CHICAGO --- A new Northwestern Medicine study of placentas from patients who received the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy found no evidence of injury, adding to the growing literature that COVID-19 vaccines are safe in pregnancy. "The placenta is like the black box in an airplane. If something goes wrong with a pregnancy, we usually see changes in the placenta that can help us figure out what happened," said corresponding author Dr. Jeffery Goldstein, assistant professor of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine pathologist. "From what we can tell, the COVID vaccine does not damage the placenta." The study will be published May 11 in the journal Obstetrics ...

TORONTO, ON - Geoscientists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Istanbul Technical University have discovered a new process in plate tectonics which shows that tremendous damage occurs to areas of Earth's crust long before it should be geologically altered by known plate-boundary processes, highlighting the need to amend current understandings of the planet's tectonic cycle. Plate tectonics, an accepted theory for over 60 years that explains the geologic processes occurring below the surface of Earth, holds that its outer shell is fragmented into continent-sized blocks of solid rock, called "plates," that slide over Earth's mantle, the rocky inner layer above ...

An article published in Frontiers in Immunology suggests that sepsis can cause alterations in the functioning of defense cells that persist even after the patient is discharged from hospital. This cellular reprogramming creates a disorder the authors call post-sepsis syndrome, whose symptoms include frequent reinfections, cardiovascular alterations, cognitive disabilities, declining physical functions, and poor quality of life. The phenomenon explains why so many patients who survive sepsis die sooner after hospital discharge than patients with other diseases or suffer from post-sepsis syndrome, immunosuppression ...

COVID-19 has had a significant impact since the pandemic was declared by WHO in 2020, with over 3 million deaths and counting, Researchers and medical teams have been hard at work at developing strategies to control the spread of the infection, caused by SARS-COV-2 virus and treat affected patients. Of special interest to the global population is the developments of vaccines to boost human immunity against SARS-COV-2, which are based on our understanding of how the viral proteins work during the infection in host cells. Two vaccines, namely the Pfizer/BioINtech and Oxford/AZ vaccine rely on the use of delivering the gene that encodes the viral spike protein either as an mRNA or through an adenovirus vector to promote the production of relevant antibodies. The use of monoclonal ...

In order to make meaningful gains in cardiovascular disease care, primary care medical practices should adopt a set of care improvements specific to their practice size and type, according to a new study from the national primary care quality improvement initiative EvidenceNOW. High blood pressure and smoking are among the biggest risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease. Primary care physicians help patients manage high blood pressure and provide smoking cessation interventions. Researchers found that there is no one central playbook for all types of practices, but they did identify ...

Although new family medicine graduates intend to provide a broader scope of practice than their senior counterparts, individual family physicians' scope of practice has been decreasing, with fewer family physicians providing basic primary care services, such pediatric and prenatal care. Russell et al conducted a study to explore family medicine graduates' attitudes and perspectives on modifiable and non-modifiable factors that influenced their scope of practice and career choices. The authors conducted five focus group discussions with 32 family physicians and explored their attitudes and perspectives on their desired and actual scope of practice. Using a conceptual framework ...

In the decade since the advent of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, researchers have used the technology to delete or change genes in a growing number of cell types. Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) have added human monocytes--white blood cells that play key roles in the immune system--to that list. The team has adapted CRISPR-Cas9 for use in monocytes and shown the potential utility of the technology for understanding how the human immune system fights viruses and microbes. Their results were published online today in the journal Cell Reports. "These experiments set the stage for many more studies on the interactions between major infectious diseases and human immune cells," says senior author Alex Marson, MD, PhD, director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute ...

Pregnant women who develop severe COVID-19 infections that require hospitalization for pneumonia and other complications may not be more likely to die from these infections than non-pregnant women. In fact, they may have significantly lower death rates than their non-pregnant counterparts. That is the finding of a new study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). The study examined medical records from nearly 1,100 pregnant women and more than 9,800 non-pregnant patients aged 15 to 45 who were hospitalized with COVID-19 and pneumonia. Slightly less than 1 percent of the pregnant patients died from COVID-19 compared to 3.5 percent of non-pregnant patients, according to the study findings. There ...

New York, NY--May 11, 2021--Widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases, implantable medical devices are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people. Researchers are increasingly interested in designing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices for in vivo and in situ physiological monitoring. These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic ...

2003 was a big year for virologists. The first giant virus was discovered in this year, which shook the virology scene, revising what was thought to be an established understanding of this elusive group and expanding the virus world from simple, small agents to forms that are as complex as some bacteria. Because of their link to disease and the difficulties in defining them--they are biological entities but do not fit comfortably in the existing tree of life--viruses incite the curiosity of many people. Scientists have long been interested in how viruses evolved, especially when it comes to giant viruses that can produce new viruses with very little help from the host--in contrast to most small viruses, which utilize the host's machinery to replicate. ...

Surgical cesarean births can expose new mothers to a range of health complications, including infection, blood clots and hemorrhage. As part of Healthy People 2020 and other maternal health objectives, the state of California exerted pressure to reduce cesarean deliveries, and statewide organizations established quality initiatives in partnership with those goals. In this study, researchers from Stanford University and the University of Chicago examined unit culture and provider mix differences on hospital and delivery units to identify characteristics of units that successfully reduced their cesarean delivery rates. The mixed-methods study surveyed ...

From the branching pattern of leaf veins to the variety of interconnected pathways that spread the coronavirus, nature thrives on networks -- grids that link the different components of complex systems. Networks underlie such real-life problems as determining the most efficient route for a trucking company to deliver life-saving drugs and calculating the smallest number of mutations required to transform one string of DNA into another. Instead of relying on software to tackle these computationally intensive puzzles, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology ...

Most patients with depression are treated in primary care, however, relatively few clinical trials for treating depression have focused on primary care. Researchers at the Vrije University Amsterdam examined the effects of the two major approaches to treating depression: psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy, as well as combined treatment and care-as-usual. The study integrated the results of 58 randomized controlled trials with a total of 9,301 patients. Results concluded that both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy were significantly more effective than care-as-usual or waitlist control. However, they found no significant difference between psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy as stand-alone treatments. Combined treatment, particularly in studies that included ...

It's widely understood that people taking a common class of antibiotics, like ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin, run the risk of tendonitis and tendon ruptures. However, a new analysis sheds light on newer, third-generation fluoroquinolones and suggests they may have a lower risk of Achilles tendon rupture. Researchers from Jichi Medical University in Tochigi, Japan, used health care administrative data to identify 504 patient cases of Achilles tendon ruptures with co-occurrence of antibiotics. They found that third-generation fluoroquinolones were not associated with an increase in Achilles tendon rupture. First- ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- You enter a room and quickly scan the crowd to gain a sense of who's there - how many men versus women. How reliable is your estimate? Not very, according to new research from Duke University. In an experimental study, researchers found that participants consistently erred in estimating the proportion of men and women in a group. And participants erred in a particular way: They overestimated whichever group was in the minority. "Our attention is drawn to outliers," said Mel W. Khaw, a postdoctoral research associate at Duke and the study's lead author. "We tend to overestimate people who stand out in a crowd." For the study, which appears ...

Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company conducted a study to evaluate the effectiveness of shared medical appointments for people with pre-diabetes compared with a group of patients receiving usual care. Shared medical appointments are typically delivered in a medical clinic by physicians and other health care providers. Within the context of this study, shared medical appointments consisted of patients consulting with their doctors one-on-one and then joining a group of similar patients to set goals and review lab results with the same family ...

Between 11% to 40% of adults in the United States experience chronic pain, and primary care physicians may feel ill-equipped to effectively and safely care for patients with chronic pain, addiction or both. Researchers from Tufts University conducted a study to evaluate the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary consultation service that supports primary care physicians who care for patients experiencing chronic pain and addiction. The goal was to identify new and effective strategies that clinics can use to support PCPs. From that interdisciplinary consultation service, the researchers collected ...

Bacteria that move around live on the edge. All the time. Their success, be it in finding nutrients, fending off predators or multiplying depends on how efficiently they navigate through their confining microscopic habitats. Whether these habitats are in animal or plant tissues, in waste, or in other materials. In a recent paper published in PNAS, a team of researchers led by McGill University, has described a number of factors affecting how five, very different, species of bacteria search and navigate through varied microfluidic environments which pose various decisional challenges. This increased understanding of the bacterial space searching and navigational 'strategies' has implications ...

Antibiotics: Patient Expectations and Doctors' Prescribing Habits May Contribute to Antimicrobial Resistance Inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for upper respiratory tract infections contributes to antibiotic resistance, making some bacterial infections difficult to treat. This often leads to higher medical costs, prolonged hospital stays and increased mortality. Still, many physicians report prescribing antibiotics at their patients' request. To address patients' expectations for antibiotic prescribing for URTIs, researchers conducted an experiment in which study participants were assigned brief educational videos to watch on a tablet immediately prior to their appointment. The authors randomized patients into three groups - one that viewed a presentation about ...

Skoltech scientists have created a new monitoring system for agricultural applications that performs real-time image segmentation on board the drone to identify hogweed. The research was published in a high-profile journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers. Sosnovsky's hogweed is equally hazardous for farming, local ecosystems, and human health. Direct contact with human skin, especially if aggravated by exposure to the Sun, causes severe burns that require continuous medical care and take weeks to heal. The rampant spread of Sosnovsky's hogweed has become a real environmental disaster that extends across the whole of ...

Individuals with diabetes are at greater risk of developing oral health issues, like gum disease, yet care for these linked health issues are usually disconnected, split between primary care and dental care. A research team from the University of Amsterdam developed an intervention that provided primary care-based oral health information and dental referrals for patients with diabetes. In a cluster randomized controlled trial, 764 patients from 24 primary care practices received either the oral health support or standard primary care. Participants were asked to rate their oral health quality of life, as well as their general health and any oral health complaints, at the start and end of the study. Analysis showed that individuals who received the primary care-based oral health support ...

Though different fabrication approaches exist, two-step deposition is one of the main experimental techniques now used to make efficient, stable PSCs, especially on the industrial scale. The process involves first depositing lead iodide (PbI2) and then adding halide salts of monovalent cations such as methylammonium iodide (MAI) and formamidinium iodide (FAI) to convert it to perovskite. While this two-step deposition is better than other options, it is difficult to maintain reproducible high performance and long-term stability when scaling up, mostly because of a lack ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. - An acute loss of smell is one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19, but for two decades it has been linked to other maladies among them Parkinson's disease and dementia. Now, a poor sense of smell may signify a higher risk of pneumonia in older adults, says a team of Michigan State University researchers. "About a quarter of adults 65 years or older have a poor sense of smell," said Honglei Chen, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics within MSU's College of Human Medicine. "Unlike vision or hearing impairment, this sensory deficit has been largely neglected; more than two-thirds of people with a poor sense of smell do not know they have it." In a first-of-its-kind study, Chen and his team found a possible link ...

Simon Fraser University researchers have designed a remarkably fast engine that taps into a new kind of fuel -- information. The development of this engine, which converts the random jiggling of a microscopic particle into stored energy, is outlined in research published this week in the END ...

Scientists now better understand early bacterial evolution, thanks to new research featuring University of Queensland researchers. Bacteria comprise a very diverse domain of single-celled organisms that are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor that lived more than three billion years ago. Professor Phil Hugenholtz, from the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics in UQ's School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, said the root of the bacterial tree, which would reveal the nature of the last common ancestor, is not agreed upon. "There's great debate about the root of this bacterial tree of life and indeed whether bacterial evolution should even be described as a tree has been contested," Professor ...