A private school in the fashionable Design District of Miami sent its faculty and staff a letter last week about getting vaccinated against Covid-19. But unlike institutions that have encouraged and even facilitated vaccination for teachers, the school, Centner Academy, did the opposite: One of its co-founders, Leila Centner, informed employees “with a very heavy heart” that if they chose to get a shot, they would have to stay away from students.In an example of how misinformation threatens the nation’s effort to vaccinate enough Americans to get the coronavirus under control, Ms. Centner, who has frequently shared anti-vaccine posts on Facebook, claimed in the letter that “reports have surfaced recently of non-vaccinated people being negatively impacted by interacting with people who have been vaccinated.”“Even among our own population, we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person,” she wrote, repeating a false claim that vaccinated people can somehow pass the vaccine to others and thereby affect their reproductive systems. (They can do neither.)In the letter, Ms. Centner gave employees three options:Inform the school if they had already been vaccinated, so they could be kept physically distanced from students;Let the school know if they get the vaccine before the end of the school year, “as we cannot allow recently vaccinated people to be near our students until more information is known”;Wait until the school year is over to get vaccinated.Teachers who get the vaccine over the summer will not be allowed to return, the letter said, until clinical trials on the vaccine are completed, and then only “if a position is still available at that time” — effectively making teachers’ employment contingent on avoiding the vaccine.Leila Centner at an event in Miami in 2019.Romain Maurice/Getty Images for Haute LivingMs. Centner required the faculty and staff to fill out a “confidential” form revealing whether they had received a vaccine — and if so, which one and how many doses — or planned to get vaccinated. The form requires employees to “acknowledge the School will take legal measures needed to protect the students if it is determined that I have not answered these questions accurately.”Ms. Centner directed questions about the matter to her publicist, who said in a statement that the school’s top priority throughout the pandemic has been to keep students safe. The statement repeated false claims that vaccinated people “may be transmitting something from their bodies” leading to adverse reproductive issues among women.“We are not 100 percent sure the Covid injections are safe and there are too many unknown variables for us to feel comfortable at this current time,” the statement said.The Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and many other authorities have concluded that the coronavirus vaccines now in emergency use in the United States are safe and effective.The Centner Academy opened in 2019 for students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, promoting itself as a “happiness school” focused on children’s mindfulness and emotional intelligence. The school prominently advertises on its website support for “medical freedom from mandated vaccines.”Ms. Centner founded the school with her husband, David Centner, a technology and electronic highway tolling entrepreneur. Each has donated heavily to the Republican Party and the Trump re-election campaign, while giving much smaller sums to local Democrats. In February, the Centners welcomed a special guest to speak to students: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the prominent antivaccine activist. (Mr. Kennedy was suspended from Instagram a few days later for promoting Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.) This month, the school hosted a Zoom talk with Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a New York pediatrician frequently cited by anti-vaccination activists.Kitty Bennett

The process designed to harvest on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars can sometimes be tricked. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory have derived and demonstrated a bit of slight-of-hand called “quasi-symmetry” that could accelerate the development of fusion energy as a safe, clean and virtually limitless source of power for generating electricity.
Fusion reactions combine light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe — to generate massive amounts of energy. Scientists around the world are seeking to reproduce the process in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called tokamaks that heat the plasma to million-degree temperatures and confine it in symmetrical magnetic fields produced by coils to create fusion reactions.
Crucial issue
A crucial issue for these efforts is maintaining the fast rotation of the doughnut-shaped plasma that swirls within a tokamak. However, small magnetic field distortions, or ripples, caused by misalignment of the magnetic field coils can slow the plasma motion, making it more unstable. The coil misalignments and resulting field ripples are tiny, as small as 1 part in 10,000 parts of the field, but they can have a significant impact.
Maintaining stability in future tokamaks such as ITER, the international facility going up in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy, will be essential to harvesting the energy to generate electricity. One way to minimize the impact of the field ripples is to add additional magnets to cancel out, or heal, the effect of magnetic field errors. However, field ripples can never be completely cancelled and there has been no optimal method for mitigating their effects until now.
The newly discovered method calls for fooling the swirling plasma particles by canceling out the magnetic field errors along the path they travel. “A way to preserve rotation while providing stability is to change the shape of the magnetic field so that the particles are fooled into thinking that they are not moving in a rippled magnetic field,” said PPPL physicist Jong-Kyu Park, lead author of a paper in Physical Review Letters (PRL) that proposes a solution. “We need to make the 3D field inside the plasma quasi-symmetric to fool the particles into behaving as if they were not affected by the fields,” Park said.

New findings detailing the world’s first-of-its-kind estimate of how many people live in high-altitude regions, will provide insight into future research of human physiology.
Dr. Joshua Tremblay, a postdoctoral fellow in UBC Okanagan’s School of Health and Exercise Sciences, has released updated population estimates of how many people in the world live at a high altitude.
Historically the estimated number of people living at these elevations has varied widely. That’s partially, he explains, because the definition of “high altitude” does not have a fixed cut-off.
Using novel techniques, Dr. Tremblay’s publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms there are about 81.6 million people who live 2,500 metres above sea level. From a physiological perspective, researchers typically use 2,500 metres as an altitude benchmark for their work.
Dr. Trembly says an important part of his study was presenting population data at 500-metre intervals. And while he says the 81 million is a staggering number, it is also important to note that by going to 1,500 metres that number jumps to more than 500 million.
“To understand the impact of life at high altitude on human physiology, adaption, health and disease, it is imperative to know how many people live at high altitude and where they live,” says Dr. Tremblay.

A major hurdle to developing new and effective treatments for drug addiction is better understanding how exactly it manifests itself before, during and after chronic use. In a paper published online in the April 21, 2021 issue of the journal eNeuro, an international team of researchers led by scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe the creation of two unique collections of more than 20,000 biological samples collected from laboratory rats before, during and after chronic use of cocaine and oxycodone.
Developed by the Preclinical Addiction Research Consortium, located in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine and at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the new cocaine and oxycodone biobanks include samples from 20 different organs, plus urine, blood and feces.
“To create new treatments for drug addiction, we need to better identify the biomarkers of addiction and the biological targets of therapy,” said senior author Olivier George, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry. “These biobanks using an animal model help serve that purpose, providing deeper insight — and potential therapeutic targets — regarding the paths and pathologies of cocaine and oxycodone addiction.”
Cocaine is among the world’s most commonly used illicit drugs. In 2016, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated approximately 2 million people age 12 and older in the United States were current users — a bit less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population. Fatal cocaine overdoses (in combination with an opioid) are rising, from 3,822 in 1999 to 15,883 in 2019.
Oxycodone is an opioid, a class of highly addictive drugs that also includes heroin, morphine and fentanyl. Opioid abuse is a major, ongoing public health crisis. In 2019, almost 71,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the U.S. — more than 70 percent involving an opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Finding new ways to treat and reduce addiction requires well-validated, long-term models of how cocaine and oxycodone impact and impair biological systems and functions. Researchers used a heterogeneous rat model that reflects the genetic diversity of humans and have been characterized as vulnerable or resistant to cocaine and oxycodone behaviors.
Biological samples were collected before exposure to drugs, during intoxication, during acute withdrawal and after protracted abstinence. These samples were compared against age-matched control animals never exposed to the drugs.
Samples from more than 1,000 animals were taken, including tissue from brains, kidneys, livers, spleen, ovary, testes and adrenal glands, and preserved in methods that will allow researchers to conduct a variety of future assessments, including epigenomics, neuroanatomy, microbiomics and biomarker discovery. 
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Materials provided by University of California – San Diego. Original written by Heather Buschman, PhD. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Alaska Airlines said it would not allow State Senator Lora Reinbold to fly because she refused to comply with its mask rules.Alaska Airlines has banned an Alaska state lawmaker from its flights for violating its mask policies, the company said.The lawmaker, Lora Reinbold, a Republican state senator, was captured on video arguing with employees at Juneau International Airport about the airline’s mask rules, according to footage posted on Twitter.“We need you to pull the mask up, or I’m not going to let you on the flight,” an airport employee is heard saying to Ms. Reinbold on the videos, which were posted on Thursday.“It is up,” Ms. Reinbold responds.“It is not,” an employee says. “It’s down below your nose. We can’t have it down.”It was not clear if she was permitted on the flight and one of the videos showed her leaving the boarding area. In the videos, Ms. Reinbold can be seen wearing a mask. It was not clear what prompted the confrontation at the airport or what happened immediately before the footage was taken.Ms. Reinbold said on Facebook she learned on Saturday that she was banned from flying with the airline.“We have notified Senator Lora Reinbold that she is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy,” the airline said, adding that the suspension is being reviewed.Ms. Reinbold said that she was suspended before getting a chance to speak to someone from the airline and that she did not get “a warning via a yellow card per their policy either,” according to a post on Facebook.“There was no due process before a temporary decision that is ‘under review’ was made public,” she wrote. “Alaska Airlines sent information, including my name, to the media without my knowledge nor permission. I do believe constitutional rights are at risk under corporate covid policies.”The clash over the company’s rule was the latest to surface in the country about masks during the pandemic. Mask mandates have become a rallying cry for some activists and a divisive political talking point. Disputes about the rules have sometimes led to angry confrontations.In an interview with Fox News last week, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, suggested President Biden should “go on national TV, take his mask off and burn it” to motivate Americans to get vaccinated.A federal mandate issued in January requires travelers to wear masks on planes and at airports, as well as on other modes of public transportation, including trains.Under the federal mandate, the only travelers exempt from wearing a mask include children ages under 2, a person with a disability who cannot wear one or someone “for whom wearing a mask would create a risk to workplace health, safety,or job duty.”“I test negative weekly,” Ms. Reinbold wrote. “I hope people can hear the truth of my actual actions thru the media mischaracterization.”Ms. Reinbold’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.On Sunday, Ms. Reinbold posted on Facebook that she had traveled to Juneau, Alaska, by road and ferry. Without a flight, the trip from the Anchorage area to Juneau takes more than 19 hours.Last week’s episode is not the first confrontation that Ms. Reinbold has had with Alaska Airlines. She has previously complained about the company on Facebook.“Mask bullies in full force,” Ms. Reinbold said of a flight with Alaska Airlines. “Sadly Alaska airlines is part of mask tyranny and not providing proof required in law they help stop the spread (I can show they cause health problems).”In February, Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, a Republican, sent a letter to Ms. Reinbold asking her to stop sharing misinformation about the pandemic.“It is clear you have abdicated the tenets of your oath as a public servant,” Mr. Dunleavy wrote. “You impugned the motivations of unelected and nonpolitical employees working for the State of Alaska with baseless allegations that, on multiple occasions, were demonstrated to you to be false.”In March, Ms. Reinbold said on Facebook that she was asked to leave a committee hearing because she was not wearing an approved face shield. After that, Ms. Reinbold was banned from the State Capitol until she complied with health and safety protocols.“My actions are to protect my constitutional rights, including civil liberties and those who I represent, even under immense pressure and public scrutiny,” Ms. Reinbold said.Ms. Reinbold has since returned to the State Capitol in a clear face mask.

Countries, companies and powerful members of the diaspora have all pledged to pitch in, but it likely won’t be enough to stop the unfolding catastrophe.NEW DELHI — Oxygen generators from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Raw material for coronavirus vaccines from the United States. Millions in cash from companies led by Indian-American businessmen.As a second wave of the pandemic rages in India, the world is coming to the rescue.But it is unlikely to plug enough holes in India’s sinking health care system to fully stop the deadly crisis that is underway, and the health emergency has global implications for new infections worldwide, as well as for countries relying on India for the AstraZeneca vaccine.“It’s a desperate situation out there,” said Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan, the founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, adding that donations will be welcome, but may only make a “limited dent on the problem.”In the early months of 2021, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi acted as if the coronavirus battle had been won, holding huge campaign rallies and permitting thousands to gather for a Hindu religious festival.Now, Mr. Modi is striking a far more sober tone. He said in a nationwide radio address on Sunday that India has been “shaken” by a “storm.”Patients are suffocating in the capital, New Delhi, and other cities because hospitals’ oxygen supplies have run out. Frantic relatives have appealed on social media for leads on intensive-care unit beds and experimental drugs. Funeral pyres have spilled over into parking lots and city parks.Now, Mr. Modi appears to be looking to the rest of the world to help India quell its seemingly unstoppable coronavirus wave.A global coronavirus surge, largely driven by the devastation in India, continues to break daily records and run rampant in much of the world, even as vaccinations steadily ramp up in wealthy countries. More than one billion shots have now been given globally.On Sunday, the world’s seven-day average of new cases hit 774,404, according to a New York Times database, higher than the peak average during the last global surge, in January. Despite the number of shots given around the world, far too few of the global population of nearly eight billion have been vaccinated to slow the virus’s steady spread.Vaccinations have been highly concentrated in wealthy nations: 82 percent of shots worldwide have been given in high- and upper-middle-income countries, according to data compiled by the Our World in Data project. Only 0.2 percent of doses have been administered in low-income countries.On Monday, India broke the world record for daily coronavirus infections for a fifth consecutive day, reporting nearly 353,000 new cases. And it added 2,812 deaths to its overall toll of more than 195,000, which experts say may be a vast undercount.Relatives of Covid-19 victims perform last rites in Delhi on Saturday.Atul Loke for The New York TimesEarlier this month, Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, made a direct appeal to President Biden on Twitter, asking him to “lift the embargo” on raw material used to make Covid-19 vaccines.Tim Manning, the White House Covid-19 supply coordinator, said that the U.S. Defense Production Act, which Mr. Biden invoked in March, did not equate to an embargo. “There are literally no export controls, export restrictions on vaccine inputs out of the United States,” Mr. Manning said.“The challenge,” he said, “what is actually happening globally, is that there is just a dramatically outstripped demand against the infrastructure for supply. And it’s really just that simple.”Facing increased pressure, the White House said Sunday that it had removed impediments to the export of raw materials for vaccines and would also supply India with therapeutics, test kits, ventilators and personal protective gear.“Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, we are determined to help India in its time of need,” Mr. Biden said on Twitter.The Biden administration then said Monday that it would share up to 60 million AstraZeneca doses from its stockpile with other countries in the coming months, so long as they clear a safety review being conducted by the Food and Drug Administration.The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who announced the plan on Twitter, did not specify which countries would receive those doses.Members of Congress had lobbied Mr. Biden to donate the AstraZeneca vaccine to India, since there is no shortage for Americans who want to be vaccinated with the three vaccines that have been authorized for emergency use there.The extent of support the president offers India could lay the foundation for a Biden-Modi relationship at a time when the United States and China are both jockeying for influence with India and greater access to its enormous market.Mr. Biden’s response to India at its time of crisis has come under scrutiny, raising questions of how far the administration has actually moved away from former President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” foreign policies.The Serum Institute did not respond to questions about the White House’s announcement.Between bouts of the pandemic, when Mr. Modi’s government thought the worst was behind it, India enacted a policy of vaccine diplomacy, selling or donating 66.4 million doses.In late March as the domestic caseload began to creep upward, Mr. Modi suddenly stopped exports, crippling the vaccination campaigns of other countries reliant on made-in-India vaccine.The Indian government is now holding back nearly all of the 2.4 million doses produced daily by the Serum Institute, one of the world’s largest producers of the AstraZeneca vaccine. So far, only the U.S. has offered to fill some of the shortage.Still, vaccine shortages have hobbled India’s effort to protect its people. Only about 2 percent of the population has been fully inoculated.Signs indicating a shortage of vaccines in Mumbai last week.Francis Mascarenhas/ReutersSeveral other countries have also stepped up to offer support to India.Britain pledged medical equipment, including 495 oxygen concentrators (devices that can extract oxygen from ambient air and provide it to patients) and 140 ventilators. France and Australia are considering sending oxygen supplies. Even Pakistan, with which India has fought several wars and maintains chilly relations, has offered X-ray machines, ventilators and other aid, its foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said.Two Indian-American businessmen — the chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, and the Google chief, Sundar Pichai — have both said that their companies will provide financial assistance to India.“Devastated to see the worsening Covid crisis in India,” Mr. Pichai wrote on Twitter, pledging $18 million to aid groups working in the country.Indian officials have also been making direct requests of other countries. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, tweeted last week about his meeting with Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president who oversees digital policy. On Sunday, the European Union announced that it would provide oxygen and medicines.“The E.U. is pooling resources to respond rapidly to India’s request for assistance via the E.U. Civil Protection Mechanism,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on Twitter.Mr. Jaishankar’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the assistance promised to India, but experts said it could only do so much.Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking in Ahmedabad in March.Amit Dave/ReutersIn many cases, India has lagged behind other countries with its preparedness measures and ability to scale up care, triaging resources like oxygen that reach patients just in time or not at all.“Early and aggressive investments were absolutely necessary,” said Krishna Udayakumar, an associate professor of global health and director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.Unlike the United States and Britain, which signed advance purchase agreements for millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine beginning last May, India waited until January, and then only bought 15.5 million doses produced by Serum and the pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech — a drop in the ocean for a country of nearly 1.4 billion people.India had indicated as early as last September, at the height of the first wave, that it would rely heavily on Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, signing a deal to buy 100 million doses. But Sputnik won’t be available in India until next month at the earliest.If India were to dramatically ramp up its vaccine manufacturing capacity and give emergency authorization to other vaccine makers, it could potentially curb the worst effects of the second wave.“This is the only long-term solution,” Dr. Laxminarayan said. “India has the capability to do it, if the country puts its mind to it.”Rebecca Robbins contributed reporting.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children generally appear to be less severely impacted by COVID-19 than adults. But a new study from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shows that the pandemic could be affecting children’s health in unexpected ways. The study reveals a surge of patients presenting with diabetic ketoacidosis, a severe complication of type 2 diabetes. Published in Diabetes Care, these data offer additional insights into how the pandemic may be impacting the nation’s children.
Diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA, is life-threatening. “DKA happens when insulin levels in the blood drop too low for too long,” says Lily Chao, MD, MS, Interim Medical Diabetes Director at CHLA. “Insulin helps the body utilize glucose. So when there’s not enough insulin, the body starts breaking down fat as a source of energy.”
This process, she says, causes dangerously high levels of acids in the blood. If untreated, this can lead to cerebral edema, coma, or even death. “Kids are coming in with dehydration and DKA. But DKA is preventable and reversible if we treat it early and appropriately,” says Dr. Chao, who is lead author on the paper.
Dr. Chao and her colleagues noticed back in March of 2020 that more and more patients were coming in with DKA and type 2 diabetes. “We used to see a few DKA cases in type 2 diabetes a year,” she says, “and all of a sudden we were seeing a spike, so we began keeping track. Now we have the numbers to confirm that there are more children with type 2 diabetes who present with this very serious complication of DKA.”
Yet the question remains: What is the cause of the increased incidence of Type 2 diabetes with DKA?
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, many children are used to wearing masks and attending online classes. But other changes have affected them, too. Fewer children may be making it to the doctor’s office for their routine well-child exams, possibly due to the fear families may feel about exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A new guideline for reporting research results has been developed to improve reproducibility, replication, and transparency in life sciences.
The new Research Materials, Design, Analysis and Reporting (MDAR) Framework will harmonise the recording of outcomes across several major journals, its developers say.
Existing guidelines address specific parts of biomedical research, such as ARRIVE — which relates to animal research — and CONSORT, associated with clinical trial reporting.
The MDAR Framework — developed by a team from the University of Edinburgh, the Centre for Open Science and six major journal publishers — complements these by establishing basic minimum reporting requirements and best practice recommendations.
The Framework is outlined in a new publication in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
Experimentation with various guidelines has resulted in a fragmented landscape, which, even though it has improved reporting, has increased the burden on authors’ and editors’ time.

A Lancaster University professor has introduced a new concept for rapidly analysing for the presence of a virus from colds to coronaviruses.
Based on analysing chemical elements the methodology, which has been adapted from an analytical technique used to identify metallic nanoparticles, is able to detect the presence of viruses within just 20 seconds.
Although the tests would need to be performed in a lab, it could be used to quickly identify whether people admitted to hospitals have been infected by a virus — enabling clinicians to decide treatments and also whether to admit patients into isolation wards.
The proposed technique, called ‘Single virus inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy’ (SV ICP-MS) analysis, can be used to quickly determine families of viruses. However, although the concept can identify that someone has a type of coronavirus for example, it would not be able to determine the type of coronavirus, or variants. Additional tests would still be required to find out the specific virus someone was infected with.
While SV ICP-MS is not an alternative for tests developed to specifically identify types of Covid-2 infections, it could be used to discriminate if viruses from one family, such as coronaviruses, are present or not. If a virus is found to be present, more specific testing would be needed.
The concept, developed by Professor Claude Degueldre, from Lancaster University’s Department of Engineering, uses diluted samples of fluids, such as nasal mucus or saliva, from patients. A plasma torch is used to atomise and ionise the virus particles. Measurements of intensities for selected masses of the elements from the viruses provide rapid results to show the presence of a virus or not. This process works on DNA and RNA virus types within seconds.
Complementary analysis such as existing sequencing techniques can be tested to complete the identification, though they can take up to two days.
Another key benefit is the ability to test a large number of samples quickly.
Professor Degueldre said: “What we are proposing here is not a new Covid test but is a new concept to rapidly find out if there are viruses present. This would be useful if people are ill but it is not known if they have a virus or another health condition that is making them sick. This concept would inform the clinical team whether or not there is a virus to inform early treatment actions and other measures such as the need for isolation. More detailed tests would still be required to discover the exact viral infection, but results from these take longer.
“Another application for the concept is to test water samples from sewage systems or down flow in rivers. The results would enable public health experts to identify areas of cities that have viral outbreaks.”
The concept is still at an early stage and further research and experiments are needed to further develop the process.
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Materials provided by Lancaster University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Brain changes in people with Alzheimer’s disease and in those with mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) have significant similarities, a new USC study shows, suggesting new ways to identify patients at high risk for Alzheimer’s. The findings appear this week in GeroScience.
TBIs, which affect over 1.7 million Americans every year, are often followed by changes in brain structure and function and by cognitive problems such as memory deficits, impaired social function and difficulty with decision-making. Although mild TBI — also known as concussion — is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, prior studies haven’t quantified the extent to which these conditions share patterns of neural degeneration in the brain.
USC researchers hypothesized that comparing these patterns could reveal not only how the degenerative trajectories of the two conditions are similar but also which features of brain atrophy could predict Alzheimer’s risk after TBI.
The study included 33 study participants with TBIs due to a fall, another 66 participants who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and 81 healthy control participants without either TBI or Alzheimer’s. The researchers analyzed MRIs of the patients’ brains and created additional computer-generated models to compare dozens of different brain structures, ultimately mapping similarities and differences between the three different groups.
In multiple brain areas of both TBI and Alzheimer’s participants, the researchers found reduced cortical thickness when compared to the healthy controls. Cortical thickness is roughly correlated with brain age and its thinning is often associated with reductions in attention, memory and verbal fluency, as well as with decreased ability to make decisions, integrate new information and adapt one’s behavior to new situations, among other deficits.
“These findings are the first to suggest that cognitive impairment following a traumatic brain injury is useful for predicting the magnitude of Alzheimer’s-like brain degradation,” said study author Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor of gerontology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “The results may help health professionals to identify TBI victims who are at greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”
Using MRIs, the study identified significant similarities between TBI and Alzheimer’s disease in how the brain’s gray and white matter degrade after injury. In gray matter — the part of the brain that contains neuron cell bodies and their short-range connections — the most extensive similarities were in areas involved in memory (temporal lobes) and decision-making (orbitofrontal cortices).