Risk factors associated With COVID-19 outcomes among people with intellectual, developmental disabilities receiving residential services

What The Study Did: Researchers found differences in sociodemographic and clinical characteristics by entry location for SARS-CoV-2 testing within a safety-net health system. White and English-speaking individuals disproportionately initiated testing via telehealth visits, while Black, Native American and non-English-speaking patients disproportionately initiated testing through the emergency department.  Authors: Rohan Khazanchi, B.A,. Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute in Minneapolis, 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.2021.12857) Editor's ...

CHICAGO --- Some leaders in health care have called for an end to annual health check visits, saying they're a waste of time for patients and overworked primary care physicians and don't reduce the risk of death. A new Northwestern Medicine study found while there is no clear proof that regular check-ups help adults live longer or prevent cardiovascular events like heart attacks or strokes, they still have many health benefits - especially for at-risk populations - and should continue. Routine check-up visits (they don't have to necessarily be done annually) ...

Decisions made now will determine whether economies win or lose money as the coal industry changes over the next couple of decades. Countries including Australia and Indonesia could lose billions of dollars if they continue to invest in new coal mines and exports as the world moves away from fossil fuels. These are the conclusions of a new analysis led by a team from Imperial College London and including researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Deloitte, which is published today in the journal Joule. The team combined data on coal resources and demand in an economic model of trade and prices. ...

BOSTON -- Death rates from chronic conditions like lung disease and cardiovascular disease and so-called "diseases of despair" such as opioid overdoses are known to be higher in rural areas than in large cities, with differing economic, social and political circumstances influencing people's access to care. To examine disparities in mortality rates for all causes of death, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital used a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) database to analyze all deaths occurring in the U.S. between 1999 and 2019. They found that age-adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) declined in both rural and urban populations, but that the gap between the death rates dramatically widened as white individuals aged 25 to ...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a severe, fatal neurodegenerative disorder causing loss of motor neurons and voluntary muscle action. While mouse studies have identified potential treatments, these drugs have typically done very poorly in human trials. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, working in collaboration with Pfizer, now report a high-throughput target and drug discovery platform using motor neurons made from ALS patients. Using the platform, they confirmed two known targets and identified an existing class of drugs -- agonists to the dopamine D2 receptor -- as potential novel treatments. The researchers, led by Clifford Woolf, MD, PhD, director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children's, and first authors Xuan Huang, PhD, and Kasper Roet, PhD, ...

A multidisciplinary team led by researchers from the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) identifies the genomic cellular map associated with hippocampal sclerosis, a major histopathological condition of temporal lobe epilepsy. The study, published in Cell Reports, identifies cell-type specific transcriptional signatures of hyper-excitability and neurodegeneration, providing grounds for improved diagnosis. While the presence of sclerosis is essential for identifying temporal lobe epilepsy (the most common form of drug-resistant epilepsy), it is also detected in some cases of dementia associated ...

Since March 2020 the Cancer Genomics and BioComputing of Complex Diseases Laboratory at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University has been dedicated to the study of COVID-19. Motivated in particular to study the evolution of coronaviruses, the lab, led by Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, has characterized and compared sequences of numerous relevant viruses. In their most recent study, published in the journal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), the research team focused on patterns of genetic coding used by viruses which infect a single or narrow range of hosts compared to those which infect a multiple or broad range of hosts. It was discovered that "promiscuous", or multiple-host, viruses utilize significantly non-optimal codons (the DNA ...

Mobility analyses show: Only a small proportion of all vehicles are responsible for the majority of the kilometers driven. We are talking above all about long-distance trucks that transport goods all over Europe. If these continue to be fueled with fossil energy, it will hardly be possible to sufficiently reduce CO2 emissions in road traffic. Synthetic fuels from surplus renewable electricity can make a significant contribution to such frequent driver applications. With electric mobility, hydrogen mobility and synthetic fuels, Empa's future mobility demonstrator, "move", is investigating ...

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo used smart watches and a dedicated app to monitor 169 subjects before and during Israel's second COVID-19 lockdown (October 2020). The watches and app provided the researchers with accurate daily data for measuring quality of life parameters, such as mood, stress, duration and quality of sleep, heart rate at rest, meeting others and physical exercise. The study was conducted by a group of experts from the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University led by Dr. Erez Shmueli, Dr. Dan Yamin, Shay Oved and Merav Mofaz, in collaboration with TAU's Prof. Noga Kronfeld Schor of the School of Zoology at the George S. Wise ...

BOSTON - Last year, people who smoked had a variety of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, with some increasing their smoking to help them cope and others quitting to potentially lessen their vulnerability to COVID-19. That's the finding of new research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine and conducted by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "Studies have shown that alcohol and opioid use increased during the pandemic, but little is known about how smokers responded," says lead author Nancy A. Rigotti, MD, director of MGH's Tobacco Research and Treatment Center and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "They might have increased ...