Pistachios may help improve eye health, new study finds
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 24-Apr-2025 14:08 ET (24-Apr-2025 18:08 GMT/UTC)
After only one to three days of a whiplash injury, scientists can predict which patients will develop chronic pain based on the extent of cross ‘talk’ between two regions of the brain, and the person’s anxiety level after the injury, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study that will be published in Nature Mental Health.
The study showed the more the hippocampus – the brain’s memory center — talked to the cortex – involved in long term memory storage — the more likely the person is to develop chronic pain. In addition, the higher a person’s anxiety immediately after the car accident, the more precisely scientists could predict the chronic pain people reported one year after the accident.
This is the first study to show that only a few days after a given injury, the brain can adapt in a way that imparts a risk for the development of chronic pain.
What keeps some immune systems youthful and effective in warding off age-related diseases? In new research done on mice, USC Stem Cell scientist Rong Lu and her collaborators point the finger at a small subset of blood stem cells, which make an outsized contribution to maintaining either a youthful balance or an age-related imbalance of the two main types of immune cells: innate and adaptive. The researchers found striking differences in how quickly the immune system ages—even among lab mice with the same genetic background raised in identical conditions. By the advanced age of 30 months, delayed aging mice retained a youthful balance of innate and adaptive immune cells. However, early aging mice showed a big increase in innate immune cells relative to adaptive immune cells. By tracking the individual blood stem cells responsible for producing both innate and adaptive immune cells, the scientists discovered the subset of blood stem cells primarily responsible for the age-associated imbalance of the immune system. The researchers also found differences in gene activity between early and delayed aging mice which appeared to affect the balance of innate and adaptive immune cells.