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Electroconvulsive therapy, which may be effective at lowering long-term risks of suicide and death among patients with certain mood disorders, may result in longer hospital stays and increased health care costs, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. They said delivering the therapy in outpatient settings may make the treatment more cost-effective.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) — which involves passing small electric currents through the brain to trigger brief seizures while a patient is under anesthesia — is seldom utilized in the U.S. due to high costs, low insurance coverage, lack of medical training and long-term side effects. The researchers conducted a study, which published June 5 in Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, examining privately insured adults hospitalized for major depression or bipolar disorder. They found that those who received ECT were hospitalized twice as long and had more than double the total health care costs compared to patients receiving standard care.
“Although ECT is an effective therapy for treatment-resistant depression, its high cost is a deterrent,” said author Edeanya Agbese, research project manager in the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Center for Applied Studies in Health Economics. “If this therapy were delivered in an outpatient setting, it’s possible that the potential of reduced cost burdens to patients and insurers could increase utilization of ECT in the U.S.”
The investigators used a private insurance database to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of ECT compared to standard care. They examined several factors including patient characteristics, length of hospitalization and treatments received. Analyzing the associated costs before, during and after hospitalization, the researchers were able to derive patients’ total health care costs during the three periods.
The findings revealed that depending on the number of treatments, those receiving ECT were hospitalized four to 29 days longer and incurred an additional $5,700 to $52,700 more than patients who did not receive this treatment. Furthermore, patients who received ECT continued to have higher health care costs even after hospitalization.
According to the researchers, it may be beneficial and more cost-effective for patients if ECT treatments could be offered in outpatient settings when possible depending on illness severity. Because this study focused on privately insured individuals, it did not explore the financial implications and out-of-pocket expenses for ECT patients without health care insurance or those on Medicare and Medicaid.
Douglas Leslie and Djibril Ba both from the Center for Applied Studies in Health Economics and Penn State College of Medicine; Robert Rosenheck from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine also contributed to this research. The researchers declare no conflicts of interest or specific funding for this research.
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Materials provided by Penn State. Original written by Tracy Cox. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A team of University of Houston pharmaceutical researchers is reporting a newly recognized process of drug metabolism in the intestines — followed by recycling through the liver — that could have important implications for developing treatments for intestinal diseases and for taking multiple medications at the same time.
“The intestines play a crucial role in metabolizing and recycling certain plant compounds and drugs,” reports Ming Hu, Diana S-L. Chow Endowed Professor of Drug Discovery and Development and the senior author of the paper in eLife. “The discovery has important implications for scientists trying to understand how both phytochemicals (a type of plant compound, such as flavonoids) and medicines are metabolized in the body.”
The new information could help chemists develop better drugs and clinicians to fine-tune medication dosing, especially when dealing with polypharmacy, where a patient takes multiple drugs at the same time.
Scientists have long recognized that bile acid is produced in the liver and released into the intestines and is then recycled back through the liver for reuse as the bile. Some medications that are metabolized in the liver also go through this process, known as enterohepatic recycling (EHR). This can extend the life of drugs in the body, which may affect how well they work and whether they cause side effects.
“The liver has long been considered the most important organ for drug metabolism,” said lead author Yifan Tu, who conducted the study while he was doing his doctoral work at the UH College of Pharmacy. “But we’ve shown that the intestines also play a major role in drug metabolism.”
In their experiments, the team administered 16 different types of flavonoids or drugs directly to the liver or intestines and then tracked what happened to the treatments. They found that some drugs and compounds were metabolized in the intestines and the metabolites were then transported to the liver before being cycled back into the intestines.
“In this process, the liver acts only as a recycling organ, which is rare, since the liver is known to be the metabolic ‘superstar’ organ in humans,” said Tu, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim in Connecticut.
The team has called this new mechanism ‘hepatic enteric recycling’ (HER). They found that, in this process, the roles of the liver and intestines are reversed. “This may explain why some drugs or plant compounds have larger effects on the intestine than anticipated and could help scientists understand how intestinal diseases may alter drug metabolism in the body,” said Tu.
“We hope our findings will be useful for medicinal chemists to design new drugs tailored to treat intestinal, especially colonic diseases,” said Hu.
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Materials provided by University of Houston. Original written by Laurie Fickman. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Your child’s doctor can offer support when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation.For pediatricians, taking good care of children as they navigate puberty and adolescence means listening — and talking — as kids figure out sexuality, identity and relationships. Even those lucky kids with supportive and open-minded parents often find they want to talk through these topics with an adult outside their immediate families, and the primary care visit should be a place to talk about every aspect of the child’s changing body and mind.The American Academy of Pediatrics is advising doctors to wear Pride stickers, display those rainbow symbols in our clinics, announce our own preferred pronouns and ask patients for theirs. We want to encourage kids to talk honestly about their own sexuality and gender questions, and we want to be sure they get those questions answered in a setting that supports them and protects their confidentiality.[Click here for the A.A.P. policy statement on good care for L.G.B.T. children and youth and here for the policy statement on good care for gender-diverse children.]How can parents find a pediatric practice that is welcoming, inclusive and ready to hold those important conversations? Here are some tips for making sure that a child has that expert adult to talk with — and for helping along those discussions at the pediatrician’s office. As a parent, you should feel that you also have access to help and advice, that you and the pediatrician are partnering to help your child.How to Find an L.G.B.T.Q.-Friendly PracticeWhen choosing a pediatric provider, keep those future conversations in mind. Charlotte J. Patterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote in an email, “parents can ask questions about how practitioners handle issues relevant to sexual orientation and gender identity. This can help parents ensure that, whether gay or straight, cisgender or nonbinary, their children will receive safe, inclusive, and supportive medical care.” She also suggested that parents can consult with local groups — PFLAG or L.G.B.T.Q. resource centers — for recommendations about pediatric practices.Dr. Christopher Harris, the chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics section on L.G.B.T. health and wellness, suggested that parents and patients could look for visual signs that indicate that a practice is friendly, like “posters on the wall, rainbows, rainbow flags, pronoun stickers on health care provider name tags, signs in the waiting room saying we care for all families.”And certainly adolescents pick up on all these signals and symbols. On medical Twitter recently, Dr. Anna Downs, a pediatric resident, tweeted about having an adolescent look at the rainbow badge she was wearing and ask excitedly, “So what kind of gay are you!?”Dr. Ilana Sherer, a pediatrician in Dublin, Calif., who is a member of the executive committee of the A.A.P. section on L.G.B.T. health and wellness, suggested that parents look on a practice’s website for language that indicates that the practice is friendly to everyone, which could include messages about serving different kinds of families, careful attention to pronouns, signals that the office is not making any assumptions.A practice that is trying to welcome these questions will have thought about what is communicated on the website, at the front desk, and on the forms to be filled in, as well as in the exam room. So parents should listen for the ways that questions are asked on intake forms and in initial interviews: “Are they asking questions in ways that allow somebody who is not straight and binary and cisgender to answer?” Dr. Sherer asked. “Do they understand that gay, straight, bisexual are not the only choices?” Look for doctors who ask open-ended questions, and who understand the diversity of child development, she said, and be wary of comments that “gender kids unnecessarily — are they giving a boy a He-Man sticker or letting him choose?”Dr. Sherer cares for many families with transgender and gender-diverse children, some who have been in her practice since early childhood, and others who find her because she speaks and writes about this population. “I hear being transgender being talked about like it’s a disorder,” she said. “My transgender kids are some of the kindest, bravest kids I have.” She tries to model for parents how to help and support their children, while also handling their own emotions, which can be complex, she said: “There’s obviously a loss to the parent but it’s not a loss of their child — it’s a loss of who they thought the child was.”For parents whose children are questioning their gender identity, “don’t be afraid to reach out to your pediatrician,” said Dr. Paria Hassouri, a pediatrician in Los Angeles who provides gender-affirming care, and who has written about her own experience as the parent of a transgender child. “Information is going to empower you to support your child and make decisions down the line.”The proportion of adolescents who report that they identify as other than heterosexual has been going up. Dr. Patterson was the corresponding author of a commentary published in late May in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, which discussed recent data — in one survey, 14.3 percent of adolescents in 2017 claimed an identity that was “lesbian, gay, bisexual, other, or questioning,” up from 7.3 percent in 2009. The article argued that while greater societal openness may have encouraged more honest answers, these adolescents are still vulnerable to stigma, bullying and abuse, and consequent mental health problems. So a strong and supportive relationship with a medical provider can be really important in helping an adolescent navigate these years.What to Expect From Your PediatricianParents should expect pediatricians to promise adolescents confidentiality. But there are some situations — especially if the child is at risk of self-harm — where a doctor can’t promise confidentiality; we lay those out clearly with kids.Parents should expect their children’s doctors to be trained in asking and answering questions about sexual behavior and sexual health, but also about issues of identification and identity.With adolescents, we’re also asking about identity, self-image, body changes, mental health, friendships, academic performance, risky behaviors (smoking, drugs, alcohol) — the whole complex mix of adolescent activity and adjustment. When she’s talking to patients in the general pediatric clinic, Dr. Hassouri said, she starts by asking, “Do you feel comfortable in your body, how do you identify, what are the gender or genders of the people you are attracted to, rather than ‘Are you gay, straight or bisexual?’”Asking kids if they feel comfortable in their bodies as an opening question, she pointed out, could mean hearing about gender identity, but it might also open up other body-related concerns about weight or what they perceive as unattractiveness, or the pace of puberty. And as the conversation moves to other aspects of her patients’ lives, she tries to ask about interests and favorite activities in gender-neutral language.For some kids, she said, those questions of sexual orientation and gender identity can get confused — what begins with wanting to do “something not typical for the gender assigned to them” as young children may be “buried,” and then later on, around puberty, they may first begin to question their sexuality — “maybe I’m bisexual, maybe I’m gay.”Sometimes those feelings of not fitting in are really about the rigidity of gender expectations. Sometimes children are in fact becoming aware of their emerging sexual orientations — who they will be attracted to. And sometimes they will realize that those early feelings of wanting the “boy clothes” or the “girl toys” actually connect to their own gender identities — how they will identify and who they are.Support for ParentsParents should also expect to get support and guidance from their children’s doctor; part of helping children navigate these years is helping their parents be there for them. Dr. Hassouri said that when parents are talking to their own child, her advice is to “really listen to your child and believe what they’re telling you and support them, no matter what stage they are in their gender journey, in their sexuality journey.” And make sure the child is seeing a doctor who will also listen and support them at every stage.Dr. Sherer tells parents of young children that “there is a lot of fluidity in gender development.” With older children who may be questioning their gender identity, she finds herself modeling for parents how to show support, from discussing preferred pronouns onward. Parents sometimes jump right away to questions of medication and even eventual surgery, she said, when she, as the physician, never starts with those issues; the real question is immediate: “How can we help you feel affirmed in your identity; how can we help you feel good?” Thus, she advises parents to “not focus so much on the result, but on where their kid is in the moment.”Rather than trying to figure out, “is my kid going to be transgender, is my kid gay?” look at the child right there, right then, who is asking for love and support.“Parental support and acceptance are very powerful for reducing all sorts of negative outcomes” Dr. Sherer said. This kind of support is associated with better mental health as adolescents grow up and with reduced depression and suicidality. Supportive parents can also help kids who experience bullying or other school problems, and can make sure that their extended families treat them well.Pediatric practices can help adolescents and families locate resources like the Trevor Project, which offers a hotline for L.G.B.T.Q. youth, the It Gets Better Project or the Family Acceptance Project, which helps families that are ethnically, racially or religiously diverse support L.G.B.T.Q. children.

The concept of interoperability describes the ability of different systems to communicate. This is a major challenge in biomedical research, and in particular, in the field of personalised medicine, which is largely based on the compilation and analysis of numerous datasets. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that even when the technical, legal and ethical constraints are lifted, the data remain difficult to analyse because of semantic ambiguities. Under the auspices of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) and in close collaboration with representatives from all five Swiss university hospitals and eHealth Suisse, a team of scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), in collaboration with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), have developed the strategy for a national infrastructure adopted by all Swiss university hospitals and academic institutions. With its pragmatic approach, this strategy is based on the development of a common semantic framework that does not aim to replace existing standards, but to use them in a synergistic and flexible way according to the needs of the research and the partners involved. The implementation of this strategy, which has already started, marks a crucial step to stimulate research and innovation for a truly personalised medicine in Switzerland. Read more in the journal JMIR Medical Informatics.
Personalised medicine is based on the exploitation and analysis of large quantities of data whether genomic, epidemiological or from medical imaging, to extract meaning. To be able to do this, cross-referencing and aggregating mutually intelligible data is compulsory, even when they come from very different sources.
With this in mind, the Swiss government created in 2017 the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN), an initiative placed under the leadership of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences in collaboration with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics that aims to promote the use and exchange of health data for research. “Despite major investments over the past decade, there are still major disparities,” says Christian Lovis, director of the Department of Radiology and Medical Informatics at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and head of the Division of Medical Information Sciences at the HUG. “This is why we wanted, with our partners and the SPHN, to propose a strategy and common standards that are flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of current and future databases.”
A three-pillar strategy
We communicate on three main standards: the meaning we give to things, because we must agree on a common basis for understanding each other; a technical standard — the sound, with which we speak; and finally, the organisation of the meaning and sound with sentences and grammar to structure the communication in an intelligible way. “In terms of data, it’s the same thing, explains Christophe Gaudet-Blavignac, a researcher in the team led by Christian Lovis. You have to agree on a semantic, to represent conceptually what has to be communicated. Then we need a compositional language to combine these meanings with all the freedom required to express everything that needs to be expressed. And finally, depending on the projects and research communities involved, this will be ‘translated’ as needed into data models, which are as numerous as the languages spoken in the world.”
“Our aim has therefore been to unify vocabularies so that they can be communicated in any grammar, rather than creating a new vocabulary from scratch that everybody would have to learn anew,” says Christian Lovis. “In this sense, the Swiss federalism is a huge advantage: it has forced us to imagine a decentralised strategy, which can be applied everywhere. The constraint has therefore created the opportunity to develop a system that works despite local languages, cultures and regulations.” This makes it possible to apply specific data models for only the last step to be adapted to the formats required by a particular project — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) format in the case of collaboration with an American team, for example, or any other specific format used by a particular country or research initiative. This constitutes a guarantee of mutual understanding and a huge time saving.
No impact on data protection
However, data interoperability does not mean systematic data sharing. “The banking world, for example, has long since adopted global interoperability standards, stresses Christophe Gaudet-Blavignac. A simple IBAN can be used to transfer money from any account to any other. However, this does not mean that anyone, be they individuals, private organisations or governments, can know what is in these accounts without a strict legal framework.” Indeed, a distinction must be made between the instruments that create interoperability and their implementation, on the one hand, and the regulatory framework that governs their accessibility, on the other hand.
Strategy implementation
This strategy has been implemented stepwise in Switzerland since the middle of 2019, in the framework of the Swiss Personalized Health Network. “Swiss university hospitals are already following the proposed strategy to share interoperable data for all multicentric research projects funded by the SPHN initiative,” reports Katrin Crameri, director of the Personalized Health Informatics Group at SIB in charge of the SPHN Data Coordination Centre. Further, some hospitals are starting to implement this strategy beyond the SPHN initiative.
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Materials provided by Université de Genève. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The corona pandemic has ensured that the term “mRNA” is now also known to a large public beyond laboratories and lecture halls. However, the molecule is much more than an important component of a successful vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “mRNAs are a central component of all living things on our planet. Without them life as we know it would not function,” says Elmar Wolf.
Wolf is a professor for tumour system biology at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Würzburg. With his research team, he has now deciphered new details about the formation of mRNA which provide novel insights into how a fundamental process inside cells works: the transcription. The team presents the results of their research in the current issue of Molecular Cell.
Information becomes protein
Transcription: If one can still remember their biology lessons, then they know that it is the process by which the genetic information in the DNA is translated into messenger RNA — or as how scientists like to call it: mRNA. Only the mRNA is capable of transmitting the information from the genetic material of the DNA in the nucleus of the cell to the sites of protein biosynthesis outside the nucleus. “The mRNA composition thus decides how the cells of our body look and how they function,” Wolf says.
The transcription process from DNA to mRNA sounds relatively simple: “You can think of transcription as an obstacle race. The RNA polymerase starts the reading process at the beginning of the gene, then moves through the entire gene and, finally reach the finish line,” Wolf explains. If the polymerase makes it through to the end, the mRNA has been produced. Scientists have long known that a lot can go wrong in this process. After all, many genes are a long “race track” with plenty of obstacles.
Polymerase fails in difficult places
In order to better understand what happens at the molecular level during the race, Wolf and his team took a close look at the process of transcription. “We studied an important component of the RNA polymerase: the protein SPT6,” explains Wolf. The question they explored is: “Is SPT6 important for the process of transcription and — if so — in what way?”
What do the scientists do when they want to learn about the function of a protein: they remove it from the cells and see what happens. That’s exactly what Wolf and his team did. The result was quite clear: “Interestingly, RNA polymerase starts making mRNA even in the absence of SPT6,” Wolf described. But then it regularly gets stuck in difficult places — you could say that it falls over an obstacle.
New picture of the transcription
This failure has two consequences that have a negative impact on cell function: On one hand, hardly any RNA polymerase makes it to the destination, which is why hardly any mRNA is produced. On the other hand, however, the gene itself is also affected. “Without SPT6, the polymerase destroys the obstacles and the racetrack, which is why functional RNA polymerases are then unable to find their way,” says Wolf. Thus, it is clear that the SPT6 protein is a central element in the production of mRNA in cells.
With these findings, the researchers are helping to shed more light on the process of transcription: “Until now, scientists had assumed that the only thing that mattered for mRNA production was how many RNA polymerases started transcription,” Wolf says. Thanks to the results that have now been published, it is now clear that by no means all RNA polymerases that start the transcription process actually make it to the end of the gene and that the protein SPT6 is essential for this arrival.
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Materials provided by University of Würzburg. Original written by Gunnar Bartsch. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In lab tests, Imperial researchers have created a metal-based molecule that inhibits the build-up of a peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
A peptide is a fragment of a protein, and one of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the build-up of a specific peptide known as amyloid-β. The team demonstrated that with the aid of ultrasound, their molecule can cross the blood-brain barrier in mice, targeting the part of the brain where the damaging peptide most often accumulates.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting approximately 50 million people worldwide. There is a pressing need to develop drugs that can prevent or reverse the effects of this devastating disease.
Some metal-based molecules have been previously designed to prevent amyloid-β from building up. However, these are often toxic to cells, or are unable to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) — a semi-permeable protective barrier that carefully regulates the passage of substances that enter and exit the brain.
Now, a team from the Departments of Chemistry and Bioengineering at Imperial College London have designed a metal-based molecule that is highly effective at preventing the build-up of amyloid-β in lab-based studies.
They also showed that the molecule is non-toxic to human brain-like cells, and that it can cross the blood-brain barrier in mice with the help of a technique using microbubbles and focused ultrasound. The results are reported in the journal Chemical Science.
First author Tiffany Chan, from the Departments of Chemistry and Bioengineering at Imperial, said: “Very few metal-based molecules have been investigated as potential inhibitors of amyloid-β build-up because of toxicity issues and difficulty crossing the blood brain barrier. The molecule we have designed is able to interfere with amyloid-β and seems non-toxic, and it can be delivered across the blood brain barrier using ultrasound, which means you don’t need an invasive procedure.”
The molecule is centred around the metal cobalt, surrounded by organic molecules that form a complex, which binds to amyloid-β peptides, preventing them from binding to each other and building up. The molecule also incorporates chemical groups that prevent it from being taken up into human nerve cells, reducing its toxicity.
To demonstrate the molecule could cross the BBB, the team used a technique that involves injecting the molecule alongside microbubbles into the veins of mice. When ultrasound is directed at the brain, the microbubbles rapidly move back and forth, opening the BBB and allowing the molecule to enter the brain in a non-invasive and targeted manner.
The team were able to focus the ultrasound on the hippocampal region of the brain, which is often strongly impacted by the build-up of amyloid-β in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. They were also able to show how specific the ultrasound targeting can be by delivering the molecule only to the left hippocampus.
The molecule was shown to be well tolerated by the mice, who showed no ill effects after several weeks. Co-author Professor Ramon Vilar, from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial, said: “This study shows the potential that metal-based molecules have in preventing amyloid-β aggregation. The new compound will be studied in more depth to establish whether it can also prevent amyloid-β build-up in mice without having unwanted toxic side effects.”
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Materials provided by Imperial College London. Original written by Hayley Dunning. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Pioneering ‘printed metal’ procedure to create bespoke treatment for early knee osteoarthritis set to be trialled in the UK following MHRA approval. World’s first 3D printed high tibial osteotomy (HTO) device and procedure developed at University of Bath given approval for UK trials Bespoke titanium alloy HTO implants that fit perfectly are designed to reduce discomfort for knee osteoarthritis patients Sophisticated 3D scanning aims to make surgery quicker and safer New TOKA process could make earlier intervention possible — saving patients decades of pain before surgery becomes viableA groundbreaking new treatment that uses 3D printed implants and that could bring relief to tens of thousands of knee osteoarthritis sufferers has received approval to be trialled in UK patients, following a virtual “in-silico” trial that demonstrated its safety.
The personalised early knee osteoarthritis treatment, developed by engineers at the University of Bath’s Centre for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI), uses state of the art 3D metal printing technology to make personalised medical-grade titanium-alloy plates that perfectly fit every patient.
The TOKA (Tailored Osteotomy for Knee Alignment) treatment improves the operative procedure and fit of high-tibial osteotomy (HTO) plates used to realign a patient’s knee, making them more stable, comfortable and better able to bear weight than existing generic plates. The technique also simplifies HTO surgery, making operations quicker and therefore safer.
The HTO plates have already been safety tested virtually, in a computer-based trial using CT scan data from 28 patients. The in-silico clinical trial, the first in the world to demonstrate the safety of an orthopaedic device, modelled the stresses that would be exerted on the bespoke plates and showed that they would be comparable in safety to the standard treatment.
Professor Richie Gill, from the Centre for Therapeutic Innovation, says: “Knee osteoarthritis is a major health, social and economic issue and does not receive as much attention as it should. A quarter of women over 45 have it, and about 15 percent of men, so it’s a significant burden that many live with.

A new study finds forensics researchers use terms related to ancestry and race in inconsistent ways, and calls for the discipline to adopt a new approach to better account for both the fluidity of populations and how historical events have shaped our skeletal characteristics.
“Forensic anthropology is a science, and we need to use terms consistently,” says Ann Ross, corresponding author of the study and a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University. “Our study both highlights our discipline’s challenges in discussing issues of ancestral origin consistently, and suggests that focusing on population affinity would be a way forward.”
Race is a social construct — there’s no scientific basis for it. Population affinity, in the context of forensic anthropology, is determined by the skeletal characteristics associated with groups of people. Those characteristics are shaped by historic events and forces such as gene flow, migration, and so on. What’s more, these population groups can be very fluid.
In practical terms, that this means that race can be wildly misleading in a forensic context. For example, a missing person may have been listed as Black on their driver’s license because of their skin color. But their skeletal remains may not indicate they were of African descent, because their bone structure may reflect other aspects of their ancestry.
“Like many disciplines, forensic anthropology has been coming to terms with issues regarding race,” Ross says. “Some people in the discipline want to do away completely with assessing an individual’s place of origin. Others say that conventional approaches still have value in helping to identify human remains.
“In this paper, we are recommending a third path. This study is focused on finding ways to evaluate human variation that give us valuable information in forensic and anthropological contexts, but that avoid clinging to the use of outdated defaults such as race.”
In one part of the study, the researchers looked at all of the papers published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences between 2009 and 2019 that referenced ancestry, race or related terms. The goal of this content analysis was to determine if the terms were being used consistently within the field. And they were not.

New research in humans and mice identifies a particular signaling molecule that can help modify inflammation and the immune system to protect against Alzheimer’s disease. The work, which was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), is published in Nature.
Cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease develops when neurons begin to die. “Neuron death can be caused by improper immune responses and excessive neuroinflammation — or inflammation in the brain — triggered by high levels of amyloid beta deposits and tau tangles, two hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease,” explains the paper’s co-senior author Filip Swirski, PhD, who conducted the work while a principal investigator in the Center for Systems Biology at MGH.
“Once neurons start dying in increasing amounts, brain cells called microglia and astrocytes — which are normally nurturing cells that clean up debris — become activated to cause neuroinflammation in an attempt to protect the brain. They are evolutionarily programmed to wipe out a brain region where there is excess neuronal cell death because it may be due to an infection, which must be stopped from spreading,” explains co-senior author Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, co-director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at MGH.
In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, the neuronal cell death brought on by amyloid beta deposits and tau tangles activates this response. “As neuroinflammation ensues, the amount of cell death is at least 10 times higher than that which was caused by plaques and tangles,” says Tanzi. “In fact, without the induction of neuroinflammation, there would be no symptoms of dementia. We know this from ‘resilient’ brains, in which there are lots of plaques and tangles in an individual’s brain but no symptoms at death because there was minimal or no neuroinflammation.” Tanzi provides an analogy, noting that amyloid beta is the “match” that lights the spreading “brushfires” of tangles, but only when this leads to increasing numbers of “forest fires” through neuroinflammation that is activated by microglia and astrocytes does one lose enough neurons to suffer cognitive decline and dementia.
This new study in Nature revealed that a subset of astrocytes actually tries to put out the fire by releasing a molecule called interleukin-3 (IL-3), which then converts killer microglial cells back into nurturing and protective cells that no longer wipe out neurons and instead focus on cleaning out amyloid beta deposits and tau tangles.
“There may be important clinical implications to knowing that astrocytes talk to microglia via IL-3 to educate the microglia and help them decrease the severity of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Swirski. “We can now think about how to use IL-3 to not only help curb the neuroinflammation that carries out the bulk of neuronal cell death in Alzheimer’s disease, but also to entice microglia to once again take on the beneficial task of clearing away the deposits and tangles that are the initiating pathology of Alzheimer’s disease.”
“It was surprising to find IL-3 in the brain,” says first author Cameron McAlpine, PhD, then an instructor in the Center for Systems Biology. “Our findings suggest that communication between astrocytes and microglia, via IL-3, is an important mechanism that wards off Alzheimer’s disease by instructing microglia to adapt protective functions. With further study, IL-3 signaling may provide a new therapeutic opportunity to combat neurological diseases.”
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Materials provided by Massachusetts General Hospital. Original written by Tracy Hampton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Bacteria’s role in gut health has received a lot of attention in recent years. But new research led by scientists at University of Utah Health shows that fungi — another microorganism that lives within us — may be equally important in health and disease.
Fungi thrive in the healthy gut, but they can also cause intestinal damage that may contribute to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), according to the study published in Nature on July 14. Experiments with mice show that normally, the immune system keeps fungi in check, targeting the microbe when it switches into a state that can cause harm. When the system is off-balance, disease is more likely to occur.
“Fungi have been wholly understudied in part because they are vastly outnumbered by bacteria,” says June Round, Ph.D., professor of pathology at U of U Health and the study’s senior author. New tools and technologies are starting to make investigations like this one possible, she adds. “This work adds an important piece to the bigger picture.”
These insights open new avenues for developing therapeutics to improve gut health. The study shows proof of concept that, one day, vaccines could be used to curb gastrointestinal disease by enhancing natural immune responses that encourage a healthy balance of fungi and other gut microbiota.
A quest for balance
Round became interested in this line of research after noting that a common medical test for diagnosing Crohn’s disease, a type of IBD, works by detecting antibodies against fungi. And yet, how antibodies affect fungi’s influence on disease had yet to be explored.