Publisher Health

Most young women already know that tanning is dangerous and sunbathe anyway, so a campaign informing them of the risk should take into account their potential resistance to the message, according to a new study.
Word choice and targeting a specific audience are part of messaging strategy, but there is also psychology at play, researchers say — especially when the message is telling people something they don’t really want to hear.
“A lot of thought goes into the content, but possibly less thought goes into the style,” said Hillary Shulman, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University.
“That’s the argument we’re trying to put out there for people to consider.”
In the study, participants who read a message that combined the most lay-friendly phrasing with references to the specific audience — young women in college — were the most likely to acknowledge the severity of tanning-related risk for skin cancer and say they would curb their own sunbathing behavior.
And that’s because the researchers considered what the young women already thought about soaking in the sun.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have developed a new mathematical model for predicting how COVID-19 spreads. This model not only accounts for individuals’ varying biological susceptibility to infection but also their levels of social activity, which naturally change over time. Using their model, the team showed that a temporary state of collective immunity — what they coined “transient collective immunity” — emerged during early, fast-paced stages of the epidemic. However, subsequent “waves,” or surges in the number of cases, continued to appear because of changing social behaviors. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The COVID-19 epidemic reached the United States in early 2020, rapidly spreading across several states by March. To mitigate disease spread, states issued stay-at-home orders, closed schools and businesses, and put in place mask mandates. In major cities like New York City (NYC) and Chicago, the first wave ended in June. In the winter, a second wave broke out in both cities. Understanding why initial waves end and subsequent waves begin is key to being able to predict future epidemic dynamics.
Here’s where modeling can help. But classical epidemiological models were developed almost 100 years ago. While these models are mathematically robust, they don’t perfectly capture reality. One of their flaws is failing to account for the structure of person-to-person contact networks, which serve as channels for the spread of infectious diseases.
“Classical epidemiological models tend to ignore the fact that a population is heterogenous, or different, on multiple levels, including physiologically and socially,” said Alexei Tkachenko, a physicist in the Theory and Computation Group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab. “We don’t all have the same susceptibility to infection because of factors such as age, preexisting health conditions, and genetics. Similarly, we don’t have the same level of activity in our social lives. We differ in the number of close contacts we have and in how often we interact with them throughout different seasons. Population heterogeneity — these individual differences in biological and social susceptibility — is particularly important because it lowers the herd immunity threshold.”
Herd immunity is the percentage of the population who must achieve immunity in order for an epidemic to end.
“Herd immunity is a controversial topic,” said Sergei Maslov, a CFN user and professor and Bliss Faculty Scholar at UIUC, with faculty appointments in the Departments of Physics and Bioengineering and at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. “Since early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been suggestions of reaching herd immunity quickly, thereby ending local transmission of the virus. However, our study shows that apparent collective immunity reached in this way would not last.”
“What was missing prior to this work was that people’s social activity waxes and wanes, especially due to lockdowns or other mitigations,” added Nigel Goldenfeld, Swanlund Professor of Physics and director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at UIUC. “So, a wave of the epidemic can seem to die away due to mitigation measures when the susceptible or more social groups collectively have been infected — what we call transient collective immunity. But once these measures are relaxed and people’s social networks are renewed, another wave can start, as we’ve seen with states and countries opening up too soon, thinking the worst was behind them.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a harsh light on the urgent need for quick and easy techniques to sanitize and disinfect everyday high-touch objects such as doorknobs, pens, pencils, and personal protective gear worn to keep infections from spreading. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have demonstrated the first flexible, hand-held, device based on low-temperature plasma — a gas that consists of atoms, molecules, and free-floating electrons and ions — that consumers can quickly and easily use to disinfect surfaces without special training.
Recent experiments show that the prototype, which operates at room temperature under normal atmospheric pressure, can eliminate 99.99 percent of the bacteria on surfaces, including textiles and metals in just 90 seconds. The device has shown a still-higher 99.9999 percent effectiveness when used with the antiseptic hydrogen peroxide. Scientists think it will be similarly effective against viruses. “We’re testing it right now with human viruses,” said PPPL physicist Sophia Gershman, first author of a paper in Scientific Reports that describes the device and the research behind it.
Positive results welcomed
The positive results were welcome at PPPL, which is widening its fusion research and plasma science portfolios. “We are very excited to see plasmas used for a broader range of applications that could potentially improve human health,” said Jon Menard, deputy director for research at PPPL.
The flexible hand-held device, called a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD), is built like a sandwich, Gershman said. “It’s a high-voltage slice of bread on cheese that is an insulator and a grounded piece of bread with holes in it,” she said.
The high-voltage slice of “bread” is an electrode made of copper tape. The other slice is a grounded electrode patterned with holes to let the plasma flow through. Between these slices lies the “cheese” of insulating tape. “Basically it’s all flexible tape like Scotch tape or duct tape,” Gershman said. “The ground electrode faces the users and makes the device safe to use.”
The room-temperature plasma interacts with air to produce what are called reactive oxygen and nitrogen species — molecules and atoms of the two elements — along with a mixture of electrons, currents, and electrical fields. The electrons and fields team up to enable the reactive species to penetrate and destroy bacteria cell walls and kill the cells.

While people may expect suicide rates to rise during a worldwide crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a University of Michigan study suggests the onset of the pandemic and state of emergency executive orders likely did not increase suicide-related behavior in the early months of the outbreak.
The report, led by U-M researchers Rachel Bergmans and Peter Larson, found that emergency room visits related to suicide attempt and self-harm decreased by 40% during the first eight months of Michigan’s lockdown. Their results are published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The study compared emergency room reports of suicide attempt and intentional self-harm at a hospital in Michigan’s Washtenaw County during the first 8 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers used what’s called a time-series analysis to look at what happened to suicide attempt and self-harm trends before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
They compared the rate of suicide attempt and self-harm from Oct. 1, 2015, to March 9, 2020, to the rates between March 10, 2020, to October 31, 2020, and found that average daily visits to the ER because of suicidal behavior decreased from 8.6 visits per day to 5.5 per day.
Bergmans, a research fellow in the Survey Research Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research, says a strengthened social structure could be the reason for the decline in these visits.
“More research is needed to confirm why there was a decrease, but the earlier phase of the pandemic came with a lot of communitywide and individual changes including changes in unemployment. These types of factors can increase the risk of suicide,” she said. “However, it’s possible that things like financial assistance from stimulus checks, the eviction moratorium and student loan support that people are receiving might have buffered against some of these other effects.”
The specific method Bergmans and Larson used, called an autoregressive integrated moving average modeling approach, also took into account seasonal variations of suicide rates, which are higher in the spring and fall.

Researchers have found a long-sought enzyme that prevents cancer by enabling the breakdown of proteins that drive cell growth, and that causes cancer when disabled.
Publishing online in Nature on April 14, the new study revolves around the ability of each human cell to divide in two, with this process repeating itself until a single cell (the fertilized egg) becomes a body with trillions of cells. For each division, a cell must follow certain steps, most of which are promoted by proteins called cyclins.
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the work revealed that an enzyme called AMBRA1 labels a key class of cyclins for destruction by cellular machines that break down proteins. The work finds that the enzyme’s control of cyclins is essential for proper cell growth during embryonic development, and that its malfunction causes lethal cell overgrowth. Moreover, the study further suggests that an existing drug class may be able to reverse such defects in the future.
As in a developing fetus, restraints on cell division are central to the prevention of abnormal, aggressive growth seen in cancers, and the new study finds that cells have evolved to use AMBRA1 to defend against it.
“Our study clarifies basic features of human cells, provides insights into cancer biology, and opens new research avenues into potential treatments,” says corresponding study author Michele Pagano, MD, chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Langone Health, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
New Tumor Suppressor
The current study addresses the three D-type cyclins, the subset that must link up with enzymes called cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs), specifically CDK4 and CDK6, if cells are to divide. The authors found that AMBRA1, as a ligase, attaches molecular tags to all three D-type cyclins, labeling them for destruction. Previously proposed mechanisms for how D-type cyclins are eliminated by the cell could not be reproduced by the scientific community. Thus, prior to the new study, a central regulator of D-type cyclins had remained elusive for a quarter of a century, Pagano says.
The new work also revealed the role of AMBRA1 in development. Mice lacking the AMBRA1 gene, which codes for the AMBRA1 enzyme, developed uncontrolled, lethal tissue growth that distorted the developing brain and spinal cord. The researchers also found for the first time that treating with a CDK4/6 inhibitor pregnant mice carrying embryos without the AMBRA1 gene reduced these neuronal abnormalities.
In terms of cancer, the authors analyzed patient databases to conclude that those with lower-than-normal expression of AMBRA1 were less likely to survive diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, the most common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the United States. The causes of lower expression of AMBRA1 may include random changes that delete the gene or make its encoded instructions harder to read.
To confirm the role of AMBRA1 as a tumor suppressor, the researchers monitored cancer cell growth in mouse models of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, in collaboration with study author Luca Busino, PhD, at the University of Pennsylvania. When human B-cell lymphoma cells were transplanted into mice, for instance, tumors without the AMBRA1 gene grew up to three times faster than those with the gene. While the NYU Langone-led study looked at diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, two other studies led by Stanford University and the Danish Cancer Society Research Center, published in the same issue of Nature, found missing or disabled AMBRA1 to be a key factor in lung cancer.
Further, D-type cyclins are known to assemble with CDK4 and CDK6 into enzymes that encourage both normal and abnormal cell growth. Drugs that inhibit CDK4 and CDK6 have been FDA-approved in recent years as cancer therapies, but some patients have a weaker response to the drugs. Providing insight into this problem, the current team found that lymphomas lacking AMBRA1 are less sensitive to CDK4/6 inhibitors. When the AMBRA1 gene is missing, levels of D-type cyclins become high enough to form complexes with another CDK (CDK2), which, due to its structure, cannot be inactivated by CDK4/6 inhibitors.
“This makes AMBRA1 a potential marker for the selection of patients best suited for CDK4/6 inhibitor therapy,” says first author Daniele Simoneschi, PhD, a senior research coordinator in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Langone Health. As a next step, he says the team plans to study the effect of combining CDK4/6 inhibitors with CDK2 inhibitors in tumors with low AMBRA1, as well as in those with mutations in D-type cyclins that make them insensitive to AMBRA1.

The human genome contains the instructions to make tens of thousands of proteins. Each protein folds into a precise shape — and biologists are taught that defined shape dictates the protein’s destined function. Tens of thousands of singular shapes drive the tens of thousands of needed functions.
In a new Cell Reports study, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology demonstrate how Ebola virus has found a different way to get things done. The virus encodes only eight proteins but requires dozens of functions in its lifecycle. The new study shows how one of Ebola virus’s key proteins, VP40, uses molecular triggers in the human cell to transform itself into different tools for different jobs.
“We’re all taught that proteins have ‘a’ structure,” says study co-leader Erica Ollmann Saphire, Ph.D., professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) and member of the LJI Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research. “Ebola virus’s VP40 protein, however, changes itself into different structures at different times, depending on the function needed.”
VP40 is the protein that gives Ebola virus its distinctive string-like shape. Saphire’s previous studies showed that VP40 can take on a two-molecule, butterfly-shaped “dimer” or an eight-molecule, wreath-like “octamer” form.
There are dramatic rearrangements of the protein as it transforms from one to the other. The dimer is what physically constructs new viruses that emerge and release from infected cells. The octamer functions only inside the infected cell, in a controlling role, directing other steps of the viral life cycle.
The new study shows exactly what triggers these structural changes. The researchers found that VP40 senses and relies on particular human mRNA to make the transformation from the dimer to octamer.

Food waste and obesity are major problems in developed countries. They are both caused by an overabundance of food, but strategies to reduce one can inadvertently increase the other. A broader perspective can help identify ways to limit food waste while also promoting healthy nutrition, two University of Illinois researchers suggest.
“You can reduce food waste by obtaining less or eating more. Our concern was that if people are reducing waste by eating more, what does that mean for nutrition? And how do we think about these tradeoffs in a way that promotes both good nutrition outcomes and good food waste outcomes? Public policies have generally focused on either obesity or food waste, but rarely considered them together, says Brenna Ellison, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) at U of I.
Ellison and Melissa Pflugh Prescott, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition (FSHN) at U of I, discuss a systems approach to addressing food waste and nutrition in a new paper, published in Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
Food waste refers to the loss of edible food that is not consumed for various reasons. It occurs at all levels of the supply chain, from farm to transportation, processing, retail, food service, and consumer levels.
Food waste is often calculated by weight or by calories, Ellison explains. If you calculate by weight, dairy products, vegetables, grain products, and fruit account for the majority of food loss. But when converted to calories, added fats and oils, grain products, and added sugars and sweeteners are the top categories for food waste. Encouraging increased consumption of those foods could have negative health consequences, she notes.
In their paper, Ellison and Prescott provide strategies for reducing food waste in a variety of settings, including food service, retail, schools, and homes.

Patients who have preexisting respiratory conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and live in areas with high levels of air pollution have a greater chance of hospitalization if they contract COVID-19, says a University of Cincinnati researcher.
Angelico Mendy, MD, PhD, assistant professor of environmental and public health sciences, at the UC College of Medicine, looked at the health outcomes and backgrounds of 1,128 COVID-19 patients at UC Health, the UC-affiliated health care system in Greater Cincinnati.
Mendy led a team of researchers in an individual-level study which used a statistical model to evaluate the association between long-term exposure to particulate matter less or equal to 2.5 micrometers — it refers to a mixture of tiny particles and droplets in the air that are two-and-one half microns or less in width — and hospitalizations for COVID-19. Medical records allowed researchers to use patients’ zip codes for estimating their particulate exposure over a 10-year period.
“Particulate matter is very small, small enough to be inhaled deep into the lungs, they cross into the blood and also affect other organ systems,” says Mendy. “Air pollution as a result of emissions from automobiles, factories or other sources is a generator of particulate matter.”
“Our study didn’t find any correlation between severity of COVID-19 and particulate matter in general, but we found something for people who had asthma and COPD,” says Mendy. “People who have preexisting asthma and COPD, when they are exposed to higher levels of particulate matter, they are more likely to have severe COVID-19, severe enough to be hospitalized.”
Researchers found that a one-unit increase in particulate matter 2.5 was associated with a 60% higher chance of hospitalization for COVID-19 patients with pre-existing respiratory disease. For patients without respiratory disease, no association was observed.
The study’s findings were published online in the scholarly journal Respiratory Medicine.
It is the first study to look at an association between air pollution, COVID-19 and individual patients, says Mendy. A study co-author, Xiao Wu, PhD, in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University, led a study last year looking at air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States.
“This study may have policy implications such as reducing particulate exposure,” says Mendy. “Many people want to have more clean energy and reduced emissions into the atmosphere.”
Mendy says the findings of his pilot study are preliminary and he hopes to use it to generate support for a larger more comprehensive study of patients. The UC Health patients in the study were diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 13, 2020 and July 5, 2020. The dataset was stripped of all Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) identifiers. The median age for patients was 46 and 96.6% were residents of Ohio with the remaining 3.4% coming from Kentucky, Indiana, New York, South Carolina, West Virginia and Iowa.
Other study co-authors from UC include Jason Keller, a researcher in the Department of Bioinformatics; Cecily Fassler, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences; Senu Apewokin, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine; Tesfaye Mersha, an associate professor pediatrics; and Changchun Xie, PhD, and Susan Pinney, PhD, both professors in the Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences.
Funding for the study included various grants from the National Institutes of Health supporting researchers.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Cincinnati. Original written by Cedric Ricks. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Former cabinet minister Owen Paterson has spoken about the loss of his wife, Rose, who took her own life last year.She was found in woodland near their home in Shropshire, in June.Mr Paterson has launched a suicide prevention charity in her name and says it is important to talk about the issue more.Speaking to BBC Woman’s Hour, Mr Paterson revealed he and his family has been left in “anguish and misery”.Listen to the full episode here.

Denmark on Wednesday became the first country to plan to permanently stop administering the AstraZeneca vaccine, a month after suspending its use following reports that a small number of recipients had developed a rare but serious blood-clotting disorder.The director general of the country’s health authority, Soeren Brostroem, said Denmark was able to halt use of the vaccine because it had the pandemic under control and could rely on two other vaccines, from Pfizer and Moderna.The Danish announcement is another setback for the AstraZeneca shot, which is easy to store and relatively cheap, and was expected to be the foundation of vaccination campaigns around the world.The country initially suspended the use of the vaccine on March 11, along with Iceland and Norway. Several other European countries, including France, Germany and Italy, followed suit last month.The European Union’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, later recommended that countries keep using the vaccine, saying its benefits far outweighed any potential risks for most people.Last week, though, the European regulator listed blood clots as a potential very rare side effect of the vaccine.Several countries that had paused and restarted use of the vaccine have since said they would stop using it in younger people. Britain, which has administered around 20 million AstraZeneca doses, said it would offer alternative vaccines to people under 30.“Based on the scientific findings, our overall assessment is there is a real risk of severe side effects associated with using the Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca,” Dr. Brostroem, the Danish health official, said in a statement. “We have, therefore, decided to remove the vaccine from our vaccination program.”“If Denmark were in a completely different situation and in the midst of a violent third outbreak, for example, and a health care system under pressure,” he added, “then I would not hesitate to use the vaccine, even if there were rare but severe complications associated with using it.”Danish health officials said that they might reintroduce the AstraZeneca vaccine “if the situation changes.”Public health officials have warned that pausing administration of vaccines like AstraZeneca’s or Johnson & Johnson’s could do more harm than good. They note that among seven million people vaccinated with the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States, six women had developed the rare blood clots — fewer than one in one million. It is not yet known whether the vaccine had anything to do with the clots, but even if it did, the risk is smaller than that of getting struck by lightning in a given year (one in 500,000).Denmark, which has a population of 5.8 million, has managed to contain the pandemic better than its neighbor Sweden or many other European countries. As of Wednesday, Denmark had recorded 2,447 Covid-related deaths.Almost one million people in the country have received at least a first dose of a vaccine, 77 percent of them the one from Pfizer, according to Denmark’s Serum Institute. Around 15 percent received a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine before the authorities suspended its use last month, and the remaining 8 percent received the Moderna vaccine.The country’s health authorities said that people who received a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine would be offered a different vaccine for their second dose.Jasmina Nielsen