Health Sciences

Globally renowned bioethicist Ezekiel J.

Performance can be enhanced by as much as 15 percent, according to a study by Penn neuroscientists published in Nature Communications. It is the first time such a connection has been made.

As part of a breast-cancer diagnosis, doctors analyze the tumor to determine which therapies might best attack the malignancy. But for patients whose cancer is triple-negative — that is, lacking receptors for estrogen, progesterone and Her2 — the options for treatment dwindle. Triple-negative cancers, or TNBC, also tend to be more aggressive than other cancer subtypes.

This study showed that the majority of such intimate partner violence — more than 80 percent of incidents — involve boyfriends and girlfriends. What’s more, these partnerships result in the most physical violence.

Network science examines how the actions of a system’s individual parts affect the behavior of the system as a whole. Some commonly studied networks include computer chip components and social media users, but University of Pennsylvania engineers are now applying network science to a much older system: the human body.

With countless medical advances and efforts to curb smoking, one might expect that life expectancy in the United States would improve. Yet according to recent studies, there’s been a reduction in the rate of improvement in American mortality during the past three decades.

George Hajishengallis of the School of Dental Medicine and an international team of colleagues have found that “training” the immune system causes changes in the precursors of immune cells in the bone marrow. These changes could facilitate a more robust response to future infections or even enable the immune system to regenerate faster after chemotherapy.

When a cancer patient receives a bone marrow transplant, time is of the essence. Healthy stem cells, which can restart the production of blood cells and immune system components after a patient’s own are compromised, need to make their way from the circulatory system into the bones as quickly as possible.

Children who eat fish at least once a week sleep better and have IQ scores that are 4 points higher, on average, according to new findings from the University of Pennsylvania published in Scientific Reports.

Gene therapy holds promise for treating a variety of diseases, including some inherited blinding conditions. But for a gene therapy to be effective, one must know the precise gene responsible for a given individual’s disorder and develop a tailored treatment.