Association of sociodemographic factors, blood type with risk of COVID-19

What The Study Did: Electronic health record data were used to examine whether the transition to remote cardiology clinic visits during COVID-19 is associated with disparities in patient use of care, diagnostic test ordering and medication prescribing. Authors: Neal Yuan, M.D., of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.4157) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

More snow is melting during winter across the West, a concerning trend that could impact everything from ski conditions to fire danger and agriculture, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder analysis of 40 years of data. Researchers found that since the late 1970s, winter's boundary with spring has been slowly disappearing, with one-third of 1,065 snow measurement stations from the Mexican border to the Alaskan Arctic recording increasing winter snowmelt. While stations with significant melt increases have recorded them mostly in November and March, the researchers found that melt is increasing in all cold season ...

Three years ago, scientists at the University of Michigan discovered an artificial photosynthesis device made of silicon and gallium nitride (Si/GaN) that harnesses sunlight into carbon-free hydrogen for fuel cells with twice the efficiency and stability of some previous technologies. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) - in collaboration with the University of Michigan and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) - have uncovered a surprising, self-improving property in Si/GaN that contributes to the material's highly efficient and stable performance ...

Thousands of our daily activities, from making coffee to taking a walk to saying hello to a neighbor, are made possible through an ancient collection of brain structures tucked away near the center of the cranium. The cluster of neurons known as the basal ganglia is a central hub for regulating a vast array of routine motor and behavior functions. But when signaling in the basal ganglia is weakened or broken, debilitating movement and psychiatric disorders can emerge, including Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive ...

Alzheimer's disease treatments that slow progression of the disease could significantly reduce the financial burden to U.S. state budgets, according to a new USC study. The study outlines how states -- which have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic -- would see relief: Medicare would cover the costs of treating the disease, while Medicaid expenditures would be reduced due to fewer patients entering nursing homes. Assuming a 40% relative reduction of Alzheimer's disease progression rates with treatment, researchers projected two decades of savings beginning in 2021, using a simulation model of state Medicaid programs. They forecast annual savings for Medicaid programs of $7.4 billion in 2030; by 2040, the annual savings would be more than $22 billion. All ...

March 10, 2021 - Hackensack, NJ - Convalescent plasma, the use of survivors' antibodies transfused into sick COVID-19 patients is safe and significantly improves clinical outcomes when using high levels of antibodies, according to a new publication by scientists at Hackensack Meridian Health, New Jersey's largest and most comprehensive health network. The treatment was safe, transferred the survivors' antibodies, and did not prevent the recipients from making their own antibodies, according to the results published recently in the journal JCI Insights. "We have developed this technique and methodology to save the lives of patients," said Michele Donato, ...

Public trust in the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fallen during the coronavirus pandemic, with the decline bringing overall population-level trust in the agency to the same lower level of trust long held by Black Americans about the agency, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Surveys done among a representative group of Americans in May and October of 2020 show about a 10% decline in trust of the CDC over that period. In contrast, the same research found that public trust in the U.S. Postal Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency increased significantly over the period, despite those agencies facing their own challenges. "The Biden administration will have an uphill ...

New research suggests anxiety among men transitioning into parenthood is significantly higher than reported by the global World Health Organization (WHO) regional prevalence rates. In a new study published in The Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology, researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus studied the prevalence of anxiety among fathers during the perinatal period, which includes pregnancy through the first year of postpartum. "The transition to parenthood is a major life event that's often accompanied with new challenges related to financial, relationship, and work-life balance concerns. Despite those changes happening for both men and women, not much is known about the prevalence of anxiety ...

The diffraction limit, also known as Abbe diffraction limit in optics, poses a great challenge in many systems that involve wave dynamics, such as imaging, astronomy, and photolithography. For example, the best optical microscope only possesses resolution around 200 nm, but the physical size of the photolithography process with an excimer laser is around tens of nanometers. Meanwhile, physical sizes in current research and applications in biology and the semiconductor industry have scaled down to several nanometers, which is far beyond the ability of optical waves. According ...

A new publication from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab's Marine Mammal Research Program (DISL) examines how bridge-building and in-water construction activities may affect manatees and other large aquatic species. The article, which was recently published in END ...