A Look Back: The Major Health Breakthroughs Of 2016

For many people across the globe, 2016 was a rough and extremely polarizing year — to the point that plenty of folks are more than happy to get it over and done with, already! In the field of health, however, some very important breakthroughs took place that have largely been overshadowed by news about key political events, and even the deaths of some of the world's most favorite musicians. 

The First New Antibiotic In Three Decades 

Everyone who keeps up-to-date with health news has gradually grown used to alarming articles about growing antibiotic resistance. While a post-antibiotic world is a dystopic future we all hope our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to avoid, the reality is that 23,000 people already lose their lives because of anbibiotic-resistant superbug infections, annually in the United States alone. 

Antibiotics were previously believed to come from soil bacteria and fungi alone, but 2016 has shown us that the human microbiome offers an exciting new source of potential antibiotics. lugdunin, a study published in the journal Nature showed, has already been proven to have the potential to fight MRSA superbug infections in mice. 

Is A Cure For HIV On The Horizon?

British clinicians and scientists made remarkable progress during what the director of the National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infra­structure, Mike Samuels, deemed "one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV". The research combines traditional antiretroviral drugs for HIV with a medication to reactivate dormant HIV cells and a vaccine that triggers the body's immune system to destroy remaining copies of the virus.

READ HIV: An Overview Of Antiretroviral Drugs

This isn't the first time someone with HIV was reported "cured" only for subsequent tests to show otherwise, but if this novel treatment turns out to really work, 2016 will forever be marked as the year during which a cure for HIV was discovered. 

Stem-Cell Therapy Helps Paralyzed Man Regain Limb Mobility

Kristopher Boesen from California was left paralyzed from the neck down, and unable to breathe without assistance, after he was involved in a car accident in March 2016. He then went on to receive the very bad news that he may never be able to use his limbs again. As soon after as April, however, Kris became part of a clinical trial with AST-OPC1, a treatment derived derived from myelin-stimulating embryonic stem cells.

Two weeks later, Kris regained partial movement within his hands and arms, and went on to once again feed himself, write with a pen, and even hug his loved ones, making a treatment that would once have belonged squarely to the realm of science fiction a reality!

Key Health And Healthcare Breakthroughs Of 2016

Bugs Are The Future!

When Chinese and English researchers teamed up to analyze the nutritional contents of various bugs in comparison to beef sirloin, they found that cricket, mealworm, buffalo worm and grasshopper all featured higher concentrations of essential nutrients such as zinc, calcium, copper and magnesium, as well as offering a more easily absorbed form of iron. Bugs, which are already enjoyed as part of the regular diet in many parts of the world, including South-East Asia, were confirmed to being more nutritious than the meats we typically eat as well as being low-fat and high in proteins. With novel restaurants offering bugs on the menu springing up all over the Western world, we can truly say that eating bugs is the future. Eating bugs doesn't only benefit the environment (while 10 kilos of food will give us only a kilo of beef, only 50 percent of which will be consumed, the same amount of feed will gives us nine kilos of bug meat, 95 percent of which can end up on your dinner table), it's hip and healthy as well!

New Breast Cancer Genes Discovered

A large and revolutionary study of breast cancer genomes, published in the journals Nature and Nature Communications, and analyzing a total of 560 breast cancer genomes, identified five new breast cancer genes and 13 mutational signatures. Not only did the analysis offer new insights into underlying reasons for the occurrence of breast cancer, it may also pave the way towards individualized medicine in the future. 

Researcher Dr Serena Nik-Zainal said: "We'd like to be able to profile individual cancer genomes so that we can identify the treatment most likely to be successful for a woman or man diagnosed with breast cancer."

Zika Breakthrough Found In Existing Medicines

2016 was the year that put the Zika virus on the global map, as the World Health Organization declared a a global public health emergency after increasing numbers of babies were born with microcephaly, widely speculated to be caused by a virus most people were previously completely unaware of existing. 

READ Could The Zika Virus Be Responsible For A Serious Autoimmune Brain Disorder In Adults Too?

However, when researchers from Florida State University, Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health teamed up in the search for possible treatments among FDA-approved drugs or those already going through clinical trials, they were successful. They identified two pre-existing medications, one of which is the tapeworm drug Nicolsamide, that can together work to prevent the Zika viruses from replicating and damaging fetal brain cells in pregnant women. 

Onwards!

What's in store for us in 2017? Plenty, as it turns out! A mini pacemaker requiring no wires and offering a much less invasive surgical procedure should be FDA-approved sometime during the first half of 2017. A drug inhibiting LDL (or "bad") cholesterol is also expected to be approved, while a device allowing people with macular degeneration to see again will become available across the United States. Here at SteadyHealth, we are excited to be bringing you news of all the other major health breakthroughs that 2017 will no doubt see!