As coronavirus vaccines slowly roll out across the world, leaders are working hard to build confidence in them.Religious leaders in particular can play a crucial role in convincing people to vaccinate. Many are working hard to spread the news that vaccines are safe and effective, but as the BBC’s population reporter Stephanie Hegarty has been finding out, there are figures in almost every faith who are undermining that message, with some spreading misinformation which could lead to vaccine hesitancy.Producer: Eloise AlannaExecutive Producer: Claire Williams

The first known study to explore optimal outpatient exam scheduling given the flexibility of inpatient exams has resulted in shorter wait times for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patients at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. A team of researchers from Dartmouth Engineering and Philips worked to identify sources of delays for MRI procedures at Lahey Hospital in order to optimize scheduling and reduce overall costs for the hospital by 23 percent.
The Dartmouth-led study, “Stochastic programming for outpatient scheduling with flexible inpatient exam accommodation,” was sponsored by Philips and recently published by Health Care Management Science in collaboration with Lahey Hospital.
“Excellence in service and positive patient experiences are a primary focus for the hospital. We continuously monitor various aspects of patient experiences and one key indicator is patient wait times,” said Christoph Wald, chair of the department of radiology at Lahey Hospital and professor of radiology at Tufts University Medical School. “With a goal of wanting to improve patient wait times, we worked with data science researchers at Philips and Dartmouth to help identify levers for improvement that might be achieved without impeding access.”
Prior to working with the researchers, on an average weekday, outpatients at Lahey Hospital waited about 54 minutes from their arrival until the beginning of their exam. Researchers determined that one of the reasons for the routine delays was a complex scheduling system, which must cater to emergency room patients, inpatients, and outpatients; while exams for inpatients are usually flexible and can be delayed if necessary, other appointments cannot.
“Mathematical models and algorithms are crucial to improve the efficiency of healthcare systems, especially in the current crisis we are going through. By analyzing the patient data, we found that delays were prominent because the schedule was not optimal,” said first author Yifei Sun, a Dartmouth Engineering PhD candidate. “This research uses optimization and simulation tools to help the MRI centers of Lahey Hospital better plan their schedule to reduce overall cost, which includes patient waiting time.”
First, the researchers reviewed data to analyze and identify sources of delays. They then worked on developing a mathematical model to optimize the length of each exam slot and the placement of inpatient exams within the overall schedule. Finally, the researchers developed an algorithm to minimize the wait time and cost associated with exam delays for outpatients, the idle time of equipment, employee overtime, and cancelled inpatient exams.
“This iterative improvement process did result in measurable improvements of patient wait times,” said Wald. “The construction and use of a simulation model have been instrumental in educating the Lahey team about the benefits of dissecting workflow components to arrive at an optimized process outcome. We have extended this approach to identify bottlenecks in our interventional radiology workflow and to add additional capacity under the constraints of staffing schedules.”
The researchers believe their solutions are broadly applicable, as the issue is common to many mid-sized hospitals throughout the country.
“We also provided suggestions for hospitals that don’t have optimization tools or have different priorities, such as patient waiting times or idle machine times,” said Sun, who worked on the paper with her advisor Vikrant Vaze, the Stata Family Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth.
The other co-authors of the paper are: Usha Nandini Raghavan and Christopher S. Hall, both from Philips, and Patricia Doyle and Stacey Sullivan Richard of Lahey Hospital.
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Materials provided by Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth. Original written by Julie Bonette. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A new UCLA study shows that while men and women who have high muscle mass are less likely to die from heart disease, it also appears that women who have higher levels of body fat — regardless of their muscle mass — have a greater degree of protection than women with less fat.
The researchers analyzed national health survey data collected over a 15-year period and found that heart disease-related death in women with high muscle mass and high body fat was 42% lower than in a comparison group of women with low muscle mass and low body fat. However, women who had high muscle mass and low body fat did not appear have a significant advantage over the comparison group.
Among men, on the other hand, while having high muscle mass and high body fat decreased their risk by 26% (compared to those with low muscle mass and low body fat), having high muscle mass and low body fat decreased their risk by 60%.
The American Heart Association estimates that 5 million men and 3 million women have heart attacks annually. Yet despite this wide gender gap and an overall decrease in heart attack-related deaths for both men and women over the past 50 years, an equal number of men and women still die from heart disease.
In addition, mortality among women over those five decades has fallen at a slower rate than for men, and the incidence of heart attacks appears to be increasing among women between the ages of 35 and 54. Recent research has also found that women have significantly higher levels of risk factors associated with adverse heart disease than men.
The researchers analyzed body composition data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999-2004 and cardiovascular disease data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999-2014. They evaluated 11,463 individuals aged 20 and older, who were then divided into four body-composition groups: low muscle mass and low body fat, low muscle and high fat, high muscle and low fat, and high muscle and high fat. Heart disease-related mortality rates where then calculated for each of these groups.
The findings highlight the importance of recognizing physiological differences between women and men when considering body composition and the risk of death from heart disease, particularly when it comes to how differences in body fat may modify that risk.
The research also underscores the need to develop sex-appropriate guidelines with respect to exercise and nutrition as preventive strategies against the development of cardiovascular disease. Even with the current emphasis by health experts on reducing fat to lower disease risk, it may be important for women to focus more on building muscle mass than losing weight, the study authors say.
The study was funded by the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Health Program.
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Materials provided by University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences. Original written by Enrique Rivero. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Her natural childbirth techniques have been used by Kate Middleton, Jessica Alba and many other women around the world in search of a more gentle, unmedicated experience.When Marie Mongan was pregnant with her third child in the 1950s, she made an unusual demand. She told her doctor that when it was time for her to give birth, she didn’t want anesthesia — and if he didn’t agree to her terms, she would find someone who did.She had declined anesthesia during her first two pregnancies, too, but in each case the nurses had not listened. They held down her wrists with leather straps and forced an ether cone onto her face.After her second child was born “the same sad way,” Ms. Mongan said, she vowed, “Never again!”Ms. Mongan had spent years preparing for an unmedicated birth. During her first pregnancy, she devoured the works of Grantly Dick-Read, a British obstetrician who popularized the phrase “natural childbirth” and espoused relaxation to lessen pain. After studying his book “Childbirth Without Fear,” she learned how to bring herself to a state of deep relaxation.She finally experienced an unmedicated labor and delivery in 1959, when she had her third child, Maura; it was, she said, “the most beautiful birth that I could have imagined.” She delivered her fourth child the same way, and it was just as “spectacular,” she said.Ms. Mongan, having been a longtime educator in New Hampshire, went on to become a certified hypnotherapist. But it wasn’t until 1989, when Maura became pregnant, that Ms. Mongan started holding classes in hypnobirthing, a series of techniques using hypnosis, positive affirmations, visualizations and meditation to ease the pain of childbirth naturally.“I think this was her gateway,” her daughter, now married as Maura Geddes, said in a phone interview.The Mongan method, first taught to Ms. Geddes and a few other couples, began spreading by word of mouth in the early 1990s. Although hypnosis had been used in obstetrics for more than a century, it had not been widely studied as a tool for childbirth. Ms. Mongan soon began receiving requests to train not only parents but also nurses, doulas and hypnotherapists. A subsequent book, national press and, eventually, Ms. Mongan’s own institute helped hypnobirthing gain popularity around the world, and her methods were used and endorsed by celebrities like Kate Middleton and Jessica Alba.Ms. Mongan was 86 when she died on June 17, 2019, at her daughter’s home in Bow, N.H. Her death was not widely reported at the time, but it gained wider attention when it was reported by The Washington Post last month. Ms. Geddes said the cause was complications of Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease.Growing up, Ms. Mongan often heard about her own birth from her mother, who would describe the labor and delivery as so traumatic that she believed that it had caused permanent damage to her body.“I felt tremendous guilt during my growing up years,” Ms. Mongan wrote in the fourth edition of her book, “HypnoBirthing: The Mongan Method,” originally published in 1992.When Ms. Geddes became pregnant, Ms. Mongan — who had by then become certified in hypnotherapy — guided her daughter through a tranquil birth experience, complete with what she called “rainbow relaxation” music.“The nurses were coming in and saying, ‘I can’t believe how calm she is,’” Ms. Geddes recalled. She had a boy, Kyle.Mothers who are guided by hypnobirthing are “breathing their babies down to crowning in deep relaxation,” Ms. Mongan wrote, in contrast to the pant-pant-blow breathing rhythms characteristic of early iterations of the Lamaze method, which became popular in the 1960s.Hypnosis does not put women in a trance or make them fall asleep, Ms. Mongan told The Washington Times in 2000. “It is similar to the daydreaming or focusing that occurs when you are engrossed in a book or staring at the fire — you lose track of what is going on around you,” she said. “You can be fully relaxed yet fully in control.”She added, “In birthing, when the mind accepts the belief that without complication, birthing proceeds naturally, no pain exists and no pain is experienced.”In 1999, about a decade after Kyle’s birth, the NBC News program “Dateline” ran a segment about an OB-GYN in Florida who used hypnosis on his patients, introducing it to viewers as a “remarkable technique” that some say “can make labor easy — even fun!” Ms. Mongan was not mentioned in the broadcast, but she was in an accompanying online article that carried a link to her website.Afterward, she said, she received almost 5,000 calls and emails. The Boston Globe reported that her book, “flew out of stock” in nine weeks.In her book, “HypnoBirthing: The Mongan Method,” Ms. Mongan said the birth of her third child using her relaxation techniques was “the most beautiful birth that I could have imagined.”Marie Madeline Flanagan, who went by Mickey, was born in San Diego on Feb. 1, 1933, to Marie and Patrick Flanagan. Her mother was a seamstress, and her father was a Navy chief petty officer who became a foreman at a fabric mill after the family moved to Franklin, N.H.Mickey married her high school sweetheart, Gerald Bilodeau, in 1954 and graduated from what is now Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She then taught English at the high school she had attended.The couple divorced in 1966. In 1970 she married Eugene Mongan, who died in 2013. In addition to Ms. Geddes, Ms. Mongan is survived by her three other children, Wayne Flanagan, Brian Kelly and Shawn Mongan; three stepchildren, Michelle Shoemaker, Steve Mongan and Nancy Kelley; 17 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Before her name became associated with hypnobirthing, Ms. Mongan had been dean of Pierce College for Women in Concord, N.H., appointed in 1965. It closed in 1972. Six years she later received a master’s degree in education from Plymouth State. In Concord she opened the Thomas Secretarial School, which is no longer in existence.Her hypnobirthing classes led her to create the HypnoBirthing Institute, now HypnoBirthing International, based in Pembroke, N.H., of which Ms. Geddes is the chief executive. The organization has trained and certified doctors, doulas, midwives and laypeople to become hypnobirth educators in 46 countries, said Vivian Keeler, a chiropractor and doula who is the president of HypnoBirthing International.Despite the popularity of hypnobirthing, in 2016 the Cochrane Collaboration, a well-regarded network of independent researchers, reviewed nine clinical trials involving nearly 3,000 women and found that there was not enough evidence to determine with certainty whether hypnosis helps women feel less pain during labor, or whether it helps them better cope with labor.But a clinical trial published in 2015 in BJOG, an international peer-reviewed journal of obstetrics and gynecology, showed that hypnobirthing can help women feel less afraid and anxious during labor than they might have been.The participants “had started off as being skeptical, but they ended up being really positive about the technique, as did their partners,” Dr. Soo Downe one of the study’s authors and a professor in midwifery studies at the University of Central Lancashire in England, told The New York Times in 2019.Ms. Mongan’s grandson Kyle Geddes, now 31, recalled having been hypnotized by his grandmother when he was younger and needed help falling asleep. He and his wife are now expecting their first child and have been attending hypnobirthing classes.Hypnosis training even helped Ms. Mongan when she fell ill several times in her last years and at one point needed open-heart surgery, Mr. Geddes said.In her last months, even after losing eyesight, she continued to work on a new book about hypnobirthing, dictating her thoughts to her secretary.“She was really good at putting her mind to something and seeing it through,” said Ms. Keeler, the president of HypnoBirthing International. “One thing I said to her was, ‘You lost your eyesight, but you never lost your vision.’”Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

The continuous improvement of imaging technology holds great promise in areas where visual detection is necessary, such as with cancer screening. Three-dimensional imaging in particular has become popular because it provides a more complete picture of the target object and its context.
“More doctors and radiologists are looking at these 3D volumes, which are new technologies that allow you to look not just at one image, but a set of images,” said UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Miguel Eckstein(link is external), whose expertise lies in the field of visual search. “In some imaging modalities this gives doctors information about volume and it allows them to segment what they’re interested in.”
Common wisdom is that with all this additional information provided, the rate of detection success should increase considerably. However that’s not always the case, Eckstein said. In a study(link is external) published in the journal Current Biology, he, lead author Miguel Lago and their collaborators point out an odd foible of human vision: We’re actually worse at finding small targets in 3D image stacks than if they were in a single 2D image.
“For those type of small targets, what happens is that they become harder to find in these 3D volumes,” Eckstein explained. Unlike humans, machine observers (e.g., deep neural networks) did not show this deficit with small targets in 3D search, suggesting that the effect is related to some human visual-cognitive bottleneck.
It’s a phenomenon that could have important implications in the medical field, particularly in the realm of breast cancer screening with the growing popularity of breast tomosynthesis (3D mammography) to detect not just large, unusual masses but also microcalcifications that could signal the beginnings of cancer development. According to the study, searching through 3D renderings led to high small target miss rates and a significantly decreased decision confidence on the part of the observer.
“Another thing we found out was that when you ask people searching these 3D volumes how much they explored, they tended to overestimate quite a bit how much they thought they explored,” he added. Based on results from eye-tracking software, subjects conducting the 3D search were looking through only about half of the search area while reporting up to more than 80% image exploration.

Those who have persistent trouble sleeping may have an especially difficult grieving process after the death of a loved one, a new study co-authored by a University of Arizona researcher finds.
Most people who lose a close friend or family member will experience sleep troubles as part of the grieving process, as the body and mind react to the stress of the event, said study co-author Mary-Frances O’Connor, a professor in the UArizona Department of Psychology.
But O’Connor and her collaborators found that those who had persistent sleep challenges before losing someone were at higher risk for developing complicated grief after a loss. Complicated grief is characterized by a yearning for a lost loved one so intense and persistent that it disrupts a person’s daily functioning. It occurs in 7-10% of bereaved people, O’Connor said.
“We know that, for many people, experiencing the death of a loved one is followed by sleep disruption — not surprisingly, given how stressful it is to lose a loved one,” said O’Connor, who directs the university’s Grief, Loss and Social Stress Laboratory. “We also know that people who have a more prolonged grief disorder tend to have persistent sleep problems. That led us to ask: What if the reverse is possible? Could it be that people who have had sleep disruption and then experience the death of a loved one are more likely to develop complicated grief?”
O’Connor and her collaborators at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the Phoenix VA Health Care System looked at data from the multiyear Rotterdam Study, which followed a group of middle-aged and older adults over time and looked at various aspects of their physical and mental health.
Participants in the study were asked, among other things, to keep sleep diaries documenting the quality of their sleep. They also were asked to wear a wristwatch monitor, called an actigraph, that objectively measures how long it takes a person to fall asleep, how often a person wakes during the night and how much time spent in bed is awake versus asleep.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightGetty ImagesThe US drug company Moderna has begun studying its Covid-19 vaccine in children aged six months to 11 years old. Moderna is the first US manufacturer to test its vaccine on infants. The company plans to enrol some 6,750 children in the US and Canada for the trial. The inoculation of children and young people is seen as critical to achieving the level of herd immunity necessary to halt the pandemic. Moderna vaccine appears to work against variantsIs Europe’s AstraZeneca jab decision-making flawed?Covid vaccines: How fast is worldwide progress?While the risk of children becoming seriously ill from the virus is smaller than for adults, there is still a risk of transmission – especially among teenagers. “This paediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our Covid-19 vaccine in this younger age population,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said. Both Moderna and Pfizer began testing their Covid-19 vaccines on children aged 12 years and older last year. Results on these trials are pending. AstraZeneca announced its first trial on children last month. Johnson & Johnson has said it will test its vaccine in infants and children but has not yet released a timeline to do so.

It has long been understood that a parent’s DNA is the principal determinant of health and disease in offspring. Yet inheritance via DNA is only part of the story; a father’s lifestyle such as diet, being overweight and stress levels have been linked to health consequences for his offspring. This occurs through the epigenome — heritable biochemical marks associated with the DNA and proteins that bind it. But how the information is transmitted at fertilization along with the exact mechanisms and molecules in sperm that are involved in this process has been unclear until now.
A new study from McGill, published recently in Developmental Cell, has made a significant advance in the field by identifying how environmental information is transmitted by non-DNA molecules in the sperm. It is a discovery that advances scientific understanding of the heredity of paternal life experiences and potentially opens new avenues for studying disease transmission and prevention.
A paradigm shift in understanding of heredity
“The big breakthrough with this study is that it has identified a non-DNA based means by which sperm remember a father’s environment (diet) and transmit that information to the embryo,” says Sarah Kimmins, PhD, the senior author on the study and the Canada Research Chair in Epigenetics, Reproduction and Development. The paper builds on 15 years of research from her group. “It is remarkable, as it presents a major shift from what is known about heritability and disease from being solely DNA-based, to one that now includes sperm proteins. This study opens the door to the possibility that the key to understanding and preventing certain diseases could involve proteins in sperm.”
“When we first started seeing the results, it was exciting, because no one has been able to track how those heritable environmental signatures are transmitted from the sperm to the embryo before,” adds PhD candidate Ariane Lismer, the first author on the paper. “It was especially rewarding because it was very challenging to work at the molecular level of the embryo, just because you have so few cells available for epigenomic analysis. It is only thanks to new technology and epigenetic tools that we were able to arrive at these results.”
Changes in sperm proteins affect offspring
To determine how information that affects development gets passed on to embryos, the researchers manipulated the sperm epigenome by feeding male mice a folate deficient diet and then tracing the effects on particular groups of molecules in proteins associated with DNA.
They found that diet-induced changes to a certain group of molecules (methyl groups), associated with histone proteins, (which are critical in packing DNA into cells), led to alterations in gene expression in embryos and birth defects of the spine and skull. What was remarkable was that the changes to the methyl groups on the histones in sperm were transmitted at fertilization and remained in the developing embryo.
“Our next steps will be to determine if these harmful changes induced in the sperm proteins (histones) can be repaired. We have exciting new work that suggest that this is indeed the case,” adds Kimmins. “The hope offered by this work is that by expanding our understanding of what is inherited beyond just the DNA, there are now potentially new avenues for disease prevention which will lead to healthier children and adults.”
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Materials provided by McGill University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Millions of people are administered general anesthesia each year in the United States alone, but it’s not always easy to tell whether they are actually unconscious.
A small proportion of those patients regain some awareness during medical procedures, but a new study of the brain activity that represents consciousness could prevent that potential trauma. It may also help both people in comas and scientists struggling to define which parts of the brain can claim to be key to the conscious mind.
“What has been shown for 100 years in an unconscious state like sleep are these slow waves of electrical activity in the brain,” says Yuri Saalmann, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology and neuroscience professor. “But those may not be the right signals to tap into. Under a number of conditions — with different anesthetic drugs, in people that are suffering from a coma or with brain damage or other clinical situations — there can be high-frequency activity as well.”
UW-Madison researchers recorded electrical activity in about 1,000 neurons surrounding each of 100 sites throughout the brains of a pair of monkeys at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center during several states of consciousness: under drug-induced anesthesia, light sleep, resting wakefulness, and roused from anesthesia into a waking state through electrical stimulation of a spot deep in the brain (a procedure the researchers described in 2020).
“With data across multiple brain regions and different states of consciousness, we could put together all these signs traditionally associated with consciousness — including how fast or slow the rhythms of the brain are in different brain areas — with more computational metrics that describe how complex the signals are and how the signals in different areas interact,” says Michelle Redinbaugh, a graduate student in Saalman’s lab and co-lead author of the study, published today in the journal Cell Systems.
To sift out the characteristics that best indicate whether the monkeys were conscious or unconscious, the researchers used machine learning. They handed their large pool of data over to a computer, told the computer which state of consciousness had produced each pattern of brain activity, and asked the computer which areas of the brain and patterns of electrical activity corresponded most strongly with consciousness.

Could birth control pills help young female athletes recover faster from concussions and reduce their symptoms?
A new Northwestern Medicine pilot study has shown when a female athlete has a concussion injury during the phase of her menstrual cycle when progesterone is highest, she feels less stress. Feeling stressed is one symptom of a concussion. Feeling less stressed is a marker of recovery.
The study also revealed for the first time the physiological reason for the neural protection is increased blood flow to the brain as a result of higher levels of progesterone.
“Our findings suggest being in the luteal phase (right after ovulation) of the menstrual cycle when progesterone is highest — or being on contraceptives, which artificially increase progesterone — may mean athletes won’t have as severe symptoms when they have a concussion injury,” said co-author Amy Herrold, research assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“Resolving those symptoms is especially problematic for our athletes who are trying to return to school, their sports and everyday life after a concussion,” said lead author Jennie Chen, research assistant professor of radiology at Feinberg.
The study was published in the Journal of Neurotrauma.