Researchers aimed to identify factors leading primary care practice personnel to decline participation in quality improvement (QI) projects, and strategies to improve the feasibility and attractiveness of QI projects in the future. Representatives from 31 practices agreed to participate in the study. Overwhelmingly, respondents said that staff turnover, staffing shortages, and general time constraints, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, prevented participation in QI projects. Challenges with electronic health records (EHR); an expectation for greater financial compensation for participation; and confidence in the practices’ current care ...

Primary Care Investigators, Clinicians, Patients and Community Members Reflect on NAPCRG’s 50 Years of Leadership and Service A team of primary care investigators, clinicians, learners, patients, and community members reflected on the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG) as it passed a 50-year milestone at its 2022 meeting. NAPCRG was started in 1972 by a small group of general practice researchers in the US, Canada, and the UK. It has evolved into an international, interprofessional, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational group devoted to improving health and health care through primary care research. The authors of the special report write that NAPCRG provides ...

Transgender Persons Face Challenges When Seeking Clinical Care, Including Decisions About What Information to Disclose and Risk of Substandard Care Researchers conducted a qualitative study to investigate transgender people’s experiences with sharing health information in clinical encounters. They held seven qualitative focus groups with 30 transgender adults living in North America. Four themes emerged: 1) Transgender people often perceive clinicians’ questions as voyeuristic, stigmatizing, or self-protective; 2) Patients describe being pathologized, denied, given substandard care, or harmed when clinicians ...

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have discovered that radiation therapy combined with two types of immunotherapy—one that boosts T cells, and another that boosts dendritic cells—can control tumors in preclinical models of triple negative breast cancer, a cancer type that’s typically resistant to immunotherapy alone. Immunotherapy activates the body’s own immune system to fight cancer but isn’t effective for difficult-to-treat “cold” tumors, like this. The findings were published Aug. 24 in Nature Communications. Though radiation therapy has previously been combined with T-cell boosting immunotherapy, it rarely succeeds ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools have received a lot of attention recently, with the majority of discussions focusing on proper use. However, this technology has a wide range of practical applications, from predicting natural disasters to addressing racial inequalities and now, assisting in cancer surgery. A new clinical and research partnership between the UNC Department of Surgery, the Joint UNC-NCSU Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center has created an AI model that can predict whether or not cancerous ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — In a recent Mayo Clinic study, researchers found that most patients prescribed fewer opioids after surgery were able to maintain satisfactory comfort levels without requiring more prescription refills later. Under new evidence-based guidelines, patients undergoing various surgeries received fewer opioid pills, and 88% reported feeling "very" or "somewhat" satisfied with their pain management. Researchers worked with the Mayo Clinic Survey Research Center to survey patients undergoing a range of elective surgeries. The survey investigated their post-surgery experiences, overall pain management approach and opioid use. The study’s ...

Irvine, Calif., Sept. 25, 2023 — Wildfires in California, exacerbated by human-driven climate change, are getting more severe. To better manage them, there’s a growing need to know exactly what fuels the blazes after they ignite. In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine report that one of the chief fuels of wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains is the decades-old remains of large trees.    “Our findings support the idea that large-diameter fuel build-up is ...

Images EAST LANSING, Mich. – The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, has awarded $115 million for the High Rigidity Spectrometer, or HRS, project at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, at Michigan State University. The HRS instrument will enable scientists to characterize the properties of isotopes that are created in rare-isotope reactions produced at about 50% of the speed of light. With the ability to measure properties such as the mass, charge and velocity of rare isotopes produced in those conditions, HRS will be a centerpiece experimental instrument ...

A University of Texas at Arlington research team has received a $450,000 grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to use statistical machine learning to review patient data and better predict which patients will need additional treatments. “With recent advances in screening, diagnosis and treatment, many diseases like cancer or cardiovascular disease can be identified in an early stage,” said Suvra Pal, associate professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics. “Fortunately, a significant proportion of patients living ...

A brand-new kind of drug, tested in mice, shows promising new results that could lead to the development of a new weight-loss drug that mimics exercise. The new compound, developed and tested by a University of Florida professor of pharmacy and his colleagues, leads obese mice to lose weight by convincing the body’s muscles that they are exercising more than they really are, boosting the animals’ metabolism. It also increases endurance, helping mice run nearly 50% further than they could before. All without the mice lifting ...

Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets – “the holy grail of astrobiology.” In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a seven-member team, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and led by Jim Cleaves and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science, reports that, with 90% accuracy, their artificial intelligence-based method distinguished modern and ancient biological samples from those of abiotic origin. “This routine analytical method has the potential to revolutionize ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Wind energy is, by far, the most common type of clean energy. And transitioning to clean energy is critical to addressing the climate crisis. Yet local opposition poses a significant barrier to the deployment of wind energy projects.  A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by researchers from UC Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan and Gallup Inc. examined wind energy projects throughout the United States and Canada to determine how common opposition is and what factors predict it. The study found that nearly one in five projects faced opposition ...

Enforcement is one of the biggest challenges to international cooperation on mitigating climate change in the Paris Agreement. The agreement has no formal enforcement mechanism; instead, it is designed to be transparent so countries that fail to meet their obligations will be named and thus shamed into changing behavior. A new study from the University of California San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy shows that this naming-and-shaming mechanism can be an effective incentive for many countries to uphold their pledges ...

Humankind is looking for life on other planets, but how will we recognise it when we see it? Now a group of US scientists have developed an artificial-intelligence-based system which gives 90% accuracy in discovering signs of life. The work was presented to scientists for the first time at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Lyon on Friday 14th July, where it received a positive reception from others working in the field. The details have now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS (see notes for details). Lead researcher Professor Robert Hazen, of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical ...

In a new study published in PNAS, researchers have extracted the first ancient DNA from Caribbean parrots, which they compared with genetic sequences from modern birds. Working with fossils and archaeological specimens, they showed that two species thought to be endemic to particular islands were once more widespread and diverse. The results help explain how parrots rapidly became the world’s most endangered group of birds, with 28% of all species considered to be threatened. This is especially true for parrots that inhabit islands. On ...

One of the most impressive and mysterious natural formations that we can observe in the arid areas of our planet are the fairy circles. These are enigmatic circular patterns of bare soil surrounded by plants generating rings of vegetation, which until now had only been described in Namibia and Australia. Over the years, multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain their formation, which have given rise to numerous discussions about the mechanisms that give rise to them. However, until now, we did not know the global dimension of this type of phenomena and the environmental ...

New York and Cambridge, UK -- Recent research demonstrates that protein phase separation (PPS) is widely present in cells and drives a variety of important biological functions. Protein phase separation at the wrong place or time could create clogs or aggregates of molecules linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and poorly formed cellular condensates could contribute to cancers and might help explain the aging process. Given the emerging association between human disease and the PPS process, scientists have been looking for ways to identify potential targets for therapeutic interventions based on PPS regulation. Today, Insilico ...

Scientists have found a surprising effect of some antibiotics on certain bacteria – that the drugs can sometimes benefit bacteria, helping them live longer. Until now, it has been widely acknowledged that antibiotics kill bacteria or stop them growing, making them widely used as blanket medication for bacterial infections. In recent years, the rise of antibiotic resistance has stopped some antibiotics from working, meaning that untreatable infections could be the biggest global cause of death by 2050. Now, researchers at the University of Exeter have shown for the first time that antibiotics ...

A team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the National Cancer Institute has developed a new algorithm for genetic risk-scoring for major diseases across diverse ancestry populations that holds promise for reducing health care disparities.  Genetic risk-scoring algorithms are considered a promising method to identify high-risk groups of individuals who could benefit from preventive interventions for various diseases and conditions, such as cancers and heart diseases. ...

A new Dartmouth study in the journal Science Advances suggests that how well people with diabetes manage their blood sugar depends on their experience with the condition and their overall success in controlling their glucose levels, as well as on the season and time of day. The findings could help physicians identify those patients who could benefit from more guidance in regulating their blood sugar, particularly at certain times of year. The researchers accessed data from wearable glucose monitors that showed how 137 people in the U.S. aged 2 to 76 living primarily with type 1, aka juvenile, diabetes managed their blood sugar on a daily basis. By analyzing more ...

As a physical quantity pressure is encountered in various fields: atmospheric pressure in meteorology, blood pressure in medicine, or even in everyday life with pressure cookers and vacuum-sealed foods. Pressure is defined as a force per unit area acting perpendicular to a surface of a solid, liquid, or gas. Depending on the direction in which the force acts within a closed system, very high pressure can lead to explosive reactions in extrem cases, while very low pressure in a closed system can cause the implosion of the system itself. Overpressure ...

A digital twin may sound like something out of a science fiction film, but Pitt engineers are developing new technology to make them a reality in our campus and beyond. Digital twins – a model that serves as a real-time computational counterpart – can be used to help simulate the effects of multiple types of conditions, such as weather, traffic, and even climate change. Still, life-cycle assessments (LCAs) of climate change’s effects on infrastructure are still a work-in-progress, leaving a need ...

In the future, quantum computers may be able to solve problems that are far too complex for today’s most powerful supercomputers. To realize this promise, quantum versions of error correction codes must be able to account for computational errors faster than they occur.  However, today’s quantum computers are not yet robust enough to realize such error correction at commercially relevant scales. On the way to overcoming this roadblock, MIT researchers demonstrated a novel superconducting qubit ...

A new injectable solution that self-assembles into a gel under the right conditions could help manage HIV unlike any currently available methods, researchers have found. The gel releases a steady dose of the anti-HIV drug lamivudine over six weeks, suggesting people living with HIV could have new therapy that doesn’t require a daily pill regimen to prevent AIDS. “The primary challenge in HIV treatment is the need for lifelong management of the virus, and one way to address this is to reduce dosing frequencies to help patients stick to medical regimens,” said Honggang Cui, a Johns Hopkins University chemical and biomolecular engineer ...

Study finds immune cells in older adults resemble those in newborns and children, but fall short in virus detection A world-first discovery has revealed special immune cells called ‘killer T cells’ in older adults, directed against influenza viruses, closely resemble those found in newborns and children, but struggle to recognise infected cells – a finding that unlocks the potential for the development of better vaccines and therapies tailored to different age groups. Killer T cells (also known as CD8+ T cells) play a critical role in the immune system by eliminating virus-infected cells. ...