Ambitious climate action to improve global air quality could save up to 1.32 million lives per year by 2040, according to a new study.

The research, led by Cardiff University, shows how developing countries rely heavily on international cooperation to see these benefits, because much of their pollution originates outside their borders.

The first-of-its-kind study analysed these cross-border pollution “exchanges” for nearly every country – 168 in total.

In rural regions of Africa, high blood pressure often goes untreated because health centres are far away and there is a shortage of health professionals. A study in Lesotho shows that, with the help of a tablet app, villagers who have received training achieve better blood pressure control in their village community compared to normal treatment in healthcare facilities. The results provide the first robust data for an approach that could significantly improve access to blood pressure treatment in underserved regions. The study was conducted by the University of Basel and the Swiss non-profit NGO SolidarMed.

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine discovered a surprising new way the body can fight insulin resistance and diabetes – by boosting a special type of “good” immune cell in fat tissue. Announced today in Nature Communications, the preclinical findings pave the path to develop a medication to treat and prevent type 2 diabetes, potentially replacing or supplementing GLP-1 weight maintenance drugs that lose effectiveness over time.

A recent study published in Science China Life Sciences demonstrates that disulfiram, a drug used to treat alcoholism, can suppress liver cancer by regulating lipid metabolism and angiogenesis. Researchers found that disulfiram upregulates the gene c-FOS by reducing its RNA methylation, which in turn inhibits key molecules involved in lipid accumulation and blood vessel formation in tumors. This discovery highlights a promising repurposing potential for disulfiram in hepatocellular carcinoma therapy.

A new study published in Life Metabolism reports that a single post-meal blood biomarker, 1-hour postprandial SPARC (SPARC-1H), can predict who will benefit most from adopting a Mediterranean diet. The discovery provides one of the clearest examples to date of how precision nutrition can identify individualized dietary responses using a simple blood test rather than complex multi-omics models.

A research team led by Professors Joo-Yong Hahn, Young Bin Song, and Ki Hong Choi of the Division of Cardiology at Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, together with Professor Yong Hwan Park of Samsung Changwon Hospital, has demonstrated that clopidogrel is more effective than aspirin as a long-term antiplatelet therapy in patients at high risk of recurrent cardiovascular events after coronary stent implantation.