Publisher Health

Over the last decades, air pollution emissions have decreased substantially; however, the magnitude of the change varies by demographics, according to a new study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The results indicate there are racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in air pollution emissions reductions, particularly in the industry and energy generation sectors. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
The research provides a national investigation of air pollution emission changes in the 40 years following the enactment of the Clean Air Act (CAA). Until now, studies have primarily focused on evaluating air pollution disparities at a single time point, focusing on pollutant concentrations instead of emissions. A focus on emissions, however, has more direct implications for regulations and policies. In this study, the researchers used county-level data to evaluate racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in air pollution emissions changes in the contiguous U.S. from 1970 to 2010.
“The analyses provide insight on the socio-demographic characteristics of counties that have experienced disproportionate decreases in air pollution emissions over the last forty years,” said Yanelli Nunez, PhD, the study’s first author, who is a scientist in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and affiliated with PSE Healthy Energy. Additionally, by analyzing air pollution emissions, the researchers identified specific pollution source sectors that are potentially important contributors to air pollution exposure disparities.
Nunez and colleagues leveraged air pollution emissions data from the Global Burden of Disease Major Air Pollution Sources inventory to analyze air pollutant emissions from six pollution source sectors: industry (sulfur dioxide), energy (sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides), agriculture (ammonia), on-road transportation (nitrogen oxides), commercial (nitrogen oxides), and residential (particles of organic carbon).
On average, national U.S. air pollution emissions declined substantially from 1970 to 2010 from all source sectors the researchers considered except for ammonia emissions from agriculture and organic carbon particle emissions from the residential sector, which the researchers indicate is primarily from using solid biofuels for indoor heating. The most pronounced emission decreases were observed for sulfur dioxidefrom industrial and energy generation activities. Nitrogen oxide emissions from transportation, commercial activities, and energy generation decreased moderately.
Despite the overall downward trends for most pollutants, the researchers found that certain populations experienced relatively smaller reductions or even increases in air pollution emissions. For instance, an increase in a county’s average Hispanic or Indian American population percentage resulted in a relative increase in sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and ammonia emissions from the industry, energy generation, and agriculture sectors, respectively. Additionally, an increase in the county median family income was linked with an increase in the magnitude of emissions reductions in every pollution source sector the researchers analyzed, except agriculture.
“Air pollution emissions do not perfectly capture population air pollution exposure, and we also know that neighborhood-level air pollution inequities are common, which we were not able to analyze in this study given the data at hand,” noted Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, ScD, associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School, and senior author. “In this study, we provide information about potential racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in air pollution reductions nationwide from major air pollution sources, which can inform regulators and complement local-level analysis.”
“Policies specifically targeting reductions in overburdened populations could support more just reductions in air pollution and reduce disparities in air pollution exposure,” observed Dr. Nunez. “This is an important lesson gained from 53 years of Clean Air Act implementation, which is particularly relevant as we develop policies to transition to renewable energy sources, which will have a collateral impact on air quality and, as a result, on public health.”
Co-authors are Jaime Benavides, Jenni A. Shearston, Misbath Daouda, and Jeff Goldsmith, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; Joan Casey, Columbia Mailman School and the University of Washington; Elena Krieger, PSE Healthy Energy; Lucas R.F. Henneman, George Mason University; and Erin McDuffie, University of Washington.
The study was supported by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, (P30 ES009089, R01 ES030616, R01 ES028805 and T32 ES007322), The Thomas F. and Kate Miller Jeffress Memorial Trust, Bank of America; and Health Effects Institute (HEI, R-82811201).

A new study by physicists and neuroscientists from the University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale describes how connectivity among neurons comes about through general principles of networking and self-organization, rather than the biological features of an individual organism.
The research, published on January 17, 2024 in Nature Physics, accurately describes neuronal connectivity in a variety of model organisms and could apply to non-biological networks like social interactions as well.
“When you’re building simple models to explain biological data, you expect to get a good rough cut that fits some but not all scenarios,” said Stephanie Palmer, PhD, Associate Professor of Physics and Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago and senior author of the paper. “You don’t expect it to work as well when you dig into the minutiae, but when we did that here, it ended up explaining things in a way that was really satisfying.”
Understanding how neurons connect
Neurons form an intricate web of connections between synapses to communicate and interact with each other. While the vast number of connections may seem random, networks of brain cells tend to be dominated by a small number of connections that are much stronger than most.
This “heavy-tailed” distribution of connections (so-called because of the way it looks when plotted on a graph) forms the backbone of circuitry that allows organisms to think, learn, communicate and move. Despite the importance of these strong connections, scientists were unsure if this heavy-tailed pattern arises because of biological processes specific to different organisms, or due to basic principles of network organization.
To answer these questions, Palmer and Christopher Lynn, PhD, Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University, and Caroline Holmes, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, analyzed connectomes, or maps of brain cell connections. The connectome data came from several different classic lab animals, including fruit flies, roundworms, marine worms and the mouse retina.

To understand how neurons form connections to one another, they developed a model based on Hebbian dynamics, a term coined by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949 that essentially says, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This means the more two neurons activate together, the stronger their connection becomes.
Across the board, the researchers found these Hebbian dynamics produce “heavy-tailed” connection strengths just like they saw in the different organisms. The results indicate that this kind of organization arises from general principles of networking, rather than something specific to the biology of fruit flies, mice, or worms.
The model also provided an unexpected explanation for another networking phenomenon called clustering, which describes the tendency of cells to link with other cells via connections they share. A good example of clustering occurs in social situations. If one person introduces a friend to a third person, those two people are more likely to become friends with them than if they met separately.
“These are mechanisms that everybody agrees are fundamentally going to happen in neuroscience,” Holmes said. “But we see here that if you treat the data carefully and quantitatively, it can give rise to all of these different effects in clustering and distributions, and then you see those things across all of these different organisms.”
Accounting for randomness
As Palmer pointed out, though, biology doesn’t always fit a neat and tidy explanation, and there is still plenty of randomness and noise involved in brain circuits. Neurons sometimes disconnect and rewire with each other — weak connections are pruned, and stronger connections can be formed elsewhere. This randomness provides a check on the kind of Hebbian organization the researchers found in this data, without which strong connections would grow to dominate the network.

The researchers tweaked their model to account for randomness, which improved its accuracy.
“Without that noise aspect, the model would fail,” Lynn said. “It wouldn’t produce anything that worked, which was surprising to us. It turns out you actually need to balance the Hebbian snowball effect with the randomness to get everything to look like real brains.”
Since these rules arise from general networking principles, the team hopes they can extend this work beyond the brain.
“That’s another cool aspect of this work: the way the science got done,” Palmer said. “The folks on this team have a huge diversity of knowledge, from theoretical physics and big data analysis to biochemical and evolutionary networks. We were focused on the brain here, but now we can talk about other types of networks in future work.”

In humans, male fertility and sperm fitness decline with age, but scientists have made the surprising discovery that this pattern is not consistent in other animals. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
The team, led by the University of Oxford, assessed the results of 379 studies which covered a wide range of animals, including mammals, insects, birds, and fish. This found that, overall, advancing age seemed to have no impact on ejaculate size, number of sperm, sperm motility, or sperm viability.
For some animals, age even had a positive effect on reproductive traits. In many insect species, for example, ejaculate size, quantity of sperm, and sperm viability all improved with age. However, it is possible that this result may be explained by methodological limitations in the studies. For instance, in many insect studies, males were kept as virgins until old age, during which they are likely to accumulate sperm.
From all animals examined, only lab rodents showed age-related deterioration in most ejaculate traits measured. Dr Regina Vega-Trejo (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), co-lead author of the study, said: ‘The lack of consistency across animals in the impact of aging on ejaculate traits suggests the jury is still out on whether age-related deterioration in ejaculates happens universally in animals or not’.
According to the researchers, the sharp contrast in ejaculate ageing patterns between most animals and humans might be because humans now live much longer than they did just a few centuries ago. This may have led to men now living beyond the age at which they evolved to maintain sperm function. Co-lead author Krish Sanghvi (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), said: ‘The surprising differences between animals and humans could reflect stronger selection pressures for animals to maintain sperm function across all ages.’
The researchers also investigated whether age impacted reproductive outcomes (such as fertilisation success and fecundity) in the males of these species. Similar to ejaculate traits, they found that, overall, reproductive outcomes did not improve or decline with advancing age, which is again in stark contrast to what is seen in humans.
According to the authors, the results may be partly explained by methodological limitations, such as studies rarely testing animals that are at an advanced age for their species. They also suggest that deterioration in male fertility might not be occurring for each ejaculate trait in every species.
Senior author Dr Irem Sepil (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), said: ‘Reproductive deterioration is of interest to a broad range of disciplines, from evolutionary ecology and demography to humanities and medicine. Our study challenges a key belief in these fields that male reproductive deterioration is universal, and documents where we may expect this to occur and why.’

Early detection of disease is considered positive — but what if it finds “too much”? While early diagnosis can improve the chances of recovery, early detection can also have unwanted side effects. After all, not everything that is found would have become life-threatening in the course of the disease. TOSYMA, the world’s largest randomized diagnostic superiority study on early breast cancer detection, has now investigated whether the innovative DBT+SM method for early breast cancer detection also has such an effect — and was once again able to hint on advantages of the approach over the screening standard by finding more early tumor stages of tumor grades 2 and 3.
In diagnostics, finding more is not automatically better. Rather, it is about finding the right thing — especially in the case of such dangerous diseases as cancer. This is where early detection comes into play, but it can also have unwanted side effects: For example, there is a risk of also discovering non-aggressive tumors that lead to treatment — but would not have substantively impaired quality of life or become life-threatening in the course of the disease. Medicine speaks of overdiagnosis. TOSYMA is also about early detection: the world’s largest randomized — i.e. randomly assigned — diagnostic superiority study for the early detection of breast cancer has set itself the task of investigating and improving the systematic early detection of invasive breast cancer. The researchers at the University of Münster, who are managing the mammoth project, have now published new results on TOSYMA in the highly ranked journal Radiology. These demonstrate the advantages of the innovative diagnostic approach.
A combination of DBT — short for Digital Breast Tomosynthesis — and Synthetic 2D Mammography (SM) was used for the almost 100,000 TOSYMA study participants. The interdisciplinary study group led by Prof. Walter Heindel, Director of the Clinic for Radiology at the University Hospital Münster, compared the data obtained with the combined procedure — known as DBT+SM — with that from conventional screening with digital mammography (DM). The result: DBT+SM leads to the detection of significantly more invasive breast cancers compared to the conventional DM procedure. However, this does not necessarily mean that women’s health is improved — the keyword here is overdiagnosis. In other words, it has been shown that DBT+SM “finds” breast cancer better — but the task now was to investigate whether this can be expected to actually lead to an improvement for the affected breast cancer patients.
In an exploratory subanalysis, Prof. Stefanie Weigel, Prof. Walter Heindel and Prof. Hans-Werner Hense examined which tumors are frequently detected at an earlier stage of breast cancer — and found that DBT+SM screening can detect relevant tumors, i.e. those that — in contrast to less aggressive variants — are potentially relevant for a reduction in breast cancer mortality. Prof. Stefanie Weigel concludes: “From the results of the subanalysis, we conclude that the higher rate of early tumor stages of tumor grades 2 and 3 through the use of DBT+SM could increase the screening effect with regard to breast cancer mortality” — another “plus point” for DBT+SM.
The next step is already in progress: this year, data from the cancer registries of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony will be evaluated for follow-up in order to further examine the screening effect of DBT+SM compared to the previous screening standard. The TOSYMA project began in 2016, comprises 17 screening units in Germany and is financially supported by the German Research Foundation. The current funding period runs until 2025.

Cold, flu and COVID-19 season brings that now-familiar ritual: swab, wait, look at the result. But what if, instead of taking 15 minutes or more, a test could quickly determine whether you have COVID-19 with a glowing chemical? Now, in ACS Central Science, researchers describe a potential COVID-19 test inspired by bioluminescence. Using a molecule found in crustaceans, they have developed a rapid approach that detects SARS-CoV-2 protein comparably to one used in vaccine research.
From fireflies to lantern fish, many animals possess the chemical tools to produce light. Typically, this reaction requires the substrate luciferin and the enzyme luciferase. However, a class of less discriminating luciferins, known as imidazopyrazinone-type (IPT) compounds, can glow when encountering other proteins, including ones that aren’t considered enzymes. Previous research suggests that IPT luciferins could serve as the basis for a new type of medical test that uses luminescence to announce the presence of a target protein in a specimen. Ryo Nishihara, Ryoji Kurita and colleagues suspected that an IPT luciferin could react with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which allows the virus particles to invade cells and cause COVID-19 — and open the door to develop a glowing test.
The team first investigated 36 different IPT luciferins’ abilities to react with a single unit of spike protein. Only one molecule, which came from tiny crustaceans from the genus Cypridina, emitted light. The researchers then tested the luciferin’s activity with the spike protein in its natural state, as three units folded together. They found that, over the course of 10 minutes, an adequate amount of light could be detected. A commercially available luminescence reading device was required; the light could not be seen by the naked eye. Additional experiments indicated that the IPT luciferin was selective because it did not glow when exposed to six proteins that occur in saliva. They define this specific luminescence reaction by non-luciferase biomolecules as “biomolecule-catalyzing chemiluminescence (BCL).”
Finally, they found that the luciferin could detect the amount of the spike protein in saliva with the same accuracy as a technique currently used in vaccine development. However, the luciferin system delivered results in one minute — significantly faster than the current rapid point-of-care tests.
This BCL-based approach could serve as the basis for a simple “mix and read” test in which the IPT luciferin is added to untreated saliva from someone suspected of having COVID-19, according to the researchers. They note that a similar approach could be adapted to detect other viruses that possess spike-like proteins, such as influenza, MERS-CoV and other coronaviruses.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Japan Science and Technology Agency, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, has dramatically improved the treatment of certain blood cancers. Initially approved for patients who had failed multiple lines of therapy, clinical trials have shown CAR T can be used as an earlier treatment option. One such trial, ZUMA-7, compared axicabtagene ciloleucel (axi-cel) with standard-of-care therapy, which includes high-dose chemotherapy followed by an autologous stem cell transplant, for patients with recurrent or treatment-resistant large B-cell lymphoma. The trial resulted in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approving axi-cel as second line therapy for this patient population. Still, researchers wanted to assess if there were specific tumor characteristics associated with improved outcomes that could better inform treatment selection. Their findings were published today in Nature Medicine.
Axi-cel CAR T targets the CD19 molecule on large B-cell lymphoma cells. The ZUMA-7 trial demonstrated that axi-cel reduced the risk of disease progression, the need for new therapy, or death by 60% compared to standard therapy. Despite these positive outcomes in event-free survival and overall survival, some patients did not respond well to therapy or relapsed quickly after treatment.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Frederick L. Locke, chair of the Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy Department at Moffitt Cancer Center, analyzed tumor gene expression patterns from patient samples and determined that a B-cell gene expression signature and CD19 protein expression were significantly associated with improved event-free survival for patients treated with axi-cel but not standard therapy. Patients with lower tumor cell levels of CD19 had gene expression patterns associated with immune suppression. These observations suggest that the tumor immune environment may play an important role in regulating axi-cel therapy and outcomes. In addition, biomarkers associated with improved outcomes to axi-cel therapy decreased as patients had more treatments, suggesting that receipt of axi-cel in earlier lines of treatment is essential to ensure better patient outcomes.
Within the standard therapy group, the researchers discovered that patients who had a high tumor burden or elevated levels of the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase had shorter event-free survival. Additionally, patients with a nongerminal center B cell-like molecular subtype of large B-cell lymphoma had poorer outcomes with standard therapy. In contrast, molecular subtypes were not associated with axi-cel outcomes, suggesting axi-cel may overcome some mechanisms of resistance to standard therapy.
“Knowledge of the immune contexture is essential for understanding mechanisms of action and likelihood of prolonged response to CAR T-cell therapy. Collectively, these data may help inform studies evaluating patient management based on tumor biology and biomarkers, as well as the design of next-generation therapeutics,” Locke said.
This study was funded by Kite, a Gilead Company.

Approximately one in three deaths in the U.S. is caused by cardiovascular disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A robust body of evidence shows aerobic exercise can reduce risks, especially for people who are overweight or obese. But few studies have compared results with resistance exercise — also known as strength or weight training — or with workout regimens that are half aerobic and half resistance. Researchers at Iowa State University led one of the longest and largest supervised exercise trials to help fill this gap.
Their results, published in European Heart Journal, indicate that splitting the recommended amount of physical activity between aerobic and resistance exercise reduces cardiovascular disease risks as much as aerobic-only regimens. Resistance exercise on its own for the same amount of time did not provide the same heart health benefits when compared to the control group.
“If you’re bored with aerobic exercise and want variety or you have joint pain that makes running long distances difficult, our study shows you can replace half of your aerobic workout with strength training to get the same cardiovascular benefits. The combined workout also offers some other unique health benefits, like improving your muscles,” says Duck-chul Lee, lead author and professor of kinesiology at Iowa State.
Performing a certain number of sets and repetitions with weight machines, free weights, elastic bands or your own body weight through push-ups or lunges, all fall under resistance exercise.
“One of the most common reasons why people don’t exercise is because they have limited time. The combined exercise with both cardio and strength training we’re suggesting is not more time consuming,” Lee underscores.
Co-authors from Iowa State include Angelique Brellenthin, associate professor of kinesiology; Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, department chair and associate professor of food science and human and nutrition; Marian Kohut, the Barbara E. Forker Professor in kinesiology. Yehua Li, professor of statistics at the University of California Riverside, also contributed.
In the paper, they wrote: “These findings may help develop clinical and public health practices and recommendations for the approximately 2 billion adults with overweight or obesity worldwide who are at increased risk of [cardiovascular disease.]”
One of the longest, largest exercise trials

Four hundred and six participants between 35 and 70 years of age enrolled in the one-year randomized controlled exercise trial. All met the threshold for being overweight or obese with body mass indexes between 25-40 kg/m2 and had elevated blood pressure.
The researchers randomly assigned participants to one of four groups: no exercise, aerobic only, resistance only, or aerobic plus resistance. Those who were in one of the three exercise groups worked out under supervision for one hour, three times a week for one year.
Every participant in one of the exercise groups received a tailored workout routine based on their individual fitness levels, health conditions and progression. Those assigned to resistance training were given a certain number of sets, repetitions and weights for weight-lifting machines. With aerobic exercises, participants wore a heart rate monitor and inserted a unique exercise program key into a treadmill or stationary bike. Sensing the participant’s heart rate, the machine automatically adjusted the speed and grade to match the prescribed intensity.
Researchers collected physical activity and diet data outside the lab, as well. All participants, including those in the no exercise group, wore pedometers to measure daily steps. They met every three months with registered dietitians at Iowa State for “Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension” education, which is promoted by the National Institutes of Health. On three random days per month, participants were asked to record what they had consumed in the last 24 hours with an online dietary assessment tool developed by the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
At the start of the year-long clinical trial, six months in and at the end, the researchers measured each participant’s systolic blood pressure, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, fasting glucose and body fat percentage. All are well-established cardiovascular disease risk factors.
“Many previous studies only looked at one of these four factors, but it’s really multiple factors combined that increase cardiovascular disease risk,” explains Lee.

The researchers used a composite score to fairly quantify changes across all four factors since each uses a different unit of measurement. A lower composite score indicates less risk for developing cardiovascular disease.
Main findings
At the end of the year-long trial, the percentage of body fat in all three exercise groups had decreased significantly compared to the no-exercise control group. The authors write in the paper that “every -1% body fat reduction is associated with -3%, -4%, and -8% lower risks of developing [cardiovascular disease] risk factors of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and metabolic syndrome.”
However, taking all four cardiovascular disease risk factors into account, the aerobic and combined exercise groups had lower composite scores than the control group. The results were consistent across gender and age.
Secondary findings
Over the course of the 12-month study, those in the aerobic-only group continued to improve with the VO2max test, which is the maximum rate of oxygen consumption attainable during a maximal treadmill test. The resistance-only group stayed relatively flat. The inverse was true for the maximal bench and leg press tests for muscular strength; the resistance-only group continued to improve while the aerobic-only group did not.
However, the combination exercise group improved both aerobic fitness and muscular strength.
Finding the right dose
The authors say their findings support “physical activity guidelines recommending both resistance and aerobic exercise by the U.S., [World Health Organization] and European Society of Cardiology, specifically for individuals with obesity.” Currently, it’s at least 150 minutes each week of moderate intensity aerobic exercise and two sessions per week of resistance training.
“But these guidelines don’t specify how long those strength training sessions should be to get the health benefits,” says Lee.
With a newly awarded grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Lee wants to find “the right dose” of resistance exercise among adults who are overweight or obese. He plans to conduct another randomized controlled resistance exercise trial, this time with 240 participants. The study will compare results from 0-, 15-, 30- and 60-minute resistance sessions, twice per week for six months in a supervised exercise lab. Participants in all four groups also will be asked to do 30-minute sessions of moderate intensity aerobic exercise, twice per week, per the physical activity guidelines.
During the second six-month phase, participants will receive a free health club membership and be asked to continue their assigned regimen, unsupervised. Lee explains this will help identify which dose of resistance exercise is both effective and feasible outside experimental trials.

“Precision medicine,” an emerging approach to health care in which a patient’s genetics, diseased tissue and other factors guide clinicians to personalize treatment strategies, can dramatically improve health outcomes for people with various diseases, notably cancer.
Years of analysis of cancer specimens makes such targeted treatment possible, yet the samples being studied in the United States and Europe overwhelmingly come from people who are white. That reality means innovative new cancer treatments may have missed genetic predispositions toward cancer that are pronounced in people from non-white races and ethnicities.
A new study published by researchers at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine at OU Health Sciences highlights racial disparities in a subset of cancer patients and, using advanced biomedical research technology, provides evidence for those differences at the molecular level. The collaborative study among researchers in Oklahoma and Alabama was led by Hiroshi Yamada, Ph.D., and Chinthalapally V. Rao, Ph.D., assistant professor of research and professor in the Department of Medicine, Section of Hematology-Oncology, as well as Upender Manne, Ph.D., professor of anatomic pathology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The study was published in NPJ Precision Oncology, a Nature journal publication, and the research was funded by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health.
“People from various races, regions and communities face differences in the prevalence of cancer and survival rates from cancer,” Yamada said. “Poor cancer outcomes have reasons. But the reasons have not been understood at the molecular level. Unlike social factors such as poverty or access to advanced cancer care, molecular differences in cancer can be addressed by a drug or other personalized treatment. But because molecular analyses on cancers historically have focused on samples from white people, that has created a blind spot in treatment development.”
To investigate whether cancer racial disparities can be identified at the molecular level, Yamada and his team analyzed colon cancer specimens from American Indian patients in Oklahoma. In addition, researchers at the University of Alabama provided cancer specimens from African American patients in Alabama. For many years, statistics have shown that non-white populations often face cancer at a higher rate and have worse health outcomes than people who are white. Advancements in technology now allow researchers to find evidence for those disparities at the molecular level.
Yamada and his team indeed discovered differences in American Indians and African Americans, as compared to white Americans, in two important areas: gene expression (instructions in the DNA that tell cells what to do) and cytokines (proteins that play a role in how cells interact and communicate with each other). Because of what researchers know about those differences, some of the colon cancer drugs under development — mostly based on data from cancer samples of white patients — may be less effective for American Indians or African Americans, Yamada said.
“This study highlights potential targets for colon cancer prevention and treatment in American Indians and African Americans, which is information that would not be available through the analysis of cancer specimens from white populations alone,” Yamada said.
Yamada said that racial/ethnic groups share biological “patterning” that occurs because of social constructs (not unchangeable characteristics), as well as dietary habits, geographic locations, and other cultural practices and lifestyles. It is essentially impossible to separate these elements that make up biological patterning, he said, but from the standpoint of research, race is an important trait to consider.
Yamada said he hopes his study raises awareness about the shortage of cancer specimens from non-white populations and bolsters the effort to diversify samples for research. He also plans to continue his research in this area by investigating the function of genes that could be influencing colon cancer development and treatment outcomes in American Indians and African Americans. In the United States, colon cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women and, in 2022, was the second most common cause of cancer death.
“Molecular analysis is a new research tool in the field of cancer disparities,” said Yamada, who is among the early adopters of the approach. “Molecular analysis according to race, or any population vulnerable to cancer, will help to identify specific cancer traits, which can be used in the development of precision medicine. This approach will improve poor health outcomes in minorities who have cancer.”

New research from the University of Kansas could help settle a question among basketball coaches and athletes on when to incorporate weightlifting during practice. In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, researchers found that resistance training before basketball practice has minimal to no effect on shooting performance in most cases.
“That was the main question that initiated this study: Should basketball players lift weights before or after practice, and does it affect their shooting mechanics and accuracy?” said Dimitrije Cabarkapa, associate director of the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory at KU and lead author of the study.
Strength is one of the key physical performance characteristics that basketball players need to possess at all levels of play. To maintain an adequate level of strength gained during the offseason, continuous participation in resistance training regimens is imperative, the authors said. Yet, the concern that often emerges is that lifting weights could negatively affect players’ performance in practice and that poor practices could be reflected in lower-quality gameplay.
For the study, researchers recruited 10 basketball players with more than four years of playing experience and more than two years of resistance training experience. They also had to be capable of making more than 50% of free-throw and 2-point shooting attempts and more than 30% of 3-point shooting attempts.
Participants performed a series of basketball shooting drills composed of 15 free-throw, 2-point and 3-point shots. Each participant visited the lab on four occasions, assigned in randomized order — familiarization session, control condition and lower- and upper-body training sessions. For a control condition, participants performed a standardized warmup routine, then completed five sets of shooting drills. Each session was completed in 30-minute increments.
Shooting accuracy was recorded in terms of the number of shots made, while a high-speed camera was used to analyze kinematic variables during the preparatory and release phases of the shooting motion such as knee angle, elbow flexion and release height. The total number of shots analyzed in this study across all participants was 6,750.
Results showed that performing resistance training had minimal impact on shooting accuracy. The only scenario in which shooting accuracy decreased was after performing the upper-body resistance training protocol, where 2- and 3-point shooting accuracy decreased by 11.8% and 9.9% when compared to the control condition, respectively. However, the observed decrease in shooting accuracy disappeared 30 minutes post-exercise completion. In addition, the changes in shooting mechanics were negligible, with less than 1% of the total variance in each kinematic variable.

“One of the key findings is that some of the commonly implemented basketball-specific lower- and upper-body resistance training regimens during the in-season competitive period have minimal to no impact on the biomechanical parameters examined in this study during both preparatory and release phases of the shooting motion,” Dimitrije Cabarkapa said. “However, what did change is shooting accuracy immediately following the upper-body training session, but this decrement in performance disappeared after the second set of shooting drills at the 30-minute time mark, and it remained absent through the rest of the testing period.”
The study was co-written with Damjana Cabarkapa, Shay Whiting, Nicolas Philipp, Drake Eserhaut and Andrew Fry, all of KU; and Anthony Ciccone of Utah Valley University.
The findings could help coaches and strength and conditioning trainers when developing training plans, especially considering the time constraints on the collegiate level of competition. As a former NCAA Division I basketball player at James Madison University, Dimitrije Cabarkapa said that in his experience, players often did not like to lift weights before practice. The common theory was that such exercises would impair shooting efficiency, which could negatively affect their standing with coaches or potentially carry over to poor play during games.
“Based on our findings, performing resistance exercises before basketball practice has minimal effect on shooting accuracy. The myth of ‘I can’t lift weights before practice because it will hurt my game’ appears to not be true,” Cabarkapa said. “Players may be upset to hear that, but a lot of coaches will be happy as they can use these data to say, ‘Yes, you can lift before practice.'”
If necessary, upper-body training protocols may be performed post-training sessions to minimize the possible effect — however slight — on shooting accuracy, the authors said.
The results add to the growing body of literature published by the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory, part of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, focused on examining factors that contribute to optimal basketball performance, including whether breakfast influences shooting performance and the biomechanical characteristics of proficient free-throw, 2-point and 3-point shooters.

Contrary to professed intent, the states where abortion access was most restricted experienced the highest levels of infant mortality in the United States from 2014-2018, according to new research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier. The findings showed that states with the most restrictive laws (11-12 laws) had a 16% increased infant mortality rate (IMR) compared to states with the least number of restrictive abortion laws (1-5 laws).
Lead investigator Lois K. Lee, MD, MPH, Division of Emergency Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Departments of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School, explained, “As pediatricians and obstetricians, we are concerned about how threats to comprehensive reproductive care affect our patients and their infants. Given the current changing legal landscape in the US regarding reproductive health policy, it is essential that we consider the larger impacts of restricting access to abortion, not just to birthing individuals, but also on infant births.”
In order to examine the association of abortion access not just on birthing individuals, but also on infant births, the research team performed a national ecologic study using county-level birth cohort linked files (linking maternal and infant data) on infant mortality from the National Center for Health Statistics for 2014-2018 (before the SCOTUS decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). While previous studies had primarily examined state-level infant mortality rates, these data are novel because of the more granular analysis of county-level infant mortality.
Investigators categorized 48 states (excluding Hawaii and Alaska) by the number of restrictive abortion laws and factored in driving distance to an abortion facility, key demographic characteristics, and state Medicaid expansion status.
In addition to the impact of restrictive abortion laws, demographic characteristics such as Black ethnicity of the birthing parent, high school education attainment or less, smoking during pregnancy, and inadequate prenatal care were associated with elevated IMR.
The investigators were surprised to find that increased driving distance to an abortion facility was not statistically associated with an increased county-level IMR, as had been determined by previous studies. This may be because prenatal care access is more of a contributor to infant mortality than abortion facility access.
The investigators stressed that if pregnant women with limited financial means have increasingly limited access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare, including contraception and pre-conception planning, the long-term health and wellbeing outcomes for these individuals and their children may affect future population health.
Dr. Lee elaborated, “Maternal health directly influences infant and child health — and ultimately population health. From our study findings, it is important to understand that limiting access to abortion as part of comprehensive reproductive care not only affects birthing individuals, but also their infants. Without the implementation of more equitable access to comprehensive reproductive care, there will be continued disparities in access to care and health outcomes, varying especially by geography in the US.”
She added, “It will take years to truly understand the long-term public health impact of the SCOTUS decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and other challenges to comprehensive reproductive health care services. Given the well-established disparities in maternal and infant mortality by race and geography, we are concerned more restrictions on comprehensive reproductive care will exacerbate these disparities, especially among lower-income individuals.”