Publisher Health

If the Chicago region replaced 30% of all on-road combustion-engine vehicles — including motorcycles, passenger cars and trucks, buses, refuse trucks and short- and long-haul trucks — with electric versions, it would annually save more than 1,000 lives and over $10 billion, according to a new Northwestern University study.
The new study, which simulates air quality at a neighborhood scale, also found that areas with predominantly Black, Hispanic and Latinx residents would benefit most.
The study underscores the potential of electric vehicles (EVs) to improve air quality and mitigate human-caused climate change, while also reducing unjust exposure and health burdens — despite EVs sourcing electricity from a grid that continues to include fossil fuel-fired power generation.
The paper was published today (Sept. 13) in the journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability.
“A common misconception regarding EVs is that areas near powerplants — which are often minority communities — disproportionately suffer the burden of poor air quality due to increased electricity demand and powerplant emissions output,” said Northwestern’s Maxime Visa, the study’s lead author. “Our study found that on-road emission decreases more than offset powerplant emission increases.
“The greatest air quality benefits from wholesale EV adoption are co-located with disinvested communities that, historically, have been susceptible to poor air quality due to systemic injustices and their proximity to highly frequented roads and interstates. Our results indicate that vehicle electrification is one potential solution for addressing long-standing air quality-related inequities in and around the city of Chicago.”
The study’s senior author is Daniel Horton, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, where he directs the Climate Change Research Group. At the time of the research, Visa was an undergraduate researcher in Horton’s group; now he is a medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that has the potential to not only identify sight-threatening eye diseases but also predict general health, including heart attacks, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease.
RETFound, one of the first AI foundation models in healthcare, and the first in ophthalmology, was developed using millions of eye scans from the NHS. The research team are making the system open-source: freely available to use by any institution worldwide, to act as a cornerstone for global efforts to detect and treat blindness using AI. This work has been published in Nature today.
Progress in AI continues to accelerate at a dizzying pace, with excitement being generated by the development of ‘foundation’ models such as ChatGPT. A foundation model describes a very large, complex AI system, trained on huge amounts of unlabelled data, which can be fine-tuned for a diverse range of subsequent tasks. RETFound consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art AI systems across a range of complex clinical tasks, and even more importantly, it addresses a significant shortcoming of many current AI systems by working well in diverse populations, and in patients with rare disease.
Senior author Professor Pearse Keane (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital) said: “This is another big step towards using AI to reinvent the eye examination for the 21st century, both in the UK and globally. We show several exemplar conditions where RETFound can be used, but it has the potential to be developed further for hundreds of other sight-threatening eye diseases that we haven’t yet explored.
“If the UK can combine high quality clinical data from the NHS, with top computer science expertise from its universities, it has the true potential to be a world leader in AI-enabled healthcare. We believe that our work provides a template for how this can be done.”
AI foundation models have been called “a transformative technology” by the UK government in a report published earlier this year, and have come under the spotlight with the launch in November 2022 of ChatGPT, a foundation model trained using vast quantities of text data to develop a versatile language tool. Taking a comparable approach with eye images in a world-first, RETFound has been trained on millions of retinal scans to create a model that can be adapted for potentially limitless uses.
One of the key challenges when developing AI models is the need for expert human labels, which are often expensive and time-consuming to acquire. As demonstrated in the paper, RETFound is able to match the performance of other AI systems whilst using as little as 10% of human labels in its dataset. This improvement in label efficiency is achieved by using an innovative self-supervising approach in which RETFound masks parts of an image, and then learns to predict the missing portions by itself.

An LSU Health New Orleans research study led by Siqiong June Liu, PhD, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, has found that cerebellar inhibitory interneurons are essential for fear memory, a type of emotional memory formation. Inhibitory interneurons within the cerebellar circuitry act as gatekeepers and control the output of the cerebellar cortex. The formation of fear memory requires the activity of these interneurons. The findings, which may lead to a novel treatment approach for post-traumatic stress disorder, are published in Cell Reports.
“While synaptic plasticity is considered the basis of learning and memory, modifications of the intrinsic excitability of neurons can amplify the output of neuronal circuits and consequently change behavior,” notes Dr. Liu. “In the cerebellum, we find that silencing molecular layer interneurons completely abolishes fear memory, revealing their critical role in memory consolidation.”
The cerebellum is a brain region that is known to control motor coordination. Recent work has shown that it is also critical for the formation of memory, but not how the cerebellar circuitry accomplishes this function.
The research team found that fear conditioning suppresses hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels and enhances cerebellar interneuron excitability. HCN currents are similar to pacemakers in the brain because they help regulate rhythmic activity and communication between brain cells. HCN loss is driven by a learning-induced decrease in endocannabinoid levels. When the activity of these neurons is suppressed, experimental animals do not remember the experience a few hours after learning.
“Our study reveals that activity in cerebellar interneurons drives fear memory formation via a learning-specific increase in intrinsic excitability,” Liu concludes. “This highlights the importance of moving beyond traditional synaptic plasticity-focused investigations of memory formation and suggests a novel therapeutic approach for the treatment of PTSD.”
LSU Health New Orleans co-authors of the paper include Drs. Kathryn Lynn Carzoli, Georgios Kogias and Jessica Fawcett-Patel. Drs. Liu, Kogias and Fawcett-Patel are also affiliated with the Southeast Louisiana VA Healthcare System, New Orleans.
The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, The Brown Foundation and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A new study finds that a natural compound found in many plants inhibits the growth of drug-resistant Candida fungi — including its most virulent species, Candida auris, an emerging global health threat. The journal ACS Infectious Diseases published the discovery led by scientists at Emory University.
Laboratory-dish experiments showed that the natural compound, a water-soluble tannin known as PGG, blocks 90% of the growth in four different species of Candida fungi. The researchers also discovered how PGG inhibits the growth: It grabs up iron molecules, essentially starving the fungi of an essential nutrient.
By starving the fungi rather than attacking it, the PGG mechanism does not promote the development of further drug resistance, unlike existing antifungal medications. Laboratory-dish experiments also showed minimal toxicity of PGG to human cells.
“Drug-resistant fungal infections are a growing healthcare problem but there are few new antifungals in the drug-development pipeline,” says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the study and assistant professor in Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology and the Center for the Study of Human Health. “Our findings open a new potential approach to deal with these infections, including those caused by deadly Candida auris.”
C. auris is often multidrug-resistant and has a high mortality rate, leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to label it a serious global health threat.
“It’s a really bad bug,” says Lewis Marquez, first author of the study and a graduate student in Emory’s molecular systems and pharmacology program. “Between 30 to 60% of the people who get infected with C. auris end up dying.”
An emerging threat
Candida is a yeast often found on the skin and in the digestive tract of healthy people. Some species, such as Candida albicans, occasionally grow out of control and cause mild infections in people.

Scientists identify a new and surprising function of a membrane protein on the surface of cancer cells: It supports and stabilizes an important ‘co-stimulatory’ factor that enhances the activation of T cells, thus improving the immune response against the tumor.

The benefits of four measures of socioeconomic status (education, income, employment status and health insurance) on ideal heart health were greater for non-Hispanic white adults compared to Black, Hispanic and Asian adults in the U.S.

Reflux disease manifests as acid regurgitation and heartburn and is a known risk factor for esophageal cancer. However, a new study now reports that the majority of patients do not have a higher risk of cancer. A large-scale study from three Nordic countries shows that the cancer risk is only elevated in patients whom gastroscopy reveals to have changes in the esophageal mucosa.

A unique new study led by researchers at University of Limerick in Ireland has found that bacteria that may lead to hospital acquired infection is present in a hospital’s wastewater system.
In a partnership with University Hospital Limerick and Queen’s University Belfast, the UL School of Medicine has completed an extensive and unique study that saw researchers dive deep into hospital wastewater to find a reservoir of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
The new research, just published in the Journal of Hospital Infection, provides new insight and is the first study of this scale to look at wastewater and to correlate what is found there with outbreaks of infection.
The term antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is well known to the public and to those working in healthcare. It is a major challenge globally, affecting millions of people each year.
One problem associated with AMR is hospital acquired infection, which occurs when people who are admitted to hospital for treatment become infected by microbes circulating in the hospital wards.
Understanding what these microbes are, where they are, and what drugs they are resistant to helps to put in place systems to prevent and control outbreaks of these infections.
In the unique new study, led by Professor Colum Dunne, Head of University of Limerick’s School of Medicine with researchers from University Hospital Limerick and the School of Pharmacy in Queen’s University Belfast, largescale genomic and microbiology analysis was completed on UHL’s wastewater system.

New research led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has found that depression and the risk of depression are linked to different inflammatory proteins in boys and girls.
When inflammation occurs in the body a host of proteins are released into the blood called cytokines. Previous research has shown that higher levels of cytokines are associated with depression in adults, but little is known about this relationship in adolescence.
Researchers investigated sex-differences in the relationship between inflammatory proteins and depression. Published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study found that different cytokines were implicated in depression risk and severity in boys compared to girls. The research was part of the IDEA (Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence) project funded by MQ Mental Health Research.
To assess inflammation, researchers measured the blood cytokine levels in 75 adolescent boys and 75 adolescent girls (aged 14-16 years) from Brazil. The 150 participants had been recruited into three groups with equal numbers (50 participants in each group: 25 girls and 25 boys). The groups were those at low-risk for depression and not depressed, those at high risk of depression and not depressed, and those currently experiencing major depressive disorder (MDD).
The findings indicated that there are sex differences between the individual inflammatory proteins that are associated with depression in adolescents. Higher levels of the cytokine interleukin-2 (IL-2) were associated with both increased risk for depression and the severity of depressive symptoms in boys, but not in girls. However, higher levels of IL-6 were associated with severity of depression in girls, but not boys. In boys the levels of IL-2 were higher in the high-risk than the low-risk group and even higher in the group diagnosed with depression, indicating that in boys IL-2 levels in the blood could help indicate the onset of future depression.
Dr Zuzanna Zajkowska, Postdoctoral Researcher at King’s IoPPN and first author of the study, said,
“This is the first study to show differences between boys and girls in the patterns of inflammation that are linked to the risk and development of adolescent depression. We found that the severity of depressive symptoms was associated with increased levels of the cytokine interleukin-2 in boys, but interleukin-6 in girls. We know more adolescent girls develop depression than boys and that the disorder takes a different course depending on sex so we hope that our findings will enable us to better understand why there are these differences and ultimately help develop more targeted treatments for different biological sexes.”
Researchers recruited adolescents from public schools in Brazil. Risk of depression was assessed by a composite risk score for depression based on 11 sociodemographic variables that had been developed as part of the IDEA project. Adolescents completed several questionnaires, self-reporting their emotional difficulties, relationships, experiences, and mood. They also completed a clinical assessment with a child and adolescent psychiatrist.

Breast cancer research takes a significant stride forward as Professor Semin Lee and his research team from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Ji-Yeon Kim and Professor Young-Hyuck Im from the Division of Hematology-Oncology at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, delves into the exploration of triple negative apocrine carcinoma. This rare breast cancer subtype has garnered attention due to its unique genetic characteristics and improved prognosis when compared to other forms of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).
Triple negative apocrine carcinoma accounts for only 1-4% of all breast cancers. While it falls under the category of TNBC, which is characterized by the absence of hormone receptors and epidermal growth factor receptors, this particular subtype exhibits a more favorable prognosis than other TNBC subtypes. However, due to limited analysis studies on triple negative apocrine carcinoma, treatment criteria have remained ambiguous.
In their study, the research team employed advanced molecular biological methods to conduct multi-omics analyses — integrating genetic information and RNA molecules — to unravel novel insights into this rare form of breast cancer.
The findings revealed distinct genomic characteristics that impact the prognosis for patients with triple negative apocrine carcinoma. The researchers identified four to five unique subtypes within breast cancer based on gene expression profiles. Notably, patients with triple-negative apocrine carcinoma exhibited similarities to Luminal A — a subtype associated with better prognostic outcomes. The study confirmed an impressive five-year disease-free survival rate for these patients at 92.2%, significantly higher than those diagnosed with other types of TNBC (59.1%).
“This research has the potential to guide treatment decisions regarding adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery and predict patient survival outcomes,” explained Sabin Park (Department of Biomedical Engineering, UNIST), first author of the study, while emphasizing the potential impact of these findings.
Published in the journal, Experimental & Molecular Medicine on July 3, this study received support from the Korea Research Foundation’s Cancer Control Research Center by Intercellular Signal Communication — a program under the Ministry of Science and ICT.
As breast cancer continues to be a significant global health concern affecting millions of lives, studies like these play a crucial role in advancing personalized treatment approaches based on specific genetic mutations. The groundbreaking insights gained from Professor Lee’s team provide hope for improved clinical management and better prognostic outcomes for patients diagnosed with triple negative apocrine carcinoma.