Publisher Health

People sleep less in mid-adulthood than they do in early and late adulthood, finds a new study led by UCL, University of East Anglia and University of Lyon researchers.
Sleep duration declines in early adulthood until age 33, and then picks up again at age 53, according to the findings published in Nature Communications.
The study, involving 730,187 participants spread over 63 countries, revealed how sleep patterns change across the lifespan, and how they differ between countries.
Study participants were playing the Sea Hero Quest mobile game, a citizen science venture designed for neuroscience research, created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL, UEA and game developers Glitchers. Designed to aid Alzheimer’s research by shedding light on differences in spatial navigational abilities, over four million people have played Sea Hero Quest, contributing to numerous studies across the project as a whole.
In addition to completing tasks testing navigational ability, anyone playing the game is asked to answer questions about demographic characteristics as well as other questions that can be useful to neuroscience research, such as on sleep patterns.
The researchers, led by Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) and Dr Antoine Coutrot (CNRS, University of Lyon) found that across the study sample, people sleep an average of 7.01 hours per night, with women sleeping 7.5 minutes longer than men on average. They found that the youngest participants in the sample (minimum age 19) slept the most, and sleep duration declined throughout people’s 20s and early 30s before plateauing until their early 50s and increasing again. The pattern, including the newly-identified key time points of age 33 when declining sleep plateaus and 53 for sleep to increase again, was the same for men and women, and across countries and education levels.
The researchers say the decline in sleep during mid-life may be due to demands of childcare and working life.
Professor Spiers said: “Previous studies have found associations between age and sleep duration, but ours is the first large study to identify these three distinct phases across the life course. We found that across the globe, people sleep less during mid-adulthood, but average sleep duration varies between regions and between countries.”
People who report sleeping the most are in Eastern European countries such as Albania, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic, reporting 20-40 minutes extra sleep per night and the least in South East Asian countries including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. People in the United Kingdom reported sleeping slightly less than the average. People tended to sleep a bit less in countries closer to the equator.
The researchers found that navigational ability was unaffected by sleep duration for most of the sample, except for among older adults (aged 54-70) whose optimal sleep duration was seven hours, although they caution that the findings among older adults might be impacted by underlying health conditions.
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A team of researchers from Brown University’s School of Public Health, Brown’s School of Engineering and Silent Spring Institute found that simple air filtration devices called Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are effective at reducing indoor air pollutants.
The study, which analyzed the effectiveness of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes installed at the School of Public Health to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, is the first peer-reviewed study of the efficacy of the boxes on indoor pollutants, according to the authors.
Lowering indoor air concentrations of commonly-found chemicals known to pose a risk to human health is a way to improve occupant health, according to lead author Joseph Braun, an associate professor of epidemiology at Brown.
“The findings show that an inexpensive, easy-to-construct air filter can protect against illness caused not only by viruses but also by chemical pollutants,” Braun said. “This type of highly-accessible public health intervention can empower community groups to take steps to improve their air quality and therefore, their health.”
Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, or cubes, can be constructed from materials found at hardware stores: four MERV-13 filters, duct tape, a 20-inch box fan and a cardboard box. As part of a school-wide project, boxes were assembled by students and campus community members and installed in the School of Public Health as well as other buildings on the Brown University campus.
To assess the cubes’ efficacy at removing chemicals from the air, Braun and his team compared a room’s concentrations of semi-volatile organic compounds before and during the box’s operation.

As rising Covid rates collide with a return to holiday festivities, hosts are coming up with inventive compromises.Lisa Ludwig knows how to throw a party. Every year around this time, she puts up a heated tent to handle the crowd, hires a D.J., spreads a buffet of food and liquor, and invites people to eat, drink and dance the night away.She has pared down the guest list over the years, but the only time she canceled outright was in 2020. But when she sent out the invitations this year, something was nagging at her.“I had a knot in my stomach,” said Ms. Ludwig, 61, of Amityville, N.Y. “I work in a lab that does blood work, so I see the results firsthand, even before I see it on the news. People testing positive for Covid, or for Covid and flu, or flu and RSV. I had a bad feeling about it all week.”A day before the party was to be held, Ms. Ludwig told friends she was canceling. Several had already called to say they couldn’t come because they were sick. One had been exposed to Covid at the hair salon. Another needed to stay healthy for an upcoming operation.“Everybody was relieved,” Ms. Ludwig said.But Ms. Ludwig — who had a recent bout of Covid herself, and still wasn’t feeling 100 percent — may be an outlier. Heading into New Year’s Eve, the height of the holiday party season, people are hungry for human interaction and a respite from the pandemic. Companies are wooing remote workers back into the office with smorgasbords and spiked punch.Nearly 60 percent of 252 U.S. companies surveyed in October and November planned to have work parties this year, up from 27 percent in 2021 and 5 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a recruiting firm.Caterers are thriving after a lean few years, said Lena Goldin, a chef in New York who recently prepared a dinner for 40 guests at a client’s home. She has strict Covid protocols for her staff, Ms. Goldin said, but most clients have stopped inquiring about them — although a few families with small children recently asked that the members of her crew take rapid tests.Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicBoosters: Americans who received updated shots for Covid-19 saw their risk of hospitalization reduced by roughly 50 percent this fall compared with certain groups inoculated with the original vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.Seniors Forgo Boosters: Nearly all Americans over 65 got their initial Covid vaccines. But only 36 percent have received the bivalent booster, according to C.D.C. data.Free at-Home Tests: With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service.Contagion: Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies.In New York and Los Angeles, large cities where rates of Covid and other respiratory illnesses have surged, public health officials have issued ominous warnings in recent days. But they have stopped short of explicitly asking residents to change plans or to stay home, instead suggesting that people wear masks in public indoor settings or even in crowded outdoor spaces.Many hosts who are proceeding with parties have taken another tack: They’re asking guests to take a rapid Covid test before walking in the front door.“I wrote on the invitation that the windows are going to be open, and I want people to test before they come,” said Dr. Dan Bauman of Manhattan, who is hosting a New Year’s Day open house for the first time in three years and plans to spend next week baking cookies and making his famous caramel-covered Cheetos. (Yes, you read that correctly: “People go nuts about them,” he said.)In a defiant nod to the pandemic, his invitations implored friends to “join me in super-spreading holiday cheer.”Perhaps surprisingly, many experts endorse rapid testing as a wise strategy for holiday partyers. At-home antigen tests can detect active infections with a high degree of accuracy, even if they are far from foolproof.While rapid Covid tests aren’t as sensitive as P.C.R. tests done in a lab, they may better predict how infectious a person is.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesRapid tests are less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction tests, which are performed in a lab and amplify the genetic material in a sample, and so they may miss an early infection when the viral load is low.But a positive result on a rapid test may actually be more closely “correlated with how infectious you are” than a positive result on a PCR test, said Bill Hanage, co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Dr. Hanage plans to take an armful of test kits along when he visits his parents in the United Kingdom for the first time in three years.“The way to think about it is that it’s cumulative risk reduction,” he said, adding, “We cannot get the risk to zero, unfortunately, but we can reduce it markedly by vaccines, masks and, if people don’t want to wear masks, having them do a rapid test before getting together.”Another safety precaution party-throwers are adopting: paring down the guest list, a painful measure for many.In November, José Xicohténcatl, a public relations professional in Huntington Beach, Calif., who goes by Pepe, started planning a big company bash with a guest list of 100, the sort that the company used to have prepandemic. But then Covid cases started climbing in California.The company decided to move the party to an outdoor space with heaters and to restrict attendance to employees only — no clients and no plus-ones. Mr. Xicohténcatl has asked guests to show proof of vaccination and booster or a negative test done in the past 48 hours.His priority is to ensure that employees feel comfortable and safe, Mr. Xicohténcatl said.“One of the things that we needed to do this year was make sure that we at least got some face time,” he said, adding that when cases started rising again it felt “like the Grinch stole Christmas.”“We can’t get out and party anymore like we did in 2019,” Mr. Xicohténcatl said.Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, pulled the plug on a newsroom party when Covid cases started rising in the area. The party, planned for mid-December, was to include an ugly holiday sweater raffle, a build-a-snowperson contest, a photo booth and an appearance by the newspaper’s mascot, Scoop.Kim Grabina-Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, said that the party was called off because “the health and safety of our employees have always been our No. 1 priority.”Already, some partygoers who have become ill are convinced that they were exposed at a holiday fete.Julie Bianucci, 61, of Sacramento, Calif., an IT project oversight manager for the state who has been working remotely, was required to attend an office potluck last week because she is a manager. She contributed her famous Christmas-tree shaped Spritz cookies.Ms. Bianucci stayed for about an hour and a half. About 80 people were at the gathering, and no one wore masks. Just days later, she was coughing, and by that evening she was having trouble breathing.Her daughter took her to an emergency room. The Covid test was positive.Ms. Bianucci has canceled her Christmas plans, including a Christmas Eve dinner with her parents at her home, a trip to Napa Valley to see her sister, and another trip to visit her deceased husband’s family in the Bay Area.She doesn’t know if her adult children will come over on Christmas Day to open presents. If they do, they will all wear masks.“So many things were planned, and no one can get to do any of it,” Ms. Bianucci said. “I did everything I could not to get it, but I still got it and not at a very good time. Not that there ever is one, but this is probably the worst it could be.”

In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine made a significant announcement: The organization no longer considered egg freezing an “experimental” treatment.Until that point, the procedure had been mostly reserved for those undergoing chemotherapy or other debilitating medical treatments. That year, the A.S.R.M. opened up egg freezing to those in the larger population who wanted to delay childbearing by preserving their eggs for future use, citing evidence that oocyte cryopreservation led to fertilization and pregnancy rates that were similar to in vitro fertilization.In the two years that followed, the procedure went mainstream: Facebook and Apple announced they would cover up to $20,000 in costs for their employees, prompting other companies vying to attract and retain top talent to follow suit. Egg freezing start-ups sprouted across the country, throwing egg freezing “parties” and offering quick, free fertility tests in parked vans. The procedure was touted by many as a potential equalizer in the workplace, promising to have as much of an effect on a woman’s life as the contraceptive pill has had.Over the decade since the A.S.R.M. announcement, the number of people who have frozen their eggs in the United States rose by more than 400 percent, to over 13,000 in 2020 from just over 2,500 in 2012, according to data from the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology. Most are white, middle-class professionals, and a growing number — roughly 35 percent, compared with 25 percent in 2012 — are women under the age of 35.“When I was first doing it, the mean age of women who came in was 38,” said Dr. Nicole Noyes, a reproductive endocrinologist and former New York University professor who presented evidence on the effectiveness of egg freezing in 2012 and who now works as a medical director at the egg freezing start-up Kindbody. “Today, most of the consults I’m doing are with women in their 20s,” she explained, and egg freezing conversations that were once “very shame-based” are now seen as routine, she said.“It’s kind of like online dating,” she added. “It’s just part of life.”The process, however, is physically, financially and emotionally demanding. Patients take hormone injections once or multiple times each day to stimulate follicles, which are fluid-filled sacs that store eggs. They visit the doctor frequently for ultrasounds and blood work. Once the follicles reach a certain size, the eggs are retrieved, frozen and stored for later use. A single egg freezing cycle, including ultrasound monitoring and doctor supervision, can cost $4,500 to $8,000, though prices can vary and often don’t include the cost of the hormones and medications, said Dr. Mindy Christianson, medical director of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center. Egg storage can cost more than $500 a year, she added.The sticker price for egg freezing — roughly $10,000 to $15,000 — doesn’t include the cost of medications and hormones needed to kick-start the process or the annual cost of storing eggs.Heather Walsh for The New York TimesDespite more women freezing their eggs in the last decade, fertility experts and endocrinologists don’t have clear success rates of live births from frozen eggs; they have only probabilities. And a majority of those women don’t go back to use their frozen eggs; a small study from 2017 found that only 6 percent of those who froze their eggs between 1999 and 2014 used them to get pregnant.A study published this summer analyzed 15 years of data from 543 patients who froze their eggs at the NYU Langone Fertility Center and found that the overall chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. The younger a woman was, the greater a chance she had, in general, of a live birth. Even the A.S.R.M. concedes that egg freezing is neither a guarantee of fertility nor a one-size-fits-all solution. The process is an intense and arduous journey for many women, riddled with uncertainty, according to stories shared with The New York Times. Among the hundreds of patients who described their experiences, many expressed joy and hope; others spoke of the crushing disappointment that can come with trying to do everything in their power to plan for parenthood, only to find it — as one woman put it — “illusionary.”These are some of their stories.Stories of success: ‘I feel really proud of myself for being patient.’Today, the vast majority of women who freeze their eggs do it to preserve fertility: In 2020, only 6 percent of the almost 13,000 women who froze their eggs did so because they had to get chemotherapy or other potentially debilitating treatments.Jenny Hayes Edwards was one of the first women in the country to preserve her eggs for nonmedical reasons. She first heard about the procedure in 2009 when she was 34 years old. At the time, she owned three restaurants in Colorado and barely had time to go on a date, let alone nurture a serious relationship, get married and have children. “I had zero money, we were in the middle of a recession and I was working 24 hours a day,” she said.A friend, who was 40 at the time and going through a third, tough round of I.V.F., told Ms. Edwards she wished she had the option of egg freezing when she was younger. Ms. Edwards was persuaded.She froze her unfertilized eggs in June 2010, before the A.S.R.M.’s official stamp of approval. She sold some jewelry, maxed out a credit card and used a portion of her inheritance to pay for the procedure. Exactly a decade later, in June 2020, the 45-year-old gave birth to a son using her frozen eggs — an outcome that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates occurs in less than 10 percent of women her age or older. Those eggs, she said, had helped her live with less urgency: She left her job, became a health coach and waited to find the right partner, meeting her husband in 2017.“I approached everything differently knowing that those eggs were there,” she said. “I was calmer about my dating life, and I wasn’t panicked about my biological clock. I feel really proud of myself for being patient.”Emily Gertsch woke up a few weeks after her 42nd birthday with what she called “intense panic” — the sudden sense that, despite wavering in her 30s, she now knew she wanted to be a mother. Ms. Gertsch lived in New York City at the time and embarked on three separate rounds of egg freezing, one right after the other, in the summer of 2020. She didn’t expect to enjoy the process, she said. But as she sat in the waiting room between seemingly endless blood tests, looking around at rows of other women, masked and spaced out six feet apart, Ms. Gertsch felt a sense of community — something she craved during the pandemic.“I just savored every moment,” she said. Months after her third retrieval, she used donor sperm to fertilize eggs, creating an embryo — and in 2021, at the age of 43, she gave birth to her son.They now live in Switzerland, where Ms. Gertsch, a single mother by choice, works at a pharmaceutical company. “I just appreciate it so much more, to know this is something I deliberately chose, this is exactly the life I wanted,” she said. “And I created that.”Stories of disillusionment: ‘I genuinely have no idea where my eggs are.’Jordan Marie Curry, a 35-year old talent acquisition director from Chicago, consulted with two doctors before she had surgery to remove fibroids from her uterus. They advised her to freeze her eggs in case the surgery compromised her ability to become pregnant. Her employer at the time paid for the annual storage fee for her frozen eggs, but once she left the company, she has paid $720 each year to keep them — even after she had a daughter in 2020, without needing to use them.“It sort of feels like this small insurance policy that I have in my back pocket, if I decide I want to have kids,” Shira Moskowitz, 29, said.Heather Walsh for The New York TimesShe struggled with whether or not to discard the eggs she froze; in an ideal world, she said, she would donate them to other Black women, but she wasn’t sure how to begin that process. And there were logistical hurdles to consider, including a fee associated with removing the eggs from storage.The center where Ms. Curry’s eggs were frozen wasn’t the same place they were being stowed, and she had scant details about the storage facility. “I genuinely have no idea where my eggs are,” she said. “I think maybe Illinois?”Maura Downs was 35 when she froze her eggs after an ectopic pregnancy left her with one ovary. She spent $20,000 on the procedures and medications, stopping at the hospital before work every two or three days to get her blood drawn.“I thought it was going to give me this amazing insurance policy,” Ms. Downs said. She went through two rounds of egg freezing in total. Both left her with zero viable eggs.Ms. Downs, 38, is now pregnant with a child she conceived without medical intervention, after trying for a year. “Knowing what I know now,” she said about freezing her eggs, “I regret it.”Stories of hope: ‘I’m glad I’m not boxed in.’For many women, egg freezing provides a sense of hope that is worth the physically intense process, the exorbitant costs and the unpredictable chances of success.When Shira Moskowitz, a New York-based customer relations representative at a technology company, was 23 years old, in 2016, doctors removed one of her ovaries after discovering a cyst that had cut off blood flow to the organ. She knew that she eventually wanted to freeze the eggs from her remaining ovary; she started a savings account for the procedure.She began the process about five years later: measuring doses of hormonal injections in her apartment with her roommate and running to the clinic for blood work every morning. In the end, her doctor retrieved 10 mature eggs to freeze, a number that is considered low. Still, Ms. Moskowitz, now 29, has no regrets.“It sort of feels like this small insurance policy that I have in my back pocket, if I decide I want to have kids,” she said. “I’m glad I’m not boxed in.”For Laura Kelly, a software engineer in Austin, the introduction of egg-freezing benefits to employees of Airbnb, where she worked, provided “the push” that she needed to go ahead with the procedure. She was 31 at the time and knew she wanted to get married and have children, but she was wary of rushing into a relationship with the wrong person. As a bisexual woman, she said, she knew that having eggs already frozen would be a step ahead if she wanted to conceive a child with another woman.“Talking to women about it who I’ve dated, everyone expects it’s going to be a really extensive process,” she said about having children. “Having that first step done is nice — it feels like we have a lot of options, like part of it is going to be less strenuous.”Evelyn Gosnell, a behavioral scientist from San Francisco, knew when she started her first egg-freezing cycle at age 32 that the process was not a guarantee. Still, when a doctor informed her that he had retrieved only seven eggs, she didn’t know that number was comparatively small (women under 38 who successfully conceive after freezing their eggs typically retrieve 10 to 20 per cycle). “My doctor didn’t say that seven eggs wasn’t great — I certainly had no idea that seven eggs were not sufficient,” she said.Ms. Gosnell froze her eggs again at 36 and once more at 38, in grueling cycles that brought her cumulative total to 30 eggs. Even her gynecologist was impressed at that number, Ms. Gosnell said, making the possibility of one of those eggs turning into a baby seem like “a done deal,” she said.But not all frozen eggs survive thawing. Not all merge properly with sperm to form early stage embryos, called blastocysts; and not all blastocysts are considered viable. After paying $45,000 for egg freezing and an additional $15,000 to have her eggs thawed and fertilized, Ms. Gosnell was in a meeting at her office when she received an email from the fertility clinic, informing her that the single blastocyst she had created was abnormal. She would not conceive a child. The blastocyst, the email said, would have been a girl.Ms. Gosnell, now 41, recently underwent two rounds of I.V.F., leading to two chromosomally normal embryos. These days, she said, she oscillates between optimism and realism, while trying to give her body its best shot at carrying a child. She gets acupuncture, she listens to podcasts about egg freezing, she reads books about fertility.“You just want to know that you did your part, you did what you could do,” she said. “And then, you just have to let go.”

Though the technology for freezing an embryo has existed since the 1980s, preserving an unfertilized egg was a technical challenge that most scientists didn’t think was worthy of solving. In the late 1990s, however, researchers from around the world found a way to freeze and thaw an egg without damaging it.In the early 2000s, fertility doctors in the United States conducted clinical trials to replicate the method. By 2012, there was strong evidence that the procedure led to fertilization and pregnancy rates that were similar to in vitro fertilization, convincing the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to stop considering it an “experimental procedure.”Without the label, insurance companies could cover the procedure, paving the way for tens of thousands of women to extend their fertility by freezing their eggs. Almost 20 percent of U.S. companies with more than 20,000 employees offer coverage for egg freezing, up from 6 percent in 2015, according to a national survey by Mercer, a corporate benefits consulting firm.But even as egg freezing has grown more popular over the last decade, the process can seem intense and overwhelming. Here’s what you need to know.What is egg freezing?Women are typically born with around one million eggs, a number that steadily decreases with age. Oocyte cryopreservation, the technical term for egg freezing, is the procedure through which eggs are harvested, frozen and stored for later use.When preparing for egg retrieval, patients take hormones to stimulate the ovaries, prompting them to grow multiple follicles (fluid-filled sacs that each house an egg). Once the follicles reach a certain size, a fertility specialist will retrieve the eggs, freezing only those that are ready to be fertilized. The entire process unfolds over about two weeks.What is the process like?First, fertility specialists conduct a blood test to estimate the patient’s current egg supply. They might also administer an ultrasound to measure follicles and ensure that the ovaries can be easily reached during the egg retrieval.Some doctors may direct a patient to take hormonal birth control before starting fertility medication to improve the chances that follicles grow together at around the same size and rate. Fertility centers tend to have their own birth control preferences and policies, said Dr. Mindy Christianson, medical director of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center.Women undergoing the egg freezing process inject themselves with hormone medication one or two times each day. These shots, administered for around eight to ten days, stimulate the follicles to grow.Patients visit their doctor’s office every few days to measure those follicles and test estrogen levels. The bigger a follicle is, the more likely it is to contain a mature egg, said Dr. Amanda Adeleye, a reproductive endocrinologist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Although a woman may have thousands of eggs, “most of them are not going to respond to the medication,” she said.About a week into the process, patients take medication that blocks ovulation, so that eggs are not released before they can be retrieved. Then, once the follicles reach a certain size, patients give themselves a “trigger shot,” that releases the eggs in preparation for egg retrieval, said Dr. Elliot Richards, director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility research at the Cleveland Clinic. About 35 hours after the trigger shot, doctors perform the egg retrieval, draining each follicle by inserting a small needle through the vaginal wall and maneuvering it within the ovary. The procedure typically takes between 15 and 30 minutes, said Dr. Rachel Ashby, director of the Donor Egg and Gestational Carrier Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And patients are generally sedated the entire time: “She doesn’t feel anything or remember anything,” Dr. Christianson said.That day, doctors can determine how many eggs were retrieved. The average patient under 38 could retrieve 10 to 20 per cycle, but that number varies depending on the individual egg supply and the ovarian response to the medication.Only mature eggs are frozen, through a process called vitrification: a type of flash freezing in which eggs are bathed in liquid nitrogen to prevent the formation of ice crystals, which could damage the eggs. Then, eggs might be kept at the center where they were vitrified or sent to another location for long-term storage.Sophi Miyoko GullbrantsWhat are the risks of egg freezing?As with any medical procedure, egg freezing comes with side effects and risks. The medication that stimulates the ovaries can raise a woman’s estrogen level 10 to 20 times higher than it is during a regular menstrual cycle, Dr. Christianson said. Some patients experience mood swings as a result of higher than normal estrogen levels. And, they might feel bloated as the ovaries enlarge from growing multiple follicles.If someone has a history of blood clots, doctors may recommend a blood thinner while the patient receives medication.A few days before egg retrieval, many patients experience discomfort. “They’re not going to feel great,” Dr. Richards said. “It’s not trivial.”Bleeding and infection are risks of egg retrieval, but complications like this are not typical, he added.Because of the anesthesia used during the retrieval process, some people may experience nausea and vomiting, which would be treated with medication, Dr. Ashby said. Patients might also notice abdominal pain after retrieval, which is often managed with ibuprofen or Tylenol, Dr. Adeleye said, adding that patients might want to take a day off work.In rare cases, women may develop severe ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, an adverse reaction to hormone medications that stimulate egg production. Their ovaries swell, causing small blood vessels to leak fluid, which can accumulate in the abdomen or, more rarely, around the lungs. The symptoms — which include bloating, nausea, and difficulty with urination and breathing — occur most prominently three to five days after the procedure, Dr. Adeleye said.The condition occurs in roughly one percent of women who undergo egg freezing, and is more common in those with polycystic ovary syndrome because P.C.O.S. can increase the risk of developing too many follicles, which in turn can cause ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, Dr. Christianson said.Women who freeze their eggs at younger ages, in their early 20s, are also more at risk, Dr. Christianson said, because larger egg supplies are a risk factor for hyperstimulation. The more eggs a woman has, the higher the chance that the medication she takes before egg retrieval will stimulate a large number of ovarian follicles.Doctors can carefully monitor patients and reduce ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome risks, but anyone considering egg freezing should be counseled on the danger of the condition, Dr. Christianson said.How much does egg freezing cost?Costs vary between fertility centers, but in general, a single cycle of egg freezing, including ultrasound monitoring and doctor supervision, can cost around $4,500 to $8,000, Dr. Christianson said. Patients typically complete one or two cycles, she added. Insurance coverage may vary depending on the type of plan a patient has.The injectable medication, separately, costs between $4,000 and $6,000 per cycle, she said, depending on how much medication the patient needs.Storing eggs is an additional cost — it can reach over $500 each year.Who is a candidate for egg freezing?Egg freezing is no longer an experimental treatment, but it’s not a fertility panacea either. One study of more than 500 women, published this summer, found that the overall chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. The findings also suggest that age and egg quantity contributed to the success rates: If a woman was younger than 38 or thawed more than 20 eggs, her chances increased significantly. Guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists state that there is not enough research to support egg freezing solely to delay having a child.Some experts, however, said that anyone at risk of age-related infertility could be a candidate. Other people who might seek out the procedure are those who are about to undergo chemotherapy, which could affect the ovaries, or people who identify as transgender or nonbinary and are considering gender-affirming hormones, Dr. Adeleye said.“The eggs we retrieve right now, technologically, are the best way we have to preserve their fertility,” Dr. Ashby said. “But we will not know if those eggs will work until they use them.”

Targeting a receptor responsible for our sense of touch and temperature, which researchers have now found to be present in our colon, could provide a new avenue for treating chronic pain associated with gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome.
A team examining the colon, led by Professor Hongzhen Hu at Washington University and Professor Nick Spencer at Flinders University, identified the presence of Piezo2, the subject of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, now known to be responsible for sensing light touch on our skin.
“In discovering that this receptor is also in our gut, there’s the potential that selectively targeting these channels could be used for long-term silencing of pain sensations from internal organs, without the need for frequent consumption of opiate pain medications,” says Professor Spencer, a Matthew Flinders Professor in the College of Medicine and Public Health.
Professor Nick Spencer said, “Chronic pain from internal organs, such as the gut or bladder, is notoriously difficult to treat. Opiates, including morphine and their derivates have been commonly used to treat a variety of types of pain but visceral pain doesn’t respond well to the treatment and the drugs are highly addictive with a multitude of side effects.”
The authors say the availability of selective pain medications for the gut has been hindered by a lack of understanding about how sensory nerves communicate pain sensations from the gut to the brain.
“It was previously known that many different ion channels are located on the ‘pain-sensing’ neurons that communicate from the gut to the brain, but our study, published in the journal Neuron, has now identified the major ion channel in the colon that responds to mechanical stimulation leading to the sensation of pain,” says Professor Spencer.
“Furthermore, we have discovered that the major ion channel that responds to this mechanical pain is a member of the Piezo ion channel, specifically Piezo2.
“From this knowledge we can focus on targeting these channels to silence the pain sensations and hopefully produce a treatment for visceral pain, common in conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, endometriosis or abdominal cancers, while avoiding the devastating side effects of opioids.”
The research was funded by grants from the US National Institutes of Health and the National Health and Medical Research Foundation.
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Looking for answers about how the brain works amid age-related hearing loss, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they found that old mice were less capable than young mice of “turning off” certain actively firing brain cells in the midst of ambient noise. The result, they say, creates a “fuzzy” sound stage that makes it difficult for the brain to focus on one type of sound — such as spoken words — and filter out surrounding “noise.”
Scientists have long linked inevitable age-related hearing loss to hair cells in the inner ear that become damaged or destroyed over time.
But the Johns Hopkins researchers say their new studies, described Dec. 7 in The Journal of Neuroscience, indicate that the brain has much to do with the condition, and it may be possible to treat such hearing loss by re-training the brain to tamp down the wildly firing neurons.
“There’s more to hearing than the ear,” says Patrick Kanold, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering at The Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine. Kanold notes that most people will experience some kind of hearing loss after age 65, like the inability to pick out individual conversations in a bar or restaurant.
Kanold and his team recorded the activity of 8,078 brain cells, or neurons, in the auditory cortex brain region of 12 old mice (16-24 months old) and 10 young mice (2-6 months old).
First, the researchers conditioned the mice to lick a water spout when they heard a tone. Then, the same exercise was performed while playing “white noise” in the background.

The artificial intelligence algorithms behind the chatbot program ChatGPT — which has drawn attention for its ability to generate humanlike written responses to some of the most creative queries — might one day be able to help doctors detect Alzheimer’s Disease in its early stages. Research from Drexel University’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems recently demonstrated that OpenAI’s GPT-3 program can identify clues from spontaneous speech that are 80% accurate in predicting the early stages of dementia.
Reported in the journal PLOS Digital Health, the Drexel study is the latest in a series of efforts to show the effectiveness of natural language processing programs for early prediction of Alzheimer’s — leveraging current research suggesting that language impairment can be an early indicator of neurodegenerative disorders.
Finding an Early Sign
The current practice for diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease typically involves a medical history review and lengthy set of physical and neurological evaluations and tests. While there is still no cure for the disease, spotting it early can give patients more options for therapeutics and support. Because language impairment is a symptom in 60-80% of dementia patients, researchers have been focusing on programs that can pick up on subtle clues — such as hesitation, making grammar and pronunciation mistakes and forgetting the meaning of words — as a quick test that could indicate whether or not a patient should undergo a full examination.
“We know from ongoing research that the cognitive effects of Alzheimer’s Disease can manifest themselves in language production,” said Hualou Liang, PhD, a professor in Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems and a coauthor of the research. “The most commonly used tests for early detection of Alzheimer’s look at acoustic features, such as pausing, articulation and vocal quality, in addition to tests of cognition. But we believe the improvement of natural language processing programs provide another path to support early identification of Alzheimer’s.”
A Program that Listens and Learns
GPT-3, officially the third generation of OpenAI’s General Pretrained Transformer (GPT), uses a deep learning algorithm — trained by processing vast swaths of information from the internet, with a particular focus on how words are used, and how language is constructed. This training allows it to produce a human-like response to any task that involves language, from responses to simple questions, to writing poems or essays.

The glass frog’s unusual adaptation to bolster its camouflage could offer clues for preventing deadly blood clots in people.Two glass frogs sleeping upside down on a leaf, backlit from the upper side of the leaf.Jesse DeliaAt first glance, you might miss the glass frog of the Costa Rican rainforest. It is, as the name suggests, nearly transparent. Apart from a lime green smear across its back, its skin, muscle and other tissues are see-through. Then there are its tiny organs, which seem to float within this clear flesh, like a pale fruit cocktail in the weirdest Jell-O salad ever to grace a tree branch.As handy as translucence might be for evading predators, it is rare in animals that live on land. Their bodies are full of substances that light can’t penetrate, many of them essential for life. Glass frogs seem to have evolved see-through versions of some of these anatomical features, but they also have some tricks to hide lingering colors when they are at their most vulnerable.In a study published in the journal Science on Thursday, researchers report that when a glass frog falls asleep, almost all of its red blood cells retreat into its liver. They hide in the organ and allow the frog to achieve near invisibility while it rests. In addition to revealing another remarkable adaptation in nature, the discovery could lead to clues for how to prevent deadly blood clots.Like people, glass frogs rely on hemoglobin, a colored protein in red blood cells that delivers oxygen around the body. Jesse Delia and Carlos Taboada, biologists and authors of the new paper, had been spending a lot of time observing the frogs when they realized that sometimes, that red color seemed to disappear.“When they are awake, the circulatory system is red,” Dr. Delia, who works at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said. “When they are asleep, it’s not.”Where were the red cells going?A glass frog during various levels of activity, showing the change in red blood cell perfusion within its circulatory system. The same animal was filmed backlit across all three conditions.Jesse DeliaTo solve the mystery of the disappearing blood cells, the researchers and their colleagues wanted to take images of the frogs under anesthesia — when the blood cells were clearly visible circulating through their bodies — and asleep, when the cells were nowhere to be seen. To do that, they needed to find a way to peer inside the frog’s organs, which have a mirror-like exterior that helps the frog blend in. Dr. Taboada, a researcher at Duke University, said they suspected the blood would retreat to various organs when not in circulation.The researchers wound up relying not on light but on sound to show them what was inside. They provoked the molecules within the sacs to release ultrasonic waves, which could be used to identify the contents.As soon as they compared the images of sleeping and anesthetized frogs, one big difference jumped out.“All the signal was coming from the liver,” Dr. Taboada said. About 89 percent of the frogs’ red blood cells had packed themselves into that organ.That made sense: The liver, which filters blood, is a logical destination for red blood cells, he said.What was stranger, and what the researchers still don’t understand, was how the frogs could cram all these cells together without dying from blood clots. In most vertebrates, when blood cells bump into each other, it leads to coagulation. The resulting clot can make a scab to seal a wound — or, if the clot is in a blood vessel, it can plug up the circulatory system and kill the creature. In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 100,000 people die from blood clots each year.High-speed photoacoustic imaging of a glass frog recovering from exercise in real time, showing the reduction in circulating red blood cells and the associated increase of red blood cells packing in the liver as the frog falls asleep.. Yao & X. ZhuGlass frogs, the new research suggests, can control when their blood clots. If they are wounded, they will form a scab in the usual way. But when they are asleep, with red blood cells packed like sardines in the liver, no clot forms.The finding implies that glass frogs could have something to teach us about how to prevent clot formation in our own bodies. If future research can illuminate what keeps the frogs safe, it could lead to treatments to reduce deaths from clots in humans.More immediately, the researchers said, the results raised other questions. If 89 percent of the cells that carry oxygen are holed up in the liver while the frog sleeps, how is it breathing? They wonder whether the frogs can shift their metabolisms to a mode that requires barely any oxygen, perhaps akin to what other frogs do when they hibernate for the winter.The new paper is just the beginning of this line of research. The team has already improved their imaging techniques to scan the frogs more quickly and to reveal substances other than blood as they move around in the creatures.“We’re in the lab now,” Dr. Delia said during a phone interview. “There’s literally a frog scanning right now in the system. I have to go check on it in a bit.”

A fundamental principle of molecular biology governs how proteins are made within the cell, which happens in two stages called transcription and translation. During transcription, information stored in DNA is copied into messenger RNA (mRNA). Then during translation, the ribosomes assemble proteins one amino acid at a time based on the instruction specified on the mRNA.
The understanding of this process is so fundamental that the mere direction of the information flow from DNA to mRNA to protein is called the “central dogma” of molecular biology, a term coined by Nobel laureate Francis Crick. Since the advent of systems biology 20 years ago, researchers have been trying to establish how cells regulate transcription and translation processes based on gene expression data — which mRNAs and proteins are made under what conditions.
Deciphering how cells regulate these activities would provide insight into how they process environmental information to modulate their behavior. It would also allow scientists to formulate strategies for the precise manipulation of protein levels — a critical step in synthetic biology, which seeks to solve problems in medicine, manufacturing and agriculture through the redesign and re-engineering of genes and their interactions.
For the first time, researchers at the University of California San Diego have shown that changes in gene expression for the model bacterium E. coli happen almost entirely during the transcription stage while the cells are growing. The researchers have provided a simple quantitative formula linking regulatory control to mRNA and protein levels. The results and formula were published in a recent issue of Science.
“Ultimately what we provide is a quantitative relationship that scientists can use to interpret how pathogenic bacteria evade antibiotic treatment and host immunity,” stated Terry Hwa, UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Physics and Biological Sciences, and principal investigator for the project. “In the synthetic biology context, it will allow bacteria to be redesigned and rewired for uses such as detecting and cleaning up toxic waste, or being sent into the body to kill cancer cells.”
The central dogma of molecular biology is linear, moving from DNA to mRNA to protein. It’s straightforward on an individual-gene level: turn on a gene, make mRNA, create proteins from the mRNA. Often, biologists think of gene regulation in such a linear fashion because they design experiments that change only a single gene or the few genes specific to their studies without drastically affecting the entire cell system.