Publisher Health

Charitable giving increased in counties that experienced COVID-19-related deaths, reveals a new study from the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.
The findings reveal that during the study period from March to August of 2020, charitable giving increased in 78 percent of counties that experienced greater threat from COVID-19. Human services charities — organizations that help mitigate the effects of the pandemic — benefited the most from increases in generosity. These charities feed the hungry, shelter homeless, or care for the elderly or young children.
“While giving increased overall in areas affected by COVID-19, we also did not see decreases in donations to any charity categories, such as education or environmental issues,” said lead author Ariel Fridman, a PhD candidate in behavioral marketing at the Rady School. “This is surprising given that a record-high majority of Americans reported a worsening financial situation during the same time. This contradicts some prior work suggesting that when people experience such financial scarcity, they act out of their own self-interest to acquire financial wealth. For example, there was a decline in charitable giving during the 2008 financial crisis.”
Fridman and co-authors Rachel Gershon, assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School and Ayelet Gneezy, the Carol Lazier and Family Endowed Chair in Social Innovation and Impact also at the Rady School, embarked on the study to gauge if individuals would act in more self-serving ways during the crisis because in the early days of the pandemic, behavior inconsiderate of others was evident with people hoarding toilet paper, masks, disinfectants and other supplies.
“Amidst the uncertainty, fear, and tragedy of the pandemic, we find a silver lining: people became more financially generous toward others in the presence of the COVID-19 threat,” write the authors. “This work adds to our understanding of human behavior during times of crisis.”
The authors analyzed donations data from Charity Navigator spanning July 2016 to December 2020. They found that from March to December 2020, giving in counties where COVID-19 deaths occurred increased by about 30 percent. They used an additional dataset from field work they conducted which measured giving behavior of 1,000 members of the public that were broadly representative of the U.S. population. From March to August 2020, these participants played an economics game via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which assessed their generosity on a monthly basis.
The researchers compared the two charitable giving datasets to a measure of threat from the novel coronavirus based on new, daily COVID-19 deaths per million in U.S. counties using data from Johns Hopkins. The findings consistently revealed increased generosity in areas where COVID-19 deaths occurred.
“Individuals may have been motivated to give more as a result of increased feelings of sympathy,” the authors write. “They also could have had a desire to regain a sense of agency while they were in a situation where they felt they had little control. Or it could be that people were faced with their own mortality more because unfortunately, the pandemic made death more salient. Donors may have also given to experience positive emotions (e.g., warm glow) during a stressful period.”
The data from Charity Navigator also revealed individuals donated to honor those who passed away during the pandemic, or were otherwise affected. It shows that the proportion of donations made “in memory of” someone was significantly greater in 2020 than every prior year.
They conclude, “Our findings have significant societal implications and advance our understanding of economic and psychological theories of social preferences in times of crises.”
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Materials provided by University of California – San Diego. Original written by Christine Clark. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

While 40,000 people in the United States are killed by firearms each year, an estimated 85,000 people survive firearm injuries. A new study shows that the repercussions of such trauma extend far beyond the immediate aftermath of the injury.
The long-term, often-hidden, costs of firearm injuries include worse mental health, substance use disorders, and higher health care spending for survivors as well as increased mental health disorders for their significant others and children, according to new research by investigators at Harvard Medical School, published April 5 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
While research in recent years has begun to shed light on the epidemic of gunshot deaths in the U.S., this is one of the first large-scale, quasi-experimental studies to examine the health and financial impact of gunshot wounds over the course of a full year. It is also one of the first studies to measure the health impact on the families of gunshot survivors.
“Our study reveals that, in addition to the obvious physical consequences of gunshot wounds, there are substantial mental health repercussions for both the survivors and their family members through a year following a shooting,” said study lead author Zirui Song, associate professor of health care policy at HMS and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Understanding how firearm injuries reverberate across peoples’ lives and families provides insights that we can use to provide better care for patients.”
The analysis, based on an examination of patient records over 10 years, shows that people who survive a firearm injury face greater risks of mental health disorders, substance use disorders, and pain in the year following injury. Moreover, gunshot survivors average $2,495 more in health care spending per month, compared with demographically and clinically matched peers. This latter finding, extrapolated to all gunshot survivors in the U.S., suggests that direct health care spending due to these injuries amounts to some $2.5 billion in the first year alone.
The immediate family members of survivors also appear to suffer indirect but tangible harms: The significant others, parents, and children of gunshot survivors showed an increased risk of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the vast assemblage of microbes on and within the human body. These include protists, archaea, fungi, viruses and vast numbers of bacteria living in symbiotic ecosystems.
Known collectively as the human microbiome, these tiny entities influence an astonishing range of activities, from metabolism to behavior and play a central role in health and disease. Some 39 trillion non-human microbes flourish on and within us, in a ceaseless, interdependent bustle. Together, they make up over half of the human body’s cells, though they may possess 500 times as many genes as are found in human cells. Identifying and making sense of this microbial mélange has been a central challenge for researchers.
In a new study, Qiyun Zhu and his colleagues describe a new method for probing the microbiome in unprecedented detail. The technique provides greater simplicity and ease of use compared with existing approaches. Using the new technique, the researchers demonstrate an improved ability to pinpoint biologically relevant characteristics, including a subject’s age and sex based on microbiome samples.
The innovative research holds the promise of rapidly advancing investigations into the mysteries of the microbiome. With such knowledge, researchers hope to better understand how these microbes collectively act to safeguard human health and how their dysfunction can lead to a broad range of diseases. In time, drugs and other therapies may even be tailor-made based on a patient’s microbiomic profile.
Professor Zhu is a researcher in the Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiology and ASU’s School of Life Sciences. The research team includes collaborators from the University of California, San Diego, including co-corresponding author Rob Knight, Zhu’s former mentor.
The group’s research results appear in the current issue of the journal mSystems.

The COVID-19 pandemic likely permanently increased the delivery of mental health counseling through telehealth, according to new research from Oregon Health & Science University.
The retrospective analysis was published today in the April issue of the journal Health Affairs.
“Our study suggests that telehealth services for mental health counseling expanded significantly and is likely to stay,” said lead author Jane Zhu, M.D., assistant professor of medicine (general internal medicine and geriatrics) in the OHSU School of Medicine. “Future applications of tele-mental health should really be focused on understanding the population, context and disease conditions most conducive to this method.”
Zhu and co-authors used a nongovernmental claims clearinghouse to analyze data from 2016-18 and compare it with the period of the onset of the pandemic, from March to December 2020, combing through a total of 101.7 million outpatient mental health visits.
They found that in the early period of the pandemic, in-person mental health visits initially fell by 21.9%, despite the onset of a stress-inducing pandemic. Mental health visits promptly rebounded, however, with nearly half of them — 47.9% — transitioning to telehealth by the end of the study period in December 2020.
Researchers detected differences in the use of telehealth among clinical conditions. For example, people being seen for schizophrenia were less likely to use in-person visits, whereas those with anxiety and fear-related disorders used telehealth to a greater extent.

The College of the Holy Cross is renaming the science buildings on its campus in Worcester, Mass., in honor of one of its most famous graduates, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.The college announced on Monday that its science complex will be formally known as the Anthony S. Fauci Integrated Science Complex starting on June 11, a date that coincides with Dr. Fauci’s 60th class reunion weekend.Holy Cross confirmed on Monday that Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s top medical adviser on the coronavirus pandemic, will be on campus for the reunion. The National Institutes of Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“We are thrilled to celebrate Dr. Fauci in such a public and enduring way,” the president of Holy Cross, Vincent D. Rougeau, said in a statement. “It’s fitting that Dr. Fauci’s name will adorn a complex designed to foster integrated learning across multiple academic disciplines — the kind of broad, collaborative and holistic thinking one needs to manage health crises such as H.I.V./AIDS, Ebola and Zika, or the current Covid-19 pandemic.”Dr. Fauci graduated from Holy Cross in 1962 as a classics major with a premedical concentration. He spoke to Holy Cross Magazine in 2021 about how the school’s Jesuit education had influenced his career advising presidents.“One of the things I learned the first time I ever briefed a president, President Ronald Reagan, is that you have to make a decision when you’re speaking truth to power that you should not be concerned about wanting to be liked,” he said. “Because once you start entering that into your equation, you might, subconsciously, slip into the situation where you tell somebody what you think they want to hear. And that is not truth. So fundamental adherence to truthful principles — that you learn with a Jesuit education — really fortifies you.”Dr. Fauci delivered a virtual address during Holy Cross’s 2020 commencement ceremony, where he again referred to his Jesuit education.“Permeating the entire experience was the Jesuit spirit of intellectual rigor,” he said. “Precision of thought and economy of expression are tenets that have remained my touchstones to this day.”

For severely immunocompromised patients, a bone marrow transplant restores immune defenses and allows them to resume normal life. But after observing the nasopharyngeal system, where the body’s first line of immune defense is deployed, scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, Inserm and the Paris Public Hospital Network (AP-HP), in collaboration with the Imagine Institute, found a failure in the immune mechanisms of some of these patients. The results of this study, published in the journal Blood on February 14, 2022, could pave the way for more effective treatment.
In patients with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID),1 the immune system is compromised and unable to deal with the onslaught of microbial attacks from the environment. Alain Fischer, a founding member of the Imagine Institute at Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital (AP-HP), has followed these patients for the past 30 years and knows them well. “SCID patients need to be treated with an allogeneic bone marrow transplant,2 sometimes combined with pre-transplant chemotherapy to prevent graft rejection,” explains the physician and immunologist. “This procedure cures patients and restores their immune system, but we had never previously taken a detailed look at what was happening in the nasal mucosa.” The immune response machinery is highly complex and involves several components: agents in the innate immune response, which are particularly active in the mucosa of the gut, lungs and nose, and agents in the adaptive immune response, which circulate in the blood and lymph.
To help elucidate the way in which the innate immune system is regulated, James Di Santo, Head of the Innate Immunity Unit (Institut Pasteur/Inserm), proposed comparing the post-transplant immune systems of immunocompromised patients with the immune systems of healthy patients from the “Milieu Intérieur” cohort.3 “We already had nasopharyngeal samples taken with a simple nasal swab from some 1,000 subjects, and we were able to study the immune response using these samples,” says the scientist. “The idea was to take the same type of samples from immunocompromised patients, together with a blood test, to observe the differences.”
The scientists soon saw significant differences in some patients. Although in the healthy subjects and most of the immunocompromised patients the entire nasopharyngeal system had generally geared up to respond to attacks by forming a protective mucus layer, producing a large quantity of antibodies (especially IgA antibodies) and immune cells, and maintaining the microbiota, the nasal mucosa was disrupted in some transplant patients. In patients who were partially immunocompromised and had received only limited pre-transplant chemotherapy, the nasopharyngeal region had a smaller quantity of mucus, fewer IgA antibodies and cytokines4 and a prevalence of pathogenic bacteria. In other words, the mucosal immune system in these individuals was less active in dealing with daily attacks from pathogens. Their blood samples also revealed a selective deficiency in some circulating immune cells.
“We know that the immune cells in the blood produce cytokines, which stimulate the production of antibodies, and these antibodies in turn have the task of neutralizing pathogenic bacteria. If there is an absence of immune cells in the blood, it triggers a chain reaction, ultimately leading to an imbalance in the microbiota known as dysbiosis,” explains James Di Santo. For the first time, the scientists were able to observe innate immunity mechanisms in action in the nasal mucosa in humans. This discovery could also prompt physicians to adjust their transplant protocol. “Patients who fail to recover their ability to produce IgA antibodies are potentially more vulnerable to respiratory infections,” explains Alain Fischer. “We can compensate for this with an antibody replacement therapy, but the results of this new study also suggest that pre-transplant chemotherapy should be offered more systematically to ensure that their immune system is fully rebuilt.”
(1) Not all types of severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) have the same genetic origins or the same immunological profile. SCID is a very rare disorder, with the most common form only occurring in approximately 1 in 200,000 births each year.
(2) A transplant from one individual to another.
(3) Milieu Intérieur (LabEx): Lluis Quintana-Murci — Darragh Duffy — Milieu Intérieur [LabEx] — Research — Institut Pasteur
(4) Soluble messengers that mediate communication between cells in the immune system.
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Many people have felt the sudden and uncontrollable urge to eat a certain food. These urges — known as cravings — are very common, mostly during pregnancy. During this time, the mother’s body undergoes a series of physiological and behavioural changes to create a favourable environment for the embryo’s development. However, the frequent consumption of tasty and high calorie foods — derived from the cravings — contributes to weight gain and obesity in pregnancy, which can have negative effects on the baby’s health.
“There are many myths and popular beliefs regarding these cravings, although the neuronal mechanisms that cause them are not widely known,” notes March Claret, lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Barcelona and head of the IDIBAPS Neuronal Control of Metabolism Group. Claret leads, together with the researcher Roberta Haddad-Tóvolli, a study published in the journal Nature Metabolism that provides new evidence on the alterations of the neuronal activity that drive cravings in an animal model.
Dopamine and compulsive eating behaviour
According to the results, during pregnancy, the brain of female mice undergoes changes in the functional connections of the brain reward circuits, as well as the taste and sensorimotor centers. Moreover, just like pregnant women, female mice are more sensitive to sweet food, and they develop binge-eating behaviours towards high calorie foods. “The alteration of these structures made us explore the mesolimbic pathway, one of the signal transmission pathways of dopaminergic neurons. Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter in motivational behaviours,” notes Claret, member of the Department of Medicine of the UB and the Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Diseases Networking Biomedical Research Centre (CIBERDEM).
The team observed the levels of dopamine — and the activity of its receptor, D2R — to increase in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in the reward circuit. “This finding suggests that the pregnancy induces a full reorganization of the mesolimbic neural circuits through the D2R neurons,” notes Haddad-Tóvolli. “These neuronal cells — and their alteration — would be responsible for the cravings, since food anxiety, typical during pregnancy, disappeared after blocking their activity.”
The team led by Claret and Haddad-Tóvolli showed that persistent cravings have consequences for the offspring. They affect the metabolism and development of neural circuits that regulate food intake, which leads to weight gain, anxiety and eating disorders. “These results are shocking, since many of the studies are focused on the analysis of how the mother’s permanent habits — such as obesity, malnutrition, or chronic stress — affect the health of the baby. However, this study indicates that short but recurrent behaviours, such as cravings, are enough to increase the psychological and metabolic vulnerability of the offspring,” concludes Claret.
The conclusions of the study could contribute to the improvement of nutritional guidelines for pregnant women in order to ensure a proper prenatal nutrition and prevent the development of diseases. Among the participants in the study were Guadalupe Soria and Emma Muñoz-Moreno (IDIBAPS), Analía Bortolozzi (IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS) and Emmanuel Valjent (INSERM and University of Montpelier).
This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), given to Marc Claret, and a grant from the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Actions program, given to the researcher Roberta Haddad-Tóvolli.
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Materials provided by University of Barcelona. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Using the nation’s largest COVID-19 data resource, a researcher at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center found the COVID-19 vaccine protected most cancer patients from getting COVID. However, patients with certain types of cancer have a higher and widely varied risk of breakthrough COVID infections after receiving the COVID vaccine.
Jing Su, PhD, assistant professor in the Indiana University School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics was the lead investigator for the study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He is also the core associate director of real-world data for the cancer center’s Biostatistics and Data Management Core.
Su led a team of 13 investigators from 10 research institutes across the country to analyze data from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) at the National Institutes of Health, including another researcher at IU School of Medicine, Xiaochun Li, PhD, a professor of biostatistics and health data sciences.
“This is one of the largest COVID real-world data resources in the world and the largest in the United States,” Su said. It includes more than 12.5 million patients and 4.5 million COVID patients. Researchers examined more than 64,000 cancer patients who were vaccinated against COVID-19.
“We systematically screened major cancer types and major treatment types, as well as other risk factors such as age, comorbidities, sex, race, geographic locations and others to qualitatively know the contribution of each risk factor and the specific rates of each cancer subgroup as well as the contribution of treatment categories for cancer patients,” Su said. “This type of analysis is only possible because we have a huge COVID cohort and control cohort.”
Among key findings were: The risk of breakthrough infection was reduced after the second vaccine dose for all cancers. Patients with hematologic cancers, or blood cancers, including leukemia, multiple myeloma and lymphoma, were at a higher risk of breakthrough COVID; those with blood cancers had a greater risk than solid cancers. The Moderna vaccine was more effective than the Pfizer vaccine for protecting patients with hematologic cancers, especially patients with multiple myeloma.These findings could help guide clinical care and treatment for cancer patients with COVID, Su said. Beyond the pandemic, this research could also help when developing immune-based cancer treatments. Some immunotherapies rely on a patient’s immune capacities, and these findings could help researchers predict which patient populations may respond best to specific treatments.
“In fact, the COVID pandemic provides a unique opportunity for us to screen the immune competence among all cancer patients at a national level,” Su said. “We could use this to imitate the differential immune capacities among cancer patients. This could guide us to better understand whether cancer patients will have good responses to cancer vaccines and if they are at a higher risk of infection of other viruses, such as the flu.”
“Risk and Outcome of Breakthrough COVID-19 Infections in Vaccinated Patients WithCancer: Real-World Evidence From the National COVID Cohort Collaborative” is the second Journal of Clinical Oncology paper published by Su and colleagues using the N3C data. The group is now working to answer additional questions about waning immunity and the effectiveness of booster shots.
“With the surging of new variants, especially the BA.2, we don’t know whether there will be another wave down the road,” Su said. “We are monitoring the situation to see what new variants will mean for cancer patients and how to best protect them through vaccination.”
This research was supported by the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute (P30 CA 082709) and the Indiana University Precision Health Initiative.
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Materials provided by Indiana University School of Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers have developed a new endoscope that combines ultrasound with optical coherence tomography (OCT) to assess structural features of the lining of the uterus, called the endometrium, in unprecedented detail. The new probe could one day help doctors diagnose infertility problems that are related to endometrial receptivity with greater accuracy than current imaging technologies while reducing the need for invasive biopsies.
“This tool combines the two techniques of ultrasound and OCT, allowing it to obtain more information and provide a more accurate assessment of endometrial status than traditional vaginal ultrasound,” said research team leader Xiaojing Gong from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It has the potential to be used for basic endometrial research and to further advance clinical assessment of endometrial receptivity and other endometrial-related diseases.”
In the Optica Publishing Group journal Biomedical Optics Express, the researchers report the ability for their dual-mode endoscope to differentiate between healthy and injured endometrial tissue in rabbit models based on both surface features and depth information. It is the first in vivo demonstration of intrauterine endoscopic imaging in small animals, with a probe measuring just 1.2 mm across.
The endometrium plays a critical role in the ability for a blastocyst to implant in a uterus and grow into a healthy fetus. Failure to implant is recognized as a key bottleneck in the reproductive process, with impaired endometrial receptivity accounting for about two-thirds of implantation failures.
By providing detailed structural information about the endometrium, the probe could offer a less invasive way to determine if endometrial problems are causing infertility, which affects about 10-20% of women worldwide, as well as help to diagnose other uterine health problems.
“The system can obtain the thickness information of the endometrium, the echo pattern of the endometrium and information about damage to the endometrial surface, which play an important role in the evaluation of endometrial receptivity,” said Gong. “It also has the potential to detect diseases in the uterus, such as endometrial cancer and uterine fibroids.”
Creating a better probe

The lethargy that many Alzheimer’s patients experience is caused not by a lack of sleep, but rather by the degeneration of a type of neuron that keeps us awake, according to a study that also confirms the tau protein is behind that neurodegeneration.
The study’s findings contradict the common notion that Alzheimer’s patients sleep during the day to make up for a bad night of sleep and point toward potential therapies to help these patients feel more awake.
The data came from study participants who were patients at UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center and volunteered to have their sleep monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) and donate their brains after they died.
Being able to compare sleep data with microscopic views of their post-mortem brain tissue was the key to answering a question that scientists have been pondering for years.
“We were able to prove what our previous research had been pointing to — that in Alzheimer’s patients who need to nap all the time, the disease has damaged the neurons that keep them awake,” said Grinberg, a neuropathologist who, along with psychiatrist Thomas Neylan, MD, is a senior author on the study, which appears in the April 4, 2022 issue of JAMA Neurology.
“It’s not that these patients are tired during the day because they didn’t sleep at night,” noted Grinberg. “It’s that the system in their brain that would keep them awake is gone.”
The opposite phenomenon occurs in patients with other neurodegenerative conditions, such as progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), who were also included in the study. Those patients have damage to the neurons that make them feel tired, so they are unable to sleep and become sleep deprived.