Publisher Health

Babies learn from looking at human faces, leading many parents and childhood experts to worry about possible developmental harm from widespread face-masking during the pandemic.
A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, allays those concerns, finding that 6- to 9-month-old babies can form memories of masked faces and recognize those faces when unmasked.
Michaela DeBolt, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology, and Lisa Oakes, a professor in the Department of Psychology and at the Center for Mind and Brain, used eye tracking to study how masks influence infants’ facial recognition.
In the study, 58 babies, each seated on a parent’s lap or in a highchair, were shown pairs of masked and unmasked women’s faces on a computer screen, while cameras recorded where they looked. Because babies linger longer over unfamiliar images, the researchers could derive which faces they recognized, DeBolt said.
The findings appear in a paper published in the January/February special issue of the journal Infancy, which focused on the impact of COVID-19 on infant development.
The testing took place at Oakes’ Infant Cognition Lab at the Center for Mind and Brain in Davis, California, from late December 2021 to late March 2022, during a statewide mask mandate and the arrival of the coronavirus omicron variant.
“When babies learned a masked face, and then they saw that face again unmasked, they recognized it,” DeBolt said.
However, when the order was reversed, babies did not show strong recognition of masked faces that they first saw unmasked. DeBolt said that was similar to her own experience of not instantly recognizing a friend who was wearing a face mask.
Learning faces is central to how babies learn to talk, perceive emotions, develop relationships with their caregivers and explore their environment, Oakes said. “So people were very worried about face masks and the effect they would have on how infants are learning about human faces.”
Oakes, an expert on cognitive development in infancy, said the study highlighted a remarkable ability of babies to adapt. “I think that it should be very reassuring to parents in general,” she said. “Babies all over the world develop and thrive.
“There are so many variations in babies’ everyday lived experience,” she added. “As long as they are well cared for and fed and they get love and attention, they thrive. We can get into a mode where we think the way we do things is the best way to do things and that anything different is going to be a problem. And that’s clearly not the case.”

Social lifestyle determinants, including social isolation, are associated with neurodegeneration risk factors, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kimia Shafighi of McGill University, Canada, and colleagues.
Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) is a growing public health crisis, with an annual global cost of more than $1 trillion US. There has been increasing evidence that social isolation is associated with an increased risk of ADRD, but the links between social lifestyle and other known ADRD risk factors are less well understood.
In the new work, the researchers studied data on 502,506 UK Biobank participants and 30,097 people enrolled in the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging. Both studies had questionnaires that included questions about loneliness, frequency of social interaction and social support.
The study found a large array of associations between potentially modifiable ADRD risk factors and both loneliness and lack of social support. Individuals who smoked more, excessively drank alcohol, experienced sleep disturbances, and failed to frequently participate in light to vigorous physical activities — all known risk factors for ADRD — had greater odds of being lonely and lacking social support. For instance, in the CLSA, increased regular participation in physical exercise with other people was associated with a 20.1% decrease in the odds of feeling lonely and 26.9% decrease in having poor social support.
Physical and mental health factors previously linked to ADRD, such as cardiovascular disease, vision or hearing impairment, diabetes and neurotic and depressive behaviors, were also associated with both subjective and objective social isolation. In the UKBB, for instance, difficulty to hear with background noise corresponded to a 29.0% increase in the odds of feeling lonely and a 9.86% increase in the odds of lacking social support. The odds of feeling lonely and lacking social support were also 3.7 and 1.4 times greater, respectively, as a function of a participant’s score for neuroticism.
The authors conclude that social isolation, which can be modified more easily than genetic or underlying health risk factors, might be a promising target for preventive clinical action and policy interventions.
The authors add: “Given the uncertain impact of social distancing measures imposed by COVID-19, our findings underscore the importance of investigating the multiscale effect of social isolation to inform public health interventions for ADRD.”

A team of researchers at the University of Houston is reporting the success of their new method for the early diagnosis and monitoring of lupus nephritis — at home. If you’ve taken an at-home COVID-19 or pregnancy test, then you’ve taken what is scientifically called a lateral flow assay (LFA) test, a diagnostic tool widely used because of its rapid results, low cost and ease of operation. The team applied that same technology to assessing lupus nephritis, or inflammation of the kidneys, one of the most severe complications for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE, or lupus).
The home test — with results read on a smartphone — is meant to eventually replace the gold standard for diagnosis of active lupus nephritis, an invasive kidney biopsy, with its attendant morbidity which cannot be serially repeated. The test assesses the levels of a protein-coding gene known as ALCAM.
“Urinary ALCAM (uALCAM) has shown high diagnostic accuracy for renal pathology activity in active lupus nephritis,” reports Chandra Mohan, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Endowed Professor of biomedical engineering, and one of the nation’s leading lupus researchers, in Frontiers in Immunology. “The LFA tests for both non-normalized and normalized uALCAM exhibited excellent accuracies in distinguishing active lupus nephritis from healthy controls.”
This test had 86% accuracy for distinguishing active lupus nephritis from all other lupus patients.
Utilizing the ALCAM biomarkers discovered by Mohan, Richard Willson, Huffington-Woestemeyer Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and professor of biochemical and biophysical sciences, created the smartphone-based app and test kit based on the technology underlying home pregnancy tests.
“Periodic monitoring of uALCAM using this easy-to-use LFA test by the patient at home could potentially accelerate early detection of renal involvement or disease flares in lupus patients, and hence reduce morbidity and mortality,” said Willson.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 204,295 Americans have systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease leading to chronic inflammation in multiple organs, including the kidneys. Nephritis flares are hard to recognize because their symptoms often masquerade as something else. A sufferer might think they have a cold or the flu or are just tired.
“A point-of-care testing platform’s importance rests on its potential to empower patients to monitor their health status with convenience, thus allowing for early diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression. The LFA represents the most widely used rapid diagnostic POC testing platform,” said Mohan.
In this work, the team used nanophosphor-based lateral flow immunoassays to demonstrate promise in facilitating home-based smartphone-enabled monitoring of disease activity in LN. These studies were carried out by biomedical graduate student Rongwei Lei, with clinical support from Dr. Michelle Petri, John Hopkins University School of Medicine. Other contributors from the University of Houston include Binh Vu and Katerina Kourentzi Vu, William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Sanam Soomro and Suma Nadimpalli, biomedical engineering; Adheesha N. Danthanarayana and Jakoah Brgoch, Department of Chemistry.
“This may allow the proactive institution of therapeutics and even preventive strategies in LN, while minimizing treatment-related side effects,” said Mohan.

People with a higher cumulative estrogen exposure throughout their life may have a lower risk of stroke, according to a new study published in the February 1, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The lower risk was found for both ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage.
An ischemic stroke is caused by a blockage of blood flow to the brain and is the most common type of stroke. An intracerebral hemorrhage is caused by bleeding in the brain.
“Our study suggests that higher estrogen levels due to a number of reproductive factors, including a longer reproductive life span and using hormone therapy or contraceptives, are linked to a lower risk of ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage,” said study author Peige Song, PhD, of the Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China. “These findings might help with new ideas for stroke prevention, such as considering screenings for people who have a short lifetime exposure to estrogen.”
The study involved 122,939 postmenopausal female participants with a median age of 58 living in China without stroke at the start of the study.
Participants answered questions on personal factors, such as age, sex, and occupation, as well as lifestyle factors, such as smoking, alcohol use, exercise and medical history. They also answered questions on reproductive health information, including age at first menstruation and start of menopause, number of pregnancies and miscarriages and oral contraceptive use.
Researchers looked at health insurance and disease registry data to determine which participants had a stroke. During an average follow-up period of nine years, 15,139 had a stroke. Of those,12,853 had ischemic stroke, 2,580 had intracerebral hemorrhage and 269 had subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is bleeding between the brain and the membrane that covers it.
Participants were divided into four groups determined by their reproductive life span, the number of years from first menstruation to menopause. Participants in the group with the shortest reproductive life span had up to 31 reproductive years. Participants in the group with the longest reproductive lifespan had 36 reproductive years or more.
As a percentage, participants in the longest group had slightly more strokes than those in the shortest group, 13.2% compared to 12.6%. But when researchers adjusted for other factors that could affect stroke risk, such as age, smoking, physical activity and high blood pressure, they found that participants in the longest group had a 5% lower risk of all kinds of stroke.
When looking at different types of stroke, female participants with the longest reproductive life span had a 5% lower risk of ischemic stroke and a 13% lower risk of intracerebral hemorrhage when compared to women with the shortest reproductive life span.
Researchers also looked at other factors affecting estrogen levels, such as number of births and use of oral contraceptives, both of which are associated with higher levels, and length of breastfeeding, which is associated with lower levels based on the hypothesis that pregnancy and oral contraceptive use represent relatively higher sustained blood estrogen levels. They found that higher estrogen levels led to a lower risk of all types of stroke, as well as ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage.
“Estrogen exposure throughout life could potentially be a useful indicator of a person’s risk of different types of stroke following menopause,” said Song. “However, more research is needed on the biological, behavioral, and social factors that may contribute to the link between estrogen exposure and stroke risk across a woman’s lifespan.”
A limitation of the study was that information on reproductive factors was collected mainly based on participants’ ability to recall events, and participants may not have remembered such events correctly.

A University of Alberta researcher is one step closer to demonstrating the potential of a brain molecule called fractalkine to halt and even reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease in which the myelin, or fatty lining of nerve cells, is eroded, leading to nerve damage and slower signalling between the brain and the body. MS symptoms range from blurred vision to complete paralysis, and while there are treatments, the causes are not fully understood and nothing exists to reverse the disease process. More than 90,000 Canadians live with MS, according to the MS Society.
In new research published in Stem Cell Reports, Anastassia Voronova, an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Neural Stem Cell Biology, injected fractalkine into mice with chemically induced MS.
She found the treatment increased the number of new oligodendrocytes — vital brain and spinal cord cells that produce myelin in both embryonic and adult brains — which are damaged during the MS autoimmune attack.
“If we can replace those lost or damaged oligodendrocytes, then they could make new myelin and it is believed that would halt the disease progression, or maybe even reverse some of the symptoms,” Voronova says. “That’s the Holy Grail in the research community and something that we’re very passionate about.”
Voronova’s earlier research tested the safety and efficacy of fractalkine in normal mice and found similar beneficial effects. Other researchers have demonstrated that fractalkine may provide protection for nerves in mouse models before the disease is induced, but this is the first time it has been tested on animals that already have the disease.
Voronova and her team observed new oligodendrocytes, as well as reactivated progenitor cells that can regenerate oligodendrocytes, in the brains of the treated animals. Remyelination occurred in both the white and grey matter. The researchers also observed a reduction in inflammation, part of the damage caused by the immune system. Next steps for the treatment include testing it in other diseased mouse models, including those with neurodegenerative diseases other than MS.

Recent advances in newborn heart surgery have greatly reduced brain injuries in infants with congenital heart disease, according to a 20-year study by scientists at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and British Columbia Children’s Hospital (BCCH).
The study, begun in 2001 and published this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, analyzed brain imaging data from 270 full-term UCSF and BCCH newborns with congenital heart disease (CHD) for changes in brain injuries before and after newborn cardiac surgery. The scientists confirmed that recent advances in surgical and clinical care that maintain a higher postoperative blood pressure resulted in reducing brain injuries and better chances of patient survival.
“We were surprised to find that advances in care over the past 7 years resulted in a clear decline in brain injury linked to increasing the patient’s blood pressure following surgery,” said Shabnam Peyvandi, MD, lead author and pediatric cardiologist for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. “With advances in cardiac therapy and outcomes, our focus now is helping these children thrive.”
CHD, which refers to one or more abnormalities of an infant’s heart, impacts 40,000 newborns a year in the U.S. It is the most common newborn birth defect. About 1 in 4 of these infants have critical CHD and require surgery in the first month to first year of life. Heart abnormalities include improperly functioning heart valves, a hole in the muscular wall separating the heart chambers, and malformations in the heart’s blood vessels, which can result in altered patterns of blood flow. These anomalies reduce the flow of oxygen and nutrients to the brain and organs before birth, and can contribute to lifelong neurological and developmental disorders.
New Approaches to Monitor Brain Health
To monitor infant brain health for the study, UCSF and BCCH scientists used advanced magnetic resonance (MRI) brain imaging before and after heart surgery and consistently as the patient aged. The data was divided into four sequential stages, each containing five consecutive years of data. In the fourth and final stage, which ran from 2016 to 2021, infants were maintained at higher post-surgical blood pressures than in previous groups. This resulted in an almost 20% reduction in post-surgical brain injuries compared to the first group in 2001.
During the course of this study, Peyvandi and the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals Pediatric Heart Center published multiple articles investigating brain development and white matter injuries — including a link between moderate-severe white matter injuries that led to delays in childhood motor function — that opened the door to improving long term developmental outcomes by decreasing early brain injuries.
“Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of tracking brain injury and implementing changes to reduce occurrences that will improve outcomes,” said Patrick McQuillen, MD, senior author and professor of Pediatrics, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. “Based on this research and others, several leading heart centers have incorporated brain imaging into routine clinical practice.”
Work from this group has directly informed the creation of novel clinical programs to monitor and protect the brain in fetuses, newborns and children with CHD, including the Healthy Hearts & Minds Program and the Neonatal Cardiovascular Center of Excellence Growth and Neurodevelopment (GRAND) program that incorporates developmental care on the inpatient setting for newborns with critical CHD.
Other UCSF authors include Duan Xu, PHD, A. James Barkovich, MD, Dawn Gano, MD, MAS, V. Mohan Reddy, MD

The quail could be the unknown reservoir of the Toscana virus (TOSV) and the Sandfly Fever Sicilian virus (SFSV), mosquito-borne pathogens that can infect domestic animals and also cause disease in humans. This conclusion is drawn from a study published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, and which is led by Jordi Serra-Cobo, professor at the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, and Remi Charrel, from the Aix-Marseille University (France).
This is the first time that researchers find neutralising antibodies to TOSV and SFSV in wild birds. “To date, the reservoir for these two viruses was unknown, although they have been sought for years. Dogs and bats had been proposed as reservoirs, but the results showed that neither of them were,” says Jordi Serra-Cobo, an expert in epidemiological studies with bats as natural reservoirs of infectious agents such as coronaviruses.
The study, whose first author is Nazli Ayhan, from Aix-Marseille University, includes the participation of José Domingo Rodríguez Teijeiro, Marc López-Roig, Dolors Vinyoles and Abir Monastiri (UB Faculty of Biology and IRBio) and Josep Anton Ferreres (UB Faculty of Biology).
Emerging viruses in the Mediterranean basin
TOSV and SFSV belong to the Phlebovirus genus and are considered emerging pathogens. They are spherical, single-stranded RNA viruses with a high mutation rate and are transmitted by mosquito bites (Phlebotomus genus), insects found mainly in the warmer, drier areas of the Iberian Peninsula. These viruses are distributed in most Mediterranean countries in Western Europe, as well as Cyprus and Turkey. With no actual vaccine against infection, epidemiological surveillance, control, and prevention measures to avoid phlebotomine sandfly bites are crucial to avoid viral infections.
“Both TOSV and SFSV have been detected in a variety of domestic animals (dogs, cats, goats, horses, pigs, cows), but they can also infect humans and cause diseases,” says the researcher, a member of the UB Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences.
In humans, feblovirus infections are usually symptomless and often result in a three-day fever — pappatasis feve — which is very similar to influenza. “SFSV can cause a period of short-length high fever, accompanied by headache, rash, photophobia, eye pain, myalgia and general weakness. TOSV can cause the same manifestations as SFSV, but it can also be responsible for various central or peripheral neurological signs, such as meningitis and encephalitis. In fact, part of the encephalitis that occurs in summer is caused by TOSV,” Serra-Cobo notes.
Viruses in migratory birds
The results of the new study suggest that birds could be the reservoir or amplifying agents of these viruses. From infected birds, mosquitoes can become infected and then bite animals or humans. In particular, the study highlights the important role of quails (Coturnix coturnix) in the infection dynamics of phleboviruses.
“Migratory birds play an important role in disease transmission due to their high mobility from one area to another, which makes them potential vectors of diseases that can affect domestic animals and human health,” Serra-Cobo stresses.
“The quail is a migratory and also a hunter species, which enhances the potential transmission of diseases by direct contact through the food chain. In this context, regular pathogen detection is of great importance to predict future disease risks for both wildlife and humans,” concludes the researcher.