Japan’s health ministry sets new guidelines for tie-up ads in movies and TV shows - The Japan Times

Common sweeteners may be doing much more inside our bodies than simply replacing sugar. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have discovered that many widely used sweeteners can directly interfere with the growth of gut bacteria, and their effects can become even more pronounced when combined with medications or other everyday substances. In laboratory experiments involving 39 sweeteners and 25 species of gut bacteria, researchers found that roughly three-quarters of the sweeteners altered the growth of at least one bacterial species. Some slowed or completely stopped the growth of microbes associated with a healthy digestive system.

A protein associated with youth may help aging brain cells regain some of their lost abilities. Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered that TIMP2 plays an important role in keeping the brain's immune cells healthy, offering new clues about how the brain changes with age. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers found that removing TIMP2 caused brain immune cells, known as microglia, to develop characteristics linked to aging and neurodegenerative disease. When the scientists restored TIMP2 in the bloodstream of older mice, these cells became better at removing cellular debris and showed fewer molecular signs of inflammation and other potentially harmful changes.

AJMC news storyOncologic factors, not HIV viral suppression status, determine how well people with HIV fare after a lymphoma diagnosis, according to a retrospective cohort study published in HIV Medicine. Lymphoma has remained one of the most common cancers in people with HIV since the earliest years of the epidemic, and that risk has persisted even as antiretroviral therapy (ART) transformed HIV from a fatal illness into a manageable chronic condition. A 2024 protocol published in BMJ Open, outlining a planned systematic review to quantify that excess burden worldwide, noted that people with AIDS face roughly 400 times the risk of high-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and about 15 times the risk of low-grade NHL compared with the general population. Because ART has sharply reduced AIDS-defining malignancies, clinicians have debated whether virologic control should factor into how aggressively to treat a lymphoma, or whether oncologic staging and histology alone should drive therapy.

Bioengineer.org news storyFor millions of people living with HIV, antiretroviral therapy has transformed a once-fatal infection into a manageable chronic condition. Yet the very drugs that suppress the virus can carry quiet costs, and one of the most insidious is bone loss. Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, or TDF, has been a cornerstone of HIV treatment worldwide for two decades, prized for its potency, durability, and low cost. But a growing body of evidence has linked TDF exposure to measurable reductions in bone mineral density, raising an increasingly urgent clinical question: once bone has been lost on a TDF-based regimen, can it be recovered? A new prospective cohort study, published in BMC Infectious Diseases, offers some of the most detailed longitudinal evidence to date that the answer, for many patients, is yes. The research team enrolled 223 virologically suppressed men living with HIV who had low bone mineral density while taking TDF-based antiretroviral therapy.