Publisher Health

Bacteria found in children’s upper respiratory systems could help fight chronic middle ear infections, the leading cause of preventable hearing loss and deafness in Indigenous communities.
The University of Queensland’s Dr Seweryn Bialasiewicz said this discovery helped explain a long-held mystery, while providing hope for potential treatments.
“We’ve been puzzled for years now, trying to work out why some children never develop chronic ear disease, despite being in a high-risk category for contracting it,” Dr Bialasiewicz said.
“By focusing on the microbiomes in the upper respiratory tracts of disease-resistant kids, we could investigate the ecological networks of bacterial interactions that seemed to be working together to protect against the condition.
“It was clear that these two groups of bacteria needed to not only be present, but to be interacting with each other, to provide protection from middle ear infections.”
Dr Bialasiewicz said they were hoping to use this information to figure out what the exact mechanism of protection is, and then mimic it in the very young children, as a therapy or a preventative measure.

Despite the belief that early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is crucial, a new Rutgers study found that the diagnosis may unintentionally impact social relationships and activity.
The study, published in the journal Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, examined how receiving a recent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias impacts social networks, social engagement and social support.
“Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are a public health priority that has a significant impact on people with these diseases, their families and society,” said lead author Takashi Amano, an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at Rutgers University-Newark. “In recent years, health professionals have wanted to diagnose people earlier because of benefits like better long-term care planning and less anxiety. While there are benefits to receiving an earlier diagnosis, negative consequences may include an increased risk of suicide or requesting physician-assisted suicide.”
The study found that a person’s social network and social support do not increase following a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and related dementias, which may be especially problematic for disadvantaged populations who have fewer resources.
According to the study — which found that such a diagnosis reduces time talking on the phone, face-to-face contact and attending sports and other social events — more than 6 million people in the United States were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in 2020.
The researchers used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a national study that surveys adults and their spouses age 51 and older. Researchers tracked adults in 2012, 2014 and 2016.
Those who received a diagnosis in 2014 were compared to those who did not. The researchers measured their social relationships two years after their diagnosis, looking at social and informal engagement, such as meeting and talking on the phone, and formal engagement, like volunteering, attending educational programs, sports games or social events with clubs or non-religious organizations. Social network included the number of close ties a person had. Social support was perceived as either positive or negative.
The findings indicate that receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias may have unintended impacts on social relationships, including decreased formal and informal social engagement.
Researchers suggest that practitioners and policymakers be aware of the consequences, identify strategies to alleviate the negative impact of receiving a diagnosis and look for ways to mobilize support networks after a diagnosis.
“Social relationships are an essential feature of our quality of life and can buffer against cognitive decline,” said coauthor Addam Reynolds, a doctoral candidate at the Rutgers School of Social Work-New Brunswick. “Given the lack of a cure of these diseases, we must focus on ways people can maintain or improve their quality of life after receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.”
Researchers say it may be especially important to promote informal social engagement — face-to-face and telephone contact — which is more accessible than formal social engagement.
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Materials provided by Rutgers University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In a study published in Nucleic Acids Research, the team of cancer researcher Francis Rodier, an Université de Montréal professor, shows for the first time that cellular senescence, which occurs when aging cells stop dividing, is caused by irreversible damage to the genome rather than simply by telomere erosion.
This discovery goes against the scientific model most widely adopted in the last 15 years, which is based on one principle: telomeres, caps located at the ends of chromosomes whose purpose is to protect genetic information, erode with each cell division. When they get too short, they tell the cell to stop dividing, thus preventing damage to its DNA. Made dormant, the cell enters senescence.
For this model to be valid, the inactivation of a single telomere should be sufficient to activate the senescence program. Rodier’s laboratory and many others had already observed that several dysfunctional telomeres were necessary.
“What’s most surprising is that, before really entering senescence, the cells divide one last time,” said Rodier. “In fact, the cell division caused by telomere dysfunction is so unstable that it ends up creating genetic defects. Contrary to what was believed, senescent cells have an abnormal genome. That’s what we show in our study.”
Snapshots of the life of a cell
To achieve such results, Rodier’s research team was able to count on state-of-the-art imaging equipment funded by the Institut du cancer de?Montréal.
“Genetically, we were able to reproduce the phenomenon of cellular aging in the laboratory and ensured that all the telomeres of a population of cells became dysfunctional,” said PhD student Marc-Alexandre Olivier, co-first author of the study with former colleague Sabrina Ghadaouia, currently pursuing postdoctoral studies in England. “With our equipment, we then observed in real time what was happening inside each single cell.”
With time, senescent cells build up in the body and are responsible for the development of diseases such as cancer. This study, therefore, opens up new research opportunities.
For example, could telomeres be repaired prior to the senescence phase, thereby preventing cellular aging and genomic instability? The scientific community has been debating this potential cellular rejuvenation for several years now. Nevertheless, these emerging therapeutic approaches still need fine-tuning.
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Materials provided by University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM). Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A new imaging technique, developed by the teams of Professors Jinyang Liang and Fiorenzo Vetrone at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), can measure temperature in 2D, without contact, and in just a snap. The results of their research were published in the journal Nature Communications. This accurate real-time temperature detection could one day improve photothermal therapy and help in the early diagnosis of skin cancers.
This technology, known as single-shot photoluminescence lifetime imaging thermometry (SPLIT), is based on the luminescence of nanoparticles doped with rare earth ions. “They are considered as nanothermometers because their luminescent properties change with the temperature of the environment. They are also biocompatible,” says Professor Vetrone, a pioneer in this field of study.
Instead of imaging the luminescence point by point, which is time consuming, SPLIT uses a novel ultrahigh-speed camera to track how quickly the luminescence decays of these nanoparticles in every spatial point. “Our camera is different from a common one, where each click gives one image: our camera works by capturing all the images of a dynamic event into one snapshot. Then we reconstruct them, one by one,” says Xianglei Liu, a PhD student at INRS and the lead author of this article.
The temperature can then be sensed by checking how fast the emitted light fades out. Since it is in real time, SPLIT can follow the phenomenon as it happens. For the first time, it enables the luminescence thermometry using the nanoparticle’s lifetime with a moving sample. “Compared to existing thermometry techniques, SPLIT is faster and has higher resolution. This allows a more accurate temperature sensing with both an advanced and economical solution,” adds Professor Liang, an expert in ultra-fast imaging.
Health applications
Professors Liang and Vetrone believe that SPLIT technology could, among other things, increase the ability to detect and treat skin cancers. At present, the capacity to detect melanomas, and more specifically micro-melanomas, is still limited. Existing diagnostic approaches are restricted by their invasiveness, resolution and accuracy, which leads to a large number of unnecessary biopsies.
Optical thermometry could thus be used to detect cancer cells, whose rapid metabolism leads to a higher temperature than that of normal tissue, making them more visible with SPLIT.
To detect melanoma, clinics can use a thermal camera, but the resolution is low. “SPLIT marks an important step in the technical development. With high resolution, the technology could be used to precisely locate the cancerous mole,” says Professor Liang.
Beyond detection, this technology could also be used to monitor the light dose during certain types of treatment. For example, photothermal therapy attacks cancer cells through the heat generated by exposure to near-infrared light. “We want to eradicate the cancer, but not the surrounding tissue, so if the temperature is too high, the treatment could be decreased or stopped for a while. If it’s too low, we can increase the light to get the right dose,” says Vetrone.
In 2020, the Canadian Cancer Society estimated that 8,000 Canadians had been diagnosed with this form of cancer alone.
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Materials provided by Institut national de la recherche scientifique – INRS. Original written by Audrey-Maude Vézina. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Dasatinib, a drug that often is used to treat certain types of leukemia, may have antidiabetic effects comparable to medications used to treat diabetes, and with more research may become a novel therapy for diabetic patients, according to new research published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Dasatinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor used to treat tumors and malignant tissue, as well as chronic myelogenous leukemia. Researchers at Mayo Clinic and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine wanted to know if dasatinib also has antidiabetic properties for older patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Using a Mayo Clinic database with more than 9 million case histories spanning 25 years, they determined it may have an antidiabetic effect comparable to or perhaps greater than current medications used to treat type 2 diabetes.
Dasatinib is a senolytic drug, a type of agent first identified at Mayo Clinic that in animal studies targets senescent cells. These cells accumulate in many tissues with aging and at sites of pathology in chronic diseases, and in animal studies senolytic drugs appear to delay, prevent or alleviate age-related changes, chronic diseases and geriatric syndromes.
“Our findings suggest that dasatinib or related senolytic drugs may become diabetic therapies,” says Robert Pignolo, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s senior author. “More study is needed to determine whether these findings also are observed in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus but without underlying malignant disease.”
Researchers used Mayo Clinic’s Informatics for Integrating Biology at the Bedside, a framework that organizes and transforms patient records into a deidentified research database. The retrospective study started with a total of 9.3 million individuals who were screened for use of either dasatinib or imatinib, another tyrosine kinase inhibitor that was approved for treatment of a type of leukemia in 2001 but with weak senolytic activity. The records were for Mayo patients from 1994 to 2019. Of those patients, 279 were treated with imatinib and 118 with dasatinib, and after further screening, a total of 48 patients were included in the study.
The findings show that dasatinib lowers serum glucose in patients with pre-existing type 2 diabetes to a greater degree than imatinib and comparable to first-line diabetic medications such as metformin and sulfonylureas.
Further study is needed to determine whether the antidiabetic effect of dasatinib is due primarily to its senolytic properties, says Dr. Pignolo, director of the Translation and Pharmacology Program at Mayo Clinic’s Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging. If it is, the effectiveness of combining dasatinib with another senolytic drug such as quercetin may be greater than with dasatinib alone.
“This study was really the first proof-of-concept that a senolytic drug may have substantial long-term beneficial effects in humans,” Dr. Pignolo says. “According to research in animal models, it is not necessary to give senolytic drugs continuously, and so patients may need only take a drug such as dasatinib every few weeks, reducing possible side effects.”
The study was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; the Robert and Arlene Kogod Professorship in Geriatric Medicine at Mayo Clinic; the National Institute on Aging; the Noaber Foundation Professorship in Aging at Mayo Clinic; the Connor Group; the Robert J. and Theresa W. Ryan Foundation; and the Travelers Chair in Geriatrics and Gerontology at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
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Materials provided by Mayo Clinic. Original written by Jay Furst. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Altered function of the red blood cells leads to vascular damage in type 2 diabetes. Results from a new study in cells from patients with type 2 diabetes and mice show that this effect is caused by low levels of an important molecule in the red blood cells. The study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has been published in the journal Diabetes.
It is well known that patients with type 2 diabetes have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Overtime type 2 diabetes may damage blood vessels, which could lead to life-threatening complications such as heart attack and stroke. However, the disease mechanisms underlying cardiovascular injury in type 2 diabetes are largely unknown and there is currently a lack of treatments to prevent such injuries.
In recent years, research has shown that the red blood cells, whose most important job is to transport oxygen to bodily organs, become dysfunctional in type 2 diabetes and can act as mediators of vascular complications. In the current study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have in cells from patients with type 2 diabetes and mice examined which molecular changes in the red blood cells could explain these harmful effects in type 2 diabetes.
The researchers found that levels of the small molecule microRNA-210 were markedly reduced in red blood cells from 36 patients with type 2 diabetes compared with red blood cells of 32 healthy subjects. Micro-RNAs belong to a group of molecules that serve as regulators of vascular function in diabetes and other conditions. The reduction in microRNA-210 caused alterations in specific vascular protein levels, and impaired blood vessel endothelial cell function. In laboratory experiments, restoration of microRNA-210 levels in red blood cells prevented the development of vascular injury via specific molecular changes.
“The findings demonstrate a previously unrecognized cause of vascular injury in type 2 diabetes,” says Zhichao Zhou, researcher at the Department of Medicine, Solna, Karolinska Institutet, who conducted the study in collaboration with among others Professor John Pernow at the same department. “We hope that the results will pave the way for new therapies that increase red blood cell microRNA-210 levels and thereby prevent vascular injury in patients with type 2 diabetes.”
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Materials provided by Karolinska Institutet. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

They say you are what you wear. New biosensor technology created at the University of Utah’s College of Engineering makes that even more true.
Chemical engineering assistant professor Huanan Zhang has developed a process that turns clothing fabric into biosensors which measure a muscle’s electrical activity as it is worn.
His new technology was recently detailed in a paper published in the science journal, APL Materials. The paper, “Gold and silver nanocomposite-based biostable and biocompatible electronic textile for wearable electromyographic biosensors,” was co-authored by University of Utah chemical engineering graduate student, Taehwan Lim, and Sohee Lee from the Department of Clothing and Textiles at Gyeongsang National University in South Korea. You can read a copy of the paper here.
Zhang and his team have devised a method of taking ordinary textile made of a cotton/polyester blend and turning the fabric into sensors that measure electrical impulses generated from muscle movement. This could become a much better solution in measuring muscle activity for physical rehabilitation or for other medical applications. Ordinarily, current bioelectrical sensor technology in which they tape sensors with wires to the skin can sometimes be ineffective, uncomfortable, expensive, and costly to manufacture.
“This new method can enable clinicians to collect a muscle’s long-term electrical signals with more precision,” says Zhang. “And we can get a better understanding of a patient’s progress and therefore their therapeutic outcomes over time.”
When human muscle contracts, it emits electrical signals in the form of ions (as opposed to electrons from an electrically powered device). Zhang’s process involves depositing a microscopic layer of silver over a piece of fabric to make the material conductive and therefore receive the electrical signal from the muscle.
But having just a layer of silver is a problem since the metal can be somewhat toxic when in prolonged contact with the skin. So the researchers also deposit a second microscopic layer of gold, which is non-toxic to the touch. The gold not only protects the skin from the silver, but it also enhances the electrical signal, Zhang says.
“The silver layer provides a baseline conductivity, but the gold on top improves the signal and the biocompatibility, and it helps reduces the cost of manufacturing pure gold devices,” he says.
The silver layer is applied to the fabric in a process similar to screen printing a graphic onto a T-shirt, and it’s applied to just the areas of the clothing that touch the muscle being measured. Then the gold layer is deposited by an electrochemical method. The patches of sensors are then attached to wires and a portable electromyography (EMG) device that measures muscle contractions.
Just as important, the process is also resistant to repeated cycles in a washing machine, Zhang says. His team ran a piece of clothing treated with the process through 15 washes, and they didn’t affect the sensors’ efficacy.
Currently, Zhang and his team have tested the method on a compression sleeve for the forearm. While this technology would mostly be used on compression sleeves or socks since it requires the clothing constantly touch the skin, Zhang imagines it could also be used for other skin-tight clothing such as bicycle pants or athletic tights.
This sensor-equipped clothing is yet another example of the popular trend of wearable technologies that constantly monitor your health throughout the day, such as the Apple Watch. And Zhang even envisions a day when his clothing could interface with a digital watch to provide real-time readings provided EGM monitors become small enough.
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Materials provided by University of Utah. Original written by Vincent Horiuchi. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A lesbian couple challenging NHS fertility policy where they live say current rules place an “unfair financial burden” on LGBTQ+ people.Megan and Whitney Bacon-Evans say they are required to undergo 12 rounds of private treatment before they can get NHS support. Heterosexual couples have to try to conceive for two years before becoming eligible.They told the BBC News Channel they are “fighting for the same rights and opportunities as a heterosexual couple”.CCG Frimley, the subject of the review, says its policies comply with guidance.

A California couple is suing a fertility clinic after giving birth to a stranger’s child, saying they were given the wrong embryo during in vitro fertilisation (IVF).At an emotional news conference, Daphna Cardinale said her memories of childbirth would “always be tainted”, adding she was struggling to explain the situation to her older daughter who had lost the little sister she “fell in love with”.The Cardinales are suing the Los Angeles-based fertility centre, the California Center for Reproductive Health (CCRH), as well as In VitroTech Labs, an embryology lab.The lawsuit alleges medical malpractice, negligence and fraudulent concealment. Neither company responded to a BBC News request for comment.Read more: US couple sue clinic for alleged IVF swap ‘horror’