Publisher Health

Wearable sensors are ubiquitous thanks to wireless technology that enables a person’s glucose concentrations, blood pressure, heart rate, and activity levels to be transmitted seamlessly from sensor to smartphone for further analysis.
Most wireless sensors today communicate via embedded Bluetooth chips that are themselves powered by small batteries. But these conventional chips and power sources will likely be too bulky for next-generation sensors, which are taking on smaller, thinner, more flexible forms.
Now MIT engineers have devised a new kind of wearable sensor that communicates wirelessly without requiring onboard chips or batteries. Their design, detailed today in the journal Science, opens a path toward chip-free wireless sensors.
The team’s sensor design is a form of electronic skin, or “e-skin” — a flexible, semiconducting film that conforms to the skin like electronic Scotch tape. The heart of the sensor is an ultrathin, high-quality film of gallium nitride, a material that is known for its piezoelectric properties, meaning that it can both produce an electrical signal in response to mechanical strain and mechanically vibrate in response to an electrical impulse.
The researchers found they could harness gallium nitride’s two-way piezoelectric properties and use the material simultaneously for both sensing and wireless communication.
In their new study, the team produced pure, single-crystalline samples of gallium nitride, which they paired with a conducting layer of gold to boost any incoming or outgoing electrical signal. They showed that the device was sensitive enough to vibrate in response to a person’s heartbeat, as well as the salt in their sweat, and that the material’s vibrations generated an electrical signal that could be read by a nearby receiver. In this way, the device was able to wirelessly transmit sensing information, without the need for a chip or battery.

Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine have mapped the surface of the cortex of the young human brain with unprecedented resolution, revealing the development of key functional regions from two months before birth to two years after.
The new cortical development mapping, reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents a valuable resource for further research on brain development and offers a powerful new approach to the study of brain-development conditions such as autism and schizophrenia.
“These results provide an important reference for exploring and understanding the dynamics of early brain development,” said study senior author Gang Li, PhD, associate professor of radiology at the UNC School of Medicine.
The study’s first author was Ying Huang, a PhD candidate in Li’s laboratory.
The cortex is a sheet of brain cells that wraps around much of the rest of the brain. The most evolutionarily advanced brain region, it is proportionately larger in humans than in other mammals, and is responsible for higher, distinctively human functions including language abilities and abstract reasoning.
The third trimester of pregnancy through the first two years of life is the most dynamic period in cortical development. The cortex thickens markedly during this interval, and grows at an even faster pace in terms of surface area, by forming complicated cortical folds.

India’s agricultural system is largely based on input-intensive monocropping of staple crops. A study publishing August 18th in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation by Lindsay Jaacks at The University of Edinburgh, Midlothian, United Kingdom, Abhishek Jain at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi, India and colleagues suggests that while COVID-19 disrupted agricultural labor, supply chains, and farmers’ access to credit and markets, the pandemic did not significantly push Indian farmers to adopt more sustainable cultivation practices.
Nearly half of the population in India is employed in agricultural work, yet the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on agricultural practices have not been fully documented. In order to quantify changes in farmers’ cropping patterns and input use, and adoption of sustainable agricultural practices, researchers interviewed 3,637 farmers living in 20 Indian states and union territories by telephone between December 1, 2020 and January 10, 2021.
The researchers found that 84% of farmers reported no change in the type of crops they grew, and 66% reported no change in fertilizer or pesticide use. The study has its limitations however, including low response rates in several major agricultural states, as well as possible self-reporting bias. Further studies will be needed to better understand medium- and long-term changes in crop cultivation practices as well as the use of chemical inputs.
According to the authors, “Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find an association between COVID-19 and changes in crop cultivation patterns or interest in trying agroecological practices. However, although most farmers continued to grow the same crops with no change in input use, many expressed an interest in learning more about practicing more sustainable farming. These findings will inform future directions for resilient agri-food systems.”
Jaacks adds, “Despite disruptions to agri-food supply chains during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, and about 1 in 5 farmers in our national sample reporting COVID-19 symptoms in the past month, the vast majority of farmers continued with prevailing cropping patterns. Rice remained the dominant crop in Kharif (monsoon season) of 2020, and the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides continued. Government support, peer-to-peer training networks, and market linkage support will be required to shift farmers to more nutrient-dense and sustainable cropping patterns.”
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The harmful molecules are everywhere, but chemists have made progress in developing a method to break them down.A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals, a group of compounds that pose a global threat to human health.The chemicals — known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are found in a spectrum of products and contaminate water and soil around the world. Left on their own, they are remarkably durable, remaining dangerous for generations.Scientists have been searching for ways to destroy them for years. In a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers rendered PFAS molecules harmless by mixing them with two inexpensive compounds at a low boil. In a matter of hours, the PFAS molecules fell apart.“I was truly shocked,” said Shira Joudan, an environmental chemist at York University in Canada who was not involved in the new research.The new technique might provide a way to destroy PFAS chemicals once they’ve been pulled out of contaminated water or soil. But William Dichtel, a chemist at Northwestern University and a co-author of the study, said that a lot of effort lay ahead to make it work outside the confines of a lab. “Then we’d be in a real position to talk practicality,” he said.Chemists first created PFAS compounds in the 1930s, and the chemicals soon proved to be remarkably good at repelling water and grease. The American company 3M used PFAS chemicals to create Scotchgard, which protects fabric and carpets. PFAS chemicals put the nonstick in nonstick Teflon pans. Firefighters began putting out fires with PFAS-laced foam. It’s easy to encounter PFAS in our everyday lives, including in the dental floss we thread between our teeth and the food wrappers used in restaurants.They’re also harmful. Even low chronic levels of PFAS exposure have been linked to an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, low birth weight, and reduced immunity.“Nearly every American has them in their bodies,” said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group that conducts research on PFAS chemicals.Handling a PFAS-laced food wrapper or wearing a pair of jeans treated with the chemicals can expose people to their dangers. But PFAS chemicals can also reach us through the environment.They are released into the air from factories that use them in manufacturing. Some companies have dumped PFAS chemicals, which have spread into rivers and groundwater. The Department of Defense has sprayed PFAS chemicals on its bases during firefighting training exercises.Once PFAS chemicals escape into the environment, they are pretty much there for good because their molecular structure lets them resist decay. Each molecule is a long carbon chain studded with fluorine atoms. The bonds between the carbon and fluorine are so strong that they can’t be broken by water, enzymes from bacteria or other natural substances.As a result, PFAS chemicals have accumulated in water and soil across the planet. Earlier this month, a team of scientists reported that they could even find PFAS in raindrops falling on Tibet and Antarctica. Many of the samples they analyzed had PFAS concentrations higher than the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has considers safe.“We’ve really polluted the whole world with this stuff,” Dr. Dichtel said.An official with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality displayed a map of drinking water contaminated with PFAS to the residents of Parchment, Mich., in 2018.Jim West/AlamyAlthough the dangers of PFAS have been known for years, governments have been slow to grapple with them. In June, the Biden Administration announced new measures to monitor the chemicals, cut down on their release and deal with the damage they can do to human health.A crucial step in undoing the damage of PFAS chemicals is removing them from the environment. Dr. Dichtel has been a part of this effort, inventing sticky polymers that can pull the molecules out of contaminated water.But on its own, filtering out PFAS is not a complete solution. “Most technologies for PFAS treatment in use today only serve to remove PFAS from water, but that just concentrates the PFAS wastes,” said Timothy Strathmann, an environmental engineer at the Colorado School of Mines.A common method to get rid of this concentrated PFAS is to burn it. But some studies indicate that incineration fails to destroy all of the chemicals and lofts the surviving pollution into the air. In May, the Defense Department halted its incineration of fire-suppressing foam.Chemists have been searching for safer ways to get rid of PFAS, but it’s been difficult to find methods that are cheap and safe. In 2020, Dr. Dichtel stumbled across a possible treatment that was surprisingly simple.At the end of a PFAS molecule’s carbon-fluorine chain, it is capped by a cluster of other atoms. Many types of PFAS molecules have heads made of a carbon atom connected to a pair of oxygen atoms, for example.Dr. Dichtel came across a study in which chemists at the University of Alberta found an easy way to pry carbon-oxygen heads off other chains. He suggested to his graduate student, Brittany Trang, that she give it a try on PFAS molecules.Dr. Trang was skeptical. She had tried to pry off carbon-oxygen heads from PFAS molecules for months without any luck. According to the Alberta recipe, all she’d need to do was mix PFAS with a common solvent called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, and bring it to a boil.“I didn’t want to try it initially because I thought it was too simple,” Dr. Trang said. “If this happens, people would have known this already.”An older grad student advised her to give it a shot. To her surprise, the carbon-oxygen head fell off.It appears that DMSO makes the head fragile by altering the electric field around the PFAS molecule, and without the head, the bonds between the carbon atoms and the fluorine atoms become weak as well. “This oddly simple method worked,” said Dr. Trang, who finished her Ph.D. last month and is now a journalist.Unfortunately, Dr. Trang discovered how well DMSO worked in March 2020 and was promptly shut out of the lab by the pandemic. She spent the next two and a half months dreaming of other ingredients which she could add to the DMSO soup to hasten the destruction of PFAS chemicals.On Dr. Trang’s return, she started testing a number of chemicals until she found one that worked. It was sodium hydroxide, the chemical in lye.When she heated the mixture to temperatures between about 175 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the PFAS molecules broke down in a matter of hours. Within days, the remaining fluorine-bearing byproducts broke down into harmless molecules as well.Dr. Trang and Dr. Dichtel teamed up with other chemists at U.C.L.A. and in China to figure out what was happening. The sodium hydroxide hastens the destruction of the PFAS molecules by eagerly bonding with the fragments as they fall apart. The fluorine atoms lose their link to the carbon atoms, becoming harmless.“Once you give it a chance, this thing will unzip,” Dr. Dichtel said.Dr. Strathmann, who was not involved in the research, said that the new study was important because it was based on chemistry profoundly different from other methods that were being studied. “We’re going to need some creative solutions,” he said.Dr. Dichtel and his colleagues are now investigating how to scale up their method to handle large amounts of PFAS chemicals. They’re also looking at other types of PFAS molecules with different heads to see if they can pry those off as well.“It’s a huge challenge, but it’s in our grasp,” he said.“This research is desperately needed,” Dr. Stoiber said. But she cautioned that even if the new technique works outside the lab, it will not solve the PFAS problem all by itself because the scale of the problem has gotten so big — and is getting bigger.Scientists estimate that over 50,000 tons of PFAS are emitted into the atmosphere each year. Meanwhile, chemical companies are inventing new PFAS molecules at a brisk clip.“The reality of the situation is that there is really no magic solution right now other than undertaking the hard work of recognizing just how difficult the problem is and turning off the tap so that we don’t make it any worse,” she said.

A Rutgers analysis of dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) software programs used in precision, or personalized, medicine to prevent, diagnose and treat disease found that no program exists that can be used for all treatments.
“Precision medicine is one of the most trending subjects in basic and medical science today,” said Zeeshan Ahmed, an assistant professor of medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School who led the study, published in Briefings in Bioinformatics. “Major reasons include its potential to provide predictive diagnostics and personalized treatment to variable known and rare disorders. However, until now, there has been very little effort exerted in organizing and understanding the many computing approaches to this field. We want to pave the way for a new data-centric era of discovery in health care.”
Precision medicine, a technology still in its infancy, is an approach to treatment that uses information about an individual’s medical history and genetic profile and relates it to the information of many others to find patterns that can help prevent, diagnose or treat a disease. The AI-based approach rests on a high level of both computing power and machine-learning intelligence because of the enormous scope of medical and genetic information scoured and analyzed for patterns.
The comparative and systematic review, believed by the authors to be one of the first of its kind, identified 32 of the most prevalent precision medicine AI approaches used to study preventive treatments for a range of diseases, including obesity, Alzheimer’s, inflammatory bowel disease, breast cancer and major depressive disorder. The bevy of AI approaches analyzed in the study — the researchers combed through five years of high-quality medical literature — suggest the field is advancing rapidly but is suffering from disorganization, Ahmed said.
In AI, software programs simulate human intelligence processes. In machine learning, a subcategory of AI, programs are designed to “learn” as they process more and more data, becoming ever more accurate at predicting outcomes. The effort rests on algorithms, step-by-step procedures for solving a problem or performing a computation.
Researchers such as Ahmed, who conducts studies on cardiovascular genomics at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research (IFH), are racing to collect and analyze complex biological data while also developing the computational systems that undergird the endeavor.
Because the use of genetics is “arguably the most data-rich and complex component of precision medicine,” Ahmed said, the team focused especially on reviewing and comparing scientific objectives, methodologies, data sources, ethics and gaps in approaches used.
Those interested in precision medicine, he said, can look to the paper for guidance as to which AI programs may be best suited for their research.
To aid the advent of precision medicine, the study concluded that the scientific community needs to embrace several “grand challenges,” from addressing general issues such as improved data standardization and enhanced protection of personal identifying information to more technical issues such as correcting for errors in genomic and clinical data.
“AI has the potential to play a vital role to achieve significant improvements in providing better individualized and population healthcare at lower costs,” Ahmed said. “We need to strive to address possible challenges that continue to slow the advancements of this breakthrough treatment approach.”
Other Rutgers researchers involved in the study included Sreya Vadapalli and Habiba Abdelhalim, research assistants at the IFH, and Saman Zeeshan, a bioinformatics research scientist and former postdoctoral research associate at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
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Materials provided by Rutgers University. Original written by Kitta MacPherson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Hallucinogen use has increased since 2015, overall and particularly among adults 26 and older, while use decreased in adolescents aged 12-17 years according to a new study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Estimates of over 5.5 million people in the U.S. used hallucinogens in the past year in 2019, which represents an increase from 1.7 percent of the population ages 12 years and over in 2002 to 2.2 percent in 2019.
LSD use between 2002 and 2019 increased overall and in all age groups with the past 12-month rate increasing from 0.9 percent in 2002 to 4 percent in 2019 for those 18-25 years of age. Conversely, PCP use between 2002 and 2019 decreased, as did the drug Ecstasy since 2015. The study is the first to provide formal statistical analyses of trends in prevalence of hallucinogen use overall and by age groups during the last two decades.
The findings are published online in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction.
To assess trends in hallucinogen use in the U.S. general population, the researchers analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from 2002 to 2019 for participants 12 years of age and older.
The use of hallucinogens — a broad category of psychoactive substances, including “classic” psychedelics such as LSD — are mostly designated as Schedule I drugs in the U. S., and may entail risk for adverse consequences including anxious reactions, confusion, acute delusional states and a prolonged sense of fear and dread. LSD and Ecstasy and several other hallucinogens are associated with an increased risk of autonomic, endocrine, cardiovascular and neurological adverse effects including elevated blood pressure, heart rate and loss of appetite, tremors and seizures. PCP is considered to be one of the most dangerous hallucinogens, and known to cause adverse effects similar to LSD and ecstasy, but unlike those drugs, PCP can lead to hostile and violent behaviors that may result in severe trauma.
“While new findings suggesting benefits from use of certain hallucinogens among a range of cognitive areas are being published at a rapid rate, there are still gaps in knowledge concerning safe hallucinogen use, and evidence for potential adverse effects even with professionally supervised use that warrant attention.” said Ofir Livne, MD, MPH, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School, and first author.
From 2002 to 2019, the prevalence of 12-month LSD use increased significantly overall and among respondents aged 12-17 years. However, the prevalence of great risk for regular LSD use decreased significantly overall for the years 2002-14, and among all age groups.
“Our finding of an upward trend in 12-month LSD use, overall and by age, matches our finding of a downward trend in perception of LSD as risky,” said Deborah Hasin, PhD, professor of epidemiology (in psychiatry) at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and senior author. “Factors such as changes in risk perception, in the specific types of drugs available and in expectations of beneficial effects of ‘microdosing’ may all have led to increased use of certain hallucinogens in recent years.”
According to author Livne, “Given the recent media coverage showing that an increasing number of adults may be reporting positive effects of ‘microdosing’ and expecting therapeutic benefits of hallucinogens without negative effects, our findings merit a comprehensive examination of time trends and motives for hallucinogen frequency and quantity of use.”
“In light of popular media reports of a forthcoming ‘psychedelic revolution’ with commercialization and marketing that may further reduce public perception of any risk, researchers, clinicians and policymakers should increase their attention to the rising rates of unsupervised hallucinogen use among the general public,” observes Hasin. “Our results highlight such use as a growing public health concern and suggest that the increasing risk of potentially unsupervised hallucinogen use warrants preventive strategies.”
Co-authors are Dvora Shmulewitz, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Claire Walsh, New York State Psychiatric Institute.
The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (T32DA031099).

It’s a scene that will be familiar for many after yet another scorching summer: You’re lying awake during a warm night, bedsheets kicked aside, an overmatched ceiling fan providing little respite as you struggle to get a good night’s sleep.
But a warming planet doesn’t just mean more people may find it harder to get quality sleep. There is also evidence suggesting that sleep disturbance could make it harder for the body to fend off infection, according to a new research paper from Dr. Michael Irwin, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavorial sciences at UCLA.
Irwin, who has extensively studied how sleep regulates the immune system, said while there are few studies on how ambient, or surrounding air, temperature affects sleep, they indicate that warmer temperatures contribute to sleep disturbance. Studies have also shown that poor sleep is associated with heightened risk of infectious disease and could make some vaccination less effective, Irwin writes in a research review published in the peer-reviewed journal Temperature last week.
Given research showing a potential link between poor sleep and reduced immune response, Irwin said this raises timely questions about whether climate change results in heightened infectious disease risk amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a monkeypox outbreak and the reemergence of the poliovirus in New York and London.
“No one has previously put together this notion that the ongoing climate crisis is contributing to sleep disturbance and that it’s possibly contributing to the altered risk of infectious disease we’re seeing,” said Irwin, the director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.
Irwin said the issue also raises important implications about disparities, since low-income communities and communities of color face heightened risk from heat and have less access to air conditioning.

For years, the nucleus within a cell was thought to be elastic like a rubber ball, deforming and snapping back into shape as the cell navigated through pores and between fibers inside the human body. Researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Florida have discovered that the nucleus is more complex than originally believed, behaving more like a liquid drop than a rubber ball.
“The discovery that the nucleus deforms like a liquid drop calls for a fresh look at how the nuclear shape becomes abnormal in diseases like cancer,” said Dr. Tanmay Lele, Unocal Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Lele, a Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar, is co-leading the team that uncovered the surprising mechanical behaviors of the nucleus. Their findings were published in Advanced Science in June 2022.
The genetic material governing a cell’s function and behavior, called the genome, is safely stored in the nucleus. Nearly 150 years of looking through microscopes has taught pathologists and researchers that misshapen nuclei are warning signs of diseases like cancer. Cancer cells with such abnormal nuclei are able to migrate to other parts of the body in a process called cancer metastasis, a spreading that can be lethal.
Nuclear shape observations are used in cancer diagnosis even today. But why nuclei become abnormal has remained unclear. Understanding how nuclei become misshapen may help uncover a way to aid cell nuclei in regaining their normal shapes, leading to new approaches for treating cancer.
The findings from this study are critical to understanding how a protective layer surrounding the nucleus, called the lamina, helps preserve nuclear shape while cells crawl through the tortuous paths through pores and around tissue fibers.
Lele and his fellow researchers began their exploration of nuclear behaviors by placing fibroblasts, the most common type of connective-tissue cells in animals, into a miniature obstacle course of tiny, flexible pillars 1/100th of the width of a human hair. In order for the cells to crawl through this obstacle course, their nuclei had to squeeze in between the pillars. The researchers observed the movements with an advanced high-resolution microscope that could image the 3D shapes of the nuclei.
Imaging revealed that the pillars created deep indentations into the nuclear surface. Yet the overall nuclear shape was preserved, allowing the nucleus to successfully pass like a liquid drop, and unlike a springy elastic rubber ball, through the obstacles.
The research also revealed that a depletion of lamin A/C, one of the normal protein components of lamina, caused the nuclei to get entangled in the obstacles. The discovery suggests that lamin A/C helps maintain the surface tension of the “nuclear drop.”
“Our work points to a fundamental mechanism by which the nucleus preserves its shape and protects its genome,” Lele said. “Our discovery also helps us better understand how misshapen nuclei arise in cancer and how to potentially make them normal again. We are now studying the implications of the drop model for the abnormal nuclear shapes commonly observed in cancer.”
The work is financially supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute’s Physical Sciences — Oncology Network to Lele, along with additional support from the National Science Foundation to co-principal investigator Dr. Richard B. Dickinson, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Florida. The research is also partially funded by a CPRIT established investigator award to Lele, facilitated through the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.
Aside from Lele and Dickinson, principal investigators and researchers on this project include Drs. Pushkar P. Lele, Cynthia A. Reinhart-King, Kyle J. Roux and Nathan J. Sniadecki. Students include Aditya Katiyar (lead author on the paper), Jian Zhang, Jyot D. Antani, Yifan Yu and Kelsey L. Scott.
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Materials provided by Texas A&M University. Original written by Nancy Luedke. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

When female mosquitoes are looking for a human to bite, they smell a unique cocktail of body odors that we emit into the air. These odors then stimulate receptors in the mosquitoes’ antenna. Scientists have tried deleting these receptors in attempts to make humans undetectable to mosquitoes.
However, even after knocking out an entire family of odor-sensing receptors from the mosquito genome, mosquitoes still find a way to bite us. Now, a group of researchers, publishing in the journal Cell on August 18, found that mosquitoes have evolved redundant fail-safes in their olfactory system that make sure they can always smell our scents.
“Mosquitoes are breaking all of our favorite rules of how animals smell things,” says Margo Herre, a scientist at Rockefeller University and one of the lead authors of the paper.
In most animals, an olfactory neuron is only responsible for detecting one type of odor. “If you’re a human and you lose a single odorant receptor, all of the neurons that express that receptor will lose the ability to smell that smell,” says Leslie Vosshall of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at Rockefeller University and the senior author of the paper. But she and her colleagues found that this is not the case in mosquitoes.
“You need to work harder to break mosquitoes because getting rid of a single receptor has no effect,” says Vosshall. “Any future attempts to control mosquitoes by repellents or anything else has to take into account how unbreakable their attraction is to us.”
“This project really started unexpectedly when we were looking at how human odor was encoded in the mosquito brain,” says Meg Younger, a professor at Boston University and one of the lead authors of the paper.
They found that neurons stimulated by the human odor 1-octen-3-ol are also stimulated by amines, another type of chemical mosquitoes use to look for humans. This is unusual since according to all existing rules of how animals smell, neurons encode odor with narrow specificity, suggesting that 1-octen-3-ol neurons should not detect amines.
“Surprisingly, the neurons for detecting humans through 1-octen-3-ol and amine receptors were not separate populations,” says Younger. This may allow all human-related odors to activate “the human-detecting part” of the mosquito brain even if some of the receptors are lost, acting as a fail-safe.
The team also utilized single-nucleus RNA sequencing to see what other receptors individual mosquito olfactory neurons are expressing. “The result gave us a broad view of just how common co-expression of receptors is in mosquitoes,” says Olivia Goldman, another lead author of the paper.
Vosshall thinks that other insects may have a similar mechanism. Christopher Potter’s research group at Johns Hopkins University recently reported that fruit flies have similar co-expression of receptors in their neurons. “This may be a general strategy for insects that depend heavily on their sense of smell,” says Vosshall.
In the future, Meg Younger’s group plans to uncover the functional significance of the co-expression of different types of olfactory receptors.
This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Institute of Health.
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Screening for depression at the primary care level could dramatically increase the likelihood of treatment for those who are traditionally undertreated — racial and ethnic minority individuals, older adults, those with limited English proficiency and men — according to a new study led by UC San Francisco.
Second only to cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of disability, depression goes unrecognized in more than half of patients presenting with symptoms in primary care, where an estimated 60% of patients receive depression care, studies have shown.
The researchers tracked electronic health data of 52,944 adult patients seen at six UCSF primary care facilities over a two-year period. After a routine screening policy was implemented, depression screening rates more than doubled — from 40.5% in 2017 to 88.8% in 2019, the researchers reported in their study, publishing in JAMA Network Open on Aug.18, 2022.
In 2018, they found that for every 100 patients ages 18 to 30 screened for depression, 75 patients ages 75 and older were likely to be screened for depression. For every 100 English-speaking white patients screened for depression, there were 59 Chinese-language patients and 55 other non-English language patients likely to be screened for depression.
By 2019, statistically significant disparities virtually disappeared for older patients, Black/African Americans, other English-speaking patients and patients with language barriers. However, screening for men remained relatively low: for every 100 women screened for depression, 87 men were likely to be screened for depression, compared to 82 men before the policy was implemented.
“Our study is the largest since 2016, when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that adult patients be screened for depression, and the first to investigate patient predictors of screening,” said first author Maria E. Garcia, MD, assistant professor in the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “Because depression impacts so many other chronic diseases, implementation of routine depression screening could also improve patient outcomes for complications from other conditions.”
The average age of the patients was 49, 59% of the patients were female, 43% English-speaking whites, 25% English-speaking Asians, 9% Latino, 7% Black, 1.4% Pacific Islander, 0.3% American Indian/Alaskan Native and 5.5% were patients with language barriers. Race and ethnicity data were missing or unknown for 9% of English-speaking patients.