Health Sciences

Before winter had even ended, the warnings came in: 2017 was going to be a bad one for Lyme disease.

In a new book, out this month, a University of Pennsylvania sociology professor addresses the complex subject of the accurate classification and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

A new study led by University of Pennsylvania researchers has found that the oral microbiome is affected by diabetes, causing a shift to increase its pathogenicity.

During the last decade, commercial brain-training programs have risen in popularity, offering people the hope of improving their cognitive abilities through the routine performance of various “brain games” that tap cognitive functions such as memory, attention and cognitive flexibility.

This summer, Stephanie Tran Rojas, an undergraduate nursing student at the University of Pennsylvania, is exploring a new approach to healthy living at a tranquil Tibetan Buddhist retreat in California.

One reason cancer is so difficult to treat is that it avoids detection by the body. Agents of the immune system are constantly checking the surfaces of cells for chemical signals that say they belong, but cancer cells express the same chemical signals as healthy ones. Without a way for the immune system to tell the difference, little stands in the way of cancer taking over.

As interventions for mental illnesses and neurological disorders are becoming increasingly powerful, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, American University and Duke University are calling for new safeguards to guide treatments and protect patients.  

Even in healthy individuals, the skin plays host to a menagerie of bacteria, fungi and viruses. Growing scientific evidence suggests that this lively community, collectively known as the skin microbiome, serves an important role in healing, allergies, inflammatory responses and protection from infection.

The use of topical antibiotics can dramatically alter communities of bacteria that live on the skin, while the use of antiseptics has a much smaller, less durable impact.

Certain pediatric leukemias share a common underlying cause with treatment-related secondary leukemias. Both diseases involve translocations in the KMT2A gene, in which a portion of this gene is swapped out with DNA from a “partner” gene on a separate chromosome.