Air pollution likely contributed to almost 6 million premature births and almost 3 million underweight babies in 2019, according to a UC San Francisco and University of Washington global burden of disease study and meta-analysis that quantifies the effects of indoor and outdoor pollution around the world.
The analysis, published September 28, 2021, in PLOS Medicine, is the most in-depth look yet at how air pollution affects several key indicators of pregnancy, including gestational age at birth, reduction in birth weight, low birth weight, and preterm birth. And it is the first global burden of disease study of these indicators to include the effects of indoor air pollution, mostly from cook stoves, which accounted for two-thirds of the measured effects.
A growing body of evidence points to air pollution as a major cause of preterm birth and low birthweight. Preterm birth is the leading cause of neonatal mortality worldwide, affecting more than 15 million infants every year. Children with low birthweight or who are born premature have higher rates of major illness throughout their lives.
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 90 percent of the world’s population lives with polluted outdoor air, and half the global population is also exposed to indoor air pollution from burning coal, dung and wood inside the home.
“The air pollution-attributable burden is enormous, yet with sufficient effort, it could be largely mitigated,” said lead author Rakesh Ghosh, PhD, a prevention and public health specialist at the Institute for Global Health Sciences at UCSF.
The analysis, which was conducted with researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, quantified preterm birth and low birthweight risks based on total indoor and outdoor pollution exposure, while also accounting for the likelihood that the negative effects taper off at higher levels.
The study concluded that the global incidence of preterm birth and low birthweight could be reduced by almost 78 percent if air pollution were minimized in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where indoor pollution is common and preterm birth rates are the highest in the world.
But it also found significant risks from ambient air pollution in more developed parts of the world. In the United States, for example, outdoor air pollution is estimated to have contributed to almost 12,000 preterm births in 2019.
Previously, the same research team quantified the effects of air pollution on early life mortality, concluding that it contributed to the deaths of 500,000 newborns in 2019.
“With this new, global and more rigorously generated evidence, air pollution should now be considered a major driver of infant morbidity and mortality, not just of chronic adult diseases,” Ghosh said. “Our study suggests that taking measures to mitigate climate change and reduce air pollution levels will have significant health co-benefit for newborns.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of California – San Francisco. Original written by Cameron Scott. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Americans who received a third dose of a coronavirus vaccine in recent weeks reported side effects at roughly the same rates as they had after their second shots, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday, a reassuring sign about the safety of additional doses.At the time of the C.D.C. study, which stretched from mid-August to mid-September, additional vaccine doses were only authorized for people with compromised immune systems who had gotten two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine. Last week, though, federal regulators authorized Pfizer booster shots for broad swaths of the general population, making the safety of the additional doses an issue of intense interest for health officials, doctors and ordinary Americans.The C.D.C. analyzed how commonly people reported side effects after a third dose compared with a second among 12,600 recipients who had filled out surveys as part of a voluntary safety monitoring system.Reactions at the injection site, like pain or swelling, were reported by 79.4 percent of recipients after a third vaccine dose, compared with 77.6 percent after a second dose. Slightly smaller numbers of people experienced systemic reactions, like a fever or headache: 74.1 percent of people reported those side effects after dose three, compared with 76.5 percent after dose two.“Most reported local and systemic reactions were mild to moderate, transient, and most frequently reported the day after vaccination,” the study’s authors said.The study focused on people who had received a third dose of the same vaccine that they had originally received, either from Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. The C.D.C. said that too few people had reported receiving an additional dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, or an additional dose from a different vaccine maker than they had originally received, to study those side effects.The results reinforced findings from a small clinical trial of third shots of the Pfizer vaccine that the company’s scientists outlined to federal medical advisers last week. That trial, too, found that adverse reactions after a third dose were similar to those after a second.While the C.D.C. study covered only a period when people with immune problems were eligible for additional doses, the data likely also included people without such conditions who had nevertheless received a third shot, the study’s authors wrote. In all, the study said, about 2.2 million people had received additional doses by Sept. 19, the end of the C.D.C. study period.

If you wanted to design the most perfect, low-energy, light-detecting device for a future camera or a prosthetic retina, you’d reach for something called ‘efficient coding theory,’ to set out the array of sensors.
Or you could just look at a mammalian retina.
In a pair of papers on retinal structure, Duke University neurobiologists have shown that the rigors of natural selection and evolution have shaped the retinas in our eyes just as this theory of optimization would predict. And that puts retinas miles ahead of anything human engineering can achieve at this point.
In a previous paper published last March in Nature, the researchers showed that rat and monkey retinas are laid out in patterns of sensitivity that mimic what efficient coding theory would predict. Different sets of retinal neurons are sensitive to individual stimuli: bright, dark, moving, and so on, and they’re arranged in a three-dimensional mosaic of cells that works to add up the image.
Now, in a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “we set out to understand that, through a lot of simulation and a little bit of pencil and paper math,” said John Pearson, an assistant professor of biostatistics & bioinformatics in the School of Medicine. “The mosaics don’t just randomly overlap, but they don’t overlap in a highly ordered way.”
“We’re making a prediction about how literally thousands of cells of multiple different types arrange themselves across space,” said Greg Field, an assistant professor of neurobiology in the Duke School of Medicine. “The monkey retina and our retinas are nearly indistinguishable,” he said. “The fact that we observed this in the monkey retina gives us incredible confidence that our retinas are laid out in the same way.”
In a cross-section of the retina, the bodies of the ganglion cells, round orbs that contain the nucleus, line up in a layer together, but they extend their tree-like, branching dendrites into a thick layer that looks like the tangled roots of a pot-bound houseplant. It’s in this thicker, spectacularly complex layer that mosaics of different sensitivities are laid out in ordered patterns.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage source, Getty ImagesWorld Health Organization (WHO) staff were among 83 aid workers who sexually abused women and girls while tackling the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a report finds.The abuses, which included nine allegations of rape, were committed by both national and international workers between 2018 and 2020.The report comes after more than 50 local women reported sexual abuse.WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was “inexcusable”.The 35-page report was produced by an independent commission following an investigation. The commission, which interviewed dozens of women who had alleged they were offered work in exchange for sex, found that 21 of the 83 alleged perpetrators were employed by the WHO.Local women were also allegedly plied with drinks, “ambushed” in hospitals, forced to have sex, and two became pregnant. The WHO said it was terminating the contracts of four people who were still employed by the organisation and promised more measures would be taken.Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Dr Tedros said the report made for harrowing reading and apologised directly to the victims and survivors.”I’m sorry for what was done to you by people who are employed by WHO to serve and protect you,” he said. “It is my top priority that the perpetrators are not excused, but held to account.”He said the responsibility ultimately rested with him and promised to help support and protect victims, while vowing to overhaul the WHO’s structure and culture.WHO Africa regional director Matshidiso Moeti also apologised to those who suffered “because of the actions of our staff”.She said she was “humbled, horrified and heartbroken” by the inquiry’s findings.’Cashpoint aid’ and Africa: Who benefits?How the Oxfam scandal unfoldedWhy Ebola keeps coming backThe commission said it found “clear structural failures and unpreparedness to manage the risks of incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse” in the central African country.It said this was partly because of the focus on eradicating Ebola.More than 2,000 people died in the Ebola outbreak in DR Congo.The WHO, which spearheaded global efforts to curb the spread of the outbreak, declared it over in June last year.

While research has shown that poor cardiovascular health can damage blood flow to the brain increasing the risk for dementia, a new study led by UC San Francisco indicates that poor mental health may also take its toll on cognition.
The research adds to a body of evidence that links depression with dementia, but while most studies have pointed to its association in later life, the UCSF study shows that depression in early adulthood may lead to lower cognition 10 years later and to cognitive decline in old age.
The study publishes in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease on Sept. 28, 2021.
The researchers used innovative statistical methods to predict average trajectories of depressive symptoms for approximately 15,000 participants ages 20 to 89, divided into three life stages: older, midlife and young adulthood. They then applied these predicted trajectories and found that in a group of approximately 6,000 older participants, the odds of cognitive impairment were 73 percent higher for those estimated to have elevated depressive symptoms in early adulthood, and 43 percent higher for those estimated to have elevated depressive symptoms in later life.
These results were adjusted for depressive symptoms in other life stages and for differences in age, sex, race, educational attainment, body mass index, history of diabetes and smoking status. For depressive symptoms in midlife, the researchers found an association with cognitive impairment, but this was discounted when they adjusted for depression in other life stages.
Excess Stress Hormones May Damage Ability to Make New Memories
“Several mechanisms explain how depression might increase dementia risk,” said first author Willa Brenowitz, PhD, MPH, of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “Among them is that hyperactivity of the central stress response system increases production of the stress hormones glucocorticoids, leading to damage of the hippocampus, the part of the brain essential for forming, organizing and storing new memories.”

A new research study at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center — Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC — James) turns cancer scientists into molecular detectives, searching for clues for why certain cancers are able to spread and evolve by studying tissues collected within hours of death.
Led by Dr. Sameek Roychowdhury, this unique clinical research study — known as the Rapid Cancer Research Autopsy Trial — allows scientists to gather biological samples after a patient’s death to conduct research otherwise not possible, with the goal of better understanding how the cancer cells overcame different treatments.
“As patients undergo cancer treatment and, in some instances, succumb to their disease, there’s limited opportunity to understand their cancer and what made it so lethal and what took their lives,” said Roychowdhury,a medical oncologist and researcher with the OSUCCC — James Translational Therapeutics Program. “The rapid autopsy program allows us to sample every site of cancer in the body. This can help us understand how the cancer cells overcame different treatments and then go back to the drawing board to develop better therapies targeted to different genes and types of cancer.”
For this Pelotonia-funded study, patients consent during life to donate biological samples upon death for the purposes of cancer research. When the patient passes, researchers rapidly mobilize to perform an autopsy before tissues degrade. Samples are preserved to “freeze/pause” the tissue characteristics at that moment so that they can go back to the lab and identify potential genetic mutations or cellular characteristics that could explain why therapy stopped working, in hopes of guiding future therapies.
Study Findings Impacting Cancer Care
Since the trial’s launch in 2016, the OSUCCC — James rapid research autopsy team has performed 55 autopsies. Data gathered from these autopsies has already led to novel findings about drug resistance mechanisms for a recently approved, novel targeted therapy called infigratinib (pronounced “IN fig RA ti nib,” marketed as Truseltiq, pronounced “troo-SEL-tik”). This drug targets FGFR2 gene mutations known as fusions in cholangiocarcinoma and other cancer types.
The team recently published findings in the medical journal Lancet: Gastroenterology & Hepatology from a single-arm, multicenter, phase 2 study of the drug infigratinib in previously treated patients with locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and difficult-to-treat form that occurs in the bile duct. Results showed meaningful impact on tumor response and led to the FDA-approval of this therapy for cholangiocarcinoma and these specific FGFR2 fusions in May 2021. Going beyond cholangiocarcinoma, OSUCCC — James investigators are enrolling patients to a phase 2 study of infigratinib for patients with other cancer types that harbor FGFR gene mutations. This study was designed and developed by the OSUCCC — James team as an investigator-initiated trial in partnership with the drug development industry. Roychowdhury notes this study could provide evidence that more patients with FGFR gene mutations could benefit from new therapy approaches that directly target FGFR.
“This represents a strong potential new therapy option for diseases that have limited treatment options,” Roychowdhury said. “We are so humbled by our patients’ selflessness by participating in research that will help others. It is a legacy of hope and exciting to see both precision cancer medicine and the research autopsy trial translating into discoveries at the patient’s bedside.”
Roychowdhury says his team is continually humbled by patients’ eagerness to help advance research in any way possible, even if those discoveries will not come in time to eradicate their own disease.
“Everyone on our team sees it as a privilege and duty to care for them in that research study and to use that autopsy to help others as that patient would have wanted,” he said. “We’re understanding how to better take care of patients with cancer, find better ways to develop therapies and to understand biology. But even more rewarding is the fact that almost every single family member has said to me how grateful they are that their loved one could be part of the study.”
Story Source:
Materials provided by Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A study on how structural economic risk at the occupational level is linked to long-term health outcomes of employees found that individuals in occupations characterized by high routine intensity are likely to become unemployed in the long term and have higher rates of disability and mortality, according to researchers at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center based at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Until now, there has been a lack of large-scale population level analyses focusing on how one’s job is affected by technology- induced displacement and its health and social effects. The findings are published online in the journalOccupational and Environmental Medicine.
The researchers categorized all Norwegian employees in 2003 aged 33-52 in 335 occupations using the Routine Task Intensity (RTI) index, a weighted sum of selected job characteristics based on an occupation’s routine cognitive or physical tasks that can potentially be automated or outsourced. The sample was composed of 416,003 men and 376,413 women.
“Because we can follow the earnings and social security history of these workers for 15 years, through 2018, we limited the data extract to those aged 33-52 in 2003 — wage earners in their prime earnings age — and observed employment and disability status in 2018 and mortality status in 2019,” noted Vegard Skirbekk, PhD, professor of population and family health at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and senior author. “The key findings are robust to controlling for other factors, such as educational attainment, and persist when we compared siblings working in jobs with different levels of routine intensity. ”
A second Index — the Frey-Osborne Index — was also used to more narrowly reflect the probability that expected advances in machine-learning techniques would make it possible to automate the tasks involved in different occupations over the coming decades.
Working in an occupation with an RTI score slightly above the mean in 2003, was associated with a raised probability of being deceased in 2019, corresponding to raised mortality rates of 6.7 percent for men and 5.5 percent for women.
“Our finding matched earlier research that found declining employment in occupations with higher RTI scores,” observed Skirbekk. “While the projected impact of technological changes on labor markets varies across studies, many expect these economic changes to continue or even accelerate and encompass larger shares of the economy.”
According to Skirbekk there are several reasons why technology-induced job loss can relate to health outcomes. Holding an occupation that is being phased out over time increases the risk of employment loss and makes re-employment harder since job openings within the same occupation will tend to become scarce. Having a job where one has a higher risk of being laid off can cause stress and greater risk of anxiety and depression.
“This unique study underscores that we should pay more attention to the types of job people hold — which can have negative implications for their job prospects, health and lifespan. In the face of widespread automation, such effects could well increase in importance in the years ahead,” said Skirbekk. “Governments need to consider individuals holding jobs that are at risk, assess opportunities for retraining and reeducation, give counselling, provide economic support, offer preventive healthcare services and pay more attention to these groups of individuals as a whole.”
Co-authors are Ole Rogeberg and Bernt Bratsberg, University of Oslo.
The research was supported by the Research Council of Norway.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Exercise is often associated positively with a good night’s sleep. But if done at certain times of day, or shortly before bedtime, it can also alter how we sleep. And yet despite years of study, there is still much we do not know about how the two are linked.
A new meta-analysis by Concordia researchers published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews assessed data from 15 published studies to see how a single session of intense exercise affects young and middle-aged healthy adults in the hours prior to bedtime.
And while no two bodies are the same, the researchers did find that the combination of factors would interact to enhance or modulate the effects of exercise on sleep.
“When we reviewed the literature on this work, we found that there were a lot of mixed results,” says Melodee Mograss, a cognitive neuropsychologist and researcher at the PERFORM Sleep Lab. “Some depended on the time of exercise, others on the fitness level of a study’s participants, or even the type of exercise.”
Timing is (almost) everything
Emmanuel Frimpong, a postdoctoral fellow at the Sleep, Cognition and Neuroimaging Lab and the study’s lead author, says their principal goal was to assess whether high-intensity exercise affected sleep afterwards and to see which factors might influence that sleep.

It’s one of the most heartbreaking things Adam Green, MD, sees as a pediatric oncologist: children who beat their cancer, only to see an incurable brain tumor arise five years later.
“It’s especially tragic because generally by this point they’re teenagers, or they’re young adults who are trying to move forward with their lives after dealing with cancer and still may be dealing with some of the aftereffects of the treatments,” says Green, a CU Cancer Center member who practices at Children’s Hospital Colorado. “Then suddenly they get this secondary tumor that’s incurable, and most of them die within a year. It’s really horrible.”
A rare killer
Known as pediatric radiation-induced high-grade gliomas (RIGs), this specific type of brain tumor is caused by cranial radiation therapy for other cancers, most often brain cancers. They account for nearly 4% of all childhood brain tumor deaths, but there have not been many studies on RIGs and how to treat them.
Working with patient samples collected over the past decade by the Morgan Adams Foundation Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Green and graduate student John DeSisto spent the past four years analyzing RIGs, using DNA and RNA sequencing to discover how they differ from “de novo” gliomas — or gliomas that develop not in response to cranial radiation. Green and his collaborators — including several CU Cancer Center members, as well as scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis and the Children’s Cancer Center in Hamburg, Germany — were searching for ways to prevent RIGs from forming, as well as methods to treat them once they arise. Their research was published September 20 in the journal Nature Communications.
“We found that the mutations that occur in these tumors are pretty different than the mutations that characterize de novo pediatric high grade gliomas. It seems to be a different biological process that is driving these to develop,” Green says.

Bioelectrical sensors on the skin can be used to measure electrical signals in the body, like heart activity and muscle contraction. While that provides valuable information for clinicians, current bioelectrical sensor technology can be ineffective, uncomfortable, expensive, and difficult to manufacture.
In APL Materials, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Utah and Gyeongsang National University in South Korea have developed a bioelectrical sensor that is convenient and low-cost.
The sensor measures electromyography (EMG) signals that are generated in muscles when they contract. EMG signals are useful for studying muscle fatigue and recovery, and they have the potential to inform diagnosis and treatment of neuromuscular diseases.
“The signal we measure is a voltage over a time,” said author Huanan Zhang. “Every time your finger moves, the potential of the body, of the muscle, changes. So, we are able to detect that difference in potential.”
The biosensor is directly integrated onto a piece of clothing. That has advantages beyond convenience and comfort — soft clothing means better contact with the skin and a better signal.
Initially, the researchers printed silver paste directly onto fabric. Silver is conductive, making it a good material for detecting electrical signals. However, it is also somewhat toxic, so prolonged exposure can lead to skin irritation.
To harness the beneficial properties of silver while solving the problems it poses, the team deposited a layer of gold nanoparticles on top of the silver. The gold completely encapsulated the silver particles, preventing them from touching the skin.
The result was a detector that was both conductive and nonirritating to the skin. The amounts of gold and silver are small enough that it remains inexpensive as well.
The scientists tested the biosensor’s performance by placing it on the bicep and fingers and monitoring the detected signal as those muscles progressed through various exercises.
Because the sensor is part of the fabric and is designed to be used over long periods of time, it needs to withstand washing. The team retested sensor performance after multiple washings and found its performance remained high.
“This work not only designs a wearable device, which has the convenience factor, but it also has great performance and is biocompatible,” said Zhang.
The team believes that using this printing technique on textiles could revolutionize future bioelectrical sensors.
Story Source:
Materials provided by American Institute of Physics. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.