Heart failure often develops after a heart attack because excessive collagen-based scar tissue forms during repair. While collagen is necessary to reinforce scars, disease and chronic inflammation can cause overproduction, which stiffens the heart muscle and impairs its pumping ability.
Could the body’s natural defenses be temporarily strengthened without knowing which virus will emerge?
A patch the size of a Band-Aid, stuck to your forehead, can now do something no traditional sleep study or fitness tracker can: nudge your brain toward a better night’s sleep. William Coon, a sleep scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, has built a wearable device, meant to be used at home, that listens to brain activity and uses neurostimulation and other techniques to manufacture deep, restorative sleep.
Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. Over the last 30 years, studies have shown that a protein called alpha-synuclein abnormally aggregates in people with Parkinson’s disease, becoming toxic to neurons in a region of the brain that controls movement. This leads to tremor, rigidity and slowness of movement.
Two people infected with the same strain of COVID-19 can have vastly different experiences. One might never even sniffle, and the other might end up on a ventilator. But why?
Vaccination is one of the most important tools for preventing infectious diseases and protecting public health. However, immune responses after vaccination vary dramatically from person to person: If you give many people the exact same vaccine, some will experience side effects such as fever and flulike symptoms while others feel fine.