Osteoporosis is so difficult to detect in early stage it’s called the “silent disease.” What if artificial intelligence could help predict a patient’s chances of having the bone-loss disease before ever stepping into a doctor’s office?
Tulane University researchers made progress toward that vision by developing a new deep learning algorithm that outperformed existing computer-based osteoporosis risk prediction methods, potentially leading to earlier diagnoses and better outcomes for patients with osteoporosis risk.
Their results were recently published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
Deep learning models have gained notice for their ability to mimic human neural networks and find trends within large datasets without being specifically programmed to do so. Researchers tested the deep neural network (DNN) model against four conventional machine learning algorithms and a traditional regression model, using data from over 8,000 participants aged 40 and older in the Louisiana Osteoporosis Study. The DNN achieved the best overall predictive performance, measured by scoring each model’s ability to identify true positives and avoid mistakes.
“The earlier osteoporosis risk is detected, the more time a patient has for preventative measures,” said lead author Chuan Qiu, a research assistant professor at the Tulane School of Medicine Center for Biomedical Informatics and Genomics. “We were pleased to see our DNN model outperform other models in accurately predicting the risk of osteoporosis in an aging population.”
In testing the algorithms using a large sample size of real-world health data, the researchers were also able to identify the 10 most important factors for predicting osteoporosis risk: weight, age, gender, grip strength, height, beer drinking, diastolic pressure, alcohol drinking, years of smoking, and income level.
Notably, the simplified DNN model using these top 10 risk factors performed nearly as well as the full model which included all risk factors.
While Qiu admitted that there is much more work to be done before an AI platform can be used by the public to predict an individual’s risk of osteoporosis, he said identifying the benefits of the deep learning model was a step in that direction.
“Our final aim is to allow people to enter their information and receive highly accurate osteoporosis risk scores to empower them to seek treatment to strengthen their bones and reduce any further damage,” Qiu said.

A new study brings fresh revelations about the connection between early-life exposure to air pollution and lung health later in life. A research team led by the Keck School of Medicine of USC has shown that exposure to air pollution during childhood is directly associated with bronchitis symptoms as an adult.
To date, many investigations in the field have established intuitive links that are less direct than that: Air pollution exposure while young is consistently associated with lung problems during childhood — and childhood lung problems are consistently associated with lung issues as an adult.
The current study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Clinical Care Medicine, is one of only a few to show the direct connection between childhood air pollution exposure and adult lung health, a connection not fully explained by air pollution impacts on lung health during childhood. It opens the possibility of yet-to-be-understood factors explaining the path from early air pollution exposure to respiratory maladies many years later.
The team drew upon the USC Children’s Health Study, a large-scale, decades-long study following cohorts of Southern Californians starting at school-age and, for many participants, continuing into adulthood. Importantly, the link between childhood air pollution exposure and adult bronchitis symptoms persisted even when the researchers adjusted for asthma or bronchitis symptoms early in life — a finding that came as a surprise.
“We would expect that these observable impacts on childhood respiratory health would explain the relationship between childhood air pollution exposure and adult respiratory health,” said corresponding author Erika Garcia, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine. “Our results suggest that childhood air pollution exposure has more subtle effects on our respiratory system that still impact us in adulthood.”
Safeguarding lung health, now and later
The focus on exposure during youth is motivated in part by the fact that children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution. Their respiratory and immune systems are still developing and compared to adults, they breathe in more air relative to their body mass.

Ultimately the concern is twofold, for the health of young people today and for their future health when they grow up. Notably, among study participants with recent bronchitis symptoms as adults, average childhood exposure to a pollutant called nitrogen dioxide fell far below annual Environmental Protection Agency standards — just a bit over half the limit that was set in 1971 and remains in place today.
“This study highlights the importance of lowering air pollution, and especially exposure during the critical period of childhood,” Garcia said. “Because there’s only so much that we can do as individuals to control our exposure, the need to protect children from the adverse effects of air pollution is better addressed at the policy level.”
The study population comprised 1,308 Children’s Health Study participants with an average age of 32 at their adult assessment. The researchers asked about recent bouts of bronchitis symptoms — having either bronchitis, chronic cough, or congestion or phlegm production not associated with a cold. One-quarter of participants had experienced bronchitis symptoms within the previous 12 months.
Presence of bronchitis symptoms was associated with exposure between birth and age 17 to two types of pollutants. One type groups together tiny particles in the air such as dust, pollen, ash from wildfires, industrial emissions and products from vehicle exhaust. The other, nitrogen dioxide, is a byproduct of combustion in automobiles, planes, boats and power plants that is known to hurt lung function.
Long-running health research proves vital to igniting discovery
For as comprehensive an analysis as possible, average pollutant exposure over childhood was based on month-by-month estimates. The researchers matched up family home address at each time point with contemporaneous local air quality measurements taken by the EPA and through the Children’s Health Study.

“We’re fortunate to have this fantastic and nuanced longitudinal study,” Garcia said. “We can learn a lot about how earlier experiences impact adult health. That’s thanks to a long-term team effort from the participants themselves, their families, the schools they attended and all the research staff and investigators who conducted interviews and generated and analyzed data over the years.”
The current study included additional analyses to rule out factors such as prenatal exposure to nitrogen dioxide, current air pollution exposure as adults and the effects of socioeconomic status in childhood or adulthood as drivers of bronchitis symptoms in adults.
Pollution exposure in youth may hurt lung health for some more than others
Garcia and her colleagues also found that the effect of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter exposure during childhood on bronchitis symptoms among adults was stronger for those who had been diagnosed with asthma as kids.
“There may be a subpopulation that is more sensitive to the effects of air pollution,” Garcia said. “We may want to be especially careful to protect them from exposure, so we can improve their outcomes later in life. Reducing air pollution would have benefits not only for current asthma in children but also for their respiratory health as they grow into adulthood.”
She and her colleagues are following up to examine how the level of air pollution exposure at different ages during youth influences breathing issues as an adult. Other future research directions building on the current study’s results could include looking into other markers of childhood and adult respiratory health, such as how well asthma was controlled, or exploring a potential genetic component.
About this study
The study’s co-authors are Zoe Birnhak, Scott West, Steve Howland, Rob McConnell, Shohreh. Farzan, Theresa Bastain, Rima Habre and Carrie Breton, all of the Keck School of Medicine; and Frederick Lurmann and Nathan Pavlovic of the environmental consulting firm Sonoma Technology.
This research received support from the National Institutes of Health (UH3OD023287, P30ES007048).

Artificial intelligence models often play a role in medical diagnoses, especially when it comes to analyzing images such as X-rays. However, studies have found that these models don’t always perform well across all demographic groups, usually faring worse on women and people of color.
These models have also been shown to develop some surprising abilities. In 2022, MIT researchers reported that AI models can make accurate predictions about a patient’s race from their chest X-rays — something that the most skilled radiologists can’t do.
That research team has now found that the models that are most accurate at making demographic predictions also show the biggest “fairness gaps” — that is, discrepancies in their ability to accurately diagnose images of people of different races or genders. The findings suggest that these models may be using “demographic shortcuts” when making their diagnostic evaluations, which lead to incorrect results for women, Black people, and other groups, the researchers say.
“It’s well-established that high-capacity machine-learning models are good predictors of human demographics such as self-reported race or sex or age. This paper re-demonstrates that capacity, and then links that capacity to the lack of performance across different groups, which has never been done,” says Marzyeh Ghassemi, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the senior author of the study.
The researchers also found that they could retrain the models in a way that improves their fairness. However, their approached to “debiasing” worked best when the models were tested on the same types of patients they were trained on, such as patients from the same hospital. When these models were applied to patients from different hospitals, the fairness gaps reappeared.
“I think the main takeaways are, first, you should thoroughly evaluate any external models on your own data because any fairness guarantees that model developers provide on their training data may not transfer to your population. Second, whenever sufficient data is available, you should train models on your own data,” says Haoran Zhang, an MIT graduate student and one of the lead authors of the new paper. MIT graduate student Yuzhe Yang is also a lead author of the paper, which will appear in Nature Medicine. Judy Gichoya, an associate professor of radiology and imaging sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, and Dina Katabi, the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, are also authors of the paper.
Removing bias
As of May 2024, the FDA has approved 882 AI-enabled medical devices, with 671 of them designed to be used in radiology. Since 2022, when Ghassemi and her colleagues showed that these diagnostic models can accurately predict race, they and other researchers have shown that such models are also very good at predicting gender and age, even though the models are not trained on those tasks.

“Many popular machine learning models have superhuman demographic prediction capacity — radiologists cannot detect self-reported race from a chest X-ray,” Ghassemi says. “These are models that are good at predicting disease, but during training are learning to predict other things that may not be desirable.” In this study, the researchers set out to explore why these models don’t work as well for certain groups. In particular, they wanted to see if the models were using demographic shortcuts to make predictions that ended up being less accurate for some groups. These shortcuts can arise in AI models when they use demographic attributes to determine whether a medical condition is present, instead of relying on other features of the images.
Using publicly available chest X-ray datasets from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the researchers trained models to predict whether patients had one of three different medical conditions: fluid buildup in the lungs, collapsed lung, or enlargement of the heart. Then, they tested the models on X-rays that were held out from the training data.
Overall, the models performed well, but most of them displayed “fairness gaps” — that is, discrepancies between accuracy rates for men and women, and for white and Black patients.
The models were also able to predict the gender, race, and age of the X-ray subjects. Additionally, there was a significant correlation between each model’s accuracy in making demographic predictions and the size of its fairness gap. This suggests that the models may be using demographic categorizations as a shortcut to make their disease predictions.
The researchers then tried to reduce the fairness gaps using two types of strategies. For one set of models, they trained them to optimize “subgroup robustness,” meaning that the models are rewarded for having better performance on the subgroup for which they have the worst performance, and penalized if their error rate for one group is higher than the others.
In another set of models, the researchers forced them to remove any demographic information from the images, using “group adversarial” approaches. Both of these strategies worked fairly well, the researchers found.

“For in-distribution data, you can use existing state-of-the-art methods to reduce fairness gaps without making significant trade-offs in overall performance,” Ghassemi says. “Subgroup robustness methods force models to be sensitive to mispredicting a specific group, and group adversarial methods try to remove group information completely.”
Not always fairer
However, those approaches only worked when the models were tested on data from the same types of patients that they were trained on — for example, only patients from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center dataset.
When the researchers tested the models that had been “debiased” using the BIDMC data to analyze patients from five other hospital datasets, they found that the models’ overall accuracy remained high, but some of them exhibited large fairness gaps.
“If you debias the model in one set of patients, that fairness does not necessarily hold as you move to a new set of patients from a different hospital in a different location,” Zhang says.
This is worrisome because in many cases, hospitals use models that have been developed on data from other hospitals, especially in cases where an off-the-shelf model is purchased, the researchers say.
“We found that even state-of-the-art models which are optimally performant in data similar to their training sets are not optimal — that is, they do not make the best trade-off between overall and subgroup performance — in novel settings,” Ghassemi says. “Unfortunately, this is actually how a model is likely to be deployed. Most models are trained and validated with data from one hospital, or one source, and then deployed widely.”
The researchers found that the models that were debiased using group adversarial approaches showed slightly more fairness when tested on new patient groups that those debiased with subgroup robustness methods. They now plan to try to develop and test additional methods to see if they can create models that do a better job of making fair predictions on new datasets.
The findings suggest that hospitals that use these types of AI models should evaluate them on their own patient population before beginning to use them, to make sure they aren’t giving inaccurate results for certain groups.
The research was funded by a Google Research Scholar Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, RSNA Health Disparities, the Lacuna Fund, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

A recent Finnish study shows that people are commonly given misleading information about depression. According to the researchers, the inaccurate information makes it harder for people to understand the causes of their distress.
Most psychiatric diagnoses are purely descriptive. For example, a diagnosis of depression is only a description of the various psychological symptoms — not the cause. Yet depression is often talked about as a disorder that causes low mood and other symptoms.
Researchers describe this as a form of circular reasoning, which means that psychiatric diagnoses are frequently talked about circularly, as if they described the causes for symptoms. This makes it difficult for people to understand their distress.
“Depression should be considered as a diagnosis similar to a headache. Both are medical diagnoses, but neither explains what causes the symptoms. Like a headache, depression is a description of a problem that can have many different causes. A diagnosis of depression does not explain the cause of depressed mood any more than a diagnosis of headaches explains the cause of pain in the head,” says Jani Kajanoja, a postdoctoral researcher and a medical doctor specialising in psychiatry at the University of Turku in Finland.
This misconception is also perpetuated by mental health professionals, shows a recent study by the University of Turku and the University of the Arts Helsinki.
In the study, the researchers analysed publicly available information on depression provided by leading international health organisations. The researchers selected the websites of English-language organisations whose information on depression was the most influential according to search engine results. The organisations included the World Health Organisation (WHO), the American Psychiatric Association (APA), National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, and Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities, among others.
Most organisations portrayed depression on their website as a disorder that causes symptoms and/or explains what causes the symptoms, although this is not the case. None of the organisations presented the diagnosis as a pure description of symptoms, as would have been accurate.
“Presenting depression as a uniform disorder that causes depressive symptoms is circular reasoning that blurs our understanding of the nature of mental health problems and makes it harder for people to understand their distress,” says Kajanoja.
The researchers suggest that the problem may be caused by a cognitive bias.
“People seem to have a tendency to think that a diagnosis is an explanation even when it is not. It is important for professionals not to reinforce this misconception with their communication, and instead help people to understand their condition,” says Professor and Neuropsychologist Jussi Valtonen from the University of the Arts Helsinki.

An interdisciplinary study led by researchers at the University of South Florida and Indiana University has uncovered significant findings on the long-term effects of one of the most common forms of chemotherapy on cancer survivors.
Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology, the study tracked a cohort of testicular cancer survivors who received cisplatin-based chemotherapy for an average of 14 years, revealing that 78% experience significant difficulties in everyday listening situations, negatively impacting their quality of life. This collaborative research is the first to measure real-world listening challenges and hearing loss progression in cancer survivors over a long period of time.
“It’s important that we understand the real-world effects of patients’ sensory problems and if we can understand that, then we can develop better therapeutic strategies and preventive measures to improve the long-term quality of life for cancer survivors,” said Robert Frisina, distinguished university professor and chair of the USF Department of Medical Engineering.
Cisplatin is commonly used in chemotherapy treatments for a variety of cancers, including bladder, lung, neck and testicular. It is administered intravenously and affects various parts of the body. However, the ears are particularly vulnerable as they have little ability to filter out the drug, causing it to become trapped. This leads to inflammation and the destruction of sensory cells that are critical for coding sound, causing permanent hearing loss that can progressively get worse well after cisplatin treatments are completed.
Lead author Victoria Sanchez, associate professor in the USF Health Department of Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery, said that despite the known risks, there’s a nationwide lack of routine hearing assessments for patients undergoing chemotherapy. “Most patients still do not get their hearing tested prior to, during or after chemotherapy. Our study highlights the need for regular auditory evaluations to manage and mitigate long-term hearing damage.”
The research team found higher doses of cisplatin led to more severe and progressing hearing loss, especially in patients with risk factors, such as high blood pressure and poor cardiovascular health. They also experienced increased difficulty hearing in common environments, such as a loud restaurant.
“It will be critically important to follow these patients for life. Their current median age is only 48 years, and eventually they will enter the years at which age-related hearing loss also begins to develop,” said Dr. Lois B. Travis, Lawrence H. Einhorn Professor of Cancer Research at Indiana University School of Medicine and a researcher at the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. This research is part of The Platinum Study, an ongoing research effort led by Dr. Travis and funded by the National Cancer Institute to study cisplatin-treated testicular cancer survivors.

The hope is that this study will inspire further investigation into alternative chemotherapeutic protocols and preventive measures, such as FDA-approved drugs to prevent or reduce hearing loss.
“This research gives oncologists the information they need to explore alternative treatment plans that could reduce the long-term side effects, such as altering the dosages and timing of the cisplatin in the treatment, when that could be an appropriate option,” Frisina said.
Innovative solutions, such as Pedmark, a new FDA-approved injection that mitigates cisplatin-induced hearing loss in children, represent promising steps forward, according to Frisina.
“We want to protect our hearing or treat a hearing loss if hearing damage occurs,” Sanchez said. “Hearing allows us to connect to the world we love. Staying connected through conversations with family and friends, enjoyment of music and entertainment, staying safe and finding pleasure in our vibrant surroundings. Promoting optimal hearing for overall wellness is essential for healthy living.”
According to the American Cancer Society, in addition to cisplatin, other platinum chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin, cause damage to the cochlea in the inner ear and lead to hearing loss. The risk of damage is greater with higher doses of chemotherapy.

Remarkable new research by a University of Virginia undergraduate may help explain recurrent Crohn’s disease in children and open the door to new ways to treat or even cure the devastating condition.
Crohn’s is a debilitating – and possibly life-threatening – inflammation of the digestive tract. Symptoms include abdominal pain, weakness, fatigue and malnutrition caused by the body’s inability to absorb nutrients. It’s most common in adults but afflicts tens of thousands of children in the United States alone. Many of those kids struggle to go to school and find their lives and childhoods greatly disrupted. These children can suffer stunted growth and delayed puberty and may need to have sections of their bowels surgically removed.
UVA’s new research suggests answers to why children with relapsing Crohn’s endure repeated bouts even after appearing to recover. Working under the guidance of the UVA School of Medicine’s Chelsea Marie, PhD, undergrad Rebecca Pierce found that children with relapsing Crohn’s had a persistent disruption of their microbiomes – the collection of microorganisms that lives in our guts – even after inflammation was successfully controlled by treatment. 
“The relationship between dysbiosis and inflammation is a long-standing question in Crohn’s disease. Rebecca leveraged a pediatric cohort at UVA to show dysbiosis was present even when gut inflammation was controlled,” said Marie, of UVA’s Department of Medicine and Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health. “Our study suggests that persistent microbial imbalances might be an important factor in the disease course in children.” 
That insight could be key to helping doctors develop better ways to treat or possible even cure Crohn’s, said Ning-Jiun “Ninj” Jan, PhD, a senior scientist in Marie’s lab who helped mentor Pierce. “Currently, the main goal of most Crohn’s disease treatments is to manage symptoms. This usually means taking different drugs to address inflammation and encourage healing,” Jan said. “However, these are not cures, meaning these drugs need to be taken continuously to prevent relapse. Our study found that though the symptoms have been alleviated the bacterial composition in their guts did not return to normal, which may be why these patients relapse.”Crohn’s Disease in ChildrenBecause Crohn’s is most common in adults, most research has focused on adult patients. But UVA’s new findings shed important light on Crohn’s in children.
The researchers hypothesized that kids who suffer relapsing Crohn’s had persistent inflammation, along with changes in the composition of the bacteria and other microbes in their guts. Scientists have increasingly come to appreciate the importance of these microbes in maintaining good health, and disruptions of the microbiome is increasingly suspected as a major contributor to disease.

Pierce, now a medical student at Georgetown University, and her collaborators compared biopsy samples collected from the intestines of children with Crohn’s who had gone into remission with samples collected from a control group of children with no signs of Crohn’s. The researchers found some big differences, with the children with Crohn’s showing significant decreases in bacteria such as Streptococcus and increases in others, such as Oribacterium. (Oribacterium has previously been linked to gut microbiome disruptions.) Further, they observed notable changes in immune cells, such as an increase in the numbers of CD4+ T cells, which play an important role in inflammation.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the children with Crohn’s also had stronger barriers of epithelial cells lining their intestines. This suggests that existing Crohn’s treatments are effective but not fully addressing the underlying issues that drive the disease, the researchers say.
“Even in our cohort of pediatric Crohn’s patients in remission, we detected persistent microbial imbalances and subtle inflammatory changes,” Pierce said. “Current therapeutics have focused on treating clinical symptoms which can leave patients vulnerable to relapse. Our work suggests that incorporating therapies that target the root causes of dysbiosis could lead to improved treatments with fewer relapses.” 
That could lead to new and better Crohn’s treatments for both children and adults, the researchers note. For example, doctors might seek to restore balance to the microbiome by using fecal transplants or by administering tailored cocktails of healthy microbes to replace those that have been lost. 
“Our study suggests that returning the bacterial composition to normal might help prevent these patients from relapsing and possibly cure them of Crohn’s disease,” Jan said.
Marie noted that the new findings were made possible by the culture of collaboration at UVA.

“Clinical research is key for improving child health,” Marie said. “Rebecca’s work brought together experts in infectious disease, pediatric gastroenterology and bioinformatics to address a disease in our pediatric patients at UVA. We are excited to continue this model of collaboration.” 
Understanding the microbiome to prevent, treat and cure disease is a priority of UVA’s TransUniversity Microbiome Initiative (TUMI), which brings together researchers from across the university to advance this cutting-edge field of biomedical research.Findings PublishedMarie and her team have published their Crohn’s findings in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. The article is open access, meaning it is free to read. The research team consisted of Pierce, Jan, Pankaj Kumar, Jeremy Middleton, William A. Petri and Marie. Petri is a consultant for TECHLAB Inc., while Marie is a consultant for Merck Inc.
The research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, award OP1136759.To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog.

A study from Michigan Medicine’s Kresge Hearing Research Institute was able to produce supranormal hearing in mice, while also supporting a hypothesis on the cause of hidden hearing loss in humans.
The researchers had previously used similar methods — increasing the amount of the neurotrophic factor neurotrophin-3 in the inner ear — to promote the recovery of auditory responses in mice that had experienced acoustic trauma, and to improve hearing in middle-aged mice.
This study is the first to use the same approach in otherwise healthy young mice to create improved auditory processing, beyond what’s naturally occurring.
“We knew that providing Ntf3 to the inner ear in young mice increased the number of synapses between inner hair cells and auditory neurons, but we did not know what having more synapses would do to hearing,” said Gabriel Corfas, Ph.D., director of the Kresge Institute, who led the research team.
“We now show that animals with extra inner ear synapses have normal thresholds — what an audiologist would define as normal hearing — but they can process the auditory information in supranormal ways.”
The resulting paper, “From hidden hearing loss to supranormal auditory processing by neurotrophin 3-mediated modulation of inner hair cell synapse density,” was published in PLOS Biology.
About the paper
As in previous studies, the researchers altered the expression of the Ntf3 to increase the number of synapses between inner hair cells and neurons.

Inner hair cells exist inside the cochlea and convert sound waves into signals sent — via those synapses — to the brain.
This time, however, two groups of young mice were created and studied: one in which synapses were reduced, and a second — the supranormal hearing mice — in which synapses were increased.
“Previously, we have used that same molecule to regenerate synapses lost due to noise exposure in young mice, and to improve hearing in middle-aged mice, when they already start showing signs of age-related hearing loss,” said Corfas.
“This suggests that this molecule has the potential to improve hearing in humans in similar situations. The new results indicate the regenerating synapses or increasing their numbers will improve their auditory processing.”
Both groups of mice underwent a Gap-Prepulse Inhibition test, which measures their ability to detect very brief auditory stimuli.
For this test, the subject is placed in a chamber with a background noise, then a loud tone that startles the mouse is presented alone or preceded by a very brief silent gap.

That gap, when detected by the mouse, reduces the startle response. Researchers then determine how long the silent gap needs to be for the mice to detect it.
Mice with fewer synapses required a much longer silent gap. That result supports a hypothesis about the relationship between synapse density and hidden hearing loss in humans.
Hidden hearing loss describes a difficulty in hearing that cannot be detected by standard testing.
People with hidden hearing loss may struggle to understand speech — or discern sounds in the presence of background noise. And results of the Gap-Prepulse Inhibition test had been previously shown to be correlated with auditory processing in humans.
A surprising find
Less expected, however, were the results of the subjects with increased synapses.
Not only did they show enhanced peaks in measured Acoustic Brain Stem response, but the mice also performed better on the Gap-Prepulse Inhibition test, suggesting an ability to process an increased amount of auditory information.
“We were surprised to find that when we increased the number of synapses, the brain was able to process the extra auditory information. And those subjects performed better than the control mice in the behavioral test,” Corfas said.
Hair cell loss had once been believed to be the primary cause of hearing loss in humans as we age.
Now, however, it’s understood that the loss of inner hair cell synapses can be the first event in the hearing loss process, making therapies that preserve, regenerate and/or increase synapses exciting possible approaches for treating some hearing disorders.
“Some neurodegenerative disorders also start with loss of synapses in the brain,” Corfas said.
“Therefore, the lessons from the studies in the inner ear could help in finding new therapies for some of these devastating diseases.”

Researchers from Aarhus University have made a significant breakthrough by discovering that the drug 4-OI can enhance the effectiveness of a cancer-fighting viral agent. This may lead to treatment of cancers that are otherwise resistant to therapies.
When a cancer cell doesn’t respond to traditional therapies, doctors may turn to a sort of viral biological warfare, by deploying ‘troops’ in the form of viral agents that are specifically engineered to target and eliminate cancer cells. The mode of attack is to transform the tumor into an immunologically “hot” environment, making it more visible and recognisable to our immune system.
Now, researchers from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University have found a way to make one strain of viral agents even more effective. And the results are groundbreaking says lead researcher, Associate Professor David Olagnier:
“We found that if we administer a specific viral agent called Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSVD51) along with a metabolite-drug called 4-Octyl-Itaconate (4-OI), we are able to treat cancers that are considered resistant to viral infections.”
In other words, by combining the drug and the viral agent, the researchers have managed to push the door open to possible treatments for cancers that have been immune to nearly all known treatments, including the viral agents. This is because some cancers have antiviral signaling, which enables them to combat the viral agents and resist the treatment.
The results are particularly surprising because the drug 4-OI has, in other combinations, shown to have the completely opposite effect on different types of viruses. 4-OI is normally antiviral — meaning it would actually stop viruses rather than boost them. But in this specific combination, 4-OI instead helps the cancer fighting viral agents to work better:
“It is the combination of the specific virus and the drug that brings about a completely unique proviral effect, which potentially can have a significant impact on patients affected by cancer that we are currently unable to treat,” explains David Olagnier.

The new findings are an important step towards a new form of treatment, and they underline the need for consistently working to find new ways to treat the many forms of cancer we face, says David Olagnier:
“Cancer is not a single disease but rather a hundred diseases with one name, so it is crucial that we develop multiple ways to eradicate the disease. The use of biologically active viral agents can potentially be a gamechanger for some currently incurable cancers. That’s why our findings are so exciting and groundbreaking,” he explains.
For the research team, the next step is a more extensive pre-clinical testing of the combinational use of VSVD51 and 4-OI.
“We are especially interested in testing this combination on tumours that have metastasised, which is when the cancer has started to spread, but also on liquid types of cancer like lymphomas,” explains David Olagnier.

Fish consumption during pregnancy is a complex scientific topic. On one hand, fish are rich in nutrients essential to brain development, including polyunsaturated fatty acids, selenium, iodine, and vitamin D. On the other, fish contain methyl mercury, a known neurotoxicant. This has led the US Food and Drug Administration to recommend that expectant mothers limit consumption, which inadvertently causes many women to forgo fish consumption during pregnancy altogether.
Fish consumption is an important route of methyl mercury exposure, however, efforts to understand the health risk posed by mercury are further complicated by the fact that the nutritional benefits from fish may modify or reduce the toxicity posed by mercury. A new study appearing in the American Journal of Epidemiology based on data from a cohort of residents of a coastal community in Massachusetts creates a new framework that could untangle these questions, reduce confusion, and produce clearer guidance on fish consumption for pregnant mothers.
“We propose an alternative modelling approach to address limitations of previous models and to contribute thereby to improved evidence-based advice on the risks and benefits of fish consumption,” said the authors, who include Sally Thurston, PhD, with the University of Rochester Medical Center, Susan Korrick, MD, MPH, with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and David Ruppert, PhD, with Cornell University. “In fish-eating populations, this can be addressed by separating mercury exposure into fish intake and average mercury content of the consumed fish.”
The new research comes from an analysis of data from the New Bedford Cohort, which was created to assess the health of children born to mothers residing near the New Bedford Harbor Superfund site in Massachusetts. The current study included 361 children from the cohort who were born between 1993 and 1998 and underwent neurodevelopment assessments, including tests for IQ, language, memory, and attention, at age eight years.
The researchers were able to measure mercury exposure during the third trimester of pregnancy through hair sample collected from the mothers after birth. While hair samples have been the traditional method to study maternal mercury exposure, this approach alone cannot distinguish between mothers who frequently consumed low-mercury fish compared to those who consumed a smaller quantity of high-mercury fish.
To overcome this limitation, the researchers instead created a model that includes estimates of mercury exposure per serving of fish. This was possible because mothers in the cohort also completed a food questionnaire and reported the type and frequency of fish and shellfish consumed during pregnancy. The authors estimated the average mercury levels by type of fish, and when combined with the information about the mother’s diet, they were able to create a more precise and detailed method to estimate the joint associations of pregnancy fish intake and fish mercury levels on neurodevelopment.
Using this model, the researchers found that the relation between pregnancy fish consumption and subsequent neurodevelopment varied depending on the estimated average mercury levels in the fish. Specifically, consuming low mercury-containing fish was beneficial, while consuming fish with higher levels of mercury was detrimental.
“Given methodologic limitations to previous analyses, future work expanding our alternative modelling approach to account for both the average mercury and nutritional content of fish could facilitate better estimation of the risk-benefit tradeoffs of fish consumption, a key component of many healthy diets,” said the authors.
The authors are in the process of applying this model to other large studies of maternal fish consumption, including the Seychelles Child Development Study, which Thurston serves on as an investigator.
The American Journal of Epidemiology study was supported with funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

29 minutes agoGetty ImagesUltraviolet (UV) radiation is emitted by the Sun and penetrates the Earth’s atmosphere.