The cost of childbirth and postpartum health care results in significant, ongoing financial hardship, particularly for lower-income families with commercial insurance. About half of people who give birth in the United States are covered by commercial health insurance, which typically requires cost-sharing in the form of deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance.
Read more: High cost of childbirth and postpartum care causes biggest financial hardship for lower-income...
A new study changes the way we understand memory. Until now, memories have been explained by the activity of brain cells called neurons that respond to learning events and control memory recall. Neurologists have now expanded this theory by showing that non-neuronal cell types in the brain called astrocytes -- star-shaped cells -- also store memories and work in concert with groups of neurons called engrams to regulate storage and retrieval of memories.
Read more: Brain stars hold our memories
Neuroscientists have discovered brain cells that form multiple coordinate systems to tell us 'where we are' in a sequence of behaviors. These cells can play out different sequences of actions, just like a music box can be configured to play different sequences of tones. The findings help us understand the algorithms used by the brain to flexibly generate complex behaviors, such as planning and reasoning, and might be useful in understanding how such processes go wrong in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.
Read more: Brain acts like music box playing different behaviors
Some patients being treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, a type of cancer immunotherapy, develop a dangerous form of heart inflammation called myocarditis. Researchers have now uncovered the immune basis of this inflammation. The team identified changes in specific types of immune and stromal cells in the heart that underlie myocarditis and pinpointed factors in the blood that may indicate whether a patient's myocarditis is likely to lead to death.
Read more: How cancer immunotherapy may cause heart inflammation in some patients