New organ and life after death: 10 medical achievements of the year
While we do not have drugs for all types of cancer or an effective way to stop aging - but this does not mean that they will never appear. We tell that interesting, unexpected and unique happened in 2017 in medicine, and explain why this is important.
According to the VTsIOM survey, the overwhelming majority of Russians (82% of respondents aged from 18 to 60 years) believe that the responsibility for matters of protected sex lies with both partners. In this light, the work on the invention of the gel for male contraception, an improved version of the medicine invented back in 2012, seems particularly interesting. The authors of the experiment from the University of Washington say that the drug tests will begin in 2018 and will continue for four years.
Something like men have already tried to offer the World Health Organization. Together with the CONRAD institute, she tested contraceptive injections that had to be done every two months. But despite the effectiveness of 96%, the drug had to be stopped. The reason is undesirable effects in the form of acne, mood swings, pain syndrome and even impotence (sounds familiar, doesn’t it). One of the participants in the study did not fully restore fertility even a few years later. We hope that the new drug will be better tolerated.
Given the level of modern surgery, organ transplantation itself is not so difficult - but other problems often arise with it. They are mainly due to the fact that patients have to wait for donor organs for too long. At the beginning of the year, the world of science was shocked by the news: scientists from the Institute of Biological Research created a chimeric embryo consisting of pig and human cells. With all the ethical controversy (although the researchers claim that they have received all the necessary permits), this is a breakthrough in the field of transplantology - every ten minutes a person appears in the world who needs an organ for transplantation.
At the moment, xenotransplantation also has serious prospects - the transplantation of human organs, not of humans, but of other species, that is, animals. Researchers from the United States and China believe that it will be possible as a result of genome editing, and British doctors are pinning their hopes on stem cell modification.
A team of doctors from the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia carried out the world's first transplant of two hands to a child. Unlike head transplantation, which is only talked about so far, this operation has become a reality and, fortunately, was successful. Although the operation itself was not conducted this year, the results were reported in the summer — after a year and a half of observations. Despite the fact that not everything went smoothly (the boy’s body tried to break new arms eight times), today’s ten-year-old Zion Harvey, the smallest patient who underwent a similar operation, can independently eat, write and even play baseball.
Another impressive story was the creation of artificial skin for a boy with epidermolysis bullosa (young patients with this disease are called "butterfly children"). In 2015, he was hospitalized with about 80% of the skin, after which doctors decided to experiment on genetic modification of cells in order to correct the mutation. No one could guarantee the result, since the artificial skin had previously been used only on small areas of the body, but already after the first operation the patient's condition improved. In November 2017, scientists said that the skin got accustomed perfectly, and on its surface even new hair began to grow.
Experiments with genes - one of the most difficult, but also the most promising areas of modern medicine. This year, for example, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco tried to change genes right in the human body, although before that experiments had always been done by extracting cells, modifying them, and introducing them back into the body.
The pioneer patient was a forty-four-year-old Brian Maido with Hunter syndrome - a form of mucopolysaccharidosis, in which there is no enzyme that splits carbohydrates, and the metabolism is disturbed. The accumulation of carbohydrates in this case faces a whole range of problems, including hearing, vision, respiratory and health problems of the internal organs and the brain. However, to finally understand whether the operation was successful, it will be possible only a couple of months after the final tests. Interestingly, in the same year, Japanese researchers managed to capture the editing of the genome with the CRISPR / Cas9 system.
More than twenty years, scientists have spent on it in order to understand the structure of human immunodeficiency virus. Researchers from the University of Alabama were able to recreate the last segment of RNA, that is, to decipher HIV completely. They didn’t just “put together a puzzle,” but literally found the lost piece under the bed. The fact is that the missing segment plays a key role in the replication of the virus, that is, its reproduction and the "capture" of healthy cells. So this discovery can make it much easier to fight HIV.
Around the same time, scientists from California also presented their version of therapy: they focused not on destroying the virus, as they usually do, but on enhancing the action of proteins capable of suppressing its activity. Around the world, meanwhile, there is a slow but sure struggle against the stigmatization of people living with HIV. The Canadians, who opened June's restaurant in Toronto, all of whose employees have a positive HIV status, have moved the farthest on this issue.
In June, a fifty-six-year-old patient from Chelyabinsk first acquired bionic vision. In the course of the operation carried out by the Scientific and Clinical Center of Otorhinolaryngology of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency of Russia, a special Argus II device was installed, and if it is simpler, a bionic eye. The device is a video camera, placed in glasses, which is shooting in real time, processing the visual signals. These signals are transmitted first to the glasses, and then to the sixty electrodes located on the damaged retina.
However, far more promising than bionic constructions, the artificial retina seems to the scientific community. Scientists from the Italian Institute of Technology have long and fruitfully been working on a kind of "retinal prosthesis", which, if everything works out, will help restore sight to millions of people. But, of course, not to a woman who for twenty-eight years pretended to be blind, not to communicate with people - simply because her story, replicated on social networks, turned out to be an invention.
Of course, we always suspected that one day the robots would take on some of our responsibilities, but the plots of films like "I, Robot" hinted that this would not happen very soon. However, already this year in Chinese Xi'an, a dental robot performed an operation to install implants without human intervention - and this is incredible. However, it is not so unbelievable, given that smart technologies in the modern world start and win.
Virtual psychotherapist Woebot consults on Facebook no less than a million users a week, artificial intelligence iFlyTek Smart Doctor Assistant from China successfully passes the exam for a doctor (with a score of 100 points higher than required), at the University of Gothenburg a robot assistant helps during uterus transplantation, and crumbs-robots from - attention - spirulina are going to cure malignant tumors.
A new organ was found in the human body - and this can be a problem, considering that approximately 30% of people do not know where the organs are located are more complicated than the brain, the stomach, or the lungs. Of course, the existence of the mesentery has long been known - it was described by Leonardo da Vinci, but now Professor Calvin Koffi from the University of Limerick has proposed to make changes to the anatomical classification.
Now it is believed that the mesentery is not part of the abdominal cavity, as they are written in most anatomy textbooks, but rather a completely separate extended organ. The mesentery is a collection of connective and adipose tissue with blood and lymphatic vessels; it surrounds the intestinal loops, as if arranging its position in the abdominal cavity. Despite the fact that scientists have yet to understand what role the mesentery plays in the development of various pathologists, as a separate body, it has already been included in the new edition of the classic American textbook "Anatomy of Gray." Coffey and his colleagues are confident that this is just the beginning.
This was stated by scientists from the University of Paris Descartes, who conducted a meta-analysis of research on the topic over the past 120 years and found that, according to the average, people stopped growing. Yes, we are taller and larger than our ancestors, but our descendants will no longer be significantly different from us. According to the author of the study, Jean-Francois Toussaint, the limits of human abilities do not expand, and the number of centenarians, although increasing, but their age does not exceed the figures recorded earlier.
Scientists, however, do not leave attempts to find the key to immortality, relying on the study of telomeres, that is, the end sections of chromosomes, and the search for genes that can slow down the aging process. So far, despite the scale and technological support of research, the scientific community agrees that aging is nevertheless inevitable. For example, experts from the University of Arizona speak about this: they are sure that any attempts to “repair” DNA or artificially lengthen telomeres are doomed to failure. Such interventions will result in too many active cells in the body, which will begin to divide uncontrollably, causing the development of deadly diseases.
Of course, not in an artistic sense, focused on the existence of potential hell and heaven, but only in the scientific sense. Resuscitators of one of the Canadian hospitals registered an extremely unusual case: after they disconnected the life support support systems of four patients, in one of them the brain continued to emit waves for another 10 minutes and 38 seconds after the death was ascertained. The researchers could not explain why this happened.
One of the probable reasons was the failure of equipment, but inspection of the devices did not reveal any violations, so the story became even more mystical. Scientists from the University of Western Ontario, who verified the data, agreed that "something happened." But it was advised to remember that a single case is an exception, not a rule, so it’s too early to talk about the unconditional existence of life after death.
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