in the nation, we are uniquely positioned with renowned experts covering all aspects of health, wellness, science, research and education. Ohio State Health & Discovery brings this expertise together to deliver today’s most important health news and the deeper story behind the most powerful topics that affect the health of people, animals, society and the world.  Like the science and discovery news you find here? You can support more innovations fueling advances across medicine, science, health and wellness by giving today.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

• The Ohio State University
• College of Dentistry
• College of Medicine
• College of Nursing
• College of Optometry
• College of Pharmacy
• College of Public Health
• College of Veterinary Medicine
• Ohio State Wexner Medical Center
• Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute

Subscribe. The latest from Ohio State Health & Discovery delivered right to your inbox.

Health Talks: Bringing mobile lung cancer screenings to the underserved

On ohio state pulmonologist describes the new mobile lung cancer screening unit that travels the buckeye state to offer screenings to underserved areas..

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Linkedin
• Share via Email
• Share this page

In this video , pulmonologist Michael Wert, MD , of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James), discusses a new mobile lung cancer screening unit that will be traveling throughout Ohio to offer important screenings to those who are most at risk of lung cancer and unlikely to have other access to screenings.

Lung cancer is the No. 1 cancer killer of men and women in the United States. Because symptoms can vary greatly and don’t always appear until the cancer has grown and spread significantly, lung cancer can be particularly difficult to treat. By screening individuals  at high risk for lung cancer, detection and diagnosis can happen earlier when the cancer is most curable.

The goal of the mobile unit is to visit area businesses, local health departments, churches and other underserved locations around Ohio to provide screenings, and potentially catch lung cancer in its early stages for those at high risk.

To qualify for a screening on the mobile unit, a person must be:

• 50-80 years old
• Current smoker with a history of smoking 1 pack per day for 20 years
• Ex-smoker who has quit within the past 15 years

While screening guidelines change often, Dr. Wert says Ohio State is currently using the guidelines most insurance companies and Medicare will approve.

Watch this Health Talks video to learn more about the new mobile lung cancer screening unit and how to find out when the unit will be in your area.

At The James, there is no routine cancer

Our experts develop and deliver the most advanced targeted treatments leading to better outcomes and more hope.

• Cancer Prevention ,
• Cancer Screening ,
• Health Talks ,
• Lung Cancer ,
• Lung Cancer Screening ,
• Ohio State Wexner Medical Center ,
• OSUCCC – James
• Health Talks

Related websites

• Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute

Recent Videos

How to recognize signs of anal cancer, how the HPV vaccine can prevent it, and more

By Syed Husain, MBBS

How gene therapy changed everything for child born with AADC deficiency

Articles on health.

What to know about TIL therapy, a new treatment for skin cancer

By Richard C. Wu, MD, PhD

A new treatment for skin cancer is available at the @OSUCCC_James, and it shows potential to treat other cancers as well.

Which over-the-counter pain medication is best for which situation?

By Jason Holmes, PharmD

The best over-the-counter pain medicine for you depends on your health. An Ohio State pharmacist explains.

Types of headaches and migraine attacks, remedies and tips

By Kevin Weber, MD, MHA

Why toughing out a migraine attack is a bad idea

Get articles and stories about health, wellness, medicine, science and education delivered right to your inbox from the experts at Ohio State.

Required fields

Tell us more about yourself

By clicking "Subscribe" you agree to our Terms of Use . Learn more about how we use your information by reading our Privacy Policy .

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Prestigious Medical Journal Ignored Nazi Atrocities, Historians Find

The New England Journal of Medicine published an article condemning its own record during World War II.

By Alexander Nazaryan

A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis.

The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “ racial science .”

In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949 , four years after World War II ended.

The new article, published in this week’s issue of the journal, is part of a series started last year to address racism and other forms of prejudice in the medical establishment. Another recent article described the journal’s enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and ’40s.

“Learning from our past mistakes can help us going forward,” said the journal’s editor, Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to ensure that we don’t fall into the same sorts of objectionable ideas in the future?”

In the publication’s archives, Dr. Abi-Rached discovered a paper endorsing Nazi medical practices: “Recent changes in German health insurance under the Hitler government,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis , an influential figure in health care, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis’ emphasis on public health , which was infused with dubious ideas about Germans’ innate superiority.

“There is no reference to the slew of persecutory and antisemitic laws that had been passed,” Dr. Abi-Rached and Dr. Brandt wrote. In one passage, Dr. Davis and Ms. Kroeger described how doctors were made to work in Nazi labor camps. Duty there, the authors blithely wrote, was an “opportunity to mingle with all sorts of people in everyday life.”

“Apparently, they considered the discrimination against Jews irrelevant to what they saw as reasonable and progressive change,” Dr. Abi-Rached and Dr. Brandt wrote.

For the most part, however, the two historians were surprised at how little the journal had to say about the Nazis, who murdered some 70,000 disabled people before turning to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews, as well as other groups.

“When we opened the file drawer, there was almost nothing there,” Dr. Brandt said. Instead of discovering articles either condemning or justifying the Nazis’ perversions of medicine, there was instead something more puzzling: an evident indifference that lasted until well after the end of World War II.

The journal acknowledged Hitler in 1933, the year he began implementing his antisemitic policies. Seven months after the advent of the Third Reich, the journal published “The Abuse of the Jewish Physicians,” an article that today would most likely face criticism for lacking moral clarity. It appeared to be largely based on reporting by The New York Times.

“Without providing any details, the notice reported that there was some indication of ‘a bitter and relentless opposition to the Jewish people,’” the new article said.

Other journals saw the threat of Nazism more clearly. Science expressed alarm about the “crass repression” of Jews, which took place not only in medicine but also in law, the arts and other professions.

“The journal, and America, had tunnel vision,” said John Michalczyk , co-director of Jewish Studies at Boston College. American corporations avidly did business with Hitler’s regime. The Nazi dictator, in turn, looked favorably at the slaughter and displacement of Native Americans, and sought to adopt the eugenics efforts that had taken place across the United States throughout the early 20th century.

“Our hands are not clean,” Dr. Michalczyk said.

Dr. Abi-Rached said she and Dr. Brandt wanted to avoid being “anachronistic” and viewing the journal’s silence on Nazism through a contemporary lens. But once she saw that other medical publications had taken a different tack, the journal’s silence took on a fraught new meaning. What was said was dwarfed by what was never spoken.

“We were looking for strategies to understand how racism works,” Dr. Brandt said. It seemed to work, in part, through apathy. Later, many institutions would claim that they would have acted to save more of the Holocaust’s victims had they known the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities.

That excuse rings hollow to experts who point out that there were enough eyewitness reports to merit action.

“Sometimes, silence contributes to these kinds of radical, immoral, catastrophic shifts,” Dr. Brandt said. “That’s implicit in our paper.”

• OU Homepage
• The University of Oklahoma

OU Research Details Adaptation Tactics of Pancreatic Cancer

Tumor cells find ways to thrive in acidic environment

OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA. – Like alien invaders in a sci-fi movie, pancreatic cancer cells quickly adapt to the weapons used against them and find ways to survive, even in the harshest of conditions.

Understanding why is the aim of cancer scientists everywhere. A University of Oklahoma researcher recently advanced the knowledge of pancreatic cancer with a study about how it acclimates to and even thrives in a highly acidic environment. The research is published in the current issue of the journal Nature Cell Biology.

“Very few studies have tried to understand how that acidification contributes to tumor cell viability and what adaptations tumor cells undergo so that they are able to grow and sustain their aggressiveness,” said the study’s lead author, Pankaj Singh, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Oncology Science in the OU College of Medicine.

Cancer is part of a tumor microenvironment – an ecosystem of normal cells, molecules and blood vessels that surround it, each affecting the other in ways both bad and good. In pancreatic cancer, the microenvironment is acidic because tumor cells consume a lot of the body’s glucose and then churn out an overabundance of lactic acid. As a whole, the tumor microenvironment is inhospitable because the cancer has deprived it of oxygen and nutrients due to its out-of-control growth. Yet pancreatic cancer constantly devises new ways to survive.

In his research, Singh discovered a series of steps that occur that allow pancreatic cancer to use the acidic environment to its advantage:

• Cancer-associated fibroblasts, a type of cell in the tumor, secrete a molecule called acetate.
• Pancreatic cancer cells use the acetate for “epigenetic reprogramming,” altering the way that genes work.
• One of those genes, called SAT1, is activated by acetate and essentially gives cancer cells the tools they need to better grow in acidic conditions.

Understanding the mechanisms that help tumor cells to adapt and thrive is the foundation for devising treatments that could stop the process somewhere along the way, Singh said. In this case, it may be possible to target SAT1 with a drug that can decrease the fitness of tumor cells to grow in the acidic microenvironment. Singh is continuing his studies by repurposing a pneumonia drug called pentamidine to test its effectiveness in decreasing pancreatic tumor aggressiveness in mice.

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers – the five-year survival rate is just under 13%, according to the National Cancer Institute – and treatment options are few. Basic science research is crucial for continuing the unravel the devious nature of the cancer.

“This study highlights the fact that pancreatic tumor cells are not acting alone,” Singh said. “They have co-culprits in other cells, which they hijack and reprogram to their own advantage. By understanding these mechanisms, we can perhaps come up with better therapeutic approaches to target cancer.”

About the Project

The Nature Cell Biology paper can be accessed at 10.1038/s41556-024-01372-4. Singh also holds the Jim and Christy Everest Chair in Cancer Research and is Senior Director of Oncology Science for OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center.

About the University of Oklahoma

Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. OU was named the state’s highest-ranking university in  U.S. News & World Report’s  most recent Best Colleges list .  For more information about the university, visit  ou.edu .

More Research News

Genetic testing may provide improved medication therapy safety and efficacy for pediatric cystic fibrosis patients.

Second-year University of Oklahoma pediatric resident Dr. Caroline Thompson has a professional and personal connection to cystic fibrosis patient care for children. A childhood friend had the disease and made a lasting impression on Thompson. Now, Thompson has received the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Medical Resident Research Award for a pilot study evaluating pharmacogenomic-directed therapy for pediatric patients at the Oklahoma Cystic Fibrosis Center Tulsa.

Americans Supportive but Misinformed About Fusion Energy's Promise

Research led by Hank Jenkins-Smith, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Oklahoma, explores American adults’ perceptions of fusion energy. This first-of-its-kind study reveals broad public support from respondents, but their limited knowledge of the technology and frequent misconceptions could pose a challenge to those seeking to develop fusion energy in the U.S.

OU Research Contributes to National Conversation on Neuropsychiatric Side Effects in Children Taking Asthma Drug

A University of Oklahoma study about a “black box warning” for the asthma drug Singulair continues to influence a national conversation about the medication and its reported neuropsychiatric side effects in children and adolescents

More OU News

• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• OU Job Search
• Legal Notices
• Resources and Offices
• OU Report It!