Publisher Health

Smelling a familiar scent can help depressed individuals recall specific autobiographical memories and potentially assist in their recovery, discovered a team of University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers and UPMC social workers in a study published today in JAMA Network Open.
The study showed that scents are more effective than words at cueing up a memory of a specific event and could even be used in the clinical setting to help depressed individuals get out of the negative thought cycles and rewire thought patterns, aiding faster and smoother healing.
Early in her career, Dr. Kymberly Young, a neuroscience researcher who studies autobiographical memories, realized that engaging the amygdala — the reptilian brain that controls not only the ‘fight or flight’ responses but also directs attention and focus to important events — helps with memory recall. She also knew of extensive evidence that people with depression have a hard time recalling specific autobiographical memories and that, in healthy individuals, odors trigger memories that feel vivid and ‘real’, likely because they directly engage the amygdala through nerve connections from the olfactory bulb.
“It was surprising to me that nobody thought to look at memory recall in depressed individuals using odor cues before,” said Young, senior author of the study and associate professor of psychiatry at Pitt.
So, she decided to test whether engaging the amygdala could help depressed individuals access their memories more effectively. And rather than using costly and often inaccessible brain scanner tests, she decided to go much more low-tech.
In this study, Young presented study participants with a series of opaque glass vials containing potent familiar scents — from oranges and ground coffee to shoe polish, and even Vicks VapoRub.
After asking participants to smell the vial, Young asked them to recall a specific memory, no matter good or bad.

Young was surprised to discover that memory recall was stronger in depressed individuals who received odor cues as opposed to word cues. Those who received odor cues were more likely to recall a memory of a specific event (for example, that they went to a coffee shop last Friday) than general memories (that they have been to coffee shops before). Memories spurred by odors were also a lot more vivid and felt more immersive and real. Excitingly, Young said, even though she did not direct participants to specifically recall positive memories, her results point out that participants were more likely to remember positive events.
Young is getting ready to start more technologically advanced studies using a brain scanner to prove that scents help engage the amygdala of depressed individuals more effectively than word cues, but in the meantime, she is excited about the progress already made.
“If we improve memory, we can improve problem solving, emotion regulation and other functional problems that depressed individuals often experience,” Young said.
Other authors of the study are Emily Leiker, Ph.D., Emma Riley, B.S., Scott Barb, L.S.W., Sair Lazzaro, B. Phil., Laurie Compere, Ph.D., Carolyn Webb, M.S., and Gia Canovali, L.S.W., all of Pitt and UPMC.

Americans may be advised that it’s safe to return to regular routines after one day without a fever.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering loosening its recommendations regarding how long people should isolate after testing positive for the coronavirus, another reflection of changing attitudes and norms as the pandemic recedes.Under the proposed guidelines, Americans would no longer be advised to isolate for five days before returning to work or school. Instead, they might return to their routines if they have been fever free for at least 24 hours without medication, the same standard applied to the influenza and respiratory syncytial viruses.The proposal would align the C.D.C.’s advice with revised isolation recommendations in Oregon and California. The shift was reported earlier by The Washington Post, but it is still under consideration, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.The C.D.C. last changed its policy on isolation in late 2021, when it scaled down the recommended period to five days from 10. If adopted, the new approach would signal that Covid has taken a place alongside other routine respiratory infections.But by focusing on the isolation policy for Covid, for example, the agency is squandering an opportunity to foster better public health policies, several experts said.“From a long-term public health perspective, I think this sets really an unfortunate precedent,” said Dr. Syra Madad, senior director of the special pathogens program at NYC Health + Hospitals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Published12 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesMore than 100 women who had eggs and embryos frozen at a leading clinic have been told they may have been damaged due to a fault in the freezing process.The clinic at Guy’s Hospital in London was warned a year ago about an issue with a solution used, but patients have only recently been told.The fertility regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), is investigating.Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTHT) said it had apologised.It is believed that many of the patients affected have had cancer treatment since having their eggs or embryos frozen, which may have left them infertile. This means they now may not be able to conceive with their own eggs.The HFEA said a safety notice about the faulty freezing solution was issued in February 2023 and that all clinics were notified.It said the investigation at Guy’s and St Thomas’ assisted conception unit was “ongoing” and that it would take “any further action required”.Roger Cutting, the HFEA’s director of compliance, said: “We appreciate any incident may be concerning to patients. “We advise patients to contact their own clinic to raise any queries or concerns as the clinic is best placed to advise individuals on how they may, or may not have been, affected.”The HFEA said the faulty liquid may have been sent to other UK clinics, but it was not aware of any other cases in which patients have been affected.GSTHT said the fault was not evident at the time the eggs and embryos were frozen.A spokesperson said: “We have contacted all of those affected and apologised for the delay in doing so and any distress this may have caused. “We are supporting those who may have been impacted, including through our counselling service, and would urge anyone with concerns to speak to us directly via the dedicated phoneline we have set up.”

This is a love story: During the spring of 2008, long before they produced evidence of humanity’s first recorded kiss, Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll clasped lips in their first good-night snog. They met a week earlier at a pub near the University of Copenhagen, where both were undergraduates. “I had asked my cousin if he knew any nice single guys with long hair and long beards,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “And he said, ‘Sure, I’ll introduce you to one.’”Dr. Arboll, in turn, had been looking for a partner that shared his interest in Assyriology, the study of Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them. “Not many people know what an Assyriologist actually does,” he told her.“I do,” said Dr. Rasmussen, who had taken some of the same classes.Dr. Arboll, now a professor of Assyriology at the university, said, “When I heard that, I knew she was a keeper.”Three years later they wed. Dr. Rasmussen is now an ecologist at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Aalborg University in Denmark.One night over dinner in 2022, the couple discussed — as scientists in love do — a new genetic study that linked modern herpes variants to mouth-to-mouth kissing in the Bronze Age, roughly 3300 B.C. to 1200 B.C. In the paper’s supplementary materials, a brief history of kissing pinpointed South Asia as the place of origin and traced the first literary buss to 1500 B.C., when Vedic Sanskrit manuscripts were being transcribed from oral history.The researcher, at the University of Cambridge, suggested that the custom — a lip-kissing precursor that involved rubbing and pressing noses together — developed into hardcore smooching. She noted that by 300 B.C. — about when the Indian how-to sex manual, the Kama Sutra, was published — kissing had spread to the Mediterranean with the return of Alexander the Great’s troops from Northern India.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Published25 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Larry WylesBy Malcolm PriorBBC News rural affairs producer​A chemical manufacturer facing legal action over alleged links between its pesticide and Parkinson’s Disease ignored key health records in studies.Syngenta insists there is no evidence of a Parkinson’s link to the toxic Paraquat, which is made in the UK.But the BBC has seen legal documents in which it admits it only looked at death certificates, rather than the medical records, of workers at its Widnes site.Syngenta is fighting legal action by thousands of farmers in the US.In court documents, the company’s chief medical officer acknowledged it did not look at whether any living former workers had Parkinson’s Disease. Instead it only looked at causes of death, even though experts say the condition was underreported on death certificates at the time.Charity Parkinson’s UK is now calling for “more robust and independent research” into any link between pesticides, including Paraquat, and Parkinson’s.Image source, Larry WylesThe pesticide has not been authorised for use in the UK since 2007 but it is still made at Syngenta’s plant in Huddersfield and exported to countries such as Japan, Australia and the US.Eighty-year-old former farmer Larry Wyles, from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, is one of the plaintiffs with Parkinson’s Disease in the US legal action.Mr Wyles used the pesticide on his own farm for more than two decades but also as a child on his father’s farm. “Back in those days we did not have very good machinery and I remember having to clean out the nozzles on the sprayer,” he told the BBC.”I would blow the nozzles and the Paraquat would get on my hand and all over my clothes. I didn’t know at the time what it was doing to me, neither did my father.”Image source, Larry WylesMr Wyles was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2002, which he says affects “every facet of my life. It’s a horrible disease.””It’s so consuming and it’s done my life in as far as my relationship with my wife. It’s tough because I am needy and I was never needy. I was always very independent and today I need help with most everything,” he explained.He told the BBC that Syngenta “ought to be banned from making Paraquat ever again. They should be told to take it off the shelves today. I was never told how detrimental it would be to my health.”That was a call backed by Julie Plumley, who runs a care farm in Dorset and whose late father was a farmer who used Paraquat and later had Parkinson’s Disease. She said of how the Syngenta study was carried out: “In my eyes they are trying to protect the company.”Syngenta’s study of workers involved in the manufacture of Paraquat at its former Widnes site rejected any link with the disease in 2011 and again in 2021 by looking at causes of death recorded on death certificates.The company has always said it had carried out “long-term monitoring” of workers at the site which showed “no increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease in the workforce who manufactured Paraquat.”The research has become a key part of the company’s defence in the ongoing legal action taken by US farm workers against the manufacturer.But, in the US litigation, the company’s chief medical officer, Dr Clive Campbell, who co-authored the research, has acknowledged it never looked at the health records of those workers still alive, which it had access to.Image source, Getty ImagesExperts say Parkinson’s Disease is underreported on death certificates and would not show the true numbers affected.The legal papers from the US litigation also show the research was rejected by three different academic journals because it did not look at the health of living workers.The documents further illustrate that the company already knew in 2009 that Parkinson’s was not mentioned in high numbers on death certificates data they already held before it decided to conduct the wider mortality study.Syngenta told the BBC that it had “considered conducting a morbidity study of the Paraquat manufacturing workforce and consulted with expert external epidemiologists to solicit their views.”They advised Syngenta that the cohort of Paraquat manufacturing workers was too small, especially when considering the anticipated participation rate, for a morbidity study to yield informative results.” It added that it did not have access to the “comprehensive medical records of the cohort – only the occupational health records of those who attended skin clinics”. While the company acknowledged that in the 2011 and 2021 publications of the Widnes study not all cases of Parkinson’s were always listed on death certificates, it said “the same would be true of the general population data which were used as a comparator in the study”. They added that the publications were “only two among more than 1,200 safety studies conducted in the 60 years since Paraquat was first registered, both by Syngenta and independent researchers.”In a statement provided to the BBC, it said: “Despite decades of investigation and myriad epidemiological and laboratory studies, no scientist or doctor has ever concluded in a peer-reviewed scientific analysis that Paraquat causes Parkinson’s.”Image source, RadboudumcThe US regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is facing a legal challenge to its approval of Paraquat, said that its current review of the herbicide’s use was looking at what measures might be needed to mitigate any health risks.Last month, its draft report said the benefits of using Paraquat outweighed the health risks but that it had still to look at 90 submissions, including scientific studies, concerning the risks of Parkinson’s.Of the Syngenta study, the EPA told the BBC: “For an outcome like Parkinson’s Disease, mortality is unlikely to be a reliable indicator for evaluating an association.”Leading expert Professor Bas Bloem, director of the Radboudumc Center of Expertise for Parkinson & Movement Disorders in the Netherlands, insisted that “scientists across the globe are convinced Paraquat is a cause of Parkinson’s.”He pointed to the most recent epidemiological study – carried out by UCLA’s Department of Neurology and published this month – to find that Paraquat exposure increases the risk of Parkinson’s Disease. He said: “The arguments against Paraquat are piling up.” ‘More robust research’Of Syngenta’s own workers mortality study, he said: “The fact that it is authored by Syngenta lowers the value of this publication. There are methodological issues. It is not heavyweight evidence at all.”Without a careful clinical analysis, just using mortality as a crude outcome has very limited value.”Independent medical experts in the UK have also told the BBC that Parkinson’s Disease would have been underreported in death certificates and a full survey of living workers’ health and medical records would have been more useful.One of those experts is Professor Peter Hobson, a clinical healthcare scientist who carried out a 2018 study of whether death certificates accurately recorded Parkinson’s Disease.He said that “employing death certificates alone to determine increased risk of developing any neurological condition is very weak and will always have questionable reliability.”Because of the weak methodology used, he said he did not believe “anyone with even a basic understanding of epidemiology would support the company’s claim that there is no increased risk of developing Parkinson’s.”Professor David Dexter, director of research at Parkinson’s UK, said that, while evidence was not yet strong enough to prove pesticides, including Paraquat, directly cause Parkinson’s, international studies “overall suggest that exposure to pesticides may increase risk of the condition”. “We need more robust and independent research… including studies looking at occupational exposure, to help us understand the role these chemicals may play in the development of the condition,” he added.Larry Gifford, president of US campaign group PD Avengers, said: “Syngenta seems more interested in safeguarding long-term commercial interests than upholding scientific rigor.”A decade passing between publications without actively monitoring Parkinson’s cases among the living workforce? It goes beyond being noteworthy; it’s outright outrageous.”Syngenta told the BBC that it “is and has always been devoted to pursuing and implementing the best available science to ensure the safety of users and farmers.”Syngenta has spent millions of dollars over decades to stay abreast of the independent scientific literature related to the safety of Paraquat and has conducted hundreds of studies evaluating the safety of Paraquat.”They added that “it is important to note that Paraquat is safe when used as directed.”More on this storyUK farmers call for toxic weedkiller banPublished1 April 2022UK ‘has double standards’ on banned pesticidesPublished10 September 2020

Pregnant women with diabetes or high blood pressure have children who are more likely to develop signs of heart trouble years later, new research finds. Women who develop high blood pressure or diabetes in the course of pregnancy are more likely to give birth to children who develop conditions that may compromise their own heart health at a young age, scientists reported on Monday.By the time they are 12 years old, these children are more likely to be overweight or to be diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar, compared with children whose mothers had complication-free pregnancies.The research underscores the strong association between healthy pregnancies and child health, though the study stops short of proving a cause-and-effect relationship. The conclusions also offer support for the “fetal origins of adult disease” hypothesis, which suggests that many chronic conditions may have roots in fetal adaptations to the uterine environment.The findings come from a government-supported study that has followed an international cohort of 3,300 mother-and-child pairs for over a decade. The research was presented at the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine’s annual pregnancy meeting in National Harbor, Md. An abstract was published in a supplement to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in January.“It sets up a potentially vicious cycle for the children, where the child is at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, and then when these girls become women and get pregnant themselves, they’re already more likely to have more severe hypertension and diabetes in pregnancy,” said Dr. Kartik K. Venkatesh, the paper’s first author, an obstetrician and perinatal epidemiologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus.The findings indicate the urgency of preventive care and early intervention, both during pregnancy and in early childhood, in order to stop the cycle, he added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

You can mend a broken heart this valentine’s day now that researchers invented a new hydrogel that can be used to heal damaged heart tissue and improve cancer treatments.
University of Waterloo chemical engineering researcher Dr. Elisabeth Prince teamed up with researchers from the University of Toronto and Duke University to design the synthetic material made using cellulose nanocrystals, which are derived from wood pulp. The material is engineered to replicate the fibrous nanostructures and properties of human tissues, thereby recreating its unique biomechanical properties.
“Cancer is a diverse disease and two patients with the same type of cancer will often respond to the same treatment in very different ways,” Prince said. “Tumour organoids are essentially a miniaturized version of an individual patient’s tumour that can be used for drug testing, which could allow researchers to develop personalized therapies for a specific patient.”
As director of the Prince Polymer Materials Lab, Prince designs synthetic biomimetic hydrogels for biomedical applications. The hydrogels have a nanofibrous architecture with large pores for nutrient and waste transport, which affect mechanical properties and cell interaction.
Prince, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering, utilized these human-tissue mimetic hydrogels to promote the growth of small-scale tumour replicas derived from donated tumour tissue.
She aims to test the effectiveness of cancer treatments on the mini-tumour organoids before administering the treatment to patients, potentially allowing for personalized cancer therapies. This research was conducted alongside Professor David Cescon at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center.
Prince’s research group at Waterloo is developing similar biomimetic hydrogels to be injectable for drug delivery and regenerative medical applications as Waterloo researchers continue to lead health innovation in Canada.

Her research aims to use injected filamentous hydrogel material to regrow heart tissue damaged after a heart attack. She used nanofibers as a scaffolding for the regrowth and healing of damaged heart tissue.
“We are building on the work that I started during my PhD to design human-tissue mimetic hydrogels that can be injected into the human body to deliver therapeutics and repair the damage caused to the heart when a patient suffers a heart attack,” Prince said.
Prince’s research is unique as most gels currently used in tissue engineering or 3D cell culture don’t possess this nanofibrous architecture. Prince’s group uses nanoparticles and polymers as building blocks for materials and develops chemistry for nanostructures that accurately mimic human tissues.
The next step in Prince’s research is to use conductive nanoparticles to make electrically conductive nanofibrous gels that can be used to heal heart and skeletal muscle tissue.
The research was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The capacity of intestinal stem cells to maintain cellular balance in the gut decreases upon ageing. Researchers at the University of Helsinki have discovered a new mechanism of action between the nutrient adaptation of intestinal stem cells and ageing. The finding may make a difference when seeking ways to maintain the functional capacity of the ageing gut.
The cellular balance of the intestine is carefully regulated, and it is influenced, among other things, by nutrition: ample nutrition increases the total number of cells in the gut, whereas fasting decreases their number. The relative number of different types of cells also changes according to nutrient status. The questions of how the nutrition status of the gut controls stem cell division and differentiation, and how the nutrient adaptation of stem cells changes as during ageing have not been comprehensively answered. Nutrient adaptation refers to the way in which nutrients guide cell function.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki identified a new regulatory mechanism that directs the differentiation of intestinal stem cells under a changing nutrient conditions. Cell signalling activated by nutrients increases the size of stem cells in the fruit fly intestine. The size of the stem cells, in turn, controls the cell type into which the stem cells differentiate. For stem cell function, flexible regulation of their size is essential. In other words, the size of the cells dynamically increases or decreases, depending on the dietary conditions. Such flexibility enables stem cells to differentiate in accordance with the prevailing nutrient status. By utilising intestine-wide cell imaging, the researchers found that the nutrient adaptation of stem cell size and the resulting differentiation vary in different regions of the gut.
“Our observations demonstrate that the regulation of intestinal stem cells is much more region-specific than previously understood. This may be relevant to, for example, how we think about the pathogenetic mechanisms of intestinal diseases,” says Jaakko Mattila, the corresponding author of the research article from the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki.
Intermittent fasting may benefit intestinal stem cells
The researchers also observed that the ability of intestinal stem cells to react to a changing nutrient status is greatly reduced in older animals. They also found that, in older animals, stem cells are in a state where they are constantly large in size, which restricts their ability to differentiate. With ageing, flexible regulation of stem cell size was markedly better preserved in animals that had been kept under diet regime that is known as intermittent fasting. In the past, intermittent fasting has been shown to prolong the lifespan of animals, and the results now obtained indicate that the improved preservation of stem cell function may underlie this prolongation.
According to the researchers, the mechanisms associated with the functioning, nutrient adaptation and ageing of human and fruit fly stem cells are fairly similar.
“We believe that these findings have a broader significance towards understanding how to slow down the loss of tissue function caused by ageing by controlling the nutrient adaptation of stem cells. However, more information is needed on the effect of the mechanism on human intestinal stem cells. Our work on the nutrient adaptation of stem cells continues,” says Professor Ville Hietakangas from the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki.

Over 100,000 individuals in the United States are currently in need of organ transplants. The demand for organs, such as hearts, kidneys, and livers, far exceeds the available supply and people sometimes wait years to receive a donated organ. Approximately 6,000 Americans die while waiting each year.
Tissue engineering to create lab-grown organs and tissues aims to close the gap between the availability of organs and the demand for transplants. But one big challenge in tissue engineering is creating blood vessel networks in artificial organs that work like natural ones, from tiny capillaries to larger arteries. Traditional artificial blood vessel designs often don’t mimic the natural design needed to function properly in the body.
However, new research shows the possibility of using 3D ice printing to help create structures that resemble blood vessels in the body. Feimo Yang, a graduate student in the labs of Philip LeDuc and Burak Ozdoganlar at Carnegie Mellon University, will present their research at the 68th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, to be held February 10 — 14, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
3D ice printing generally involves adding a stream of water to a very cold surface. “What makes our method different from other kinds of 3D printing is that instead of letting the water completely freeze while we’re printing, we let it maintain a liquid phase on top. This continuous process, which is what we call freeform, helps us to get a very smooth structure. We don’t have a layering effect typical with many 3D printing,” Yang explained.
They also used heavy water, a form of water where the hydrogen atoms are replaced by deuterium, which gives the water a higher freezing point, and helps create the smooth structure.
These 3D-printed ice templates are then embedded in a gelatin material, GelMA. When exposed to UV light, the gelatin hardens, and the ice melts away, leaving behind realistic blood vessel channels.
The researchers successfully demonstrated that they could introduce endothelial cells, like those in blood vessels, into the fabricated blood vessels. The cells survived on the gelatin for up to two weeks. (In the future, they intend to culture those cells for a longer duration.)
In addition to potential use for organ transplant, Yang points out that 3D printed blood vessels could be used for testing the effects of drugs on blood vessels. They could also be coated with a patient’s own cells to see how the cells respond to a drug treatment before giving it to the patient.
This innovative approach could be a significant step forward in creating complex, lifelike blood vessel networks for use in tissue engineering.

Many premature infants need mechanical ventilation to breathe. However, prolonged ventilation can lead to problems like respiratory diseases or ventilation-induced injury.
Jonas Naumann and Mareike Zink study the physics of mechanical stress from ventilation at Leipzig University, in Leipzig, Germany and discovered some of the mechanisms that explain why premature lungs are especially sensitive to stress. Naumann will present their research at the 68th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, to be held February 10 — 14, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
When you breathe normally, your diaphragm and the muscles between ribs create a negative pressure inside the lung. “But when you are undergoing mechanical ventilation, you are creating hydrostatic overpressure. And the forces which are acting during mechanical ventilation are completely different than during normal breathing. And this is probably causing some kind of damage to the cells,” Zink explained.
Using lung tissue from fetal and adult rats, the researchers together with collaborators from the Division of Neonatology, University Clinic Leipzig, used varying amounts of tension with rest phases in between, similar to the actions that occur within the lung during mechanical ventilation. Even with a little pressure, the premature rat lung tissue showed characteristics of being both elastic and viscous. This means the lung tissue changed its shape and responded to stress in a way that wasn’t normal. Moreover, they found that “the fetal lung is much stiffer than the adult lung under deformation,” said Naumann.
To determine whether these tension-related changes in the tissue led to alterations in sodium transport, which is important for removing the water from the lungs that is present at birth, the team used electrophysiology to measure the movement of ions across a layer of premature lung cells. They found that changes in pressure affected the activity of two channels involved in sodium transport — the epithelial sodium channel and the sodium-potassium ion pump in the cells of lung alveoli. This disruption in the normal function of these transporters could explain why mechanical ventilation has negative effects on the infant’s lungs.
“This may be the reason why lung fluid cannot get absorbed that well into the circulation after the preterm births,” Naumann explained. He hopes that there will be more research about what ventilator settings might lead to the best outcomes for preemies. Naumann points out that “small pressure gradients can have such a big impact on the lung mechanics.”
The next phase of their research will be exploring how the lung tissue’s extracellular matrix, the scaffolding and the glue that holds cells together, plays a role in mechanical ventilation. By better understanding how the premature lung responds to pressure, they hope that future studies improve therapies for babies born early.