The French Connection.

Replacing lithium with sodium.

1. Aging seems to affect cellular processes in the same way across five very different kinds of life — humans, fruit flies, rats, mice and worms — according to a study published in Nature on 12 April. The findings could help to explain what drives aging and offer suggestions for how to reverse it. “It opens up a really fundamental new area of understanding how and why we age,” says Lindsay Wu, a biochemist at UNSW Sydney in Australia. (Source: nature.com, research.unsw.edu.au)

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2. Early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease requires reliable and cost-effective screening methods. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now discovered that a type of sugar molecule in blood is associated with the level of tau, a protein that plays a critical role in the development of severe dementia. The study, which is published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, can pave the way for a simple screening procedure able to predict onset ten years in advance. (Source: news.ki.se)