NEW YORK, NY--A pair of new studies led by researchers at Columbia University explains why babies get so many common respiratory infections and identifies a specialized cluster of immune cells found only in babies that help them better cope with new pathogens.  “We know little about how the immune system develops throughout life, and most of what we know about immune system development in children comes from animal studies,” says Donna Farber, PhD, an expert in immune system development at Columbia University ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. –  For many busy families, online access to a child’s health provider for medical advice, health records or prescription refills is likely a convenient option. Yet, only 43% of parents have set their child up for a patient portal – an online tool allowing communication between patients and medical providers – and others may not be optimizing portal use, suggests the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. “Patient portals offer a wide range of benefits, including decreasing unnecessary hassles for providers and patients and improving access to both the medical ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, July 17, 2023                          Contact: Jillian McKoy, jpmckoy@bu.edu Michael Saunders, msaunder@bu.edu ## The Missing Americans: Unprecedented US Mortality Far Exceeds Other Wealthy Nations A new study found that more than one million US deaths a year—including many young and working-age adults—could be avoided if the US had mortality rates similar to its peer nations. In 2021, 1.1 million deaths would have been averted ...

As the world's population continues to grow, ensuring access to clean and safe water has become an increasingly important concern, yet little is known about how surface water quality will change in the future. Recent scientific research has shed light on the potential challenges that surface water quality may face in the coming years, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. “While surface water quality is projected to improve in most developed countries, there is an important caveat: the outlook for the poorest nations is bleak”.  A recent study, published in Nature Water, has projected an increase in surface water pollution in Sub-Saharan Africa. These findings ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In a lab at The Ohio State University masquerading as a playroom, pairs of kids ages 8 to 12 participating in a study found a variety of toys and games to play with – as well as a mysterious file cabinet.   Inside one of the drawers of the unlocked cabinet were two disabled 9-mm handguns.   As they played in the room, nearly all the children eventually found the guns. But some kids in the study were much more likely to tell an adult they found a gun, less likely to touch the gun, and were less reckless if they did touch it – and they were the kids who had watched a one-minute gun safety video a week earlier.   The study may be the ...

NNew research appearing in the journal Nature Biotechnology answers important questions about the viability of treatments that seek to replace diseased and aged cells in the central nervous system with healthy ones.  Its findings have implications for a number of neurological and psychiatric disorders—including Huntington’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and schizophrenia—that have been linked to glia, a population of cells that support brain health and function.  “A broad variety of disorders we associate with neuronal loss now appear to be caused ...

Griffith University researchers have played a key role in using DNA ‘origami’ templates to control the way viruses are assembled. The global team behind the research, published in Nature Nanotechnology, developed a way to direct the assembly of virus capsids – the protein shell of viruses - at physiological conditions in a precise and programmable manner. Dr Frank Sainsbury and Dr Donna McNeale from the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery were part of the research team and said forcing viruses to assemble onto DNA folded into different shapes “like origami” was a question that this project answered. “We achieved control over the virus protein ...

Consumers in the richer, developed nations will have to accept restrictions on their energy use if international climate change targets are to be met, warn researchers.   The big challenge is to identify the fairest and most equitable way that governments can curtail energy use, a process known as energy demand reduction.    Writing in the journal Nature Energy, the research team - led by Milena Büchs, Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the University of Leeds - analysed several scenarios to identify a potential ...

About The Study: This study found that large increases in mortality with Alzheimer disease and related dementias as an underlying or contributing cause of death occurred in COVID-19 pandemic year 1 but were largely mitigated in pandemic year 2. The most pronounced declines were observed for deaths in nursing home/long-term care settings. Conversely, excess deaths at home and in medical facilities remained high in year 2.  Authors: M. Maria Glymour, Sc.D., of the Boston University School of Public Health ...

About The Study: History of present illnesses generated by a chatbot or written by senior internal medicine residents were graded similarly by internal medicine attending physicians. These findings underscore the potential of chatbots to aid clinicians with medical documentation.  Authors: Ashwin Nayak, M.D., M.S., of Stanford University in Stanford, California, 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/jamainternmed.2023.2561) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

A new study proposes ways to better incorporate adaptation in climate change research, addressing the uneven distribution of adaptation capacities and needs worldwide. Research on adaptation to the risks posed by climate change has witnessed significant growth in the past decade, with increasing recognition of its urgency in policy agendas at the international, national, and local levels. Adaptation needs and capacities are not evenly distributed worldwide, with countries in the Global South generally experiencing the highest challenges. ...

About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that repetitive heading during a professional soccer career is associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment in later life. Further study is needed to establish the upper threshold for heading frequency to mitigate this risk.  Authors: Weiya Zhang, Ph.D., of the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, United Kingdom, 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.2023.23822) Editor’s Note: Please ...

Deaths among older adults with dementia fell starkly in nursing homes and long-term care centers after COVID-19 vaccinations became available, yet remained high for those living at home, according to a new study led by UC San Francisco.     The nationwide study published July 17, 2023 in JAMA Neurology, is the first to use data from 2019 to 2022 to quantify “excess” deaths – or those above what would have been anticipated had there been no pandemic – taking into account age, sex, racial and ethnic groups, as well as the settings where people died.  In the first year, there were 509,179 dementia-related ...

Bioengineers have found a way to program the size and shape of virus particles by combining viral protein building blocks and templates made from DNA. The resulting nanostructures could have applications in vaccine development and transporting drugs inside the body. Virus capsid proteins—the proteins that shield the genome of a virus—can be used to build precisely structured protein assemblies. Their shapes and geometry, however, depend largely on the virus strain. Reprogramming these assemblies, no matter the original ...

Penicillin allergy affects more than 25 million people in the United States (up to 1 in 10 Americans) and has been shown to lead to particularly poor health outcomes in pregnant women and surgical patients. It is also a public health threat, leading to antibiotic resistance and infections in hospitalized patients that can be life threatening. Seventy-five% or more penicillin allergy labels come on by age 3 due to, for example, confusion with a viral rash. The majority of these rashes were never allergic, but the labels ‘stick’ into adulthood and carry many adverse consequences.”   Many low-risk patients with a penicillin allergy were able to have their ...

Scent dogs may represent a cheaper, faster and more effective way to detect COVID-19, and could be a key tool in future pandemics, a new review of recent research suggests. The review, published in De Gruyter’s Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, found that scent dogs are as effective, or even more effective, than conventional COVID-19 tests such as RT-PCR. Dogs possess up to 300 million olfactory cells, compared to just 5 or 6 million in humans, and use one-third of their brains to process scent information, ...

“Detecting and sensing our environment is essential for understanding how to interact with it effectively,” says Sonja Groß. An important factor for interactions with objects is their shape. “This determines how we can perform certain tasks,” says the researcher from the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at TUM. In addition, physical properties of objects, such as their hardness and flexibility, influence how we can grasp and manipulate them, for example. Artificial hand: interaction with the robotic system The ...

Chitin hydrogel is recognized as a promising material for a variety of biomedical applications. Its biocompatibility and biodegradability make it useful in tissue repair, artificial organs, and wound healing. Yet scientists continue to face challenges in fabricating chitin hydrogel. A team of researchers has developed a green, efficient and scalable preparation method for chitin hydrogels.   The team’s work provides a rational strategy to fabricate chitin hydrogels and paves the way for its practical applications as a superior biomedical material.   Their ...

Improving diagnosis in health care is a moral, professional and public health imperative, according to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. However, little is known about the full scope of harms related to medical misdiagnosis — current estimates range widely. Using novel methods, a team from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence and partners from the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions sought to derive what is believed to be the first rigorous national estimate of permanent disability and death from diagnostic error.   The original research article ...

Press materials are now available for NUTRITION 2023, the annual flagship meeting of the American Society for Nutrition (ASN). Top nutrition scientists and practitioners from around the world will gather to share the latest research findings on food and nutrition during NUTRITION 2023, held July 22-25 at the Sheraton Boston.   Register for a press pass to attend NUTRITION 2023 in person or to access embargoed press materials before the meeting. Explore the meeting schedule, poster presentations, and oral presentations to see all the exciting research topics covered at this year’s meeting.   EMBARGOED MATERIALS   Researchers Identify Genes ...

Annapolis, MD; July 17, 2023—Responsible use of pesticides includes striving to avoid negative effects on the environment, often with an emphasis on protecting bees and other pollinators. A new study, however, finds that many common methods for minimizing pesticides' impact on bees—even some recommendations on product labels—are backed by minimal scientific evidence. The researchers behind the study say stronger testing is needed to evaluate which bee-protection measures are truly effective ...

FEMSelect Ltd., a women-led company developing innovative technologies to make a lasting impact on women's health, today announced positive results from a large six-month safety and outcome study of EnPlace® in 123 women with pelvic organ prolapse, published in the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics(IJGO).  The article, titled The EnPlace® sacrospinous ligament fixation—A novel minimally invasive transvaginal procedure for apical pelvic organ prolapse repair: Safety and short-term outcome results,1 discusses how investigators found that EnPlace, cleared by the FDA for attaching sutures to ligaments of the ...

Giving patients with operable pancreatic cancers a three-pronged combination immunotherapy treatment consisting of the pancreatic cancer vaccine GVAX, the immune checkpoint therapy nivolumab and urelemab, an anti-CD137 agonist antibody treatment, is safe, it increases the amount of cancer-killing immune system T cells in the tumors and it appears effective when given two weeks prior to cancer-removal surgery, according to new research directed by Johns Hopkins investigators. A description of the work was published online June 20 in the journal Nature Communications. This study, led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, the Bloomberg~Kimmel ...

The nonprofit PhRMA Foundation launched a new grant program to provide more than $1 million in funding for research on the use of digital health technologies (DHTs) in underrepresented populations in clinical trials to advance regulatory decision-making.  Based on applicants’ letters of intent, the Foundation will award up to eight $25,000 planning grants to support the development of detailed research proposals to compete for two $500,000 grants. Planning grant award recipients will also be offered a $5,000 promotional credit from ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (7/17/2023)  – Putting truth to the test in the “post-truth era”, Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source, the team reported recently in Nature’s Scientific Reports. That confidence is based on what individuals think the source is trying to do – in this case either informing or deceiving their audience. “Even when people know precisely how accurate or inaccurate a claim of fact is, whether they consider that claim to be true or false hinges on the intentions ...