Coffee may help shield the liver from fat, scarring, and cancer - Science Daily

If puberty is like climbing a physiological cliff, then menopause may be like falling off one. A new study, published in Nature Medicine, argues that the end of menstruation is not a gradual part of aging, as previously assumed, but an abrupt physiological transition. Using more than 300 million lab tests from over one million women, the new study identifies a number of sudden 'jumps' that occur throughout the body when menopause begins. Some of the most obvious changes are to do with sex hormones, which the ovaries help produce, but there are also sudden shifts in bone health, liver function, kidney function, blood chemistry, and blood fats. "Menopause reshapes female physiology, yet current understanding islimited by small longitudinal cohorts that characterize it as a gradualtransition," explain the authors, led by molecular cell biologist Glen Pridham from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. That may be a misconception. Pridham and colleagues have instead used a computational framework to analyze the transition to menopause in two large cohorts of women, one in the United States and another in Israel.

A small clinical trial led by researchers at Dana Farber Cancer Institute has tested a treatment strategy that began with laboratory discoveries at the Salk Institute. The idea is to activate the vitamin D receptor and, in doing so, alter the protective environment surrounding pancreatic tumors. That change could potentially make this notoriously difficult cancer more vulnerable to existing treatments. The study, published in Nature Cancer, included patients with previously untreated metastatic pancreatic cancer. Participants received standard chemotherapy either alone or in combination with paricalcitol, a vitamin D analog already approved by the FDA for other medical uses.