Excess weight or obesity boosts risk of death by anywhere from 22% to 91%—significantly more than previously believed—while the mortality risk of being slightly underweight has likely been overestimated, according to new CU Boulder research. The findings, published Feb. 9 in the journal Population Studies, counter prevailing wisdom that excess weight boosts mortality risk only in extreme cases.  The statistical analysis of nearly 18,000 people also shines a light on the pitfalls of using ...

Ancient climates can help us understand the past, but also the future. 23 million years ago, in a time called the Miocene Epoch, Connecticut was around five to six degrees warmer than today and located roughly where Long Island is now. By the end of the Miocene, around five million years ago the earth had gradually cooled, Antarctica was glaciated, and there was some Arctic ice as well. This cooling scenario moved in the opposite direction of today’s changing climate. One difference UConn Department of Earth Sciences Assistant Professor in Residence Tammo Reichgelt points out is that in the past, these changes happened gradually, spaced ...

Substance use disorder (SUD) is an extremely difficult disorder to overcome, and many individuals with SUD return to regular use after repeated attempts to quit. A return to regular drug use can be caused by the body’s physical dependence on the drug as well as experiences associated with prior drug use. Exactly how these drug associations are formed in the brain and how they trigger a return to drug use remain unclear. “Individuals make long-lasting associations between the euphoric experience of the drug and the people, places and things associated with drug use,” said Christopher Cowan, Ph.D. professor in the Department ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 24, 2023) — A recent University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center study suggests a new radiopharmaceutical compound may be a viable treatment option for patients with advanced cervical cancer. The study, led by UK Markey Cancer Center radiation oncologist Charles Kunos, M.D., and published in Frontiers in Oncology, validates that the radioactive drug 212Pb-DOTAM-GRPR1 may be useful in the treatment of persistent, recurrent, or metastatic cervical cancer. Radiopharmaceuticals are expected to play ...

For two decades, scientists have observed an elongated object named X7 near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way and wondered what it was. Was it pulled off a larger structure nearby? Was its unusual form the result of stellar winds or was it shaped by jets of particles from the black hole? Now, having examined the evolution of X7 using 20 years of data gathered by the Galactic Center Orbit Inintiative, astronomers from the UCLA Galactic Center Group and the Keck Observatory propose that it could be a cloud of dust and gas that was ejected during the collision of two stars. Over time, they report, X7 has stretched, and it is being pulled apart ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Our bodies are made up of 60,000 miles of complex pipes that play a vital role in transporting nutrients throughout our bodies, performing waste disposal, and supplying our organs with fresh oxygen and blood. Vascular malformations (VMs) are a group of rare genetic disorders that causes an abnormal formation of veins, arteries, capillaries, or lymphatic vessels at birth. VMs can interfere with the duties of our precious pipes by causing blockages, poor drainage, and the formation of cysts and tangles. To address a need for further study, William Polacheck, PhD, an assistant professor at the ...

Philadelphia, February 24, 2023—Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have identified variants of a chaperone molecule that optimizes the binding and presentation of foreign antigens across the human population, which could open the door to numerous applications where robust presentation to the immune system is important, including cell therapy and immunization. The findings were published today in Science Advances.  Class I major histocompatibility complex (MHC-I) proteins are ...

Antarctic bottom water (AABW) covers more than two-thirds of the global ocean bottom, and its formation has recently decreased. However, its long-term variability has not been well understood. Researchers led by Prof. DENG Chenglong from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators have reconstructed AABW history back to approximately 4.7 million years ago (mya). They found that AABW has collapsed several times and such collapses might have induced moisture transport to fuel the Northern Hemisphere ...

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Liège on group 2 innate lymphoid cells (or ILC2s) shows that the functional reprogramming of these cells following their exposure to viruses allows our body to react differently to exposure to certain respiratory allergens. This study is published in Science Immunology. The hygiene hypothesis states that exposure during childhood to certain micro-organisms protects against the development of allergic diseases such as asthma. In this context, researchers from the immunology-vaccinology laboratory (FARAH research ...

CÚRAM SFI Research Centre for Medical Devices researchers have published in Nature Communications a key study establishing a new pre-clinical model to develop clinically relevant treatments for heart attacks.    Heart attacks (myocardial infarction (MI)) occur due to an acute complication of coronary artery disease and are a major cause of global mortality. The two main types of heart attack are ST-elevation (STEMI) and Non-ST elevation (NSTEMI). A non-ST-elevation is a type of heart attack that usually happens when your heart's oxygen needs are unmet. This condition gets its name because it doesn't have an easily identifiable electrical pattern like with an ...

Palliative care — a specialized medical care focused on quality of life for people with a serious illness such as cancer or heart failure — isn’t likely to reduce psychological distress, according to a Rutgers study.   Researchers involved with the study, published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, found there were no statistically significant improvements in patient or caregiver anxiety, depression or psychological distress in a meta-analysis of 38 randomized clinical trials of palliative care interventions. This study took results ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (02/24/2023) — Published in JAMA, a University of Minnesota led study shows that verapamil, a drug commonly used to treat high blood pressure and heart conditions, can have a beneficial effect on the pancreas in children with newly-diagnosed type 1 diabetes (T1D).  Results of the CLVer clinical trial showed that oral verapamil taken once a day improved the pancreas' insulin secretion by 30% over the first year following diagnosis of T1D when compared with a control group that received a placebo.  “The beneficial effect of verapamil observed in the trial is extremely exciting,” said Antoinette Moran, MD, the ...

How society organizes affects different phenomena, from the transmission of information to the spread of contagious diseases. The more links we establish with each other via social and transportation networks, the more spread is favored. To study the dynamics of complex systems, such as society, we can infer these networks – in which nodes, representing individuals, connect through lines – from real-world data. However, these networks are usually large, dense, and cumbersome to manipulate.  In previous work, Luís M. Rocha’s group at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) found a way to simplify networks ...

Attention editors:  Under embargo by the journal Current Biology until Friday, February 24 at 11 a.m. eastern Scientists who study the origins and evolution of the plague have examined hundreds of ancient human teeth from Denmark, seeking to address longstanding questions about its arrival, persistence and spread within Scandinavia. In the first longitudinal study of its kind, focusing on a single region for 800 years (between 1000-1800AD), researchers reconstructed Yersinia pestis genomes, the bacterium responsible for the plague, and showed that it was reintroduced into the Danish population from other parts of Europe again and again, perhaps via ...

OAKLAND, Calif. — Long-term exposure to air pollution is tied to an increased risk of having a heart attack or dying from heart disease — with the greatest harms impacting under-resourced communities, new Kaiser Permanente research shows. The study, published February 24 in JAMA Network Open, is one of the largest to date to look at the effects of long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution, which is emitted from sources such as vehicles, smokestacks, and fires. Fine particle air pollution, also known as PM2.5, are fine particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller. The ...

About The Study: In this case series study that analyzed 44,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Tokyo, cases identified in nightlife settings were associated with a higher likelihood of spreading COVID-19 than household and health care cases. Surveillance and interventions targeting nightlife settings should be prioritized to disrupt COVID-19 transmission, especially in the early stage of an epidemic.  Authors: Michihiko Yoshida, Ph.D., of the Minato Public Health Center in Tokyo, 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.2023.0589) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this study including 3.7 million adults in California, long-term fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) exposure at moderate concentrations was associated with increased risks of heart attack, ischemic heart disease mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality. The findings add to the evidence that the current regulatory standard is not sufficiently protective.  Authors: Stacey E. Alexeeff, Ph.D., of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California, is the corresponding author.  To access ...

Gestational diabetes and preeclampsia may be linked to slower biological development in infants, according to a new study led by USC. The research, published today in JAMA Network Open, found that newborns exposed to these two pregnancy complications were biologically younger than their chronologic gestational age. The infants’ biological or “epigenetic” age is based on molecular markers in their cells. The results raise intriguing questions about how common pregnancy complications may affect infants and health outcomes later in childhood. Could they create developmental delays? Could some exposures advance biological ...

A team of researchers has highlighted human-wildlife conflict as one of the globe’s most pressing human development and conservation dilemmas. New research published in Communications Biology looked at 133 countries where 18 large carnivores ranged, and found that a person farming with cattle in developing countries such as Kenya, Uganda or India were up to eight times more economically vulnerable than those living in developed economies such as Sweden, Norway or the U.S. Duan Biggs from Northern Arizona University’s School of Earth and Sustainability is the senior author of the study. He partnered with organizations throughout the world to conduct ...

Researchers from the UCL Cancer Institute have provided important molecular understanding of how injury may contribute to the development of a relatively rare but often aggressive form of brain tumour called a glioma. Previous studies have suggested a possible link between head injury and increased rates of brain tumours, but the evidence is inconclusive. The UCL team have now identified a possible mechanism to explain this link, implicating genetic mutations acting in concert with brain tissue inflammation to change the behaviour of cells, making them more likely to become cancerous. Although this study was largely carried out in mice, it suggests ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (February 24, 2023) — The history of life on Earth has been punctuated by several mass extinctions, the greatest of these being the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as the “Great Dying”, which occurred 252 million years ago. While scientists generally agree on its causes, exactly how this mass extinction unfolded—and the ecological collapse that followed—remains a mystery. In a study published today in Current Biology, researchers analyzed marine ecosystems before, during, and after the Great Dying ...

A small but significant metabolic difference between human and mouse lung tumor cells, has been discovered by Weill Cornell Medicine researchers, explaining a discrepancy in previous study results, and pointing toward new strategies for developing cancer treatments. The work, published Jan. 30 in Cancer Discovery, focuses on lung adenocarcinoma, a common but often difficult to treat cancer that researchers have long studied in mouse models. However, those models didn’t quite align with human clinical observations in some instances. The new paper shows why; a specific gene mutation has opposite effects on tumor ...

Led by scientists at The University of Manchester, a series of new stable, porous materials that capture and separate benzene have been developed. Benzene is a volatile organic compound (VOC) and is an important feedstock for the production of many fine chemicals, including cyclohexane. But, it also poses a serious health threat to humans when it escapes into the air and is thus regarded as an important air pollutant. The research published today in journal Chem, demonstrates the high adsorption of benzene at low pressures and concentrations, as well as the efficient separation of benzene and cyclohexane. This was achieved by the design and successful preparation ...

Graphic A team from the University of Michigan has developed a new software tool to help researchers across the life sciences more efficiently analyze animal behaviors.  The open-source software, LabGym, capitalizes on artificial intelligence to identify, categorize and count defined behaviors across various animal model systems.   Scientists need to measure animal behaviors for a variety of reasons, from understanding all the ways a particular drug may affect an organism to mapping how circuits in the brain communicate to produce a particular behavior.   Researchers ...

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases (ESCEO) signed an agreement to develop a strategic roadmap on bone health and ageing and advocate for a public health strategy to prevent fractures among older people. The collaboration entails a strategic roadmap of research and publication deliverables, in recognition of the fact that osteoporosis is a major contributor to the Global Burden of Disease. The collaboration agreement, signed on February 23, 2023, at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, is an important ...