Publisher Health

Reaching the age of 90, 95 or 100, known as exceptional longevity, was more likely for women who maintained their body weight after age 60, according to a multi-institutional study led by University of California San Diego. Older women who sustained a stable weight were 1.2 to 2 times more likely to achieve longevity compared to those who experience a weigh loss of 5 percent or more.
Reporting in the Aug. 29, 2023 online issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, researchers investigated the associations of weight changes later in life with exceptional longevity among 54,437 women who enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative, a prospective study investigating causes of chronic diseases among postmenopausal women. Throughout the follow up period, 30,647, or 56 percent of the participants, survived to the age of 90 or beyond.
Women who lost at least 5 percent weight were less likely to achieve longevity compared to those who achieved stable weight. For example, women who unintentionally lost weight were 51 percent less likely to survive to the age of 90. However, gaining 5 percent or more weight, compared to stable weight, was not associated with exceptional longevity.
“It is very common for older women in the United States to experience overweight or obesity with a body mass index range of 25 to 35. Our findings support stable weight as a goal for longevity in older women,” said first author Aladdin H. Shadyab, Ph.D., M.P.H., associate professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at UC San Diego.
“If aging women find themselves losing weight when they are not trying to lose weight, this could be a warning sign of ill health and a predictor of decreased longevity.”
The findings suggest that general recommendations for weight loss in older women may not help them live longer. Nevertheless, the authors caution that women should heed medical advice if moderate weight loss is recommended to improve their health or quality of life.
The data expands on the growing research linking the relationship between weight change and mortality. Notably, this is the first large study to examine weight change later in life and its relation to exceptional longevity.
Co-authors include: Matthew A. Allison and Andrea Z. LaCroix, UC San Diego; JoAnn E. Manson, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Deepika Laddu, University of Illinois Chicago; Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Linda Van Horn, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; Robert A. Wild, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center; Hailey R. Banack, Dalla Lana School of Public Health; Fred K. Tabung, Ohio State University; Bernhard Haring, University of Wurzburg and Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Yangbo Sun, University of Tennessee Health Science Center; Erin S. LeBlanc, Kaiser Permanente; Jean Wactawski-Wende, University at Buffalo — SUNY; Meryl S. LeBoff, Harvard Medical School; Michelle J. Naughton, Ohio State University; Juhua Luo, Indiana University Bloomington; Peter F. Schnatz, Reading Hospital/Tower Health; Ginny Natale, Stony Brook University; and Robert J. Ostfeld, Montefiore Health System.
This research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (75N92021D00001, 75N92021D00002, 75N92021D00003, 75N92021D00004 and 75N92021D00005).

People at increased risk for cardiovascular disease who participated in produce prescription programs increased their consumption of fruits and vegetables, which was associated with improved body mass index (BMI), blood sugar and blood pressure levels, as well as a decrease in food insecurity. This new research was published today in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a peer-reviewed American Heart Association journal.
Produce prescription programs enable doctors to prescribe fruits and vegetables in addition to medications. Patients receive electronic cards or vouchers to access free or discounted produce of their choice at retail grocery or farmers’ markets, explained study lead author Kurt Hager, Ph.D., M.S., an instructor at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Although previous research has examined the effects of small, individual produce prescription programs, this analysis is believed to be the largest produce prescription study by pooling data from nine programs across the U.S. to assess health outcomes after about six months.
“We know that food insecurity impacts health through several important pathways, including overall dietary quality, but also through stress and anxiety, mental health and tradeoffs between paying for food and other basic needs such as housing costs, utilities and medications,” said Hager, who completed these analyses while a doctoral student at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. “These results indicate produce prescriptions may lay an important foundation for improved health and well-being.”
Study participants received a median of $63 per month to purchase produce at local stores and farmers markets. In addition, participants attended nutrition classes. At the beginning and after completing the program — which ranged from 4 to 10 months — participants completed questionnaires about fruit and vegetable consumption, food insecurity and health status. Routine testing of blood pressure; weight and height; and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) -a measure of blood sugar — was completed at enrollment and at the conclusion of the program. The study did not include a control group and compared outcomes among participants before and after program participation.
The analysis of all participants found: Adults reported that their intake of fruits and vegetables increased by nearly one cup per day (0.85 cups per day). Among children, intake of fruits and vegetables increased by about a quarter of a cup per day (0.26 cups per day). Systolic blood pressure — blood pressure during heartbeats — decreased more than 8 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg); while diastolic blood pressure — blood pressure between heartbeats — decreased nearly 5 mm Hg among adults who had high blood pressure at enrollment in the study. Blood sugar, as measured by HbA1C levels, decreased by 0.29 to 0.58 percentage points among adults with diabetes. BMI significantly improved, with a reduction of 0.52 kilograms per square meter (kg/m2) among adults with obesity. Among children, however, BMI did not change. Adults were 62% more likely and children were more than twice as likely to report better health status by program completion. Overall, participants were one-third less likely to report food insecurity after completing the programs compared to before the programs.”Poor nutrition and nutrition insecurity are major drivers of chronic disease globally, including cardiometabolic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and their cardiovascular consequences, including heart failure, heart attack and stroke,” according to Mitchell Elkind, M.D., M.S., FAHA, chief clinical science officer of the American Heart Association and a tenured professor of neurology and epidemiology at Columbia University. “This analysis of produce prescription programs illustrates the potential of subsidized produce prescriptions to increase consumption of nutritious fruits and vegetables, reduce food insecurity and, hopefully, improve subjective and objective health measures. Future research will need to include randomized controlled trials to offset any potential bias and prove more rigorously the benefits of produce prescription programs. The American Heart Association’s new Food Is Medicine Initiative will be focused on supporting such trials.”
The Food is Medicine Initiative, announced in September 2022 by the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation — at a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health — seeks to ensure patients receive medical prescriptions for healthy food to help prevent and manage chronic disease.

Scientists at UC San Francisco are working on a new approach to treating kidney failure that could one day free people from needing dialysis or having to take harsh drugs to suppress their immune system after a transplant.
They have shown for the first time that kidney cells, housed in an implantable device called a bioreactor, can survive inside the body of a pig and mimic several important kidney functions. The device can work quietly in the background, like a pacemaker, and does not trigger the recipient’s immune system to go on the attack.
The findings, published in Nature Communications on August 29, 2023, are an important step forward for The Kidney Project, which is jointly headed by UCSF’s Shuvo Roy, PhD (technical director) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s William H. Fissell, MD (medical director).
Eventually, scientists plan to fill the bioreactor with different kidney cells that perform vital functions like balancing the body’s fluids and releasing hormones to regulate blood pressure — then pair it with a device that filters waste from the blood.
The aim is to produce a human-scale device to improve on dialysis, which keeps people alive after their kidneys fail but is a poor substitute for having a real working organ. More than 500,000 people in the U.S. require dialysis several times a week. Many seek kidney transplants, but there are not enough donors, and only about 20,000 people receive them each year. An implantable kidney would be a boon.
“We are focused on safely replicating the key functions of a kidney,” said Roy, a bioengineering professor in the UCSF School of Pharmacy. “The bioartificial kidney will make treatment for kidney disease more effective and also much more tolerable and comfortable.”
Inspired by nature, honed by science
Roy and his colleagues engineered the bioreactor to connect directly to blood vessels and veins, allowing the passage of nutrients and oxygen, much like a transplanted kidney would. Silicon membranes keep the kidney cells inside the bioreactor safe from attack by the recipient’s immune cells.

Several major childhood allergies may all stem from the community of bacteria living in our gut, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital.
The research, published in Nature Communications, identifies gut microbiome features and early life influences that are associated with children developing any of four common allergies — eczema, asthma, food allergy and/or hay fever. The findings could lead to methods of predicting whether a child will develop allergies, and ways to prevent them from developing at all.
“We’re seeing more and more children and families seeking help at the emergency department due to allergies,” said Dr. Stuart Turvey, professor in the department of pediatrics at UBC and an investigator at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and co-senior author on the study. “Hundreds of millions of children worldwide suffer from allergies, including one in three children in Canada, and it’s important to understand why this is happening and how it can be prevented.”
The study is one of the first to examine four distinct school-aged pediatric allergies at once. While these allergic diseases each have unique symptoms, the Turvey lab was curious whether they might have a common origin linked to the infant gut microbiota composition.
“These are technically different diagnoses, each with their own list of symptoms, so most researchers tend to study them individually,” says Dr. Charisse Petersen, co-senior author on the paper and postdoctoral fellow in the Turvey lab. “But when you look at what is going wrong at a cellular level, they actually have a lot in common.”
For the study, researchers examined clinical assessments from 1,115 children who were tracked from birth to age five. Roughly half of the children (523) had no evidence of allergies at any time, while more than half (592) were diagnosed with one or more allergic disorders by an expert physician. The researchers evaluated the children’s microbiomes from stool samples collected at clinical visits at three months and one year of age.
The stool samples revealed a bacterial signature that was associated with the children developing any of the four allergies by five years of age. The bacterial signature is a hallmark of dysbiosis, or an imbalanced gut microbiota, that likely resulted in a compromised intestinal lining and an elevated inflammatory response within the gut.

Almost one in five Danes experiences depression during their lives. A new study from Aarhus University now shows that the genetic risk of depression can be linked to an increased genetic risk of other psychiatric diagnoses. The study has just been published in Nature Medicine.
Through a detailed genetic scan, the researchers studied the genome of 1.3 million people, where more than 370,000 of them suffered from depression. This is the largest genetic study of depression to date, and it shows that people with hospital-treated depression often have a higher risk of developing diseases such as substance abuse, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, and that it is possible to predict the risk of developing these psychiatric disorders using genetic analyses.
The study shows for instance that people with hospital-treated depression and a high genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder are 32 times more likely to develop the disease than the rest of the general population.
Similarly, people with hospital-treated depression and a high genetic predisposition to schizophrenia are 14 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared to the rest of the population.
New prevention and treatment options
The results pave the way for offering high-risk people preventative measures and early treatment in the future, says professor Anders Børglum from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University and iPSYCH (national initiative for integrative psychiatric research), who led the study:
“For example, targeted efforts that offer more frequent monitoring for the development of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety among people with depression who have the highest genetic and clinical risk of being diagnosed with one of these disorders. This would enable early diagnosis and treatment, which we know can have beneficial effects.”
Likewise, according to Anders Børglum, identifying people with depression and a high genetic risk of developing substance abuse could make the patient and the doctor aware of the issue. Preventative measures could then be initiated to prevent the development of substance abuse.

Findings from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research reveal a new Australian drug that targets scar-like ‘fibrotic’ tissue within tumours shows promise for treating pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, one of the most aggressive forms of pancreatic cancer with a five-year survival rate of less than 10%.
The research in mouse models showed that when given in combination with chemotherapy, the drug PXS-5505 increased survival time by more than 35%, compared to chemotherapy treatment alone.
“The preclinical validation of this first-in-class anti-fibrotic drug marks a major milestone in our quest to overcome the significant challenges in treating pancreatic cancer and brings hope to patients and their families,” says Associate Professor Thomas Cox, head of the Matrix & Metastasis Lab at Garvan and senior author of the study, published in the journal Nature Cancer.
Potential to increase cancer survival
Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, which means that chemotherapy is often the only treatment option available. Many pancreatic cancers develop chemotherapy resistance soon after treatment starts, which contributes to the poor survival of patients. Part of this resistance is driven by tumour fibrosis — the formation of a mesh of scar tissue-like collagen — within and around pancreatic tumours that in turn reduces the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.
The new drug PXS-5505, developed by Sydney-based pharmaceutical research company Pharmaxis (ASX: PXS) and currently in Phase II clinical trials for the treatment of bone marrow cancer, works by blocking a family of enzymes that are critical for the deposition of collagen into the fibrotic tissue around tumours.
In collaboration with Pharmaxis, Garvan researchers found that the drug significantly reduced fibrosis in pancreatic tumours in mouse models.

Countries like Japan are experiencing declining birth rates and an aging population. The increased burden of care for this aging population may lead to a shortage of caregivers in a decade’s time. Thus, the recruitment and allocation of resources must be planned in advance. Technological interventions in the form of robots that provide home care services to the aged appear to be a promising solution to this problem.
Although care robots are being developed and improved at a rapid pace, their social acceptance has been limited. It is suspected that the ethical issues surrounding the use of such robots may be obstructing the implementation of this technology. Many acceptance models have demonstrated that the ethical perceptions of older people, their families, and professional caregivers regarding care robots can impact their willingness to adopt this technology. However, there is no universal model that can elucidate the relationship between ethical perceptions and the willingness to use care robots across countries and cultural contexts.
To fill this knowledge gap, a team of international researchers led by Professor Sayuri Suwa from Chiba University, including Dr. Hiroo Ide from the University of Tokyo, Dr. Yumi Akuta from Tokyo Healthcare University, Dr. Naonori Kodate from University College Dublin, Dr. Jaakko Hallila from Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences, and Dr. Wenwei Yu from Chiba University, among others, conducted a cross-sectional study across Japan, Ireland, and Finland. The findings of their study were made available online on July 25, 2023, and will be published in January 2024 in Volume 116 of the journal Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics.
Sharing the motivation behind the study, Prof. Suwa explains, “Today, in Japan’s super-aged society, various care robots, including monitoring cameras, have been developed and marketed to compensate for the shortage of care staff and to alleviate their stress. However, there are no discussions among users — older people, family caregivers, and care staff — and developers regarding the willingness to use care robots, the protection of privacy, and the appropriate use of personal information associated with the use of care robots. The desire to improve this situation and to promote appropriate utilization of care robots beyond Japan was the impetus for this research.”
The team developed a questionnaire that examined the ethical issues that could affect the willingness to use a care robot across the three countries. The survey was conducted between November 2018 and February 2019 among older people, their family caregivers, and professional caregivers. This study was also reviewed by multiple ethical committees in all three countries. The researchers analyzed a total of 1,132 responses, which comprised 664 responses from Japan, 208 from Ireland, and 260 from Finland. They found that the willingness to use care robots was highest in Japan (77.1%), followed by Ireland (70.3%), and was lowest in Finland (52.8%).
Next, the researchers developed a conceptual model and evaluated it using statistical methods. From the questionnaire, the researchers included responses to ten items in the model, categorized into four broad domains — acquisition of personal information, use of personal information for medical and long-term care, secondary use of personal information, and participation in research and development. They then improved the model using Akaike’s information criterion (AIC). The model underwent incremental improvements to attain better (smaller) AIC values. The final model was then applied to each country.
Thus, this study demonstrated the successful use of a single universal model that could explain the correlation between ethical perceptions and social implementation of care robots across three countries with different geographies, demographics, cultures, and systems.
Discussing the importance and long-term impact of their study, Prof. Suwa concludes, “From our results, we can infer that social implementation of care robots can be promoted if developers and researchers encourage potential users to participate in the development process, proposed in the form of a co-design and co-production concept. We hope that the process of developing care robots will be improved to contribute to human well-being in a global aging society.”

How much time elapses between a blow to the head and the start of damage associated with Alzheimer’s disease?
A device that makes it possible to track the effects of concussive force on a functioning cluster of brain cells suggests the answer is in hours. The “traumatic brain injury (TBI) on a chip” being developed at Purdue University opens a window into a cause and effect that announces itself with the passage of decades but is exceedingly difficult to trace back to its origins.
“We’re basically creating a miniature brain that we can hit and then study,” said Riyi Shi, lead researcher and the Mari Hulman George Endowed Professor of Applied Neuroscience in Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “We know there’s a link between TBI and Alzheimer’s; that’s well established in clinical observation. But teasing out the basic essential pathway is not easy. With the TBI on a chip, we’re able to test a lot of hypotheses that would be very difficult to do in living animals.”
In a study recently published in Lab on a Chip, a research team led by Shi subjected functioning clusters of cultured neurons from embryonic mice to three blows of 200 g-force, each approximating the higher end of what a football player receives in a single hit. The trauma leads to an immediate surge in production of acrolein — a molecule associated with oxidative stress and neurodegenerative disease — and a rise in misfolded clumps of the protein amyloid beta 42 (AB42), which is found in masses called plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Additional experiments traced the links between impact, acrolein and AB42.
The device can also be used to test possible therapeutics, including drugs known to reduce acrolein levels. In the current study, Shi’s team used the device to show that the drug hydralazine, a known acrolein scavenger that is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for lowering blood pressure, reduces the amount of acrolein and levels of misfolded AB42 produced in the cluster of neurons after a hit. Shi, who has a long history of studying neurodegenerative disease, acrolein and hydralazine, said the TBI on a chip enabled a finding he’s sought over two decades of study.
“Now that we know what’s happening, is there something we can do about it? And the answer is yes,” said Shi, who is also a member of the Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience. “Acrolein is time-dependent; the longer it’s there, the more AB42 aggregation it will cause. Here we show that if we lower acrolein with this drug, we can lower inflammation and AB42 aggregation.”
The device, custom-fabricated at the Purdue Center for Paralysis Research, uses a pendulum to deliver a specific g-force to a small chamber housing a cluster of a quarter million neurons supported by a bed of nutrients. A microelectronic array embedded in the chamber measures the electrical activity of the neurons, which will sustain functional firing patterns for several weeks, while a clear viewing port allows microscopic observation of the neurons. Researchers remove the cluster of neurons from the chamber at intervals to take specific biochemical measurements.

A new study suggests rough surfaces inspired by the bacteria-killing spikes on insect wings may be more effective at combatting drug-resistant superbugs, including fungus, than previously understood.
The increasing rates of drug-resistant infection has health experts globally concerned.
To avoid infection around implants — such as titanium hips or dental prosthesis — doctors use a range of antimicrobial coatings, chemicals and antibiotics, but these fail to stop antibiotic-resistant strains and can even increase resistance.
To address these challenges, RMIT University scientists have designed a pattern of microscale spikes that can be etched onto titanium implants or other surfaces to provide effective, drug-free protection from both bacteria and fungus.
The team’s study published in Advanced Materials Interfaces tested the effectiveness of the altered titanium surface in killing multi drug-resistant Candida — a potentially deadly fungus responsible for one in 10 hospital-acquired medical device infections.
The specially designed spikes, each of a similar height to a bacteria cell, destroyed about half the cells soon after contact.
Significantly, the other half not immediately destroyed were rendered unviable from the injuries sustained, unable to reproduce or cause infection.

An advancement in 3D bioprinting of native-like skeletal muscle tissues has been made by scientists at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI). The key to the TIBI scientists’ approach lies in their specially formulated bioink, which contains microparticles engineered for sustained delivery of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). As was shown in their recent paper in Macromolecular Bioscience, sustained delivery of IGF-1 enhances the formation of mature skeletal muscle tissue from muscle precursor cells and facilitates their structural alignment. This increases the efficiency of the regenerative process and can lead to successful therapies for people suffering from muscle loss or injury.
The loss of skeletal muscle due to trauma, disease, or surgical procedures results not only in functional impairment but causes damage to associated tissues, such as blood vessels and other structural tissues. Current treatment for such muscle loss is the transfer of a patient’s healthy muscle tissue from a different site to the injury site. However, insufficient innervation and other complications with the transplanted tissue can hamper full muscle recovery.
The normal process for muscle development is gradual, where round muscle precursor cells called myoblasts fuse to form tubular-shaped cells called myotubes. These myotubes eventually develop into mature muscle fibers. In addition to muscle cell maturation, precise cellular alignment and orientation are essential to successful muscle contraction and function.
Efforts have been made to bioengineer functional skeletal muscle tissue, but most approaches present their own set of challenges. For example, attempts to engineer native-like skeletal muscle tissue using electrospinning methods have produced muscle tissue with the proper structural alignment and orientation for repair and regeneration; however, the capabilities of the tissues for cell maturation and muscle contraction have proven insufficient.
The TIBI approach utilizes 3D bioprinting with a bioink composed of GelMA (a biocompatible gelatin-based hydrogel), myoblast cells, and microparticles engineered for sustained delivery of IGF-1.
IGF-1 promotes muscle regeneration and repair when present for at least ten days. To provide sustained release of IGF-1 for several days, the researchers used a microfluidic system to fabricate uniformly sized microparticles which were coated with IGF-1. The IGF-1 was gradually released from the surface of the microparticles as the particles degraded.
One week after the muscle constructs were created with the new bioink, the researchers observed enhanced myoblast alignment, fusion, and differentiation into myotubes, which were also shown to grow and elongate significantly more than constructs without a sustained release of IGF-1. Interestingly, ten days after bioprinting, the muscle tissue constructs having sustained release of IGF-1 began to contract spontaneously.
Preclinical studies were carried out with mice receiving implants of 3D bioprinted muscle tissue constructs. Those mice implanted with muscle tissue constructs that offered sustained release of IGF-1 exhibited the highest degree of muscle tissue regeneration six weeks after implantation.
Additional in vivo experiments revealed that sustained release of IGF-1 also triggered a well-regulated inflammatory response that proved beneficial for tissue repair.
“The sustained release of IGF-1 facilitates the maturation and alignment of muscle cells, which is a crucial step in muscle tissue repair and regeneration,” said TIBI’s Director and CEO, Ali Khademhosseini, Ph.D. “There is great potential for using this strategy for the therapeutic creation of functional, contractile muscle tissue.”