Publisher Health

People with Parkinson’s Disease who eat more flavonoids — compounds found in richly colored foods like berries, cocoa and red wine — may have a lower mortality risk than those who don’t, according to a new study.
Specifically, the researchers found that when people who had already been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) ate more flavonoids, they had a lower chance of dying during the 34-year study period than those who did not consume as many flavonoids.
Additionally, they found that eating more flavonoids before being diagnosed with PD was associated with a lower risk of dying in men, but not in women.
“Adding a few servings of flavonoid-rich foods to their diets a week could potentially be an easy way for people with PD to help improve their life expectancy,” said Xinyuan Zhang, Ph.D. candidate in nutritional sciences at Penn State. “Greater consumption of berries and red wine, which are rich in the flavonoid anthocyanins, was particularly associated with lower mortality.”
Zhang noted that consumption of wine should not exceed the amount outlined in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is one drink per day for women and two for men.
The study was published today (Jan. 26) in the journal Neurology.
According to the Parkinson’s Foundation, more than 60,000 people are diagnosed with PD each year, and more than 10 million people worldwide are living with the disease. The disease is caused by the brain not making enough dopamine and leads to tremors, stiffness and problems with balance.

The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 diverged from previous SARS-CoV-2 variants as a result of adaptive evolution, in which beneficial mutations are passed on to future generations through natural selection, rather than through recombination between previous variants, according to a large international team of researchers. The study, which published recently in Nature, is the first to describe the genomic profile of Omicron and explore the origins of the variant.
“We have seen SARS-CoV-2 generate three major variants — Alpha, Delta and Omicron — in about 16 months, which is very surprising because other viruses do not make such repeated big evolutionary leaps,” said Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology, Penn State, who led the recombination analysis for this global collaboration. “The latest variant — Omicron — is extraordinary because of the even bigger jump it made in the evolution of its spike protein.”
Boni noted that compared to previous variants, Omicron’s spike protein has more than 30 mutations, many of which are known to influence host antibody neutralization.
“Given that Omicron made such a big leap forward evolutionarily speaking, we wanted to investigate why and how this may have happened,” he said.
To do that, the team — which was led by the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa — analyzed all 686 Omicron sequences that were available by Dec. 7, 2021. They found that Omicron falls within the B.1.1 lineage, which also includes the Alpha variant. Interestingly, the team found that Omicron is genetically distinct from Alpha, as well as any other known variants of interest.
“What this means is that although Omicron belongs to the same lineage as the Alpha variant, it has changed to such a great extent that it is largely unrecognizable as a cousin or nephew of the Alpha variant,” said Boni. “When the Omicron genome was first sequenced, it became clear that this virus had the potential to be phenotypically very different from previous SARS-CoV-2 variants that we were familiar with.”
To determine when the Omicron variant first emerged, the team used a technique, called time-calibrated Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. They estimated that the date when the most recent common ancestor of all Omicrons existed was early October 2021.

Resuming non-contact physical activity 72 hours after a concussion is safe, and may also reduce symptoms and the risk of delayed recovery, suggests the first and largest real-world, randomized clinical trial on the topic to be conducted with children and youth aged 10 to 18.
Led by researchers at the CHEO Research Institute, the multi-site study was published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the world’s leading journal in the field. Previous randomized clinical trials have been smaller in nature, conducted in the lab or only used a sport-related population.
“The findings of this study should give every health-care professional who manages kids with concussions the confidence to prescribe early and controlled return to physical activity, even if they have symptoms,” said Andrée-Anne Ledoux, the study’s corresponding author and a scientist at the CHEO Research Institute, a pediatric health-care and research centre in Ottawa, Canada.
“The study confirms that early return to physical activity is safe, can reduce concussion symptoms and reduces the rate of delayed recovery,” added Ledoux, who is also an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa. “Gone are the days of resting in a dark room.”
Called PedCARE, the clinical trial divided 456 participants into two groups. One group rested until symptom resolution after their concussion and the second group started to re-introduce physical activity 72 hours after the concussion, according to a set protocol. They regularly answered a standard survey about their symptoms and their activity levels were recorded using an accelerometer.
At two weeks, symptoms were comparable between both groups, which means that early physical activity was not harmful. When examining results of everyone who stayed within the prescribed level of activity, those who re-introduced physical activity early showed improved symptoms and a reduced rate of delayed recovery, when compared to those who rested until they were symptom free.
The study sets out guidelines for gradually introducing physical activity back into the daily routine of a child or youth. For example, at 72 hours after the injury, the youth should start walking for 15 minutes at a moderate level. If symptoms are tolerable the youth should increase their physical activity intensity the next day, for example, light jogging. If symptoms are not tolerable while doing physical activity or after physical activity, the next day the child or youth should return to the last well-tolerated physical activity intensity and re-attempt progression after 24 hours. They must be cleared by their primary care provider before returning to contact sports.
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Researchers including a postdoc at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created a gear-shaped photonic crystal microring that increases the strength of light-matter interactions without sacrificing optical quality. The result is an on-chip microresonator with an optical quality factor 50 times better than the previous record in slow light devices that could improve microresonators used in a range of photonics applications, including sensing and metrology, nonlinear optics and cavity quantum electrodynamics.
Optical microresonators are structures that enhance light-matter interactions through a combination of long temporal confinement (i.e., high quality factor) and strong spatial confinement of an electromagnetic wave. The device the authors have developed in many ways integrates the best attributes of two types of optical microresonators — a photonic crystal and a whispering gallery mode resonator — in one device. While combining the two has been attempted in the past, previous microring devices that have succeeded in slowing light to increase interactions (a consequence of the photonic crystal) have had to sacrifice quality factor. In this new “microgear” photonic crystal ring, researchers observed modes with group velocity slowed down by 10 times relative to conventional microring modes without any degradation in quality factor.
The study, led by first author Xiyuan Lu and principal investigator Kartik Srinivasan, both from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, appears in the January 2022 issue of Nature Photonics. UMass Amherst’s Andrew McClung, a postdoc in the photonics lab of Amir Arbabi and a former NIST colleague of Lu, provided modeling and computer simulations for the work.
“We show that the optical modes in these structures can show a much lower group velocity than the modes in standard integrated photonic waveguides (‘slow-light’) while maintaining low loss (high quality factor), and that we can further localize these modes spatially by introducing a ‘defect’ region within the resonator,” Srinivasan says. “Due to its unique combination of features, the overall system is appealing for many applications of microresonators, which in general are used to enhance light-matter interactions in a wide range of contexts, from single-photon sources to single-photon gates to nonlinear optics.”
“What differentiates this work,” McClung says, “is the geometry of their microring.”
“In the past, people have put holes in the center of these rings to introduce the photonic crystal,” he says. “Instead of punching a hole, we created little bumps along the inside of the ring. This introduces the modulation you need and it perturbs the mode less aggressively.”
In the defect version of the device, instead of the bumps being perfectly periodic along the circumference of the ring, some number of bumps have a slightly different amplitude, forming a way to localize light within just a small fraction of the ring.
“Devices like ours can be used to enhance light-matter interaction, and we are currently working on using our microgear photonic crystal ring to increase the strength of interaction between light and a vapor of rubidium atoms for applications in quantum networking,” added Lu.
This research is supported by the DARPA Science of Atomic Vapors for New Technologies (SAVaNT) and NIST on a chip programs.
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Blocking a key protein found in Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes — the principal vector for malaria transmission to humans in Africa — could thwart infection with malaria parasites and thus prevent them from transmitting the parasites to humans, according to a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In a lab experiment, the researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to delete the gene for a protein called CTL4 from Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes. This deletion made the mosquitoes highly resistant to the malaria parasite. The researchers found that disrupting the CTL4 protein brought a 64 percent decrease in infection prevalence. The researchers believe that targeting the CTL4 protein could be the basis for new strategies to control malaria in regions where it is still endemic.
The findings are published online January 26 in PLoS Biology.
“Compared to most other gene-manipulation or genetic engineering strategies that have been studied, these results are really potent — and promising,” says study senior author George Dimopoulos, PhD, professor in the Bloomberg School’s W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. “Doing this with a mosquito population in the wild might be all you need to eliminate malaria in that region.”
Malaria remains one of the world’s major diseases. In 2020, it caused an estimated 241 million cases and 627,000 deaths, mostly among children age five and under, according to the World Health Organization. Malaria control relies on a mix of preventive measures and treatments, including mosquito nets, insecticides, antimalarial drugs and, as of last year, vaccination. Scientists have also focused on the mosquito-to-human transmission chain, researching ways to make mosquitoes more resistant to malaria parasites.
Prior studies have identified CTL4, a protein with multiple, partly unknown functions in Anopheles mosquitoes, as a possible target for mosquito alteration. Reducing the level of CTL4, using an older technique called RNA-interference (RNAi), strongly protects Anopheles from infection with a parasite called Plasmodium berghei, which causes a malaria-like disease in rodents and is commonly used to model human malaria.

George Washington University researchers have developed a blood test that quickly detects if someone has COVID-19 and predicts how severely the immune system will react to the infection, according to a new study coming out On Janurary 26 in PLOS One. The findings could one day lead to a powerful tool to help doctors determine the best treatment plan for people with COVID-19.
Currently, there is no good way to predict how the immune system will respond to the virus that causes COVID-19 or other disease-causing microbes. The immune response could range from mild symptoms, all the way to critically severe symptoms, which can lead to the intensive care unit or even death.
To understand more about the variation in symptoms and prognosis, the GW researchers sequenced whole blood RNA from COVID-19 patients whose symptoms ranged from asymptomatic to severe. They found visible changes in the cells of people with COVID-19. Their analysis also revealed that COVID-19 severity was associated with an increase in neutrophil activity and a decrease in T-cell activity. Neutrophils and T-cells, both a type of white blood cell, are part of the body’s immune system and help fight off infections. In other words, the body’s immune system response, as measured by neutrophil activity, signals that there’s an infection whether caused by a known, novel, or variant pathogen.
“This test could prove very valuable during the pandemic, especially as variants continue to spread and doctors need to be confident in identifying the problem and providing effective treatment,” said Timothy McCaffrey, professor of medicine at GW and lead researcher on the project. “When we sequence whole blood RNA, we’re given a fuller, more dynamic picture of what’s happening inside the body, and our test helps identify those who need the more aggressive treatments.”
Previous research by McCaffrey and others identified RNA biomarkers for infection in patients with inflammatory conditions such as appendicitis and pneumonia. Similar to their more recent findings with COVID patients, when they measured RNA levels in the patients’ blood, they detected an increase in neutrophil-related RNAs. When the pandemic hit, McCaffrey and his team pivoted and applied their approach to identifying RNA biomarkers for COVID-19 infection detection and severity. The point-of-care device they’ve developed and are testing would be able to detect infection from pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, but would also have other useful applications, according to McCaffrey.
“Beyond the current pandemic, our technique would be able to detect any infection with a high degree of accuracy,” he said. “That has applications for all sorts of conditions wherein doctors diagnosing patients need to quickly rule in or rule out whether they are dealing with an infection or something else.
If additional studies prove the test is effective, the researchers plan to seek an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Such authorization could take 6 months or longer, but if approved, the test would give clinicians a powerful tool in the fight against this and future pandemics, McCaffrey said.
The paper, “RNA Sequencing in COVID-19 patients identifies neutrophil activation biomarkers as promising diagnostic platform for infections” appeared in PLOS One on January 26. The research was supported by funding from The St. Laurent Institute, True Bearing Diagnostics, and The Ulvi and Reykhan Kasimov Family.
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UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have demonstrated that a novel combination of two drugs that act as targeted inhibitors, delivered in a nanoparticle formulation, extend the survival of mice with medulloblastoma. The research team believes this laboratory success could be translated into a less toxic treatment for medulloblastoma, the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor. Advances such as this are crucial because current treatments, while effective for many patients, often result in potentially disabling brain injury.
“We showed that palbociclib, an FDA-approved drug for breast cancer, may be effective for medulloblastoma, but as a single agent it is not curative because it does not stay in the brain for long enough, and because tumors can become resistant to it,” said Timothy R. Gershon, MD, PhD, professor and vice-chair for research, UNC School of Medicine department of neurology, and co-corresponding author of the article. “In our mouse studies, we addressed the limited brain penetration by developing a nanoparticle formulation that delivers the therapeutics into the brain more effectively. We then we studied why resistance developed over the long-term and ultimately, we found a mechanism of resistance that we could target by adding another drug, sapanisertib.”
The researchers’ finding appeared January 26, 2022, in Science Advances.
Medulloblastoma is an aggressive brain tumor that can spread to other parts of the brain as well as the spinal cord. According to the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the U.S. Statistical Report, between 250 and 500 children are diagnosed with medulloblastoma each year in the U.S., often before the age of 10. Overall, the survival rate for children with medulloblastoma that has not spread is close to 80%, and the survival rate drops to about 60% if the cancer has spread. For patients whose tumor recurs — or returns — after treatment, there is no effective established therapy.
The current standard of care for medulloblastoma includes surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. This therapeutic approach, though often effective, can produce disabling side effects. Therefore, the investigators wanted to develop a drug to complement radiation so that clinicians could lower the dose of radiation and cause less brain injury. Of special interest to the researchers were the 20% of patients whose experience cancer recurrence; this is the group of patients where the new dual nanoparticle drug could provide the greatest benefit.
The researchers focused on the drug palbociclib, which disrupts the proliferation cycle of cancer cells and has been effective in breast cancer. Because palbociclib’s ability to get into the brain is limited, the researchers turned to nanoparticle carriers to help increase medulloblastoma drug exposure and reduce off-target toxicity. The method they used to formulate the nanoparticle has proven effective and works for other drugs.
By analyzing gene expression patterns of medulloblastoma cells that were able to grow in mice treated with palbociclib, the authors identified a resistance mechanism that could be targeted by the mTOR inhibitor sapanisertib. The authors then showed that the combination of palbocicbib and sapanisertib, delivered in nanoparticles, was more effective than either drug alone, as well as being more effective than combinations of other drugs with palbociclib. These data show that targeting the mTOR pathway, which affects cell growth and blood flow to tumors, makes palbociclib markedly more effective. This finding may be relevant to palbociclib in other cancers.
“The nanoparticle formulation incorporating palbociclib plus sapanisertib may also combine well with standard radiation, potentially enabling lower, less toxic doses of radiation without increasing recurrence risk,” said Marina Sokolsky-Papkov, PhD, co-corresponding author and associate professor and director of the Translational Nanoformulation Research Core Facility at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. “Our next steps are getting the nanoparticle approved for use in people and also finding ways to ramp up production for potential use in humans.”
Gershon noted that if drug approval and production plans proceed quickly, the investigators look forward to opening a clinical trial for patients with recurrent medulloblastoma in collaboration with multiple institutions, optimizing the chance of gathering enough patients and allowing patients to be treated near their homes.
In addition to Gershon and Sokolsky-Papkov, the paper’s other authors at UNC include Chaemin Lim, PhD, Taylor Dismuke, MS, Daniel Malawsky, Jacob D. Ramsey, PhD, Duhyeong Hwang, PhD, Virginia L. Godfrey, DVM, PhD, and Alexander V. Kabanov, PhD, DrSci.
Kabanov is an inventor on U.S. Patent No. 9,402,908 and is a cofounder of DelAQUA Pharmaceuticals Inc., having intent of commercial development of POx-based drug formulations. Sokolsky-Papkov has a potential interest in DelAQUA as a spouse of the cofounder. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.
This work was supported by the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer grant (U54CA198999, Carolina Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grants (R01NS088219, R01NS102627, and R01NS106227), and the St. Baldrick’s Foundation.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neuromuscular disease, believed to affect as many as 30,000 Americans. A hundred and fifty years after its discovery, the disease remains mysterious and devastating, striking without warning.
Teasing out the constellation of factors that underlie this complex disorder has been a challenge for researchers. In addition to a hereditary component for some ALS and related neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have pointed to a broad range environmental agents as possible risk factors.
In a new meta-analysis of available ALS literature, Professor Rolf Halden and two doctoral students at Arizona State University Biodesign Institute explore environmental influences potentially linked to the disease, using rigorous quantitative methods. The study also examines the distribution of ALS over space and time, correlating geographic data with exposure risks and lifestyle or occupational hazards.
The new findings will help researchers begin to fill in the many remaining blank spaces in the full portrait of this disease, which the study projects will affect around 22,650 Americans by 2040.
Doctoral student and lead author of the study, Melanie Newell, points out that “narrowing possible risk factors to a likely subset will hasten the work needed to determine whether these factors are merely associated or actually causal to ALS. The realities for patients and caregivers of this horrific disease could be significantly improved by reducing the delay of diagnosis and avoidable (occupational) exposures early in life.”
Halden, director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, adds that “the role of environmental factors in diseases, not just neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, continues to be understudied and underappreciated. Many disease trends in industrialized nations are increasing to an extent and within a rather short time scale which simply cannot be explained by inherently slow genetic changes. To improve U.S. and global health outcomes, studying environment factors is key.”
The review recently appeared in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

A study performed at the University of Jyväskylä compared two-week blocks of low-intensity training and high-intensity interval training in terms of performance and recovery. Both methods can improve endurance performance in recreational athletes after already two weeks when the training load is increased significantly from what the individual is accustomed to.
The weekly routine of distance runners typically consists of a permanent mix of low-intensity training and moderate- to high-intensity training. As an alternative, it has been suggested that block periodization with a more focused training target within a single period may have its advantages.
In a recent study, block periodization was examined with a setting where participants either added the volume of low-intensity training by 70% or performed 10 sessions of 6 x 3-min intervals (5 times/week) during the two-week block. A short block of low- or high-intensity interval training seemed to be an effective method for recreational athletes.
“Both groups improved their 3000 m running performance immediately after the block,” explains doctoral researcher Olli-Pekka Nuuttila from the University of Jyväskylä. “The Interval group improved on average 13 seconds and the low-intensity group 11 seconds. The same trend was observed after the recovery week: the Interval group’s time was on average 19 seconds faster compared to baseline and in the low-intensity group difference was 17 seconds. No statistically significant differences were observed between the groups.”
Interval period more demanding — monitoring the recovery state is beneficial
When recovery was considered, differences were found in the muscle soreness of lower extremities, which increased at a group level only in the interval group. The change differed from the low-intensity group across the training and recovery weeks. Increased muscle soreness at the end of the block was also associated with smaller improvement in the running test. Resting levels of stress hormone norepinephrine concentrations increased after the block in the interval group and remained elevated after the recovery week. The same trend was observed in the nocturnal heart rate variability, which decreased compared to the low-intensity group during the first week of the block.
“Based on the recovery markers we measured, the interval block seemed more demanding compared to the low-intensity block,” Nuuttila summarizes. “Therefore, ensuring sufficient recovery especially after such a period would be important. It is also recommendable to monitor recovery at least via subjective markers during these types of blocks to avoid excessive impairment in the recovery state.”
The effectiveness of block periodization protocols has not been examined in detail in recreational athletes. Previous studies have not investigated, in particular, both recovery from different perspectives and changes in performance during a block of varying training targets.
Changes in endurance performance were analyzed by a 3000 m running test, and recovery state was monitored with nocturnal heart rate recordings and perceived recovery scales. In addition, resting hormone concentrations were analyzed from urine and blood samples.
Participants were 20- to 45-year-old males and females (15 per group) who trained recreationally. The study was financially supported by the Foundation of Sports Institute and the Finnish Sports Research Foundation. The study was also supported by Firstbeat Analytics Oy, whose heart rate monitors were used in the data collection.
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Regular physical activity significantly changes the body’s metabolite profile, and many of these changes are associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. The study population included more than 7,000 men who were followed up for eight years. Men in the highest physical activity category had a 39% lower risk of type 2 diabetes than men who were physically inactive. Physical activity was associated with the levels of a total of 198 metabolites, i.e., compounds formed as a result of the body’s metabolism, and increased physical activity had an impact on some of the same metabolites that have previously been associated with a health-promoting diet. In addition, the study showed that increased physical activity improves insulin secretion.
A total of 1,260 metabolites were analysed from the study participants’ fasting glucose samples. The association of physical activity with the metabolite profile hasn’t been studied this comprehensively nor in such an extensive cohort before. Indeed, published in Metabolites, this study is the first to establish an association between many metabolites and physical activity.
The researchers investigated the association of physical activity with metabolite profile, insulin sensitivity, insulin secretion and risk of type 2 diabetes in men participating in the METabolic Syndrome In Men (METSIM) study. None of the participants had diabetes at the onset of the study. A physical activity questionnaire was conducted among the participants at the onset of the study and again eight years later, and they also underwent an oral glucose tolerance test and had their metabolites analysed from a fasting glucose sample.
Men were classified into four categories based on their physical activity: those who were physically inactive, those who were physically active only occasionally, those who were physically active regularly but no more than twice a week, and those who were physically active regularly at least three times a week. The duration of a single session of physical activity was defined as at least 30 minutes.
Physical activity was associated with the levels of a total of 198 metabolites. Among other things, physical activity changed the levels of several lipids in a manner that in previous studies has been associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes. In previous studies, a health-promoting diet has also been observed to have some similar associations with unsaturated fatty acid levels, for example. As completely new metabolic biomarkers associated with physical activity, the researchers identified in particular steroids, amino acids, imidazoles, carboxylic acids, and hydroxy acids.
During the follow-up, the risk of developing type 2 diabetes was 39% lower for men who were physically the most active, and 30% lower even for men who were physically active no more than twice a week, when compared to men who were physically inactive. Lower fasting glucose and insulin levels, and better insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion, were observed in men who increased their physical activity during the follow-up.
The association of physical activity with insulin secretion has remained unclear, despite several studies on the matter. The study published now confirms that increased physical activity improves insulin secretion.
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