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A new study from UCLA researchers finds sex-specific brain signals that appear to confirm that different drivers lead men and women to develop obesity. The study, appearing in the peer-reviewed journal Brain Communications, combined data from several modes of MRI with patients’ clinical features and personal histories to identify sex-specific mechanisms in the brain underlying obesity.
“We found differences in several of the brain’s networks associated with early life adversity, mental health quality, and the way sensory stimulation is experienced. The resulting brain signatures, based on multimodal MRI imaging, may help us more precisely tailor obesity interventions based on an individual’s sex,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, a brain, obesity and microbiome researcher at UCLA and senior author of the study .
Gupta said this is believed to be the first study using a data-driven approach to predict sex-specific obesity status based on multimodal brain signatures. It builds on an earlier UCLA study in which Gupta and colleagues examined sex-related differences in the prominence and signaling of brain regions in obesity. In addition to finding that emotion-related and compulsive eating appear to play a major role in obesity in women, that study showed that men’s eating behavior tends to be affected by a greater awareness of gut sensations and visceral responses — those related to abdominal discomfort.
The new study supports and corroborates many findings from that and earlier studies and provides MRI evidence of differences in brain structure, function, and connectivity that may help researchers better understand obesity-related drives and behaviors. For example, alterations in certain brain networks suggest that compared to men, women with a high body mass index (BMI) may be more keenly aware of and drawn to highly processed foods, with an increased risk of developing cravings and food addiction.
“In designing treatment plans for females with high BMI, it may be important to focus on emotional regulation techniques and vulnerability factors,” Gupta said.
The study, conducted through the G. Oppenheimer Family Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, Ingestive Behavior and Obesity Program at UCLA, included 183 participants, ages 18-55. Forty-two males had non-obese BMI, 23 males had high BMI, 63 females had non-obese BMI, and 55 females had high BMI. All participants filled out a battery of self-report questionnaires assessing childhood trauma, anxiety and depression, visceral sensitivity, food addiction, bowel symptoms, personality traits, and many other factors.
Each participant also underwent three different brain MRIs to assess structure, function and connectivity. Data sets from the three scans and from clinical information were analyzed using an analytical tool that seeks to identify a limited number of variables from multiple data sets to predict an outcome.
The results show specific network connectivity changes associated with high BMI, regardless of sex. In females, the study identified brain regions and networks with alterations associated with early life trauma. These appear consistent with previous observations that females with obesity, compared to males, may have greater anxiety, lower resilience and difficulty integrating emotions with action-directed goal planning. Females also may be more susceptible to the sight, smell and taste of ultra-processed foods.
Importantly, the authors said the study identified associations, not cause and effect. Future studies will be needed to determine whether changes in the brain are a factor in the development of obesity or a result of the condition.
“Although causality is unknown, the strong associations between clinical markers, such as anxiety, depression, obesity and neural signatures suggest the importance of the bidirectional mechanistic connection of the gut-brain axis,” the authors said.

The risk of developing cardiovascular disease is lower in people with obesity who have a genetic predisposition for high BMI than people with obesity influenced mainly by environmental factors such as lifestyle, researchers from Karolinska Institutet report in eClinicalMedicine.
There has been a global increase in the incidence of overweight and obesity over the past few years. Almost one third of the world’s population now liveswith overweight or obesity.
“The figure is alarming since it is well-established that a high BMI in middle-age increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and other conditions,” says Ida Karlsson, assistant professor at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet.
However, according to this new study, the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases varies widely among people with obesity. The researchers used data from over 15,000 twins from the Swedish Twin Registry, gathering information about their BMI and their genetic predisposition for high BMI. They also used data from medical registries to establish the incidence of cardiovascular disease in this group.
By analysing this information, the researchers were able to study how overweight and obesity as a result of genetic versus environmental and lifestyle factors influenced the risk of cardiovascular disease.
“The link between obesity and cardiovascular disease was twice as strong in those with a genetic predisposition to a low BMI as it was in those with obesity driven by genetic factors,” says the study’s last author Ida Karlsson.
Dr Karlsson stresses that a healthy lifestyle is always important for everyone, and that the risk of cardiovascular disease was higher in all people with overweight or obesity compared to people with a healthy weight. However, the findings also indicate that obesity mainly driven by genetic factors might not have the same adverse impact on health as obesity driven by other factors, such as lifestyle.
“Obesity is a complex common disease that can have many different causes,” she says. “Since it’s so stigmatised, the results can help us understand that its effects on health differ from one individual to the next.”
She continues: “Even though we all know that it takes more than exercise and diet to combat obesity, there’s still a large stigma attached to it. I think much could be gained by focusing on what has caused the obesity and what we can do to reduce the risk of comorbidities in each individual instead of mainly focusing on BMI.”
The next step of Dr Karlsson’s research is to examine how individuals with overweight and obesity caused, respectively, by genetic and lifestyle factors differ as regards to blood glucose levels, cholesterol and inflammation markers.
The study was mainly financed by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte) and the Strategic Research Area in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet. 

While new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease tend to receive the most public attention, many well-researched ways to care for people with dementia don’t involve medication. A new evaluation compared the cost-effectiveness of four non-drug interventions to the usual care received by people with dementia and found that the interventions not only resulted in a better quality of life, but also saved money.
In a study published April 6 in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, researchers used a computer simulation model to show that the four dementia-care interventions saved between $2,800 and $13,000 in societal costs, depending on the type of intervention, and all reduced nursing home admissions and improved quality of life compared to usual care.
Alzheimer’s drugs hold great promise, but they still need additional research and improvement, said lead study author Eric Jutkowitz, an associate professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health. In the meantime, he said, a number of non-drug interventions have been shown to be effective in clinical trials in improving quality of life for people with dementia and helping them stay safely at home longer.
“Now that we can show that these effective interventions can also save money, it just makes sense to find ways to make them available to more families,” Jutkowitz said. “These interventions can be used to help people with dementia starting today.”
The four interventions studied included the following: Maximizing Independence at Home, an at-home, care coordination intervention that consists of care planning, skill-building, referrals to services and care monitoring; New York University Caregiver, which is implemented in an outpatient clinic and provides caregivers with six counseling sessions over four months plus lifetime ad-hoc support and access to weekly support groups; Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care, in which a health care system provides people living with dementia and their caregivers a needs assessment, individual care plans and round-the-clock access to a care manager; and Adult Day Service Plus, which augments adult day care services with staff providing face-to-face caregiver support, disease education, care management, skill-building and resource referrals.
Nonpharmacological interventions like these provide family caregivers with knowledge, skills and support tailored to their care challenges. They have been shown to improve quality of life for the caregiver and the person living with dementia, as well as to reduce nursing home admissions, and they are not associated with adverse events such as hospitalizations and mortality. For these reasons, nonpharmacological interventions are recommended as first-line therapies for the management of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

While non-drug interventions are well-studied, Jutkowitz said they haven’t been widely implemented in clinical care centers. He added that there isn’t currently an infrastructure in place to support these methods of care — for example, there are limited mechanisms for providers to be reimbursed for these types of interventions.
To conduct the study, the researchers used a computer simulation to model the likelihood of nursing home admission for four evidence-based Alzheimer’s and dementia nonpharmacological interventions compared to usual care. For each, the study evaluated societal costs, quality-adjusted life-years and cost-effectiveness. The inputs in the simulation were based on data from Medicare, clinical trials and national surveys with families of people with dementia.
Jutkowitz noted that the researchers benefited not only from Brown University computing resources that could handle intensive analytic tasks, but also access to data from the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which was crucial to the analysis.
In addition to finding that the interventions were cost-effective from a societal perspective, the researchers also found that from a health care payer perspective, the interventions involved little to no additional cost, compared to usual care, while increasing patient quality of life.
Based on the study findings, the authors concluded that health insurance policies should find ways to incentivize providers and health systems to implement nonpharmacological interventions.

The importance of understanding the cost-effectiveness of non-drug Alzheimer’s and dementia interventions is further highlighted by changes in Medicare payment models and emerging Alzheimer’s therapeutics, the researchers noted. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is in the process of determining coverage for new Alzheimer’s and related dementia drugs.
“As the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services determine coverage for new Alzheimer’s and related dementia drugs, we strongly believe that CMS should also consider the benefits of nonpharmacologic interventions,” Jutkowitz said.
While this study focused on non-drug interventions that reduce nursing home admissions, a future analysis will look at similar interventions that reduce or maintain functional decline and challenging behaviors. The researchers are also working on designing a trial that would test the interventions with patients in a health care setting.
Additional Brown contributors included Peter Shewmaker and Gary Epstein-Lubow.
This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging (1R21AG059623-01, 1R01AG060871-01, 1RF1AG069771, R01AG049692).

She constantly felt the need to clear her throat. Then she started to feel winded on stairs. A flurry of tests narrowed down the cause.One of the first things she noticed was how she had to keep clearing her throat. Everyone does it every now and then, but for her, a healthy woman in her early 70s, it had become constant. Her husband never complained. He was a surgeon, and when the throat-clearing started, he showed her a few breathing exercises. Those were sometimes helpful, but eventually she would be ahem-ing every few minutes again. Even more annoying was that any exertion could trigger a strange, harsh-sounding wheeze. Even when she was on the phone, she often muted herself so friends and family wouldn’t worry. Her primary-care doctor wasn’t worried. Her lungs were clear; her oxygen saturation was fine. She saw a cardiologist, who pronounced her heart to be in good shape after a vigorous stress test. Despite the reassurance, she noticed that she was getting winded more easily. In Europe with her granddaughter, she walked 20,000 steps a day on the mostly flat streets of Paris, but the hilly cobblestones of Montmartre left her huffing and puffing. She knew she had to figure this out. But when she got back to her home in Cupertino, Calif., Covid hit, and everything shut down. During that time, the stairs in her home became her measure. For decades, she went up and down those steps many times a day, no problem. She had become used to the harsh wheeze the stairs seemed to trigger, but now she felt out of breath by the time she reached the top. Then she had to stop halfway up. Then after just a few steps. Finally, when the pandemic eased after a terrible year and a half, she saw her primary-care doctor and then a bunch of specialists. Her lungs sounded clear, and a chest X-ray was normal. Was this asthma, or some kind of allergy? A variety of inhalers and an antihistamine were ineffective; an examination of her nose and throat with a tiny scope found nothing. A CT scan of her lungs wasn’t totally normal: She had a few little nodules, and so seven months later she had another scan to see if any of the tiny dots had changed. They hadn’t — probably just scars from some past infection. It was discouraging to hear that everything was fine and at the same time know that it wasn’t. The doctors didn’t know what else to do, and neither did the patient. Her husband asked his colleagues. He called an old friend, Dr. James Wolfe, in nearby San Jose. Wolfe was a lung doctor as well as an allergy specialist. Even though the antihistamines hadn’t helped, maybe allergies were playing a role. Photo illustration by Ina JangSomething Other Than a WheezeWeeks later, the patient and her husband sat in Wolfe’s exam room. As they waited for the specialist, the husband said to his wife: Can you jump up and down a few times so the doctor can hear what you sound like when you are a little out of breath? It worked. As Wolfe greeted his old friend, he noticed the patient’s noisy breathing. But it was obvious to him that this wasn’t a typical wheeze. Those usually occur during exhalation. This woman’s breath was noisiest when she inhaled — a type of wheeze known as stridor. This is an important observation, because the causes of stridor are different from other types of wheezing. Stridor is usually caused by blockages in the upper airways — from vocal-cord dysfunction or swollen tissues in the nose or throat. That was puzzling; her upper airways had already been examined. They were fine.Wolfe had the patient do a second breathing test when she arrived. The first, done a year earlier, was completely normal. This one wasn’t. The changes were subtle but real. The amount of air she could get out in a forced exhalation was less than it was when she was tested the year before.Could this be some tough form of asthma, considering that the usual medications hadn’t helped? Or was this some kind of slow-growing lung infection? There is a bacterium, a distant cousin of tuberculosis, called mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), which can cause coughing, shortness of breath and phlegm production. It is rare but is most often seen in older women. It’s thought to be caused, at least in part, by a woman’s reluctance to cough and clear mucus and other secretions from her lungs and airways. It’s called Lady Windermere syndrome, after a character in an Oscar Wilde play. Lady Windermere is a very proper young woman of the Victorian era who presumably would be too well behaved to cough or show other signs of illness. The nodules in the patient’s lungs that showed up on her CT scans could be the earliest sign of such an infection.Wolfe ordered a series of tests to look for each of these disorders. He also ordered another CT scan of her lungs — her third — to see if the nodules had changed in the months since her last scan. Flipping Through CT ImagesDr. Emily Tsai, a radiologist who specialized in imaging of the chest at Stanford University School of Medicine, sat in a darkened room looking through the more than 300 images of the patient’s new CT scan. Although you could look at each image separately, it is often more useful to view them sequentially, like a flipbook in which drawings turn into moving pictures. In this way the radiologist can take a three-dimensional tour through the examined chest, following the blood vessels and airways as they appear, progress and end in this animated show. Tsai had developed her own system: First she would look through the image as a whole, seeking obvious abnormalities and getting the lay of the land. She compared the newest views with the earlier images. Then she would focus on the part of the lung where there were reported or expected abnormalities. In this woman’s case, she looked where the reported nodules had been located. There was a little scarring — where the narrow treelike branches of the airways got stretched out and baggy in what was called bronchiectasis. That could certainly go along with a diagnosis of MAC infection. Then she took another careful look at all the other parts of the chest. In images like these, filled with so much information, a radiologist has to review the images as closely as possible. No one can see everything. Maybe artificial intelligence will get there one day. But she tried to see what was there.As she scrolled to the very top of the image, she saw something that seemed a little abnormal. The trachea, the breathing tube that connects the upper airways of nose and mouth to the lower airways of the lungs, seemed to be strangely narrow near the top. The narrowing was less than a centimeter long before it widened out to the normal diameter. Tsai found the same narrowing in the other CTs and reviewed the reports to see what previous radiologists made of this finding. Neither mentioned it at all, perhaps because it looked like a tiny puddle of secretions. The key was that it was the same in all three exams. Secretions move around. This narrowing, whatever the cause, did not. Tsai wasn’t sure what to make of it, but in her report she suggested that it could be contributing to the patient’s symptoms. When Wolfe saw the radiologist’s report, he realized that this narrowing of the trachea could be the cause of all of the patient’s symptoms. How had it happened? She had never needed a breathing tube placed in her trachea during surgery or a serious illness — that was the most common cause of this type of unusual finding. Wolfe ordered further tests to look for possible infections or inflammatory causes of the narrowing. All were unrevealing. It wasn’t MAC or any of the other causes Wolfe could think of or test for. Ruling out everything gave him her diagnosis: She had idiopathic subglottic stenosis. Idiopathic meant that the cause was unknown. Subglottic identified the location in the trachea, just below the vocal cords. It is a rare and poorly understood disorder seen almost exclusively in middle-aged women. Because her narrowing was causing her to be short of breath, the stricture needed to be opened. Wolfe sent her to a surgeon who used a balloon to widen the narrowed tract. The patient told me that she could feel the difference as soon as she woke up. And in the eight months since her surgery, she has regained all that she lost. Within days, she was able to run up and down her hallway stairs once more.Lisa Sanders, M.D., is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her latest book is “Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries.” If you have a solved case to share, write her at Lisa.Sandersmdnyt@gmail.com.

Exposure to fine particulate air pollutants (PM2.5) may increase the risk of developing dementia, according to a new meta-analysis from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“This is a big step in providing actionable data for regulatory agencies and clinicians in terms of making sense of the state of the literature on this hugely important health topic. The results can be used by organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently considering strengthening limits on PM2.5 exposure,” said lead author Marc Weisskopf, Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Physiology. “Our findings support the public health importance of such a measure.”
The study is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to use the new Risk of Bias In Non-Randomized Studies of Exposure (ROBINS-E) tool, which addresses bias in environmental studies in greater detail than other assessment approaches. It also is the first to include newer studies that used “active case ascertainment,” a method that involved screening of entire study populations followed by in-person evaluation for dementia among individuals who did not have dementia at baseline.
The study will be published online April 5, 2023, in The BMJ.
More than 57 million people worldwide are currently living with dementia, and estimates suggest that number will increase to 153 million by 2050. Up to 40% of these cases are thought to be linked to potentially modifiable risk factors, such as exposure to air pollutants.
Weisskopf and his co-authors, Elissa Wilker, researcher in the Harvard Chan-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health, and Marwa Osman, a doctoral student in the Biological Science in Public Health program, scanned more than 2,000 studies and identified 51 that evaluated an association between ambient air pollution and clinical dementia, all published within the last 10 years. Those studies were assessed for bias using ROBINS-E, and 16 of them met the criteria for the meta-analysis. The majority of the research was about PM2.5, with nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxide being the next most common pollutants studied. Of the studies used in the meta-analysis, nine used active case ascertainment.
The researchers found consistent evidence of an association between PM2.5 and dementia, even when annual exposure was less than the current EPA annual standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air (μg/m3). In particular, among the studies using active case ascertainment, the researchers found a 17% increase in risk for developing dementia for every 2 μg/m3 increase in average annual exposure to PM2.5. They also found evidence suggesting associations between dementia and nitrogen oxide (5% increase in risk for every 10 μg/m3 increase in annual exposure) and nitrogen dioxide (2% increase in risk for every 10 μg/m3 increase in annual exposure), though the data was more limited.
The researchers noted that air pollution’s estimated association with risk of dementia is smaller than that of other risk factors, such as education and smoking. However, because of the number of people exposed to air pollution, the population-level health implications could be substantial.
“Given the massive numbers of dementia cases, identifying actionable modifiable risk factors to reduce the burden of disease would have tremendous personal and societal impact,” Weisskopf said. “Exposure to PM2.5 and other air pollutants is modifiable to some extent by personal behaviors — but more importantly through regulation.”
Funding for the study came from Biogen and from National Institutes of Health grants P30 ES000002 and T32 HL007118.

A report from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) provides strong evidence of the importance of a healthy lifestyle for adults who were treated for cancer as children. The study is the first to find that the specific primary causes of death in long term survivors are many of the same leading causes of death in the U.S. population, often occurring at younger than expected ages. It also found that adult survivors of childhood cancer experience four times the risk of late mortality as the general population, even 40 years after diagnosis. However, the study contains reason for hope: survivors without certain modifiable lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors had a lower risk of death, suggesting survivors may be able to improve their odds. For example, survivors maintaining a healthy lifestyle had a 20% lower risk of mortality than those following an unhealthy lifestyle. The findings were published today in The Lancet.
Empowering survivors with the numbers
Despite the finding of excess mortality in survivors, the investigators found that patients’ health behaviors had an impact on their risk. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle (defined as having a healthy weight, not drinking more than moderate amount of alcohol, not smoking and exercising at or above the intensity recommended by the Centers for Disease Control guidelines) was associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of mortality, compared to those who did not.
“These findings provide important evidence that the high-risk for mortality that this population faces may be able to be reduced through changes in their health behaviors,” said senior author Greg Armstrong, M.D., M.S.C.E., St. Jude Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control chair. “This is important because our goal is to extend the lifespan of survivors and to improve their healthspan as well.”
In addition to lifestyle, several major risk factors for heart disease and related issues were associated with mortality risk. Survivors with hypertension or diabetes had a significantly higher mortality rate than survivors without those conditions. However, these conditions are modifiable — patients can improve or prevent them, and physicians can provide treatments effective against these diseases.
“Much research has demonstrated that survivors are vulnerable to early onset of chronic disease and mortality,” said co-author Melissa Hudson, M.D., St. Jude Cancer Survivorship Division director. “The study highlights the importance of encouraging survivors to practice healthy behaviors and maintain good control of cardiovascular disease risk factors to improve their healthspan and lifespan.”
Excess mortality and cause of death in survivors

In addition to the importance of potentially modifiable risk factors, this report is the first to detail that the specific primary causes of death in long term survivors are similar to the leading causes of death in the U.S. population, occurring earlier in survivors.
“We identified that long-term survivors of childhood cancer are experiencing a large number of deaths in excess of what would be expected for the general, aging population,” said the first and corresponding author Stephanie Dixon, M.D., MPH, St. Jude Department of Oncology. “We were the first to find that decades after treatment, these excess deaths are predominantly due to the same leading causes of death as in the general population, including second cancers, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease/stroke, chronic liver and kidney disease and infectious causes of death, experienced at a younger age and higher rate, in childhood cancer survivors,” Dixon said.
Treatments for childhood cancers have improved to the point where over 85% of U.S. patients are effectively cured of their primary tumor after frontline treatment. As more patients survive their childhood cancer, there is a growing population of adult survivors. By comparing the CCSS cohort to the public, the researchers found that decades after treatment survivors still experience four times the expected risk of death.
The largest cancer survivor cohort feeds discovery
The researchers were able to understand the problems affecting survivors using detailed health data from thousands of CCSS participants. The CCSS is the largest cohort of cancer survivors in North America, representing an estimated 20% of all childhood cancer survivors in that region. The scientists were able to take this vast swath of data to statistically isolate variables affecting survivor mortality. The group showed that even when common confounders, such as sociodemographic features, were controlled for, the gap in mortality between survivors and the general public persisted, but so did the protective effects of a healthy life.

“What was most exciting to see was that, independent of prior treatment exposures and sociodemographic factors, a healthy lifestyle and absence of hypertension or diabetes were each associated with a reduced risk of health-related mortality,” Dixon said. “This suggests that while continued efforts to reduce treatment intensity while maintaining (or improving) 5-year survival are needed, future research should also focus on interventions for modifiable lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors which may need to be specifically tailored to survivors with the goal of reducing chronic disease development and extending the lifespan of survivors of childhood cancer.”
Intensive treatments continue to tax childhood cancer survivors
Patients treated with more intensive therapies continued to experience higher mortality than other survivors. Much research has focused on minimizing the harms of therapy, but many survivors in the CCSS were treated before improved techniques were widely available. This study showed that physicians and researchers need to consider interventions that can decrease risk for the vulnerable population of survivors that were treated with aggressive therapies in their youth.
“The Childhood Cancer Survivors Study continues to provide important insights into the long-term outcomes of the growing number of children successfully treated for cancer,” said co-author Leslie Robison, emeritus St. Jude Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control chair. “The findings from the current analysis further emphasize the need to expand our efforts to reduce acute, chronic and late-onset toxicities of treatment, particularly those toxicities that can directly or indirectly result in premature mortality.”

Scientists have developed new technology to help couples undergoing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) due to male fertility problems to increase their chances of success in having a baby.
Approximately one in six people worldwide is affected by infertility, according to the World Health Organization, and one in every 22 children in Australia is born via assisted reproduction. With a 78% failure rate, each IVF cycle can be an emotional rollercoaster that often ends in heartbreak.
“Male infertility plays a role in around 30% of cases, due to problems such as low sperm count, reduced motility or movement or poor sperm quality,” says Professor Majid Warkiani from the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
“While much work has been done around selecting eggs and embryos to boost the success rates of IVF, sperm selection, an essential component in assisted reproduction, is by far the most neglected step in regard to technological innovation,” he says.
To tackle this problem, researchers from UTS and NeoGenix Biosciences, a UTS-born start-up, have created and tested a new microfluidic sperm selection device that provides a more reliable process for selecting high-quality sperm.
Traditional sperm selection methods, such as density gradient centrifugation and swim-up, can cause DNA fragmentation and cell death, leading to unsuccessful IVF cycles.
“This new technology is a 3D printed, biologically inspired microfluidic sperm selection device, which replicates the female reproductive tract and the natural sperm selection process, where only a small percentage of total sperm reach the egg,” Professor Warkiani said.
“We conducted extensive testing against conventional IVF selection methods, with the new method showing an 85% improvement in DNA integrity and an average 90% reduction in sperm cell death. The sperm selected by our method also demonstrated better recovery after freezing than traditional methods,” he said.
The study results were recently published in Nature: Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
The researchers have partnered with Monash University and Australian IVF clinics to implement the technology into clinical practice. They hope the device will provide help for those struggling with infertility and reduce the number of unsuccessful IVF cycles.

Published18 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, EPABy Hugh Pym and Nick TriggleHealth editor and health correspondentHospital bosses in England say they cannot guarantee patient safety during next week’s four-day strike by junior doctors.London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust conceded patients could be harmed as managers struggle to staff rotas.Other hospital bosses also voiced concerns over the walkout, which will affect both emergency and planned care.The British Medical Association has refused to exempt any services but says it has plans to protect patients.It contrasts with the approach of both the Royal College of Nursing and ambulance unions, which both excluded key emergency services from strike action.Instead, the BMA has said it will meet trade union requirements for life-and-limb cover to be provided by considering pulling junior doctors off the picket line if individual hospitals report lives are in immediate danger during the actual strike, which runs from 07:00 BST on Tuesday to 07:00 BST on Saturday.The BMA is after a 35% pay rise to make up for 15 years of below-inflation wage rises, but the government has called the claim unrealistic.During last month’s junior doctors’ strike, hospitals were able to draft in consultants to provide cover, but with an estimated quarter of them on leave next week – the four-day walkout is immediately after the Easter weekend – NHS bosses are warning this time they fear the worst.Dr Sara Hanna, who is part of the senior management team at Guy’s and St Thomas’, said: “I am really worried about next week. I am particularly worried about ability to staff our rotas. I am hopeful we will have enough doctors but can’t say for sure. “It is impossible to say there won’t be harm to patients. Junior doctors are an incredibly important part of the workforce.”Why are doctors demanding the biggest pay rise?Doctors want up to £262 an hour to cover strikeJunior doctors represent more than 40% of the medical workforce and include those fresh out of university through to experienced medics with more than 10 years of experience.Dr Hanna, who is interim head of the trust’s Evelina London Children’s Hospital, said up to half of all planned treatments could be cancelled as the trust redeployed its senior doctors – and this is on top of the impact of postponements during previous walkouts.She said the cumulative impact of this was particularly problematic for children who are growing and developing.NHS Providers, which represents health managers, said such concerns were widespread.Chief executive Sir Julian Hartley said: “It’s clear from our extensive dialogue with trust leaders that we are in uncharted territory. “We need a solution to prevent further strikes and we need it now.”The organisation also released a series of statements provided by hospital chief executives.One warned: “This is less about what planned routine work gets pulled down and everything about maintenance of safety in emergency departments, acute medicine and surgery. Concerned doesn’t begin to describe it.”Another said: “I am not confident this time that we can maintain patient safety, as we will not be able to provide the cover.”A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said the government was also concerned that safety was at risk.”We are working with NHS England to put in place contingency plans to protect patient safety. The NHS will prioritise resources to protect emergency treatment, critical care, maternity and neonatal care, and trauma,” he added.But BMA workforce lead Dr Latifa Patel said there was a jointly agreed system in place with the NHS to ensure patient safety in the event of “extreme or unforeseen circumstances”.”We met with NHS England four times per day during the last strikes to monitor the situation, but there were no requests for a temporary stoppage of the industrial action to be made. The same proven arrangements will be in place this time.”And she added: “No-one understands better than us – the doctors who care for them – that patients are getting a sub-standard experience 365 days a year from an overstretched and understaffed NHS. “In this brutal work environment, patient care is at risk every day.”More on this storyDoctors want up to £262 an hour to cover strike4 MarchBacklog of longest-wait patients slashed in England9 August 2022’I’ve been let down – I shouldn’t have stage-4 cancer’10 August 2022NHS waits force patients to pay for private ops22 July 2022

Published26 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingHundreds of people with inherited breast or prostate cancer could now benefit from a targeted therapy on the NHS in England and Wales.Cancer experts hailed the decision as “momentous” while healthcare body NICE said it would “improve quality of life”.The drug olaparib is designed to treat specific cancers linked to faulty versions of genes known as BRCAs.Some 800 people in total will be eligible for the treatment.Around 500 men with advanced prostate cancer and 300 women with HER2-negative early breast cancer who are at high risk of the disease returning will be able to access olaparib free on the NHS immediately.’Desperate’ for itAva Lee, 46, from east London, was diagnosed with breast cancer more than two years ago.She said cancer had turned her life upside down, but having early access to olaparib following a successful trial had made her feel more positive.”It’s given me a realistic hope, a realistic chance of a future without cancer – that I can live a long and healthy life without the cancer coming back,” she said.Ava is now looking forward to spending time with her husband, going travelling together and doing the things they love – like cycling and running.After her surgery and radiotherapy, she felt scared about the cancer returning.”To know there was a drug out there that could reduce the chance of recurrence and potentially stop it ever coming back… I was absolutely desperate to get it.”She said she would treasure every day with family and friends from now on.How does olaparib work?Olaparib works by blocking an enzyme that helps cells repair damaged DNA, thereby preventing cancer cells from growing and spreading while leaving healthy cells intact.Andrew Tutt, professor of breast oncology at the Institute of Cancer Research and King’s College London, carried out early lab work on olaparib and said the move to recommend it for use by the NHS was “exciting”.The medicine helps patients with breast cancer due to inherited gene faults (BRCA1 or BRCA2 are the most common), which can be tested for quite easily.Around 5% of women with breast cancer carry these altered genes – actress Angelina Jolie is probably the most well-known of those affected.It then targets that particular weakness and improves someone’s chances of surviving breast cancer or extends their life with prostate cancer in a way that has not been possible before, Prof Tutt said. “For example, it means that for a woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer and told she needs chemotherapy to improve survival, she can now have a year of tablet treatments that will further improve her chances of surviving breast cancer by about a third,” he added.’Stop people dying’NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, said a deal had been struck between NHS England and manufacturer AstraZeneca to allow the drug to be offered to:adults with HER2-negative, high-risk early breast cancer who have inherited faults in their BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, after surgery and chemotherapypeople with previously treated hormone-relapsed metastatic prostate cancer who have the same BRCA mutationsOlaparib has already been available on the NHS in England and Wales for women with advanced ovarian cancer, caused by the same faulty genes.In Scotland, it has been offered free to the same groups of patients, and also to some men with advanced inherited prostate cancer, since 2021.Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive at charity Breast Cancer Now, said: “Olaparib can reduce the risk of people’s cancer returning or progressing to incurable secondary breast cancer and stop people dying from this devastating disease.”There are 55,000 new cases of breast cancer in the UK each year, and the disease kills 1,500 women annually. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, with 52,000 new diagnoses and 12,000 deaths each year.The Prostate Cancer UK charity said the first targeted treatments “finally move us away from the old ‘one size fits all’ approach to prostate cancer treatment”.In trials, 82.7% of people having olaparib after chemotherapy and surgery were alive and free of breast cancer after four years, compared with 75.4% with a dummy drug.Trials in patients with advanced prostate cancer showed the drug could increase how long people lived if given instead of, or in addition to, current standard treatments.More on this storyNHS reaches deal for life-saving breast-cancer drug8 November 2022Ovarian cancer drug ‘to benefit newly diagnosed’26 July 2019

Scientists from the Chinese C.D.C. confirmed that DNA from raccoon dogs and other animals susceptible to the coronavirus was found at the market in early 2020.Chinese government scientists on Wednesday published a long-awaited study about a market in the city of Wuhan, acknowledging that animals susceptible to the coronavirus were there around the time the virus emerged. But the scientists also said that it remained unclear how the pandemic began.The study, published in the journal Nature, focused on swabs taken from surfaces in early 2020 at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a large market where many of the earliest known Covid patients had worked or shopped. The Chinese scientists had posted an early version of their genetic analysis of those samples in February 2022, but at the time downplayed the possibility of animal infections at the market.The scientists, many of whom are affiliated with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, also wanted to publish their data in a peer-reviewed journal. And as part of that process, the scientists uploaded more genetic sequence data to a large international database, the administrators of the database said last month.A few weeks after the data became public, a team of international scientists who had been studying the origins of the pandemic said they stumbled upon the sequences. They found that samples testing positive for the coronavirus contained genetic material belonging to animals, including large amounts that were a match for the raccoon dog, a fluffy mammal sold for fur and meat that was known to be able to spread the coronavirus.That analysis, the subject of a report posted online in late March, did not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected or that animals gave the virus to people. But it established that raccoon dogs deposited their genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the virus was left.Many virologists said that scenario was consistent with one in which the virus spilled into people from an illegally traded wild animal at the market.It appeared that the international team’s analysis sped up the release of the Chinese scientists’ study about the same data: The article appeared on Wednesday on Nature’s website with a note saying that it had been accepted for publication, but was still an “early version” and had not yet been edited.Several authors of the article affiliated with the Chinese C.D.C., William J. Liu, George Gao and Guizhen Wu, did not respond to requests for comment.In their first version of the article from February 2022, the Chinese authors did not mention finding any genetic material from raccoon dogs in the market swabs, which were taken from walls, floors, metal cages and carts. Beyond that, they said that the data did not point to any infected animals.But in Wednesday’s version a little more than a year later, they wrote that the study “confirmed the existence of raccoon dogs” and other animals susceptible to the coronavirus at the market.Many scientists believe that the existing evidence points to those animals likely acting as so-called intermediate hosts for the virus, which probably originated in bats. But they also say the evidence does not completely rule out a scenario in which people gave the virus to animals at the market.The Chinese authors stressed that uncertainty in the new study. They also raised the notion that the virus could have been ferried to the Wuhan market on packages of frozen food, also known as cold chain products. Many scientists consider that scenario highly improbable, but China has promoted it because it gives credence to the idea that the pandemic could have started outside of the country and arrived via imported foods.“The possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans, or cold chain products, cannot be ruled out yet,” the article said.The study included several other unlikely findings as well, outside scientists said in interviews on Wednesday. For example, it said that the swabs contained genetic material from a number of animals that were almost certainly not present at the market, including pandas, chimpanzees and mole-rats.Alice Hughes, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong focused on conservation biology, said that the inclusion of those animals suggested either that the authors had incorrectly categorized the genetic material or that the samples were contaminated during sequencing in a lab.“This paper’s greatest asset is the fact that it releases a data set for other scientists to analyze more carefully and responsibly,” Dr. Hughes said. “Given the glaring errors in this analysis, the analysis has not been done in a way that’s careful enough to have confidence in any of the results.”Asked how Nature’s peer-review process had treated the species findings, a spokesman for the journal noted that the authors included a caveat that the list of species identified at the market was “not definitive” and more analysis was required.For the international scientists who had first reported finding signs of raccoon dogs in the Covid-positive swabs last month, the latest Nature study left a number of important questions unanswered about the methods used by the Chinese team to analyze the sequences.Still, the publication, as well as an earlier version of it posted online by the Chinese scientists last week, did supply critical new data, including the number of swabs taken from each stall in the market, said Alexander Crits-Christoph, a former postdoctoral researcher and computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University who helped lead the international team’s analysis.With that information, Dr. Crits-Christoph said that he and his collaborators were able to confirm an important finding: Swabs taken from a corner of the market selling wild animals were more likely to test positive for the virus, a result that could not be explained merely by Chinese researchers having taken more samples from that corner, he said.“It’s an extremely impressive data set and its importance is quite high,” Dr. Crits-Christoph said of the market samples. “And because of that, I think it’s a good thing this data has been published in the scientific record, even if I don’t agree with every interpretation.”