In 2010, Inserm and the French Directorate-General of Health signed a partnership agreement to evaluate the health benefits of various forms of alternative medicine practiced in France. In a new report published today, researchers from Inserm focused on cryotherapy, a technique in which the body is exposed for 2 to 3 minutes to intense cold ranging […]
In order to see objects clearly, our eyes need to be able to work together by superimposing the images perceived by each eye: by rotating inwards (convergence) when the object is close, and by releasing this convergence when switching to object farther away. This ability of our eyes to perform symmetrical and coordinated movements (at […]
An international team led by Toby Lawrence, Inserm researcher at Unit 1104 Center of Immunology Marseille-Luminy (Inserm / CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université), has developed a potential therapy to reduce tumor size, where previous drugs have failed. Its findings have been published in Journal of Experimental Medicine. Tumors develop from abnormal cells in the body that […]
To estimate the health of their elderly patients, healthcare professionals have various clinical tools at their disposal: geriatric assessment scales, health questionnaires and frailty scores. However, although these tests are appropriate to a medical context, they are more difficult for primary care physicians (PCPs) to implement because they require time and equipment that they do […]
The VirPath team from the International Center for Infectiology Research (CIRI, Inserm Unit 1111 – CNRS Joint Research Unit 5308 – ENS Lyon – UCBL1), in collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Guy Boivin (Canada Research Chair in Emerging Viruses, Infectious Diseases Research Center of the University Hospital of Quebec – Université Laval), has developed […]
In humans, “Theory of Mind” is the ability to understand others’ mental states: what they think, what they feel, what they desire, what they love, etc. It plays a major role in human social interactions. But where did this ability evolve from? What type of selection pressure ultimately led to this being imparted on the […]
Pregnancy is a sensitive time, particularly in the first months. Pregnant women are therefore strongly advised to limit their use of medicines, as some of their effects are yet poorly known. Nevertheless, a recent study conducted by Inserm researchers from Unit 1181 “Biostatistics, Biomathematics, Pharmacoepidemiology and Infectious Diseases”, reveals that pregnant French women are among […]
Between November 2014 and November 2015, a study conducted by Inserm (Unit 912 SESSTIM – Economic and Social Sciences, Health Systems and Medical Informatics), Université Aix-Marseille, IRD, CNRS and the PACA Regional Health Observatory, trialed the unit-dose dispensing of certain antibiotics across four regions in France. Out of 100 volunteer pharmacies, 75 pharmacies were randomly […]
The way in which people make decisions can sometimes seem reckless or even totally irrational. One explanation for this behavior is that humans tend to prefer information that confirms their beliefs and overlook that which contradicts them. This is a phenomenon called confirmation bias. In recent research published in PLoS Computational Biology, a team […]
Osteoarthritis is an incapacitating condition with diverse etiologies, the most recently described of which is metabolic syndrome (MetS). For the first time, researchers from the “Molecular Engineering and Articular Physiopathology” (Cnrs/Université de Lorraine) and “Acute and chronic cardiovascular failure” (Inserm/Université de Lorraine) research laboratories in Nancy, France, have described the spontaneous development of this type […]