A consistent sleep schedule is key to unlocking healthy benefits such as skin that feels fresh and rejuvenated and a strong heart and immune system. A new study says that you can catch up on sleep on the weekend and undo some of the damage caused by lack of zzz’s Monday through Friday—like feeling like you’re drunk at work.

The findings were published in the Journal of Sleep Research, which analyzed the relationship between sleep and mortality rates; it examined data from more than 38,000 adults in Sweden who answered a medical survey in 1997 and then were tracked for 13 years through a national death register. According to the results, people younger than 65 who got five hours of sleep or less seven days a week had a 65 percent higher morality rate than people who got a healthy six or seven hours of sleep. (In case I hadn’t stressed this enough, sleep really is important!) But they also showed that people who got five hours of sleep a night during the week and then caught up on weekends by snoozing for eight hours or more a night experienced the same mortality rate as those who consistently slept six or seven hours nightly.

However, too much regular sleep (eight or more hours nightly) was linked to a 25 percent higher mortality rate than those who slept six or seven hours nightly—but that may be because oversleeping can be an indicator of health problems, as lead author of the study, Torbjörn Åkerstedt, PhD, a professor and director of Stress Research Institute, told The Guardian.

Although busy bees will be pleased to hear their hectic lifestyles won’t negatively impact their longevity (at least where zzz’s are concerned), you should know that the study is limited: Participants were only asked about their sleep habits once in 1997, and they self-reported them, which sacrifices accuracy. Still, Stuart Peirson PhD, associate Professor in the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, said the results make sense, since the longer you are awake the more sleep you need—your “sleep debt” needs to be “paid off,” he told The Guardian.

Hopefully, additional research will find further evidence to support the ethos of work hard, sleep hard.

McMaster University researchers have found cord blood that has been stored through freezing for long periods of time has the potential to be used as a treatment for breast cancer.

The research comes as McMaster health scientists seek additional medical opportunities for frozen, or cryopreserved, cord blood currently in storage around the world, since this reservoir is most commonly used for stem cell transplants.

The results were recently published in The Journal of Immunotherapy.

“It is important to explore ways we can utilize the vast quantities of long-term cryopreserved cord blood and understand its full potential as a therapeutic product,” said Ali Ashkar, corresponding author and professor of the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine with McMaster’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.

Comparing 10.5 and 2.5 year-old cryopreserved blood to fresh cord blood, researchers derived what are called ‘natural killer’ cells. This is a type of white blood cell that is important in eliminating tumour and virus-infected cells. 

Based on experimentation conducted outside of the human body, known as ex vivo, researchers measured the ability to generate vast quantities of activated natural killer cells and their effectiveness in destroying breast cancer cells.

The results showed long-term cryopreservation had no negative effect on the expansion potential or function of the activated cord blood natural killer cells. The research also indicated these cells had a particular effectiveness in attacking primary breast cancer cells.

“We demonstrated it is possible to obtain an exponential amount of natural killer cells from older cryopreserved cord blood,” said Ashkar. “This makes it a viable source of cells for the advancing field of natural killer cell cancer immunotherapy, especially as it applies to breast cancer.”

There are currently more than 600,000 units of cord blood stored globally, with that number expected to increase as storage technology develops. To date, there have been approximately 30,000 cord blood transplants performed.

“Cord blood can be stored at birth so that in the event it is needed, it can later be used to help treat the child,” said Tina Nham, lead author of the study and a second-year McMaster medical student. “This study demonstrates that instead of discarding cord blood samples when the child is grown, cord blood can be cryopreserved and later harnessed as an immunotherapy with the potential to treat a variety of illnesses including breast cancer.”

“It is unclear what happens to publicly or privately-banked cord blood samples that are stored for extensive periods of time,” said Ashkar. “We suggest the ability to store cord blood samples that maintain functionality after decades of cryopreservation, as this raises the possibility of housing vast, diverse and long-lasting donor libraries where readily available sources of therapeutic natural killer cells can be harvested.”

Additional authors on the study came from McMaster University’s Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, McMaster Immunology Research Centre and the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The original article can be viewed here.

Another reason to save your baby’s cord blood stem cells today. 

Stroke is a major cause of death and long-term disability, affecting one in six people worldwide. The only currently available approved pharmacological treatment for ischemic stroke is tissue plasminogen activator; however, relatively few patients are eligible for this therapy.

We hypothesized that intravenous (IV) infusion of banked unrelated allogeneic umbilical cord blood (UCB) would improve functional outcomes in patients with ischemic stroke. To investigate this, we conducted a phase 1 open-label trial to assess the safety and feasibility of a single IV infusion of non-human leukocyte antigen (HLA) matched, ABO matched, unrelated allogeneic UCB into adult stroke patients. Ten participants with acute middle cerebral artery ischemic stroke were enrolled. UCB units were matched for blood group antigens and race but not HLA, and infused 3-9 days post-stroke. The adverse event (AE) profile over a 12 month postinfusion period indicated that the treatment was well-tolerated in these stroke patients, with no serious AEs directly related to the study product.

Study participants were also assessed using neurological and functional evaluations, including the modified Rankin Score (mRS) and National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS). At 3 months post-treatment, all participants had improved by at least one grade in mRS (mean 2.8 ± 0.9) and by at least 4 points in NIHSS (mean 5.9 ± 1.4), relative to baseline.

Together, these data suggest that a single i.v. dose of allogeneic non-HLA matched human UCB cells is safe in adults with ischemic stroke, and support the conduct of a randomized, placebo-controlled phase 2 study. Stem Cells Translational Medicine 2018.

The original article can be viewed here.