Publisher Health

Volunteering in late life is associated with better cognitive function — specifically, better executive function and episodic memory. Those are the findings of a new study from UC Davis Health presented today (July 20) at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2023 in Amsterdam.
“We hope these new data encourage individuals of all ages and backgrounds to engage in local volunteering — not only to benefit their communities, but potentially their own cognitive and brain health,” said Donna McCullough, Alzheimer’s Association chief mission and field operations officer.
Volunteer activities — such as supporting educational, religious, health-related or other charitable organizations — allow older adults to be more physically active, increase social interaction and provide cognitive stimulation that may protect the brain. However, there has been a lack of information on the relationship between volunteering and cognitive function, especially in large, diverse populations.
Yi Lor, an epidemiology doctoral student at UC Davis, and Rachel Whitmer, the study’s principal investigator, examined volunteering habits among an ethnic and racially diverse population of 2,476 older adults. The participants are in the Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences Study (KHANDLE) and the Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans (STAR).
The study group had an average age of 74 and contained 48% Black, 20% white, 17% Asian and 14% Latino participants. A total of 1,167 (43%) of the participants reported volunteering in the past year.
The researchers found that volunteering was associated with better baseline scores on tests of executive function and verbal episodic memory. This was true even after adjusting for age, sex, education, income, practice effects and interview mode (phone versus in-person).
Those who volunteered several times per week had the highest levels of executive function.
“Volunteering may be important for better cognition in late life and could serve as a simple intervention in all older adults to protect against risk for Alzheimer’s disease and associated dementias,” Lor said. “Our next steps are to examine whether volunteering is protective against cognitive impairment, and how physical and mental health may impact this relationship.”
Volunteering was also associated with a trend toward less cognitive decline over the follow-up time of 1.2 years, but this association did not reach statistical significance.
“You’re not in control of your family history or age — you can’t turn back the clock. But you are in control of how you spend your day and life,” Whitmer said. “Volunteering is about keeping your brain active. It’s also about socializing, which keeps you engaged and happy, and potentially lowers stress.”

One of the world’s largest studies on the impact of cholesterol-lowering medication has highlighted an issue with a new class of drugs that could impair lung function in some patients.
That’s the finding from a recent University of South Australia study, the first in the world to compare cholesterol lowering medications (LDL-C drugs) to a range of clinical and heart and brain MRI biomarkers.
Genetic data from 340,000 UK Biobank participants was analysed to explore the risks and benefits of LDL-C drugs. The outcomes have been published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
In the vast number of cases, medication prescribed for high cholesterol does what it promises: significantly lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and age-related diseases. It does not cause any other adverse health conditions except diarrhea in some people.
However, lipid lowering medications that clear cholesterol from the cells — known as PCSK9 inhibitors — could impair lung function and further studies are needed on their long-term side effects, researchers say.
Genetic variants reflecting another cholesterol lowering medication, statins, were found to correlate with higher BMI and body fat, as well as reduced testosterone. Statins are the most common cholesterol lowering medication prescribed.
One unexpected benefit of taking statins was found, with some people seeing an increase in brain volume of the hippocampus, which may reduce the risk of dementia and depression.

The majority of older adults with cognitive impairment are still driving, despite concerns raised by caregivers and others, a Michigan Medicine study in a South Texas community finds.
Researchers assessed more than 600 adults over 65 years old in Nueces County, Texas, who had cognitive assessment scores that indicated a likelihood of impairment.
Of those people with cognitive impairment, 61.4% were current drivers, and around one-third of all caregivers had concerns about their care-recipient driving. The results are published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
“It is likely appropriate that some with mild cognitive impairment are still driving, but for some it may not be,” said senior author Lewis B. Morgenstern, M.D., professor of neurology, neurosurgery and emergency medicine at University of Michigan Medical School and professor of epidemiology at the U-M School of Public Health.
“Patients and caregivers should discuss these issues with their health care providers and consider on the road driving evaluations to ensure safety.”
Approximately one in nine Americans aged 65 and older, or 6.7 million people, are estimated to live with Alzheimer’s disease and millions more have related dementias.
These conditions may affect neuropsychological and visual skills that reduce the ability to drive safely. A 2017 review of motor vehicle crash risk found that dementia had medium to large effects on driving impairment and that people with dementia have an increased likelihood of failing a road test compared to those without.

Omega-3 fatty acids, which are abundant in fish and fish oil supplements, appear promising for maintaining lung health, according to new evidence from a large, multi-faceted study in healthy adults supported by the National Institutes of Health. The study provides the strongest evidence to date of this association and underscores the importance of including omega-3 fatty acids in the diet, especially given that many Americans do not meet current guidelines. Funded largely by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH, the study results were published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
“We know a lot about the role of diet in cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but the role of diet in chronic lung disease is somewhat understudied,” said corresponding author Patricia A. Cassano, Ph.D., director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “This study adds to growing evidence that omega-3 fatty acids, which are part of a healthy diet, may be important for lung health too.”
There’s increased interest in trying to understand whether nutritional interventions could contribute to lung disease prevention efforts. Past studies have suggested that omega-3 fatty acids may help, due largely to their established anti-inflammatory actions. However, robust studies of this association have been lacking, until now.
To learn more, researchers developed a two-part study investigating the link between omega-3 fatty acid levels in the blood and lung function over time. In the first part, the researchers conducted a longitudinal, observational study involving 15,063 Americans from the NHLBI Pooled Cohorts Study — a large collection of NIH-funded studies that helps researchers to study determinants of personalized risk for chronic lung disease.
The participants studied were generally healthy when the study began, and the majority had no evidence of chronic lung disease. They comprised a racially diverse group of adults, with an average age of 56 years, and 55% were female. The researchers followed participants for an average of seven years and up to 20 years.
The longitudinal study showed that higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in a person’s blood were associated with a reduced rate of lung function decline. The researchers observed the strongest associations for docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid that is found at high levels in fatty fish such as salmon, tuna, and sardines. DHA is also available as a dietary supplement.
In the second part, the researchers analyzed genetic data from a large study of European patients (over 500,000 participants) from the UK Biobank. They studied certain genetic markers in the blood as an indirect measure, or proxy, for dietary omega-3 fatty acid levels to see how they correlated with lung health. The results showed that higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids — including DHA — were associated with better lung function.

The fastest way to heat food and drink might also rank as the fastest route to ingesting massive quantities of minuscule plastic particles, says new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Experiments have shown that microwaving plastic baby food containers available on the shelves of U.S. stores can release huge numbers of plastic particles — in some cases, more than 2 billion nanoplastics and 4 million microplastics for every square centimeter of container.
Though the health effects of consuming micro- and nanoplastics remain unclear, the Nebraska team further found that three-quarters of cultured embryonic kidney cells had died after two days of being introduced to those same particles. A 2022 report from the World Health Organization recommended limiting exposure to such particles.
“It is really important to know how many micro- and nanoplastics we are taking in,” said Kazi Albab Hussain, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “When we eat specific foods, we are generally informed or have an idea about their caloric content, sugar levels, other nutrients. I believe it’s equally important that we are aware of the number of plastic particles present in our food.
“Just as we understand the impact of calories and nutrients on our health, knowing the extent of plastic particle ingestion is crucial in understanding the potential harm they may cause. Many studies, including ours, are demonstrating that the toxicity of micro- and nanoplastics is highly linked to the level of exposure.”
The team embarked on its study in 2021, the same year that Hussain became a father. While prior research had investigated the release of plastic particles from baby bottles, the team realized that no studies had examined the sorts of plastic containers and pouches that Hussain found himself shopping for, and that millions of other parents regularly do, too.
Hussain and his colleagues decided to conduct experiments with two baby food containers made from polypropylene and a reusable pouch made of polyethylene, both plastics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In one experiment, the researchers filled the containers with either deionized water or 3% acetic acid — the latter intended to simulate dairy products, fruits, vegetables and other relatively acidic consumables — then heated them at full power for three minutes in a 1,000-watt microwave. Afterward, they analyzed the liquids for evidence of micro- and nanoplastics: the micro being particles at least 1/1,000th of a millimeter in diameter, the nano any particles smaller.

A single human cell teems with as many 100,000 different proteins. Actin is one of the most abundant and essential of them all. This protein forms into filaments that help make up the skeleton of cells, giving them shape. And as the actin filaments elongate, they work like muscles, pushing against the inner membrane of a cell to move it forward.
Three other proteins are known to drive the activities of actin. One class of protein assembles individual actin molecules into actin filaments, another causes the filaments to stop growing and a third disassembles filaments.
Biophysicists at Emory University, however, have discovered an even more complex and nuanced view of how these three proteins together influence actin dynamics. Nature Communications published the findings, showing how these proteins sometimes shift from solo or duet acts to perform as a trio, allowing them to fine-tune the activity of actin filaments.
The discovery opens another window onto the dynamics of cellular movement, which is key to processes ranging from stem-cell differentiation and wound healing to the development of diseases such as cancer.
“We found that while these three proteins do one thing when working on their own, they do a completely different thing when the other two proteins join them,” says Shashank Shekhar, Emory assistant professor of physics and cell biology, and senior author of the study. “It gets really complex, very fast.”
“No one had looked at all of these proteins interacting at once on actin,” adds Heidi Ulrichs, co-first author of the study and an Emory PhD candidate in biochemistry, cell and developmental biology. “Our paper is the first report of all three of them occupying the same barbed end of an actin filament.”
Ulrichs worked closely on the project with Ignas Gaska, a postdoctoral fellow in the Shekkhar lab who is co-first author of the paper.

Gastrulation, the process where an embryo reorganizes itself from a hollow sphere into a multilayered structure, is considered a “black box” of human development. This is because human embryos are typically not cultured for longer than 14 days because of bioethical concerns, and gastrulation occurs between 17- and 21-days post-fertilization. In addition, current stem cell models that mimic gastrulation have not been able to include the necessary extraembryonic tissues that give rise to the yolk sac and the placenta. In a study appearing on July 20 in the journal Cell, researchers report a new method to develop “peri-gastruloids,” an embryo-like structure that includes one of the supporting tissues, the yolk sac, missing from previous models.
“While non-integrated models of human gastrulation and early organogenesis have been developed from primed human pluripotent stem cells, these models lack the extraembryonic cells that play vital roles in embryo patterning and morphogenesis,” says senior author Jun Wu, a stem cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “The presence of both embryonic and extraembryonic tissues enables researchers to examine the interactions between the epiblast, amnion, and yolk sac during gastrulation — an endeavor previously unattainable in humans.”
Instead of the more commonly used primed pluripotent stem cells, the researchers’ method used expanded pluripotent stem cells (EPSCs). These cells have previously been shown to differentiate into both embryonic and extraembryonic tissue in mice. By adding the proper growth factors to human EPSCs, they differentiated into these two types of tissues. The cells then self-organized into structures that resembled the human embryo, which the researchers refer to as “peri-gastruloids.”
Extraembryonic tissues release chemical signals that guide embryo development, which allows these peri-gastruloids to mimic several important processes that are considered part of this black-box period of development. Peri-gastruloids develop the amniotic cavity that embryos live inside, and the yolk sac cavities that provide the embryos with blood supply. In addition, peri-gastruloids show early signs of organogenesis, such as neurulation, which marks the very beginning of central nervous system development.
The research team reports that their method is efficient and reproducible. In what they consider a small-scale trial, they were able to generate hundreds of peri-gastruloids. “The power of this model stems from its ability to exploit the remarkable self-organizing capacity of human EPSCs with minimal external intervention” says Wu.
The team notes that peri-gastruloids are not viable because of the exclusion of trophoblasts that give rise to the placenta, which helps assuage the ethical concerns of this research. This project followed international stem cell research guidelines and was approved by UT Southwestern’s Stem Cell Oversight Committee.
This work was supported by the New York Stem Cell Foundation and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Research Institute.

Trans-Tasman research collaborators from Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington’s Ferrier Research Institute and the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in New Zealand, and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Australia have developed an mRNA-based vaccine that can effectively target and stimulate protective immune cell responses against the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium in preclinical models.
Ferrier Research Institute’s Professor Gavin Painter says the approach is distinctive, as the team leveraged years of prior research from the University of Melbourne’s Professor Bill Heath at the Doherty Institute and Professor Ian Hermans from the Malaghan Institute.
“Thanks to this synergy, we were able to design and validate an example of an mRNA vaccine that works by generating resident memory cells in the liver in a malaria model,” says Prof Painter.
“It demonstrates the huge potential of RNA technology in solving some of the world’s biggest health problems and the growing capability and expertise in mRNA vaccine development here in New Zealand and Australia.”
The focus of the collaborative research investigating a novel target for malaria was originally on peptide-based vaccines. However, in 2018, the team shifted their approach and started investigating RNA-based vaccines — a decision that, so far, seems to have paid off with the recent success of RNA technology in vaccine development.
“While our successful peptide-based vaccines targeting malaria only contain small protein fragments of a malaria protein, mRNA vaccines encode an entire malaria protein,” says the University of Melbourne’s Dr Lauren Holz, Research Officer at the Doherty Institute and co-author of the paper.
“This is a real strength because it means we can generate a broader and hopefully more protective immune response.”
To pack an extra protective punch, the mRNA vaccine has been combined with an adjuvant — originally developed at the Malaghan and Ferrier Institutes for cancer immunotherapies — which targets and stimulates liver-specific immune cells. This additional ingredient helps localise the RNA vaccine response to the liver, a key site in preventing the parasite from developing and maturing in the body.

Ultra-processed foods — including industrially produced packaged snacks, fruit-flavored drinks, and hot dogs — have been linked to health issues ranging from weight gain to certain cancers. So where are the food policies helping Americans to steer clear of these foods?
A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine finds that only a small number of U.S. policies consider ultra-processed foods, lagging behind countries such as Belgium, Brazil, and Israel.
“In some countries, ultra-processed foods have been directly integrated into national dietary guidelines and school food programs, but in the U.S., few policies directly target ultra-processed foods,” said Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at NYU School of Global Public Health and the first author of the study.
After decades of focusing on single nutrients such as protein, fat, and carbohydrates in nutrition science and food policy, a growing body of evidence shows that there is more to dietary quality than nutrients.
“It’s clear that the extent of processing of a food can influence its health effects, independent of its food ingredients or nutrient contents. Ultra-processed foods generally contain ‘acellular nutrients’ — nutrients lacking any of the natural intact food structure of the source ingredient — and other industrial ingredients and additives that together can increase risk of weight gain, diabetes, and other chronic diseases,” said study co-author Dariush Mozaffarian, the Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.
Only a few countries around the world directly regulate ultra-processed foods, but those that do have limited its consumption in schools and recommend eating less ultra-processed food in dietary guidelines. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which inform the country’s food and nutrition policies, do not currently mention ultra-processed food. However, the scientific advisory committee for the 2025-2030 U.S. Dietary Guidelines has been tasked with evaluating research related to ultra-processed foods consumption as it relates to weight gain.
To understand how U.S. policymakers have already addressed ultra-processed foods in policies, the researchers gathered all federal and state statutes, bills, resolutions, regulations, proposed rules, and Congressional Research Services reports related to “highly processed” and “ultra-processed” food.

A teenage ritual takes on deeper significance as a setting where autistic young people can blossom — and exercise their social skills along the way.“How to Dance in Ohio,” a poignant new musical about a group of young autistic adults gearing up for a spring dance, will open on Broadway late this year, with a cast of seven autistic performers playing the central roles.The musical is based on a 2015 documentary from the filmmaker Alexandra Shiva that followed participants in a social skills therapy program for people on the autism spectrum; the musical is also set at a therapy program, and it tells the story of young adults preparing for a dance that they hope could help them confront some of the challenges they face in navigating social interactions.The musical had a previous run last year at Syracuse Stage in central New York; the production schedule was cut short when Covid cases arose among the cast and crew. The review of the show in The Post-Standard, a Syracuse newspaper, was headlined “The musical you’ll talk about for the rest of your life” and called it “exhilarating, groundbreaking, celebratory.”Casting is not yet complete, but will include several actors making their Broadway debuts: Desmond Edwards, Amelia Fei, Madison Kopec, Liam Pearce, Imani Russell, Conor Tague and Ashley Wool. Among the others on the bill so far are Haven Burton and Darlesia Cearcy.“How to Dance in Ohio” features a book and lyrics by Rebekah Greer Melocik and music by Jacob Yandura; it is directed by Sammi Cannold and choreographed by Mayte Natalio. The famed director and producer Hal Prince was initially attached to the project; he died in 2019.The musical is being produced by a company called P3 Productions, which is led by Ben Holtzman, Sammy Lopez and Fiona Howe Rudin. It is being capitalized for up to $15.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show is to begin previews Nov. 15 and to open Dec. 10 at the Belasco Theater.