Are you or your spouse/daughter/partner pregnant or trying to get pregnant? Get your vitamin D blood test and boost your levels. '''Newborns with vitamin D deficiency had a

44 per cent increased risk

of being diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.'''

Maybe all newborns should get dosed with vitamin D periodically? Actually, probably holds true for many adults as well, especially anons spending all their waking hours at their computer.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-link-neonatal-vitamin-d-deficiency.html

Link between neonatal vitamin D deficiency and schizophrenia confirmed

December 6, 2018, University of Queensland

Newborns with vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, a team of Australian and Danish researchers has reported.

The discovery could help prevent some cases of the disease by treating vitamin D deficiency during the earliest stages of life.

The study, led by Professor John McGrath from The University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia and Aarhus University in Denmark, found newborns with vitamin D deficiency had a 44 per cent increased risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.

"Schizophrenia is a group of poorly understood brain disorders characterised by symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions and cognitive impairment," he said.

"As the developing foetus is totally reliant on the mother's vitamin D stores, our findings suggest that ensuring pregnant women have adequate levels of vitamin D may result in the prevention of some schizophrenia cases, in a manner comparable to the role folate supplementation has played in the prevention of spina bifida."

Professor McGrath, of UQ's Queensland Brain Institute, said the study, which was based on 2602 individuals, confirmed a previous study he led that also found an association between neonatal vitamin D deficiency and an increased risk of schizophrenia.

The team made the discovery by analysing vitamin D concentration in blood samples taken from Danish newborns between 1981 and 2000 who went on to develop schizophrenia as young adults.

The researchers compared the samples to those of people matched by sex and date of birth who had not developed schizophrenia.

Professor McGrath said schizophrenia is associated with many different risk factors, both genetic and environmental, but the research suggested that neonatal vitamin D deficiency could possibly account for about eight per cent of schizophrenia cases in Denmark.

"Much of the attention in schizophrenia research has been focused on modifiable factors early in life with the goal of reducing the burden of this disease," he said.

"Previous research identified an increased risk of schizophrenia associated with being born in winter or spring and living in a high-latitude country, such as Denmark.

"We hypothesised that low vitamin D levels in pregnant women due to a lack of sun exposure during winter months might underlie this risk, and investigated the association between vitamin D deficiency and risk of schizophrenia."

Professor McGrath said that although Australia had more bright sunshine compared to Denmark, vitamin D deficiency could still be found in pregnant women in Australia because of our lifestyle and sun-safe behaviour.

Professor McGrath, who holds a prestigious Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University, also led a 2016 Dutch study that found a link between prenatal vitamin D deficiency and increased risk of childhood autism traits.

"The next step is to conduct randomised clinical trials of vitamin D supplements in pregnant women who are vitamin D deficient, in order to examine the impact on child brain development and risk of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia."

Journal article: Darryl W. Eyles et al, The association between neonatal vitamin D status and risk of schizophrenia, Scientific Reports (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-35418-z

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35418-z

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-major-breakthrough-quest-cancer-vaccine.html

Major breakthrough in quest for cancer vaccine

December 6, 2018, University of Montreal

The idea of a cancer vaccine is something researchers have been working on for over 50 years, but until recently they were never able to prove exactly how such a vaccine would work.

Now, a team of researchers at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at Université de Montréal has demonstrated that a vaccine can work. Not only that, it could become an extremely effective, non-invasive and cost-effective cancer-fighting tool.

The team's work was published yesterday in Science Translational Medicine.

The discovery represents a major breakthrough in the quest for a cancer vaccine, a highly competitive pursuit in which numerous research teams around the world are engaged. Unlike other teams, however, IRIC's looked for a solution in an unusual place: non-coding DNA sequences.

Better recognition of antigens

In 2000 and 2005, a number of studies were able to show that immune-defence cells (T lymphocytes) are capable of recognizing and penetrating cancer cells in order to attack them. "The longer the tumour is infiltrated by the lymphocytes, the longer the patient's survival," explained Claude Perreault, a principal investigator on the IRIC team, along with Pierre Thibault and Sébastien Lemieux. "In patients whose tumours are under greatest attack by T lymphocytes, a drug developed 12 years ago that stimulates their immune system is capable of fighting 25 per cent of cancer cases," Perreault said.

T lymphocytes recognize tumours by the presence of foreign antigens – or peptides – on the surface of cells. However, even if these antigens are recognized by the immune system, they do not sufficiently stimulate it for the lymphocytes to target and destroy them. As such, the search for a vaccine has focused on identifying tumour-specific antigens in order to allow the immune system to attack them more effectively. Since these antigens are the result of defective genes, various research teams have tracked the culprits to the portion of DNA known to encode antigens and proteins. But they have not been successful.

"This portion of DNA makes up only 2 per cent of the human genome," Perreault explained. "DNA sequences known to be "non-coding" may have been "silenced" by the methylation of DNA that affects gene expression. It is here, in this non-coding DNA, which is estimated to account for 98 per cent of the DNA of our cells, that our work is focused."

An effective test vaccine

Using mice injected with various types of cancer cells, the IRIC team was able to identify numerous antigens deriving from the non-coding portion of DNA, several of which were both specific to cancer cells and common to different types of cancer. This allowed the team to develop a vaccine based on leukemia cells containing some of the identified antigens, which was administered to the mice. The results were highly encouraging.

"Each antigen we tested eliminated 10 to 100 per cent of the leukemia," said Perreault, adding that "some of the antigens protected the mouse for its entire life, despite the reinjection of new leukemia cells. This suggests a long-lasting effect."

Hope for several types of cancer

The same antigens were subsequently identified in leukemia cells in humans. Perreault describes his team's findings as extremely promising and as opening up the possibility for the development of vaccines to treat leukemia and lung cancer in humans.

The IRIC team focused on these two specific types of cancer because they are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the number of mutations at their source. The fact that the vaccine has proven effective to treat leukemia, which is caused by a small number of mutations, holds promise for the efficacy of this therapy in fighting all other types of cancer as well.

[Moar at website]

Journal article at: Céline M. Laumont et al. Noncoding regions are the main source of targetable tumor-specific antigens, Science Translational Medicine (2018). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aau5516

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/470/eaau5516