Researchers have refined a molecule that shows promise for the prevention of Parkinson’s disease.… See more.

Summary: Researchers have refined a molecule that shows promise for the prevention of Parkinson’s disease.

Source: University of Bath

A molecule that shows promise in preventing Parkinson’s disease has been refined by scientists at the University of Bath in the UK, and has the potential to be developed into a drug to treat the deadly neurodegenerative disease.

Professor Jody Mason, who led the research from the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at Bath, said: “A lot of work still needs to happen, but this molecule has the potential to be a pre-cursor to a drug. Today there are only medicines to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s—we hope to develop a drug that can return people to good health even before symptoms develop.”

Physical exercise is great for a mouse’s brain, and for yours. Numerous studies conducted in mice, humans and laboratory glassware have made this clear. Now, a new study shows it’s possible to transfer the brain benefits enjoyed by marathon-running mice to their couch-potato peers.

Stanford School of Medicine researchers have shown that blood from young adult mice that are getting lots of exercise benefits the brains of same-aged, sedentary mice. A single protein in the blood of exercising mice seems largely responsible for that benefit.

The discovery could open the door to treatments that—by taming brain inflammation in people who don’t get much exercise—lower their risk of neurodegenerative disease or slow its progression.

What if the next global health crisis is a mental health pandemic? It is here now.

According to Gallup, anger, stress, worry and sadness have been on the rise globally for the past decade — long before the COVID-19 pandemic — and all reached record highs in 2020.

People die from COVID-19 — they also die from depression and anxiety disorders. The U.S. has seen spikes in deaths from suicide and “deaths of despair.”

Deaths of despair — a new designation made prominent by Princeton economists Anne Case and Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton in their book of the same name — are suicides and deaths caused by fatal behaviors such as drug overdoses and liver failure from chronic alcohol consumption. They have particularly harmed working-class males in the American heartland and increased dramatically since the mid-1990s, from about 65,000 in 1995 to 158,000 in 2018.

Think of deaths of despair as suicide in slow motion.