Nursing home residents with dementia get better care when they’re in the majority, but that’s typically not the case, research indicates.

Most facilities accommodate a heterogeneous population, where specialized staff training is limited, according to a new study.

“Recognizing and managing the complex medical conditions and behavioral symptoms of residents with [Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias] require enhanced knowledge among staff,” says Dana Mukamel, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine, and corresponding author of the study in the journal Health Affairs.

“These findings raise significant concerns regarding the level of care and quality of life for the majority of these people, highlighting the urgent need for a higher level of care for them.”

The researchers based their findings on an analysis of 13,909 facilities between 2017 and 2019. They analyzed data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to assess facilities with high and low Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) populations, staffing levels, quality of care, and health outcomes for 7.6 million residents, 42% of whom were diagnosed with ADRD or cognitive impairment.

Researchers discovered that ADRD residents were dispersed throughout all nursing homes, with fewer than half in facilities where they accounted for 60-90% of the population.

The study also showed that fewer than 5% of nursing home beds are in dementia special care units, and only facilities that had an ADRD population exceeding 90% seemed to offer better care.

“This study aimed to address the gaps in the current literature regarding the concentration of ADRD residents in nursing homes, and the implications that has on their quality of care,” Mukamel says. “Our findings highlight the need for specialized training and raise important policy issues that must be addressed.”

The National Alzheimer’s Project Act of 2011 has prompted increased investment in research by the National Institute on Aging, and federal policies to improve nursing home care through enhanced staffing standards are expected to benefit all residents. However, the lack of training based on population mix raises concerns about ensuring quality and safety for those with ADRD.

“While the prevalence of ADRD is expected to grow in coming decades, those residing in nursing homes represent the majority in only a few facilities,” Mukamel says. “Efforts to inform optimal care practices, staffing requirements, and training require investments in research, policy, and innovation. Continued focus and collaboration are essential to drive progress and improve the care, quality of life, and health outcomes for this vulnerable population.”

Additional coauthors are from UCLA, the University of Chicago, and UC Irvine. The National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health supported the work.

Source: UC Irvine

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Astronomers have detected complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth.

The discovery of the organic molecules, which are familiar on Earth in smoke, soot, and smog, demonstrates the power of Webb to help understand the complex chemistry that goes hand-in-hand with the birth of new stars even in the earliest periods of the universe’s history.

At least for galaxies, the new findings cast doubt on the old adage that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Because of its extreme distance, the light detected the astronomers detected began its journey when the universe was less than 1.5 billion years old—about 10% of its current age. The National Science Foundation’s South Pole Telescope first discovered the galaxy in 2013 and it has since been studied by many observatories, including the radio telescope ALMA and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The discovery, reported this week in the journal Nature, was possible through the combined powers of the NASA’s Webb telescope and fate, with a little help from a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, says Justin Spilker, assistant professor in the physics and astronomy department at Texas A&M University.

Lensing, originally predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, happens when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned from our point of view on Earth. The light from the background galaxy is stretched and magnified by the foreground galaxy into a ring-like shape, known as an Einstein ring.

“By combining Webb’s amazing capabilities with a natural ‘cosmic magnifying glass,’ we were able to see even more detail than we otherwise could,” Spilker says. “That level of magnification is actually what made us interested in looking at this galaxy with Webb in the first place, because it really lets us see all the rich details of what makes up a galaxy in the early universe that we could never do otherwise.”

The data from Webb found the telltale signature of large organic molecules akin to smog and smoke—building blocks of the same cancer-causing hydrocarbon emissions on Earth that are key contributors to atmospheric pollution. However, Spilker says the implications of galactic smoke signals are much less disastrous for their cosmic ecosystems.

“These big molecules are actually pretty common in space,” Spilker explains. “Astronomers used to think they were a good sign that new stars were forming. Anywhere you saw these molecules, baby stars were also right there blazing away.”

The new results from Webb show that this idea might not exactly ring true in the early universe, according to Spilker.

“Thanks to the high-definition images from Webb, we found a lot of regions with smoke but no star formation, and others with new stars forming but no smoke,” Spilker says.

Astronomers are using Webb to make connections across the vastness of space with unprecedented potential, says Kedar Phadke, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the technical development of the team’s Webb observations.

“Discoveries like this are precisely what Webb was built to do: understand the earliest stages of the universe in new and exciting ways,” Phadke says. “It’s amazing that we can identify molecules billions of light-years away that we’re familiar with here on Earth, even if they show up in ways we don’t like, like smog and smoke. It’s also a powerful statement about the amazing capabilities of Webb that we’ve never had before.”

The discovery is Webb’s first detection of complex molecules in the early universe—a milestone moment that Spilker sees as a beginning rather than an end.

“These are early days for the Webb Telescope, so astronomers are excited to see all the new things it can do for us,” Spilker says. “Detecting smoke in a galaxy early in the history of the universe? Webb makes this look easy.

“Now that we’ve shown this is possible for the first time, we’re looking forward to trying to understand whether it’s really true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe we’ll even be able to find galaxies that are so young that complex molecules like these haven’t had time to form in the vacuum of space yet, so galaxies are all fire and no smoke. The only way to know for sure is to look at more galaxies, hopefully even further away than this one.”

JWST is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute under the management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the United States Antarctic Program.

Source: Texas A&M University

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The percentage of women in federal STEM jobs hasn’t changed since 2005, research finds.

They also quit those jobs at a disproportionately high rate.

“These positions are important, and we are not making a great deal of progress in bringing women into STEM jobs in any sort of equitable numbers,” says Edward Kellough, lead author of the study and a professor in the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs. “The key takeaway of our study is that one way to help improve the representation of women in STEM jobs is to increase their presence amongst STEM supervisors in those organizations.”

The researchers isolated the effects of women STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) supervisors to determine the impact of having female supervisors.

The researchers analyzed employment at all 15 Cabinet-level departments in the federal government and two agencies with substantial STEM employment—NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency—from 2005 to 2018.

Additionally, the researchers separated the Air Force, Army, and Navy from the remainder of the Department of Defense to determine differences across branches of the military.

On average, fewer than one in four STEM jobs were held by women in the Air Force, Army, Navy, the departments of Energy and Transportation, and NASA. Women account for less than 30% of STEM jobs in the departments of Veterans Affairs, State, Interior, Homeland Security, Defense, and Commerce.

“You might expect that employment of women in federal STEM jobs would have gone up since 2005, but there’s been virtually no change,” Kellough says. “It’s increased only a fraction of 1 percentage point during that time, which is shocking.”

To measure support for diversity within each organization, the researchers relied on data from the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks employment, budget and workforce demographics across federal agencies. The nonprofit also measures support for diversity within the agencies, which the researchers included in their analysis.

In those agencies where more women are in supervisory roles and support for diversity is stronger, such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of the Treasury, the percentage of female STEM employees hovers around 42%.

Although more female bosses translated to more women in the workforce, the researchers found that having women in supervisory positions didn’t staunch the hemorrhaging of female STEM employees leaving their jobs.

The quit rate for women varied widely depending on the agency, the researchers find. For example, though women comprise only 37.9% of STEM employees in the EPA, they account for more than half of the agency’s employees who quit those jobs. At both the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, STEM employment and quit rates for women are almost exactly equal.

One possible contributing factor for the high quit rates is that many of the agencies employ women in their 20s. Younger employees are more likely to leave their jobs on average than older ones.

It’s also possible that women are not reaching what some experts call a numerical “critical mass” in many agencies, making it difficult for young women to find supportive role models, the researchers say.

“The underemployment of women in STEM jobs is an important issue that has been recognized as such for a very long time, but progress in dealing with the problem has been excruciatingly slow,” the researchers write. “Public managers seeking to increase the STEM employment of women in their agencies should strongly consider investing in developing and promoting women into supervisory roles.”

The study appears in the journal Public Personnel Management.

Source: University of Georgia

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Political ideology and user choice—not algorithmic curation—are the biggest drivers of engagement with partisan and unreliable news via Google Search, a study finds.

The study addresses a long-standing concern that digital algorithms learn from user preferences and surface information that largely agrees with users’ attitudes and biases. However, search results shown to Democrats differ little in ideology from those shown to Republicans, the researchers find. The ideological differences emerge when people decide which search results to click, or which websites to visit on their own.

The results, published in the journal Nature, suggest the same is true about the proportion of low-quality content shown to users. The quantity doesn’t differ considerably among partisans, though some groups—particularly older participants who identify as “strong Republicans”—are more likely to engage with it.

Katherine Ognyanova, an associate professor of communication at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and coauthor of the study, says Google’s algorithms do sometimes generate results that are polarizing and potentially dangerous.

“But what our findings suggest is that Google is surfacing this content evenly among users with different political views,” Ognyanova says. “To the extent that people are engaging with those websites, that’s based largely on personal political outlook.”

Despite the crucial role algorithms play in the news people consume, few studies have focused on web search—and even fewer have compared exposure (defined as the links users see in search results), follows (the links from search results people choose to visit), and engagement (all the websites that a user visits while browsing the web).

Part of the challenge has been measuring user activity. Tracking website visits requires access to people’s computers, and researchers have generally relied on more theoretical approaches to speculate how algorithms affect polarization or push people into “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” of political extremes.

To address these knowledge gaps, researchers at Rutgers, Stanford, and Northeastern universities conducted a two-wave study, pairing survey results with empirical data collected from a custom-built browser extension to measure exposure and engagement to online content during the 2018 and 2020 United States elections.

Researchers recruited 1,021 participants to voluntarily install the browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. The software recorded the URLs of Google Search results, as well as Google and browser histories, giving researchers precise information on the content users were engaging with, and for how long.

Participants also completed a survey and self-reported their political identification on a seven-point scale that ranged from “strong Democrat” to “strong Republican.”

Results from both study waves showed that a participant’s political identification did little to influence the amount of partisan and unreliable news they were exposed to on Google Search. By contrast, there was a clear relationship between political identification and engagement with polarizing content.

Platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are technological black boxes: Researchers know what information goes in and can measure what comes out, but the algorithms that curate results are proprietary and rarely receive public scrutiny. Because of this, many blame the technology of these platforms for creating echo chambers and filter bubbles by systematically exposing users to content that conforms to and reinforces personal beliefs.

Ognyanova says the findings paint a more nuanced picture of search behavior.

“This doesn’t let platforms like Google off the hook,” she says. “They’re still showing people information that’s partisan and unreliable. But our study underscores that it is content consumers who are in the driver’s seat.”

Source: Rutgers University

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Unseasonably warm and cold days can prolong the active period of moths and butterflies by nearly a month, according to a new study.

As Earth’s climate continues to warm due to the emission of greenhouse gases, extreme and anomalous weather events are becoming more common. But predicting and analyzing the effects of what is, by definition, an anomaly can be tricky.

Scientists say museum specimens can help. For the new study, the first of its kind, the researchers used natural history specimens. “The results are not at all what we expected,” says Robert Guralnick, curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study in Communications Biology.

Most studies view climate change and its consequences through a periscope of average temperature increases. As temperature goes up over time, the plants and animals in a particular region become active earlier in the spring, delay dormancy until later in the fall, and slowly shift their ranges to align with the climate in which they’re best suited to survive.

Erratic weather adds a layer of complexity to these patterns, with unknown consequences that erect an opaque screen ahead of scientists attempting to predict the future of global ecosystems.

“There had been hints in the scientific literature that weather anomalies can have cumulative effects on ecosystems, but there wasn’t anything that directly addressed this question at a broad scale,” Guralnick says.

This omission, he explains, was due primarily to a lack of sufficient data. While climate data has been reliably collected in many areas of the world for more than a century, records documenting the location and activity of organisms are harder to come by.

Natural history museums have been increasingly regarded as a potential solution. The oldest museums have accumulated specimens for hundreds of years, and recent efforts to digitize collections have made their contents widely available. But digital museum records come with their own unique pitfalls and drawbacks.

In 2022, coauthor Michael Belitz constructed a dataset of moths and butterflies from museum collections to chart a course for other researchers hoping to use similar data. The result was a comprehensive instruction manual for how to gather, organize and analyze information from natural history specimens.

With this robust resource at their disposal, Belitz and his colleagues wanted to see if they could detect a signal from aberrant weather patterns. Restricting their analyses to the eastern United States, the authors used records for 139 moth and butterfly species collected from the 1940s through the 2010s.

Their results were unequivocal: Unusually warm and cold weather has significantly altered insect activity to a greater extent than the average increase in global temperature for the last several decades.

The location and timing of extreme weather events influenced how insects responded. In higher latitudes, warm days in winter meant moths and butterflies became active earlier in the spring. Unusually cold days kept insects at all latitudes active longer, and the combination of exceptionally high and low temperatures had the strongest effect.

“If you have a succession of abnormally cold and warm days, it limits the ability of insects to function at peak performance,” Guralnick says. “If cold doesn’t kill you, it slows you down, and it might force insects into a torpor. Insects can recover from the cold snaps pretty quickly and go on to have longer lifespans as a direct result of sudden temperature declines.”

Insects being active for longer periods of time might initially seem like a good thing. But rather than a counterweight to the negative repercussions of climate change, coauthor Lindsay Campbell—who studies mosquitos—points out that longer or altered insect lifespans may also mean more opportunities for pathogen transmission.

“There’s a correlation between El Niño and rift valley fever outbreaks in East Africa, and there are anecdotal observations that show unusually warm or hot and dry springs, followed by a heavy precipitation event, are also linked with increased outbreaks,” says Campbell, an assistant professor at the University of Florida.

Long-term ecosystem stability is also entirely dependent on the synchronized activity of its constituent parts, and plants may not respond to extreme weather in the same way as insects. If moths and butterflies take flight too early, they risk encountering plants that haven’t yet produced leaves or flowers, expending their energy in a vain search for food.

And with a constantly shifting baseline for what constitutes ‘extreme,’ it’s unclear if insects will be able to keep pace with the changes.

“As average temperature and climate variability increases, an organism’s resilience is going to drop precipitously,” Guralnick says. “The extreme events of today are going to become much more extreme in the future, and at some point, the capacity to buffer against these changes is going to reach its limit.”

Indirect support for the study came from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Source: University of Florida

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Adult alexithymia—difficulty identifying and describing one’s emotions—is linked to childhood maltreatment, a meta-analysis shows.

Have you ever wanted to convey a feeling but just couldn’t find the right words? Millions of people struggle with alexithymia, which means “no words for feelings.” The trait can harm their social and intimate relationships. They are likely to miss social cues and thus fail to recognize or understand the feelings of others. Past research has suggested that a history of child maltreatment could play a role in developing adult alexithymia.

The new meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin is the first study to synthesize empirical evidence in global literature on links between adult alexithymia and all forms of child maltreatment.

“We can say now with more confidence that these phenomena—child maltreatment and alexithymia—are related to each other to a great extent,” says senior coauthor Anat Talmon, who supervised the study as a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University and currently serves as an assistant professor with the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The researchers examined 78 published sources that reported details of potential child maltreatment and levels of alexithymia in adulthood. In total, 36,141 participants were included in the study conducted by the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory with collaborators at the Hebrew University and Adam Mickiewicz University.

“One in four children worldwide is maltreated, but it often goes unrecognized,” says Julia Ditzer, lead author of the study, a graduate researcher at Stanford University, and a PhD student in psychology at the Technical University of Dresden.

Three child maltreatment types—emotional neglect, emotional abuse, and physical neglect—were particularly strong predictors of alexithymia. Emotional neglect and physical neglect commonly occur together. Two other types—sexual abuse and physical abuse—were related to alexithymia but were less strongly predictive.

Emotional neglect occurs when caregivers fail to provide for a child’s emotional needs, including security and comfort. Emotional abuse happens when caregivers ridicule, belittle, or blame children, making them responsible for household or caregiver problems. Physical neglect involves caregivers who fail to provide adequate food, clothing, or a safe environment.

“When someone is sexually or physically abused, he or she often knows, to a certain extent, that something is wrong,” says Talmon. Emotional neglect and emotional abuse, however, are often more difficult to identify by the victim or other family members or neighbors. Victims may be less likely to seek help. “Emotional neglect and emotional abuse are extremely devastating experiences for a child,” says Talmon. “No one is fulfilling your emotional needs, but you lack the ability to identify and recognize your emotions on your own, which increases the likelihood of developing alexithymia.”

About 10% of the general population have clinically relevant levels of alexithymia. For women, it’s about 7%. For men, it’s almost double that, about 13%. High levels of alexithymia are associated with psychological disorders, including autism, depression, and schizophrenia. According to James Gross, professor of psychology, “It is increasingly clear that both alexithymia and child maltreatment are transdiagnostic risk factors, meaning that their presence puts a person at higher risk for developing a wide range of mental disorders. However, what is not yet clear is how these two risk factors are related to one another, and why they often co-occur.”

To understand the links between alexithymia and child maltreatment, it is helpful to consider the crucial role played by caregivers. Caregivers are typically the most important model for children in their emotional development, yet caregivers are also the most common perpetrators of child maltreatment. Maltreated children grow up with fewer examples of positive coping strategies under stress and less opportunity to express emotions appropriately.

In response to negative events, some maltreated children can behave aggressively or violently, while others shut down with a flat emotional affect or dissociation. Past research has shown that childhood dissociation—detachment from feeling—is strongly related to emotional abuse or the unavailability of caregivers.

“These children might say, ‘I don’t care. I’m just surviving,'” says Talmon. “They don’t know what they want because they don’t know what their inside voice is, and what their true will is.”

But some forms of maltreatment can be subtle. Well-meaning caregivers could be chronically ill, clinically depressed, or unable to support children emotionally for other reasons. “No one living in that environment might see what’s happening as maltreatment,” says Talmon.

Improved therapeutic interventions for adults with alexithymia are needed, the authors note. People in treatment for depression or PTSD might score high on alexithymia, making it more difficult for them to be introspective and successful in therapy.

Therapists assess patients’ difficulty in expressing and identifying emotions. Treatment for adults with alexithymia often involves helping them develop an ability to be in touch with their emotions, understand them, and explain them in an embodied way. “Before you can work on regulating your feeling, you first need to understand and recognize your feeling,” says Talmon.

Family members and friends should try to understand that people with alexithymia often do not identify and express their feelings as readily as others do or understand the feelings of others. “They are not trying to be difficult,” says Ditzer. “They just really struggle with this.”

Source: John Tibbetts for Stanford University

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The gut microbiome of female southern white rhinos who are reproducing successfully in captivity are significantly different than those who are not, according to a new study.

The findings raise questions about the role that a particular genus of gut microbes may be playing in limiting captive breeding of this rhinoceros species.

“Our work focuses on the southern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum), because while it is not yet endangered, species numbers are declining in the wild due to poaching,” says Christina Burnham, a former graduate student at North Carolina State University and first author of the paper in the journal Animal Microbiome.

“There is a significant population of southern white rhinos under human care in the United States, but there have been challenges in getting many of these animals to reproduce successfully.

“It is critical we understand why, as the managed rhinos serve as important assurance populations in case wild rhino numbers continue to fall. We wanted to know how the gut microbiome may influence the reproductive ability of these rhinos.”

To that end, the researchers collected multiple fecal samples from eight female southern white rhinoceroses over a six-month period. The study population consisted of two juveniles; two “subadults” who are no longer nursing but are not yet of reproductive age; two adults who have reproduced successfully; and two adults who have not reproduced successfully.

“We wanted to have a robust sample size that would allow us to assess the gut microbiome of females in this species while accounting for age, the time of year and reproductive status,” Burnham says.

The researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the fecal samples, which allowed them to identify the diversity and abundance of bacteria in the gut of the study animals.

“We found differences between rhinos in each age group,” says coauthor Erin McKenney, an assistant professor of applied ecology.

“In other words, microbial communities in the gut microbiome change predictably as animals age from juveniles to subadults to adults. This likely reflects, among other things, changes in the diet and behavior of the animals. This sort of microbiome ‘succession’ is fairly common in many animal species. And it’s important here because it casts the differences we found between reproductively successful adults and reproductively unsuccessful females in stark relief.”

The researchers found that reproductively successful females had less diversity in the types of microbial species present in their gut microbiome when compared to the microbiome of reproductively unsuccessful females. The researchers also found that each group of adults was playing host to microbial species that have previously been associated with reproductive health.

“One of the microbial families we found at significant levels in reproductively successful adults was Rikenellaceae,” Burnham says. “This is of interest because Rikenellaceae has previously been theorized to play a role in helping southern white rhinos break down dietary plant compounds—including phytoestrogens that are associated with limiting reproductive success.

“On the other hand, we only saw significant enrichment of Mobiluncus microbes in reproductively unsuccessful adults,” Burnham says. “Previous work has found that Mobiluncus is associated with a range of reproductive health problems in a variety of non-rhinoceros species.

“However, in those previous studies, Mobiluncus was detected in cervical and vaginal microbiomes. We looked only at the gut microbiome. We hypothesize that the gut may serve as a reservoir for Mobiluncus, but we need to collect cervical or vaginal swabs from the adult females we studied to determine whether Mobiluncus may be present in those microbiomes.”

“Because this was a longitudinal study, we collected multiple samples from each animal over the course of half a year,” McKenney says. “And the differences we saw in the gut microbiomes of adult females were consistent over time, which suggests that these differences in microbial communities may be playing an important role in the reproductive health of these animals. That said, we will need to do additional research to determine what that role may be, if any.”

Source: NC State

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TikTok videos related to endometriosis focus on people’s experiences with chronic pain and infertility, specifically in vitro fertilization, researchers report.

With over 301 million views, the videos provide a window into the real-life experiences of patients with the chronic condition, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus.

“TikTok is a growing space for reproductive health awareness and advocacy.”

Endometriosis is often stigmatized and underdiagnosed—patients often suffer for years before getting a diagnosis—so the social media conversations can be instructive to both patients and doctors.

“TikTok is a growing space for reproductive health awareness and advocacy,” says Jenny Wu, a resident in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University School of Medicine.

“We wanted to understand what people were saying about endometriosis, which occurs in about 10% of women during their reproductive years. We found that patients with the disease used the platform to share their diagnosis, the way their symptoms have impacted their lives, and find community.”

The researchers used a web application to download and compile information on the top 100 most-liked TikTok videos tagged #endometriosis. Of the videos analyzed, 83% of content creators were patients and 17% were health care professionals.

A majority of videos highlighted a patient’s experience with chronic pain and infertility. A quarter of videos highlighted distrust of health care and 15% highlighted a perceived delay in diagnosis. Videos discussing hormonal treatments were negative or ambiguous in tone.

“This study highlights the symptoms and stories of many of my patients,” says Arleen Song, an assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology. “We found that patients were looking for solutions outside established healthcare, and there’s a distrust of hormonal treatment. This is an opportunity for us to understand this communication gap and to improve our care of these patients.”

The study appears in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the US. National Institutes of Health funded the work.

Source: Duke University

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Marine biologists have discovered the remnants of ancient RNA viruses embedded in the DNA of symbiotic organisms living inside reef-building corals.

The finding is surprising because most RNA viruses are not known for embedding themselves in the DNA of organisms they infect.

The RNA fragments are from viruses that infected the symbionts as long ago as 160 million years. The discovery appears in the journal Communications Biology, and could help scientists understand how corals and their partners fight off viral infections today.

The research shows that endogenous viral elements, or EVEs, appear widely in the genomes of coral symbionts. Known as dinoflagellates, the single-celled algae live inside corals and provide them with their dramatic colors. The EVE discovery underscores recent observations that viruses other than retroviruses can integrate fragments of their genetic code into their hosts’ genomes.

“So why did it get in there?” asks study coauthor Adrienne Correa of Rice University. “It could just be an accident, but people are starting to find that these ‘accidents’ are more frequent than scientists had previously believed, and they’ve been found across all kinds of hosts, from bats to ants to plants to algae.”

That an RNA virus appears at all in coral symbionts was also a surprise.

“This is what made this project so interesting to me,” says study lead author Alex Veglia, a graduate student in Correa’s research group. “There’s really no reason, based on what we know, for this virus to be in the symbionts’ genome.”

The researchers did not find EVEs from RNA viruses in samples of filtered seawater or in the genomes of dinoflagellate-free stony corals, hydrocorals or jellyfish. But EVEs were pervasive in coral symbionts that were collected from dozens of coral reef sites, meaning the pathogenic viruses were—and probably remain—picky about their target hosts.

“There’s a huge diversity of viruses on the planet,” says Correa, an assistant professor of biosciences. “Some we know a lot about, but most viruses haven’t been characterized. We might be able to detect them, but we don’t know who serves as their hosts.”

She says viruses, including retroviruses, have many ways to replicate by infecting hosts. “One reason our study is cool is because this RNA virus is not a retrovirus,” Correa says. “Given that, you wouldn’t expect it to integrate into host DNA.

“For quite a few years, we’ve seen a ton of viruses in coral colonies, but it’s been hard to tell for sure what they were infecting,” Correa says. “So this is likely the best, most concrete information we have for the actual host of a coral colony-associated virus. Now we can start asking why the symbiont keeps that DNA, or part of the genome. Why wasn’t it lost a long time ago?”

The discovery that the EVEs have been conserved for millions of years suggests they may somehow be beneficial to the coral symbionts and that there is some kind of mechanism that drives the genomic integration of the EVEs.

“There are a lot of avenues we can pursue next, like whether these elements are being used for antiviral mechanisms within dinoflagellates, and how they are likely to affect reef health, especially as oceans warm,” Veglia says.

“If we’re dealing with an increase in the temperature of seawater, is it more likely that Symbiodiniaceae species will contain this endogenous viral element? Does having EVEs in their genomes improve their odds of fighting off infections from contemporary RNA viruses?” he asks.

“In another paper, we showed there was an increase in RNA viral infections when corals underwent thermal stress. So there are a lot of moving parts. And this is another good piece of that puzzle.”

Correa says, “We can’t assume that this virus has a negative effect. But at the same time, it does look like it’s becoming more productive under these temperature stress conditions.”

The study had support from the Tara Ocean Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was led by Correa, Veglia, and two scientists from Oregon State University, postdoctoral scholar Kalia Bistolas, and marine ecologist Rebecca Vega Thurber.

Additional collaborators are from the University of Konstanz, Germany; the Institute of Microbiology and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Zürich; the University of Perpignan, France; the Scientific Center of Monaco; the Université Paris-Saclay, Evry, France; the Tara Ocean Foundation, Paris; the University of Maine; Sorbonne University, France; the University of Tsukuba, Japan; Paris Science and Letters University, France; the University of Paris-Saclay; the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel; Côte d’Azur University, Nice, France; the European Bioinformatics Institute, University of Cambridge, England; Ohio State University; and the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Source: Rice University

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New finding in mice are a step closer to finding a possible target for treating neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and autism in young adulthood.

The brain continuously changes during childhood and throughout adolescence. The onset of neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia often begins during young adulthood. Dysfunction of the dopamine system—necessary for cognitive processing and decision-making—begins during this point in development.

“Brain development is a lengthy process, and many neuronal systems have critical windows—key times when brain areas are malleable and undergoing final maturation steps,” says Rianne Stowell, a postdoctoral fellow in the Wang Lab at the University of Rochester Medical Center and co-first author of a new study in the journal eLife.

“By identifying these windows, we can target interventions to these time periods and possibly change the course of a disease by rescuing the structural and behavioral deficits caused by these disorders.”

Researchers targeted underperforming neurons in the dopamine system that connect to the frontal cortex in mice. This circuitry is essential in higher cognitive processing and decision-making. They found that stimulating the cells that provide dopamine to the frontal cortex strengthened this circuit and rescued structural deficiencies in the brain that cause long-term symptoms.

Previous research from the Wang Lab identified that this specific arm of the dopamine system was flexible in the adolescent brain but not in adults. This most recent research used this window for plasticity in the system as an opportunity for therapeutic intervention.

“These findings suggest that increasing the activity of the adolescent dopaminergic circuitry can rescue existing deficits in the circuit and that this effect can be long-lasting as these changes persist into adulthood,” Stowell says. “If we can target the right windows in development and understand the signals at play, we can develop treatments that change the course of these brain disorders.”

Additional collaborators are from the University of Rochester Medical Center; the National Institute of Mental Health; and the University of Pennsylvania. This research had support from the National Institutes of Health and the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience pilot program.

Source: University of Rochester

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The likelihood of extreme temperatures that could affect wheat crop yields has increased significantly in regions of the US and China, according to a new study.

The world is getting hotter, causing shifts in seasonal patterns and increasing the amount of extreme weather such as severe droughts and heat waves, which can affect crop yields and food supplies.

The findings of the new study predict heat waves that happened approximately once every hundred years in 1981 are now likely to happen once every six years in the Midwestern US and once every 16 years in Northeastern China. The work shows the range of conditions that people need to prepare for, even if those conditions haven’t occurred yet.

“The historical record is no longer a good representation of what we can expect for the future,” says Erin Coughlan de Perez, professor at the Friedman School at Tufts University and lead author of the paper in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. “We live in a changed climate and people are underestimating current day possibilities for extreme events.”

According to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the average global surface temperature in the last decade was 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than it was between 1850 and 1900.

To evaluate how this has changed our risk of extreme weather, Coughlan de Perez and her colleagues collected a large group of seasonal forecasts from the past 40 years. They used this ensemble to generate thousands of possible variations in temperature and rainfall, essentially showing all the things that could have happened in a given year.

With this method, known as the Unprecedented Simulated Extreme Ensemble or UNSEEN approach, the researchers were able to estimate the likely frequency of extreme temperatures that exceed critical growth thresholds for wheat crops.

Winter wheat crops start their growth in the fall and are harvested the following summer. High temperatures in spring, when the plant is flowering, can affect the wheat’s development. At temperatures over 27.8 degrees Celsius (about 82 degrees Fahrenheit), the plants start to suffer from heat stress. At temperatures over 32.8 degrees Celsius (about 91 degrees Fahrenheit), important enzymes in the wheat start to break down.

“In the Midwest, we used to have seasons where you’d see an average of maybe four or five days of that enzyme breakdown threshold being exceeded—it was pretty uncommon,” says Coughlan de Perez, who is also part of the Feinstein International Center at the Friedman School. “But our research showed possible alternative realities of today’s climate that generated 15 days above this threshold, which we surmise would be very damaging.”

Record-breaking heat also tends to be associated with record-breaking drought, Coughlan de Perez says. The combination of these two hazards could severely impact the growing season. Both the US and China are considered global breadbaskets—areas that produce significant amounts of the world’s grains. If these crops were to fail simultaneously, or at the same time as other staple crops, it could have serious impacts on the price and availability of food around the world.

The results indicate that both regions have been lucky in recent years. There is an aspect of randomness to weather—a range of possibilities could occur, sort of like when you roll a six-sided die. So far, these regions have been rolling fairly low numbers, ending up with cooler weather than they could have had. But climate change has switched out the die—the highest number is bigger than it used to be. These regions haven’t experienced the full extent of what is possible, and they might not be ready for it.

“My hope is that we can tell people that their die has changed. You can roll something really extreme,” Coughlan de Perez says. “Maybe you won’t roll an eight for a while, but I think it’s worth having some plans in place for when that happens.”

The researchers also identified regional and global atmospheric circulation patterns that could lead to severely hot and dry events, including a possible worst-case scenario where wheat crop production in both the US and China is hit hard in the same season. Their results can help inform climate adaptation plans in these regions and ensure that stakeholders can prepare for the unprecedented events to come.

“I think, with climate change, we’re suffering from a failure of imagination. If we’re not imagining the kinds of extremes that could happen, then we won’t prepare for them,” Coughlan de Perez says. “We don’t have to be surprised. We can use tools at our disposal to try to understand what’s possible and be ready when it happens.”

Source: Laura Castañón for Tufts University

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A survey of more than 600 married or cohabitating individuals found that moving in together was not enough of a reason to combine finances.

While some traditional indicators of stability—marriage, more dependents, and higher net worth—increased the likelihood of joint accounts, having two sources of income made couples more likely to split finances.

“I just always assumed, based on my family background, that couples always pool their money. If they were married, they just pooled assets and income and made joint decisions,” says study coauthor John Grable, a professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “That’s not always the case, and this study shows we can actually identify groups of people or profiles of individuals and couples where pooling resources is not as common.”

The study’s authors believe these results can not only help other researchers and financial counselors gain insight into financial integration styles, but also help couples understand their approach to joint finances.

“Our research does suggest that people have a really hard time talking about money,” says coauthor Michelle Kruger, a part-time lecturer at the university and a financial planner. “So, if they’re able to even establish whether they have the same kind of goals and values when it comes to spending money, that probably indicates a level of cohesiveness.”

The study, published in the journal Contemporary Family Therapy, found that married participants were 4.5 times more likely to have pooled finances, which Grable says is expected.

“Pooling assets in a case where there’s not a marital agreement can be really dangerous for the couple and the individual because the law doesn’t provide the same protection for unmarried cohabitating couples as it would for a married couple,” Grable says.

The impact of net worth, on the other hand, was more surprising.

Individuals identified their household’s net worth as positive, zero, or negative. Couples with a positive net worth, meaning their combined assets were higher than their combined debts, were more likely to merge finances. Those with a neutral net worth were less likely to combine, and negative net worth did not have a significant impact either way.

“To me, it was interesting that it wasn’t driven primarily by income. It wasn’t necessarily the level of debt that mattered, but the net worth,” Grable says. “And debt could include credit cards, student loans, auto loans, mortgages, those kinds of things.”

Researchers also found that a growing household could push couples toward joint accounts. With a one-person increase in household size, the likelihood of a combined account increased by about 20%.

On the other hand, individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education were slightly less likely to combine accounts. And couples with multiple income earners were about 50% less likely to pool finances. If both partners have income, they may choose to manage that income alone, researchers say. A non-working partner, however, could face challenges if they could not access any household income.

“If there’s one income earner, and I make the income, do I feel entitled to make all the decisions on how the income is spent or saved? That can create a power dynamic problem in a relationship,” Grable says. “The pooling of assets helps alleviate some of that.”

Aside from demographics, agreeing on spending was also a top indicator of how couples manage their finances. Couples who had more open conversations about money and agreed with their approach were 105% more likely to combine their accounts.

“Agreeing on spending mattered a lot,” Kruger says. “That’s a good thing. That’s something we want couples to factor in when they are making decisions about how to manage their money, whether that’s together or separate.”

This aligns with existing research, which shows that couples who pool resources tend to exhibit more stability in their marriage, Grable says.

“If a couple decides because they don’t agree on spending to kind of keep things separate, that’s a potential warning sign there might be stability issues or power structure issues within that couple,” he says. “It’s not something to be alarmed about, or a predictor of divorce or separation, but it is something to consider.”

While this study provided insight into how couples might approach their finances, there is not a hard and fast rule for what financial integration style sets couples up for success. That has to come from communication and seeking out resources or help when issues arise, researchers said.

And when they seek out guidance from a financial planner or counselor, a better understanding of these factors can help guide conversations and steps forward.

“There are so many different ways that couples do this. What’s most important is that they find a system that works for them,” Kruger says. “But when there is trust and communication, couples can come to a place where they’re both happy with how they’re managing things.”

Source: University of Georgia

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Researchers have developed a nanoparticle to take a chemotherapy drug into fast growing, aggressive brain tumors.

The silica nanoparticle can be loaded with temozolomide, a small molecule drug used to treat glioblastoma brain tumors, the researchers say.

“This chemotherapy drug has limitations—it t doesn’t stay in the blood for very long, it can be pushed out of the brain, and it doesn’t have high penetration from blood into the brain,” says Taskeen Janjua, from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Queensland.

“To make the drug more effective, we developed an ultra-small, large pore nanoparticle to help it move through the blood-brain barrier and penetrate the tumor while also reducing unwanted patient side effects.

“This strategy could be a more effective way to treat brain cancer and prevent it from coming back,” Janjua says.

The nanoparticles are one billionth of a meter in size.

The researchers tested the nanoparticle delivery using 3D spheroids, multi-cellular structures created to mimic the brain tumor cell responses and interactions.

The study results showed that in mice, the nanoparticles successfully accumulated in the brain within a few hours without any negative effects on vital organs.

Brain cancer affects thousands of people every year and the chances of surviving at least five years is less than 23%.

Cancer Australia data showed it was the ninth most common cause of cancer death in Australia in 2020.

While there is still more research to be done, the results are promising for people with brain cancer, says coauthor associate professor Amirali Popat.

“This innovative drug delivery system has the potential to improve the effectiveness of brain cancer treatment and could lead to new and better treatments for this devastating disease,” Popat says.

“This preclinical research will accelerate future clinical development of a promising health technology and further the goal of improving outcomes for patients with brain cancer.”

The study is published in the Journal of Controlled Release. Additional coauthors are from the University of New South Wales and the University of Queensland.

Source: University of Queensland

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Palm trees infected with lethal bronzing disease emit signals that warn nearby healthy palms of the threat, a new study shows.

Those healthy palms produce their own defense that scientists one day hope to harness to protect palms against the disease.

The researchers consider the new findings a turning point for palm disease research because it has high potential for developing management strategies for lethal bronzing, a deadly disease spread by a small insect commonly called a planthopper.

The discovery could help manage other palm and plant diseases.

“Volatile organic compounds are common in plants and play an important role in protecting the plant,” says Brian Bahder, associate professor of insect vector ecology at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center (FLREC).

“Most importantly, some of these compounds have antimicrobial properties. They have the potential for use in defending against a variety of different infections in palms and perhaps even other plants.

“We suspected there was a chemical compound the planthopper was detecting,” says Bahder. “The goal was to identify the chemical to see if we could use it as a bait system. The resulting data showed there was a much more interesting story going on and could lay the foundation for developing a management plan for lethal bronzing and perhaps other palm diseases.”

This marks the first documented case of green leaf volatiles in palms infected by the bacteria that causes lethal bronzing.

For the study, Bahder and his team took leaf samples from infected cabbage palms, nearby threatened palm trees, and healthy palm trees that were outside of the area with disease spread. All samples were taken from trees in Fort Lauderdale. Over time, they tested the plants for the disease among the three sets of palms and locations.

The lethal bronzing-infected palms gave off a specific signal, whereas the nearby palms that were healthy responded and emitted a different signal. The healthy palms that were at a distance from the infected area emitted a different signal than both the infected and threatened palms.

“The threatened palms produced a compound with known antimicrobial properties, and we are now interested in how this affects the epidemiology of lethal bronzing in the field,” says Bahder. “We hope to be able to harness these natural plant volatiles to either treat palms directly or stimulate them to produce their own defenses.”

Lethal bronzing, first detected in Tampa in 2006, transmitted by the planthopper Haplaxius crudus was confirmed as the vector in 2021. For almost two decades, the disease has been making its way steadily across the state, creating significant casualties in Florida palms.

“The most important thing to note is that once symptoms show up on the palm tree, it is too late, which is why prevention has been the first line of defense,” says Bahder.

Currently, when a tree has been infected, the only remedy is to remove it. To prevent the bacteria from spreading, the surrounding trees require sampling for phytoplasma. If the palm tests negative, then an antibiotic treatment of oxytetracycline is administered as prevention. The treatment, which is expensive, is repeated on a quarterly basis.

With the discovery of these plant-produced compounds, scientists see this as a breakthrough in developing ways to manage the disease that could allow for harnessing the plant’s own natural defenses to create a cure for infected plants that would eliminate the need for costly antibiotic treatments.

“Scientists hope to be able to harness these compounds to develop new management strategies,” says Bader.

The next stage of the research process requires additional funding to find ways to use the healthy green leaf volatiles compounds that are natural to the palm’s defense system to treat infected palms. The methods could involve injecting the compound directly into infected palms and hopefully curing the infected palm. It could also involve potentially placing dispensers or spraying areas of risk to stimulate the at-risk palms with natural defenses.

“The goal is to find cost-effective ways to protect palms whether they are over large areas that may be at risk or individual properties. Ultimately, we want to cut down on time and resources for nurseries and consumers,” says Bahder.

Source: University of Florida

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Severe grief can cause a marked rise in blood pressure, according to new research.

The researchers say that suggests grief could be a risk factor for cardiac events.

The study, published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, demonstrates an association between grief severity and elevated systolic blood pressure response.

The idea of “dying of a broken heart,” which can happen following the loss of a loved one, was the motivation for the research, says senior author Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona who specializes in grief.

Increased risk of mortality after the death of a loved one has long been documented in epidemiological studies. For the new study, which included 59 participants that had lost a close loved one in the past year, O’Connor and colleagues looked at blood pressure as a possible contributing factor.

“We were looking for a way to test the cardiovascular effects of grief during that vulnerable time in the first year after the loss,” says lead author Roman Palitsky, who was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona when the study was conducted and is now the director of research projects in spiritual health at Emory University Woodruff Health Sciences Center.

The researchers interviewed study participants and asked them to focus on feelings of separation and attachment through a process researchers call “grief recall.”

The researchers talked to each participant for 10 minutes and asked them to share a moment when they felt very alone after the death of their loved one. The researchers then measured the study participants’ blood pressure.

“When you go to a cardiologist, they don’t just measure your blood pressure. They also sometimes do a stress test, like a treadmill, and measure your blood pressure. This is sort of like an emotional stress test,” O’Connor says.

After grief recall, participants’ systolic blood pressure—which is the pressure that the heart exerts on the arteries while beating—increased. From the baseline level, systolic blood pressure climbed by an average of 21.1 millimeters of mercury—the unit used to measure blood pressure. That is approximately as much of an increase as would be expected during moderate exercise.

Among the 59 participants, those who showed the highest level of grief symptoms experienced the greatest increase in blood pressure during the grief recall.

“This means that it isn’t just the death of a loved one that impacts the heart, but our emotional response to loss that is affecting our heart,” O’Connor says.

The study’s findings are helpful for clinicians, as they show that people who are experiencing bereavement are at higher risk for hypertension and other heart-related problems, O’Connor says.

“It’s important for psychologists and therapists to encourage grieving clients to get their regular medical checkups. Often, when we’ve been caring for a loved one who’s dying, we neglect our own health care,” she says.

Source: University of Arizona

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence to speed the discovery of critical biomarkers that can predict, at diagnosis, if patients with chronic myeloid leukemia will respond to conventional treatment.

With this early prognosis, these patients could receive a life-saving bone marrow transplant during the early stages of the disease.

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a type of blood cancer that develops when a genetic mutation results in the permanent switching-on of an enzyme called a tyrosine kinase. The mutation forms in a blood stem cell in the bone marrow, and causes the stem cell to change into an aggressive leukemic cell, which eventually takes over healthy blood production.

The conventional treatment for CML is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), which switches off the tyrosine kinase that was turned on as a result of the genetic mutation. However, not everyone responds similarly to these drugs.

At one end of the spectrum, some patients respond exceptionally well—to the point where their life expectancy would be considered normal. At the other end, some patients hardly respond at all, and their disease progresses to an aggressive state called blast crisis that is resistant to all forms of standard therapy.

Because the only treatment for blast crisis is a bone marrow transplant, which would be most effective when performed during the early stages of the disease, finding out if a patient is resistant to TKI therapy sooner could mean the difference between survival or an early death.

“Our work indicates that it will be possible to detect patients destined to undergo blast crisis when they first see their hematologist,” says Ong Sin Tiong, associate professor in the Duke-NUS’ Cancer & Stem Cell Biology (CSCB) Programme and senior author of the paper in the journal Blood.

“This may save lives since bone marrow transplants for these patients are most effective during the early stages of CML.”

“Based on these findings, we aim to develop simple clinical tests that can advise physicians on the optimal choice of treatment at the time of diagnosis,” says first author Vaidehi Krishnan, principal research scientist with the CSCB Programme.

“Single cell analysis coupled with the power of AI have provided a crystal ball for predicting drug response in leukemia,” says Shyam Prabhakar, associate director of spatial and single cell systems and senior group leader of systems biology and data analytics at A*STAR’s Genome Institute of Singapore.

For the study, the researchers generated a cell “atlas” from bone marrow samples taken from six healthy people and 23 patients with CML prior to treatment. The atlas allowed them to see the different types of cells and their proportions in each sample. The researchers conducted RNA sequencing at the single-cell level and employed machine learning algorithms to determine which genes and molecular processes were turned on and off in each cell.

The work revealed eight statistically significant features in pre-treatment bone marrow cells that were either associated with sensitivity to tyrosine kinase inhibitor treatment or extreme resistance to it.

Specifically, patients were more likely to respond well to leukemia treatment if their bone marrow samples showed a stronger tendency towards premature red blood cells and a specific type of tumor-destroying “natural killer cell.” As the proportions of these cells in the bone marrow shifted, patient response to treatment changed.

The research could lead to drug targets for preventing or delaying leukemia treatment resistance and blast crisis in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia.

“Treatment outcomes of chronic myeloid leukemia have improved tremendously over the years and many options are now available for our patients. Knowing which treatment works best for our patients will further enhance these outcomes and we are excited by the possibility of being able to do so,” says Charles Chuah, an associate professor from Duke-NUS’ CSCB Programme who is also senior consultant at the department of hematology at SGH and NCCS.

The team next plans to use the findings to develop a predictive test of treatment resistance that hospitals can routinely use with their patients.

Source: Duke-NUS

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Blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) are actually really good at surviving extreme cold and heat in nature, research finds.

Previous lab research suggests that even short periods of especially warm or cold conditions should easily kill ticks, but the analysis reveals this is only the case for larval ticks in the environment. Instead, nymph and adult ticks weather the hot and cold times with little impact, dying when they apparently run out of energy. The findings could ultimately provide valuable insights into the spread of Lyme disease and other vector-borne pathogens.

“We thought we would see some evidence that if there was like a very dry period, all the ticks might be at a greater risk of dying,” says Jesse Brunner, lead author of the study and an associate professor of biological sciences at Washington State University. “However, just the larvae were impacted by heat and dry conditions. Cold weather had even less of an impact. Somehow, they hunker down and survive great.”

Blacklegged ticks, also called deer ticks, are notorious carriers of pathogens responsible for various diseases, including Lyme disease, which is the most common vector-borne illness in North America. Over the years, these ticks have expanded their range significantly across the Eastern United States and Midwest, challenging previous assumptions about their preferred habitats. While one of the culprits is likely climate change, scientists have yet to clearly establish why ticks are abundant in some areas while rare in others.

To address the knowledge gap, the US Department of Defense provided funding to Brunner and a team of collaborators from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies to set up an unprecedentedly large field study at three military bases located across the US East Coast. By placing more than 9,000 ticks in soil core enclosures and monitoring their survival and development over a three-year period, the researchers were able to collect valuable data on the ticks’ response to climatic conditions.

Their work suggests that while extreme weather conditions don’t seem to have as much of an effect on tick mortality as previously thought, it does make them burn through their food faster. This means that hotter weather could shorten the window of time for ticks to find a host walking by to feed on. This was especially true in the case of tick larvae. The researchers found their median survival times were almost cut in half when exposed to frequent periods of hot and dry weather.

The researchers also found something else seemed to be happening on a small scale that was killing ticks. Soil core enclosures located just a few meters apart from each other often had surprisingly different rates of tick mortality. In one container the researchers would find 80% of the ticks had survived and in another right next to it none of the ticks had survived. The cause of these significant variations in tick survival is unclear, but the study’s findings suggest the influence of environmental factors such as arthropods or fungi.

The implications of the research are far-reaching, considering the public health impact of tickborne diseases. The study’s findings emphasize the importance of targeting interventions during the larvae stage, when ticks are the most vulnerable. By focusing on this stage of development, researchers hope to develop effective strategies, such as vaccinating host species to resist ticks, that can significantly reduce tick populations and mitigate the risk of disease transmission.

Moving forward, the research team plans to investigate the factors leading to localized tick mortality and delve deeper into the role host species, such as mice, deer, and yes, humans, play in tick survival.

“The ultimate goal is to develop a comprehensive framework that can predict and effectively manage tick populations,” Brunner says. “This could in turn lead to improved public health outcomes.”

The study appears in the journal Ecological Monographs.

Source: Washington State University

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More than 80% of New Yorkers who inject drugs test positive for the opioid fentanyl, despite only 18% reporting using it intentionally, according to a new study.

The findings suggest that many people who inject drugs are unknowingly using fentanyl, which may increase their risk for overdose and potentially their tolerance to fentanyl if it is used over time.

In 2021, more than 100,000 people died of a drug overdose in the United States, with 66% of these deaths involving illicit the synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

In New York City, drug overdose deaths have more than tripled since 2013 when fentanyl began to regularly appear in the illicit drug supply. Since 2017, fentanyl has been the most common drug involved in overdose deaths in New York City.

Research shows that people who take drugs may use the drug unintentionally, thinking that they are instead using heroin or another drug. However, more recent studies show that some people are aware of their use and may seek out fentanyl or heroin mixed with fentanyl.

“As the proportion of drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl continues to increase, it’s important to monitor how often people are exposed to fentanyl and any changes in preference for fentanyl among people who use drugs,” says Courtney McKnight, clinical assistant professor of epidemiology at New York University’s School of Global Public Health and lead author of the study in the International Journal of Drug Policy.

To understand the pervasiveness of fentanyl use in New York City, McKnight and her colleagues conducted surveys and in-depth interviews in 2021 and 2022 with people who inject drugs. In the 313 surveys and 162 interviews, the researchers asked participants about their drug use, including whether they used fentanyl intentionally in the last month, and their experience with overdoses.

All survey participants underwent drug testing for fentanyl, heroin, other opioids, and stimulants so that researchers could compare toxicology results with self-reported drug use.

The toxicology results revealed widespread use of fentanyl among people who inject drugs in New York City. The drug was the most common recently used drug, with 83% of participants testing positive for it (including 46% who tested positive for both fentanyl and heroin and 54% who tested positive for fentanyl without heroin).

However, only 18% reported recently using fentanyl intentionally; most reported using heroin instead.

“The overwhelming majority of people in this study—regardless of intentionality of recent fentanyl use—reported heroin as their main drug, indicating a strong preference for heroin over fentanyl. Yet, as our urine toxicology data indicate, people who inject drugs seem to have little agency in avoiding fentanyl,” says McKnight, who is also a researcher with the Center for Drug Use at HIV/HCV Research.

Nearly one-quarter of participants had overdosed at least once in the previous six months, with 36% of those who intentionally used fentanyl experiencing a recent overdose, compared to 21% of those who reported no recent use but tested positive for it, and 19% who reported no recent fentanyl use and tested negative for it. People who intentionally used the drug were also more likely to be younger, white, use drugs more often, and test positive for stimulants, among other characteristics.

In both the surveys and interviews, concerns about overdosing were common, with nearly all participants using strategies to prevent overdose, including keeping naloxone (a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose) nearby, using smaller amounts of drugs, using drugs around others, and having a trusted dealer.

“Nearly every person discussed the increased frequency of overdoses—a constant reminder of the lethality of the drug supply. A few said that the regularity with which overdoses were occurring in New York City was like nothing they had ever experienced,” says McKnight.

The interviews also revealed that people who inject drugs may be developing an increased tolerance to fentanyl, which may be driving a greater preference for the more potent drug. Several people interviewed reported that the potency of heroin has declined, which may indicate a developing but unintended tolerance to fentanyl that heroin can no longer address.

The findings point to the need for scaling up existing evidence-based methods to prevent overdose deaths, such as naloxone distribution and increased access to medication for opioid use disorder, the researchers say.

However, given the prevalence and deadliness of fentanyl, they stress that novel strategies to reduce overdoses should be considered, including increased support for and research on overdose prevention centers, and other forms of opioid maintenance treatments in which people who use drugs are prescribed opioids to avoid drugs tainted with fentanyl.

“New York City is home to the country’s first two legally sanctioned overdose prevention centers, which opened in 2021 and have already saved hundreds of lives, but more support and access to these programs are needed to further reduce overdose mortality,” says McKnight.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse supported the work. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Source: NYU

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Patients who have prolapse surgery for pelvic floor disorders do just as well if they resume exercise soon after the procedure compared to patients who restrict activities, researchers report.

The finding could change standard post-surgery instructions, which currently discourage patients from resuming exercise and activity levels for several weeks.

The researchers wanted to see whether resuming exercise immediately after prolapse surgery would result in similar anatomic and symptomatic outcomes when compared to standard guidelines.

They enrolled 108 women and randomly assigned them to two groups. In the first group, patients followed standard restrictions to avoid lifting more than 10 pounds for six weeks, and not return to work for two to six weeks.

A second group of patients had no lifting or activity restrictions and were permitted to return to work as soon as they were able.

After three months, the researchers found no statistically significant differences in anatomic and symptomatic issues among the two groups.

“This study is a paradigm shift for urogynecologists—it is practice changing,” says Matthew Barber chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University School of Medicine and senior author of the study published in JAMA Surgery.

“For decades, surgeons have been instructing patients to avoid activity after reconstructive surgery, and we now know that is unnecessary.

“The findings of this study are consistent with trials in other fields, like orthopedics and hernia surgery, which have shown that early activity doesn’t impede outcomes and may improve them in some circumstances,” Barber says.

The EC Hamblen Endowed Professorship fund of the Duke University School of Medicine funded the work.

Source: Duke University

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A new study on French Canadian populations incorporates genealogical records to provide an accurate map of genetic relatedness.

The study offers insight into the complex relationship between human migration and genetic variation, using a unique genealogical dataset of over five million records spanning 400 years to unravel the genetic structure of French Canadian populations.

The team developed a new method to simulate genomes based on a population scale genealogy dating back to the arrival of the first French settlers. By comparing the simulations to real genetic data, they were able to prove that the genetic structure of this population was encoded within its genealogy.

“It is the first genetic study, in any worldwide population, that incorporates genealogical records to provide a strikingly accurate map of genetic relatedness at the population scale,” explains Simon Gravel, associate professor in McGill University’s department of human genetics and an author of the study in Science.

The dataset was used in part to investigate how certain historical events and landscapes have influenced the genomes of French Canadians today. The study highlights the relationship between river networks and genetic similarity, as European colonial history was marked by a rapid expansion of borders along the banks of the St. Lawrence River and its tributaries.

“This study tells the genetic story of French Canadians, showing that their population structure today is not a result of ancestral French population structure, but rather one that has been shaped by events in North America over the past four centuries,” says Gravel. “We were even able to tie a meteor impact crater in the region of Charlevoix to the appearance of a founder effect observed in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region.”

By tracing the ancestry of millions of individuals over space and time, the study bridges the gaps between family pedigrees and continental population structure, providing valuable insights into the complex tapestry of human genetic history.

“Beyond mapping the rich genetic history of French Canadians, the findings have significant implications for understanding the impact of migration on genetic variation and the broader history of humanity,” adds Gravel.

The researchers are hoping that the large, freely available simulated dataset with realistic population structure and mating patterns will help improve genetic risk prediction, historical inference, and genealogical inference, which could have potential implications for identifying genetic diseases and improving medical treatments.

Additional researchers contributed from Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford.

Source: McGill University

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