Entries by Janet

How RA Begins: A Detective Story

What causes rheumatoid arthritis? The search, by scientists around the world, has been exhaustive, and the prey surprisingly elusive – but in breakthrough Johns Hopkins research, scientists Maximilian Konig, M.D., and Felipe Andrade, M.D., Ph.D., believe they have pinpointed one culprit: a kind of bacteria that lives in the mouth and is present in gum […]

Hope for the Future:  An Engineered Bladder 

“Tissue engineering is the ultimate in reconstruction,” says David McConkey, Ph.D., Director of the Greenberg Bladder Cancer Institute at Johns Hopkins, “and we have a fantastic team” working to create a new bladder out of a patient’s own cells. Using a scaffold to layer stem cells and similarly “plastic” cells called progenitor cells – kind […]

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New Marijuana Studies: Pot Hurts Your Brain

Before we start this discussion, please hear these words:  this is not about your right to smoke marijuana.  I don’t care if you spend every waking moment high as a kite, as long as you don’t operate heavy machinery or endanger anyone else.  I do not care.  That’s not my business. However, I’m worried about […]

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Preventing Dementia: What You Need to Know

I’ve had a lot of requests to print a talk I recently gave. Here it is. — Janet Recently, I took part in a large, two-day dementia seminar in Prescott, Arizona, presented by Prescott United Methodist Church for the community.  There was a full house both days; hundreds of people came, which shows that the […]