Irvine, CA - June 18, 2021 - A new study paves the way for the development of next generation therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI), the most frequent cause of healthcare-acquired gastrointestinal infections and death in developed countries. Published today in Nature Communications, the study reveals the first 3D structure of the Clostridioides difficile toxin B (TcdB) in complex with chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan 4 (CSPG4), a human receptor. The study was co-led by senior author Rongsheng Jin, PhD, a professor in the Department of Physiology & Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, and Min Dong, PhD, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. "TcdB is one of two homologous C. ...

June 18, 2021 - An experimental artificial heart includes an autoregulation control mechanism, or Auto-Mode, that can adjust to the changing needs of patients treated for end-stage heart failure. Outcomes in the first series of patients managed with the new heart replacement pump in Auto-Mode are presented in the ASAIO Journal, official journal of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. The study reports on the response to "pressure sensor-based autoregulation of blood flow" in ten patients for up to two years after implantation of the Carmat Total Artificial ...

The visual thalamus is classically known to relay visual stimuli coming from the retina to the cerebral cortex. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology now show that although neurons in the mouse visual thalamus connect to both eyes, they establish strong functional connections only with one retina. These results settle partly contradictory results of earlier studies and demonstrate how important it can be to complement structural data with functional analyses. We have two eyes, but perceive the tree in front of us only once. Our brain therefore has the complicated task of combining the information of both eyes in a meaningful way. To do so, visual stimuli first travel from the retina via so-called ganglion cells to the visual thalamus. There, the information does end up ...

June 18, 2021 - At least so far, the currently limited research base does not establish that cannabis has additional adverse effects on brain development or functioning in adolescents or young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), concludes a review in the July/August issue of Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. While ADHD is clinically defined to have impairments in cognitive functioning, cannabis use by itself is also associated with cognitive impairments: "[T]he evidence to date does not clearly support either an addictive effect or an interaction - whether protective ...

After graduating or leaving college, many students face a difficult choice: Try to pay off their student loans as fast as possible to save on interest, or enroll in an income-based repayment plan, which offers affordable payments based on their income and forgives any balance remaining after 20 or 25 years. There are pros and cons to each option, and trying to discern the better path can be daunting. That's why University of Colorado Boulder's Yu-Jui Huang and Saeed Khalili, a former graduate student in financial mathematics, along with Dublin City University's Paolo Guasoni, decided to throw a little mathematical ...

HOUSTON - (June 18, 2021) - To boost employees' creativity, managers should consider offering a set of rewards for them to choose from, according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Tulane University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and National Taiwan Normal University. The study, co-authored by Jing Zhou, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business, is the first to systematically examine the effects of reward choice in a field experiment, which was conducted in the context of an organizationwide suggestion ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (06/18/2021) -- University of Minnesota Medical School researchers determined that the common blood pressure medication, losartan, is not effective in reducing hospitalization for mildly-ill COVID-19 outpatients. In the multicenter, randomized, double-blinded clinical trial, non-hospitalized patients recently diagnosed with COVID-19 were given either losartan or a placebo and monitored for 15 days. The study's results, which were published in END ...

Left hands and right hands are almost perfect mirror images of each other. But whatever way they are twisted and turned, they cannot be superimposed onto each other. This is why the left glove simply won't fit the right hand as well as it fits the left. In science, this property is referred to as chirality. Just like hands are chiral, molecules can be chiral, too. In fact, most molecules in the cells of living organisms, such as DNA, are chiral. Unlike hands, however, that usually come in pairs of left and right, the molecules of life almost exclusively occur in either their "left-handed" or their "right-handed" version. They are homochiral, as researchers say. Why that is, is still not clear. But ...

SAN ANTONIO (June 18, 2021) -- Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) and colleagues worldwide describe a new science-based intervention for hiccups in a research letter published June 18 in the journal JAMA Network Open. In the publication, the scientists coined a new term for the intervention: the "forced inspiratory suction and swallow tool," or FISST. The team also reported the results of a survey of 249 users who were asked whether it is superior to hiccup home remedies such as breathing into ...

An international team led by researchers at Princeton University has uncovered a new pattern of ordering of electric charge in a novel superconducting material. The researchers discovered the new type of ordering in a material containing atoms arranged in a peculiar structure known as a kagome lattice. While researchers already understand how the electron's spin can produce magnetism, these new results provide insights into the fundamental understanding of another type of quantum order, namely, orbital magnetism, which addresses whether the charge can spontaneously flow in a loop and produce magnetism dominated by extended orbital motion of electrons in a lattice of atoms. Such orbital currents can produce unusual quantum ...

Cancer cells have an uncanny ability to evolve and adapt to overcome the treatments used against them. While patient survival has been extended by modern drugs that block the production or action of male hormones that fuel prostate cancer -- androgen receptor inhibitors such as enzalutamide, apalutamide, darolutamide, and abiraterone -- eventually these drugs stop working. At that point, a patient's disease is considered incurable, or what doctors call metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer. In a new study, a team of researchers led by Joshi Alumkal, M.D., who ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Will a reduction in tau protein in brain neurons protect against Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementias? A new study, published in the journal eNeuro, suggests the answer is no. If this is borne out, that result differs from Alzheimer's disease, where reducing endogenous tau levels in brain neurons is protective for multiple models of the disease -- which further suggests that the role of tau in the pathogenesis of Lewy body dementias is distinct from Alzheimer's disease. Both Parkinson's disease dementia and Lewy body dementia are characterized by intracellular aggregates of misfolded alpha-synuclein protein in brain neurons, and the two diseases together are the second most common cause of neurodegenerative dementia after ...

Lake Victoria, which came under the spotlight in 2004 by the documentary "Darwin's nightmare", is not only suffering from the introduction and commercialisation of the Nile perch. A study lead researchers from the University of Liège (Belgium) has highlighted other worrying phenomena, particularly climatic ones, which have an equally important impact on the quality of the lake's waters. Located in East Africa, just south of the Equator, Lake Victoria is the source of the Nile and is the largest tropical lake in the world. With a surface area of 68,800 km² (twice the size of Belgium), it is considered to be one of the largest water and fishery resources in East Africa, supporting more than 47 million people in the three neighbor countries ...

Colorado State University Professor of Psychology Silvia Sara Canetto has spent many years researching patterns and meanings of suicide by culture, trying to make sense of the variability in women's and men's suicide mortality around the world. Suicide rates are generally higher in men than in women, but not everywhere - which suggests cultural influences. Canetto and colleagues have completed a new study that provides insight into what may contribute to men's suicide vulnerability. The study tests Canetto's theory that men's suicide mortality ...

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys have gained a deeper insight into the intricacies of autophagy, the process in which cells degrade and recycle cellular components. The findings, published in Current Biology, describe how the "trash bags" in a cell--called autophagosomes--are tagged to direct their movement to the cellular "recycling plants" where waste is processed. The research opens new paths to understanding the relationship between autophagy and age-related diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders. "Our latest study identifies how a chemical modification (phosphate-related ...

Food has become one of the major challenges of the 21st century. According to a study carried out by CNRS scientists1, an organic, sustainable, biodiversity-friendly agro-food system, could be implemented in Europe and would allow a balanced coexistence between agriculture and the environment. The scenario proposed is based on three levers. The first would involve a change in diet, with less consumption of animal products, making it possible to limit intensive livestock farming and eliminate feed imports. The second lever would require the application of the principles of agroecology, with the generalization of long, diversified crop rotation systems2 incorporating nitrogen-fixing legumes, making it possible to do without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and ...

What The Study Did: Researchers reviewed access to COVID-19 vaccination sites in Brooklyn, the most populated borough in New York, to better understand disparities in vaccination. Authors: Natasha Williams, Ed.D., M.P.H., of the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York, 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.2021.13937) Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support 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 ...

What The Study Did: Researchers describe the local transmission pattern of SARS-CoV-2 in Valencia, the third most populated city in Spain. Authors: Carolina Romero García, M.D., Ph.D., of the University General Hospital, European University, in Valencia, Spain, 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.2021.13818) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see ...

Karin Hellgren and colleagues examined pregnancy outcomes in relation to disease activity and antirheumatic treatment strategies in women with RA. This matched cohort study from Sweden and Denmark explored the associations between maternal RA and pre-term birth (PTB), or delivering babies small for gestational age (SGA)in relation to the mother's disease activity and use of antirheumatic treatment before and during pregnancy. Using national medical birth registers and rheumatology registers, the authors looked at1739pregnancies in women with RA, and 17,390 control pregnancies in the general population. Overall, women with RA had an increased likelihood of having pre-term and small babies. High ...

RA is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. It can also cause fatigue, and the underlying inflammation may affect other body systems. It is more common in women than in men. To date, active smoking has been the most reproducibly reported risk factor for a type of RA called anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) positive RA-particularly in people who carry the HLA-DRB1-shared epitope alleles. Nguyen and colleagues set out to investigate the relationship between passive smoking and the risk of developing RA in a large prospective cohort of healthy French women. The E3N-EPIC (Etude Epidémiologique au prèsdes femmes de la Mutuelle générale de l'Education ...

At the 2021 EULAR congress, Brkic and colleagues presented data from people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)treated at Norwegian rheumatology outpatient clinics between 2010 and 2019. The project BioRheuma (BIOlogic treatment of patients suffering from inflammatory RHEUMAtic disorders in Norway) aimed to monitor people receiving b/tsDMARDs. Anonymized data files from10 participating centres were merged and analyzed over a 10-year period to show the annual total b/tsDMARD cost, as well as the mean cost per patient for all current users, for all those who started treatment, and for initiating patients naïve to b/tsDMARDs. The cost was calculated based on price offers given at the annual tender process for the different years. The number of registered RA patients in the databases increased ...

Murat Torgutalp and colleagues investigated the longitudinal association between radiographic sacroiliitis progression and treatment with TNFi in patients with early axSpA in a long-term inception cohort. The results were shared in an oral session at the 2021 EULAR congress. Based on the availability of at least two sets of sacroiliac joint (SIJ radiographs), 166 people with non-radiographic axialspondyloarthritis (nr-axSpA), and135 with radiographic (r-axSpA), from the German Spondyloarthritis Inception Cohort (GESPIC) were included in the analysis. Two trained and calibrated ...

RA is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. It can also cause fatigue, and the underlying inflammation may affect other body systems. Dementia is a symptom of damage to the brain, which can be caused by a number of different diseases - for example, Alzeimer's. Symptoms include memory loss, difficulty concentrating, confusion, and mood changes. It is not known what causes all types of dementia, but it is it thought that some of the damage could be caused by other underlying diseases. Heart failure happens when ...

Uveitis occurs in up to 20% of children with JIA, although this varies depending on the specific type of JIA that each child has. Jens Klotsche and colleagues shared new data at the 2021 EULAR congress analysing the risk of uveitis events after discontinuing disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARD) in children with one of two JIA categories: extended oligoarthritis and rheumatoid factor (RF)-negative polyarthritis. The data for the analysis came from two ongoing biologic registers: the German Biologics in Pediatric Rheumatology (BiKeR) registry, and the Juvenile arthritis Methotrexate/Biologics long-term Observation (JuMBO) study. Adverse events and reports about uveitis events during treatment and after discontinuation of DMARDs were collected. ...

Fruit flies have found at least two solutions to the problem of sorting their sex chromosomes: a matter of life and death. Sex determination in animals often depends on the unequal segregation of specific chromosomes. Female cells generally possess two X chromosomes, while male cells contain one X and one Y chromosome. The latter, which is inherited from the male parent, has far fewer genes than the X. In the fruit fly Drosophila, male cells make up for the fact that they have only one X chromosome by boosting the level of expression of all of its genes by a factor of 2. This phenomenon, which is known as dosage compensation, requires that the X chromosome in males be regulated differently from all the others. A team of molecular biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) ...