Current treatments sometimes fail to help people with “wet” age-related macular degeneration — and researchers now think they know why. Wet AMD is caused by an overgrowth of blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye. The vessels leak fluid or bleed, damaging the retina and causing vision loss. To combat this, doctors prescribe medications that slow the growth of new blood vessels, called anti-VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) drugs. Unfortunately, these anti-VEGF drugs might actually hamper vision improvements by triggering the over-expression of a second blood-vessel-related protein, researchers have discovered. This second protein, ANGPTL4, also can stimulate overproduction of abnormal blood vessels in the retina, researchers reported Nov. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These findings could explain why fewer than half of patients who receive monthly anti-VEGF eye injections wind up showing any major improvements in their vision, researchers said. “We have previously reported that ANGPTL4 was increased in patients who did not respond well to anti-VEGF treatment,” said researcher Dr. Akrit Sodhi, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. “What we saw in this paper was a paradoxical increase of ANGPTL4 in patients that received anti-VEGF injections — the anti-VEGF therapy itself turned on expression of this protein,” Sodhi said in a Hopkins news…  read on >  read on >

Many people turn to mindfulness meditation to help them manage their chronic pain, a practice that’s been used for centuries. However, it’s been an open question whether meditation is simply functioning as a placebo, rather than actually quelling pain. Now, a new study involving brain scans has revealed that’s not the case. Mindfulness meditation engages distinct brain mechanisms to reduce pain, and those are not part of a placebo response, researchers reported. “These two brain responses are completely distinct, which supports the use of mindfulness meditation as a direct intervention for chronic pain rather than as a way to engage the placebo effect,” said lead researcher Fadel Zeidan, a professor of anesthesiology with the University of California, San Diego. For the study, researchers recruited 115 healthy people and randomly placed them into four different treatment groups: An actual mindfulness meditation practice that involved focusing on breath without judgment A sham meditation practice that only consisted of deep breathing A placebo cream that patients were trained to believe reduce pain A control group that listened to an audiobook The team then applied a very painful but harmless heat stimulus to the back of every person’s leg and scanned their brains, to see how each responded to the pain. Placebo cream and the sham medication practice both lowered pain, but mindfulness meditation was significantly more effective at…  read on >  read on >

Huntington’s disease is a devastating, fatal neurological illness with little means of treatment, but a new study in mice offers a glimmer of hope. Huntington’s occurs when inherited genes cause key proteins to fold and clump together within brain cells. Over time, this severely hampers brain function and patients lose the ability to talk, walk, swallow and focus. There’s no cure, and the illness is typically fatal within a decade or two of symptom onset. However, new research in mice is investigating the utility of “peptide-brush polymers” as treatment. The peptides involved in the therapy are naturally occurring proteins that may block the lethal clumping of Huntington’s-associated proteins within brain cells. In studies conducted in a mouse model of Huntington’s, use of the polymer treatment appeared to “rescue” brain cells harmed by protein clumping and reverse Huntington’s symptoms, a joint team from Northwestern University and Case Western Reserve University reported. Of course, studies in mice sometimes fail to deliver the same results in people. Nevertheless, study co-lead author Nathan Gianneschi, of Northwestern University in Chicago, said “it’s quite compelling when you see animals behave more normally than they would otherwise” after the polymer treatment. Gianneschi, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern, has a personal stake in the new research. “My childhood friend was diagnosed with Huntington’s at age 18 through a genetic test,” he said in…  read on >  read on >

The GLP-1 drug semaglutide can help obese people manage debilitating knee arthritis, a new trial has found. People who received weekly injections of semaglutide — the active agent in the diabetes drug Ozempic and the weight-loss medication Wegovy — had a nearly 14% decrease in their body weight after 68 weeks, compared with 3% of people given a placebo, results showed. The trial was funded by Novo Nordisk, the drug company that makes semaglutide. This weight loss translated into a decrease in knee pain and improved knee function among those taking semaglutide, researchers reported Oct. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Obesity-related knee osteoarthritis is a progressive condition that can lead to pain and stiffness of the knee and impair critical daily functions such as walking or moving around,” said lead researcher Dr. Henning Bliddal, a professor of rheumatology with Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark. “The risk of developing the condition is more than four times higher in people with obesity,” Bliddal added in a Novo Nordisk news release. Added weight places more stress on the knee, causing the natural cartilage that cushions the joint to wear down more quickly, experts say. Dropping excess pounds is often recommended to treat knee arthritis, but it can be tough to achieve through diet and exercise alone, Bliddal noted. For this study, researchers recruited 407 adults…  read on >  read on >