Publisher Health

After 7 days of recovery from a 10-day period of deficient sleep, participants in a small study had recovered their pre-sleep deprivation reaction speed, but had not fully recovered on any other measures of function. Jeremi Ochab of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 1, 2021.
Sleep deficiency is well known to negatively impact human functioning. For example, it is associated with deficits in attention and memory, as well as increased risk of car accidents, heart problems, and other medical issues. However, while some research has addressed recovery after chronic sleep deprivation, it has been unclear how much time is needed to fully recover from prolonged periods of deficient sleep.
To shed more light on this topic, Ochab and colleagues conducted a small study with several healthy adults who underwent 10 days of purposeful sleep restriction followed by 7 recovery days of unrestricted sleep. Participants completed the study in their normal day-to-day environments and wore wrist sensors to monitor daily patterns of sleep and activity. They also underwent daily electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity, and they answered daily questions (Stroop tasks) to measure reaction times and accuracy.
After 7 days of recovery, the participants had not yet returned to pre-sleep deprivation performance on most measures of functioning. These included several EEG measures of brain activity, rest-versus-activity patterns captured by wrist sensors, and accuracy on Stroop tasks. Only their reaction times had recovered to baseline levels.
While the researchers note that it is difficult to compare these results with other studies that employed different methods, the findings contribute new insights into recovery from chronic sleep loss. Future research could expand to a greater number of participants, investigate longer recovery periods, and disentangle the order in which different functions return to normal.
The authors add: “The investigation of the recovery process following an extended period of sleep restriction reveal that the differences in behavioral, motor, and neurophysiological responses to both sleep loss and recovery.”
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Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Cartilage cells from the nasal septum can not only help repair cartilage injuries in the knee — according to researchers from the University of Basel and the University Hospital of Basel, they can also withstand the chronic inflammatory tissue environment in osteoarthritis and even counteract the inflammation.
A research team at the Department of Biomedicine of the University of Basel and the University Hospital of Basel is cultivating cartilage tissue from cells of the nasal septum to repair articular cartilage in the knee. The team led by Professor Ivan Martin and Professor Andrea Barbero has already succeeded in doing this in initial clinical studies on isolated cartilage damage, and they have now reported that the approach could also be suitable for degenerative joint diseases such as osteoarthritis. Their findings have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Osteoarthritis is associated with cartilage degradation, which can cause severe pain and reduce mobility. The therapeutic approach up to now aims at palliative treatment of the inflammation and pain until a knee joint replacement by a prosthetic implant becomes unavoidable. Joint prostheses, however, have a limited durability, which makes the treatment problematic, especially in younger patients.
From the nose to the knee
A possible alternative could be to repair the articular cartilage using engineered cartilage tissue. To this end, the research team, in collaboration with orthopedic and plastic surgeons from the University Hospital of Basel, takes a tissue sample from a patient’s nasal septum, cultivates the isolated cartilage cells and uses them to grow a cartilage layer that is then surgically implanted into the knee joint.
Unlike traumatic and confined cartilage defects, for example following sports injuries, the tissue environment in the osteoarthritic knee is characterized by persistent inflammatory reactions. “First we had to test whether the cartilage replacement was attacked and degenerated by the inflammatory factors,” explains Ivan Martin.

With a goal of developing rheumatoid arthritis therapies with minimal side effects, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have genetically engineered cells that, when implanted in mice, will deliver a biologic drug in response to inflammation.
The engineered cells reduced inflammation and prevented a type of damage to bone, known as bone erosion, in a mouse model of rheumatoid arthritis. The research team’s ultimate aim is to develop therapies for people coping with rheumatoid arthritis, a debilitating condition that affects about 1.3 million adults in the United States.
“Doctors often treat patients who have rheumatoid arthritis with injections or infusions of anti-inflammatory biologic drugs, but those drugs can cause significant side effects when delivered long enough and at high enough doses to have beneficial effects,” said senior investigator Farshid Guilak, PhD, the Mildred B. Simon Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery. “We used CRISPR technology to reprogram the genes in stem cells. Then we created a small cartilage implant by seeding the cells on woven scaffolds, and we placed them under the skin of mice. The approach allows those cells to remain in the body for a long time and secrete a drug whenever there is a flare of inflammation.”
The new findings are published online Sept. 1 in the journal Science Advances.
The researchers used CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology to make cells that secrete a biologic drug in response to inflammation. The drug reduces inflammation in joints by binding to interleukin-1 (IL-1), a substance that often promotes inflammation in arthritis by activating inflammatory cells in a joint.
Guilak, a co-director of the Washington University Center of Regenerative Medicine, and his team previously developed scaffolding that they coat with stem cells and then implant into joints to form cartilage. The strategy allows the researchers to implant the engineered cartilage cells in such a way that they don’t drift away after a few days and can survive for months or longer.

University of Central Florida researchers have developed a nanoparticle-based disinfectant that can continuously kill viruses on a surface for up to seven days — a discovery that could be a powerful weapon against COVID-19 and other emerging pathogenic viruses.
The findings, by a multidisciplinary team of the university’s virus and engineering experts and the leader of an Orlando technology firm, were published this week in ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society.
Christina Drake, a UCF alumna and founder of Kismet Technologies, was inspired to develop the disinfectant after making a trip to the grocery store in the early days of the pandemic. There she saw a worker spraying disinfectant on a refrigerator handle, then wiping off the spray immediately.
“Initially my thought was to develop a fast-acting disinfectant,” she said, “but we spoke to consumers — like doctors and dentists — to find out what they really wanted from a disinfectant. What mattered the most to them was something long-lasting that would continue to disinfect high-touch areas like doorhandles and floors long after application.”
Drake partnered with Dr. Sudipta Seal, a UCF materials engineer and nanosciences expert, and Dr. Griff Parks, a College of Medicine virologist who is also associate dean of research and director of the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Kismet Tech and the Florida High Tech Corridor, the researchers created a nanoparticle-engineered disinfectant.
Its active ingredient is an engineered nanostructure called cerium oxide, which is known for its regenerative antioxidant properties. The cerium oxide nanoparticles are modified with small amounts of silver to make them more potent against pathogens.

A study examining the body mass index (BMI) of over 14,000 children from birth to age 15 shows those in the Midwest have the highest BMI levels while kids in the West have the lowest, suggesting regional influences may play a role in the development of childhood obesity.
The study, published today in the journal Obesity, also showed a higher birthweight and lower levels of formal education among mothers was associated with higher BMI in children. Black and Hispanic children had a higher BMI than non-Hispanic white children in some, but not all, parts of the country.
“We know that home and school environments are important drivers of children’s nutritional status,” said the study’s lead author Traci Bekelman, PhD, MPH, a research assistant professor in the Lifecourse Epidemiology of Adiposity and Diabetes (LEAD) Center at the Colorado School of Public Health at CU Anschutz. “But we don’t know as much about regional influences.”
Obesity is a persistent problem in adults and increasingly in children. At least 35% of children are overweight or suffer from obesity. Interventions often fail so investigators in this study wanted to see if regional differences could account for varying BMI levels.
“If we know the factors that affect children’s body size, we can help prevent them from becoming overweight or obese,” said the study’s senior author Dana Dabelea, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and director of the LEAD Center. “This study looked at factors related to children’s body size, like where children live, how much they weighed at birth, and their ethnic background.”
The study population was drawn from the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. ECHO investigates the effects of environmental exposures on child health. In this study, that included a large sample of children from 25 community and clinic-based cohorts with longitudinal data across the US.

A study led by a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that food insecurity among college students is associated with lower college graduation rates and lower chances of obtaining a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
Food insecurity is a household’s lack of consistent access to adequate food resources. The study examined a nationally representative sample of 1,574 college students in 1999-2003 to assess whether they lived in a household experiencing food insecurity. They found that nearly 15 percent of the students qualified as food insecure. Following up on data on educational attainment through 2015-2017, the researchers found that students in the food-insecure group were more than 40 percent less likely to graduate from college and more than 60 percent less likely to achieve a graduate or professional degree.
Food-insecure students whose parents and grandparents had not attended college fared even worse in terms of educational attainment — less than half graduated from college.
The study appears online in the September issue of Public Health Nutrition.
“These results suggest that we really need robust policies to address food insecurity among college students, especially now with the higher food insecurity levels observed during the COVID-19 pandemic,” says study lead author Julia Wolfson, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School.
For the study, Wolfson and her colleagues examined data from a long-running U.S. government-sponsored project called the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed a nationally representative set of several thousand families in the U.S. since 1968, using annual — or, since 1997, biennial — surveys to collect sociodemographic, economic, and health information on family members. The researchers drew from this dataset a sample of 1,574 individuals who were enrolled in higher education at any point during the 1999-2003 surveys and were still being tracked in the 2015 or 2017 surveys. They classified a student as food-insecure if they or their parents reported being food-insecure at any point when they were college students in 1999-2003. Most of the students in the sample attended college while living at home as dependents in a household.
Even after adjusting for other factors known to be linked to higher or lower educational attainment, Wolfson and colleagues found a strong inverse association between household food insecurity and educational attainment. Students from food-insecure households were 43 percent less likely to graduate from college, including with an associate’s degree; 43 percent less likely to attain a bachelor’s degree; and 61 percent less likely to attain a graduate or professional degree, compared to non-food-insecure students.
The analysis suggested that being a “first-generation student” — the first in a family to attend college — was another factor strongly associated with lower educational attainment. While 76 percent of students who were “food secure” and not first-generation students graduated from college, only 59 percent of food secure but first-generation students graduated from college — and less than half, only 47 percent, of food-insecure first-generation students graduated.
The study, Wolfson notes, is thought to be the first to examine food insecurity’s effects on educational attainment in a study that tracks data for the same group of people over time. These results suggest that food insecurity is not just associated with but a contributing cause of lower educational attainment.

Cleveland Clinic researchers have engineered a first-of-its-kind bionic arm for patients with upper-limb amputations that allows wearers to think, behave and function like a person without an amputation, according to new findings published in Science Robotics.
The Cleveland Clinic-led international research team developed the bionic system that combines three important functions — intuitive motor control, touch and grip kinesthesia, the intuitive feeling of opening and closing the hand. Collaborators included University of Alberta and University of New Brunswick.
“We modified a standard-of-care prosthetic with this complex bionic system which enables wearers to move their prosthetic arm more intuitively and feel sensations of touch and movement at the same time,” said lead investigator Paul Marasco, Ph.D., associate professor in Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. “These findings are an important step towards providing people with amputation with complete restoration of natural arm function.”
The system is the first to test all three sensory and motor functions in a neural-machine interface all at once in a prosthetic arm. The neural-machine interface connects with the wearer’s limb nerves. It enables patients to send nerve impulses from their brains to the prosthetic when they want to use or move it, and to receive physical information from the environment and relay it back to their brain through their nerves.
The artificial arm’s bi-directional feedback and control enabled study participants to perform tasks with a similar degree of accuracy as non-disabled people.
“Perhaps what we were most excited to learn was that they made judgments, decisions and calculated and corrected for their mistakes like a person without an amputation,” said Dr. Marasco, who leads the Laboratory for Bionic Integration. “With the new bionic limb, people behaved like they had a natural hand. Normally, these brain behaviors are very different between people with and without upper limb prosthetics.” Dr. Marasco also has an appointment to in Cleveland Clinic’s Charles Shor Epilepsy Center and the Cleveland VA Medical Center’s Advanced Platform Technology Center.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage sourceReutersNorth Korea has asked that almost three million Covid-19 jabs offered to it be redirected elsewhere, the UN says.A spokesperson said the country had asked that the shots be relocated to harder hit nations in view of global vaccine shortages.The Chinese-made Sinovac shots were offered under the Covax programme which aims to help poorer nations obtain vaccines. North Korea is part of the scheme but is yet to receive any doses under it.The secretive nation imposed strict anti-virus measures from the beginning of the pandemic. It was one of the first countries to close its borders in January last year.However, analysts have expressed doubts about the country’s success in containing the virus and health officials have told the BBC that China is increasingly concerned about the potential spread of the virus inside North Korea. This isn’t the first time the country has rejected vaccines. In July, it rejected shipments of around two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, citing concerns over potential side effects, a South-Korean think-tank associated with the country’s intelligence service said. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, told reporters in July that it had offered to supply North Korea with its own Sputnik vaccine on multiple occasions. North Korea has expressed some doubt over the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccinations, with state media frequently reporting on incidents in the US and Europe where individuals have had adverse reactions to the shots. For much of the pandemic North Korea insisted it had seen no cases, but this year its leader Kim Jong-un berated senior officials over a “grave incident” believed to be related to the virusMore on North Korea:How North Korea almost pulled off a billion-dollar hackNorth Korea: Why doesn’t it have enough food this year?North Korea’s ‘only openly gay defector’ finds love

Boosting a family of naturally occurring proteins that dampens inflammation in the body has been shown to be effective in reducing damage from an ischemic stroke, according to preclinical researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
Called inter-alpha inhibitor proteins (IAIP), the family of structurally related proteins — produced largely in the liver and found in high concentrations in the plasma — has broad anti-inflammatory activity. The study was published today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
“By extensively testing for neuroprotective role of IAIPs in stroke, we found that IAIPs offer remarkable neuroprotection and could potentially represent an important, novel treatment for ischemic stroke,” said Venugopal Reddy Venna, PhD, senior author of the reportand an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. “To test the clinical relevance of these proteins, we first studied for changes of IAIP using blood and brain samples from stroke patients. Next, to study the role of these IAIPs, we performed experiments in mice, using clinically relevant stroke models to mimic the most common strokes seen in patients. Finally, we used genetically engineered mice in which a receptor for complement activation is deleted to identify the mechanism of action of this family of blood-derived proteins.”
Stroke is the primary cause of long-term adult disability and fifth-leading cause of mortality in the U.S. Ischemic strokes, which account for 80% to 85% of all strokes, are caused by a blockage in an artery that supplies blood to the brain. The blockage reduces the blood flow and oxygen to the brain, leading to damage or death of brain cells.
The researchers discovered that naturally occurring levels of IAIP dropped in mice and humans after stroke. They also found that administering supplemental purified IAIP in mice immediately after ischemic stroke reduced the size of the damaged area and limited brain swelling.
Importantly, even delayed administration of IAIP reduced the size of the damaged area and improved functional recovery even when the therapy was administered 4.5 hours after ischemic stroke onset. Moreover, treating the mice anywhere from six hours to nine days after stroke (known as “extended delayed treatment”) also showed benefit, with reduced brain atrophy and improved long-term recovery.
IAIP was also most effective in mice when used in combination with tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA), which is currently the only Food and Drug Administration-approved pharmacotherapy for the treatment of acute ischemic strokes. The combination significantly reduced the size of the damaged area in the brain compared to t-PA alone, and reduced bleeding in the brain. These proteins may be a viable treatment for stroke patients, the authors wrote.
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Materials provided by University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Original written by Caitie Barkley. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Having a structured environment for children, whether during school days or when stuck in quarantine as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, could benefit children’s health, according to new research from the University of Central Florida.
In a study of more than 50 rural schoolchildren over the course of two weeks, researchers found that behaviors that lead to obesity — like too much sedentary behavior or screen time — dropped on school days compared to non-school days, while amounts of activity increased. The results were published recently in the journal Childhood Obesity.
The findings are important because more than 20 percent of U.S. children ages 6 to 11 are obese, which could lead to problems such as type 2 diabetes or other diseases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The researchers focused on rural children because they are at increased risk for obesity compared to their urban-dwelling counterparts. Additionally, rural children’s obesogenic behaviors have not been studied as much, says Keith Brazendale, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Health Sciences and the study’s lead author.
These behaviors can include low physical activity, poor diets, irregular sleep and excess screen and media time.
The researchers used wristband accelerometers to compare the students’ physical activity and sleep on school and non-school days in addition to diaries of daily activities, diet and screen time that were recorded by the parents.