Publisher Health

Preterm babies given a supplement with a combination of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids have better visual function by the age of two and a half. This has been shown by a study at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
The study, published in The Lancet Regional Health Europe, covers 178 extremely preterm babies at the neonatal units of the university hospitals in Gothenburg, Lund, and Stockholm between 2016 and 2019. Extremely preterm babies are those born before the 28th week of pregnancy.
Around half of the children were given preventive oral nutritional supplements containing the omega-6 fatty acid AA (arachidonic acid) and the omega-3 fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). Neither AA nor DHA are included in the supplements that are currently routinely given to extremely preterm babies immediately after birth.
The researchers have previously found that the combination supplement led to the risk of contracting the sight-threatening eye disease ROP (retinopathy of prematurity) being halved. The current study looks at children’s visual development at two and a half years of corrected age (i.e. age from the estimated date of birth).
Better visual interpretation in the brain
The study’s first author is Pia Lundgren, an associate professor in pediatric eye research at the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Academy and a chief physician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
“The study shows that children who have received the combination supplement had improved visual function, regardless of whether or not they had previously had ROP,” she notes. “The improved visual development was thus not only due to the beneficial effect on the retina. The supplement also seems to have improved the brain’s ability to interpret visual impressions.”
The issue of nutrition and supplementation for extremely preterm babies is a highly topical issue within neonatal care in many parts of the world. Sweden currently lacks precise guidelines for administering fatty acid supplements to extremely preterm children, but the guidelines are now being revised — partly on the basis of the current findings.

Parents with children in adolescence know this all too well: one minute “the little ones” are just up to your shoulder, and all of a sudden, they’re growing over your head. Until now, it was assumed that such pubertal growth spurt in body length only occurs in humans, but not in other primates. A recently published study of the German Primate Center (DPZ) — Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna has now investigated this widespread hypothesis in bonobos (Pan paniscus). The result: Pronounced, human-like growth in the adolescent years also exists in bonobos and presumably also in other monkeys. Thus, humans are less exceptional in this trait than previously thought.
Until now, there has been a broad consensus that the human adolescent growth spurt in body length is evolutionarily unique and absent in other primates. However, such adolescent growth spurt occurs in many primate species in body weight, including humans. The study published in the journal eLife suspected and confirmed that the reason for this divergence could be methodological issues.
Mind the scale…
In their scientific work, the researchers used three approaches: They first outlined how scaling problems and incorrect comparisons between growth rates of body length (linear) and weight (volume) can lead to misleading interpretations, effectively comparing apples to oranges.
… leads to correct results
Subsequently, the research team applied a scale-corrected approach to an extensive dataset of 258 zoo-living bonobos. These data included weight and length growth, as well as several physiological markers related to growth and puberty. “We found pronounced growth spurts in body weight and body length in both sexes. Weight and length growth curves corresponded with each other and with patterns of testosterone and IGFBP-3 levels that resemble adolescent hormone surges in humans,” says first author Andreas Berghänel from the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology (KLIVV) at the University of Veterinary Medicine about the results.
Re-interpretation of studies provides different insights
In a third step, data published in other studies on non-human primates were reinterpreted. The results showed that adolescent growth spurt in weight and length occurs not only in bonobos, but very likely also in other monkeys. “Our results underline the importance of taking scaling laws into account when interpreting growth curves in general,” summarizes Verena Behringer, scientist in the Endocrinology Laboratory at the German Primate Center and senior author of the publication. “Furthermore, our data show that pronounced, human-like adolescent growth spurts in body weight and body length exist not only in bonobos, but probably also in many other non-human primates.
The study was conducted in cooperation with researchers from Odisee University of Applied Sciences, Antwerp Zoo Centre for Research and Conservation, the Antwerp University, the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and for Animal Behaviour, and the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. In addition, 19 zoos provided their data and contributed significantly to the success of the study.

The virulence of a rice-wrecking fungus — and deployment of ninja-like proteins that help it escape detection by muffling an immune system’s alarm bells — relies on genetic decoding quirks that could prove central to stopping it, says research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
A Nebraska team helmed by Richard Wilson hopes that identifying an essential but formerly unknown stage in the fungal takeover of rice cells can accelerate the treatment or prevention of rice blast disease, which ruins up to 30% of global yields each year.
“The response I’ve gotten from people in my field is that they’re very excited, because nobody’s been able to get a handle on this,” said Wilson, professor of plant pathology at Nebraska.
Most cellular machines, or proteins, are secreted in the same way: After being constructed and folded into their near-final forms at the endoplasmic reticulum, they move on to the Golgi body, which packages and forwards them along to their ultimate destinations. But certain proteins will bypass the Golgi body in favor of unconventional, poorly understood pathways. Wilson’s team has now shown that one of those unconventional pathways involves modifying not the secreted protein itself, but the genetic code of a molecule that aids in its construction.
Known as transfer RNA, or tRNA, that molecule hauls around amino acids — the building blocks of every protein — in search of a blueprint that calls for its particular cargo. Those blueprints exist as three-letter codes, or codons, carried by the fittingly named messenger RNA. When a tRNA comes across and decodes an mRNA whose codon matches its own three-letter combination, it unloads its corresponding amino acid, adding it to a string of others that ultimately yield a finished protein.
Before giving up their precious cargo, though, some tRNAs undergo chemical makeovers. One especially notable modification? The addition of sulfur to the tRNA’s third letter, or nucleotide — specifically when that letter is U, the nucleotide known as uridine. Though that sulfur addition has been conserved and observed in a wide range of organisms, from yeast to mice to humans, researchers have yet to pin down all its functions.
Wilson and his colleagues decided to play an educated hunch: that the modification of the tRNA’s uridine might prove important to the growth of Magnaporthe oryzae, the fungal species that causes rice blast disease. To test its importance, the researchers resorted to the tried-and-true method of removing the genes responsible for the modification, then looking for any differences between that mutant fungus and its original counterpart.

Published9 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Nicola RourkeBy Kate ScotterBBC News, EssexA man has called for a “systemic” change after his father-in-law was left on a trolley – and put into another patient’s vacant bed at one point – after being admitted to hospital.Jim Rourke said his 85-year-old father-in-law had gone to Basildon Hospital’s emergency department with stomach pain.Mr Rourke said he had “nothing but praise” for the care provided by staff, but after a 24-hour wait for a bed the system needed looking at. The Essex hospital has apologised.A spokesperson said the site was “particularly pressured” at the time following four days of industrial action by junior doctors earlier this month.A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said “immediate action” was being taken to improve access to urgent and emergency care.Image source, PA MediaMr Rourke said his wife’s father had gone to Basildon Hospital on 15 August.He said while the care was “outstanding from the time we arrived”, his father-in-law spent almost 24 hours either on a trolley or on a chair on a ward before he got a bed, because “there was nowhere else to put him”.Mr Rourke, who lives in the Billericay area, said at one point his father-in-law ended up going in another patient’s bed while it was vacant because he was “doubled over in pain”.He said: “It goes beyond the hospital. I don’t know if it’s a management issue or the government… It’s a systemic issue and it’s impacting people, I’m sure, on a daily basis.”Mr Rourke stressed the staff were “fantastic” and his father-in-law was being treated while waiting.England hospitals with the worst A&E waits revealedHospital to immediately start £8m A&E upgradeCare at three hospitals has deteriorated says CQCMatthew Hopkins, chief executive of Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, said the junior doctors’ strike led to beds “not being readily available for patients that needed to be admitted from our emergency department”.He said they were sorry for the “longer than usual wait”, adding: “Our staff are working incredibly hard to provide safe and compassionate care and we note that the family were happy with the care provided.”The DHSC said its Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan aimed to deliver one of the “fastest and longest sustained improvements” in waiting times in the NHS’s history, including creating 5,000 permanent staffed hospital beds – with the NHS on track to deliver this by winter. Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email eastofenglandnews@bbc.co.uk or get in touch via WhatsApp on 0800 169 1830Related Internet LinksBasildon University HospitalDepartment of Health and Social CareThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Many diseases affecting the brain and nervous system are linked to the formation of protein aggregates, or solid condensates, in cells from their liquid form condensate, but little is known about this process.
This liquid-to-solid transition can trigger the formation of what are called amyloid fibrils. These can further form plaques in neurons causing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Biomedical engineers at the University of Sydney, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, have now developed sophisticated optical techniques to monitor at close range the process by which these protein aggregates form.
By testing a protein associated with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis — ALS disease, which affected astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking — the Sydney engineers closely monitored the transition of this protein from its liquid to solid phase.
“This is a huge step forward to understanding how neurogenerative diseases develop from a fundamental perspective,” said Dr Yi Shen, lead author of the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“We can now directly observe the transition of these critical proteins from liquid to solid at the nanoscale — a millionth of a metre in scale,” said Dr Daniele Vigolo, a senior lecturer in the School of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the University of Sydney Nano Institute.
Proteins regularly form condensates during liquid-to-liquid phase separation in a wide range of critical and healthy biological functions, such as the formation of human embryos. This process assists biochemical reactions where protein concentrations are critical and also promotes healthy protein-protein interactions.

Griffith University researchers are on the brink of a technological breakthrough in vaccine development with a possible new vaccine modality.
Professor Bernd Rehm and Dr Shuxiong Chen from the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD) and Griffith’s Centre for Cell Factories and Biopolymers have succeeded in developing a new vaccine modality that is a stable particulate vaccine.
The new vaccine modality is at proof-of-concept stage and in early development.
To demonstrate this vaccine approach, it was tested with a more established Griffith vaccine against Strep A that is currently performing strongly in human clinical trials in Canada.
Professor Rehm said the tests we’ve run so far show this technology facilitates development of vaccines that are safe and induce strong immune responses against Strep A.
“It’s a synthetic vaccine based on our innovative technology that uses reprogrammed safe Escherichia coli cells to assemble vaccine particles at high yield,” he said.
“To develop the vaccine, we reprogrammed bacterial cell factories to assemble biopolymer particles coated with the Griffith Strep A antigens and found the particles were safe and protected against infection.

The NewsA comparatively quick treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, in which a patient writes about traumatic experiences in five supervised 30-minute sessions, is as effective as the therapies most recommended by federal agencies, according to a study published on Wednesday.The treatment, called written exposure therapy, involves asking clients to write down the thoughts and feelings that occurred during a traumatic event, and then speak with the therapist about the writing process. In later sessions, they are asked to write about how the event has affected their lives.In the new study published in JAMA Psychiatry, 178 veterans with PTSD received either written exposure therapy or prolonged exposure therapy, which consists of eight to 15 therapy sessions that are 90 minutes long in which the patient vividly imagines the terrifying situation, and then, between sessions, confronts real-life reminders of it.iStock/Getty ImagesThe two therapies were found to be equally effective, and only 12.5 percent of subjects dropped out of the written exposure group before completing a course of treatment, compared with 35.6 percent in the prolonged exposure group. In 2018, a study by the same team found that written exposure therapy was as effective as cognitive processing therapy, another first-line, or most highly recommended, PTSD treatment.Writing down traumatic memories may be easier for some people, if they feel shame or embarrassment about what happened to them, said Denise Sloan, a psychologist who helped develop the treatment and is an author of the study. She said patients were asked to write by hand, which takes longer and allows them to engage with the memory.“It’s a slower process, that allows them to better think through ‘what happened next, and who was there, and what did they say,’ because they’re writing about it,” said Dr. Sloan, associate director of the Behavioral Science Division of the National Center for PTSD. “It slows everything down, versus just saying it out loud.”The therapy was inspired by the work of James Pennebaker, a Texas psychologist who, in the 1980s, began experimenting with what he called “expressive writing,” and found that people who regularly wrote about negative life experiences had stronger immune systems and paid fewer visits to the doctor.The first study of written exposure therapy as a treatment for PTSD appeared in 2012. It works, Dr. Sloan said, much the way other trauma-focused treatments do: by allowing the client to confront the traumatic memory, lessening their fear and avoidance, and allowing them to identify misconceptions like self-blame.Why It MattersCognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy, the two treatments most highly recommended by the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, have been in widespread use since the 1980s and are backed up by abundant research. A newer method, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is rapidly growing in popularity.But all three are time-intensive, requiring sessions of 60 to 90 minutes for three months or more. A large number of patients — an average of 20 percent, and sometimes as high as 50 percent, studies have shown — drop out before completing a course of treatment.Written exposure therapy, Dr. Sloan said, seems to achieve similar effects in fewer sessions.“We have a lot of people that need mental health treatment, and we can’t accommodate the demand,” she said. “We need to revisit what we’re doing and how much is necessary for a good outcome. Because most people can’t go to treatment for 12 to 16 sessions.”What’s NextData on the effectiveness of written exposure therapy is still emerging.The studies comparing it to cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy are non-inferiority trials — devised to demonstrate that a newer treatment is not worse than an established one — and “not as scientifically stringent” as trials devised to determine superiority, said Dr. Barbara Rothbaum, one of the developers of prolonged exposure therapy. She added that dropout rates at her clinic, at Emory University, were around 10 percent.There is a reason, she said, that talk therapy has such a strong record of success in treating PTSD.“There is something inherently healing about saying out loud the worse, most scary, most embarrassing, most shameful moment of your life to another human who is trying to be helpful,” she said. “Does it have to be that? No.”Written exposure therapy was not endorsed as a first-line intervention by the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense in its most recent clinical practice guidelines, largely, Dr. Sloan said, because of the small number of published studies examining it.That is likely to change over the next two years, she said, as a number of larger trials are completed. Clinicians, too, are going to have to get used to the idea of using writing, in addition to speech, to engage with patients on painful topics.“Some people, they feel threatened by this, because it kind of challenges the crux of what they generally do,” she said. “It flies in the face of what they think is important in treatment.”

Like every industry, modern farming relies heavily on plastics. Think plastic mulch lining vegetable beds, PVC pipes draining water from fields, polyethylene covering high tunnels, and plastic seed, fertilizer, and herbicide packaging, to name a few. In a new review article, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers say these plastics are now widely dispersed in agricultural soils in the form of microplastics and nanoplastics.
That’s not necessarily new; microplastics have been found in nearly every ecosystem and organism on Earth. The twist, according to the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) researchers, is that micro- and nanoplastics in agricultural soil could contribute to antibiotic resistant bacteria with a ready route into our food supply.
“Plastic itself may not be very toxic, but it can act as a vector for transmitting pathogenic and antimicrobial resistant bacteria into the food chain,” said study author Jayashree Nath, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in ACES. “This phenomenon is not very well known to people, so we wanted to raise awareness.”
If the link between microplastics and antibiotic resistance is less than obvious, here’s how it works. First, plastics are an excellent adsorbent. That means chemical substances and microscopic organisms love to stick to plastic. Chemicals that would ordinarily move through soil quickly — things like pesticides and heavy metals — instead stick around and are concentrated when they encounter plastics. Similarly, bacteria and other microorganisms that occur naturally in soil preferentially congregate on the stable surfaces of microplastics, forming what are known as biofilms.
When bacteria encounter unusual chemical substances in their new home base, they activate stress response genes that incidentally help them resist other chemicals too, including, sometimes, antibiotics. And when groups of bacteria attach to the same surface, they have a habit of sharing these genes through a process called horizontal gene transfer. Nanoplastics, which can enter bacterial cells, present a different kind of stress, but that stress can have the same outcome.
“Bacteria have been evolving genetic mechanisms to cope with stress for millions of years. Plastic is a new material bacteria have never seen in nature, so they are now evoking these genetic tool sets to deal with that stress,” said co-author Pratik Banerjee, associate professor in FSHN and Illinois Extension specialist. “We have also shown bacteria may become more virulent in the presence of plastics, in addition to becoming more resistant to antimicrobials.”
Gene transfer between bacteria on microplastics has been documented in other environments, particularly water. So far, the phenomenon is only hypothetical in agricultural soil, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Nath and Banerjee are currently running laboratory studies to document gene transfer.

In the rural United States, an adolescent who drinks heavily has a 43% greater probability of carrying a handgun in the following year, according to a study published this month in The Journal of Rural Health.
“While there has been a lot of research on this correlation in urban areas, little is known about the association between alcohol use, particularly heavy drinking, and handgun carrying in rural areas,” said lead author Alice Ellyson, an acting assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and investigator in UW Medicine’s Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program.
“Our study establishes a clear link between these two behaviors in rural areas, and there are evidence-based prevention programs to address both,” she said. Heavy drinking was defined as consuming five or more alcoholic drinks in a row at least once in the previous two weeks.
The study involved a longitudinal sample of 2,002 youth ages 12 to 26 in 12 rural communities in seven states, including Washington. Survey responses were collected annually from 2004 to 2019 starting with children who were in fifth/sixth grades.
The authors say their findings can inform strategies to discourage drinking and thereby decrease the likelihood of handgun-carrying among youth and young adults in rural areas. The findings, coupled with existing evidence-based approaches, might also offer key tactics to lower the homicide and suicide rates among adolescents in rural areas, the study concluded.
The association between heavy drinking and gun-carrying also was evident (38% greater) among young adults ages 19 to 26, noted senior author Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor of epidemiology at the UW School of Public Health and pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine. He is also the UW Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence and the interim director of the UW Medicine’s Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
The study did not break out the differences between male and female respondents nor did it address the respondents’ likelihood of firing the handgun, Rowhani-Rahbar said.

Highly challenging to sequence and long overlooked, the human Y chromosome’s contributions to health and disease remain largely unknown. A new paper that presents, for the first time, the complete sequences of multiple human Y chromosomes from lineages from around the globe provides an essential step forward in understanding the roles of the Y chromosome in human evolution and biology.
Even as the field of human genomics forged ahead at an astonishing pace, the Y chromosome — one of the sex chromosomes — has long remained overlooked. It has been postulated that the human sex chromosomes once originated from a pair of structurally similar chromosomes, but subsequently one of the sex chromosomes, the ancestral Y chromosome, underwent significant degradation, losing 97%of its former complement of genes over many millions of years. This peculiar evolutionary trajectory has given rise to speculation that the human Y chromosomes might eventually disappear completely, albeit millions of years from now, and we already observe that some biological males do lose them in dividing cells as they age, with unclear health consequences.
In practical terms, the Y chromosome contains a large proportion of repetitive and heterochromatic (highly condensed, gene-poor and not transcribed to messenger RNA) sequences, making it exceptionally difficult to fully sequence. Using sequencing methods that can cover long, continuous sequences, the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium has now published the first complete Y chromosome assembly from a single individual of European descent in “The complete sequence of a human Y chromosome” (Rhie et al. Nature). At the same time, a team led by Jackson Laboratory (JAX) Professor and The Robert Alvine Family Endowed Chair Charles Lee, Ph.D., FACMG, has assembled Y chromosomes from 43 unrelated males, with nearly half coming from African lineages in “Assembly of 43 human Y chromosomes reveals extensive complexity and variation” (Hallast et al., Nature). Taken together, these two papers provide intriguing insights into human Y chromosomes, reveal the highly variable nature of Y chromosomes across individuals, and provide an important foundation for future studies on how they may be contributing to certain disorders and diseases.
The need for long reads
Standard short-read genomic sequencing technologies require breaking genomic DNA into short (~250-base-long) fragments. These fragments are then reassembled into the full genome of more than 3 billion base pairs across 46 chromosomes in humans. The method is very accurate and works well for most, but not all, of the genome. Almost all “complete” human genome sequences, including the current reference genome sequence (known as GRCh38), are actually only about 90% complete, because it is difficult to assemble the highly repetitive and other complex sections accurately. GRCh38 falls particularly short for the Y chromosome, as it barely assembles half of that chromosome.
As a result, while the much larger and gene-rich other sex chromosome — the X chromosome — has been extensively studied, the Y chromosome has been often overlooked outside of male-based fertility studies. In a significant step forward for the genomics field, scientists from JAX, including first author and JAX Associate Research Scientist, Pille Hallast, Ph.D., with collaborators from Clemson University, Heinrich Heine University (Germany) and more, have now revealed a full picture of the Y chromosome’s key characteristics and differences between individuals for the first time. Of note is the striking variation in size and structure across the 43 Y chromosomes sequenced that covered 180,000 years of human evolution and range from 45.2 million to 84.9 million base pairs in length.
The inclusion of 43 different individuals representing diverse Y lineages allowed the researchers to redefine inter-chromosomal region boundaries and identify large-scale variations at an unprecedented resolution and clarity. The study also revealed an unexpected degree of structural variation across the Y chromosomes. For example, half of the euchromatin (gene-rich region) of the sequenced chromosomes carries large recurrent inversions — segments that contain the same nucleotide sequences but oriented in the opposite direction — at a rate much higher than anywhere else in the genome. The study further identified regions of the Y chromosome that demonstrate little single nucleotide variation but show high gene copy number variation for specific gene families. Other gene families tended to maintain their copy numbers, however, consistent with their roles in fertility and normal development.