Health Highlights: Oct. 3, 2016

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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

Japanese Scientist Wins Nobel for Medicine

Japanese researcher Yoshinori Ohsumi has won this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine for his groundbreaking work on the life of the cell.

According to the Associated Press, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm — which bestows the prizes — gave the award to Ohsumi for his “brilliant experiments” in the 1990s on a cellular process called autophagy. Autophagy is the mechanism by which cells recycle their content.

Disruptions in autophagy have been tied to a number of human illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and cancer, the Karolinska Institute said.

While researchers have known about autophagy for half a century, its “fundamental importance in physiology and medicine was only recognized after Yoshinori Ohsumi’s paradigm-shifting research in the 1990s,” Karolinska noted in its citation.

Ohsumi was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan. He is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The Nobel carries a prize worth about $930,000, the AP said.

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