Publisher Health

One in three new mothers during early COVID-19 screened positive for postpartum depression — nearly triple pre-pandemic levels — and 1 in 5 had major depressive symptoms, say University of Michigan researchers.
New research from the U-M School of Nursing found that depression in new mothers rose considerably during the pandemic. Before COVID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 1 in 8 women experienced postpartum depression, and about 5-7% experienced major depressive symptoms, said lead author Clayton Shuman, U-M assistant professor of nursing.
The study, “Postpartum depression and associated risk factors during the COVID-19 pandemic” appears in BMC Research Notes. It comes from a larger study called “COVID-19 MAMAS (Maternal Attachment, Mood, Ability, and Support),” which gave rise to several papers about pregnancy and postpartum experiences during COVID.
For this paper, researchers collected survey data between February and July 2020 from 670 U.S. postpartum patients who completed the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale online and provided demographic information.
Their research found that: Moms who fed infants formula had 92% greater odds of screening positive for postpartum depression and were 73% more likely to screen positive for major depressive symptoms, compared to those who breastfed or bottle-fed with their own human milk. Moms with infants in neonatal intensive care units had 74% greater odds of screening positive, and each one-week increase in weeks postpartum increased the odds of screening positive by 4%. Moms worried about contracting COVID-19 had 71% greater odds of screening positive for postpartum depression.Shuman says he was surprised by how many women screened positive for depression and major depression.
“We also found that almost 1 in 5 participants who screened positive for postpartum depression reported having thoughts of harming themselves. This is very concerning given that prior to the pandemic, Dr. Lindsay Admon and colleagues from U-M found the rate of suicidality among prenatal and postpartum patients is on the rise in the U.S.”
There are several possible reasons for the breastfeeding finding, Shuman said.
Previous research found that breastfeeding support resources such as lactation consults were limited during early COVID and may have increased distress or caused people to switch to formula. Stress from supply chain problems that resulted in formula shortages could have also contributed to depression. Finally, studies suggest that breastfeeding may help to protect postpartum patients from postpartum depression, helping to minimize the severity of depressive symptoms and improving recovery time.
This increase highlights the need to identify depressive symptoms in postpartum patients, but screening is only a first step, Shuman said.
“Treatment is pivotal to recovery,” he said. “Resources and education about postpartum depression must be better disseminated and implemented. These resources should be shared with the general public to reduce stigma, and shared with those who provide social and emotional support to postpartum patients, such as partners and family members.
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Five ways to soothe a mind overstimulated by anxiety, stress and streams of information.Coronavirus cases are receding across the United States, and face masks are coming off. Little green shoots are finally poking through the earth, signaling the arrival of warmer weather. The pandemic has not been declared over, but after living in survival mode for the last two years, some would say we are emerging into a “new normal.” Though that doesn’t mean our minds are at ease.Many have endured illness, economic upheaval, the climate crisis, grief and racial inequities. Add to that inflation, supply chain issues and the ripple effects of Russia’s war with Ukraine — three of the biggest sources of stress among people in the United States right now, according to a recent poll for the American Psychological Association.Perhaps, experts say, the arrival of spring can serve as a natural point to take stock of our mental well-being and reconnect with the things that bring us purpose and joy, offering our brains a respite when possible.“It really is — for a number of reasons — a perfect time for folks to turn their attention to taking an inventory. Where do I find myself? What have I been through?” said Paul Napper, a psychology consultant to business leaders and co-author of “The Power of Agency: The 7 Principles to Conquer Obstacles, Make Effective Decisions, and Create a Life on Your Own Terms.”Creating a clear, more focused mind starts by making decisions about how we spend our time every day. When those choices are in line with our values, interests and passions, this is referred to as personal agency.“You do always have a choice,” Dr. Napper said. “It may not be a great choice,” he added, but examining your options helps you to adapt to your circumstances.Here are five ways to declutter your mind as we enter a new season.Practice mindfulness“Being a human, particularly right now, is stressful,” said Nkechi Njaka, a meditation guide in San Francisco with a background in neuroscience. “And when we think of how degenerative stress is, and how harmful to the body, we need something that can help mitigate it.”Mindfulness meditation, a practice that helps you remember to return to the present when you become distracted, has been shown to reduce the stress of daily life.When people notice that their mind is racing or they start to become anxious, they are typically thinking about something in the past or in the future.To refocus on the here and now, you can start by noticing the sensations in the body, Ms. Njaka said. “Can we feel the ground below us? The heat of the sun?” It is normal for the mind to wander. If this happens, gently return your awareness to your breathing and come back to the present.If you are compassionate with yourself and approach the practice with curiosity, openness and forgiveness, you will be more likely to try it again, she added.Take advantage of the transitional moments of the day to practice mindfulness — when you wake up, right before or after a meal or when you change your physical location, for example — so that you can start to form a routine.Try the Bullet Journal methodStudies have found that jotting down thoughts in a journal can improve well-being.One method that has gained popularity in recent years is a practice created by the digital designer Ryder Carroll and outlined in his best-selling book, “The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future.”The Bullet Journal is an organizational system but also an exercise in mindfulness — one that requires you to continually re-evaluate how you are investing your time and energy and then decide whether those things are worth it.Otherwise, Mr. Carroll said, “you can be very productive working on the wrong things.”Mr. Carroll, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, initially started journaling to help him stay focused and succeed in his career, but then he began exploring how he felt about the tasks he was accomplishing. “Did it give me energy? Did it take it away?” he asked himself.Through journaling, he discovered a pattern: The experiences that gave him a sense of purpose or pride all involved helping others and performing acts of service.“If you don’t know what you want, you will never be satisfied with anything you have,” he added.Reduce information overloadWe have all been inundated by a relentless news cycle, a fire hose of information coming at us in the form of breaking news notifications, social media posts and email newsletters (among other sources) that can leave us feeling anxious, angry or even helpless.“Now is the time to completely overhaul your news consumption,” said Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.”Choose just one or two reliable sources and read them at a specific time each day, he advised. For example, you can listen to a news roundup podcast while commuting to work or read a newspaper at breakfast, Dr. Newport said.Dr. Newport, who is 39 and has managed to avoid social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok for his entire adult life, also recommends taking a 30-day break from the technologies in your life that are optional.In his book, he described what happened when 1,600 people gave it a try. Those who lasted the full 30 days were “cheerily gung-ho and positively aggressive about trying to fill in the time,” he said.So instead of reflexively watching TikTok or scrolling through Instagram during your free time, think about what you would be doing if you weren’t on either of those platforms: Reading a novel? Taking a restorative walk in nature? Relaxing and listening to music?Set aside time for those activities.Declutter your physical spaceDuring the pandemic, and especially during lockdown, many people finally began to clear the junk out of their homes, a phenomenon The Washington Post referred to as the “great decluttering.” If you haven’t tackled your pile of clutter, now might be a good time to do it.“Messy spaces tend to prevent clear cognitive thinking,” said Catherine Roster, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico who has researched how cluttered homes affect people. “It has a distorting effect that can bleed into other aspects of a person’s life — not only their emotions but their productivity.”Hiring a professional organizer to help sort through the mess is not within everyone’s budget, so Dr. Roster suggested relying on a buddy — ideally someone who is also decluttering their home. Together the two of you can serve as a sounding board for each other to make decisions about what to keep and stay on schedule. Listening to music while you sort and organize can also help motivate you, she added.Reconnect with the people you love“What I’m seeing with my patients is that many seem to be emotionally cluttered,” said Barbara Greenberg, a clinical psychologist in Fairfield County, Conn.Information overload coupled with either social isolation or not getting your needs met socially or emotionally “is a really bad brew,” she added.If there are people you care about whom you have lost touch with during the pandemic, don’t be shy about getting back in touch, she urged.“We need the support and levity of people who make us feel good,” Dr. Greenberg said.If it has been a while, it might feel awkward at first to re-establish contact. But just be honest, Dr. Greenberg advised. For example, you might say: “We lost touch during the pandemic, but now things are calming down and I would really love to see you. Not seeing you has been one of the things I’ve missed.”It might even inspire a “chain of positivity” where the person you contacted feels inspired to do the same with others.“Truly, everybody wants to get that call,” she said.

Around 500,000 people in the UK live with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), a life-long, chronic condition characterised by sporadic bouts of gut inflammation causing debilitating symptoms. Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis — the latter affecting around 1 in 400 people — are the two most common types of IBD. Current treatments are ineffective and seriously impact the quality of life of the patients and those of their families.
Scientists at the Earlham Institute, Quadram Institute and University of East Anglia on the Norwich Research Park, have developed a new computational biology method to better understand IBD for targeted clinical treatments. By analysing specific differences in gut cell types, the study deciphers cellular crosstalk to identify how beneficial bacteria communicate with our immune system to treat IBD and reduce gut inflammation.
The human gut harbours a community of microbes, known collectively as the microbiome, which is crucial to maintaining good health. A disrupted microbiome can cause gut-related conditions including IBD, an immune-linked inflammatory disease that causes abdominal pain, diarrhea and extreme fatigue.
People with IBD tend to have reduced diversity or a change in the balance in their gut microbiome, especially of Bacteroides and Firmicutes bacteria. However, we still don’t know how exactly this translates to the triggering and progression of IBD. By understanding how these bacteria interact with the gut lining, and the immune system, and how this differs in IBD, we can better understand the causes and start developing targeted, effective treatments.
But to decipher this crosstalk across the different kingdoms of life, you need to understand how bacteria communicate, and then how human cells react to that information. This quest united microbiologist and immunologist Professor Simon Carding from the Quadram Institute and UEA, with Dr Tamás Korcsmáros, a systems biologist whose expertise lies in cellular signalling networks from the Earlham and the Quadram Institutes.
Professor Carding and his team have been investigating Bacterial Extracellular Vesicles (BEVs), which are tiny packages created by bacteria that they fill with various molecules and release from the cell. They can cross the gut lining, reaching cells of the immune system where they are recognised by receptors. The contents of the BEVs are molecular signals that then trigger the immune cells to react, with that signal potentially cascading into widespread effects.

The p53 protein protects our cells from cancer and is an interesting target for cancer treatments. The problem is, however, that it breaks down rapidly in the cell. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now found an unusual way of stabilising the protein and making it more potent. By adding a spider silk protein to p53, they show that it is possible to create a protein that is more stable and capable of killing cancer cells. The study is published in the journal Structure.
P53 plays a key role in the body’s defence against cancer, in part by discovering and preventing genetic mutations that can lead to cancer. If a cell is lacking functional p53, it quickly becomes a cancer cell that starts to divide uncontrollably. Researchers around the world are therefore trying to develop cancer treatments that in some way target p53.
“The problem is that cells only make small amounts of p53 and then quickly break it down as it is a very large and disordered protein,” says the study’s last author Michael Landreh, researcher at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet. “We’ve been inspired by how nature creates stable proteins and have used spider silk protein to stabilise p53. Spider silk consists of long chains of highly stable proteins, and is one of nature’s strongest polymers.”
In a collaborative project with, amongst others, Jan Johansson and Anna Rising at KI’s Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, who use spider silk in their research, the researchers attached a small section of a synthetic spider silk protein onto the human p53 protein. When they then introduced it into cells, they found that the cells started to produce it in large quantities. The new protein also proved to be more stable than ordinary p53 and capable of killing cancer cells. Using electron microscopy, computer simulations, and mass spectrometry, they were able to show that the likely reason for this was the way the spider silk part managed to give structure to p53’s disordered sections.
The researchers now plan to study the protein’s structure in detail and how its different parts interact to prevent cancer. They also hope to find out how the cells are affected by the new potent p53 protein and how well they tolerate its spider-silk component.
“Creating a more stable variant of p53 in cells is a promising approach to cancer therapy, and now we have a tool for this that’s worth exploring,” says co-author and senior professor Sir David Lane at Karolinska Institutet. “We eventually hope to develop an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, but before we do so we need to know how the protein is handled in the cells and if large amounts of it can be toxic.”
Sir David Lane was one of the discoverers of the p53 protein in the late 1970s. P53 has been called the guardian of the genome since it can stop cells with DNA damage turning into cancer cells. Mutations of the p53 gene are found in roughly half of all cancer tumours, which makes it the most common genetic change in cancer.
The study was a collaboration between researchers at Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University in Sweden and A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) in Singapore. It was supported by grants from several bodies, including the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, Karolinska Institutet, the Swedish Cancer Society, the Swedish Research Council, Vinnova, the Olle Engkvist Foundation, the Swedish Society for Medical Research (SSMF), Formas and the Åke Wiberg Foundation. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
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New research from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences has revealed that the link between ‘bad’ cholesterol (LDL-C) and poor health outcomes, such as heart attack and stroke, may not be as strong as previously thought.
Published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the research questions the efficacy of statins when prescribed with the aim of lowering LDL-C and therefore reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Previous research has suggested that using statins to lower LDL-C positively affects health outcomes, and this is reflected in the various iterations of expert guidelines for the prevention of CVD. Statins are now commonly prescribed by doctors, with one third of Irish adults over the age of 50 taking statins, according to previous research.
The new findings contradict this theory, finding that this relationship was not as strong as previously thought. Instead, the research demonstrates that lowering LDL-C using statins had an inconsistent and inconclusive impact on CVD outcomes such as myocardial infarction (MI), stoke, and all-cause mortality.
In addition, it indicates that the overall benefit of taking statins may be small and will vary depending on an individual’s personal risk factors.
The lead author on the paper is Dr Paula Byrne from the HRB Centre for Primary Care Research based in RCSI’s Department of General Practice. Commenting on the findings, Dr Byrne said: “The message has long been that lowering your cholesterol will reduce your risk of heart disease, and that statins help to achieve this. However, our research indicates that, in reality, the benefits of taking statins are varied and can be quite modest.”
The researchers go on to suggest that this updated information should be communicated to patients through informed clinical decision-making and updated clinical guidelines and policy.
This important discovery was a collaboration with Professor Susan M Smith, also of RCSI and with researchers from the University of New Mexico, USA, (Dr Robert DuBroff), the Institute for Scientific Freedom in Denmark (Dr Maryanne Demasi), Bond University in Australia (Dr Mark Jones) and independent researcher Dr Kirsty O’Brien.
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A new study from Keck Medicine of USC finds that the incidence rate of metastatic prostate cancer has significantly increased for men 45 and older and coincides with recommendations against routine prostate cancer screenings.
“This study is the first to document a continued rise in metastatic prostate cancer using the most up-to-date population dataset,” said Mihir M. Desai, MD, MPH, a urologist with Keck Medicine and co-lead author of the study. “The discovery has important ramifications for men because prostate cancer, when caught early, typically through a screening, is very treatable and often curable.”
Desai is also a professor of clinical urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and an associate member of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of Keck Medicine.
Routine prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screenings for prostate cancer began in the United States almost three decades ago. PSA screenings measure the amount of PSA in the blood, and elevated levels can indicate cancer.
The introduction of screenings resulted in drops in both metastatic prostate cancer and prostate cancer deaths. However, the benefit of routine screenings was counterbalanced by risks of overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk prostate cancer.
In 2008, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a leading national organization in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine, recommended against routine PSA screening for men older than 75. This was followed by a recommendation against screening for all men in 2012.

Irradiation with fast protons is a more effective and less invasive cancer treatment than X-rays. However, modern proton therapy requires large particle accelerators, which has experts investigating alternative accelerator concepts, such as laser systems to accelerate protons. Such systems are deployed in preclinical studies to pave the way for optimal radiation therapy. A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now successfully tested irradiation with laser protons on animals for the first time, as the group reports in the journal Nature Physics.
Radiation therapy is one of the main cancer treatment methods. It usually leverages strong, focused X-ray light. Protons — the nuclei of hydrogen atoms — accelerated to high energies and bundled into small, precisely targetable bunches are an alternative. They can penetrate deep into the tissue where they deposit most of their energy in the tumor, destroying the cancer while leaving the surrounding tissue largely intact. This makes the method both more effective and less invasive than X-ray therapy. “The method is particularly suitable for irradiating tumors at the base of the skull, in the brain, and in the central nervous system,” explains HZDR researcher Dr. Elke Beyreuther. “It is also used in pediatric cancer patients to reduce possible long-term effects.”
However, the method is significantly more complex than X-ray therapy as it requires elaborate accelerator facilities to generate the fast protons and transport them to the patient. This is why there are only a few proton therapy centers in Germany, including one at Dresden University Hospital. Currently, experts are working to steadily improve the method and adapt it to patients. Laser-based proton accelerators could make a decisive contribution here.
Customized laser flashes
“The approach is based on a high-power laser to generate strong and extremely short light pulses, which are fired at a thin plastic or metal foil,” explains HZDR physicist Dr. Florian Kroll. The intensity of these flashes knocks swathes of electrons out of the foil, creating a strong electric field that can bundle protons into pulses and accelerate them to high energies. Fascinatingly, the scale of this process is miniscule: The acceleration path is merely a few micrometers long.
“We have been working on the project for 15 years, but so far, the protons hadn’t picked up enough energy for irradiation,” Beyreuther reports. “Also, the pulse intensity was too variable, so we couldn’t make sure we were delivering the right dose.” But over the past few years, scientists finally achieved crucial improvements, in particular thanks to a better understanding of the interaction between the laser flashes and the foil. “Above all, the precise shape of the laser flashes is particularly important,” Kroll explains. “We can now tailor them to create proton pulses that have sufficient energy and are also stable enough.”
New research requirements
Finally, the parameters had been optimized to the point that the HZDR team was able to launch a crucial series of experiments: the first-ever, controlled irradiation of tumors in mice with laser-accelerated protons. The experiments were carried out in cooperation with experts from Dresden University Hospital at the OncoRay — National Center for Radiation Research in Oncology and benchmarked with comparative experiments at the conventional proton therapy facility. “We found that our laser-driven proton source can generate biologically valuable data,” Kroll reports. “This sets the stage for further studies that will allow us to test and optimize our method.”
Another special feature of laser-accelerated proton pulses is their enormous intensity. While in conventional proton therapy, the radiation dose is administered in a span of a few minutes, the laser-based process could occur within a millionth of a second. “There are indications that such a rapid dose administration helps spare the healthy surrounding tissue even better than before,” explains Elke Beyreuther. “We want to follow up on these indications with our experimental setup and conduct preclinical studies to investigate when and how this rapid irradiation method should be used to gain an advantage in cancer therapy.”
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New research has begun to unravel the mystery of why a particular form of leukaemia in infants has defied efforts to improve outcomes, despite significant improvements in treating older children. Scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Newcastle University and their collaborators found subtle differences in the cell type that causes B acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL) that may help to explain why some cases are more severe than others.
The study, published today (14 March 2022) in Nature Medicine, focused on the majority of infant B-ALL cases caused by changes to the KMT2A gene. The findings provide a number of promising drug targets, raising hopes that effective treatments for infant B-ALL may be developed in the future.
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) can take various forms, depending on the cell type involved. These cancers occur when cells malfunction as they develop from haematopoietic stem cells to mature blood cells. In the case of B-ALL, disease arises from a type of immune cell called B lymphocytes, more commonly known as B cells.
B-ALL in children was once a universally fatal disease that is now curable in the majority of cases1. An exception is B-ALL in children below one year of age, where treatment is successful in less than 50 per cent of cases, with no significant improvement in the last two decades. Treatments that are proven in tackling other forms of leukaemia, such as bone marrow transplants, have proved ineffective against infant B-ALL. It is currently treated with strong chemotherapy, which can be hard for the patient to endure even if they are cured.
In this paper, researchers set out to study KMT2A-rearranged infant B-ALL by comparing cancer cells to normal human blood cells. Gene expression data from 1,665 childhood leukaemia cases was referenced against single-cell mRNA data from around 60,000 normal fetal bone marrow cells2.
Analysis found that infant B-ALL exhibited distinct cellular signals with a notable contribution from early lymphocyte precursors (ELPs)3, an immature immune cell type that normally develops into B cells.
Dr Laura Jardine, a first author of the study from Newcastle University, said: “Leukaemias are usually classified by the cell type involved, and in the case of B acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL) we talk about B cell progenitors. But our analysis of this disease has shown that this is actually an early lymphocyte precursor leukaemia.”
As well as being able to distinguish ELP cells from other types of B cell, the researchers found that the closer an ELP cell was to becoming a mature B cell, the better the outcome for the patient.
Dr Jack Bartram, a senior author of the study from Great Ormond Street Hospital, said: “As part of this study, we think that we have unpicked why B acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL) is more responsive to treatment in some children, but why it’s not so successful for infants. Cancers with more ‘mature’ early lymphocyte precursors (ELPs) have characteristics that seem to respond better to treatment. These more mature cells are more common in B-ALL in older children but sadly not for our younger patients, meaning the treatment is less effective. The challenge now is to develop our understanding and confirm these suspicions so that we can improve treatments for all patients.”
To further investigate the molecular landscape of KMT2A-rearranged infant B-ALL, researchers compared gene expression profiles of the cancer to that of normal ELP cells. Unlike normal ELP cells, those involved in cancer had molecular features of different cell types, suggesting a malfunction in the normal process of differentiation. Multiple biological pathways and markers were identified in these hybrid ELP cells that could make promising targets for new therapies.
Dr Sam Behjati, a senior author of the study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “Though it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about why B acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL) has much poorer outcomes in infants than in older children, this study offers compelling evidence that the maturity of the cells involved is a key factor. As well as generating new drug targets, these data will allow us to observe how the ‘cell type’ of certain cancers corresponds to patient outcomes, allowing us to better assess disease severity and determine the best course of treatment.”

Women who are obese and struggling to become pregnant are often advised to lose weight, but a new study finds no fertility benefits from weight loss.
A randomized study of 379 women with obesity and unexplained infertility found that intensive lifestyle changes that shed pounds led to no better chances of pregnancy and healthy births than simply increasing physical activity without weight loss.
“We have known for decades that obese women often have difficulty getting pregnant,” said researcher Daniel J. Haisenleder, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Center for Research in Reproduction. “For this reason, many physicians advise weight loss prior to conception. However, there are few studies that have addressed the issue comparing a healthy lifestyle — i.e., exercise — vs. exercise plus weight loss.”
Obesity and Pregnancy
The FIT-PLESE study, conducted at nine academic medical centers across the country, divided participants into two groups: Half the women dieted intensely using meal replacements, medications and increased physical activity. The other half simply increased their physical activity without trying to lose weight. After completing the programs, both groups received three rounds of standard infertility treatments.
Women in the weight-loss program ended up losing, on average, 7% of their body weight, while participants in the exercise-only group typically maintained their weights. But, in the end, there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of the frequency of healthy births. In total, 23 of the 188 women who completed the 16-week intensive weight-loss program ended up giving birth; among the 191 who completed the exercise-only program, 29 gave birth.
The intensive dieting program did offer health benefits for the women who completed it, however. In addition to dropping pounds, they saw a major decrease in metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that increase the risk for serious health problems such as diabetes, stroke and heart disease.
Based on their findings, Haisenleder and his collaborators conclude that the weight-loss program did not make women more fertile or improve birth outcomes compared with simply exercising. They note the health benefits of weight loss may not translate into better odds of getting pregnant.
“Weight loss improved metabolic health in these subjects. Unfortunately the changes seen did not improve fertility,” Haisenleder said. “Infertility within this population remains an important health issue, and will require further studies to address the problem in the future.”
Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, grants U10 HD38992, U10 HD077680, U10 HD39005, U10 HD077844, U10HD055925, U10 HD27049, U54-HD29834 and R24-HD102061. The project also was supported by the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, grants UL1 TR002014 and UL1 TR001863. Nutrisystem provided discounted coupons, and Fitbit provided discounted Fitbits for activity monitoring.
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Researchers working in one of the world’s most biodiverse and threatened ecosystems have discovered a new plant species, Castela senticosa, which they recommend be designated as endangered. The plant, which grows as a small bush sheathed in an imposing layer of spines, was found during a survey to catalog the flora of the Martín García mountain range in the Dominican Republic.
“We were collecting everything we came across with the goal of having a complete species list for the entire mountain range,” said lead author Lucas Majure, an assistant curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and curator of the University of Florida Herbarium.
Hispaniola’s mountains support large swaths of intact tropical dry forests, highly diverse ecosystems that — like the rainforests they border — are globally imperiled due to the combined effects of deforestation, overharvesting and climate change. But although they face the same threats, the destruction of a tropical dry forest might mean the loss of considerably more species. That’s because rainforests are often found in lowland basins, where conditions like rainfall, temperature and soil type are similar over large areas. While species diversity is high, many rainforest plants can have distributions that span hundreds of miles.
Dry forests can be just as diverse, but their plants tend to be geographically restricted; up to 73% of plant species of dry forests in the American tropics are endemic to a particular region. Plants growing on Caribbean islands, which have been separated from continental landmasses for more than 50 million years, have an extra layer of isolation built in. As a result, much of the Caribbean flora can be found nowhere else on Earth.
“The overall diversity is amazing,” Majure said. “If you go across Hispaniola, Cuba and Jamaica, there are quite a few plant groups that make these forests incredible places to work.”
Along the slopes of the Sierra Martín García alone, Majure and other researchers from the U.S. and Dominican Republic identified more than 700 plant species during their survey. But when Majure and Teodoro Clase of the Dominican Republic’s National Botanical Garden stumbled across a non-descript shrub halfway up the mountain, both botanists were stumped. The plant was largely a tangle of thorns, with few leaves and no flowers or fruits, which left little in the way of identifying characteristics. They carefully collected and pressed one of the branches, which Majure took with him back to the Florida Museum for further study.