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Published2 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Family Handout/GoFundMeBy Tom Oakley & PA news agency BBC NewsThe parents of a critically ill seven-month-old baby girl are preparing for an appeal after a judge ruled doctors could withdraw life support.Indi Gregory has mitochondrial disease and medics at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre have said they can do no more for her.A High Court judge has ruled Indi’s treatment can be lawfully limited.Her parents Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth, from Ilkeston, Derbyshire, will appeal against the ruling.A Court of Appeal hearing is due to be held in London on Monday, according to campaign group Christian Legal Centre, which has been supporting Indi’s parents.Mitochondrial disease prevents cells in the body producing energy and the NHS says there is no cure for the disease. Image source, Victoria JonesSpecialists have said Indi is dying and bosses at the hospital’s governing trust asked Mr Justice Peel to rule that doctors could lawfully limit treatment provided to her.Barrister Emma Sutton KC, who led Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s legal team, said at the Royal Courts of Justice that Indi had an exceptionally rare and devastating neurometabolic disorder.She said the treatment Indi received caused pain and was futile.Indi’s father Mr Gregory had told Mr Justice Peel his daughter had “proved everyone wrong” and needed “more time”.The judge considered evidence behind closed doors but allowed journalists to attend the hearing and ruled that Indi, her parents and the hospital can be named in reports. He ruled medics treating Indi, and a guardian appointed to represent her interests, could not be named.Follow BBC East Midlands on Facebook, on X, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk.More on this storyJudge rules baby’s life-support treatment can endPublished5 days agoCritically ill baby girl is dying, judge toldPublished9 OctoberDad vows to fight for ‘gravely ill’ daughter’s lifePublished3 OctoberParents of ill baby given time to secure legal helpPublished27 SeptemberJudge to decide on ending baby’s life supportPublished15 SeptemberRelated Internet LinksNottingham University Hospitals NHS TrustHM Courts & Tribunals ServiceThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Researchers have invented an experimental wearable device that generates power from a user’s bending finger and can create and store memories, in a promising step towards health monitoring and other technologies.
The innovation features a single nanomaterial incorporated into a stretchable casing fitted to a person’s finger. The nanomaterial enabled the device to generate power with the user bending their finger.
The super-thin material also allows the device to perform memory tasks, as outlined below.
Multifunctional devices normally require several materials in layers, which involves the time-consuming challenge of stacking nanomaterials with high precision.
The team, led by RMIT University and the University of Melbourne in collaboration with other Australian and international institutions, made the proof-of-concept device with the rust of a low-temperature liquid metal called bismuth, which is safe and well suited for wearable applications.
Senior lead researcher Dr Ali Zavabeti said the invention could be developed to create medical wearables that monitor vital signs — incorporating the researchers’ recent work with a similar material that enabled gas sensing — and memorise personalised data.
“The innovation was used in our experiments to write, erase and re-write images in nanoscale, so it could feasibly be developed to one day encode bank notes, original art or authentication services,” said Zavabeti, an engineer from RMIT and the University of Melbourne.

Published10 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesFertility treatment “add-ons” offered to patients in the UK do not always improve their chances of having a baby, according to a new ratings system from the fertility regulator.It follows concerns clinics are offering unproven treatments costing hundreds or thousands of pounds.Clinics must give clear information on costs and success rates, experts say.Support groups hope the ratings will improve the stressful process of buying private fertility treatment.Add-ons are optional, non-essential treatments that may be offered in addition to proven fertility treatments, such as IVF (in-vitro fertilisation), in private clinics. Support group Fertility Network UK welcomed the new HFEA ratings system, which uses five colours – ranging from green to red – to indicate the amount of evidence an add-on is effective at improving the chances of having a baby.Examples include:pre-implantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) – where a cell is removed from the embryo and tested for chromosomal abnormalities – rated redendometrial scratching – the theory is that this triggers the body to repair the site of the scratch, releasing chemicals and hormones that make the womb lining more receptive to an embryo implanting – rated amberimmunological tests – rated redNone of those listed on the regulator’s website had been rated green, Fertility Network UK pointed out, encouraging patients to look at all the information provided before making decisions.”For defined patient groups, there are particular treatment add-ons that may be potentially beneficial – but we know that for the vast majority of patients, more rounds of proven treatment could be more effective,” Prof Tim Child, who chairs the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) Scientific and Clinical Advances Advisory Committee, said.’Difficult decisions'”These emotionally and financially difficult decisions often centre on whether to try expensive fertility treatment add-ons and are typically made when patients are at their most vulnerable – desperate to try anything if there is a chance it may help them become parents,” head of policy at Fertility Network UK Dr Catherine Hill said. The HFEA said patients should not be left in the dark – and add-ons with no strong evidence of safety or effectiveness should be offered only as part of research.”Clinics must give patients a clear idea of what any treatment add-on will involve, how likely it is to increase their chance of a successful pregnancy and how much it will cost, and link to the HFEA ratings system,” chief executive Peter Thompson said.Sign up for our morning newsletter and get BBC News in your inbox.Related Internet LinksHFEA- UK fertility regulatorTreatment add-ons with limited evidence – HFEAFertility NetworkThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

The explosive rise in tick-borne diseases in many parts of the United States over the last five decades represents a major public health threat that demands innovative solutions, warns a group of Yale scientists. In a review article, they outline why the stakes are so high and describe some potential solutions.
Possible solutions include a new class of vaccines for humans, including vaccines being developed at Yale, and even for the animals that carry the ticks.
The article is published Oct. 18 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The research team was led by Sukanya Narasimhan, associate professor in Yale’s Department of Internal Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Erol Fikrig, Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) and of microbial pathogenesis.
The public health threat, they say, is escalating rapidly. It wasn’t until 1982 that the threat of tick-borne diseases was recognized after a bacterium transmitted by ticks caused an outbreak of arthritis-like symptoms in children in Lyme, Connecticut. And even then, known cases of the disease were extremely rare.
Today an estimated 490,000 people in the United States are infected annually by tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, an increase that researchers say has been fueled by the return of formerly depleted forests and a dramatic increase in populations of tick-hosting white-tailed deer.
The threat has also spread from isolated areas near the New England coastline into the U.S. Midwest and other parts of the country since the cause of Lyme Disease was identified four decades ago. A single tick species — Ixodes scapularis, commonly called the black-legged or deer tick — accounts for 97% of tick-borne diseases in the United States.

Cedars-Sinai Cancer investigators have identified two promising new treatment options for men with recurrent prostate cancer — both of which helped patients live longer without their disease progressing than the current standard treatment. The results of their international Phase III clinical trial were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“If these treatments are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, our results will be practice changing,” said Stephen Freedland, MD, associate director for Training and Education and the Warschaw, Robertson, Law Families Chair in Prostate Cancer at Cedars-Sinai, and lead author of the study. “In the study, both of these new options improved metastasis-free survival while preserving quality of life.”
Cancer of the prostate, a walnut-sized gland that helps make semen, will be diagnosed in 288,300 men in the U.S. in 2023, according to American Cancer Society estimates. For some, treatment may never be needed because they have a slow-growing form of the disease, but those with more aggressive prostate cancer are often first treated with surgery or radiation therapy.
“Unfortunately, in about a third of those patients, the cancer recurs within 10 years,” Freedland said.
Patients with aggressive recurrence are treated with androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), also known as hormone therapy, which reduces the patient’s production of the male sex hormone testosterone. Testosterone helps prostate cancer cells grow and spread, and the hormone therapy effectively reduces the growth-stimulating effects. But Freedland said ADT has two downsides: It doesn’t completely eliminate testosterone, and it can cause many side effects.
“When you go on ADT, the testosterone level in the blood is reduced, but not completely eliminated,” Freedland said. “And the concern is that the testosterone that remains may still be enough to stimulate tumor growth. Also, patients don’t love the idea of being on hormones.”
In this study of 1,068 prostate cancer patients from 244 sites in 17 countries, Freedland and fellow investigators tested two experimental interventions — one to address each of these issues.

At a time when teen suicide was seen as random and unpredictable, Dr. Shaffer, a psychiatrist, led investigations that proved that it was not.Dr. David Shaffer, a psychiatrist who spent decades studying children and teenagers who died by suicide, constructing a framework for screening and laying the groundwork for modern prevention efforts, died on Sunday in Mastic, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 87.His son, Dr. Charlie Shaffer, said the cause was respiratory failure from Alzheimer’s disease. For about six years, as the disease progressed, he had lived on the estate of the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, his former wife and the mother of two of his children.In the 1970s, when Dr. Shaffer was a young doctor, most people saw the suicide of a child or adolescent as a random and unpredictable act. Trained as an epidemiologist, he undertook an investigation known as a “psychological autopsy,” gathering detailed information from adult caregivers of 31 children who had died by suicide.The research yielded surprises. In more than a third of the cases, the suicide had occurred in the midst of what he called a “disciplinary crisis,” as the child awaited consequences. Many of the children were described, not as depressed, but as aggressive or impulsive.And there were clusters of suicides apparently driven by contagion. Dr. Shaffer realized this when he repeatedly spotted the name of one Welsh town in coroners’ reports, a light-bulb moment that he recalled with satisfaction many years later.“He liked the detective work,” Dr. Charlie Shaffer said. “That’s why he loved being an epidemiologist. He loved detective stories.”That investigation, and the others that Dr. Shaffer conducted in the years that followed, have helped identify clinical, neurological and behavioral characteristics linked to suicide.As the head of Columbia University’s vast and influential child psychiatry program, he developed clinical tools that are widely used today, such as the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children, or DISC-IV, an interview that assesses more than 30 common diagnoses.The prevention and screening programs that he championed decades ago are now commonplace. Looking back on his career in 2004, in Focus, the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical review journal, he recalled that, in his youth, society had regarded suicide as “a reasoned choice for those facing harsh circumstances” that “defied prediction and prevention.”The work of epidemiologists and social and cognitive psychologists had proved that mental illness is common. “Once the province of the author, poet, and philosopher, suicide is now squarely in clinical territory,” Dr. Shaffer added.Colleagues recalled him as an insatiable researcher, seeking out the families of young people who had died by suicide and trying to learn everything about them, in hopes of eventually finding ways to interrupt a chain of events that can lead to suicide.“He was fascinated by how people behaved, and why they behaved that way,” said Prudence Fisher, a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan who often accompanied him on these visits.The interviews often lasted four to six hours, she said, and the researchers were frequently the first people the families had spoken to about their child’s death; they “welcomed someone coming in to ask these questions,” Dr. Fisher added.Dr. Daniel Pine, who worked under Dr. Shaffer’s supervision at Columbia for 10 years, said Dr. Shaffer was “really drawn to the tragedy of it all.”“He was this really passionate guy, and tragedy wouldn’t make him necessarily turn away where other people might,” said Dr. Pine, the chief of the emotion and development branch at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They talk about people who run toward the danger — David was that kind of guy.”David Percy Shaffer was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on April 20, 1936, to Joyce and Isaac Shaffer. His father, an immigrant from Lithuania, was a wealthy businessman who oversaw factories for multinational corporations.As a child, David was repelled by South Africa’s apartheid system, and when he left for boarding school in Switzerland as a teenager, he was drawn to left-wing causes, his son said. At one point, he was caught smuggling socialist pamphlets home to distribute to workers in his father’s factory.That rebellion was interrupted by the death of his father in a plane crash when David was 16.He felt at home in London, where he trained at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the Maudsley Hospital. He had an “English eccentricity and values to life,” Ms. Wintour said, hosting a revolving cast of houseguests and gathering large groups for elaborate meals, only to vanish as they sat down because he thought of something else he wanted to serve.“He was supremely eccentric,” Ms. Wintour said. “He didn’t follow the traditional rules of life in any way.”In England, he began working with Dr. Michael Rutter, who pioneered child psychiatry as a specialty. He viewed suicide as an untapped opportunity, an area where “people were not doing science, and he thought they should be and they could be,” his son said.When he relocated to the United States, in the 1970s, American psychiatry was dominated by the psychoanalytic model, in stark contrast to his own data-driven approach. Each new research finding on suicide “reinforced his desire to sort of push back against the psychoanalysts’ grip on psychiatry at the time,” his son said.Mr. Shaffer’s first marriage, to society caterer Serena Millington, ended in divorce in 1983. His marriage to Ms. Wintour ended in divorce in 1999.Dr. Shaffer with his second wife, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, at a party in 1990. They divorced in 1999, but he spent his last years living at her Long Island estate after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesBoth marriages situated him at the edge of high-octane New York glamour not typical of academic psychiatrists. Colleagues recall that he and Ms. Wintour would buy multiple tables at galas supporting mental health causes, and that extra seats were filled with models.He traveled widely and unpredictably. “You know, he took us to Libya for Christmas,” said his daughter, Bee Carrozzini.In addition to her and his son Charlie, both from his marriage to Ms. Wintour, Dr. Shaffer is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Joe and Sam, and seven grandchildren.Dr. Shaffer was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015. In 2017, Ms. Wintour invited him to live full-time on her property in Mastic. “He was never good at arguing with me,” she said.At first, they played dominoes and read together, she said, but “toward the end, it was, you know, holding his hand and eating with him, and feeding him.”He had been living there for more than a year when his daughter was married at the house. Ms. Carrozzini recalled her friends’ wonder at the arrangement: “They turned to me and said, ‘That is the purest form of love, the way that your mom was taking care of your dad.’”If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Researchers have shown how the principles of rogue waves — huge 30-metre waves that arise unexpectedly in the ocean — can be applied on a nano scale, with dozens of applications from medicine to manufacturing.
Long considered to be a myth, rogue waves strike from comparably calm surroundings, smashing oil rigs and ships in their path. Unlike tsunamis, rogue waves form by the chance combination of smaller waves in the ocean, creating an event that is very rare.
There has been a lot of research into rogue waves in recent years but now, for the first time, scientists are showing how this can be applied on a much smaller scale — nanometrically. A nanometre is a million times smaller than the thickness of the page of a book. This is a completely new approach to the behaviour of liquids on a nanometric scale, published as a Letter in Physical Review Fluids.
The holes and bumps caused by rogue waves can be manipulated to spontaneously produce patterns and structures for use in nano-manufacturing (manufacturing on a scale one-billionth of a metre). For example, patterns formed that rupture liquid films can be used to build micro-electronic circuits, which could be used in the production of low-cost components of solar cells. Furthermore, the behaviour of thin liquid layers could help to explain why millions of people worldwide suffer from dry eye. This occurs when the tear film covering the eye ruptures.
Through direct simulations of molecules and new mathematical models, the study led by the University of Warwick’s Mathematics Institute discovered how nanoscopic layers of liquid behave in counterintuitive ways. Whilst a spilt layer of coffee on a table may sit apparently motionless, at the nanoscale the chaotic motion of molecules creates random waves on a liquid’s surface. A rare event occurs when these waves conspire to create a large ‘rogue nanowave’ that bursts through the layer and creates a hole. The new theory explains both how and when this hole is formed, giving new insight into a previously unpredictable effect, by taking their large oceanic cousins as a mathematical blueprint.
The team of researchers is excited about the potential of this research in different industries; the applications are far-reaching.
Professor James Sprittles, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, said: “We were excited to discover that mathematical models originally developed for quantum physics and recently applied to predict rogue ocean waves are crucial for predicting the stability of nanoscopic layers of liquid.
“In future, we hope that the theory can be exploited to enable an array of nano-technologies, where manipulating when and how layers rupture is crucial. There might also be applications in related areas, such as the behaviour of emulsions, e.g. in foods or paints, where the stability of thin liquid films dictates their shelf-life.”

A woman’s fertility normally decreases by her late 30s with reproductive function eventually ceasing at menopause. It is known that a small molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) plays a critical role in this decline, and Buck scientists have revealed how this happens and have identified potential new approaches to enhance reproductive longevity.
“Studying ovarian biology and reproductive aging is not just about trying to increase fertility, but really about the overall health of females,” said Buck President and Chief Executive OfficerEric Verdin, MD, senior author of the study, which is in iScience, published by Cell press. “We want to understand the processes that lead to decreased fertility that are linked to menopause and therefore linked to overall lifespan and healthspan of women. This is a perspective shift that needs to happen.”
“We really made a step forward in understanding the role of NAD in ovarian function and how a female’s reproductive lifespan progresses,” said Rosalba Perrone, PhD, co-first author of the study and a senior research scientist inthe Verdin lab. “What makes this research exciting is demonstrating we can modulate NAD+ to affect fertility.”
NAD+, which is present in all cells throughout the human body, begins to decline with age and maintaining optimal levels is vital for key cellular functions and healthy aging, said Perrone. Recently, it became clear that the same decline was occurring in the ovaries, contributing to the natural winnowing over time of egg numbers combined with reduced egg quality, both of which contribute to decreased fertility in females.
“So we knew that NAD was really important in promoting ovarian function, but what we didn’t know is why it declines in the first place, what is the driver of this decline?” she said.
To uncover the molecular mechanisms regulating ovarian NAD+ loss, first the researchers began by adding another piece of the puzzle: CD38, an enzyme known to be one of the main culprits in degrading NAD+.
What happens during aging, Perrone explained, is that more CD38 is expressed, leading to more degradation of NAD+, which accelerates the aging processes. However, CD38’s role in female reproductive function was not established. “We realized nobody had even looked at where this protein was located in the ovaries, so we really started from scratch,” she said.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and global collaborators have mapped the mosquito’s tree of life, a major step toward understanding important traits, such as how the insects choose their hosts, feed on blood and spread disease. The findings will help researchers make better predictions to model disease transmission and understand what makes some mosquitoes better disease carriers than others.
The research suggests that mosquito evolution over the past 200 million years mirrors the Earth’s history of shifting land masses and changing host organisms, says Dr. Brian Wiegmann, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Entomology at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the mosquito family tree, published in Nature Communications.
“This ongoing project builds a big-data resource that mines the academic literature with published observations of the sources of blood mosquitoes drink, from animals as diverse as fish to humans,” Wiegmann said. “It focuses explicitly on data collection to infer aspects of mosquito biology in a contextualized way. That means linking up the family, or phylogenetic, tree with the narrative of life on Earth: geologic history, climate history and organism history.”
While the researchers pored over the academic literature to capture as much published information about mosquitoes as possible, new genomic sequencing techniques also allowed them to take decades-old mosquitoes — some held in place by pins inside insect collections — and capture a great deal of information on their genetic similarities from just fragments of their genetic blueprints, or genomes.
“A lot of research goes into the important mosquitoes and there’s not much known about the incredible mosquito diversity across the globe,” Wiegmann said. “We now have the tools to sample genetic information more rapidly and very thoroughly. And so the time was right to take a big stab at putting the disease vectors and the well-known mosquitoes into the context they evolved in.”
Piecing the genetic and published information together gave the researchers a few notable findings and these can be evaluated against current patterns and distributions.
Mosquitoes are an ancient group — around 217 million years old — that probably originated in South America before it was South America, on one big land mass called Gondwana that hadn’t yet split apart.

Researchers at Kyushu University have discovered that turning brain immune cells into neurons successfully restores brain function after stroke-like injury in mice. These findings, published on October 10 in PNAS, suggest that replenishing neurons from immune cells could be a promising avenue for treating stroke in humans.
Stroke, and other cerebrovascular diseases, occur when blood flow to the brain is affected, causing damage to neurons. Recovery is often poor, with patients suffering from severe physical disabilities and cognitive problems. Worldwide, it’s one of the most common causes for needing long-term care.
“When we get a cut or break a bone, our skin and bone cells can replicate to heal our body. But the neurons in our brain cannot easily regenerate, so the damage is often permanent,” says Professor Kinichi Nakashima, from Kyushu University’s Graduate School of Medical Sciences. “We therefore need to find new ways to replace lost neurons.”
One possible strategy is to convert other cells in the brain into neurons. Here, the researchers focused on microglia, the main immune cells in the central nervous system. Microglia are tasked with removing damaged or dead cells in the brain, so after a stroke, they move towards the site of injury and replicate quickly.
“Microglia are abundant and exactly in the place we need them, so they are an ideal target for conversion,” says first author, Dr. Takashi Irie from Kyushu University Hospital.
In prior research, the team demonstrated that they could induce microglia to develop into neurons in the brains of healthy mice. Now, Dr. Irie and Professor Nakashima, along with Lecturer Taito Matsuda and Professor Noriko Isobe from Kyushu University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, showed that this strategy of replacing neurons also works in injured brains and contributes to brain recovery.
To conduct the study, the researchers caused a stroke-like injury in mice by temporarily blocking the right middle cerebral artery — a major blood vessel in the brain that is commonly associated with stroke in humans. A week later, the researchers examined the mice and found that they had difficulties in motor function and had a marked loss of neurons in a brain region known as the striatum. This part of the brain is involved in decision making, action planning and motor coordination.