Publisher Health

Obesity has been a major global health issue in recent decades as more people eat unhealthy diets and fail to exercise regularly.
A new University of Michigan study suggests there is another factor that tips the scale in women’s weight, body mass index, waist circumference and body fat — air pollution.
Women in their late 40s and early 50s exposed long-term to air pollution — specifically, higher levels of fine particles, nitrogen dioxide and ozone — saw increases in their body size and composition measures, said Xin Wang, epidemiology research investigator at the U-M School of Public Health and the study’s first author.
Data came from 1,654 white, Black, Chinese,and Japanese women from the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation. These women, whose baseline median age was nearly 50 years, were tracked from 2000 to 2008.
Annual air pollution exposures were assigned by linking residential addresses with hybrid estimates of air pollutant concentrations. The researchers examined the associations between the pollution and the participants’ body size and composition measures. One question they sought to answer was whether these associations differed by physical activity.
Exposure to air pollution was linked with higher body fat, higher proportion fat and lower lean mass among midlife women. For instance, body fat increased by 4.5%, or about 2.6 pounds.
Researchers explored the interaction between air pollution and physical activity on body composition. High levels of physical activity — which had been based on the frequency, duration and perceived physical exertion of more than 60 exercises — was an effective way to mitigate and offset exposure to air pollution, the research showed.
Since the study focused on midlife women, the findings can’t be generalized to men or women in other age ranges, Wang said.
The findings appear in Diabetes Care.
The study’s co-authors are Carrie Karvonen-Gutierrez (U-M), Ellen Gold (UC Davis), Carol Derby (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), Gail Greendale (UCLA), Xiangmei Wu (California Environmental Protection Agency), Joel Schwartz (Harvard) and Sung Kyun Park (U-M).
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A team of researchers from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and collaborating academic research institutions have discovered new RNA bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria, advancing understanding of virus evolution. Findings were published in the journal Cell.
Viruses are considered the most numerous and diverse biological entities on Earth, and researchers have a limited understanding of them. The advent of metatranscriptomics — that is, sequencing of the total RNA in a sample from a particular environment — is helping researchers uncover important features of the Earth RNA virome. In this study, researchers identified a variety of novel viruses that provide insights into the diversity, host range and evolution of RNA viruses.
Researchers mined more than 5,150 diverse metatranscriptomes from existing repositories and uncovered 2.5 million RNA virus derived sequences. This expansion corresponds to a five-fold increase of known RNA virus diversity. According to study authors, many of the discovered viruses are truly novel, being only distantly related to previously known viruses. Two groups of the most unusual viruses form potential new phyla and others are classified into numerous new classes and orders.
“The most notable discovery is the dramatic increase in the number and diversity of viruses infecting bacteria that are shown to account for a much greater fraction of RNA viruses than we previously thought,” said Eugene. V. Koonin, PhD, a co-author of the study and senior investigator in the Computational Biology Branch of NLM’s Intramural Research Program.
According to study authors, the vast collection of new RNA virus genomes provides insight into RNA virus evolution and should serve as a major resource for RNA virology.
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Researchers have puzzled over the neurodegenerative disorder Alzheimer’s disease for decades, but treatments to stop or reverse the disease’s effects on the brain have remained elusive. Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital recently added an important piece to the puzzle by creating a mouse model that more closely resembles the disease in humans than previous models. The findings appeared today in Nature Aging.
The researchers used their new model to discover how defects in RNA splicing contribute to neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. RNA splicing is a process that removes non-coding genetic sequences and joins protein-coding sequences together.
“RNA splicing is an essential step between transcription and translation,” said corresponding author Junmin Peng, Ph.D., St. Jude Departments of Structural Biology and Developmental Neurobiology and the Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics, who led the research. “It is particularly important in the brain because we know the brain has more cellular diversity than any other organs in the body and splicing is believed to be an important process for generating protein diversity.”
Previous work by Peng and others revealed that a specific component of the RNA splicing machinery, called the U1 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein (snRNP), creates aggregates in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s. The U1 snRNP complex is essential in RNA splicing.
Now, Peng and his team have demonstrated that the dysfunction of the U1 snRNP contributes to neurodegeneration, opening new avenues of research for Alzheimer’s treatment. The study found that RNA splicing dysfunction due to U1 snRNP pathology helps cause neurodegeneration.
“Our previous work showed that the U1 snRNP is a type of aggregate in the brain that forms tangle-like structures — but that is just descriptive, we didn’t understand the mechanisms that link this pathology to the disease phenotype until now,” Peng said.

Geographical pockets of vaccination behavior can be attributed to both pre-existing socio-demographic clusters as well as the way vaccine hesitancy spreads through neighboring societies, according to a new study publishing October 13 in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology by Lucila Alvarez-Zuzek of Georgetown University, US, and colleagues.
In recent decades, vaccine hesitancy has gained ground, threatening the maintenance of herd immunity for various pathogens. The geographic clustering of vaccine hesitancy creates pockets of unprotected sub-populations that can become hotspots for outbreak emergence.
In the new study, researchers created theoretical models to explain how clusters of vaccination behavior are shaped by two social processes — social selection, the pre-existence of socio-demographic clusters; and social influence, the spread of ideas between populations. The models found that both processes are independently capable of generating geographical clusters of high hesitancy. Moreover, they suggested that when a society trusts hesitancy propaganda, social selection plays an important role and many smaller clusters of hesitancy appear. When a society tends to be more skeptical about propaganda, social influence overcomes and a few larger clusters appear, despite the same overall frequency of vulnerable communities.
The computational models also allowed the team to determine how intervention strategies can reduce both overall vaccine hesitancy, and the spatial clustering of vaccine hesitancy. They found that when social selection in a society is low, the most effective strategy involves targeting communities that are vulnerable due to their own socio-economic traits but also are surrounded by a socio-cultural environment with a high tendency towards hesitancy.
Dr. Alvarez-Zuzek adds, “Social human behavior is complex, and understanding in the context of public health is very challenging. We believe that our findings are a step forward towards understanding the underlying processes that generate dangerous clustering in vaccine hesitancy and designing mitigation strategies to better protect vulnerable populations.”
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The agency cited Teva’s continuing supply problems as well as those of other drug makers struggling to fill the gap.The Food and Drug Administration has declared a nationwide shortage of Adderall, a medication used to treat A.D.H.D. that has had surging demand in recent years.The F.D.A. noted that one maker of the drug, Teva Pharmaceuticals, has had continuing manufacturing delays, and other manufacturers of generic versions or alternatives have also reported periodic problems with meeting demand.The agency recommended that patients taking Adderall talk to their doctors to find alternative treatments.Adderall, which contains the stimulant amphetamine, is a controlled substance and highly regulated, so it is difficult for pharmacies to quickly pivot and carry new brands, analysts said. Further muddying the picture is the recent popularity of telehealth services. A crop of telehealth start-up companies flourished during the pandemic, with some prescribing Adderall and other drugs to patients in unknown quantities.The number of Adderall and generic-equivalent prescriptions has been rising in recent years, according to figures from IQVIA, a data analytics company. Total prescriptions rose by about 16 percent, to 41.2 million last year from 35.5 million in 2019.Over the years, concerns have been raised about the overprescribing of Adderall for children and young adults with A.D.H.D., and about its abuse as a study aid among college students. The teenage mental health crisis that exploded during the pandemic put a spotlight on sharp increases in some prescriptions, like Adderall.Dr. David Goodman, director of the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland, said about 4 percent of adults and 8 percent of children have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and large numbers of them go untreated — roughly 70 percent of adults and 40 percent of children. He said growing awareness about the condition appears to be leading to a surge in demand for medications.In addition, he said, the telehealth start-ups made it cheaper and less time-consuming to get a diagnosis, although he questioned whether all of those were accurate.“I can understand why there are shortages, because there’s an increased demand of people who are seeking these medications,” said Dr. Goodman, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He received $18,000 in 2021 as a consultant for drug companies.While a number of companies make Adderall and generic versions, pharmacies may find it difficult to pivot to other suppliers because of amphetamine’s status as a controlled substance that typically includes restrictions on its use and monitoring of prescription orders. Any given pharmacy might risk raising red flags with the Drug Enforcement Administration by doubling its supply, said Erin Fox, an expert on drug shortages at the University of Utah.“With a controlled substance, it’s harder for patients to call around and find a pharmacy that has product for them,” Ms. Fox said.Dr. Goodman said patients report almost every day that they are unable to get prescriptions filled. He said his office has had to reissue them in different dosages to help patients receive treatment. Even then, some come up short and, without their medications, may miss deadlines or forget important tasks if they are working in a high-pressure situation.There is little data on start-up telehealth companies that have drawn criticism for rapidly prescribing a variety of medications, including Adderall.One such company is Cerebral, which is based in San Francisco. A former vice president of Cerebral, Matthew Truebe, filed a wrongful termination suit against his former employer, claiming that a company goal was to prescribe stimulants to 100 percent of the company’s A.D.H.D. patients, something he considered “not safe or legal,” according to court records. Mr. Truebe also claimed the company had duplicate patients in its database, suggesting that some were seeking prescriptions to resell.Cerebral, valued at over $1.2 billion this summer, said in a court filing that Mr. Truebe was not fired as an act of retaliation, but because he was a “poor performer.” The company has received a subpoena from federal investigators reviewing its compliance with the Controlled Substances Act. A Cerebral rival, called Done, is also facing Drug Enforcement Administration scrutiny, The Wall Street Journal reported.Chris Savarese, a spokesman for Cerebral, said the company had ceased prescribing controlled substances to new patients and had not been accused by any government agency of wrongdoing.

Published31 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesSome people with “lucky genes” or certain DNA may get extra strong protection after Covid jabs, say scientists from University of Oxford.The researchers found people with a version of a gene called HLA-DQB1*06 had a bigger antibody response following vaccination than others.About 30 to 40% of the UK population have this type.The preliminary work appears in Nature Medicine. More research is needed to confirm it.Experts say vaccines are the best way people can protect themselves against Covid. People are being invited for boosters this autumn to top up their immunity. There are fears of a flu and Covid “twindemic” this winter, and officials say those who qualify for free jabs should get them. How many people have had boosters so far?Who can get a Covid booster this autumn? Researchers analysed blood samples from people who took part in five different trials, including 1,600 adults who had either the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as their first jab. They found people who carried the gene variant were more likely to have higher levels of antibodies – proteins that recognise and attack coronavirus – a month after their first jab than people who had other versions of the gene. The study also followed a group of people who had weekly Covid tests for more than a year after their first jab. They found those who had the gene variant were less likely to experience a “breakthrough infection” over this time period, where people still got a mild Covid infection after vaccination.Scientists acknowledge many other factors contribute to the risk of getting Covid, including age, other illnesses and people’s occupations. But they say genetics still played a significant role after accounting for these. Dr Alexander Mentzer, NIHR academic clinical lecturer at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and a lead researcher on the study, said: “We have seen a wide variation in how quickly people test positive for Covid-19 after vaccination.”Our findings suggest that our genetic code may influence how likely this is to happen over time.”We hope that our findings will help us improve vaccines for the future so they not only stop us developing severe disease, but also keep us symptom-free for as long as possible.”Lead researcher Prof Julian Knight added: “From this study we have evidence that our genetic make-up is one of the reasons why we may differ from each other in our immune response following Covid-19 vaccination. “We found that inheriting a specific variant of an HLA gene was associated with higher antibody responses, but this is only the start of the story.”Further work is needed to better understand the clinical significance of this specific association,” he added. “And more broadly what identifying this gene variant can tell us about how effective immune responses are generated, and ways to continue to improve vaccines for everyone.”The team acknowledge there is also an urgent need to understand whether the findings are applicable to more ethnically diverse populations, because different groups have different levels of the gene variant. More on this storyHow many people have had boosters so far?4 MarchWho can get a Covid booster this autumn?5 hours agoOver-50s invited for Covid and flu jabs in England15 hours agoRelated Internet LinksNature MedicineUniversity of Oxford.websiteCoronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine – NHS.websiteThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Scientists demonstrate a new method for stretching the length of time qubits can maintain information — by disrupting the symmetry of their environment.
What happened
Scientists have demonstrated that they can extend the lifetime of a molecular qubit by altering the surrounding crystal’s structure to be less symmetrical.
The asymmetry protects the qubit from noise, enabling it to maintain information for five times longer than if it were housed in a symmetrical structure. The research team achieved a coherence time — the time the qubit maintains information — of 10 microseconds, or 10 millionths of a second, compared to the 2 microsecond coherence time of a molecular qubit in a symmetrical crystal host.
“This newfound ability to chemically control the host environment opens up new space for targeted applications of molecular qubits.” — Danna Freedman, MIT
The result, published in Physical Review X, comes from a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, MIT, Northwestern University, The University of Chicago and the University of Glasgow. The result is supported in part by Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne.

The adage ‘Seeing is believing’ was front of mind for Dr. Chih-Wei Logan Hsu and Dr. Joshua D. Wythe at Baylor College of Medicine as they and their colleagues developed an innovative technology called EZ Clear. This new tissue clearing method has simplified and sped up the process to render tissue optically transparent, which enables 3D imaging of entire, intact tissues or even entire organs.
Their new method, published in the journal eLife, was developed at the Optical Imaging and Vital Microscopy Core (OiVM) at Baylor. Tissue clearing and whole organ imaging have revolutionized biology, enabling the exploration of organs in three-dimensional space without compromising tissue architecture.
“Previous methods were complicated, laborious and often required expensive equipment, as well as the use of hazardous organic solvents, all of which prevented the widespread adoption of these methods,” said Hsu, co-director of OiVM and assistant professor of integrative physiology and education, innovation and technology at Baylor. “These difficulties motivated us to develop a simpler clearing process that users could more easily complete, saving time and valuable resources to focus on the actual questions they want to investigate in their systems.”
“The beauty of this method is that you can analyze the sample from a global or macro view without physically disturbing the natural organization of the tissue or organ,” said Wythe, associate professor of integrative physiology and of neurosurgery at Baylor. He also is a member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Cardiovascular Research Institute.
“For instance, researchers can now visualize neuronal connections between the eye and the brain. If done in sections, the process would disturb the natural organization of the tissues and is incredibly difficult to reconstruct in 3D, limiting our understanding of the connections between neurons and other surrounding cells over larger volumes or areas. 3D imaging circumvents these limitations, and the advent of EZ Clear makes 3D imaging accessible to most modern molecular biology laboratories,” Wythe said.
EZ Clear also preserves endogenous and synthetic labeling methods, such as fluorescence, without altering sample size. The study shows successful clearing and labeling of neurons and blood vessels within the brain, as well as vessels within the eye, heart, kidney, testis and ovary, and successful whole organ clearing of mouse lung, liver and pancreas.
“EZ Clear eliminates previous technical barriers, allowing researchers to inspect their organs of interest from a macro, whole organ level, down to a cellular resolution,” Wythe said. “It has eliminated previous practical, safety and economical challenges, while providing reproducible, high-quality whole organ visualization, which is an important perspective as it can provide new insights on the topic being investigated.”
EZ Clear is faster, less expensive and simpler than previous clearing methods. “Researchers can now learn this easier-to-complete, reproducible tissue clearing process at the OiVM. They can then implement it in their own labs and obtain results in 48 hours by following three simple steps, while other methods need weeks or even months to clear the tissue,” Hsu said. “Then, they can bring the cleared organ to the OiVM for 3D imaging and analysis.”
Other contributors to this work include Juan Cerda, Jason M. Kirk, Williamson D. Turner, Tara L. Rasmussen, Carlos P. Flores Suarez and Mary E. Dickinson. The authors are all affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine.
This project was supported by the Optical Imaging and Vital Microscopy Core and the Bioengineering Core at Baylor College of Medicine. Further support was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health (5T32GM088129-10, R01HL146745, R01HD099026, U42OD026645, R01HL159159 and 1S10OD016167), the American Heart Association (22PRE916015), the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (RP200402), the Department of Defense (W81XWH18-1-0350) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (PJT-155922).
Video: https://youtu.be/PqlJB3ROoas
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Published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School researchers examined whether the general public understands the medical jargon that physicians typically use in their introductions to patients. They found speciality names and seniority titles are sources of misunderstanding.
“Jargon is pervasive in medicine and the opportunity for misunderstanding due to this terminology begins the instant that physicians introduce themselves to patients,” said Emily Hause, MD, MPH, a pediatric rheumatology fellow at the U of M Medical School. “We found that most people can’t define specialty names nor correctly rank medical seniority titles. Physicians should describe their medical specialty and role on the patient’s care team in plain language to help reduce this source of potential confusion.”
Volunteer participants at the 2021 Minnesota State Fair completed an electronic survey that measured their knowledge of medical specialties and titles. Of the 14 specialties included in the survey, six specialties were correctly defined by less than half of the respondents: Neonatologists: 48% Pulmonologists: 43% Hospitalists: 31% Intensivists: 29% Internists: 21% Nephrologists: 20%When asked to rank medical roles, only 12% of participants correctly placed these titles in order: medical student, intern, senior resident, fellow and attending.
Further research is suggested to survey knowledge on additional specialties and obtain more demographic information.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences grant UL1TR002494. Funding was also provided by the University of Minnesota Driven to Discover grant.
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Each year, 700,000 people die due to antibiotic resistance. A growing global population unfortunately generates a growing resistance to established antibiotic treatments — a threat that has been met with insufficient funding and dwindling inspiration, as commercial incentives for developing new antibiotics have fallen. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, addresses this growing problem in antibiotic development using a novel, interdisciplinary approach to construct a robust, computer-program-generated library of antibiotics and to identify an effective antibiotic for targeted use in a bone cement matrix. This approach could potentially be used to treat bone infections, a common complication after surgical orthopaedic procedures. Their results are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“Currently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only approved of bone cements loaded with antibiotics notoriginally developed for bone tissue,” said Hae Lin Jang, PhD, co-director of the Brigham’s Center for Engineered Therapeutics and principal investigator of the Laboratory for Developing Advanced Biomaterials and Biotechnologies. “In addition to not being bone tissue-specific, resistance has emerged against these antibiotics. We must create a new generation of antibiotics that are optimized to meet this emerging need.”
This increasing struggle with antibiotic resistance has fused with a similarly increasing aging population, which now requires more orthopaedic procedures than ever. Common procedures such as knee and hip replacements can result in bacterial infection, such as Staphylococcal, which is currently treated with systemic antibiotics. Systemic exposure to antibiotics does not precisely target infection; therefore, huge doses are needed, resulting in the unintended consequences of drug resistance and destruction of beneficial microbiota. To remedy this growing issue, collaborating researchers from the Brigham’s Department of Medicine and the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery aimed to create a locally delivered and potent combination of antibiotic and bone cement.
To engineer a new antibiotic for specific local delivery via a bone cement matrix, polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) bone cement was used — the accepted FDA gold-standard. The team shortlisted molecules for antibiotic design and screened for drug-susceptible and drug-resistant bacteria in a preclinical model. Finally, the team compared clinically used PMMA bone cement and the new antibiotic-loaded PMMA bone cement using a prophylactic and an established Staphylococcal-infected tibial injury model.
Researchers pinpointed dual-action antibiotic VCD-077, studying its activity and efficacy in cells and in animal models. VCD-077 not only exhibited desired drug release kinetics without affecting the stability of PMMA bone cement, but it also demonstrated high efficacy against a broad range of drug-resistant bacteria strands and slowed development of future resistance. In fact, VCD-077-loaded PMMA bone cement exhibited greater efficacy than all currently used antibiotic-loaded bone cements against Staphylococcal bone infections in a rat model.
Before clinical application, the team must confront two major limitations: potential differences between the rat model studied and humans, and necessary toxicity studies. But, the researchers note, the future is bright for tissue-specific, localized treatment, such as a minimally invasive injection of antibiotic-infused bone cement. Focusing on tissue-specificity from the development stage and the interaction between drug and device can help engineer treatments that function precisely without perpetuating drug resistance. Additionally, the team’s novel application of computer engineering to find molecules and optimize antibiotic design was a huge success, suggesting potential for computer programming and AI technology to streamline drug development.
“The future lies in mixing artificial intelligence and drug discovery to make developing new antibiotics more efficient and cost-effective than ever before,” said co-corresponding author Shiladitya Sengupta, PhD, co-director of the Brigham’s Center for Engineered Therapeutics. “Interdisciplinarity in our approach and specificity in our drug development will truly bring about a new medical engineering paradigm.”
Said Jang, “Treatment may be getting more complicated, and bacteria may be getting more sophisticated, but us biomedical engineers are getting more sophisticated, too.”
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