Emma Morano passed away last April. At 117 years old, the Italian woman was the oldest known living human being.

Super centenarians, such as Morano and Jeanne Calment of France, who famously lived to be 122 years old, continue to fascinate scientists and have led them to wonder just how long humans can live. A study published in Nature last October concluded that the upper limit of human age is peaking at around 115 years.

Now, however, a new study in Nature by McGill University biologists Bryan G. Hughes and Siegfried Hekimi comes to a starkly different conclusion. By analyzing the lifespan of the longest-living individuals from the USA, the UK, France and Japan for each year since 1968, Hekimi and Hughes found no evidence for such a limit, and if such a maximum exists, it has yet to be reached or identified, Hekimi says.

Far into the foreseeable future

“We just don’t know what the age limit might be. In fact, by extending trend lines, we can show that maximum and average lifespans, could continue to increase far into the foreseeable future,” Hekimi says. Many people are aware of what has happened with average lifespans. In 1920, for example, the average newborn Canadian could expect to live 60 years; a Canadian born in 1980 could expect 76 years, and today, life expectancy has jumped to 82 years. Maximum lifespan seems to follow the same trend.

It’s impossible to predict what future lifespans in humans might look like, Hekimi says. Some scientists argue that technology, medical interventions, and improvements in living conditions could all push back the upper limit.

“It’s hard to guess,” Hekimi adds. “Three hundred years ago, many people lived only short lives. If we would have told them that one day most humans might live up to 100, they would have said we were crazy.”

Reference: Bryan G. Hughes, Siegfried Hekimi. Many possible maximum lifespan trajectories. Nature, 2017; 546 (7660): E8 DOI: 10.1038/nature22786

America has a drinking water crisis. An NRDC study has found that contaminants that may harm human health are found in tap water in every state in the nation. This is a problem even for people who don’t drink tap water since water borne toxins can be absorbed through the skin and lungs while bathing and into food if used for cooking.

Established in 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act is one of the bedrock environmental laws in the United States, consisting of rules that regulate about 100 contaminants found in drinking water. NRDC has documented serious problems with our outdated and deteriorating water infrastructure, widespread violations and inadequate enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act for more than 25 years.

The study shows that in 2015 alone, there were more than 80,000 reported violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act by community water systems. Nearly 77 million people were served by more than 18,000 of these systems with violations in 2015. These violations included exceeding health-based standards, failing to properly test water for contaminants, and failing to report contamination to state authorities or the public. What?s worse, 2015 saw more than 12,000 health-based violations in some 5,000 community water systems serving more than 27 million people.

In 2016, the publication “What?s in Your Water: Flint and Beyond” detailed the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, and contextualized a larger, national crisis around lead in drinking water. The new study picks up where that one left off, detailing a stunning number of violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act around the nation.

1. Combined Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts

Exposure to these contaminants can lead to cancer and may be linked to reproductive impacts such as miscarriages and birth defects. In 2015, there were 11,311 violations (4,591 health-based) at community water systems serving 25,173,431 people (12,584,936 health-based). Formal enforcement measures were taken in 12.4 percent of all cases and 23.0 percent of health-based cases.

2. Total Coliform

The presence of coliforms in drinking water indicates that possible presence of organisms that can cause diarrhea, cramps, nausea, and headaches in otherwise-healthy people. These impacts can be much more serious and even life-threatening for children, the elderly, and immune-compromised people. In 2015, there were 10,261 violations (2,574 health-based) at community water systems serving 17,768,807 people (10,118,586 health-based). Formal enforcement was taken in 8.8 percent of cases (and 8.3 percent of health-based cases).

3. Combined Surface, Ground Water, and Filter Backwash Rules

Exposure to some of these pathogens, such as Cryptosporidium or Giardia, can cause severe gastrointestinal distress, nausea, and diarrhea. They can cause serious, life-threatening infections for the very young, elderly, and immune-compromised. In 2015 there were 5,979 violations (1,790 health-based) at community water systems serving 17,312,604 people (5,336,435 health-based). Formal enforcement was taken in 13.7 percent of cases (28.2 percent of health-based cases).

4. Nitrites and Nitrates

Exposure can lead to blue baby syndrome in infants (potentially leading to death in extreme cases), developmental effects, and cardiovascular disease. In extreme cases, blue baby syndrome can be severe and lead to death. In 2015, there were 1,529 violations (459 health-based) at community water systems serving 3,867,431 people (1,364,494 health-based). Formal enforcement action was taken in 11.3 percent of all cases (and 27.9 percent of health-based cases).

5. Lead and Copper

Exposure to lead is particularly toxic to children and can cause serious, irreversible damage to their developing brains and nervous systems. Lead exposure can also cause miscarriages and stillbirths in pregnant women, as well as fertility issues, cardiovascular and kidney effects, cognitive dysfunction, and elevated blood pressure in healthy adults. In 2015, there were 8,044 violations (303 health-based) by systems serving 18,350,633 people (582,302 health-based). Formal enforcement action was taken in 12.0 percent of the cases (and in 14.2 percent of health-based cases).

6. Radionuclides

Exposure can lead to cancers and compromised kidney function. In 2015, there were 2,297 violations (962 health-based) in community water systems serving 1,471,364 people (445,969 health-based). Formal enforcement was taken in 11.7 percent of all cases (and 16.1 percent of health-based cases).

7. Arsenic

A known human carcinogen, exposure can lead to cancers, development effects, pulmonary disease, or cardiovascular disease. In 2015, there were 1,537 violations (1,135 health-based) at community water systems serving 1,842,594 people (358,323 health-based). Formal enforcement was taken in 28.9 percent of cases (37.1 percent of health-based cases).

8. Synthetic Organic Contaminants

Exposure can lead to cancers, developmental effects, central nervous system and reproductive difficulties, endocrine issues, or liver and kidney problems. In 2015 there were 6,864 violations (17 health-based) serving 2,669,594 people (301,099 health-based). Formal enforcement action was taken in 7.3 percent of cases (and 5.9 percent of health-based cases).

9. Inorganic Contaminants

Exposure can lead to increased cholesterol, kidney damage, hair loss, skin irritation, and cancer. In 2015, there were 1,505 violations (291 health-based) in community water systems serving 1,312,643 people (83,033 health-based). Formal enforcement was taken in 5.2 percent of cases (15.1 percent of health-based cases).

10. Volatile Organic Contaminants

Exposure can lead to cancers; developmental, skin, and reproductive issues; and cardiovascular problems. Exposure can also cause adverse effects on the liver, kidneys, and immune and nervous systems. In 2015 there were 10,383 violations (15 of them health-based) at community water systems serving 3,451,072 people (5,276 health-based). Formal enforcement was taken in 6.1 percent of cases (and 26.7 percent of health-based cases).

11. Public Notification

All community water systems are required to directly deliver information about their drinking water quality to each customer once a year. In 2015 there were 13, 202 violations by community water systems serving 8,381,050 people. Formal enforcement action was taken in 10.3 percent of cases.

The take away from this is to either install a water purifier or use natural spring water. Purifiers are also available for showers and are typically installed between the shower head and pipe.

A Cedars-Sinai-led team of investigators has successfully repaired severe limb fractures in laboratory animals with an innovative technique that cues bone to regrow its own tissue. If found to be safe and effective in humans, the pioneering method of combining ultrasound, stem cell and gene therapies could eventually replace grafting as a way to mend severely broken bones.

“We are just at the beginning of a revolution in orthopedics,” said Dan Gazit, PhD, DMD, co-director of the Skeletal Regeneration and Stem Cell Therapy Program in the Department of Surgery and the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute. “We’re combining an engineering approach with a biological approach to advance regenerative engineering, which we believe is the future of medicine.”

Gazit was the principal investigator and co-senior author of the research study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

More than 2 million bone grafts, frequently necessitated by severe injuries involving traffic accidents, war or tumor removal, are performed worldwide each year. Such injuries can create gaps between the edges of a fracture that are too large for the bone to bridge on its own. The grafts require implanting pieces from either the patient’s or a donor’s bone into the gap.

“Unfortunately, bone grafts carry disadvantages,” said Gazit, a professor of surgery at Cedars-Sinai. “There are huge unmet needs in skeleton repair.”

One problem is that enough healthy bone is not always available for repairs. Surgeries to remove a bone piece, typically from the pelvis, and implant it can lead to prolonged pain and expensive, lengthy hospitalizations. Further, grafts from donors may not integrate or grow properly, causing the repair to fail.

The new technique developed by the Cedars-Sinai-led team could provide a much-needed alternative to bone grafts.

In their experiment, the investigators constructed a matrix of collagen, a protein the body uses to build bones, and implanted it in the gap between the two sides of a fractured leg bone in laboratory animals. This matrix recruited the fractured leg’s own stem cells into the gap over a period of two weeks. To initiate the bone repair process, the team delivered a bone-inducing gene directly into the stem cells, using an ultrasound pulse and microbubbles that facilitated the entry of the gene into the cells.

Eight weeks after the surgery, the bone gap was closed and the leg fracture was healed in all the laboratory animals that received the treatment. Tests showed that the bone grown in the gap was as strong as that produced by surgical bone grafts, said Gadi Pelled, PhD, DMD, assistant professor of surgery at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s co-senior author.

“This study is the first to demonstrate that ultrasound-mediated gene delivery to an animal’s own stem cells can effectively be used to treat nonhealing bone fractures,” Pelled said. “It addresses a major orthopedic unmet need and offers new possibilities for clinical translation.”

The study involved six departments at Cedars-Sinai, plus investigators from Hebrew University in Jerusalem; the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York; and the University of California, Davis.

“Our project demonstrates how scientists from diverse disciplines can combine forces to find solutions to today’s medical challenges and help develop treatments for the patients of tomorrow,” said Bruce Gewertz, MD, surgeon-in-chief and chair of the Department of Surgery at Cedars-Sinai.

Reference: Maxim Bez, Dmitriy Sheyn, Wafa Tawackoli, Pablo Avalos, Galina Shapiro, Joseph C. Giaconi, Xiaoyu Da, Shiran Ben David, Jayne Gavrity, Hani A. Awad, Hyun W. Bae, Eric J. Ley, Thomas J. Kremen, Zulma Gazit, Katherine W. Ferrara, Gadi Pelled, Dan Gazit. In situ bone tissue engineering via ultrasound-mediated gene delivery to endogenous progenitor cells in mini-pigs. Science Translational Medicine, 2017; 9 (390): eaal3128 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aal3128

Many people know Watson as IBM’s world Jeopardy champion on the television show. Now IBM is turning it’s artificially intelligent supercomputer into a medical genius.

“Watson, the supercomputer, basically went to med school after it won Jeopardy,” MIT’s Andrew McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age, said recently in an interview with Smart Planet. “I?m convinced that if it?s not already the world?s best diagnostician, it will be soon.”

Watson is already capable of storing far more medical information than doctors, and unlike humans, its decisions are all evidence-based and free of cognitive biases and overconfidence. It’s also capable of understanding natural language, generating hypotheses, evaluating the strength of those hypotheses, and learning not just storing data, but finding meaning in it.

As IBM scientists continue to train Watson to apply its vast stores of knowledge to actual medical decision-making, it’s likely just a matter of time before its diagnostic performance surpasses that of even the sharpest doctors.

Back in 2011, McAfee wrote on his blog about why a diagnosis from “Dr. Watson” would be a game changer.

It?s based on all available medical knowledge. Human doctors can?t possibly hold this much information in their heads, or keep up it as it changes over time. Dr. Watson knows it all and never overlooks or forgets anything.

It?s accurate. If Dr. Watson is as good at medical questions as the current Watson is at game show questions, it will be an excellent diagnostician indeed.

It?s consistent. Given the same inputs, Dr. Watson will always output the same diagnosis. Inconsistency is a surprisingly large and common flaw among human medical professionals, even experienced ones. And Dr. Watson is always available and never annoyed, sick, nervous, hung over, upset, in the middle of a divorce, sleep-deprived, and so on.

It has very low marginal cost. It?ll be very expensive to build and train Dr. Watson, but once it?s up and running the cost of doing one more diagnosis with it is essentially zero, unless it orders tests.

It can be offered anywhere in the world. If a person has access to a computer or mobile phone, Dr. Watson is on call for them.

An April study estimated that as many as 1 in 20 U.S. adults are misdiagnosed by their human doctors each year, so it’s an area ripe for improvement and competition.

That’s one reason IBM has been pumping Watson full of medical knowledge a subject area that’s actually significantly more contained than “all the world’s general knowledge,” which is what Watson tried to learn for Jeopardy.

Watson has “read” dozens of textbooks, all of PubMed and Medline (two massive databases of medical journals), and thousands of patient records from Memorial Sloan Kettering. All together, “Watson has analyzed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, 25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours fine-tuning its decision accuracy,” Forbes reported in 2013.

And it’s getting “smarter” every year. So how would Dr. Watson work in practice? Here’s how IBM describes the process:

First, the physician might describe symptoms and other related factors to the system. Watson can then identify the key pieces of information and mine the patient?s data to find relevant facts about family history, current medications and other existing conditions. It combines this information with current findings from tests, and then forms and tests hypotheses by examining a variety of data sources such as treatment guidelines, electronic medical record data and doctors? and nurses? notes, as well as peer reviewed research and clinical studies. From here, Watson can provide potential treatment options and its confidence rating for each suggestion.

So far, IBM’s most high-profile AI partnerships are with MD Anderson Cancer Center and WellPoint, where Watson helps the insurer evaluate doctors’ treatment plans.

Watson is not yet able to leverage all the information it has absorbed, so it still has a ways to go before it catches up with our best human diagnosticians, whose versatility and agility is difficult to match. But Watson’s ability to learn, analyze, and apply knowledge suggests that it’s only a matter of time before is surpasses the best human doctors.

“If and when Dr. Watson gets as good at diagnosis as Watson is at Jeopardy I want it as my primary care physician,” McAfee wrote, back in 2011.

That day may come sooner than we imagined.

A recent study conducted at Baycrest Health Sciences has uncovered a crucial piece into why playing a musical instrument can help older adults retain their listening skills and ward off age-related cognitive declines. This finding could lead to the development of brain rehabilitation interventions through musical training.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that learning to play a sound on a musical instrument alters the brain waves in a way that improves a person’s listening and hearing skills over a short time frame. This change in brain activity demonstrates the brain’s ability to rewire itself and compensate for injuries or diseases that may hamper a person’s capacity to perform tasks.

“Music has been known to have beneficial effects on the brain, but there has been limited understanding into what about music makes a difference,” says Dr. Bernhard Ross, senior scientist at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and senior author on the study. “This is the first study demonstrating that learning the fine movement needed to reproduce a sound on an instrument changes the brain’s perception of sound in a way that is not seen when listening to music.”

This finding supports Dr. Ross’ research using musical training to help stroke survivors rehabilitate motor movement in their upper bodies. Baycrest scientists have a history of breakthroughs into how a person’s musical background impacts the listening abilities and cognitive function as they age and they continue to explore how brain changes during aging impact hearing.

The study involved 32 young, healthy adults who had normal hearing and no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders. The brain waves of participants were first recorded while they listened to bell-like sounds from a Tibetan singing bowl (a small bell struck with a wooden mallet to create sounds). After listening to the recording, half of the participants were provided the Tibetan singing bowl and asked to recreate the same sounds and rhythm by striking it and the other half recreated the sound by pressing a key on a computer keypad.

“It has been hypothesized that the act of playing music requires many brain systems to work together, such as the hearing, motor and perception systems,” says Dr. Ross, who is also a medical biophysics professor at the University of Toronto. “This study was the first time we saw direct changes in the brain after one session, demonstrating that the action of creating music leads to a strong change in brain activity.”

The study’s next steps involve analyzing recovery between stroke patients with musical training compared to physiotherapy and the impact of musical training on the brains of older adults.

With additional funding, the study could explore developing musical training rehabilitation programs for other conditions that impact motor function, such as traumatic brain injury.

Reference: Bernhard Ross, Masihullah Barat, Takako Fujioka. Sound-making actions lead to immediate plastic changes of neuromagnetic evoked responses and induced beta-band oscillations during perception. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2017; 3613-16 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3613-16.2017

The emergency call issued by the American Red Cross earlier this year was of a sort all too common: Donations of platelets were needed, and desperately. But a new discovery from the University of Virginia School of Medicine may be the key to stopping shortages of these vital blood-clotting cells.

The UVA researchers have identified a “master switch” that they may be able to manipulate to overcome the obstacles that have prevented doctors from producing platelets in large quantities outside the body. “The platelet supply is limited and the demand is growing,” said researcher Adam Goldfarb, MD, of UVA’s Department of Pathology. “The quantities we can produce outside the body are very, very small, and the inability to scale up right now is a major roadblock. We think that our understanding of this pathway is actually a critical step toward fixing that problem.”

Scientists also may be able to use this master switch to battle neonatal thrombocytopenia, a condition that complicates the care of babies who are already at great risk. “It turns out in premature infants and newborns that [the platelet] reserve is compromised. They are less capable of responding to distress and the demand for increased platelet production,” Goldfarb said. “A goodly percentage of those babies, these tiny little babies, require platelet transfusions to keep their platelets up.”

The switch discovered by Goldfarb’s team controls whether the bone marrow produces cells called megakaryocytes of the type seen in adults or of the sort found in infants. This is important because the adult and infantile versions have very different specialties: Adult megakaryocytes are great at making platelets. Lots and lots of them. Infantile megakaryocytes, on the other hand, are much smaller cells, and they concentrate on dividing to produce more megakaryocytes.

The ability to toggle between the two could be a huge asset for doctors. Now, doctors cannot produce large quantities of platelets in the lab and instead must rely on platelet donations for patients. The new finding, however, may help change that. “It’s thought that in our bodies every single megakaryocyte produces like a thousand platelets, and when you do it in culture [outside the body] it’s like 10,” he said. “We think the pathway we’re studying enhances the efficiency of platelet release, and this pathway, we think, could be manipulated in both directions: to suppress the pathway to promote the growth [of megakaryocytes] and then to activate the pathway at some point to enhance the efficiency of platelet release.”

For example, babies might be given a drug that would prompt their bodies to make more platelets. Researcher Kamal Elagib, MBBS, PhD, noted that the research team already has identified compounds that can flip the switch in the lab, but that those compounds likely aren’t the best option for treatment: “Those inhibitors have multiple effects, so there would be side effects,” he said.

The researchers, however, have already identified other drugs that look much more promising. “Our future efforts that Kamal is working on now are to identify better, cleaner, more effective approaches at flipping this switch,” Goldfarb said. “Understanding this process could really enhance the future approaches towards treating patients with low platelet counts.”

Reference: Kamaleldin E. Elagib, Chih-Huan Lu, Goar Mosoyan, Shadi Khalil, Ewelina Zasadzi?ska, Daniel R. Foltz, Peter Balogh, Alejandro A. Gru, Deborah A. Fuchs, Lisa M. Rimsza, Els Verhoeyen, Miriam Sans?, Robert P. Fisher, Camelia Iancu-Rubin, Adam N. Goldfarb. Neonatal expression of RNA-binding protein IGF2BP3 regulates the human fetal-adult megakaryocyte transition. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2017; DOI: 10.1172/JCI88936

Generating mature and viable heart muscle cells from human or other animal stem cells has proven difficult for biologists. Now, Johns Hopkins researchers report success in creating them in the laboratory by implanting stem cells taken from a healthy adult or one with a type of heart disease into newborn rat hearts.

The researchers say the host animal hearts provide the biological signals and chemistry needed by the implanted immature heart muscle cells to progress and overcome the developmental blockade that traditionally stops their growth in lab culture dishes or flasks.

In a summary of the work published Jan. 10 in Cell Reports, the researchers say their method should help advance studies of how heart disease develops, along with the development of new diagnostic tools and stem cell treatments.

“Our concept of using a live animal host to enable maturation of cardiomyocytes can be expanded to other areas of stem cell research and really opens up a new avenue to getting stem cells to mature,” says Chulan Kwon, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and member of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Institute for Cell Engineering, who led the study.

According to Kwon, cell biologists have been historically unable to induce heart muscle cells to get past the point in development characteristic of newborns, even when they let them mature in dishes for a year.

Those neonatal heart cells, Kwon explains, are smaller and rounder than mature adult heart cells and generate very low pumping force. As a result, he adds, they aren’t the best model for heart muscle diseases, nor do they accurately mimic the biology and chemistry of adult heart tissue.

Kwon’s group recently showed that cells kept and grown in lab dishes weren’t turning on the proper genes needed to let the cells transition to maturity, a phenomenon they attributed to the artificial conditions of growing cells in a dish. But they also found that those genes were similar to those activated, or turned on, in the hearts of newborn rats.

In their initial experiments designed to overcome the developmental roadblock, the researchers first created a cell line of immature heart cells taken from mouse embryonic stem cells. They next tagged these cells with a fluorescent protein and injected about 200,000 of the cells into the ventricle or lower heart chamber of newborn nude rats — rats with deficient immune systems that wouldn’t attack and reject the newly introduced cells.

After about a week, Kwon reports, the fluorescent cells were still rounded and immature-looking. After a month, however, the cells looked like adult heart muscle cells — elongated with striped patterns.

When the researchers compared 312 genes in the individual mouse cells grown in the rat hearts to the genes found in both immature heart cells and adult heart muscle cells, they found the cells grown in the rat hearts had more in common with genetics of adult heart muscle cells.

The investigators confirmed that the new heart-grown cells could contract or beat like normal adult heart muscle cells using a type of optical microscopy.

In the next set of proof-of-concept experiments, Kwon’s team worked with human adult skin cells from a healthy human donor that were chemically converted back into a stem cell-like state known as induced pluripotent stem cells. A month after these cells were implanted into newborn rat hearts, the healthy human donor cells appeared rod-shaped and mature.

Kwon cautions that clinical use of these lab-grown cells is years away. But, he says, “The hope is that our work advances precision medicine by giving us the ability to make adult cardiomyocytes from any patient’s own stem cells.” Having that capability, he says, means having a way to test each patient for old and new drug sensitivities and value, and to have a scalable process to create large cell sources for heart regeneration.”

Reference: 1.Gun-Sik Cho, Dong I. Lee, Emmanouil Tampakakis, Sean Murphy, Peter Andersen, Hideki Uosaki, Stephen Chelko, Khalid Chakir, Ingie Hong, Kinya Seo, Huei-Sheng Vincent Chen, Xiongwen Chen, Cristina Basso, Steven R. Houser, Gordon F. Tomaselli, Brian O?Rourke, Daniel P. Judge, David A. Kass, Chulan Kwon. Neonatal Transplantation Confers Maturation of PSC-Derived Cardiomyocytes Conducive to Modeling Cardiomyopathy. Cell Reports, 2017; 18 (2): 571 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.12.040