It puts the emollient on its skin….

What’s the best moisturizer for kids with eczema — lotion, cream, gel, or ointment? A ‘first in the world’ study out of Britain found the answer: It doesn’t matter.

“[T]here was no difference in effectiveness of the four types of moisturiser used in the study.” All that matters, they found, is what the kid likes and will be more likely to use.

Small and mighty

Guys, are you a regular shopper at the ‘big and tall’ stores? Are you twice the man you once were, but your sperm hasn’t kept up? Good news, courtesy of those shifty Danes: You can double (!) your sperm count just by losing weight … and keeping it off.

Previous studies have also suggested a link between weight loss and increased semen quality, but these studies have had so few participants or such modest weight loss that it has been difficult to draw conclusions from them. “But now we are ready to do just that. This is the first long-term randomised study, where we have shown that semen quality in men with obesity improve with a sustained weight loss.”

And then, as a nod to the Danish Kaptajn Obvious, the University of Copenhagen gives us this shocker:

The new findings may be good news for fertility, as a link between higher sperm count and faster achievement of pregnancy has previously been shown.

Two interesting pieces of monkeypox news

1. The U.S. is releasing monkeypox vaccine from the national stockpile.
2. We apparently have a national stockpile of monkeypox vaccine.

NSAIDs’ secrets slowing emerging

NSAIDS are quirky little beasts. We know what they do — fight inflammation, yes, but they also have a variety of seemingly disconnected side effects.

[S]ome NSAIDs prevent heart disease while others cause it, some NSAIDs have been linked to decreased incidence of colorectal cancer, and various NSAIDs can have a wide range of effects on asthma.

It turns out (say Yale medical researchers) that some NSAIDs fight inflammation in different ways than we thought. Indomethacin and ibuprofen, for example, don’t inhibit enzymes the way we thought. Instead, they activate a protein (“nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2”, or NRF2) that itself triggers an anti-inflammatory response.

Could there be a whole chain of events coming out of NRF2? Mebbe. “That NRF2 does so much suggests that NSAIDs might have other effects, whether beneficial or adverse, that we haven’t yet looked for.”

Taking the brakes off brain repair

After a stroke, the brain — being the awesome organ that it is — tries to repair itself by repurposing undamaged neurons to take up the slack. You know what might help? Gabapentin. In mice, at least, researchers at an Ohio State University found it “helped neurons on the undamaged side of the brain take up the signaling work of lost cells.”

How? By blocking a particular protein that (for whatever reason) prevents axons from regrowing — ‘lifting the brake pedal,” as the lead author put it.

Results showed that daily gabapentin treatment for six weeks after a stroke restored fine motor functions in the animals’ upper extremities. Functional recovery also continued after treatment was stopped, the researchers found.

Do you think they put this on their CVs?

Medical researchers at Cedars Sinai have done what armchair programmers have only dreamt of: They designed a smartphone app to analyze poop. In fact, they say the app is not only better at evaluating patients’ poop than the patients themselves, it’s “as good as expert gastroenterologists at characterizing stool specimens.”

“The mobile app produced more accurate and complete descriptions of constipation, diarrhea and normal stools than a patient could and was comparable to specimen evaluations by well-trained gastroenterologists.”

Hey kids, get a puppy!

Do you want Mom or Dad to buy you a puppy? Here’s something you can try. Tell ’em, “A new study out of the American Gastroenterological Association found that living with a dog can reduce my risk of Crohn’s disease.” And if they’re iffy, say, “A large family also works, but I think dogs are easier to take care of.”

The study found that exposure to dogs, particularly from ages 5 to 15, was linked with healthy gut permeability and balance between the microbes in the gut and the body’s immune response, all of which might help protect against Crohn’s disease.

Melanoma breakthrough

Considering how much of their skin is exposed to the sun, Brazilians are naturally worried about melanoma. So researchers there were happy to stumble upon a useful peptide: one they called “Rb4” that seems to interfere with subcutaneous melanoma growth … at least in mice.

They don’t know how it works, but they know it does. “Tumor cells in the study lost the integrity of their plasma membranes.” And we all once your plasma membranes lose their integrity, well, the jig is up.

More science-y:

[T]he peptide interfered with the morphology, replication and association of B16F10-Nex2 melanoma cells cultured in the laboratory. In contrast with controls, cells treated with Rb4 did not replicate and formed clusters, losing their natural morphology after incubation for at most 24 hours.

Or, cutting to the chase, “The survival rate of mice treated with Rb4 was significantly greater than that of the controls.” As always, of course, more research is needed.

The Long Read: Rebound edition

“Paxlovid rebound” has gone from a handful of anecdotes to a full-fledged issue. (And that’s before Joe Rogan claims it’s some kind of Bill Gates/Illuminati/dwarf king/robot-George-Soros plot.) As Stat News explains, “Covid researchers scramble for answers.”