PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

The key to easy asthma diagnosis is in the blood

2014-04-15
(Press-News.org) MADISON, Wis. — Using just a single drop of blood, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has developed a faster, cheaper and more accurate tool for diagnosing even mild cases of asthma.

This handheld technology — which takes advantage of a previously unknown correlation between asthmatic patients and the most abundant type of white blood cells in the body — means doctors could diagnose asthma even if their patients are not experiencing symptoms during their visit to the clinic.

The team described its findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published online on April 7. The researchers used neutrophil cell function in a clinical study to show accurate asthma diagnosis.

"What we've done in this paper is presented data that neutrophil cell function in some cases can predict — and in this case actually predicted and measured — whether someone is asthmatic or not," says David Beebe, a UW-Madison professor of biomedical engineering and co-author on the paper. "This is one of the first studies to show that this process could actually work in a cheap, easy and practical way."

Asthma remains a very difficult disorder to accurately diagnose. Currently, asthma diagnosis consists of a series of clinical tests, often heavily informed by lung functionality tests. "They'll measure how much air you can take in, and they'll measure different chemical components of the respired air," Beebe says.

Many of the current tests for diagnosing asthma rely at least partially on the patient experiencing symptoms during or close to their physician visit. Additionally, all of the diagnostic tests require the patient's compliance, which can make diagnosis difficult for the elderly or in children. "Right now, asthma diagnosis is based on indirect measures," Beebe says, "which is not optimal. So the premise in this paper was that cell function could be used to diagnose asthma and that we could measure cell function in way that was simple and cheap enough to be used clinically."

To directly diagnose asthma, Beebe and his team focused on the cell function of neutrophils. Neutrophils are the most abundant white blood cell in the body and generally are the first cells to migrate toward inflammation. "Neutrophils are sort of like a dog tracking something. They sense a chemical gradient, like an odor, in the body," Beebe says.

In other words, the human body emits chemical signals in response to inflammation or wounds and the neutrophils detect those chemical signals and migrate to the site of the wound to aid in the healing process. Researchers can track the velocity at which the neutrophil cells migrate — the chemotaxis velocity — to differentiate nonasthmatic samples from the significantly reduced chemotaxis velocity of asthmatic patients.

Traditionally, a clinical study of neutrophils required so much blood work, specialized equipment and processing that it was impractical to use in diagnostics. However, UW-Madison students developed the kit-on-a-lid-assay (KOALA) microfluidic technology, which allows them to detect neutrophils using just a single drop of blood.

The KOALA diagnostic procedure is very simple. Using simple lids and bases (each being a small, cheap piece of plastic), diagnosticians place a KOALA lid containing a chemical mixture onto the base containing the blood sample. That chemical mixture triggers neutrophil migration — and researchers can automatically track and analyze the neutrophil chemotaxis velocity using custom software.

Beebe emphasizes that by using the KOALA lids containing premixed chemicals, the diagnostic procedure is scalable, cheap, quick and repeatable. "The KOALA platform represents the next-generation biomedical research kit," he says. "Instead of getting a box of media and staining solution and having to do a lot of manual manipulation, you would get the base for the fluid sample, the prepackaged KOALA lids, and to do any testing, just place a lid (or series of lids) on the base."

INFORMATION: Other UW-Madison collaborators on the project include recent graduate Eric Karl-Heniz Sackmann; Erwin Berthier, a research scientist in biomedical engineering; Elizabeth Schwantes and Paul Fichtinger, allergy and immunology research specialists; Michael Evans, a biostatistician in the department of biostatistics and medial informatics; Anna Huttenlocher, a pediatrics professor; Sameer Mathur, an allergy and immunology associate professor; and Laura Dziadzio, formerly of UW-Madison. —John Steeno, 608-263-5988, jsteeno@wisc.edu


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Girls' mental health suffers when romances unfold differently than they imagined

2014-04-15
WASHINGTON, DC, April 15, 2014 — A new study reveals that for adolescent girls, having a romantic relationship play out differently than they imagined it would has negative implications for their mental health. "I found that girls' risk of severe depression, thoughts of suicide, and suicide attempt increase the more their relationships diverge from what they imagined," said the study's author Brian Soller, an assistant professor of sociology and a senior fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico. "Conversely, ...

Genetic pre-disposition toward exercise and mental development may be linked

2014-04-15
COLUMBIA, Mo. – University of Missouri researchers have previously shown that a genetic pre-disposition to be more or less motivated to exercise exists. In a new study, Frank Booth, a professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, has found a potential link between the genetic pre-disposition for high levels of exercise motivation and the speed at which mental maturation occurs. For his study, Booth selectively bred rats that exhibited traits of either extreme activity or extreme laziness. Booth then put the rats in cages with running wheels and measured how much ...

How mothers help children explore right and wrong

2014-04-15
Montreal, April 15, 2014 — There's no question that mothers want their children to grow up to be good people — but less is known about how they actually help their offspring sort out different types of moral issues. According to a new study published in Developmental Psychology and led by Holly Recchia, assistant professor in Concordia's Department of Education and the Centre for Research in Human Development, many mums talk to their kids in ways that help them understand moral missteps. The study — co-written by Cecilia Wainryb, Stacia Bourne and Monisha Pasupathi ...

Biologists develop nanosensors to visualize movements and distribution of plant hormone

2014-04-15
Biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in visualizing the movement within plants of a key hormone responsible for growth and resistance to drought. The achievement will allow researchers to conduct further studies to determine how the hormone helps plants respond to drought and other environmental stresses driven by the continuing increase in the atmosphere's carbon dioxide, or CO2, concentration. A paper describing their achievement appears in the April 15 issue of the scientific journal eLife and is accessible at: http://elife.elifesciences.org/lookup/doi/10.7554/elife.01739 ...

Pharmacist-led interventions show high success rates for post-stroke care

2014-04-15
A new study from the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry is looking at nurse- and pharmacist-led interventions to improve the standard of care for patients who have suffered minor stroke or transient ischemic attack, also known as "mini stoke." "What we were finding was that six months or 12 months after their stroke, a lot of patients still had uncontrolled blood pressure and uncontrolled cholesterol," said Finlay McAlister (MD '90), lead author of the study. "[This factor] puts the patients at an increased risk of recurrent events, including strokes, heart attacks, amputation ...

Photo: Tiger beetle's chase highlights mechanical law

2014-04-15
ITHACA, N.Y. – If an insect drew a line as it chased its next meal, the resulting pattern would be a tangled mess. But there's method to that mess, says Jane Wang, a Cornell University professor of mechanical engineering and physics, who tries to find simple physical explanations for complex, hardwired animal behaviors. Photo: https://cornell.box.com/tbeetle It turns out the tiger beetle, known for its speed and agility, does an optimal reorientation dance as it chases its prey at blinding speeds. Publishing online April 9 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, ...

Researchers transplant regenerated esophagus

Researchers transplant regenerated esophagus
2014-04-15
Tissue engineering has been used to construct natural oesophagi, which in combination with bone marrow stem cells have been safely and effectively transplanted in rats. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that the transplanted organs remain patent and display regeneration of nerves, muscles, epithelial cells and blood vessels. The new method has been developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, within an international collaboration lead by Professor Paolo Macchiarini. The technique to grow human tissues and organs, so called tissue engineering, ...

Sensitive detection method may help impede illicit nuclear trafficking

Sensitive detection method may help impede illicit nuclear trafficking
2014-04-15
WASHINGTON D.C., April 15, 2014 -- According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the greatest danger to nuclear security comes from terrorists acquiring sufficient quantities of plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU) to construct a crude nuclear explosive device. The IAEA also notes that most cases of illicit nuclear trafficking have involved gram-level quantities, which can be challenging to detect with most inspection methods. According to a new study appearing this week in the Journal of Applied Physics, coupling commercially available spectral X-ray ...

New study from Harvard identifies transgender health disparities

New study from Harvard identifies transgender health disparities
2014-04-15
New Rochelle, NY, April 15, 2014—Transgender individuals are medically underserved and their healthcare needs incompletely understood in part because they represent a subpopulation whose health is rarely monitored by U.S. national surveillance systems. To address these issues, a new study compared methods of collecting and analyzing data to assess health disparities in a clinical sample of transgender individuals, as reported in an article published in LGBT Health, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the LGBT ...

Targeting cancer with a triple threat

2014-04-15
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Delivering chemotherapy drugs in nanoparticle form could help reduce side effects by targeting the drugs directly to the tumors. In recent years, scientists have developed nanoparticles that deliver one or two chemotherapy drugs, but it has been difficult to design particles that can carry any more than that in a precise ratio. Now MIT chemists have devised a new way to build such nanoparticles, making it much easier to include three or more different drugs. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the researchers showed ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Program takes aim at drinking, unsafe sex, and sexual assault on college campuses

Inability to pay for healthcare reaches record high in U.S.

Science ‘storytelling’ urgently needed amid climate and biodiversity crisis

KAIST Develops Retinal Therapy to Restore Lost Vision​

Adipocyte-hepatocyte signaling mechanism uncovered in endoplasmic reticulum stress response

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Low LDL cholesterol levels linked to reduced risk of dementia

Thickening of the eye’s retina associated with greater risk and severity of postoperative delirium in older patients

Almost one in ten people surveyed report having been harmed by the NHS in the last three years

Enhancing light control with complex frequency excitations

New research finds novel drug target for acute myeloid leukemia, bringing hope for cancer patients

New insight into factors associated with a common disease among dogs and humans

Illuminating single atoms for sustainable propylene production

New study finds Rocky Mountain snow contamination

Study examines lactation in critically ill patients

UVA Engineering Dean Jennifer West earns AIMBE’s 2025 Pierre Galletti Award

Doubling down on metasurfaces

New Cedars-Sinai study shows how specialized diet can improve gut disorders

Making moves and hitting the breaks: Owl journeys surprise researchers in western Montana

PKU Scientists simulate the origin and evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation

ICRAFT breakthrough: Unlocking A20’s dual role in cancer immunotherapy

How VR technology is changing the game for Alzheimer’s disease

A borrowed bacterial gene allowed some marine diatoms to live on a seaweed diet

Balance between two competing nerve proteins deters symptoms of autism in mice

Use of antifungals in agriculture may increase resistance in an infectious yeast

Awareness grows of cancer risk from alcohol consumption, survey finds

The experts that can outsmart optical illusions

Pregnancy may reduce long COVID risk

Scientists uncover novel immune mechanism in wheat tandem kinase

Three University of Virginia Engineering faculty elected as AAAS Fellows

[Press-News.org] The key to easy asthma diagnosis is in the blood