microbiome

See the following -

Babies' Immune Systems May Stand Down To Let Good Microbes Grow

Rob Stein | Shots | November 6, 2013

Here's possible solace for parents who are up at night with a baby who gets sick all the time: There appears to be a good reason why infant immune systems don't fight off germs. Read More »

Does Gum Disease Have a Link to Cancer, Dementia, Stroke?

Suzanne Allard Levingston | The Washington Post | October 1, 2016

Open wide. There’s a host of researchers peering inside your mouth, and you may be surprised at what they hope to find. They’re looking for a connection between gum disease and illnesses such as breast cancer and even dementia. What they’re seeing in there is intriguing: possible relationships between gum or periodontal disease and diabetes, heart disease, stroke and at-risk pregnancies. Some studies have been pursuing an association between bleeding gums and pancreatic cancer. Others are looking at whether there’s a connection between mouth bacteria and Alzheimer’s...

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From Birth, Our Microbes Become As Personal As A Fingerprint

Rob Stein | Shots | September 9, 2013

Look in the mirror and you won't see your microbiome. But it's there with you from the day you are born. Over time, those bacteria, viruses and fungi multiply until they outnumber your own cells 10 to 1. Read More »

Imagining a Future American Culture of Health

One of the most thought-provoking articles I've read lately is Tom Vanderbilt's Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot in Nautilus. In it, he discusses how our technological visions of the future seem to do much better on predicting the technology of that future than they do the culture in which they will be used. As he says, "But when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date.... Chances are, that person resembles you now."

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Let's Place Some Big Bets - Reinventing Medical Care

When we think about market research and Big Data, think about Henry Ford's (possibly apocryphal) quote: Most of our healthcare innovations and reforms take the existing healthcare system as a given and try to build upon it in some way. They add more on-ramps to the healthcare superhighway, widen its lanes, try to smooth the pavements, maybe even automate our driving on it. But sometimes we need to tear the highway down. Here, in brief, are some big bets I'd like to see someone take on...

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Modern Medicine May Not Be Doing Your Microbiome Any Favors

Staff Writer | NPR Books | April 14, 2014

There are lots of theories about why food allergies, asthma, celiac disease and intestinal disorders like Crohn's disease have been on the rise. Dr. Martin Blaser speculates that it may be connected to the overuse of antibiotics, which has resulted in killing off strains of bacteria that typically live in the gut. Read More »

OSEHRA 2015: Chairman of Open Source Health Speaks on the Future of Healthcare at Open Source Summit

Press Release | Open Source Health, OSEHRA | July 28, 2015

Open Source Health Inc...is pleased to announce it’s Executive Chairman, Gary Bartholomew, will present on the main stage at the 2015 OSEHRA Summit in Washington on July 29, 2015. “This is an important summit relating to open source technology in the healthcare industry which is on the verge of a revolution”, states Executive Chairman, Gary Bartholomew, Open Source Health Inc. “We are re-defining the next generation healthcare platform by incorporating big data and artificial intelligence to deliver personalized medicine at the molecular level”.

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Remembrance of Things Past -- Bacterial Memory of Gut Inflammation

Press Release | Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University | May 29, 2017

The microbiome, or the collections of microorganisms present in the body, is known to affect human health and disease and researchers are thinking about new ways to use them as next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics. Today bacteria from the normal microbiome are already being used in their modified or attenuated form in probiotics and cancer therapy. Scientists exploit the microorganisms' natural ability to sense and respond to environmental- and disease-related stimuli and the ease of engineering new functions into them. This is particularly beneficial in chronic inflammatory diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that remain difficult to monitor non-invasively...

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The Most Important Health Care Jobs of the Future

Fast Company ran an interesting article The Most Important Design Jobs of the Future, predicting 18 of the most important design jobs of the future (at least 3 to 5 years out).  A couple of them were in health care, and arguably all of them would have some impact on health care, but I thought it might be fun to do a similar list specific to health care, and not limited to design. Let's hope no one comes back in a few years to show how wrong I was. I'll skip the usual suspects -- e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists.  Yes, those jobs will (almost) certainly still be around, but they may not be central as they are today.  And those jobs will evolve in ways that reflect the trends illustrated by the jobs I list...

This Actually Is a Test

When it comes to health care, testing is not what it used to be, or what it is going to be in the not-too-distant future. For example, confirmation of a cancer diagnosis is getting much easier.  The New York Times reported that blood tests -- known as "liquid biopsies" -- have now been shown to generally match the results of a tumor biopsy.  The blood tests look for DNA fragments from the tumor that signal its presence.  The liquid biopsies are useful for both detecting the presence of a tumor and its ongoing monitoring. The current generation of tests are not perfect, with as many as 15% of tumors not generating enough DNA to be detected, but they do offer the advantage of not requiring an invasive procedure...

uBiome and University of Oxford Investigate the Relationship Between the Human Microbiome and Personality

Press Release | uBiome | July 12, 2016

Microbial genomics leader uBiome is partnering with the University of Oxford to run a pioneering investigation into the possible connections between adult personality and their gut microbiome. Past research on this subject has focused on mice, and this is the first study of its kind on humans. The study is open to adult participants in the UK, the US, as well as other countries. The experiment is led by Oxford University DPhil student Katerina Johnson, who works with leading evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar (perhaps best known for establishing “Dunbar’s Number”—the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships) and respected neurobiologist Dr. Phil Burnet.

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What Does the Environment Have to Do with Diseases That Affect the Immune System?

Lindsey Konkel | Ensia | January 4, 2016

In 1932, New York gastroenterologist Burrill Crohn described an unusual disease in 14 adults. The patients had bouts of abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea, and lesions and scars on the bowel wall. Doctors in other parts of North America and Europe were seeing it in their patients, too. They called the rare condition Crohn’s disease. After World War II, the number of new people getting inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn’s disease and a related condition called ulcerative colitis) skyrocketed across the West in countries such as the U.S., Canada and the UK. In the last three decades, IBD has begun to crop up in newly industrialized parts of the world like Hong Kong and China’s big cities...

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