ALS is driven by a domino‑like chain reaction that begins in nerve cells
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 23-Jun-2026 03:16 ET (23-Jun-2026 07:16 GMT/UTC)
A new Northwestern Medicine study publishing in Nature Neurosciences has identified evidence that ALS unfolds through a domino‑like sequence of events that begins with an early breakdown inside motor neurons and is followed by a damaging inflammatory response. The findings help explain why the disease worsens over time, why some patients progress faster than others and how future treatments could be more personalized.
Dear Experts and Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to present and participate in our first annual Experimental Therapeutics at Ruijin meeting, to be held on June 1st to 4th, 2026, at Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. Annual meeting will bring together leading investigators to share experiences in translating scientific discoveries into clinical success. We hope the event will provide every participant—faculty, students, and guests alike—with valuable insights and a stimulating exchange of ideas. The organizers are:
H. Michael Shepard, PhD – Experimental Therapeutics Group, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai
Baiyong Shen, MD – Professor and Chief Physician, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai
Mone Zaidi, PhD – Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
We anticipate a high level of interest in this topic and will provide ample opportunity for meaningful interaction and discussion among participants. Some presentations will highlight programs with regulatory approval, while most will focus on those with preclinical or early clinical proof of concept.
We sincerely hope you can join us for this exciting event in Shanghai.
Time: June 1st to 4th, 2026
Location: 1F Lecture Hall, Building 35, Translational Medicine Building, No. 197 Ruijin 2nd Road, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai, China
Contact: ying.zhang@jueqianmed.com
Kyoto, Japan -- Despite their crucial function, public hospitals often face limited resources and financial distress, and an aging population can further exacerbate any imbalances in medical resource distribution. Furthermore, the proportion of aging individuals is not uniform across the country; in Japan, this has lead to regional disparities in healthcare for the elderly.
Previous studies suggest that restructuring public hospitals, though challenging, can alleviate the mismatch in healthcare resources. At least compared to private hospitals, it is more feasible to align public hospitals with regional needs. However, such studies often adopt qualitative approaches while lacking quantitative evidence to measure the effects of reorganization. This inspired a team of researchers at Kyoto University to examine the impact of public hospital restructuring on elderly hospital admissions in Japan.
"Many countries have reformed public hospitals to reduce resource imbalances, but there is limited information on the impact this has on communities and the regional healthcare system," says first author Kenji Kishimoto.
A widely used method for measuring how well streams absorb excess nutrients has a hidden flaw: it systematically overestimates uptake length under high-nutrient conditions. Researchers at Duke Kunshan University have derived a corrected zero-order analytical approach that better captures stream nutrient processing when nutrients are abundant, improving the accuracy of tools used to assess river health and guide restoration decisions.
A new review published in the journal Addiction confirms drinking causes substantial harm to health. Some of those harms may be reversible if the person reduces or stops drinking.
A new study published in Research describes a deep-learning system designed to assist lumbar spine MRI at the point of image acquisition rather than only after scanning. The system, named Lumbar VNet Pro (LVP), was embedded directly into the MRI workflow and evaluated in a multicenter clinical setting. According to the study, the platform supports automated anatomical localization, scan-plane optimization, and real-time structural analysis during MRI scanning, offering a possible route toward more standardized and intelligent imaging workflows.