Publisher Health

In the race to draw down greenhouse gas emissions around the world, scientists at MIT are looking to carbon-capture technologies to decarbonize the most stubborn industrial emitters.
Steel, cement, and chemical manufacturing are especially difficult industries to decarbonize, as carbon and fossil fuels are inherent ingredients in their production. Technologies that can capture carbon emissions and convert them into forms that feed back into the production process could help to reduce the overall emissions from these “hard-to-abate” sectors.
But thus far, experimental technologies that capture and convert carbon dioxide do so as two separate processes, that themselves require a huge amount of energy to run. The MIT team is looking to combine the two processes into one integrated and far more energy-efficient system that could potentially run on renewable energy to both capture and convert carbon dioxide from concentrated, industrial sources.
In a study appearing today in ACS Catalysis, the researchers reveal the hidden functioning of how carbon dioxide can be both captured and converted through a single electrochemical process. The process involves using an electrode to attract carbon dioxide released from a sorbent, and to convert it into a reduced, reusable form.
Others have reported similar demonstrations, but the mechanisms driving the electrochemical reaction have remained unclear. The MIT team carried out extensive experiments to determine that driver, and found that, in the end, it came down to the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. In other words, the more pure carbon dioxide that makes contact with the electrode, the more efficiently the electrode can capture and convert the molecule.
Knowledge of this main driver, or “active species,” can help scientists tune and optimize similar electrochemical systems to efficiently capture and convert carbon dioxide in an integrated process.
The study’s results imply that, while these electrochemical systems would probably not work for very dilute environments (for instance, to capture and convert carbon emissions directly from the air), they would be well-suited to the highly concentrated emissions generated by industrial processes, particularly those that have no obvious renewable alternative.

Northwestern University researchers have developed the first electronic device for continuously monitoring the health of transplanted organs in real time.
Sitting directly on a transplanted kidney, the ultrathin, soft implant can detect temperature irregularities associated with inflammation and other body responses that arise with transplant rejection. Then, it alerts the patient or physician by wirelessly streaming data to a nearby smartphone or tablet.
In a new study, the researchers tested the device on a small animal model with transplanted kidneys and found the device detected warning signs of rejection up to three weeks earlier than current monitoring methods. This extra time could enable physicians to intervene sooner, improving patient outcomes and wellbeing as well as increasing the odds of preserving donated organs, which are increasingly precious due to rising demand amid an organ-shortage crisis.
The study will publish Friday (Sept. 8) in the journal Science.
Rejection can occur at any time after a transplant — immediately after the transplant or years down the road. It is often silent, and patients might not experience symptoms, the study authors said.
“I have noticed many of my patients feel constant anxiety — not knowing if their body is rejecting their transplanted organ or not,” said Dr. Lorenzo Gallon, a Northwestern Medicine transplant nephrologist, who led the clinical portion of the study. “They may have waited years for a transplant and then finally received one from a loved one or deceased donor. Then, they spend the rest of their lives worrying about the health of that organ. Our new device could offer some protection, and continuous monitoring could provide reassurance and peace of mind.”
Northwestern’s John A. Rogers, a bioelectronics pioneer who led the device development, said it’s critical to identify rejection events as soon as they occur.

Who can forget the stomach-churning moments when “Survivor” contestants forced down crunchy insects, among other unappetizing edibles, for a chance to win $1 million? In daring culinary challenges, the TV show’s contestants exhibited gastronomic bravery as viewers watched in discomfort.
Digesting a crunchy critter starts with the audible grinding of its rigid protective covering — the exoskeleton. Unpalatable as it may sound, the hard cover might be good for the metabolism, according to a new study, in mice, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The researchers, led by Steven Van Dyken, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology & immunology, found in mice that digesting chitin, an abundant dietary fiber in insect exoskeletons and also mushrooms and crustacean shells, engages the immune system. An active immune response was linked to less weight gain, reduced body fat and a resistance to obesity.
“Obesity is an epidemic,” Van Dyken said. “What we put into our bodies has a profound effect on our physiology and on how we metabolize food. We’re investigating ways to counteract obesity based on what we learn about how the immune system is engaged by diet.”
The study is published Sept. 7 in Science.
The immune system is well known for safeguarding the body against various threats, including bacteria, viruses, allergens and even cancer. The researchers found that a particular arm of the immune system also is involved in chitin digestion. Stomach distention after chitin ingestion activates an innate immune response that triggers stomach cells to ramp up production of enzymes, known as chitinases, that break down chitin. Of note, chitin is insoluble — incapable of being dissolved in liquid — and thus requires enzymes and harsh acidic conditions to digest.
Do-Hyun Kim, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate and first author on the study, performed the experiments in germ-free mice lacking intestinal bacteria. His results show that chitin activates immune responses in the absence of bacteria.

As many as 5.8 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition associated with progressive cognitive decline, including loss of memory capabilities . Protein aggregates, composed of beta-amyloid or other proteins, form in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s. These beta-amyloid plaques appear to be a significant contributor to the disease. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists uncovered a subset of immune cells that appears to slow this beta-amyloid plaque accumulation and the key proteins involved in the process. The findings were published today in Nature Immunology.
“People typically think of the immune system as being involved in defense from bacterial or viral infection, though there is growing interest in the role of the immune system in neurodegenerative diseases,” said co-first author Jordy Saravia, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Immunology. “We uncovered an important immune cell communication axis that is protective in an Alzheimer’s disease model.”
Microglia are immune cells in the brain responsible for clearing beta-amyloid plaques. As Alzheimer’s disease progresses, microglia can lose their capacity to remove these plaques and instead produce inflammatory mediators that may accelerate beta-amyloid plaque progression. The St. Jude team found that accumulating another subtype of immune cells, called CD8+ T cells, is essential to slow this process by interacting with microglia. This interaction, in turn, was important to limit beta-amyloid burden and preserve memory capabilities in a mouse model of the disease.
“Our paper is the first to demonstrate that a subpopulation of CD8+ T cells can be protective in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease,” said co-first author Wei Su, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Immunology. “Moving forward, we may be able to extend this work to find an effective intervention for neurodegenerative diseases.”
Immune cells’ opposing roles in Alzheimer’s disease
Previous research has established complex roles for T cells and other immune system cells in Alzheimer’s disease. In particular, research groups using other experimental systems have suggested that certain T cells with inflammatory functions worsen the disease. However, the St. Jude scientists showed that CD8+ T cells with suppressive features accumulate in the brains of both mouse models and patients with Alzheimer’s disease, highlighting that T cells play a complex role in this disease.
“We showed that CD8+ T cells can play a protective role against Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis, although there is also evidence for a contributing role,” said corresponding author Hongbo Chi, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Immunology. “Our results demonstrate the need to better understand these complex neuro-immune interactions to improve outcomes for this neurodegenerative disease.”
To understand how T cells were delaying symptom progression in their Alzheimer’s disease model, the St. Jude group searched for the most abundant molecular interaction between CD8+ T cells and the microglia. They found a protein on the surface of CD8+ T cells, CXCR6, interacts with the protein CXCL16 expressed by microglia.

People who had high blood pressure while lying flat on their backs had a higher risk of heart attack, stroke, heart failure or premature death, according to new research to be presented at the American Heart Association’s Hypertension Scientific Sessions 2023, to be held Sept. 7-10, 2023, in Boston. The meeting is the premier scientific exchange focused on recent advances in basic and clinical research on high blood pressure and its relationship to cardiac and kidney disease, stroke, obesity and genetics.
The autonomic nervous system regulates blood pressure in different body positions; however, gravity may cause blood to pool when seated or upright, and the body is sometimes unable to properly regulate blood pressure during lying, seated and standing positions, the authors noted.
“If blood pressure is only measured while people are seated upright, cardiovascular disease risk may be missed if not measured also while they are lying supine on their backs,” said lead study author Duc M. Giao, a researcher and a 4th-year M.D. student at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
To examine body position, blood pressure and heart health risk, the researchers examined health data for 11,369 adults from the longitudinal Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. The data on supine and seated blood pressure was gathered during the enrollment period, ARIC visit 1, which took place between 1987-1989. Participants had their blood pressure taken while briefly lying down at a clinic. The average age of participants at that time was 54 years old; 56% of the group self-identified as female; and 25% of participants self-identified as Black race. Participants in this analysis were followed for an average of 25 to 28 years, up through ARIC visit 5, which includes health data collected from 2011-2013.
The researcher’s findings included: 16% percent of participants who did not have high blood pressure — defined in this study as having top and bottom blood pressure measures greater than or equal to 130/80 mm Hg — while seated had high blood pressure while lying supine (flat on their backs), compared to 74% of those with seated high blood pressure who also had supine high blood pressure. In comparison to participants who did not have high blood pressure while seated and supine, participants who had high blood pressure while seated and supine had a 1.6 times higher risk of developing coronary heart disease; a 1.83 times higher risk of developing heart failure; a 1.86 times higher risk of stroke; a 1.43 times higher risk of overall premature death; and a 2.18 times higher risk of dying from coronary heart disease Participants who had high blood pressure while supine but not while seated had similar elevated risks as participants who had high blood pressure while both seated and supine. Differences in blood pressure medication use did not affect these elevated risks in either group.”Our findings suggest people with known risk factors for heart disease and stroke may benefit from having their blood pressure checked while lying flat on their backs,” Giao said.
“Efforts to manage blood pressure during daily life may help lower blood pressure while sleeping. Future research should compare supine blood pressure measurements in the clinic with overnight measurements.”
The study’s limitations included that it focused on adults who were middle-aged at the time of enrollment, meaning the results might not be as generalizable to older populations, Giao said.

Blood pressure among patients diagnosed with hypertension appeared to slightly increase and rates of systolic, or top number, blood pressure being controlled during an outpatient visit appeared to slightly decrease during winter months, according to a new study to be presented at the American Heart Association’s Hypertension Scientific Sessions 2023, held Sept. 7-10, 2023, in Boston. The meeting is the premier scientific exchange focused on recent advances in basic and clinical research on high blood pressure and its relationship to cardiac and kidney disease, stroke, obesity and genetics.
According to the American Heart Association’s 2023 Statistical Update, nearly half of adults in the U.S. have high blood pressure. Previous research found that blood pressure varies with the seasons of the year. Most of this variation is in systolic blood pressure — the top number in a blood pressure reading that gauges the pressure in/against blood vessels during heartbeats. The study authors sought to understand whether blood pressure control, defined in this study as less than 140/90 mm Hg among patients with hypertension, varied by season.
“Despite the smaller degree of systolic blood pressure variation in comparison to previous studies on seasonality in blood pressure, we were surprised to observe a large degree of change in blood pressure control between winter and summer months,” said lead study author Robert B. Barrett, a software engineer at the American Medical Association in Greenville, South Carolina. “Individuals with hypertension or values near the range of hypertension may benefit from periodic blood pressure monitoring and improvements in physical activity and nutritional patterns during winter months to offset adverse effects from seasonal blood pressure changes.”
The researchers reviewed electronic health records for 60,676 adults treated for hypertension between July 2018 and June 2023 at six health care centers. Each participant remained on their originally prescribed classes of antihypertensive drugs throughout the review period. Primarily in the Southeast and Midwest regions, the centers ranged from small federally funded nonprofit health centers or clinics to large academic medical centers. Seasonal blood pressure readings were analyzed to assess variations in blood pressure control during the winter vs. summer months (December through February vs. June through August, respectively) as part of an American Medical Association-supported, quality-improvement program for clinicians and health care centers. Study participants were an average age of 62 years old; 52.3% identified as white race; 59.7% identified as female.
The analysis of the health records found that, on average, participants’ systolic blood pressure increased by up to 1.7 mm Hg in the winter months compared to the summer months. In addition, they found that blood pressure control rates decreased by up to 5% during the winter months.
Future directions for investigation might include analyzing the frequency of heart disease and deaths during each season, the authors noted.
The study’s limitations include that the electronic health records did not capture a complete health history for each participant and that information collected for each patient was retrieved only from the institution where they were treated.

Children of a parent with alcohol or drug use disorder have a greater risk of intellectual disability, even if the problem only lies with the father, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden report. According to the study, which is published in the journal eClinicalMedicine, preventive measures should be directed at both parents.
It is well known that a woman’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy can increase the risk of her child developing an intellectual disability. Research from Karolinska Institutet now shows that all forms of substance abuse, both in the mother and the father, and not only during pregnancy, can constitute a risk factor.
Have mainly focused on mothers
“Preventative measures, such as educating healthcare professionals and public health recommendations, have focused for decades on mothers with alcohol-related problems,” says Lotfi Khemiri, researcher at the Departments of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. “Our findings highlight the importance of also directing such measures towards fathers with different types of substance use disorder.”
The study, which is based on data from Swedish registries, comprised almost two million babies born between 1978 and 2002 and their parents. The researchers found that 1.2 per cent of babies born to parents without such a disorder were diagnosed with an intellectual disability, compared with 3 per cent of the babies who had one parent with a diagnosis related to a substance use disorder (alcohol or drug abuse).
Higher risk before birth
The elevated risk was greater if the parent had received a diagnosis before or during pregnancy rather than after birth. A substance use disorder diagnosis registered before birth was associated with more than twice the risk of intellectual disability in the baby, regardless of which parent had the diagnosis. The correlation was weaker but still statistically significant after adjustment of socioeconomic factors and psychiatric comorbidity in the parents.

An artificial intelligence tool developed by researchers at the University of Rochester can help people with Parkinson’s disease remotely assess the severity of their symptoms within minutes. A study in npj Digital Medicine describes the new tool, which has users tap their fingers 10 times in front of a webcam to assess motor performance on a scale of 0-4.
Doctors often have patients perform simple motor tasks to assess movement disorders and rate the severity using guidelines such as the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). The AI model provides a rapid assessment using the MDS-UPDRS guidelines, automatically generating computational metrics such as speed, amplitude, frequency, and period that are interpretable, standardized, repeatable, and consistent with medical guidebooks. It uses those attributes to classify the severity of tremors.
The finger-tapping task was performed by 250 global participants with Parkinson’s disease and the AI system’s ratings were compared with those by three neurologists and three primary care physicians. While expert neurologists performed slightly better than the AI model, the AI model outperformed the primary care physicians with UPDRS certification.
The AI-based Parkinson’s disease severity test generates computational metrics such as speed, amplitude, frequency, and period, and uses those attributes to classify the severity of tremors. 
“These findings could have huge implications for patients who have difficulty gaining access to neurologists, getting appointments, and traveling to the hospital,” says Ehsan Hoque, an associate professor in Rochester’s Department of Computer Science and co-director of the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. “It’s an example of how AI is being gradually introduced into health care to serve people outside of the clinic and improve health equity and access.”
The study was led by Md. Saiful Islam, a Google PhD fellow and a graduate student in computer science advised by Hoque. The team of computer scientists collaborated with several members of the Medical Center’s Department of Neurology, including associate professor Jamie Adams; Ray Dorsey, the David M. Levy Professor of Neurology; and associate professor Ruth Schneider.
The researchers say their method can be applied to other motor tasks, which opens the door to evaluating other types of movement disorders such as ataxia and Huntington’s disease. The new Parkinson’s disease assessment is available online, though the researchers caution that it reflects an emerging technology and at this early stage should not be considered, on its own and without a physician’s input, as a definitive measure of the presence or severity of the disease.

Millions of Americans have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which occurs in one of two forms: Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. Though the two have similar symptoms, they require different treatment strategies, and tests to distinguish between them are invasive. Reporting in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research, researchers now show that chains of sugar molecules are tacked onto antibodies differently in patients with the diseases, which could someday lead to a simple blood-based diagnostic test.
Though Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis have similar symptoms and unknown causes, they affect disparate parts of the gastrointestinal tract and therefore require different therapies. Currently, distinguishing between the two typically requires invasive procedures, such as an endoscopy or biopsy. To develop a less uncomfortable option, some researchers are searching for biomarkers in blood or other easily accessible body fluids. Antibodies, also known as immunoglobulins, could serve as biomarkers, given that immunoglobulin G (IgG) was previously shown to play a role in autoimmune diseases, including IBD. But another class, immunoglobulin A (IgA), could play a role as well, because it functions within the mucous membranes that cover and protect internal organs, such as the intestinal tract. These immune molecules can be decorated with chains of sugars called glycans, and this can affect their structure and function. Since Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis both affect the intestinal tract, Manfred Wuhrer and colleagues wanted to understand how IgA glycosylation might differ between these two diseases.
To investigate these glycosylation patterns, the researchers analyzed over 400 clinical plasma samples from patients with either form of IBD, alongside nearly 200 healthy controls. Using a combination of liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, they found over 30 different forms of the IgA1 and IgA2 antibodies. The glycans differed between the three experimental groups. The Crohn’s disease patients had IgAs with fewer branched sugars, but more glycosylation overall compared to other groups. Ulcerative colitis patients had more glycans attached to the opposite end of the IgA protein chain than the control group. These patterns were used to construct a preliminary statistical model that could predict the disease group, and the model could be expanded further to be used as a diagnostic tool. The researchers say that this work could help make diagnosing IBD easier and less invasive for patients.
The authors acknowledge funding from the European Commission.

Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health researchers have successfully created chimeric embryos containing a combination of human and pig cells. When transferred into surrogate pig mothers, the developing humanized kidneys had normal structure and tubule formation after 28 days. This is the first time that scientists have been able to grow a solid humanized organ inside another species, though previous studies have used similar methods to generate human tissues such as blood or skeletal muscle in pigs. The work appears September 7 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
The researchers focused on kidneys because they are one of the first organs to develop, and they’re also the most commonly transplanted organ in human medicine.
“Rat organs have been produced in mice, and mouse organs have been produced in rats, but previous attempts to grow human organs in pigs have not succeeded,” says senior author Liangxue of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Wuyi University. “Our approach improves the integration of human cells into recipient tissues and allows us to grow human organs in pigs.”
Integrating human stem cells into pig embryos has been a challenge because pig cells outcompete human cells and pig and human cells have different physiological needs. “We have been working on mechanisms to overcome the extremely low efficiency in interspecies chimera,” says senior author Guangjin Pan of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health. “We identified a couple of critical factors that enhance the formation of interspecies chimera by facilitating cell competition.”
The team’s technique depends on three key components: First, they created a niche within the pig embryo so that the human cells would not have to compete with pig cells by using CRISPR to genetically engineer a single-cell pig embryo so that it was missing two genes that are needed for kidney development. Second, the researchers engineered human pluripotent stem cells — cells that have the potential to develop into any cell type — to make them more amenable to integration and less likely to self-destruct by temporarily shutting down apoptosis. Then, they converted these cells into “naïve” cells resembling early human embryonic cells by culturing them in a special medium. Third, before implanting the developing embryos in surrogate sows, the researchers grew the chimeras in conditions that were optimized to provide unique nutrients and signals to both the human and pig cells, since these cells usually have disparate needs.Altogether, the researchers transferred 1,820 embryos to 13 surrogate mothers. After either 25 or 28 days, they terminated gestation and extracted the embryos to assess whether the chimeras had successfully produced humanized kidneys.
The researchers collected five chimeric embryos for analysis (two at 25 days and three at 28 days post-implantation) and found that they had structurally normal kidneys for their stage of development and were composed of 50-60% human cells. At 25-28 days, the kidneys were in the mesonephros stage (the second stage of kidney development); they had formed tubules and buds of cells that would eventually become ureters connecting the kidney to the bladder.