Broken bones can mean weeks of having to wear a cast and the muscle atrophy that comes with that. More severe breaks can take months to mend, result in restricted movement, or in the worst cases the possible loss of a limb. There’s also the chance of re-fracture due to the amount of time some breaks take to heal if a patient isn’t extremely careful.

Speeding up the time it takes to heal a broken bone is highly desirable, and a solution may be on the horizon. Research being carried out at the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Centre has helped create a new gel being referred to as Fracture Putty. It’s major benefit to those suffering broken bones is its ability to heal them in just a few days, or in the case of severe breaks, cut the healing time to weeks instead of months.

Fracture Putty has yet to be tested on humans, but it has already been proven to work in animals. The putty takes the form of a gel that gets injected into the broken bones. It then goes to work rapidly generating bone much faster than a body can achieve on its own — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A skin cancer drug may rapidly reverse pathological, cognitive and memory deterioration associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research published on Thursday.

Bexarotene, a drug that is currently used to combat T cell lymphoma, appeared to reverse plaque buildup and improve memory in the brains of mice with Alzheimer’s disease by reducing levels of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that cause mental deficits in Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers said the findings were particularly promising because the drug worked with unprecedented speed by reducing soluble amyloid by 25 percent and its build-up in the brain by 50 percent in three days — via redwolf.newsvine.com