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Children who are born with a single functioning copy of the SCN2A gene develop a condition called SCN2A haploinsufficiency, one of the most frequent causes of neurodevelopmental disorders. Patients with the condition have defects in the connections between some brain cells and experience symptoms such as seizures and speaking difficulties. Now, scientists from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and their collaborators elsewhere are assessing whether they can use CRISPR technology to address some of the features of the disease. Details of their preclinical work in mice engineered to carry the form of the mutation found in humans are…

Your body balances acidic and alkaline substances to maintain a stable pH. According to StatPearls, the average pH of the human body is 7.4 on a scale of 0 to 14, ranging from acidic to alkaline.Having a slightly alkaline pH is important to keep your blood oxygenated. Having a pH below 7.35 may be a sign of acid disorders such as metabolic or respiratory acidosis.But what we eat and drink does not always have an effect on the pH of our blood, which our heart, kidneys, and lungs regulate, according to the National Kidney Foundation. Typically, we complain about symptoms…

Researchers at the Salk Institute investigated how Arabidopsis thaliana deals with stress, namely how it recovers from drought.Image credit:KasiqPlants, firmly rooted in the soil, face numerous challenges, whether it is battling pathogens or coping with the pressures of a warming climate and drought. This has sparked significant interest among farmers and researchers in understanding how plants adapt to drought conditions.Natanella Illouz-Eliaz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute, studies how plants recover from stress.Salk InstituteWhile researchers have identified many genes that regulate the drought response, the processes that occur during drought recovery are much less understood.1 This motivated Natanella Illouz-Eliaz,…

Your digestive tract is most active in the morning, making it the best time to drink coffee to poop. Build a healthy coffee habit by limiting coffee to early in the day and limiting added sugar and creamer.Other strategies include eating a high fiber diet, staying hydrated and moving your body. If you’re like me, one of the simple joys of a new morning is sipping a hot mug of coffee. Millions of people around the globe reach for a cup for its rich aroma, taste or jolt of energy it provides. But there’s another benefit we don’t often talk about—its…

Becks Fisher, director of research and policy11Nuffield Trust, London W1G 7LP, UKbecks.fisher{at}nuffieldtrust.org.ukTrends threaten government plans for the NHSProblems with recruitment and retention of general practitioners (GPs) in England are longstanding. Some causes are well understood: unsustainable workloads, increasing demands from patients, insufficient time to do justice to the job, and high administrative burden are cited by GPs as reasons to leave general practice or reduce working hours.1 Poor methods for recording their working patterns mean that full time equivalent hours reported in national data likely underestimate GPs’ true working hours.2A new study (doi:10.1136/bmj-2024-083978) by Pettigrew and colleagues—the first to link…

Credit: ChrisChrisW / iStock / Getty Images Plus Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, have developed an AI model that uses large-scale health records to understand how human health develops over time and predict the risk of over 1,000 diseases developing within the next two decades.  “Our AI model is a proof of concept, showing that it’s possible for AI to learn many of our long-term health patterns and use this information to generate meaningful predictions,” said Ewan Birney,…

Menopause is a natural biological transition, marking the end of a woman’s fertile years, and is not a disease, as confirmed by WHO (World Health Organization) and the NHS (UK’s National Health Services). However, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) classify any claim reated to treating the symptoms of menopause as a disease treatment claim. The bodies state that only MHRS-licensed medicines, such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT), can claim to treat these symptoms.These guidelines have led the ASA to call out several supplement advertisements in recent months, especially since the implementation…

Experts agree that soda can interfere with how certain drugs are absorbed and how they are processed and function in your body. It’s best not to drink soda with some medications like antacids, levothyroxine and azole antifungals.If you want a soda alternative, talk with a health care professional to ensure it doesn’t interact with your medicine. Grabbing a can of soda to help wash down a dose of medication may seem harmless. But experts warn that pairing your medications with soda can actually change how your body absorbs, processes or tolerates the drug. “Soda’s caffeine, carbonation and acidity can interfere with…

Physicists studied the phase transitions that occur while making the pasta dish cacio e pepe.Credit: Karisssa/iStock via GettyMany scientists dream of winning a Nobel Prize, an accolade that brings worldwide recognition, prestige and a place in the pantheon of greatness alongside the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Francis Crick. Then there are the other awards — the Ig Nobel prizes, which were devised to highlight research that makes people laugh, then think.Highlights of this year’s Ig Nobel recipients include a nutrition prize for studying the preferred pizza toppings of rainbow lizards at a seaside resort in Togo1 (their…

Twenty-seven species of bacteria and fungi among the hundreds that live in people’s mouths have been collectively tied to a 3.5 times greater risk of developing pancreatic cancer, the results of a study led by NYU Langone Health and its Perlmutter Cancer Center have shown. The researchers, headed by Yixuan Meng, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, carried out a prospective study, analyzing the genetic makeup of microbes collected from the saliva of 122,000 healthy men and women, and following participants to identify those who went on to develop pancreatic…