Suicide is the cause of over 800,000 deaths around the world each year according to estimates from the World Health Organization, amounting to one death every 40 seconds. It affects all age groups and all parts of the world[1]. In France, the emergency services handle 220,000 suicide attempts every year[2], and 10,500 individuals take their own lives.
Researchers from Inserm, the Université Paris Diderot, King’s College London, and the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore have identified a gene that may be associated with brain lesions that can be caused by preterm birth. This study is published today in Nature Communications.
In 2014, Inserm researcher Jean-Philippe Lachaux launched the ATOL (Attentif à l'écOLe or Attention at School) program, which aims to use neuroscientific knowledge to improve children's attention span in school. A thousand children from 40 classes, spanning the French equivalents of kindergarten to the 7th grade, have now benefited from this program, which is funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
A recent study conducted by Anne Giersch and her team of researchers (Inserm Unit 1114 /University of Strasbourg) showed that some people with schizophrenia are unable to perceive and anticipate the passage of time. These results, published in the Scientific Reports journal, also reveal a link between fragile temporal prediction and minimal self disorders (self-perception, "I am here, now").
Scientists at the Institut Pasteur, CNRS and Inserm, together with a team from Switzerland*, have shown that the bacterial pathogen Legionella pneumophila (the causative agent of Legionnaires’ disease or legionellosis) has developed a specific strategy to target the host cell mitochondria, the organelles in charge of cellular bioenergetics. By changing the shape of these host organelles, L. pneumophila impairs mitochondrial respiration leading to metabolic changes in the host cell...
It’s good news. Over the last 20 years there has been a marked improvement in the survival rate of preterm infants, and rates of brain damage at the age of 2 years have halved. These are the latest results of the EPIPAGE-2 study carried out by researchers from the Inserm group EPOPé - Obstetrical, Perinatal, and Pediatric Epidemiology Team at the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Statistics, Sorbonne...
Teams from the virology, hematology-bone marrow transplant and biostatistics departments of the Saint-Louis Hospital, AP-HP, Université Paris Diderot and INSERM, in collaboration with scientists from the University of California-San Francisco (USA) discovered that a group of viruses in the intestine may trigger the onset of graft-versus-host disease. Researchers demonstrated the role of this intestinal "virome" (the population of viruses found in the intestine) in the onset of graft-versus-host disease...
The origin, development, and characteristics of two types of testicular macrophage have been described by a CNRS team at the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CNRS / INSERM / Aix-Marseille University). To elucidate the nature of these immune cells, the researchers used a novel cell tracing method. Their findings were published on August 7, 2017, in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, and are of fundamental importance. They may help understand certain kinds of...
Researchers from Généthon, the AFM-Téléthon laboratory, Inserm (UMR 1089, Nantes) and the University of London (Royal Holloway) demonstrated the efficacy of an innovative gene therapy in the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Indeed, after injecting microdystrophin (a “shortened” version of the dystrophin gene) via a drug vector, the researchers managed to restore muscle strength and stabilise the clinical symptoms in dogs naturally affected by Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A first....
On July 13, 2017, the journal Lancet Neurology published the results of a gene therapy trial conducted in four children with Sanfilippo type B syndrome (also known as MPS IIIB). This trial is the achievement of a two-decade partnership with financial support of AFM-Téléthon and the cooperation of the charity "Vaincre les Maladies Lysosomales" (VML). After monitoring of the treated children for 30 months, Dr. Jean-Michel Heard, from the...