Publisher Health

Pesticides and heavy metals in soil may have detrimental effects on the cardiovascular system, according to a review paper published today in Cardiovascular Research, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
“Soil contamination is a less visible danger to human health than dirty air,” said author Professor Thomas Münzel of the University Medical Center Mainz, Germany. “But evidence is mounting that pollutants in soil may damage cardiovascular health through a number of mechanisms including inflammation and disrupting the body’s natural clock.”
Pollution of air, water and soil is responsible for at least nine million deaths each year. More than 60% of pollution-related disease and death is due to cardiovascular disease such as chronic ischaemic heart disease, heart attack, stroke and heart rhythm disorders (arrhythmias).
This paper highlights the relationships between soil pollution and human health, with a particular focus on cardiovascular disease. Soil pollutants include heavy metals, pesticides, and plastics. The authors state that contaminated soil may lead to cardiovascular disease by increasing oxidative stress in the blood vessels (with more “bad” free radicals and fewer “good” antioxidants), by causing inflammation, and by disturbing the body clock (circadian rhythm).
Dirty soil may enter the body by inhaling desert dust, fertilizer crystals, or plastic particles. Heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, plastics, and organic toxicants (for example in pesticides) can also be consumed orally. Soil pollutants wash into rivers and create dirty water which may be consumed.
Pesticides have been linked with an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease. While employees in the agricultural and chemical industries face the greatest exposure, the general public may ingest pesticides from contaminated food, soil and water.
Cadmium is a heavy metal that occurs naturally in small amounts in air, water, soil and food, and also comes from industrial and agricultural sources. Food is the main source of cadmium in non-smokers. The paper states that population studies have shown mixed results on the relationship between cadmium and cardiovascular disease and cites a Korean study showing that middle aged Koreans with high blood cadmium had elevated risks of stroke and hypertension.
Lead is a naturally occurring toxic metal with environmental contamination through mining, smelting, manufacturing and recycling. Studies have found associations between high blood lead levels and cardiovascular disease, including coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke, in women and in people with diabetes. Further studies have indicated a higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease associated with exposure to arsenic, a naturally occurring metalloid whose levels can increase due to industrial processes and using contaminated water to irrigate crops.
The paper states: “Although soil pollution with heavy metals and its association with cardiovascular diseases is especially a problem low- and middle-income countries since their populations are disproportionately exposed to these environmental pollutants, it becomes a problem for any country in the world due to the increasing globalisation of food supply chains and uptake of these heavy metals with fruits, vegetables and meat.”
The potential hazards of contaminated airborne dust are noted. Desert dust can travel long distances, and research has shown that particles from soil in China and Mongolia were related to an increased odds of heart attacks in Japan. The number of cardiovascular emergency department visits in Japan was 21% higher on days with heavy exposure to Asian dust.
While there are no population studies on the cardiovascular health effects of nano- and microplastics in humans, research has shown that these particles can reach the bloodstream, making it plausible that they could travel to the organs and cause systemic inflammation and cardiometabolic disease.
Professor Münzel said: “More studies are needed on the combined effect of multiple soil pollutants on cardiovascular disease since we are rarely exposed to one toxic agent alone. Research is urgently required on how nano- and microplastic might initiate and exacerbate cardiovascular disease. Until we know more, it seems sensible to wear a face mask to limit exposure to windblown dust, filter water to remove contaminants, and buy food grown in healthy soil.”

HIV has an “early and substantial” impact on aging in infected people, accelerating biological changes in the body associated with normal aging within just two to three years of infection, according to a study by UCLA researchers and colleagues.
The findings suggest that new HIV infection may rapidly cut nearly five years off an individual’s life span relative to an uninfected person.
“Our work demonstrates that even in the early months and years of living with HIV, the virus has already set into motion an accelerated aging process at the DNA level,” said lead author Elizabeth Crabb Breen, a professor emerita at UCLA’s Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “This emphasizes the critical importance of early HIV diagnosis and an awareness of aging-related problems, as well as the value of preventing HIV infection in the first place.”
The study is published today in the peer-reviewed journal iScience.
Previous research has suggested that HIV and antiretroviral therapies used to keep the infection under control are associated with an earlier onset of age-related conditions typically associated with aging, such as heart and kidney disease, frailty, and cognitive difficulties.
The research team analyzed stored blood samples from 102 men collected six months or less before they became infected with HIV and again two to three years after infection. They compared these with matching samples from 102 non-infected men of the same age taken over the same time period. The authors say this study is the first to match infected and non-infected people in this way. All the men were participants in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, an ongoing nationwide study initiated in 1984.

The experts agree — the pandemic is not over. Infections are ticking up again, fueled by the new variants our immune systems are ill prepared for.
That’s according to a study by Canadian and US researchers who found that the antibodies generated in people who were vaccinated and/or recovered from COVID-19 prior to 2022 failed to neutralize the variants circulating today.
The study was led by Igor Stagljar, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics, at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, at Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and Shawn Owen, an associate professor of pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical chemistry, at the University of Utah.
The journal Nature Communications published their findings.
The researchers expect that the antibody test they developed to measure immunity in the study’s participants will become a valuable tool for deciding who needs a booster and when, which will help save lives and avoid future lockdowns.
“The truth is we don’t yet know how frequent our shots should be to prevent infection,” said Stagljar. “To answer these questions, we need rapid, inexpensive and quantitative tests that specifically measure Sars-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, which are the ones that prevent infection.”
Many antibody tests have been developed over the past two years. But only a few of the authorized ones are designed to monitor neutralizing antibodies, which coat the viral spike protein so that it can no longer bind its receptor and enter cells.

Despite significant and stunning advances in vaccine technology, the COVID-19 global pandemic is not over. A key challenge in limiting the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is identifying infected individuals. Now, investigators from Japan have developed a new antibody-based method for the rapid and reliable detection of SARS-CoV-2 that does not require a blood sample.
The ineffective identification of SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals has severely limited the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the high rate of asymptomatic infections (16%-38%) has exacerbated this situation. The predominant detection method to date collects samples by swabbing the nose and throat. However, the application of this method is limited by its long detection time (4-6 hours), high cost, and requirement for specialized equipment and medical personnel, particularly in resource-limited countries.
An alternative and complementary method for the confirmation of COVID-19 infection involves the detection of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies. Testing strips based on gold nanoparticles are currently in widespread use for point-of-care testing in many countries. They produce sensitive and reliable results within 10-20 minutes, but they require blood samples collected via a finger prick using a lancing device. This is painful and increases the risk of infection or cross-contamination, and the used kit components present a potential biohazard risk.
Lead author Leilei Bao from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, explains: “To develop a minimally invasive detection assay that would avoid these drawbacks, we explored the idea of sampling and testing the interstitial fluid (ISF), which is located in the epidermis and dermis layers of human skin. Although the antibody levels in the ISF are approximately15%-25% of those in blood, it was still feasible that anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgM/IgG antibodies could be detected and that ISF could act as a direct substitute for blood sampling.”
After demonstrating that ISF could be suitable for antibody detection, the researchers developed an innovative approach to both sample and test the ISF. “First, we developed biodegradable porous microneedles made of polylactic acid that draws up the ISF from human skin,” explains Beomjoon Kim, senior author. “Then, we constructed a paper-based immunoassay biosensor for the detection of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies.” By integrating these two elements, the researchers created a compact patch capable of on-site detection of the antibodies within 3 minutes (result from in vitro tests).
This novel detection device has great potential for the rapid screening of COVID-19 and many other infectious diseases that is safe and acceptable to patients. It holds promise for use in many countries regardless of their wealth, which is a key aim for the global management of infectious disease.
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Materials provided by Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Acute cholangitis is a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection that often is associated with gallstones. Symptoms include fever, jaundice, right upper quadrant pain, and elevated liver enzymes.
While these may seem like distinctive, telltale symptoms, unfortunately, they are similar to those of a much different condition: alcohol-associated hepatitis. This challenges emergency department staff and other health care professionals who need to diagnose and treat patients with liver enzyme abnormalities and systemic inflammatory responses.
New Mayo Clinic research finds that machine-learning algorithms can help health care staff distinguish the two conditions. In an article published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers show how algorithms may be effective predictive tools using a few simple variables and routinely available structured clinical information.
“This study was motivated by seeing many medical providers in the emergency department or ICU struggle to distinguish acute cholangitis and alcohol-associated hepatitis, which are very different conditions that can present similarly,” says Joseph Ahn, M.D., a third-year gastroenterology and hepatology fellow at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. Dr. Ahn is first author of the study.
“We developed and trained machine-learning algorithms to distinguish the two conditions using some of the routinely available lab values that all of these patients should have,” Dr. Ahn says. “The machine-learning algorithms demonstrated excellent performances for discriminating the two conditions, with over 93% accuracy.”
The researchers analyzed electronic health records of 459 patients older than age 18 who were admitted to Mayo Clinic in Rochester between Jan. 1, 2010, and Dec. 31, 2019. The patients were diagnosed with acute cholangitis or alcohol-associated hepatitis.
Ten routinely available laboratory values were collected at the time of admission. After removal of patients whose data were incomplete, 260 patients with alcohol-associated hepatitis and 194 with acute cholangitis remained. These data were used to train eight machine-learning algorithms.
The researchers also externally validated the results using a cohort of ICU patients who were seen at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston between 2001 and 2012. The algorithms also outperformed physicians who participated in an online survey, which is described in the article.
“The study highlights the potential for machine-learning algorithms to assist in clinical decision-making in cases of uncertainty,” says Dr. Ahn. “There are many instances of gastroenterologists receiving consults for urgent endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography in patients who initially deny a history of alcohol use but later turn out to have alcohol-associated hepatitis. In some situations, the inability to obtain a reliable history from patients with altered mental status or lack of access to imaging modalities in underserved areas may force providers to make the determination based on a limited amount of objective data.”
If the machine-learning algorithms can be made easily accessible with an online calculator or smartphone app, they may help health care staff who are urgently presented with an acutely ill patient with abnormal liver enzymes, according to the study.
“For patients, this would lead to improved diagnostic accuracy and reduce the number of additional tests or inappropriate ordering of invasive procedures, which may delay the correct diagnosis or subject patients to the risk of unnecessary complications,” Dr. Ahn says.
The authors are from the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and the Division of Internal Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and from the Department of Computer Science at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. Co-author Yung-Kyun Noh was supported in this research by Samsung Research Funding and Incubation Center of Samsung Electronics. The authors report no competing interests.
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Materials provided by Mayo Clinic. Original written by Jay Furst. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Published9 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, KCNANorth Korea’s Covid outbreak began with citizens touching “alien things” that had fallen near its South Korea border, state media in Pyongyang has claimed.Citizens were urged to be vigilant around objects that may have blown across the border from the South.For years activists in the South have flown balloons across the border to send leaflets and humanitarian aid.In response, Seoul says there is “no possibility” Covid could have crossed the border in that way. According to North Korea’s state media, an official investigation found two people who became infected with Covid early on in the outbreak after coming into contact with unidentified materials near the South Korean border.An 18-year-old soldier and five-year-old child tested positive for the virus in early April after finding the objects on a hill in Ipho-ri, it reported.Since then, state media said: “The malignant Covid-19 virus…has rapidly spread in the DPRK [North Korea].”As a result of the investigation, people in the country are instructed to “vigilantly deal with alien things coming by wind and other climate phenomena and balloons in the areas along the demarcation line and borders.” Anyone who notices a strange object is instructed to report it immediately so it can be swiftly removed by an emergency anti-epidemic team.Although the report did not mention South Korea directly, Seoul’s unification ministry strongly denied the North’s explanation for how Covid could have got into the country. The closed border between the Koreas is one of the most heavily guarded in the world, but defectors and South Korean activists have for years launched balloons across the divide with anti-North Korean messages. Uncovering the mystery of North Korea’s Covid outbreakOver a million Covid cases feared in North KoreaCovid outbreak a great disaster – Kim Jong-unSince late April North Korea has been battling an explosive wave of 4.7 million cases of “fever,” believed to be untested Covid infections.Kim Jong-un described the outbreak in May as the greatest “turmoil to fall on our country since the founding”, state media reported.Until this year the reclusive nation had claimed to be completely Covid-free – although some experts believe the virus may have been circulating before then.Its population of 25 million is vulnerable due to the lack of a vaccination programme and poor healthcare system, although in recent weeks there have been media reports that Pyongyang has accepted an offer of Chinese-manufactured vaccines. It’s not clear how many North Koreans, if any, have so far been vaccinated.In the last few weeks officials say the number of new cases has dropped dramatically but many suspect the government of under-reporting the true figures.The outbreak began some months after the North eased a strict lockdown of its border with China – with freight trains resuming their journeys between the two countries for the first time since early 2020.Any suggestion that the virus could have entered the country this way, especially as China was dealing with a severe outbreak of the Omicron variant, would have raised difficult and diplomatically sensitive questions, North Korea expert Professor Lim Eul-chul told Reuters news agency.”If they concluded the virus was from China they would have had to tighten quarantine measures on the border area in a further setback to North Korea-China trade,” he said.You might also be interested in:This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.More on this storyUncovering the mystery of North Korea’s Covid outbreak2 JuneOver a million Covid cases feared in North Korea16 MayCovid outbreak a great disaster – Kim Jong-un14 May

The crystal structure of a human endogenous reverse transcriptase has similarities to HIV reverse transcriptase, a well-known tractable drug target, which will help design drugs to treat cancer and other diseases, according to a study co-authored by a Rutgers researcher.
The study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), describes the first-ever high-resolution three-dimensional structure of an endogenous reverse transcriptase — specifically human endogenous retrovirus-K (HERV-K) reverse transcriptase (RT). Past research has found a significant portion of the human genome is made up of repetitive elements that are relics of past viral infections, which are associated with a range of serious diseases, including cancer.
According to the study, the structure provides therapeutic opportunities for RT inhibitors-antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV infection or AIDS, and also hepatitis B-in cancer, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.
“This study marks a significant step forward in our understanding of endogenous retroviruses and how they could be targeted to treat disease,” said Eddy Arnold, resident faculty member at the Rutgers Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) and scientific advisory board member of biotechnology company ROME Therapeutics.
“Characterizing the structure of HIV RT was a critical turning point in designing novel medicines to combat that deadly virus,” said Arnold, a Distinguished Professor and Board of Governors Professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers. “Similarly, deeper insights into human endogenous RT could pave the way toward a new class of therapies for cancer and other serious diseases.”
Repetitive elements in the genome such as HERV-K are frequently overexpressed in cancer and elicit biological viral mimicry responses that can alter the tumor microenvironment, according to past research.
The study was co-authored by researchers from ROME Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that aims to develop novel therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases by researching the Dark Genome — vast stretches of uncharted genetic material that represent more than 60 percent of the human genome — for drug development.
“In this publication, we describe for the first time the crystal structure of an endogenous reverse transcriptase, one known as HERV-K RT, and show that it has remarkable similarities to HIV reverse transcriptase, a well-known tractable drug target,” said Dennis Zaller, chief scientific officer of ROME. “This achievement is a milestone in the Dark Genome field and sheds light on opportunities for structure-based drug design based on established anti-viral targets present in our human genome. This work is the result of a great collaboration between ROME’s exceptional structural biology team and world-leading crystallographers.”
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Materials provided by Rutgers University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers from Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered potential new drugs that work in concert with other drugs to deliver a deadly one-two punch to leukemia.
The potential drugs are still years away from being tested in cancer patients, but a recently published study in the journal Leukemia highlights their promise and the innovative methods that led to their discovery.
In previous studies, the research groups of Rice biochemist Natasha Kirienko and MD Anderson physician-scientist Marina Konopleva screened some 45,000 small-molecule compounds to find a few that targeted mitochondria. In the new study, they chose eight of the most promising compounds, identified between five and 30 closely related analogs for each and conducted tens of thousands of tests to systematically determine how toxic each analog was to leukemia cells, both when administered individually or in combination with existing chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin.
“One of the big challenges was to establish optimal conditions and doses for testing on both cancer cells and healthy cells,” said study lead author Svetlana Panina, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who conducted the research during her postdoctoral studies at Rice. “The results from our previously published cytotoxicity assay were helpful, but very little is known about these small-molecule compounds. None of them had been thoroughly described in other studies, and we had to essentially start from scratch to determine how much to use, what they do in cells, everything. All the doses and treatment conditions had to be adjusted by multiple preliminary experiments.”
In prior work, Kirienko’s lab had shown the eight compounds targeted energy-producing machinery inside cells called mitochondria. Dozens to thousands of mitochondria are at work every minute in every living cell, and like all machines, they wear out with use. The eight compounds induce mitophagy, the housekeeping routine cells use to decommission and recycle mitochondria that are past their prime.
During times of extreme stress, cells can temporarily forgo mitophagy to get an emergency energy boost. Cancer is notorious for hijacking these sorts of programs to fuel pathological growth. For example, previous research has shown leukemia cells have far more damaged mitochondria than healthy cells and are also more sensitive to mitochondrial damage than healthy cells.

Researchers at North Carolina State University show that an important gene in maize called HPC1 modulates certain chemical processes that contribute to flowering time, and has its origins in “teosinte mexicana,” a precursor to modern-day corn that grows wild in the highlands of Mexico. The findings provide insight into plant evolution and trait selection, and could have implications for corn and other crops’ adaptation to low temperatures.
“We are broadly interested in understanding how natural variation of lipids are involved in the growth and development of plants, and how these compounds may help plants adapt to their immediate environments,” said Rubén Rellán-Álvarez, assistant professor of structural and molecular biochemistry at NC State and the corresponding author of a paper describing the research. “Specifically, we wanted to learn more about variation in lipids called phospholipids, which consist of phosphorus and fatty acids, and their role in adaptation to cold, low phosphorus, and the regulation of important processes for plant fitness and yield like flowering time.”
Maize grown at higher altitudes, like the highlands of Mexico, needs special accommodations in order to grow successfully. The colder temperatures in these mountainous regions put maize at a slight disadvantage when compared with maize grown at lower elevations and higher temperatures.
“At high elevations, in colder temperatures, it takes longer to make a maize plant due to lower heat unit accumulation — corn needs to accumulate heat or growth units,” Rellán-Álvarez said. “At 10,000 feet (2,600 meters), it takes three times longer to make a maize plant than at lower elevations. To adapt to these special conditions campesinos — smallholder farmers — must plant early in the season and plant deep in the soil; there is very slow but steady growth in earlier months until the rainy season arrives. Over millennia, campesinos have selected maize varieties that can thrive in these special conditions by being able to grow at low temperatures and flower early before the colder months arrive in the winter.”
That’s where the HPC1 gene comes in, the researchers say. In corn varieties grown in low elevations, including most of the corn grown in the United States, the gene breaks down phospholipids that in other species have been shown to bind to important proteins that accelerate flowering time.
“Phospholipids are also important building blocks of cell membranes. All lipids have different shapes and balancing these shapes is what allows membranes to stay intact and helps plants to survive periods of stress,” said Allison Barnes, a postdoctoral researcher in Rellán-Álvarez’s lab and co-first author of the paper.