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Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. Some complained that they didn’t have enough time to talk to their patients because they were too busy filling out electronic medical records. Others bemoaned having to fight with insurers about whether a person with a serious illness would be preapproved for medication. The doctors Dean surveyed were deeply committed to the medical profession. But many of them were frustrated and unhappy, she sensed, not because they were burned out from working too hard but because the health care system made it so difficult to care for their patients.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling,

Even the most seasoned travelers can get a little anxious when the plane starts shaking.On a recent flight to Chicago, Allison Levy said she was “white-knuckling” the armrest as the plane rumbled and shook for brief periods of time.Ms. Levy, 47, who lives in Arlington, Va., started to take deep breaths and tried to reassure herself: “It’s like a bumpy road — it’s not a big deal.”But, she added, “if I knew the person next to me, I’d definitely grip their thigh.”Airplane turbulence, which is usually caused by large changes in airflow in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, is generally a minor nuisance.But this year alone, there have been multiple instances of severe turbulence on flights that have led to dozens of passenger injuries. And scientists have warned that we may have bumpier flights in the years ahead because of elevated carbon dioxide emissions that are warming the atmosphere, which can alter the speed and direction of the wind.This is unwelcome news for everyone, especially those of us who are already scared of flying, like Ms. Levy.Here are several ways to help calm your nerves if you’re eager to travel but dreading potential turbulence.Put things in perspective.Turbulence is not usually a cause for concern. It’s far more common to encounter low to moderate turbulence than the severe kind that throws heavy drink carts into the air.“While pilots can ease most turbulence, it is still unavoidable or unexpected for some flights, but planes are designed to safely withstand the impacts,” the Air Line Pilots Association, a prominent pilots’ union, said in a statement.It may also help to know that, according to a 2020 study, it has never been safer to travel on a commercial airline.Passenger injuries from turbulence are rare. In the 13 years spanning 2009 to 2022, for example, a total of 34 passengers were seriously injured because of turbulence, according to data from the Federal Aviation Administration. And the last turbulence-related death on a major airline happened more than 25 years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a 2021 report.Traveling by plane is much safer than traveling by car: The odds of dying during a commercial flight in the United States are too small to calculate, according to the National Safety Council. Meanwhile, the chances of dying in a motor vehicle crash are 1 in 93, the nonprofit advocacy group says.Skip the alcohol.It might be tempting to reach for an alcoholic beverage in the hopes of calming your nerves, but “remember that what you eat and drink impacts your anxiety and how you are feeling,” said Dr. Uma Naidoo, the director of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and the author of “This Is Your Brain on Food.”Too much alcohol is dehydrating and can also produce feelings of nausea. That’s a bad combination with turbulence, which can leave passengers queasy, too.“Staying hydrated, perhaps skipping the coffee or wine on the plane, can help create a sense of calm,” Dr. Naidoo said.Try deep breathing.If turbulence (or the mere thought of it) makes your heart race, taking steps to control your breathing can be a simple and powerful way to help soothe your body, Dr. Naidoo said. One example is 4-4-8 breathing: Take a breath in for four counts, hold your breath for four counts and then exhale for eight counts. Repeat.As an alternative, you can also try belly breathing or controlled breathing.“With practice, they can become a normal part of your response to stress and anxiety,” Dr. Naidoo said.Consider therapy.Some travelers might find it helpful to try exposure therapy, which involves gradually facing specific fears and anxieties until they feel less frightening.Brenda K. Wiederhold, a psychologist in San Diego, regularly sees patients who have an intense fear of flying. For more than two decades, she has used both real-life scenarios and virtual reality to help expose patients to various scenarios like airplane turbulence.Turbulence is akin to rolling waves, she tells her clients. “You don’t think, Oh my goodness, this boat is going to crash!” she said. Instead, you think: There are waves today.Other patients, including some with anxiety disorders, may benefit from medication like Xanax, but such a drug should be taken only under supervision of a doctor.Buckle that seatbelt.Strong turbulence can sometimes appear without warning, a phenomenon known as clear air turbulence. The Federal Aviation Administration advises passengers to wear their seatbelt at all times, not just when the seatbelt light is on, and to secure children under the age of 2 in an F.A.A.-approved car seat or restraint device to reduce the possibility of injuries during unexpected turbulence.“The biggest danger is not being secured,” said Kristie Koerbel, who has worked as a flight attendant for 21 years. “If you are seated with your seatbelt fastened, there is no reason to fear turbulence.”Plan ahead.Where you sit can make a difference. Passengers in window seats are less likely to be struck by any projectile objects, suitcases falling out of overhead bins or ceiling tiles coming down, said Sara Nelson, the president of the largest flight attendant union. In addition, seats near the front and next to the wing will typically be less bumpy compared to the back of the aircraft. In severe turbulence, though, where you’re sitting won’t make a difference, Ms. Nelson said.Think about what calms you in general and try to do some of those activities on the flight. For her trip to Chicago, Ms. Levy brought a sketchbook for doodling, her favorite music and some crossword puzzles. She also spoke to her doctor about taking a low dose of Xanax (though she isn’t convinced that it helped).Finally, keep an eye on the weather. Thunderstorms typically develop in the warmer months of spring, summer and fall, according to the National Weather Service, and can create turbulence. If you have the flexibility to postpone your flight, you might try for a day with clearer skies in the hopes of a smoother ride.And remember, “the plane is not going to take off if it’s not safe,” Ms. Nelson said.

The same type of machine learning methods used to pilot self-driving cars and beat top chess players could help type-1 diabetes sufferers keep their blood glucose levels in a safe range.
Scientists at the University of Bristol have shown that reinforcement learning, a type of machine learning in which a computer program learns to make decisions by trying different actions, significantly outperforms commercial blood glucose controllers in terms of safety and effectiveness. By using offline reinforcement learning, where the algorithm learns from patient records, the researchers improve on prior work, showing that good blood glucose control can be achieved by learning from the decisions of the patient rather than by trial and error.
Type 1 diabetes is one of the most prevalent auto-immune conditions in the UK and is characterised by an insufficiency of the hormone insulin, which is responsible for blood glucose regulation.
Many factors affect a person’s blood glucose and therefore it can be a challenging and burdensome task to select the correct insulin dose for a given scenario. Current artificial pancreas devices provide automated insulin dosing but are limited by their simplistic decision-making algorithms.
However a new study, published today in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, shows offline reinforcement learning could represent an important milestone of care for people living with the condition. The largest improvement was in children, who experienced an additional one-and-a-half hours in the target glucose range per day.
Children represent a particularly important group as they are often unable to manage their diabetes without assistance and an improvement of this size would result in markedly better long-term health outcomes.

Lead author Harry Emerson from Bristol’s Department of Engineering Mathematics, explained: “My research explores whether reinforcement learning could be used to develop safer and more effective insulin dosing strategies.
“These machine learning driven algorithms have demonstrated superhuman performance in playing chess and piloting self-driving cars, and therefore could feasibly learn to perform highly personalised insulin dosing from pre-collected blood glucose data.
“This particular piece of work focuses specifically on offline reinforcement learning, in which the algorithm learns to act by observing examples of good and bad blood glucose control.
“Prior reinforcement learning methods in this area predominantly utilise a process of trial-and-error to identify good actions, which could expose a real-world patient to unsafe insulin doses.”
Due to the high risk associated with incorrect insulin dosing, experiments were performed using the FDA-approved UVA/Padova simulator, which creates a suite of virtual patients to test type 1 diabetes control algorithms. State-of-the-art offline reinforcement learning algorithms were evaluated against one of the most widely used artificial pancreas control algorithms. This comparison was conducted across 30 virtual patients (adults, adolescents and children) and considered 7,000 days of data, with performance being evaluated in accordance with current clinical guidelines. The simulator was also extended to consider realistic implementation challenges, such as measurement errors, incorrect patient information and limited quantities of available data.
This work provides a basis for continued reinforcement learning research in glucose control; demonstrating the potential of the approach to improve the health outcomes of people with type 1 diabetes, while highlighting the method’s shortcomings and areas of necessary future development.
The researchers’ ultimate goal is to deploy reinforcement learning in real-world artificial pancreas systems. These devices operate with limited patient oversight and consequently will require significant evidence of safety and effectiveness to achieve regulatory approval.
Harry added: “This research demonstrates machine learning’s potential to learn effective insulin dosing strategies from the pre-collected type 1 diabetes data. The explored method outperforms one of the most widely used commercial artificial pancreas algorithms and demonstrates an ability to leverage a person’s habits and schedule to respond more quickly to dangerous events.”

University of Queensland researchers have used an algorithm from a video game to gain insights into the behaviour of molecules within live brain cells.
Dr Tristan Wallis and Professor Frederic Meunier from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute came up with the idea while in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Combat video games use a very fast algorithm to track the trajectory of bullets, to ensure the correct target is hit on the battlefield at the right time,” Dr Wallis said.
“The technology has been optimised to be highly accurate, so the experience feels as realistic as possible.
“We thought a similar algorithm could be used to analyse tracked molecules moving within a brain cell.”
Until now, technology has only been able to detect and analyse molecules in space, and not how they behave in space and time.

“Scientists use super-resolution microscopy to look into live brain cells and record how tiny molecules within them cluster to perform specific functions,” Dr Wallis said.
“Individual proteins bounce and move in a seemingly chaotic environment, but when you observe these molecules in space and time, you start to see order within the chaos.
“It was an exciting idea — and it worked.”
Dr Wallis used coding tools to build an algorithm that is now used by several labs to gather rich data about brain cell activity.
“Rather than tracking bullets to the bad guys in video games, we applied the algorithm to observe molecules clustering together — which ones, when, where, for how long and how often,” Dr Wallis said.

“This gives us new information about how molecules perform critical functions within brain cells and how these functions can be disrupted during ageing and disease.”
Professor Meunier said the potential impact of the approach was exponential.
“Our team is already using the technology to gather valuable evidence about proteins such as Syntaxin-1A, essential for communication within brain cells,” Professor Meunier said.
“Other researchers are also applying it to different research questions.
“And we are collaborating with UQ mathematicians and statisticians to expand how we use this technology to accelerate scientific discoveries.”
Professor Meunier said it was gratifying to see the effect of a simple idea.
“We used our creativity to solve a research challenge by merging two unrelated high-tech worlds, video games and super-resolution microscopy,” he said.
“It has brought us to a new frontier in neuroscience.”
The research was published in Nature Communications.

Last month, the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Surgeon General both issued health advisories. Their concerns and recommendations for teens, parents and policymakers addressed a mounting body of research that shows two trends are intertwined.
Young people are using social media more, and their mental health is suffering.
Researchers at Iowa State University found a simple intervention could help. During a two-week experiment with 230 college students, half were asked to limit their social media usage to 30 minutes a day and received automated, daily reminders. They scored significantly lower for anxiety, depression, loneliness and fear of missing out at the end of the experiment compared to the control group.
They also scored higher for “positive affect,” which the researchers describe as “the tendency to experience positive emotions described with words such as ‘excited’ and ‘proud.'” Essentially, they had a brighter outlook on life.
“It surprised me to find that participants’ well-being did not only improve in one dimension but in all of them. I was excited to learn that such a simple intervention of sending a daily reminder can motivate people to change their behavior and improve their social media habits.” says Ella Faulhaber, a Ph.D. student in human-computer interaction and lead author of the paper.
The researchers found the psychological benefits from cutting back on social media extended to participants who sometimes exceeded the 30-minute time limit.

“The lesson here is, it’s not about being perfect but putting in effort, which makes a difference. I think self-limiting and paying attention are the secret ingredients, more so than the 30-minute benchmark,” Faulhaber states.
Douglas A. Gentile, co-author and distinguished professor of psychology, says their results fit with other research that’s grown out of kinesiology and health fields.
“Knowing how much time we spend on activities each day and making something countable makes it easier for people to change their behaviors,” he says, giving Fitbits and daily steps as an example.
Many of the participants in the ISU study commented that the first few days of cutting back were challenging. But after the initial push, one said they felt more productive and in tune with their lives. Others shared that they were getting better sleep or spending more time with people in person.
Self-limiting may be more practical
Gentile and Faulhaber point out other studies have investigated the effects of limiting or abstaining from social media. But many of the interventions require heavy supervision and deleting apps or using a special application to block or limit social media. Like rehab for someone who’s addicted to drugs, external accountability can help some users. But it also carries a higher risk of backfiring.

“When a perceived freedom is taken away, we start resisting,” says Gentile. He adds that eliminating social media also means losing some of the benefits it can bring, like connecting with friends and family.
Faulhaber says their study extends the current research on social media and provides a practical way for people to limit their use. For anyone looking to cut back, she recommends: Create awareness. Set a timer or use a built-in wellness app to see how much time you spend on social media. Give yourself grace. Recognize that it’s not easy to stick to a time limit. Social media apps are designed to keep you engaged. Don’t give up. Limiting social media use over time has real benefits for your daily life.The researchers say it’s also important to be mindful of how and when we use these platforms. Future research could further explore this, along with the long-term effects from limiting social media and what people do with the time they gain.
“We live in an age of anxiety. Lots of indicators show that anxiety, depression, loneliness are all getting worse, and that can make us feel helpless. But there are things we can do to manage our mental health and well-being,” says Gentile.
Paying more attention to how much time we spend on social media and setting measurable goals can help.
Jeong Eun Lee, assistant professor of human development and family studies, contributed to the paper.

Newborns delivered by cesarean section who are swabbed with the vaginal fluid of their mothers after birth have beneficial bacteria restored to their skin surface and stools, according to a new study.
In the first randomized study of its kind, published in the science journal mBio, a team of researchers that included Rutgers scientists found the process, known as vaginal seeding, definitively engrafted new strains of maternal bacteria in the babies’ bodies. These strains normally wouldn’t be present in the newborns because, during C-sections, infants are directly extracted from their mothers’ wombs, bypassing the vaginal canal.
“Our study is the first double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial to determine whether vaginal seeding causes maternal bacteria to engraft in the skin and stool of neonates,” said Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, an author of the study and the Henry Rutgers Professor of Microbiome and Health at the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology in the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS).
Neonates are infants who are younger than 28 days old. In the randomized, blinded study, neither the participants nor the study’s facilitators knew which of the subjects was receiving the material being studied — in this case, the participating mothers’ vaginal fluids — and who was given a placebo.
“Despite some limitations in this early study, including a small sample size and only two samples taken over time, we observed significant effects of vaginal seeding on the neonatal microbiota,” Dominguez-Bello said.
The term microbiome refers to the collection of genomes or essential genetic material from all the microorganisms in the environment. The word microbiota usually pertains to microorganisms — bacteria, viruses and fungi — found within a specific environment, such as on the skin or in the gut. Scientists have found over recent decades that these collections of microorganisms play a pivotal role in human health, interacting with metabolism, the immune system and the central nervous system.

Numerous studies have shown substantial differences exist between the microbiomes in neonates delivered by C-section and those born in a vaginal delivery. Some scientists, such as Dominguez-Bello, theorize that babies born via C-section may miss out on the exposure to the first live microbes meant to colonize their bodies and sustain their health. An increasing body of research demonstrates that this thwarting of microbial colonization during critical early-life windows of development alters metabolic and immune programming and is associated with an increased risk of immune and metabolic diseases — including asthma, food allergies, obesity and diabetes.
In the study, the scientists took samples of microbiota from the skin and stool of 20 infants during two periods — when the babies were one day old and when they were one month old. They found evidence the maternal microbes had been engrafted in the infants. They also found that, when compared with the babies that received a placebo, the infants that received vaginal seeding hosted a different bacterial population on their skin and in their stool. Their microbiomes included a pattern of bacterial diversity that was more characteristic of those babies who have been breastfed and have been delivered vaginally.
As part of a continuing study, the researchers will continue to assess the microbiomes of the babies for the next five years, as well as tracking their growth patterns and whether they develop any markers of metabolic or immune-related disease.
The scientists also are continuing the study to increase the number of babies and to assess infant health outcomes.
“There is now a critical need to evaluate the health benefits and safety of vaginal seeding in large randomized controlled trials,” Dominguez-Bello said.
Other Rutgers scientists on the study included: Martin Blaser, the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and director of Rutgers Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM); Haipeng Sun, a research associate, and Jincheng Wang, a guest researcher, in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at SEBS; and Tanima Kundu, a researcher at CABM.
Other scientists involved with the study include principal investigator Suchitra Hourigan of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Md., as well as researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Inova Children’s Hospital and Inova Women’s Hospital in Falls Church, Va.

In a recent study, researchers created a diagnostic test to identify functional sperm in infertile men that could change the treatment of male infertility and assisted reproductive technology.
“Male infertility is a recognized issue and deserves scientific and clinical attention,” said Andrei Drabovich, an assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Alberta and corresponding author of the Molecular & Cellular Proteomics study.
One in every six couples trying to conceive experience infertility issues. In fact, about 10% of men in the United States are infertile. The most common cause of severe male infertility is a condition known as nonobstructive azoospermia, which results in the absence of sperm in the ejaculate due to poor sperm, or spermatozoa, development.
While assisted reproductive technology has improved exponentially over the past 50 years, according to Drabovich, extracting sperm from men with NOA can take up to 10 hours in the operating room and has varying rates of success.
“Sometimes surgeons can only extract a few intact spermatozoa during a surgery that takes many hours,” Drabovich said.
That’s why he set out to develop a noninvasive method to diagnose NOA and figure out if these men contain intact sperm that could fertilize an egg.
“Tests that show the presence or absence of intact spermatozoa in semen can give a good clue of the total numbers of spermatozoa in the patient,” Drabovich said. “If there are intact spermatozoa in the ejaculate that is a green light for urologist and the surgeon to go ahead with the surgery. However, it is an extreme challenge to find intact spermatozoa in a field of debris.”
Drabovich performed mass spectrometry on semen from men with normal fertility as well as infertile men with biopsy-confirmed obstructive azoospermia or NOA.
After analysis, his team identified two proteins, AKAP4 and ASPX, that are found in intact sperm in men with NOA. They showed that ASPX is located in the head of sperm while AKAPA4 is found in the tail using a method called imaging flow cytometry. During imaging flow cytometry, a machine takes images of individual cells. After running these samples, computational algorithms help the researchers mine the millions of images of cell debris and underdeveloped sperm to identify a few intact sperm cells.
Since the roles of AKAP4 and ASPX are not fully understood, Drabovich plans to investigate how they contribute to sperm function.
He also said that his work may lead to male birth control drugs in the future.
“We want to see if we can flip the story and try to work on male contraceptives,” Drabovich said. “If we know the function of the protein, we may be able to inhibit it to create a nonhormonal male contraceptive, which is a much desired type of drug at the moment.”

A new artificial intelligence-based technique for measuring fluid flow around the brain’s blood vessels could have big implications for developing treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
The perivascular spaces that surround cerebral blood vessels transport water-like fluids around the brain and help sweep away waste. Alterations in the fluid flow are linked to neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s, small vessel disease, strokes, and traumatic brain injuries but are difficult to measure in vivo.
A multidisciplinary team of mechanical engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists led by University of Rochester Associate Professor Douglas Kelley developed novel AI velocimetry measurements to accurately calculate brain fluid flow. The results are outlined in a study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“In this study, we combined some measurements from inside the animal models with a novel AI technique that allowed us to effectively measure things that nobody’s ever been able to measure before,” says Kelley, a faculty member in Rochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The work builds upon years of experiments led by study coauthor Maiken Nedergaard, the codirector of Rochester’s Center for Translational Neuromedicine. The group has previously been able to conduct two-dimensional studies on the fluid flow in perivascular spaces by injecting tiny particles into the fluid and measuring their position and velocity over time. But scientists needed more complex measurements to understand the full intricacy of the system — and exploring such a vital, fluid system is a challenge.
To address that challenge, the team collaborated with George Karniadakis from Brown University to leverage artificial intelligence. They integrated the existing 2D data with physics-informed neural networks to create unprecedented high-resolution looks at the system.
“This is a way to reveal pressures, forces, and the three-dimensional flow rate with much more accuracy than we can otherwise do,” says Kelley. “The pressure is important because nobody knows for sure quite what pumping mechanism drives all these flows around the brain yet. This is a new field.”
The scientists conducted the research with support from the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program, the National Institutes of Health Brain Initiative, and the Army Research Office’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives program.

People in the earliest stage of Alzheimer’s disease — after brain changes have begun but before cognitive symptoms become apparent — harbor an assortment of bacteria in their intestines that differs from the gut bacteria of healthy people, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The findings, published June 14 in Science Translational Medicine, open up the possibility of analyzing the gut bacterial community to identify people at higher risk of developing dementia, and of designing microbiome-altering preventive treatments to stave off cognitive decline.
“We don’t yet know whether the gut is influencing the brain or the brain is influencing the gut, but this association is valuable to know in either case,” said co-corresponding author Gautam Dantas, PhD, the Conan Professor of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine. “It could be that the changes in the gut microbiome are just a readout of pathological changes in the brain. The other alternative is that the gut microbiome is contributing to Alzheimer’s disease, in which case altering the gut microbiome with probiotics or fecal transfers might help change the course of the disease.”
The idea of studying the connection between the gut microbiome and Alzheimer’s disease came together at a youth soccer game, where Dantas and Beau M. Ances, MD, PhD, the Daniel J. Brennan Professor of Neurology, chatted while their children played. Ances treats and studies people with Alzheimer’s disease; Dantas is an expert on the gut microbiome.
Scientists already knew that the gut microbiomes of people with symptomatic Alzheimer’s differ from the microbiomes of healthy people of the same age. But, Ances told Dantas, nobody had yet looked at the gut microbiomes of people in the critical pre-symptomatic phase.
“By the time people have cognitive symptoms, there are significant changes that are often irreversible,” said Ances, the other co-corresponding author. “But if you can diagnosis someone very early in the disease process, that would be the optimal time to effectively intervene with a therapy.”
During the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease, which can last two decades or more, affected people accumulate clumps of the proteins amyloid beta and tau in their brains, but do not exhibit signs of neurodegeneration or cognitive decline.

Dantas, Ances and first author Aura L. Ferreiro, PhD, then a graduate student in Dantas’ lab and now a postdoctoral researcher, evaluated participants who volunteer for studies at the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center at Washington University. All participants were cognitively normal. As part of this study, participants provided stool, blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples; kept food diaries; and underwent PET and MRI brain scans.
To distinguish participants already in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease from those who were healthy, the researchers looked for signs of amyloid beta and tau accumulation through brain scans and cerebrospinal fluid. Of the 164 participants, about a third (49) had signs of early Alzheimer’s.
An analysis revealed that healthy people and people with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease have markedly different gut bacteria — in terms of the species of bacteria present and the biological processes in which those bacteria are involved — despite eating basically the same diet. These differences correlated with amyloid and tau levels, which rise before cognitive symptoms appear, but did not correlate with neurodegeneration, which becomes evident about the time cognitive skills start to decline. These differences potentially could be used to screen for early Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers said.
“The nice thing about using the gut microbiome as a screening tool is its simplicity and ease,” Ances said. “One day individuals may be able to provide a stool sample and find out if they are at increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease. It would be much easier and less invasive and more accessible for a large proportion of the population, especially underrepresented groups, compared to brain scans or spinal taps.”
The researchers have launched a five-year follow-up study designed to figure out whether the differences in the gut microbiome are a cause or a result of the brain changes seen in early Alzheimer’s disease.
“If there is a causative link, most likely the link would be inflammatory,” said Dantas, who is also a professor of pathology & immunology, of biomedical engineering, of molecular microbiology and of pediatrics. “Bacteria are these amazing chemical factories, and some of their metabolites affect inflammation in the gut or even get into the bloodstream, where they can influence the immune system all over the body. All of this is speculative at this point, but if it turns out that there is a causal link, we can start thinking about whether promoting ‘good’ bacteria or getting rid of ‘bad’ bacteria could slow down or even stop the development of symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.”

A research group from the Graduate School of Medicine and iGCORE at Nagoya University in Japan, has discovered that using an antibiotic to target Fusobacterium reduced the formation of lesions associated with endometriosis, a gynecological disorder characterized by endometrial tissue usually found inside the uterus being found outside it. Their findings suggest an alternative treatment for this disorder. The study was published in Science Translational Medicine.
Endometriosis affects one in ten women between the ages of 15 and 49. The disorder can cause lifelong health problems, including pelvic pain and infertility. Although it can be treated using hormone therapy and surgical resection, these procedures sometimes lead to side effects, recurrence, and a significant impact on pregnancy.
The group led by Professor Yutaka Kondo (he, him) and Assistant Professor Ayako Muraoka (she, her) from the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, in collaboration with the National Cancer Center, found that the uterus of mice infected with Fusobacterium had more and heavier lesions. However, mice that had been given an antibiotic to eradicate Fusobacterium saw improved lesion formation.
The team’s findings strongly suggest that targeting Fusobacterium is an effective non-hormonal antibiotic treatment for endometriosis. Dr. Kondo praised the potential for easier diagnosis and treatment. “Eradication of this bacterium by antibiotic treatment could be an approach to treat endometriosis for women who are positive for fusobacteria infection, and such women could be easily identified by vaginal swab or uterus swab,” he said.
This study also shows the benefit of looking at upstream events to determine causative agents. The initial finding was that a protein called transgelin (TAGLN) was often upregulated in patients with endometriosis. This was unsurprising because the protein is associated with processes that are important in the development of endometriosis. However, this finding led them to determine that transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) seemed to cause the upregulation of TAGLN. Since TGF-β is released by macrophages, the natural anti-inflammatory response and immune regulation cells of the body, this led them to conclude that these macrophages were being activated in response to Fusobacterium.
“In this study, we demonstrated that the Fusobacterium-TAGLN-endometriosis axis is frequently dysregulated in endometriosis,” said Dr. Kondo. “Our data provide a strong and novel rationale for targeting Fusobacterium as a non-hormonal antibiotic-based treatment for endometriosis.”
Clinical trials of antibiotic treatment for human patients are ongoing at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Nagoya University Hospital.