What The Study Did: This Viewpoint discusses potential associations between functional neurological disorder and COVID-19 vaccinations. Authors: David L. Perez, M.D., M.MSc., of  Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, 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/jamaneurol.2021.1042) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full article is linked ...

What The Study Did: Researchers analyzed changes in out-of-pocket health care expenses in the United States during the last two decades. Authors: Amit Jain, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, 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.2021.5499) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

Researchers at IMBA - Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences - demonstrate that different viruses can lead to brain malformations through diverse mechanisms by using human brain organoid models. The results are published in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Microcephaly, a term referring to developmental malformations of the fetal brain, can be caused by diverse infections during pregnancy. The infectious agents in question are grouped under the general term of TORCH pathogens, in reference to Toxoplasma gondii, Other, Rubella, Human Cytomegalovirus ...

Electrical batteries are increasingly crucial in a variety of applications, from integration of intermittent energy sources with demand, to unlocking carbon-free power for the transportation sector through electric vehicles (EVs), trains and ships, to a host of advanced electronics and robotic applications. A key challenge however is that batteries degrade quickly with operating conditions. It is currently difficult to estimate battery health without interrupting the operation of the battery or without going through a lengthy procedure of charge-discharge that requires specialised ...

Washington, DC (April 9, 2021) -- The American Society of Nephrology (ASN) and the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) announce the concurrent publication of "Special Article: Reassessing the Inclusion of Race in Diagnosing Kidney Diseases: An Interim Report from the NKF-ASN Task Force" in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN) and the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (AJKD). The publication in JASN and AJKD provides an essential review of the many challenges relative to identifying and implementing alternative methods to diagnosing kidney diseases. Last month, ASN and NKF asserted that race modifiers should not be included in equations used to estimate kidney function. ASN and ...

A tiny protein of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that gives rise to COVID-19, may have big implications for future treatments, according to a team of Penn State researchers. Using a novel toolkit of approaches, the scientists uncovered the first full structure of the Nucleocapsid (N) protein and discovered how antibodies from COVID-19 patients interact with that protein. They also determined that the structure appears similar across many coronaviruses, including recent COVID-19 variants -- making it an ideal target for advanced treatments and vaccines. They reported their results in Nanoscale. "We discovered new features about the N protein structure that could have large implications in antibody testing ...

Since 2016, a federal regulation has allowed nurse practitioners and physician assistants to obtain a waiver to prescribe buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder as a medication assisted treatment. But a recent study by Indiana University researchers found the bill, called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), has not greatly increased the amount of nurse practitioners prescribing buprenorphine, especially in states that have further restrictions. The study was published in Medical Care Research and Review. "Nurse practitioners and physician assistants are an important workforce with a capacity to expand treatment access for those with substance use disorders," said Kosali Simon, ...

Michigan State University's Witold Nazarewicz has a simple way to describe the complex work he does at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (frib.msu.edu), or FRIB. "I study theoretical nuclear physics," said Nazarewicz, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Physics and chief scientist at FRIB. "Nuclear theorists want to know what makes the nucleus tick." There is a nucleus in every atom. Atoms, in turn, make up matter -- the stuff we interact with every day. But the nucleus is still shrouded in mystery. One of FRIB's goals in creating rare isotopes, or different forms of elements, is to better understand what's going on inside the cores of atoms. In a new paper for END ...

Led by a South African team at the South African Medical Research Council Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science (PRICELESS-SA) in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), and the University of the Western Cape, in partnership with the University of North Carolina, USA, the study was published on 8 April in The Lancet Planetary Health. South Africa faces an increasing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancers - diseases that can be linked to increased consumption of sugar, particularly ...

A clean energy future propelled by hydrogen fuel depends on figuring out how to reliably and efficiently split water. That's because, even though hydrogen is abundant, it must be derived from another substance that contains it -- and today, that substance is often methane gas. Scientists are seeking ways to isolate this energy-carrying element without using fossil fuels. That would pave the way for hydrogen-fueled cars, for example, that emit only water and warm air at the tailpipe. Water, or H2O, unites hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen atoms in the form of molecular hydrogen must be separated out from this compound. That process depends on a key -- but often slow -- step: the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The OER is what frees up molecular ...

Amsterdam, April 9, 2021 -- This study builds upon two earlier published studies (Mold et al., 2020, Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports) from the same group. The new data, also published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports, demonstrate that aluminum is co-located with phosphorylated tau protein, present as tangles within neurons in the brains of early-onset or familial Alzheimer's disease (AD). "The presence of these tangles is associated with neuronal cell death, and observations of aluminum in these tangles may highlight a role for aluminum in their formation," explained lead investigator Matthew John Mold, PhD, Birchall Centre, Lennard-Jones ...

The properties of carbon-based nanomaterials can be altered and engineered through the deliberate introduction of certain structural "imperfections" or defects. The challenge, however, is to control the number and type of these defects. In the case of carbon nanotubes - microscopically small tubular compounds that emit light in the near-infrared - chemists and materials scientists at Heidelberg University led by Prof. Dr Jana Zaumseil have now demonstrated a new reaction pathway to enable such defect control. It results in specific optically active defects - so-called sp3 defects - which are more luminescent and can emit single photons, that is, particles of light. The efficient ...

A new study using human genetics suggests researchers should prioritize clinical trials of drugs that target two proteins to manage COVID-19 in its early stages. The findings appeared online in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2021. Based on their analyses, the researchers are calling for prioritizing clinical trials of drugs targeting the proteins IFNAR2 and ACE2. The goal is to identify existing drugs, either FDA-approved or in clinical development for other conditions, that can be repurposed for the early management of COVID-19. Doing so, they say, will help keep people with the virus from being hospitalized. IFNAR2 is the target ...

PHILADELPHIA - Psychosocial stress - typically resulting from difficulty coping with challenging environments - may work synergistically to put women at significantly higher risk of developing coronary heart disease, according to a study by researchers at Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health, recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The study specifically suggests that the effects of job strain and social strain -- the negative aspect of social relationships -- on women is a powerful one-two punch. Together they are associated with a 21% higher risk of developing coronary heart disease. Job strain ...

There are millions of people who face the loss of their eyesight from degenerative eye diseases. The genetic disorder retinitis pigmentosa alone affects 1 in 4,000 people worldwide. Today, there is technology available to offer partial eyesight to people with that syndrome. The Argus II, the world's first retinal prosthesis, reproduces some functions of a part of the eye essential to vision, to allow users to perceive movement and shapes. While the field of retinal prostheses is still in its infancy, for hundreds of users around the globe, the "bionic eye" enriches the way they interact with the world on a daily basis. For instance, seeing outlines of objects enables them to move around unfamiliar environments with increased safety. That is ...

A new biosealant therapy may help to stabilize injuries that cause cartilage to break down, paving the way for a future fix or - even better - begin working right away with new cells to enhance healing, according to a new animal-based study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Their research was published in Advanced Healthcare Materials. "Our research shows that using our hyaluronic acid hydrogel system at least temporarily stops cartilage degeneration that commonly occurs after injury and causes pain in joints," said the study's senior author, Robert Mauck, PhD, a professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and the director of Penn Medicine's McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory. "In addition to pausing cartilage breakdown, we think that applying ...

Experts have uncovered a new molecular reason why faecal transplants are highly effective in treating infections such as C. difficile (a nasty bacteria that can infect the bowel), which could lead to more targeted treatments for this and other similar diseases. The study, published today in Gastroenterology, was led by experts from the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University. Clostridium difficile, also known as C. difficile or C. diff, is a bacterium that can infect the bowel and cause diarrhoea. The infection most commonly affects people who have recently been treated with antibiotics. It can spread easily to others. A stool transplant - or to give it its full title "a faecal ...

New York, NY (April 9, 2021) - Sets of genes associated with resistance to immunotherapy in patients with metastatic urothelial cancer of the bladder have been identified and validated by researchers at Mount Sinai. In a study published in Clinical Cancer Research, the team uncovered gene signatures representing adaptive immunity and pro-tumorigenic inflammation that were responsible for sensitivity or resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that help the body's immune system recognize and attack cancerous cells. "These findings enabled us to identify potential biomarkers in patients who are less likely to respond favorably to immune checkpoint inhibitors, as well as new combination therapeutic approaches that might overcome such resistance ...

Nine out of ten Danes say that they will accept the COVID-19 vaccine when offered. This is the same level as before the AstraZeneca vaccine was paused. This is shown by a questionnaire-based survey collected by Søren Dinesen Østergaard and co-authors. He is professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University and affiliated with the Department of Affective Disorders at Aarhus University Hospital, Psychiatry. "In February 2021, we asked a sample of Danes whether they were willing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, and 89 per cent replied that they would. This picture was unchanged when the same people were asked again after the pausing of the AstraZeneca vaccine," says Søren Dinesen Østergaard. ...

Throughout the last ice age, the climate changed repeatedly and rapidly during so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, where Greenland temperatures rose between 5 and 16 degrees Celsius in decades. When certain parts of the climate system changed, other parts of the climate system followed like a series of dominos toppling in succession. This is the conclusion from an analysis of ice-core data by a group of researchers that included postdoc Emilie Capron and associate professor Sune Olander Rasmussen from the Section for the Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth at the Niels Bohr ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Plants in the bean family (legumes) form nodules on their roots to take up nitrogen. Legumes will stop nodule production when nitrogen is plentiful (Figure 1), but precisely how nitrate presence controls nodule formation in these plants has been a mystery. Now, researchers from Japan have found that interactions between proteins and nitrate can induce and repress genes, controlling nodulation with potential applications in sustainable agriculture. In a study published in April in The Plant Cell, a research team from the University of Tsukuba has shown that the different DNA-binding properties between proteins that establish nodule development determine if genes involved in symbiosis that govern nodulation turn on or off and that ...

Two studies led by the Mental Health Unit of the Virgen del Rocio University Hospital and involving researchers from the US conclude that antipsychotic drugs could have a protective effect against SARS-CoV-2. For this reason, patients treated with these drugs have a lower risk of becoming infected or suffer a milder form of the disease if they do become infected. Thus, a first descriptive epidemiological study of a sample of 698 patients treated with antipsychotics at the Seville hospital revealed that antipsychotic drugs could provide protection against both infection and the tendency to clinical severity of Covid-19 infection. "These are very interesting findings that reflect a clinical reality where we see few patients ...

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists and physicians worldwide undertook enormous efforts to understand the disease caused by the virus. In their latest collaborative study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg and physicians from the University of Freiburg Medical Center unveil a novel feature of COVID-19 immunity, which could have implications for future therapies. The study points to the involvement of Interleukin 33, an important danger signal, when immune cells encounter Sars-CoV-2 for a ...

An international group of scientists led by the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research have studied the chemical composition of 50 protoplanetary-disk forming regions in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, and found that despite being in the same cloud, the amounts of complex organic molecules they contain are quite different. Interestingly, the chemically rich young disks have similar compositions of organic molecules. These findings raise an important question: do solar-like systems share a common chemistry at birth? It was once believed that complex organic molecules were rare in the universe, and that this rarity ...

Imperial Brands scientists have utilised Toxys' ToxTracker suite of stem-cell based in-vitro assays, which provide mechanistic insight into the potential DNA damaging properties of chemicals, comparing vape e-liquid samples and their aerosols to combustible cigarette smoke. Imperial scientists are the first to publish results using the ToxTracker system for the assessment of vape e-liquids and aerosols, and it forms part of the company's continuing research into the tobacco harm reduction potential of Next Generation Products (NGPs) such as vapes. The assays help assess how product samples may impact cellular functioning across six reporter cell lines, picking up the tell-tale molecular signs of potential harm in the ...