Although there is no cure yet, science is tightening the siege on neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, and there are increasingly more and better diagnostic tools and new treatments that slow their progression. This Friday, the prestigious journal The Lancet published two investigations on new techniques that allow detecting Alzheimer's, which is the most common form of dementia, long before the first symptoms appear. They are a simple blood test, which has been shown in other studies to be a great tool for early diagnosis and is already used in hospitals, and a new brain scanner that improves the results of the technique currently used in the United States and Europe. The sooner the disease is identified, the sooner strategies can be deployed to delay its course, which is why it is essential to have early diagnosis tools.

New scientific milestone for Barcelona, which continues to take steps to consolidate itself as one of the European capitals of knowledge, research and innovation. This Thursday, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) has officially presented its third quantum computer, the EuroQCS-Spain, which with a cost of 9.8 million euros makes the institution one of the few centers in the world that combine supercomputing and quantum technology. "It is the only one with three quantum computers connected to a classic supercomputer," claimed the director of the BSC, Mateo Valero, during the presentation of the new technology, which has been co-financed by the European Commission and the Spanish government.

Menopause is a stage in all women's lives, with over a billion expected to be postmenopausal next year, according to the American Menopause Society. With the end of menstruation, the ovaries stop producing essential hormones, such as estrogen and progesterone, leading to physiological and hormonal changes that until a few years ago were associated with the onset of old age. Some of these symptoms, such as hot flashes, are widely known, but there are others that are not usually associated with menopause and that many women also experience. To enter this new stage in the best way and with good health, it is necessary to make lifestyle changes, such as incorporating physical exercise and following a good diet, and even consulting with experts about whether hormone replacement therapy is necessary.

A disease detected simultaneously in Barcelona, Lyon, and Berlin could be emerging as a new sexually transmitted infection (STI). This is the conclusion reached by professionals at Vall d'Hebron Hospital after diagnosing a dozen cases of dermatophilosis in recent months, a rare skin infection in humans caused by bacteria associated with animals, especially livestock such as horses, goats, and cows. This time, however, professionals believe that transmission has been from person to person through sexual contact, far from the animals that generally cause contagion and the tropical areas where this disease is more frequent.

Nearly 1.2 billion people worldwide live with a mental disorder, almost double the figure recorded in 1990. This is a blatant increase that places them as the leading cause of disability ahead of cardiovascular diseases and cancer, and they already account for one in six cases, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and the University of Queensland. The research findings are published in the journal The Lancet and indicate that they disproportionately affect adolescents between 15 and 19 years old and women. "These upward trends may reflect both the lingering effects of pandemic-related stress and long-term structural drivers, such as poverty, insecurity, abuse, violence, and declining social connectivity," explains Damian Santomauro, an associate professor at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research.

La Sagrada Família is already warming up its engines for the arrival of Pope Leo XIV with only 20 days left until his visit to the Catalan capital. It will be one of the highlights of Gaudí Year, which commemorates the centenary of the architect's death throughout this 2026. The Pope will officiate a Mass in his memory inside the temple and will then go outside to bless the tower of Jesus Christ, which at the beginning of the year was crowned with the cross that has made it the tallest religious building in Europe, with a height of 172.5 meters. Given the great expectation to attend the Eucharist, the general director of the Sagrada Família Construction Board, Xavier Martínez, has specified that there will be 4,000 people inside the temple and 4,000 more outside who will be able to experience live the ceremony officiated by the Pope.

It is not the same to receive a cancer diagnosis now as it was three decades ago. Patients' prognosis is radically better and so is their quality of life. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, on the other hand, are almost the same as 30 years ago: neurodegenerative diseases are unfortunately still irreversible and have no available cure. However, the appearance of the first approved drugs against Alzheimer's, which are reluctant to arrive in Spain, are disease modifiers, they delay its progression and are the first step towards a paradigm shift, as patients have had no therapy available until now. New and better diagnostic tools have also been developed, capable of anticipating symptoms and their evolution. This encourages professionals at the start of a revolution against these diseases, which have enough parallels to consider joint strategies in the future.

Just 24 hours after the Spanish government and the World Health Organization (WHO) congratulated each other on the management of the hantavirus outbreak, the provisional toll of this disease is 10 confirmed cases, three deaths, and dozens of people in isolation in different countries in case they develop symptoms. In Spain there is one positive case, which remains stable, while the rest of the Spanish passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius and those who briefly coincided with an infected woman on a plane from Johannesburg – one at the Hospital Clínico in Barcelona and another in Alicante – have tested negative in all the tests performed. In France, the situation is almost identical, but the only woman who has tested positive is hospitalized in an intensive care unit (ICU) in serious condition, and the professionals attending her are working to improve her prognosis. One of the challenges of this disease is that there is no treatment or vaccine available.

One of the fourteen Spanish passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius isolated at the Gómez Ulla Hospital has provisionally tested positive for hantavirus in the PCR test performed when the group entered this military center in Madrid to undergo quarantine. The other thirteen cruise ship passengers, on the other hand, have tested negative and will undergo a second test within seven days. The positive passenger is a man who, according to the Ministry of Health, is in good health and shows no symptoms. Following protocol, biological samples will be re-analyzed in the coming hours, and if the same result is repeated, he will be transferred to the High-Level Isolation and Treatment Unit (Uatan) of the same hospital, with stricter and more specific conditions for treating infectious diseases. The rest of the passengers will continue in individual rooms. The medical news coincided with the completion of the ship's evacuation operation and the repatriation of all passengers, except for about twenty crew members who have set sail for the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. "Mission accomplished," said the Minister of Health, Mónica García, in a press conference from the port of Granadilla, in Tenerife, where only disinfection of the facilities remains.

As happened six years ago due to the covid-19 pandemic, the hantavirus outbreak has shown that zoonoses, diseases transmitted between animals but with the potential to infect humans, are one of the great threats of the present and future for the health of the population. Although there are some parallels between the current escalation of infections and the covid-19 crisis —mainly the animal origin of the virus—, experts insist that the current situation is very different and assure that hantavirus does not have the capacity to cause a upheaval of the magnitude that coronavirus caused. It is much less contagious and, therefore, it is more unlikely to spread. However, they acknowledge that the growth of global mobility, the rise of extreme climate phenomena and rising temperatures will make the appearance of these types of diseases increasingly frequent.

In the last decade, at least 405 sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have been detected in children under 14 years old in Catalonia. Although they are a growing public health problem throughout Europe, the increase in cases in the younger age groups particularly worries health authorities, which is why the Department of Health has announced that it is extending surveillance of these infections to 12-year-olds. Promotion and prevention among adolescents will also be strengthened, and there will be clinical referents for these infections in primary care teams. These are some of the measures in the new STI care model, with which the aim is to reduce the number of cases, as since 2010 they have increased by an average of 32.4% each year and, for the first time in Catalonia, more than 40,000 were diagnosed in 2024, the last year with available data.

While the hantavirus-affected cruise ship is already heading towards the Canary Islands, the unknowns about the origin of the outbreak remain open. The World Health Organization (WHO) has downplayed the possibility that the infection was caused by the presence of rodents on board the vessel, so the most probable hypothesis at this point is that the first two fatalities, a Dutch couple, had contracted the virus before boarding the ship and that, once there, they had infected other passengers. Argentina, from where the cruise ship departed, has reconstructed the journey of the man and woman before embarking on the sea voyage. In the last four months, they had been in a large part of this country, but also in Chile and Uruguay, on a bird-watching trip. The strain responsible for the outbreak is native to the Andes and circulates in some of the areas where the couple had been.

The luxury cruise ship MV Hondius is sailing towards the Canary Islands after being immobilized for a few days off the coast of Cape Verde due to a hantavirus outbreak that has caused three deaths and at least eight positive cases among the 147 people on board. In total, there are thirteen passengers and one crew member of Spanish nationality, of whom five reside in Catalonia. Health authorities are finalizing the care circuits for individuals once they disembark, but the Department of Health has already indicated that it is most likely that Catalans will undergo home isolation once they return home, provided they continue to be asymptomatic as they have been so far.

It is a little-known virus to the public, it is transmitted mainly through rodents and has 147 people paralyzed on a luxury cruise ship off the coast of Cape Verde. The outbreak of hantavirus at sea, which has caused three deaths and at least seven positive cases among passengers on the Dutch ship, has awakened the ghosts of the 2020 pandemic due to some of these parallels with the COVID-19 crisis. However, experts are adamant: human-to-human infection is possible, but the virus is not contagious enough. "It has no pandemic potential," states Fernando Salvador, a specialist from the infectious diseases service at the Vall d'Hebron Hospital, who clarifies that the pathogen has been known for a long time and outbreaks like this occur occasionally, but most cases are usually sporadic and without risk of explosive spread.

When Carmen Boer is asked about her health, she responds with a long, ironic "Oof..." before quickly reviewing her list of ailments. This year she will turn 91, she has overcome two cancers – one breast and one colon – she has heart failure, chronic bronchitis, and an incurable kidney disease. Every day she takes a dozen medications. "Ten or eleven," she says with a smile, without specifying. Last year she went to the emergency room six times due to decompensation, and on three occasions, she had to be hospitalized. However, since she became part of a program for complex chronic patients at Vall d'Hebron Hospital, she has not returned to the emergency room or required any admission.

It is 12 at night and Nancy is watching a movie on Netflix like many Catalans do before going to sleep. She, however, is doing it from her mobile, on a street in Barcelona, ​​sheltered from the cold with a parka she uses as a blanket. Next to her is another girl sleeping on the ground covered with several layers. She has taken off her shoes to sleep and Nancy is watching her shoes, although she doesn't know her name. They met in the queue in front of the accompaniment center for the regularization of migrant people on Miquel Bleach street, which started operating on Monday to respond to high demand. Like them, this week hundreds of people living and working in Catalonia have spent the night at the doors of municipal buildings and social entities to obtain the vulnerability report or the census and complete the process to obtain residency and have a work permit in order.

The age at which sexual relations are had has advanced, there is a lack of knowledge in the prevention of sexually transmitted infections and the use of condoms has been decreasing in recent years among adolescents. It is the perfect scenario for sexually transmitted infections to become increasingly frequent in minors, which is why Vall d'Hebron Hospital launched a sexual infection clinic specifically for patients between 13 and 17 years old in 2019. In that time, it has already seen 345 adolescents, 41 of whom were seen last year. Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are a public health problem throughout Europe, and in Catalonia, for the first time, more than 40,000 cases were diagnosed in one year.

A multitude of white coats demonstrated this Monday morning on Sardenya street in Barcelona, in the vicinity of the Sagrada Familia, to demand – for the tenth time since autumn – a health agreement that exclusively regulates the conditions of doctors. In front of dozens of disoriented tourists who were also photographing the protest, half a thousand doctors have once again demanded improvements in working conditions from both the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Health, whom they accuse of ignoring their demands. "We will maintain the pressure to the limit of our strength," stated the union's general secretary, Xavier Lleonart.

To improve muscle strength, to increase endurance, to have more energy, to have better performance, to recover faster from a tough training session... The growing interest in the gym and the obsession with perfect bodies have increased the consumption of a series of products designed to perform better and more during workouts and achieve better results. It is a fever for supplements such as protein shakes, creatine, magnesium, omega-3, or vitamin D, among others, which have become popular in recent years, especially through social networks like Instagram or TikTok. In some cases, the recommendation comes from users who do not have the training or expertise in nutrition or sports medicine, and experts warn that before starting to take any of these supplements, one must consult a professional.

This Friday, Barcelona inaugurated the first center in the State fully dedicated to the study of immunotherapy and one of the only ones in Europe, the CaixaResearch Institute. It is a pioneering center in the world that is born with the objective of studying the functioning of the immune system to use it as a tool for the control and treatment of some of the most frequent diseases in the world, such as cancer, Alzheimer's, or tuberculosis. With an event that was attended by the King of Spain, Felipe VI, the center has opened its doors to try to answer some of the great unknowns of health. For this first year, the infrastructure will have a budget of 10 million euros. When it is fully operational, the CaixaResearch Institute will have more than 400 scientists dedicated to improving people's health and lives through immunology. This discipline is at the forefront of modern medicine, and there are increasingly more treatments aimed at stimulating the body's defenses. In recent decades, immunotherapies have revolutionized the approach to some pathologies that until then had no cure, but their potential is broad and, still, little explored. "This center is being launched with the aspiration of becoming an international benchmark and will seek to develop research that practically improves people's quality of life," claimed the president of the "La Caixa" Foundation, Isidre Fainé. However, he warned that it will be a difficult and complex path and that it will take time to start obtaining results, although he expressed confidence that they will eventually arrive. Fainé presided over the inauguration ceremony, which was attended by King Felipe VI; the president of Catalonia, Salvador Illa; the delegate of the Spanish government in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto; the Minister of Health, Mónica García; and the Minister of Research and Universities, Núria Montserrat, as well as members of the "La Caixa" Foundation's board of trustees and the scientific council of the new center, which is led by the renowned oncologist and researcher Josep Tabernero. In fact, he was the one who explained the mission of the new center: to better understand the immune system and leverage this knowledge to improve health. "The CaixaResearch Institute aims to be a space where basic science, data science, and environmental study converge under the prism of immunology, with collaboration as the norm and innovation from the outset," claimed Tabernero. Attracting talent

The new center, driven by an investment of 100 million euros and an area of 20,000 m², is located opposite the CosmoCaixa Science Museum. The institute already has more than twenty active professionals and, when fully operational, will have the capacity to host 45 research groups and units. This makes it, according to sources from the La Caixa Foundation, a hub for attracting and retaining international talent to Barcelona. The same sources have clarified that the intention is to collaborate with the different institutes and hospitals that make up Catalonia's biomedical research ecosystem, not to incorporate staff from these centers. Among the researchers already working there are four group leaders: Gabriel Rabinovich, a doctor in biochemistry from the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine in Buenos Aires; Josep Dalmau, a neurologist and researcher at IDIBAPS-Clínic; Gemma Moncunill, an immunologist specializing in vaccines and infectious diseases; and Héctor Huerga, an immunologist specializing in aging. They will be joined by Maria Mittelbrunn, the current leader of the laboratory of immunometabolism and inflammation at the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center, who has just joined the institute (she will start in the fall), and María Martínez, an immunologist who will join in July after completing her postdoctoral studies at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon.Lines of research

Tabernero has explained that the immune system works on two very complementary levels. On the one hand, there is innate immunity, which acts immediately against external threats such as viruses and bacteria, and on the other, adaptive immunity, which produces a more precise response, capable of recognizing specific threats, learning from them, and generating memory, which protects us when these threats reappear. "It is thanks to this system that, for example, vaccines work and protect us throughout our lives," the expert detailed. Along these lines, the group led by Dr. Moncunill will work to improve the efficacy and duration of vaccines, especially in vulnerable populations, and to understand the impact of infections on the immune system.But the immune system also acts as an internal surveillance system, Tabernero indicated, so it has the capacity to detect and eliminate damaged, infected, or premalignant cells before they can trigger more serious diseases such as cancer. The research of the group led by Rabinovich will be aimed at trying to understand how the immune system can be manipulated to open new therapeutic avenues in cancer, inflammation, and autoimmunity. "When this system fails – whether because it responds little or because it responds excessively – diseases can appear ranging from cancer to autoimmune, cardiovascular, or neurodegenerative diseases, which we are still trying to understand," said the center's scientific leader. Therefore, Dalmau's team will focus on diseases in which the immune system mistakenly attacks certain proteins in neurons and alters the correct functioning of the brain. Finally, Mittelbrunn and his group's work will focus on identifying new therapeutic targets in inflammatory, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases that allow for improved health in advanced ages.Catalonia is one of the regions in Europe where more clinical trials in cancer are conducted, it has a diverse and increasingly extensive ecosystem of research centers and hospitals, and from 2028 onwards, it will have a large hub of biomedicine crowned with the new Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), in the Ciutadella del Conocimiento. For Ernest Nadal, research director of the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO), this very favorable context for research in Barcelona is the legacy of many researchers from the city, and from now on they will have a new agent for scientific collaboration. "That they bet on immunotherapy is not by chance. It is one of the most transformative treatments in cancer, but also in other diseases, and there are still many challenges and much room for improvement," he values.

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