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Published23 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Edinburgh UniversityBy Pallab GhoshScience correspondentResearchers have developed gene-edited chickens that are partially resistant to bird flu.Although the birds are not completely immune, the scientists say their work shows it might be possible to block the virus in three years.The latest results suggest that making further changes to the birds’ DNA could produce fully immune chickens.Critics say gene editing tackles the symptoms of high-density farming rather than the root cause of animal diseases.Professor Helen Sang, of the the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, said the team had made significant progress.”We have got to the point where the results are very encouraging and we want to take this approach further.”Image source, Getty ImagesThe researchers identified three genes they believed were important for the bird flu (formally known as avian influenza) virus to reproduce in the chickens. They made two small changes to one of the genes using a technique known as gene editing.The resulting chickens had no side effects after two years. They also had increased resistance to bird flu, but were not fully immune: half the chickens infected with a high dose of the virus developed an infection.Although any increase in resistance to bird flu should be welcome, only a solution that provides complete immunity can be used in practice. Any intervention that develops partial resistance would also encourage the virus to change in order to fight back and so, if the intervention were widely used, it would slightly increase the risk of another human global pandemic if a mutation made the virus deadly to humans.But Prof Mike McGrew, also of the Roslin Institute, told BBC News that experiments in test tubes showed if changes are made to all three genes, then a fully resistant bird might be possible.”When we did these edits in the cells there was no growth of the virus at all. The changes stopped all replication of the flu.”I am extremely confident that editing the three genes will give full immunity.”This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Gene editing involves making precise changes to DNA to change the function of a gene. In this instance the three genes were altered to stop them helping bird flu reproduce, but in a way that did not harm the bird.The researchers are trying to identify the further genetic changes required, before producing gene-edited chickens for the next phase of their research.Bird flu is a major global threat, with a devastating impact in both farmed and wild bird populations. In the UK alone, the current outbreak of H5N1 bird flu has decimated seabird populations and cost the poultry industry more than £100 million in losses.What is bird flu and where did it come from?It is thought to have emerged in intensive poultry farming in China in the 1990s.In rare instances, mutations in the bird flu virus allow it to infect people and cause serious illness. Image source, DAVID AUBREY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYPeter Stevenson, of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) said the use of gene editing to tackle diseases in farms risked making it easier for animals to be kept in poor conditions. “Highly pathogenic bird flu has not been caused by wild birds; it has been generated by the crowded, stressful conditions of industrial poultry production. The proper approach to bird flu necessitates a radical restructuring of the poultry sector to reduce stocking densities and flock sizes as well as to reduce the number of farms clustered together”.CIWF has supported the use of gene editing to prevent the slaughter of billions of male chicks at birth who are unwanted by the egg producing industry. The campaign group believes that the technology should be used only to reduce animal suffering.Image source, AcceligenWork is under way across the world to develop gene edited animals that are resistant to disease and are more productive.Parliament passed legislation earlier this year that permits the commercial development and sale of gene edited food. It opens the door for the use farm animals created by the technology, but a further vote in Parliament will be required, once MPs are satisfied that the animals will not suffer.The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.Follow Pallab on X, formally known as TwitterMore on this storyWhat is bird flu and what’s behind the outbreak?Published23 MayGene-edited food now legal to be sold in EnglandPublished23 March

Pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes have recently been associated with a higher risk of developing heart disease later in life. But a new Northwestern Medicine study has found obesity before or during pregnancy is the actual root cause of future cardiovascular disease.
Prior to this study, scientists were unsure which factor — obesity or pregnancy complications — played a larger role in cardiovascular disease risk years after pregnancy. This large, multi-center and diverse study is the first to disentangle that question, ultimately determining that pre-pregnancy obesity is the true driver of both poor pregnancy outcomes and future cardiovascular disease risk. It is one of the only studies to follow its participants — about half of whom were overweight or had obesity — from the beginning of their first pregnancy through several years postpartum.
“We demonstrate, for the first time, that adverse pregnancy outcomes are primarily indicators — and not the root cause — of future heart health,” said corresponding author Dr. Sadiya Khan, the Magerstadt Professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician. “This means that pregnancy just reveals the risk for heart disease that is already there.”
The findings will be published Oct. 10 in the journal Circulation Research.
The study used data from the nuMoM2b Heart Health Study to prospectively follow 4,216 first-time pregnant individuals from the early stages of their pregnancy to an average of 3.7 years postpartum. At the early-pregnancy first study visit, the average maternal age was 27 years old, and 53% had a normal body mass index (BMI), 25% were overweight and 22% had obesity. Compared to those with a normal BMI in early pregnancy, individuals with overweight or obese BMI had a higher risk of developing hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
‘Pregnancy is a natural stress test for the heart’
In the study, the scientists wanted to better understand the associations among maternal obesity, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and other adverse pregnancy outcomes, and cardiovascular health several years after delivery.

Q: I’m in my 50s, and I’ve heard that it’s normal to burn fewer calories as I get older. Is this true?You can think of burning calories as “Step 1 of being alive,” said Herman Pontzer, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. Food gives your body the fuel it needs to stay healthy, he said.Your age — among several other factors — can have a big effect on how many calories you need to maintain your body’s weight and basic functions, Dr. Pontzer and other experts said.Here’s what to know.How your age affects the calories you burnThe size of your body is the most important factor that affects your calorie requirements, Dr. Pontzer said. “The bigger you are, the more calories you need.”But your life stage is also crucial, he added.Babies and children, for example, require fewer calories than adults simply because they are smaller. But when you calculate how many calories they use relative to their body size, it’s actually more than what adults use because they are growing and developing, Dr. Pontzer said.Being more physically active also increases the number of calories you burn, said Anna Maria Siega-Riz, a nutrition professor and the dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was the lead author of a 2023 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that estimated the calorie needs of people in the United States and Canada.According to that report, an inactive, 200-pound, 40-year-old man would need about 2,700 calories per day to maintain his weight and basic bodily functions. But if he were an athlete training for a couple of hours each day, he would need about 3,500 calories per day.The same report estimated that starting around age 19, calorie requirements “drift down” a bit each year — to the tune of about 11 calories annually for men and seven for women, said Susan Roberts, a senior associate dean of foundational research at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine.A 170-pound woman who walks for 60 to 80 minutes each day, for example, would need 2,450 calories per day at age 20 — at age 60, however, that would drop to 2,150, and at 80 it would be 2,000.This age-related drop in calorie burn is usually most noticeable in your 60s and beyond, Dr. Roberts said, possibly manifesting in weight gain or a less robust appetite. As you age, you tend to lose muscle and gain fat, which burns fewer calories, she said. And your brain — the body’s most metabolically active tissue — naturally shrinks in size and requires less energy, she added.It’s also common for people to become less physically active as they age, further reducing the number of calories they burn each day, Dr. Siega-Riz said.You can estimate your own calorie requirements using an online calculator. Just keep in mind that such calculators can provide only a general picture of what you should consume. Your actual needs will vary according to your daily activities, genetics and other factors, Dr. Siega-Riz said.If you’re wondering whether you’re consuming the right amount, the best way to check is to weigh yourself every so often, Dr. Siega-Riz said. If your weight is relatively stable, then you’re eating an appropriate number of calories.But for some people, a hyper-focus on the scale can create or worsen anxieties about food and weight, Dr. Siega-Riz said, so weigh yourself only as often as you’re comfortable.What burning fewer calories means for your eating habitsThe good news is that you probably won’t need to do much calorie counting as you age, because your appetite should naturally ebb to match your needs, Dr. Pontzer said.But as you get older, it’s important to make sure you’re getting the right balance of nutrients, Dr. Roberts said.For instance, research suggests that beginning in your 50s, your body needs more of certain nutrients such as calcium, vitamin B6, vitamin D and protein, even though you’re likely eating fewer daily calories overall.Because of that, Dr. Siega-Riz said, you’ll need to dedicate more of your daily calorie budget to foods that give you a bigger bang for your buck nutrient-wise, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean sources of protein.Dr. Roberts agreed. When you’re in your 20s and 30s, she said, “you can still have calories left over for chocolate or beer or a piece of cake.” But if you’re in your 80s and consuming only about 1,500 calories per day, there’s less room for treats, she said.Dr. Roberts thinks it’s wise for older adults to take a multivitamin supplement to help fill in any nutritional gaps. But even then, a good diet is still necessary to ensure you’re getting other important nutrients like protein, fiber and healthful plant-based compounds, she said.Do you have a health question? Ask Well

Many employers and government programs won’t cover costly obesity medications. A lawsuit is challenging one such policy.Jeannette Simonton was a textbook candidate for the obesity drug Wegovy when her doctor prescribed it to her in February.At 5 feet 2 inches and 228 pounds, she had a body mass index of nearly 42 — well above the cutoff U.S. regulators had approved for eligibility for the medication. She also had serious joint problems after decades of struggling with her weight.But her insurance refused to pay for the medication, citing a blanket ban on covering weight-loss drugs, according to a letter Ms. Simonton received in March from her benefits administrator.Now, Ms. Simonton is suing the Washington State agency that purchases health insurance for public employees like her. Her lawyers argue that the state’s health plans are discriminating against Ms. Simonton — and others who, like her, are seeking weight-loss drugs — in violation of state law, which recognizes obesity as a type of disability.Ms. Simonton’s case is a flashpoint in the conflict over whether health insurance should have to cover obesity drugs. The challenge for payers is that the medications would be hugely costly if they were broadly covered in the United States, where more than 100 million people are obese.The lawsuit is likely to be closely watched as a test of whether health plans can refuse to pay for obesity drugs. Ms. Simonton is being represented by a Seattle law firm, Sirianni Youtz Spoonemore Hamburger, that has a long track record of challenging health insurance restrictions, including those for costly hepatitis C cures.Wegovy and other appetite-suppressing drugs are in huge demand because they are stunningly effective in helping patients lose weight. But the scale of that demand would pose an unprecedented financial burden for the employers and government programs that shoulder most of the costs of prescription drugs. Wegovy, Novo Nordisk’s high-dose version of its popular drug Ozempic, has a sticker price of over $16,000 a year.More payers have recently begun covering the obesity medications, encouraged by research suggesting that the drugs may pay for themselves in the long run by improving patients’ health. But others say they simply cannot afford to cover the medications.Ms. Simonton, 57, a nurse who is well-versed on the health benefits of the drugs, said she saw the refusal to cover her Wegovy as shortsighted.“They’re being penny wise and pound foolish,” she said. “What will they be paying in 10, 15 years if I don’t continue to lose the weight?”The agency Ms. Simonton is suing, the Washington State Health Care Authority, declined to comment. Ms. Simonton gets her health insurance through the public hospital where she works. As part of her compensation, her hospital pays premiums to the state, which the Health Care Authority uses to pay for her health plan. The agency has authority over which drugs are covered.Wegovy is in a class of injectable drugs known as GLP-1s, named after the natural hormone whose effects they emulate. The drugs have been used for years to treat Type 2 diabetes but more recently have been recognized for their extraordinary power to slash body weight.Wegovy is in a class of injectable drugs that have been used for years to treat Type 2 diabetes but more recently have been recognized for their extraordinary power to slash body weight.Jim Vondruska/ReutersAbout 36 million people with Type 2 diabetes in the United States — as well as about 18 million who are obese but not diabetic — have access to GLP-1s through their health plans, according to analysts at the investment bank Jefferies. That is about 17 percent of the country’s insured people.Federal law prohibits Medicare from paying for drugs for weight loss, a ban that persists largely because of the staggering costs. If Congress were to overturn the ban, one projection from academic researchers estimates that two million Medicare beneficiaries — 10 percent of older people with obesity — would take Wegovy. Under that scenario, the government’s annual expenditure would be $27 billion, nearly a fifth of the yearly spending for Medicare’s Part D program covering prescription drugs taken at home.Employers and state health insurance programs for public employees face a similar dilemma. In Arkansas, where 40 percent of people on the plan for state employees have obesity, covering the drugs would cost $83 million annually. The Wisconsin program would have to come up with an additional $25 million annually.“Employers don’t suddenly have a new pot of money to pay for higher health insurance premiums,” said Dr. Steven Pearson, president of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which assesses the value of medicines. “We’re talking about big changes to companies’ ability to provide other benefits, wage increases, new hires, and they may also have to turn that into higher premiums for their own employees.”Another worry for employers is that they may not actually reap the savings of investing in weight-loss medications. Averted heart attacks and avoided hospital stays made possible by the drugs may not manifest in savings until years down the line, when a patient has left that employer.But advocates for patients with obesity see stigma and bias at play when health plans view weight-loss treatment as akin to unnecessary vanity procedures.Ms. Simonton, who lives in Ellensburg, Wash., has had obesity for as long as she can remember. At one point in her 40s, she weighed 424 pounds. After she underwent an operation to reduce the size of her stomach, her weight fluctuated for years above 250 pounds.The weight has taken a toll. With osteoarthritis so bad that the bones in her knees were rubbing against one another, she has already had her right knee replaced and has surgery for her left scheduled for next month. “I wondered if I was going to have a nursing career left,” she said.Last year, she started taking Mounjaro, another powerful GLP-1 medication, with most of her costs covered by the drug’s manufacturer, Eli Lilly. When that assistance ran out, she paused treatment while her doctors helped her seek insurance coverage for the Novo Nordisk drug.In February, frustrated by the lack of progress, Ms. Simonton began paying out of pocket to obtain a version of the Novo Nordisk medication from a compounding pharmacy.Since she started taking GLP-1 drugs in September 2022, she has lost 76 pounds. She now weighs 191 pounds.“My life has changed, in an amazing way,” she said. “It’s the first time where I’m not constantly thinking about food.”But to cover the out-of-pocket costs — nearly $2,000 so far — Ms. Simonton and her husband have reduced their spending on groceries and cut their retirement savings.Ms. Simonton’s lawsuit, filed in state court in Washington last month, is seeking to force her health plan to pay for Wegovy going forward, as well as reimbursement from when she was denied coverage. Her lawyers are seeking class-action status on behalf of others like her who are insured through plans for public and school workers in Washington State.In 2019, Washington State’s Supreme Court ruled that obesity is “always” a protected disability under the state’s anti-discrimination law. Other courts outside the state have ruled that obesity is not usually protected.

Researchers from the United States, Brazil, and Spain, including scientists with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, published an analysis in a special edition of the British Medical Journal with a timely and controversial recommendation: It’s time for an international shift in the way we think about ultra-processed food.
“There is converging and consistent support for the validity and clinical relevance of food addiction,” said Ashley Gearhardt, the article’s corresponding author and a psychology professor at the University of Michigan. “By acknowledging that certain types of processed foods have the properties of addictive substances, we may be able to help improve global health.”
While people can give up smoking, drinking, or gambling, they can’t stop eating, said co-author Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. The challenge, and the open and controversial question, is defining which foods have the most potential for addiction and why.
Their work was published Oct. 10 in Food For Thought, a special edition of the British Medical Journal, a high-impact publication and one of the world’s oldest medical journals.
DiFeliceantonio is also associate director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute’s Center for Health Behaviors Research and an assistant professor in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech.
Not all foods have the potential for addiction, the researchers said.
“Most foods that we think of as natural, or minimally processed, provide energy in the form of carbohydrate or fat — but not both,” DiFeliceantonio said.

Models built on machine learning in health care can be victims of their own success, according to researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine and the University of Michigan. Their study assessed the impact of implementing predictive models on the subsequent performance of those and other models. Their findings — that using the models to adjust how care is delivered can alter the baseline assumptions that the models were “trained” on, often for worse — were detailed in the October 9 online issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
“We wanted to explore what happens when a machine learning model is deployed in a hospital and allowed to influence physician decisions for the overall benefit of patients,” says first and corresponding author Akhil Vaid, M.D., Clinical Instructor of Data-Driven and Digital Medicine (D3M), part of the Department of Medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai. “For example, we sought to understand the broader consequences when a patient is spared from adverse outcomes like kidney damage or mortality. AI models possess the capacity to learn and establish correlations between incoming patient data and corresponding outcomes, but use of these models, by definition, can alter these relationships. Problems arise when these altered relationships are captured back into medical records.”
The study simulated critical care scenarios at two major health care institutions, the Mount Sinai Health System in New York and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, analyzing 130,000 critical care admissions. The researchers investigated three key scenarios:
1. Model retraining after initial use
Current practice suggests retraining models to address performance degradation over time. Retraining can improve performance initially by adapting to changing conditions, but the Mount Sinai study shows it can paradoxically lead to further degradation by disrupting the learned relationships between presentation and outcome.
2. Creating a new model after one has already been in use
Following a model’s predictions can save patients from adverse outcomes such as sepsis. However, death may follow sepsis, and the model effectively works to prevent both. Any new models developed in the future for prediction of death will now also be subject to upset relationships as before. Since we do not know the exact relationships between all possible outcomes, any data from patients with machine-learning influenced care may be inappropriate to use in training further models.

New analysis of the remains of victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, contradicts the widespread belief the flu disproportionately impacted healthy young adults.
Because so many people fell ill so quickly, physicians at the time believed the healthy were as likely to die from the flu as those who had already been sick or frail. Despite numerous historical accounts, though, it turns out there is no concrete scientific evidence to support that belief.
Researchers at McMaster University and the University of Colorado Boulder who analyzed victims’ age of death and studied lesions on victims’ bones report that the most susceptible to dying of the flu had exhibited signs of previous environmental, social and nutritional stress.
“Our circumstances — social, cultural and immunological — are all intertwined and have always shaped the life and death of people, even in the distant past,” explains Amanda Wissler, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster and lead author on the study, published today in the journal PNAS.
“We saw this during COVID-19, where our social backgrounds and our cultural backgrounds influenced who was more likely to die, and who was likely to survive,” she says.
Much of the research on the 1918 pandemic relies on historical documentation such as vital statistics, census data and life insurance records, none of which include information on pre-existing conditions, or general environmental, dietary or other chronic stressors which can impact one’s overall health over the course of a lifetime.
For the study, researchers examined the skeletal remains of 369 individuals from the Hamman-Todd Documented skeletal collection, which is housed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. All had died between 1910 and 1938. The sample was divided into two groups: a control group who had died before the pandemic, and those who died during the pandemic.

In cases where standard therapies fail, a medication called XEN1101 reduces seizure frequency by more than 50% in some patients and sometimes eliminates them altogether, a new study shows. Unlike several treatments that must be started at low doses and slowly ramped up, the new drug can safety be taken at its most effective dose from the start, the authors say.
Focal seizures, the most common type seen in epilepsy, occur when nerve cells in a particular brain region send out a sudden, excessive burst of electrical signals. Along with seizures, this uncontrolled activity can lead to abnormal behavior, periods of lost awareness, and mood changes. While many available therapies control or reduce seizures, they fail to stop seizures in about one-third of patients and may cause harsh side effects, experts say.
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, a new clinical trial found that patients who added XEN1101 to their current antiseizure treatments saw a 33% to 53% drop in monthly seizures, depending on their dose. By contrast, those given a placebo had on average 18% fewer seizures during the treatment phase of the trial, which lasted eight weeks. Most patients then volunteered to extend the trial, with about 18% of those treated with the new drug remaining entirely seizure free after six months, and about 11% having no seizures after a year or longer.
“Our findings show that XEN1101 may offer a swift, safe, and effective way to treat focal epilepsy,” said study lead author, neurologist Jacqueline French, MD. “These promising results offer hope for those who have struggled for decades to get their symptoms under control.”
French, a professor in the Department of Neurology at NYU Langone Health, notes that XEN1101 was well tolerated by the study participants, who reported side effects similar to other antiseizure treatments, including dizziness, nausea, and fatigue, and the majority felt well enough to continue the regimen. Another benefit of the drug, she adds, is that it takes more than a week to break down, so levels in the brain remain consistent over time. This steadiness allows the treatment to be started at full strength and helps to avoid dramatic spikes that worsen side effects, and dips that allow seizures to return. This lengthy breakdown time also allows for a “grace period” if a dose is accidently skipped or taken late.
XEN1101 is part of a class of chemicals called potassium-channel openers, which avert seizures by boosting the flow of potassium out of nerves, stopping them from firing. French notes that while other drugs of this kind have been explored for epilepsy patients in the past, such treatments were taken out of use because the compounds were later found to gradually build up in the skin and eyes, prompting safety concerns, the researchers say.
Meanwhile, XEN1101 combines the effectiveness of potassium-channel openers with the safety of more traditional drugs, says French, who is also a member of NYU Langone’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. A report on the trial is publishing Oct. 9 in the journal JAMA Neurology.
For the study, which included 285 men and women with epilepsy and ran from January 2019 to September 2021, the research team recruited adults with epilepsy who had already tried and stopped taking an average of six drugs that failed to treat their focal seizures. Patients in the trial had to have experienced at least four episodes a month despite ongoing treatment to qualify. The patients were randomly provided either a daily oral capsule of XEN1101 (in doses of 10 milligrams, 20 milligrams, or 25 milligrams) or an inert placebo tablet that appeared identical to the real drug.

Liquid biopsies are blood tests that can serially measure circulating tumor DNA (cell-free DNA that is shed into the bloodstream by dying cancer cells). When used in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer undergoing immunotherapy, they may identify patients who could benefit from treatment with additional drugs, according to a phase 2 clinical trial in the U.S. and Canada. The trial is led by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, BC Cancer and the Canadian Cancer trials Group (CCTG).
The results, published October 9 in the journal Nature Medicine, suggest that ctDNA analyses could be used as an early marker of immunotherapy response and may help guide therapy.
Immunotherapies are drugs which unharness the power of the immune system against cancers. Despite their success in improving survival, they pose a challenge to the standard use of imaging to determine treatment response because changes in imaging may not always reflect how well immunotherapy is working. Liquid biopsies may help determine which patients are benefiting from available immunotherapies and could be a new endpoint for clinical trials testing these treatments. Although initial reports are promising, how these approaches can best be used has not been established through a clinical trial.
The BR.36 clinical trial (NCT04093167) is designed to establish the role of ctDNA as an early measurement of immunotherapy response by first, defining ctDNA response, its timing and how it compares with the gold standard of imaging tests and then by using ctDNA response to guide treatment for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
The first stage of the BR.36 trial found that by serial testing ctDNA using next-generation sequencing (an advanced technology that can rapidly sequence millions of gene targets), immunotherapy responses were detected early, within an average of eight weeks after treatment started. A ctDNA response (ctDNA no longer detected in the blood) reflected tumor shrinkage by imaging, however, there were notable exceptions that showed that ctDNA response may capture survival more accurately, especially for patients with stable disease on imaging.
Compared to patients who did not have a ctDNA response, patients with a ctDNA response had a longer progression-free survival (the time in which the disease does not worsen), a difference of 2.6 months versus 5.03 months respectively. In addition, patients with a ctDNA response had a longer overall survival, with median survival not reached at the time of analysis.
“There is an unmet clinical need to implement real-time, minimally invasive molecular analyses to understand patients’ responses to cancer treatments and guide clinical decision-making,” says lead study author Valsamo “Elsa” Anagnostou, M.D., Ph.D., director of the thoracic oncology biorepository at Johns Hopkins, leader of Precision Oncology Analytics, co-leader of the Johns Hopkins Molecular Tumor Board and co-director of the Lung Cancer Precision Medicine Center of Excellence. “Our study demonstrates that ctDNA response correlated with tumor size seen on imaging, which is the gold standard for monitoring response to cancer treatments and seemed to be better correlated with survival. This suggests ctDNA could be used as a strategy to identify patients at high risk of disease progression who could benefit from a switch in their therapeutic regimen.”
Investigators hypothesized that liquid biopsies would rapidly and accurately predict outcomes for patients. During the first stage of the BR.36 study, investigators enrolled 50 patients with advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer at six medical centers in the U.S. and Canada, between May 2020 and September 2022. Nearly all patients had been smokers, and 92% received no prior therapies. The group was 82% white, 52% female and 56% age 65 or older. The goals were to identify the optimal timepoint for ctDNA molecular response and to see how well molecular response correlated to response evaluation criteria in solid tumors (RECIST), the standard for measuring response to cancer treatment by monitoring changes in tumor size as seen on imaging.

In the game of soccer (association football), goalkeepers have a unique role. To do the job well, they must be ready to make split-second decisions based on incomplete information to stop their opponents from scoring a goal. Now researchers reporting in Current Biology on October 9 have some of the first solid scientific evidence that goalkeepers show fundamental differences in the way they perceive the world and process multi-sensory information.
“Unlike other football players, goalkeepers are required to make thousands of very fast decisions based on limited or incomplete sensory information,” says Michael Quinn, the study’s first author at Dublin City University who is also a retired professional goalkeeper and son of former Irish international Niall Quinn. “This led us to predict that goalkeepers would possess an enhanced capacity to combine information from the different senses, and this hypothesis was confirmed by our results.”
“While many football players and fans worldwide will be familiar with the idea that goalkeepers are just ‘different’ from the rest of us, this study may actually be the first time that we have proven scientific evidence to back up this claim,” says David McGovern, the study’s lead investigator also from Dublin City University.
Based on his own history as a professional goalkeeper, Quinn already had a feeling that goalkeepers experience the world in a distinctive way. In his final year working on a psychology degree, he wanted to put this notion to the test.
To do it, the researchers enlisted 60 volunteers, including professional goalkeepers, professional outfield players, and age-matched controls who don’t play soccer. They decided to look for differences among the three groups in what’s known as temporal binding windows — that is the time window within which signals from the different senses are likely to be perceptually fused or integrated.
In each trial, participants were presented with one or two images (visual stimuli) on a screen. Those images could be presented along with one, two, or no beeps (auditory stimuli). Those stimuli were presented with different amounts of time in between.
In these tests, trials with one flash and two beeps generally led to the mistaken perception of two flashes, providing evidence that the auditory and visual stimuli have been integrated. This mistaken perception declines as the amount of time between stimuli increases, allowing researchers to measure the width of a person’s temporal binding window, with a narrower temporal binding window indicating more efficient multisensory processing.