Nanoparticle eats away plaque that causes heart attacks

Michigan State University and Stanford University scientists have invented a nanoparticle that eats away—from the inside out—portions of plaques that cause heart attacks. 

Atherosclerosis is a cardiac-based disease where plaque builds up inside the body’s arteries, the blood vessels responsible for carrying oxygen-rich blood to the heart and other organs of the body. Plaque is made up of white immune blood cells, known as macrophages, fat, cholesterol, calcium, and other substances found in the blood. As this plaque hardens it narrows the arteries, limiting the flow of oxygen-rich blood around the body. This, in turn, can lead to serious problems, including heart attack, stroke, or even death.

The team states their nanoparticle reduces and stabilizes plaque, providing a potential treatment for atherosclerosis, a leading cause of death in the United States. The study is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Macrophages are a type of white blood cell in our immune system, which engulf and digest cellular debris, foreign substances, microbes, cancer cells, and anything else that does not have the type of proteins specific to healthy body cells.

Once inside the macrophages of arterial plaques, the nanoparticle delivers a drug agent that can stimulate the cell to engulf and eat cellular debris, removing the diseased/dead cells. By reinvigorating the macrophages, plaque size is reduced.

Future clinical trials on the nanoparticle are expected to reduce the risk of most types of heart attacks, with minimal side effects due to the unprecedented selectivity of the nanodrug, according to Smith. His research is focused on intercepting the signaling of the receptors in macrophages and sending a message via small molecules using Nano-immunotherapeutic platforms. Previous studies have acted on the surface of the cells, but this new approach works intracellularly and has been effective in stimulating macrophages.

"We found we could stimulate the macrophages to selectively eat dead and dying cells – these inflammatory cells are precursor cells to atherosclerosis – that are part of the cause of heart attacks," Smith said. "We could deliver a small molecule inside the macrophages to tell them to begin eating again."

This approach also has applications beyond atherosclerosis, he added.

"We were able to marry a groundbreaking finding in atherosclerosis by our collaborators with the state-of-the-art selectivity and delivery capabilities of our advanced nanomaterial platform," explained Smith. "We demonstrated the nanomaterials were able to selectively seek out and deliver a message to the very cells needed. It gives a particular energy to our future work, which will include clinical translation of these nanomaterials using large animal models and human tissue tests. We believe it is better than previous methods."

Smith has filed a provisional patent and will begin marketing it later this year.

Thanks https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nanoparticles-beat-back-atherosclerosis https://phys.org/news/2020-01-nanoparticle-chomps-plaques-heart.html,https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2020/plaque-eating-nanoparticles-may-help-prevent-heart-attacks

Why are people who are poor more likely to have mental health issues?

The health of people with low incomes often suffers because they can’t afford adequate housing, food, or child care. Such living conditions, and the stress they cause, can lead to higher rates of  tobacco and alcohol use and increase the risk of health problems developing or worsening over time.

An overwhelming majority of people with mental and psychosocial disabilities are living in poverty, poor physical health, and are subject to human rights violations.

Mental health issues cannot be considered in isolation from other areas of development, such as education, employment, emergency responses and human rights capacity building.

There is a bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and common mental illnesses—depression and anxiety—and the underlying mechanisms.

A new Science Magazine review examines the literature on natural and controlled economic experiments involving individuals living in poverty.

Research shows that mental illness reduces employment and therefore income, and that psychological interventions generate economic gains. Similarly, negative economic shocks cause mental illness, and antipoverty programs such as cash transfers improve mental health. A crucial step toward the design of effective policies is to better understand the mechanisms underlying these causal effects.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/

https://www.who.int/

Language can also be present in the absence of sound, What happens to the electric waves in our brain

 What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound?

Language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read or when we use words while thinking.

"The very fact that the majority of human communication takes place via waves may not be a casual fact; after all, waves constitute the purest system of communication since they transfer information from one entity to the other without changing the structure or the composition of the two entities. They travel through us and leave us intact, but they allow us to interpret the message borne by their momentary vibrations, provided that we have the key to decode it. It is not at all accidental that the term information is derived from the Latin root forma (shape): To inform is to share a shape.

In his “Philosophical Investigations,” Ludwig Wittgenstein asked: “Is it conceivable that people should never speak an audible language, but should nevertheless talk to themselves inwardly, in the imagination?” "

Electrodes on the brain have been used to translate brainwaves into words spoken by a computer – which could be useful in the future to help people who have lost the ability to speak.

When you speak, your brain sends signals from the motor cortex to the muscles in your jaw, lips and larynx to coordinate their movement and produce a sound.

“The brain translates the thoughts of what you want to say into movements of the vocal tract, and that’s what we’re trying to decode,” says Edward Chang at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He and his colleagues created a two-step process to decode those thoughts using an array of electrodes surgically placed onto the part of the brain that controls movement, and a computer simulation of a vocal tract to reproduce the sounds of speech.

Cecile G. Tamura

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2200683-mind-reading-device-uses-ai-to-turn-brainwaves-into-audible-speech/#ixzz6ZP8kSBlo