New perspective on stress pandemics and human resilience from the analysis of COVID-19
2021-05-14
(Press-News.org) A new analysis of the effects of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the current pandemic, on the human body has provided novel insights into the nature of resilience and how we deal with stressful situations. Using COVID-19 as an example, the findings provide a new framework that may be central to managing this disease, minimise the likelihood of ferocious viral outbreaks in the future and deal with other major stresses.
"COVID-19 has been a huge burden on society at all levels. Whilst the prospects are improving in countries with efficient vaccination schemes like the UK, the virus is still present, and new variants continue to pose considerable risks. Moreover, there are sustained effects such as Long COVID and the mental health burden of the pandemic to overcome," Martin Feelisch, Professor of Experimental Medicine and Integrative Biology at the University of Southampton explained.
"By analysing and re-ordering the information available in the literature we aimed to offer a systems-level view on the disease within a single framework that provides a coherent picture about the way this infection stresses the human body."
The research team involving physicians, chemical biologists and an authority on human nutrition, looked at COVID from a higher level than just a disease affecting the lungs and considered how the whole body deals with the various stresses the virus causes when viewed through the lens of electron exchange (also known as 'redox') processes. Electron exchange reactions are the foundation of all Life on Earth, underpinning human physiology and our ability to react to changes in demand and environmental conditions. While change is healthy in principle, some people experience unfavourable consequences when a major stress such as a viral infection is added to the stresses of daily life. What happens when such stresses act together is not yet fully understood, and COVID-19 was used as an example to look at the consequences of those interactions.
"COVID can present as a severe lung infection in one person while producing only minor symptoms in others, although it may have affected several other organs by then already. Arriving at a better understanding of how the body deals with different stresses while maintaining an appropriate redox balance would put us in a better position to treat patients acutely, protect the rest of the population and control disease spread. While the current vaccination success story is encouraging, emerging virus mutants show the threat continues, and we need to be better prepared in the future." Prof Feelisch continued.
Their analysis, published in the leading journal Antioxidants & Redox Signaling, revealed three key areas in the body's ability to cope with the stress of viral infections:
Firstly, nutrition emerges to be of utmost importance in maintaining the necessary redox balance and provide one's metabolism with the flexibility to adjust and combat the damaging effects of viral infection on cells and tissues. It also explains the greater susceptibility to disease in more deprived areas of the country because low income increases the risk for poor nutrition.
The second key finding was the importance of the endothelium - the inner lining of blood vessels that provides organs with oxygen and nutrients - in particular, a highly fragile layer on its surface that regulates nutrient/fluid exchange and protects blood cells from coming into close contact with the vessel wall. The research team have found that the crucial regulatory function performed by the endothelium has not been fully recognised in existing research and may also be essential to understanding the effects of Long COVID, where the body does not get back to its normal balance. They advise that routine monitoring of this cell layer in a non-invasive fashion, such as from under the tongue, may provide valuable insight into this and other stressful process and guide therapeutic approaches.
The final key observation was the role played by small molecules known as 'gasotransmitters'. These are used by all cells to sense changes in their environment and adapt. These molecules are part of a body-wide system that uses circulating blood as a communication highway to inform other organs how to best respond to the mixture of stresses experienced by other parts of the body, for example how to ramp up the metabolism in the liver to deal with an infection of the lung. Of all the molecules involved, nitric oxide appears to be fundamental in protecting the overall redox system.
Professor Feelisch concluded, "We need to make best use of the opportunity the current crisis has given us to learn more about how the body and individual cells deal with stresses. Our holistic framework should be interpreted as a 'call to action' and encourage investigators around the world to study whole-body redox regulation, find ways to monitor redox status and identify factors that are critical for health and resilience. The next pandemic could be just around the corner and if we do not learn from current events, chances are we will face the same problems all over again."
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-14
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Mother fence lizards that experience stress during pregnancy give birth to male offspring with shortened telomeres, or bits of non-coding DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes, according to a Penn State-led study. Shorter telomeres are associated with decreased lifespan in humans; therefore, the team's findings may have implications for human longevity.
"Human men have shorter telomeres than women, which may partly explain why they have shorter lifespans of about seven years," said Tracy Langkilde, professor and Verne M. Willaman dean of the Eberly College of Science. "Our study shows that stress experienced by mothers during gestation could further shorten the telomeres, and therefore the lifespans, of their sons, thereby exacerbating these sex differences." ...
2021-05-14
Increasingly, businesses rely on algorithms that use data provided by users to make decisions that affect people. For example, Amazon, Google, and Facebook use algorithms to tailor what users see, and Uber and Lyft use them to match passengers with drivers and set prices. Do users, customers, employees, and others have a right to know how companies that use algorithms make their decisions? In a new analysis, researchers explore the moral and ethical foundations to such a right. They conclude that the right to such an explanation is a moral right, then address how companies might do so.
The analysis, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, appears in Business Ethics Quarterly, a publication of the Society for Business Ethics.
"In most cases, ...
2021-05-14
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health determined that stomach inflammation is regulated differently in male and female mice after finding that androgens, or male sex hormones, play a critical role in preventing inflammation in the stomach. The finding suggests that physicians could consider treating male patients with stomach inflammation differently than female patients with the same condition. The study was published in Gastroenterology.
Researchers at NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) made the discovery after removing adrenal glands from mice of both sexes. Adrenal glands produce glucocorticoids, hormones that have several functions, one of them being suppressing inflammation. With no glucocorticoids, the female mice soon ...
2021-05-14
In 1961, the Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner proposed what is now known as the Wigner's friend thought experiment as an extension of the notorious Schroedinger's cat experiment. In the latter, a cat is trapped in a box with poison that will be released if a radioactive atom decays. Governed by quantum mechanical laws, the radioactive atom is in a superposition between decaying and not decaying, which also means that the cat is in a superposition between life and death. What does the cat experience when it is in the superposition? ...
2021-05-14
A study led by LMU plant biologist Hans-Henning Kunz uncovers a new role for ion transporters: they participate in gene regulation in chloroplasts.
In plants, photosynthesis takes place in intracellular 'factories' called chloroplasts. Plant chloroplasts evolved from photosynthetic cyanobacteria, which were engulfed by a non-photosynthetic cell in the course of evolution. As a result of this evolutionary event, chloroplasts possess two envelope membranes, and have retained functional remnants of their original cyanobacterial genomes. Henning Kunz (LMU Biocenter), his group, and their collaborators have now demonstrated that ...
2021-05-14
Input one, output one; input two, output two; input three; output purple --what kind of system is this? Computer algorithms can exist as non-deterministic systems, in which there are multiple possible outcomes for each input. Even if one output is more likely than another, it doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility of putting in three and getting purple instead of three. Now, a research team from Iowa State University has developed a way to control such systems with more predictability. The results were published in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.
"The supervisory control problem for discrete event systems under control involves ...
2021-05-14
The ability to visualize transparent objects such as biological cells is of fundamental importance in biology and medical diagnostics. Conventional approaches to achieve this include phase-contrast microscopy and techniques that rely on chemical staining of biological cells. These techniques, however, rely on expensive and bulky optical components or require changing, and in some cases damaging, the cell by introducing chemical contrast agents. Significant recent advances in nanofabrication technology permit structuring materials on the nanoscale with unprecedented ...
2021-05-14
Australian researchers have documented the diversity of cells in the human breast, explaining the relationship between healthy breast cells and breast cancer cells.
The research, which relied on expertise spanning from breast cancer biology through to bioinformatics, measured gene expression in single cells taken from healthy women and cancerous breast tissue, including tissue carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene. This enabled the researchers to create an 'RNA atlas' that details the different cells found in these tissues.
The atlas, which was described in EMBO Journal, ...
2021-05-14
Japanese researchers successfully tested reflectionless, highly refractive index metasurface that may eventually be used in practical applications to send, receive, and manipulate light and radio waves in the terahertz waveband (THz). THz is measured in millionths of a meter, known as micrometers. The metasurface, an artificial two-dimensional flat material, was made of micro-sized cut metal wires of silver paste ink placed on both the front and back of a polyimide film. The team, led by Takehito Suzuki, Associate Professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) Institute of Engineering, published their findings on April 29, 2021 in Optics Express.
Such flat metasurfaces ...
2021-05-14
Psychology researchers at UC Santa Cruz have found that playing games in virtual reality creates an effect called "time compression," where time goes by faster than you think. Grayson Mullen, who was a cognitive science undergraduate at the time, worked with Psychology Professor Nicolas Davidenko to design an experiment that tested how virtual reality's effects on a game player's sense of time differ from those of conventional monitors. The results are now published in the journal Timing & Time Perception.
Mullen designed a maze game that could be played in both virtual reality and conventional formats, then the research team recruited 41 UC Santa Cruz undergraduate ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] New perspective on stress pandemics and human resilience from the analysis of COVID-19
