The legacy of systemic racism in the U.S impacts psychosis risk at the individual and neighborhood level, according to a definitive review published online today. Researchers examined U.S. based evidence connecting social and environmental factors with outcomes relating to psychotic experiences, including schizophrenia. The review examined potential risk factors and influence of structural racism within three key areas. These included disparities in neighborhoods; trauma and stress experienced at both collective and individual levels; and complications experienced around pregnancy. Disparities in U.S. neighborhoods perpetuate disadvantage for racially minoritized ...

Candidates often give in to temptation to attack opponents in electoral campaigns through negative ads (more than 55% of the ads aired by the Clinton and Trump campaigns in 2016 were negative), even if evidence of this tactic effectiveness is, at least, mixed. A study by Bocconi University professors Vincenzo Galasso, Tommaso Nannicini and Salvatore Nunnari, just published in the American Journal of Political Science, reveals the backlash of electoral smearing and shows that, in a three-candidate race, it's the "idle candidate" (the one neither attacking nor being attacked) to have the upper hand. During a three-candidate mayoral race in a mid-sized Italian town in 2015, the authors ...

The research team led by Fuyuki Ishikawa at the National Institute of Informatics (NII, Japan) developed a technique to search automatically for simulation configurations that test various behaviors of automated driving systems. This research was conducted under the ERATO-MMSD project (*1) funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST, Japan). The proposed technique iterates trials on simulations using an optimization method called evolutionary computation so that it discovers simulation configurations that lead to specific features of driving behaviors such as high acceleration, deceleration, and steering operation. The outcome of this research was presented in ICST 2021 (*2), a flagship conference on software testing ...

New research has shown that COVID-19 infections in healthcare workers during the first wave of the pandemic provided an accurate sample of the general population, suggesting that data from healthcare workers could be used to estimate the severity of future viruses more quickly. The study, led by researchers from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in collaboration with IBM Research, is published in PLOS ONE. The researchers analysed the infection data from healthcare workers and the progression of the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak using the reported daily infection numbers in Ireland. Using similar data in four other countries (Germany, UK, South Korea and Iceland), computer models showed how the disease progressed in different countries related to ...

Volunteer firefighters -- who comprise more than 65 percent of the U.S. fire service -- have higher levels of "forever chemicals," per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), in their bodies than the general public, according to a Rutgers study. The study, which was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, compared the levels of nine PFAS chemicals in the blood of volunteer firefighters against levels in the general population. It is the first study to evaluate volunteer firefighters' exposure to PFAS, which are chemicals that accumulate in human bodies and in the environment and ...

Boston, MA (May 2, 2021) - A new study, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, found that heart transplantation using donation after cardiac death (DCD) with normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) is feasible in the United States. Broader application of DCD heart transplantation has the potential to increase cardiac allograft availability by 20-30 percent. Over a one-year period, from January 2020 to January 2021, eight heart transplants were performed using cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) for immediate regional reperfusion and cardiac unloading to accomplish optimal myocardial salvage. All hearts ...

Boston, MA (May 2, 2021) - A new study, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, finds that AATS Foundation fellowships support success in academic surgery career tracks. The AATS Foundation has two primary grant funding mechanisms: the AATS Foundation Scholarship and the Surgical Investigator Award. The study looked at publications, citations, NIH funding, and leadership position of awardees, among other factors. Results show that recipients of both the AATS Surgical Investigator award and the Foundation Scholarship demonstrate sustained scholarship ...

Boston, MA (May 2, 2021) - A new study, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, shows an association between decreased survival at five years and leaving an atrial communication at biventricular repair of unbalanced AVSD after adjusting for other known risk factors. During repair of atrioventricular septal defect (AVSD), surgeons may leave an atrial level shunt when they have concerns about postoperative pulmonary hypertension, a hypoplastic right ventricle (RV), hypoplastic left ventricle (LV), or as part of their routine practice. The study sought to determine factors associated with mortality after biventricular repair of AVSD. The study included 581 patients enrolled from 31 Congenital Heart Surgeons' ...

Boston, MA (April 30, 2021) - A new study, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, found that patients treated surgically for segmental Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension (CTEPH) had excellent outcomes with the vast majority doing very well in the long term without any additional treatment other than surgery. In addition, the study found that the proportion of CTEPH patients with segmental disease increased dramatically during the study period - from 2005 to 2020. At the beginning of the study, roughly seven percent of patients were diagnosed with segmental disease. During the last five years of the study, the proportion ...

Boston, MA (May 1, 2021) - A new study, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, and simultaneously published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, finds that patients suffering from severe mitral regurgitation should be carefully screened and counselled before undergoing transcatheter edge-to-edge mitral repair (TEER). Data showed that up to 95 percent of patients who needed surgery after failed TEER could not have their valves repaired, and needed mitral valve replacement to resolve the issue. The findings highlight the need to select patients carefully ...

Boston, MA (May 1, 2021) - Preliminary results of a clinical trial, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, showed that a new, low-profile thoracic aortic endograft is safe and effective in the treatment of descending thoracic aortic aneurysm or penetrating atherosclerotic ulcer (PAU) diseases. A multi-disciplinary team, led by both cardiac and vascular surgeons as co-investigators, conducted the study in 36 centers in the United States and Japan, enrolling patients between 2016 and 2019. The trial aimed to measure safety and efficacy of the RELAY®Pro endovascular device, a second-generation product featuring a dramatically reduced profile and a non-bare stent ...

Boston, MA (May 1, 2021) - A new study presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, found that the percentage of patients undergoing esophagectomy for cancer who suffer Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) post-operatively is much higher than previously reported, with as many as 24 percent suffering from Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) or Pulmonary Embolism (PE). Six-month mortality for patients with VTE was 17.6 percent compared to 2.1 percent for those without. Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) is a common, potentially preventable post-operative complication leading to significant morbidity and mortality. Esophagectomy patients are amongst the highest risk groups ...

Niigata, Japan--Researchers from Niigata University , the University of Tokyo, Osaka University and Tokyo Medical University, Japan have developed a new approach that could revolutionize the treatment, prevention, and possibly reversal of the damages caused by liver diseases. This novel strategy exploits small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) derived from interferon-γ (IFN-γ) pre-conditioned MSCs (γ-sEVs). Cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases remain a global health concern, with close to 2 million deaths reported annually, these account for approximately 3.5% of annual worldwide deaths. All these ...

Researchers from University of Arizona and University of Utah published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines why most scholarly research is misinterpreted by the public or never escapes the ivory tower and suggests that such research gets lost in abstract, technical, and passive prose. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Marketing Ideas: How to Write Research Articles that Readers Understand and Cite" and is authored by Nooshin L. Warren, Matthew Farmer, Tiany Gu, and Caleb Warren. From developing vaccines to nudging people to eat less, scholars conduct research that could change the world, but most of their ideas either are misinterpreted by the public or never escape the ivory tower. Why does most academic ...

Supporting female survivors of childhood maltreatment is critical to disrupting intergenerational abuse as new research from the University of South Australia shows a clear link between parents who have suffered abuse and the likelihood of their children suffering the same fate. The finding amplifies an acute need for far better support for victims of child maltreatment to ensure safer and more nurturing environments for all children. Funded by the NHMRC and the Channel 7 Children's Research Foundation, and published in The Lancet Public Health today, the study found that most child maltreatment is occurring among families caught up in intergenerational cycles of child abuse and neglect - 83 per cent of ...

Largest study so far of more than 17 million adults in England confirms that minority ethnic groups had a higher risk of testing positive, hospitalisation, admission to intensive care units (ICU), and death from COVID-19 compared with white groups, even after accounting for other factors known to increase risk like deprivation, occupation, household size and underlying health conditions. Disparities for hospitalisation and death lessened for most minority ethnic groups between pandemic waves 1 (February to September 2020) and wave 2 (September to December 2020), but increased for South Asian groups. To tackle ethnic disparities in COVID-19 risks, the authors call for reducing structural disadvantage and inequality, improving quality of and access to healthcare, and improving uptake ...

HOUSTON ? A Phase II trial led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found that BK virus (BKV)-specific T cells from healthy donors were safe and effective as an off-the-shelf therapy for BKV-associated hemorrhagic cystitis (BKV-HC), a painful complication common after allogeneic stem cell transplants for patients with leukemia or lymphoma. The study was published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Infusion of T cells targeting BKV resulted in rapid responses, with 67.7% of patients seeing a complete or partial improvement in symptoms after 14 days. This increased to 81.6% of patients after 28 days post-infusion. No cases of grade ...

The marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata, which lives within the internal canals of a sponge, is one of only two such species possessing a branching body, with one head and multiple posterior ends. An international research team led by the Universities of Göttingen and Madrid is the first to describe the internal anatomy of this intriguing animal. The researchers discovered that the complex body of this worm spreads extensively in the canals of their host sponges. In addition, they describe the anatomical details and nervous system of its unusual reproductive ...

Scientists from several hospitals and research centers have shown what happens in individual cells of patients who died of COVID-19. In a study published in Nature, the researchers describe how infected cells from multiple organs exhibited a range of molecular and genomic changes. They also saw signs of multiple, unsuccessful attempts by the lungs to repair themselves in response to respiratory failure, which is the leading cause of death in COVID-19 patients. "You really feel the tragedy of the disease when you see that result," said Aviv Regev, co-senior author of the study and a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard when the study began. "The lung tries everything at its disposal, and it still can't fix itself. This was a very ...

HOUSTON - (April 30, 2021) - The microscopic structures and properties of materials are intimately linked, and customizing them is a challenge. Rice University engineers are determined to simplify the process through machine learning. To that end, the Rice lab of materials scientist Ming Tang, in collaboration with physicist Fei Zhou at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, introduced a technique to predict the evolution of microstructures -- structural features between 10 nanometers and 100 microns -- in materials. Their open-access paper in the Cell Press journal Patterns shows how neural networks ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - In 2018, industry and academic researchers revealed a potentially devastating hardware flaw that made computers and other devices worldwide vulnerable to attack. Researchers named the vulnerability END ...

CHICAGO --- Itch torments its sufferers and can be as debilitating as chronic pain. But it's a hard symptom to measure -- particularly for the 10 million U.S. children with atopic dermatitis, also known as eczema. They can't always verbalize or quantify their suffering via a survey or scale. It can also be difficult to objectively measure itch for adults with liver disease, kidney disease and certain cancers who experience its symptoms. So, it's hard to track how well treatments and drugs are working. But now there is a soft, wearable sensor that actually quantifies itch by measuring scratching when placed on the hand developed by Northwestern University scientists. While it was tested ...

Boston, MA (April 30, 2021) - A new study, presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, shows significant reduction in post-operative use of Schedule II opioids for pain management following robotic surgery. To address the on-going issues of opioid overuse and abuse, the study aimed to examine the use of painkillers in Enhanced Recovery After Thoracic Surgery (ERATS) protocols and determine the impact of alternative pain management approaches on clinical outcomes. An Institutional Review Board-approved retrospective analysis of a prospectively maintained ...

Boston, MA (April 30, 2021) - A new set of guidelines, developed by AATS and ESTS (European Society for Thoracic Surgery) presented today at the AATS 101st Annual Meeting, recommends a 30-day course of Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) prophylaxis post-discharge for patients undergoing surgical resection for lung or esophagus cancer. The AATS and ESTS formed a multidisciplinary guideline panel that included broad membership to minimize potential bias when formulating recommendations. The McMaster University GRADE Centre supported the guideline development process, including updating or performing systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The results are endorsed by the American Society of Hematology (ASH) and the International Society ...

Global sea level rise associated with the possible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been significantly underestimated in previous studies, meaning sea level in a warming world will be greater than anticipated, according to a new study from Harvard researchers. The report, published in Science Advances, features new calculations for what researchers refer to as a water expulsion mechanism. This occurs when the solid bedrock the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rebounds upward as the ice melts and the total weight of the ice sheet decreases. The bedrock sits below sea level so when it lifts, it pushes water from the surrounding area into the ocean, adding to global ...