Pregnancy may carry a cost, reports a new study from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research, carried out among 1735 young people in the Philippines, shows that women who reported having been pregnant looked biologically older than women who had never been pregnant, and women who had been pregnant more often looked biologically older than those who reported fewer pregnancies. Notably, the number of pregnancies fathered was not associated with biological aging among same-aged cohort men, which implies that it is something about pregnancy or breastfeeding specifically that accelerates biological aging. The findings are published in The Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
This study builds on epidemiological findings that high fertility can have negative side effects on women’s health and longevity. What was unknown, however, was whether the costs of reproduction were present earlier in life, before disease and age-related decline start to become apparent. Until now, one of the challenges has been quantifying biological aging among the young. This challenge was overcome by using a collection of new tools that use DNA methylation (DNAm) to study different facets of cellular aging, health, and mortality risk. These tools, called ‘epigenetic clocks’ allow researchers to study aging earlier in life, filling a key gap in the study of biological aging.
“Epigenetic clocks have revolutionized how we study biological aging across the lifecourse and open up new opportunities to study how and when long-term health costs of reproduction and other life events take hold,” said Calen Ryan PhD, lead author of the study and associate research scientist in the Columbia Aging Center.
“Our findings suggest that pregnancy speeds up biological aging, and that these effects are apparent in young, high-fertility women,” said Ryan. “Our results are also the first to follow the same women through time, linking changes in each woman’s pregnancy number to changes in her biological age.”
The relationship between pregnancy history and biological age persisted even after taking into account various other factors tied to biological aging, such as socioeconomic status, smoking, and genetic variation, but were not present among men from the same sample. This finding, noted Ryan, points to some aspect of bearing children — rather than sociocultural factors associated with early fertility or sexual activity — as a driver of biological aging.
Despite the striking nature of the findings, Ryan encourages readers to remember the context: “Many of the reported pregnancies in our baseline measure occurred during late adolescence, when women are still growing. We expect this kind of pregnancy to be particularly challenging for a growing mother, especially if her access to healthcare, resources, or other forms of support is limited.”
Ryan also acknowledged that there is more work to do, “We still have a lot to learn about the role of pregnancy and other aspects of reproduction in the aging process. We also do not know the extent to which accelerated epigenetic aging in these particular individuals will manifest as poor health or mortality decades later in life.”
Ryan said that our current understanding of epigenetic clocks and how they predict health and mortality comes largely from North America and Europe, but that the aging process can take slightly different forms in the Philippines and other places around the world.

“Ultimately I think our findings highlight the potential long-term impacts of pregnancy on women’s health, and the importance of taking care of new parents, especially young mothers.”
Co-authors are Christopher Kuzawa, Northwestern University, Nanette R. Lee and Delia B. Carba,USC-Office of Population Studies Foundation; Julie L. MacIsaac, David S. Lin, and Parmida Atashzay, University of British Columbia; Daniel BelskyColumbia Public Health and Columbia Aging Center; Michael S. Kobor, University of British Columbia, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health R01AG061006; National Science Foundation BCS 1751912; University of British Columbia UBC 60055724.

Adults with heart disease risks who received daily reminders or incentives to become more active increased their daily steps by more than 1,500 after a year, and many were still sticking with their new habit six months later, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health that published in Circulation. The findings were simultaneously presented as late-breaking research at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Session.
The improvements, which also resulted in an extra 40 minutes of moderate exercise each week, correlated with a 6% reduced risk of premature death and a 10% reduced risk of cardiovascular-related deaths, compared to data from prior studies. The Department of Health and Human Services recommends that most adults should get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise per week, such as brisk walking, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, like fast cycling, or a combination of the two, paired with twice-weekly strength sessions.
Researchers found that while a simple daily reminder was effective in helping people move more, offering financial incentives or point-based rewards, such as in a game, was even more effective. However, combining the two incentives proved most effective. Participants who got both were still logging improvements in activity levels six months after the rewards stopped.
“Even moderate exercise can drastically reduce cardiovascular risk, so finding low-cost ways to get people moving and stay in a fitness program that they can do at home is a huge win for public health,” said Alison Brown, Ph.D., R.D., a program officer at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH.
The study took place between 2019 and 2024. Researchers followed more than 1,000 adults at elevated risk for major cardiovascular events. All participants received a wearable fitness tracker, which connected to an online health portal and enabled researchers to count their baseline daily step count. Participants then set a goal to increase their daily steps by 33%, 40%, 50%, or any amount greater than 1,500 steps from their starting point. After they set their goals, participants were randomized into one of four groups.
Three groups offered incentives, including game-like rewards, financial rewards, or a combination of the two. In the game group, each participant received points every week and kept them by meeting their daily step goals. On days they failed to meet their goals they lost points. Participants with enough points moved up a level and participants who failed to meet goals moved down a level. A family member or friend could act as a participant’s “support crew” and receive weekly updates about their progress. At the end of the study, adults who reached the highest levels by meeting their daily step goals received trophies. In the financial group, each participant received $14 each week, but lost $2 a day if they did not meet their step targets. The third group received game-like and financial incentives.
The fourth group — a control group — received no incentives but got the fitness tracker, along with daily messages that noted their step count. Each intervention lasted for 12 months followed by a six-month follow-up period where all participants received the same information as controls.

Before the study began, participants in all groups logged an average of about 5,000 daily steps, or 2.4 miles. After 12 months, they increased their daily step count by more than 1,500, or three-fourths of a mile.
Compared to the control group, the game-incentive group walked an extra 538 steps from their baseline amount, while those who received financial incentives walked an extra 492. The group who received both incentives averaged 868 extra steps and maintained an average 576 more daily steps six months later. Adults in the single interventions kept their physical activity increases, but the gains didn’t differ significantly from the average 1,200 extra steps people in the control group took 18 months after the start of the study.
Still, “The interventions created immediate benefits for participants — and they worked,” said Alexander C. Fanaroff, M.D., a study author, an expert in behavior change, and an interventional cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. “Research shows it’s easier to think about today instead of the future, whether it’s exercising more to support long-term heart health or saving for a future goal, like college or retirement.”
Researchers said people wanting to change their behavior, especially around exercise, can focus on the same principles used in the study, which created immediate benefits or rewards for movement. For example, there are exercise apps that provide daily reminders and rewards for meeting personal health goals, people could enlist family and friends for support, and even create scenarios where they lose money by giving it away if they don’t meet their targets. Healthcare systems and organizations could also use tactics in the study to help patients increase physical activity levels. The research was supported by NHLBI grant R61/R33HL141440.

Withdrawing aspirin one month after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in high-risk heart patients and keeping them on ticagrelor alone safely improves outcomes and reduces major bleeding by more than half when compared to patients taking aspirin and ticagrelor combined (also known as dual antiplatelet therapy or DAPT), which is the current standard of care.
These are the results from the ULTIMATE-DAPT study announced during a late-breaking trial presentation at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions on Sunday, April 7, and published in The Lancet.
This is the first and only trial to test high-risk patients with recent or threatened heart attack (acute coronary artery syndromes, or ACS) taking ticagrelor with a placebo starting one month after PCI, and compare them with ACS patients taking ticagrelor with aspirin over the same period. The significant findings could change the current guidelines for standard of care worldwide.
“Our study has demonstrated that withdrawing aspirin in patients with recent ACS one month after PCI is beneficial by reducing major and minor bleeding through one year by more than 50 percent. Moreover, there was no increase in adverse ischemic events, meaning continuing aspirin was causing harm without providing any benefit,” says Gregg W. Stone, MD, the study co-chair of ULTIMATE-DAPT, who presented the trial results.
“It is my belief that it’s time to change the guidelines and standard clinical practice such that we no longer treat most ACS patients with dual antiplatelet therapy beyond one month after a successful PCI procedure. Treating these high-risk patients with a single potent platelet inhibitor such as ticagrelor will improve prognosis,” adds Dr. Stone, who is Director of Academic Affairs for the Mount Sinai Health System and Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), and Population Health Science and Policy, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The study analyzed 3,400 patients with ACS at 58 centers in four countries between August 2019 and October 2022. All of the patients had undergone PCI, a non-surgical procedure in which interventional cardiologists use a catheter to place stents in the blocked coronary arteries to restore blood flow. The patients were stable one month after PCI and were on ticagrelor and aspirin. Researchers randomized the patients after one month, withdrawing aspirin in 1,700 patients and putting them on ticagrelor and a placebo, while leaving the other 1,700 patients on ticagrelor and aspirin. All patients were evaluated between 1 and 12 months after the procedure.
During the study period, 35 patients in the ticagrelor-placebo group had a major or minor bleeding event, compared to 78 patients in the ticagrelor-aspirin group, meaning that the incidence of overall bleeding incidents was reduced by 55 percent by withdrawing aspirin. The study also analyzed major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events including death, heart attack, stroke, bypass graft surgery, or repeat PCI. These events occurred in 61 patients in the ticagrelor-placebo group compared to 63 patients in the ticagrelor-aspirin group, and were not statistically significant — further demonstrating that removing aspirin did no harm and improved outcomes.
“It was previously believed that discontinuing dual antiplatelet therapy within one year after PCI in patients with ACS would increase the risk of heart attack and other ischemic complications, but the present study shows that is not the case, with contemporary drug-eluting stents now used in all PCI procedures. Discontinuing aspirin in patients with a recent or threatened heart attack who are stable one month after PCI is safe and, by decreasing serious bleeding, improves outcomes,” Dr. Stone adds. “This study extends the results of prior work that showed similar results but without the quality of using a placebo, which eliminates bias from the study.”
This trial was funded by the Chinese Society of Cardiology, the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China, and Jiangsu Provincial & Nanjing Municipal Clinical Trial Project.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have successfully grown ‘mini kidneys’ in the lab and grafted them into live mice, revealing new insights into the metabolic defects and a potential therapy for polycystic kidney disease.
‘Mini kidneys,’ or kidney organoids, are kidney-like structures grown in the lab using stem cells. In the study led by NTU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine), researchers grew the organoids using skin cells derived from patients with polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a prevalent form of genetic condition that affects 1 in 1000 individuals across all ethnicities.*
People with PKD often progress to end-stage kidney disease between their 50s and 60s, with the standard treatment options available being dialysis or a kidney transplant. However, dialysis significantly compromises a patient’s quality of life, while a transplanted kidney can be challenging to acquire. One other option is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drug Tolvaptan, which is very costly and has severe side effects on the liver.
To address the need for more effective treatment for PKD patients, the NTU research team sought to better understand the disease by engrafting their newly developed mini kidneys into mice.
Previous studies were conducted on mini kidneys grown in a dish, which could only partly mimic the kidney structure and function. The NTU scientists engrafted the mini kidneys into live mice to comprehensively replicate the pathological features of kidney disease, including blood flow, fluid movement (tubular fluid) and cellular communication with other organs.
Lead investigator Assistant Professor Xia Yun at LKCMedicine said, “Engrafting the kidney organoid in mice provided us with a physiologically sophisticated approach to studying polycystic kidney disease as we were able to successfully emulate critical disease characteristics similar to those observed in human kidney patients.”
Critical disease characteristics included abnormalities like the spontaneous formation of cysts in the kidneys and the subsequent damage to its tiny tubes.

In their study, reported in the scientific journal Cell Stem Cell, the NTU research team said that they believed their engrafted mini kidneys were high quality because cysts sustained without extra stress stimulation or chemicals, even after they were removed from the live mice for further investigations in a dish. In contrast, previous kidney organoids grown in a dish cannot form cysts without stress stimulation.
Co-investigator Assistant Professor Foo Jia Nee at LKCMedicine said, “The similarity between the disease manifestation observed in our engrafted mini kidney model and the real-life experiences of polycystic kidney disease patients suggest that growing kidney organoids and engrafting them into live mice could be beneficial in studying the disease and a useful tool to test new treatments.”
Metabolic defects in polycystic kidney disease
Scientists have long known that abnormalities in a structure on kidney cells, or the primary cilium, cause cysts to form in kidneys. However, tests to understand the regulatory mechanism and relationship between the primary cilium and cell metabolism (autophagy) in live mice with PKD, have not been possible until now.
By studying the development of PKD in live mice and testing cellular pathways, researchers found evidence that boosting autophagy could reduce the severity of cysts in the mini kidney.
After establishing that boosting autophagy could reduce cysts, the NTU scientists shortlisted 22 drugs known for their effects on cell metabolism and tested them in the lab. Results showed that minoxidil, a clinical drug widely used to cure hypertension and hair loss, effectively reduced cyst formation in the novel mouse model.

Asst Prof Xia Yun said, “Our study has demonstrated how cysts in polycystic diseased kidneys can be reduced by boosting autophagy, suggesting that this could be a promising treatment for PKD. Moreover, the proven clinical safety of minoxidil may allow it to be quickly re-purposed to treat PKD patients in clinic. However, more research will be needed to establish this potential.”
Commenting as an independent expert, Associate Professor Ng Kar Hui, Senior Consultant, Division of Paediatric Nephrology, Dialysis and Renal Transplantation, Department of Paediatrics, Khoo Teck Puat — National University Children’s Medical Institute, National University Hospital, said, “Polycystic kidney disease is one of the biggest causes of chronic kidney diseases among adults. An effective treatment may potentially ameliorate the rising numbers of people with kidney failure in Singapore. The establishment of such models in live organisms brings us one step closer to finding more treatment options.
In future studies, the NTU team will test the efficacy of minoxidil and adapt the mini kidney models to investigate other burgeoning kidney diseases without a strong genetic underpinning, such as diabetic kidney disease.
* Harris, P.C., and Torres, V.E. (2009). Polycystic kidney disease. Annual Review of Medicine. Volume 60, 321-337.

Multidrug-resistant bacterial infections that cannot be treated by any known antibiotics pose a serious global threat. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a Chinese research team has now introduced a method for the development of novel antibiotics to fight resistant pathogens. The drugs are based on protein building blocks with fluorous lipid chains.
Antibiotics are often prescribed far too readily. In many countries they are distributed without prescriptions and administered in factory farming: prophylactically to prevent infections and enhance performance. As a result, resistance is on the rise — increasingly against reserve antibiotics as well. The development of innovative alternatives is essential.
It is possible to learn some lessons from the microbes themselves. Lipoproteins, small protein molecules with fatty acid chains, are widely used by bacteria in their battles against microbial competitors. A number of lipoproteins have already been approved for use as drugs. The common factors among the active lipoproteins include a positive charge and an amphiphilic structure, meaning they have segments that repel fat and others that repel water. This allows them to bind to bacterial membranes and pierce through them to the interior.
A team led by Yiyun Cheng at East China Normal University in Shanghai aims to amplify this effect by replacing hydrogen atoms in the lipid chain with fluorine atoms. These make the lipid chain simultaneously water-repellant (hydrophobic) and fat-repellant (lipophobic). Their particularly low surface energy strengthens their binding to cell membranes while their lipophobicity disrupts the cohesion of the membrane.
The team synthesized a spectrum (substance library) of fluorous lipopeptides from fluorinated hydrocarbons and peptide chains. To link the two pieces, they used the amino acid cysteine, which binds them together via a disulfide bridge. The researchers screened the molecules by testing their activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a widespread, highly dangerous strain of bacteria that is resistant to nearly all antibiotics. The most effective compound they found was “R6F,” a fluorous lipopeptide made of six arginine units and a lipid chain made of eight carbon and thirteen fluorine atoms. To increase biocompatibility, the R6F was enclosed within phospholipid nanoparticles.
In mouse models, R6F nanoparticles were shown to be very effective against sepsis and chronic wound infections by MRSA. No toxic side effects were observed. The nanoparticles seem to attack the bacteria in several ways: they inhibit the synthesis of important cell-wall components, promoting collapse of the walls; they also pierce the cell membrane and destabilize it; disrupt the respiratory chain and metabolism; and increase oxidative stress while simultaneously disrupting the antioxidant defense system of the bacteria. In combination, these effects kill the bacteria — other bacteria as well as MRSA. No resistance appears to develop.
These insights provide starting points for the development of highly efficient fluorous peptide drugs to treat multi-drug resistant bacteria.

Researchers with McMaster University have crafted the first-ever guidelines to help prepare families who plan to build their child’s tolerance to common food allergens.
These international guidelines, published on April 8, 2024 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, standardize the preparation process for families considering oral immunotherapy, a process that involves giving very small amounts of an allergen, like peanuts, to patients and gradually increasing the amount to build up their tolerance.
Until now, clinicians had little evidence-based guidance to provide parents administering this procedure to their child. The guidelines fill an important gap as the therapy is not without its risks — it is administered daily at home to children by their parents, requiring caregivers to act like amateur medical professionals, observing reactions and deciding on necessary treatments.
“This is a landmark paper in our field because it has never been done before and this process has never been standardized,” says Douglas Mack, lead author of the paper and assistant clinical professor with McMaster’s Department of Pediatrics. “We’re in dear need of having some kind of guidance on how to approach oral immunotherapy. We simply have not had this before.”
Among the guidelines, the researchers included the following recommendations: A robust standardized education process for patients and caregivers through a detailed consent procedure Establishing adequate parental supervision for dosing before beginning treatment Identifying inadvisable risk factors including uncontrolled asthma, an unwillingness to use epinephrine, uncontrolled psychological concerns and pregnancy Clearly understanding the patient and caregiver goals Developing a structured universal consent form templateTo develop the recommendations, the panel of 36 international oral immunotherapy experts identified more than 250 statements that met consensus as important considerations for clinicians in prescribing oral immunotherapy and 71 statements that were used to craft a consent form for families.
Using these statements, researchers have put forward a standardized protocol that clinicians can use to prepare patients. They also developed a template consent form that can be used by clinicians to ensure patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to this therapy.

“These families must provide the therapy every single day. That’s why these guidelines are so important. Safety can be optimized to make sure that they understand what they’re taking on, while ensuring that they are aware of the kinds of side-effects that can be dangerous.”
Prior to these guidelines as many as one third of patients were not getting any degree of adequate consent or preparation before starting treatment. When adequate counselling was performed, the study found the average time to be about 30-60 minutes.
“If families are not prepared for oral immunotherapy, they’re going to fail or it’s going to become unsafe,” he says.
“If they decide they want to do it after following these guidelines, they’re prepared for what they’re getting into. They understand the risks and most importantly, it makes it safer because they can anticipate the challenges. This protocol sets the standard moving forward.”
The National Institute of Health provided funding for the study.

The new technology, which was created at the University of Turku and developed by the company CardioSignal, uses a smartphone to analyse heart movement and detect heart failure. The study involved five organisations from Finland and the United States.
Heart failure is a condition affecting tens of millions of people worldwide, in which the heart is unable to perform its normal function of pumping blood to the body. It is a serious condition that develops as a result of a number of cardiovascular diseases and its symptoms may require repeated hospitalisation.
Heart failure is challenging to diagnose because its symptoms, such as shortness of breath, abnormal fatigue on exertion, and swelling, can be caused by a number of conditions. There is no simple test available to detect it and diagnostics relies on an examination by a doctor, blood tests, and sophisticated imaging, such as an ultrasound scan of the heart.
Gyrocardiography is a non-invasive technique for measuring cardiac vibrations on the chest. The smartphone’s built-in motion sensors can detect and record these vibrations, including those that doctors cannot hear with a stethoscope. The method has been developed over the last 10 years by researchers at the University of Turku and CardioSignal.
The researchers’ latest study on using smartphone motion sensors to detect heart failure was carried out at the Turku and Helsinki University Hospitals in Finland and Stanford University Hospital in the US. Approximately 1,000 people took part in the study, of whom around 200 were patients suffering from heart failure. The study compared the data provided by the motion sensors in the heart failure patients and patients without heart disease.
“The results we obtained with this new method are promising and may in the future make it easier to detect heart failure,” says Cardiologist Antti Saraste, one of the two main authors of the research article and the Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Turku, Finland.
Precise detection uncovers heart failure
The researchers found that heart failure is associated with typical changes in the motion sensor data collected by a smartphone. On the basis of this data, the researchers were able to identify the majority of patients with heart failure.

The analysis of the movements detected by the gyroscope and accelerometer is so accurate that in the future it could provide healthcare professionals with a quick and easy way to detect heart failure.
“Primary healthcare has very limited tools for detecting heart failure. We can create completely new treatment options for remote monitoring of at-risk groups and for monitoring already diagnosed patients after hospitalisation,” says CardioSignal’s founding member and CEO, Cardiologist Juuso Blomster.
Consistent with several European countries, heart failure affects around 1-2% of the population in Finland, but it is much more common in older adults, affecting around one in ten people aged 70. Detecting heart failure is important as effective treatment can help to alleviate its symptoms. Accurate diagnosis and timely access to treatment can also reduce healthcare costs, which are driven up by emergency room visits and hospital stays, especially during exacerbations.
The joint research projects between CardioSignal and the University of Turku aim to promote people’s health and reduce healthcare costs through innovation, improved disease diagnostics, and prevention of serious complications.

Focusing attention on your mobile phone instead of your partner doesn’t just strain your relationship — it also affects women’s creativity in the workplace, caution researchers from the Universities of Bath, Aston, and IESE Business School.
The study sheds light on the negative effects of ‘phubbing’, the idea of snubbing someone in favour of your phone, which is known for its detrimental impact on relationships and mental wellbeing. Now the study of working couples in the US points to repercussions in the workplace as well, but only for the female partner.
“Phone usage is eroding the connection between couples and hindering their capacity to discuss and address stresses and concerns that are playing on their mind,” said Professor Yasin Rofcanin from the University of Bath’s Future of Work research centre.
“Supportive interactions at home have a positive crossover effect on partners, enhancing their creativity in the workplace. However, this spiral of support is lost when individuals are absorbed in phone scrolling, missing out on these valuable moments of connection.”
Analysis of diary entries spanning 15 working days, from 65 full-time, dual-income heterosexual couples with children, in the US, reveals that phone use is disrupting social interaction and the support couples provide each other in balancing work and family responsibilities.
Previous research from a similar study setup shows that supportive interactions with co-workers extend to the home environment, benefiting partners in loving relationships and contributing to enhanced creativity in the workplace.
However, the effect only works for women. Researchers say women seem more adept at translating this support into workplace creativity, possibly because expectations on women to juggle home and work push them to pursue support networks and seek out family-friendly work policies.

The researchers say that the support spiral enables women to be more resourceful at work — to engage in proactive ‘job-crafting’ that enhances job satisfaction, such as seeking out new challenges, building stronger relationships with colleagues and choosing a positive perspective on their role, which all contribute to enhanced creativity at work.
“These findings around phubbing hold particular relevance in the post-pandemic era, where hybrid working arrangements have become increasingly prevalent,” said Professor Rofcanin. “As organizations navigate this new landscape, it’s crucial to consider the impact of home dynamics on employee productivity and well-being.”
The researchers hope that the findings will contribute to employer thinking on boundaries around using technology for working out of hours, and that it will underline the importance of policies that support work-family balance, such as flexible working schedules.
Dr Siqi Wang from Aston Business School said: “In fostering a supportive work-family environment, close collaboration between HR managers and employees’ first-line supervisors is essential. Employers can benefit from work-family supervisor training programs emphasizing communication and limiting technology use, particularly for work purposes.”

A study from the University of Jyväskylä confirms the concerns raised in the public domain about how young people’s decreased fitness may affect their future work ability. The association of low youth cardiorespiratory fitness and adulthood decreased work ability persisted until the end of working life, which predicts substantial societal costs.
In the 45-year study published in JAMA Network Open, the participant’s baseline physical fitness was measured in school between the ages of 12 and 19. Work ability was self-assessed twice during working life, between the ages of 37 and 44 and then between the ages of 57 and 64. Low cardiorespiratory fitness in adolescence was associated with decreased work ability and higher rates of absence due to illness in the middle of working life, and with decreased work ability at the end of working life. Low musculoskeletal fitness or high body mass was not associated with adulthood work ability.
The study is the first to demonstrate the association of youth cardiorespiratory fitness with adulthood work ability in working men and women.Recently, studies among Swedish men have shown that low fitness in youth increases the risk of chronic disability in adulthood.
“The finding is worrying, even though work ability is a multifaceted concept with numerous factors affecting it,” says doctoral researcher Perttu Laakso. “Given that the participants in the study were born in the 1960s and had a higher average youth cardiorespiratory level compared to today’s adolescents, the finding is even more worrisome.”
“It can be assumed that the risk of decreased work ability is higher among today’s adolescents.”
For the individual, lowered work ability, sick leave and premature retirement are linked to decreased quality of life, and also result in higher economic burden at the societal level.
The results of the study highlight the importance of physical fitness assessment in childhood and adolescence. By monitoring physical fitness of children and adolescents, those at high risk can be identified early and preventive strategies can be implemented.
To improve cardiorespiratory fitness, Laakso encourages children, adolescents, and their families to increase physical activity in everyday life. Increasing the number of mandatory physical education classes in schools should also be discussed. In addition, he would look for easier access to organized sports so as to prevent dropout from organized physical activity, which is common in adolescence.

Most people have experienced a night or two of sleeplessness, tossing and turning while being unable to fall asleep or stay asleep. But for some people, sleep disturbances aren’t just a one-off occurrence, and they can begin in childhood.
A team, led by Penn State researchers, found that children and teens from racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by persistent insomnia symptoms that begin in childhood and continue through young adulthood. Specifically, Black children were 2.6 times more likely to experience these long-term sleep problems compared to white children. The findings underscore the need to identify insomnia symptoms early and intervene with age-appropriate treatment.
“Insomnia is a public health problem,” said Julio Fernandez-Mendoza, professor at Penn State College of Medicine and senior author of the study recently published in the journal SLEEP. “We’ve identified that more people than we thought have childhood-onset insomnia where symptoms start in childhood and remain chronic all the way through young adulthood.”
Poor sleep is linked to cardiometabolic disease, depression and anxiety, among other concerns. Yet, when it comes to sleep and children, insomnia symptoms aren’t always taken seriously. Fernandez-Mendoza said that most people assume that difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep is a phase that kids will outgrow.
“Insomnia isn’t like childhood sleep terrors or sleepwalking. It won’t go away with puberty and maturation for many children,” Fernandez-Mendoza said. Childhood-onset insomnia confers a greater risk for health problems because of the chronic exposure to sleeplessness, he explained. Those risks may be higher for Black and Hispanic/Latino children compared to non-Hispanic white children because disparities in sleep patterns begin at a young age.
The researchers followed 519 participants from the Penn State Child Cohort, a random, population-based study established in 2000. Participants were first recruited as school-age children, between the ages of 5 and 12, and were followed as adolescents and young adults, with assessments at the mean ages of 9, 16 and 24, respectively. Each time point represents a different maturational and development stage. At each stage, participants — or their parents during childhood — reported on difficulty falling or staying asleep and underwent an in-lab sleep study like the one used to diagnose sleep apnea or other sleep disorders. This longitudinal data was then used to determine what happens to sleep during this specific lifespan period. The researchers wanted to know: Does insomnia that starts in childhood resolve with age or does it persist?
The study is one of the first to look at how childhood insomnia symptoms evolve over the long-term and investigate how the trajectory of insomnia differs between racial and ethnic groups, addressing a gap in the research literature, Fernandez-Mendoza said. The researchers found that 23.3% of participants had persistent insomnia symptoms, with symptoms present at all three time points, and 16.8% developed insomnia symptoms in young adulthood. When broken down by race and ethnicity, Black participants made up the biggest share of those with persistent insomnia symptoms, followed by Hispanic/Latino youth.

In particular, compared to non-Hispanic white participants, Black participants were 2.6 times more likely to have insomnia symptoms that persisted through young adulthood. What’s more, Black participants had higher odds — 3.44 times higher — that their insomnia symptoms would persist rather than resolve after childhood compared to their non-Hispanic white counterparts. What this means is that among Black children whose symptoms continued beyond the transition from childhood to adolescence, their symptoms are less likely to resolve in the transition to adulthood. Hispanic/Latino participants were 1.8 times more likely to have persistent insomnia symptoms compared to white participants.
“We shouldn’t wait until someone comes to the clinic as an adult who has suffered from poor sleep all their life. We need to pay more attention to insomnia symptoms in children and adolescents,” Fernandez-Mendoza said.
Other Penn State authors on the paper include: Edward Bixler, professor emeritus; Alexandros Vgontzas, professor; Kristina Lenker, assistant professor; Susan Calhoun, associate professor; and Raegan Atha, sleep medicine specialist, all members of the department of psychiatry and behavioral health, Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Penn State College of Medicine. Jiangang Liao, Fan He and Duanping Liao are all faculty of the department of public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine. Other authors are Rupsha Singh, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Aging, and Chandra Jackson, senior investigator, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The work was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the NIH, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institute on Aging, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the Intramural Programs at the NIH.