A new study in laboratory rats has discovered a direct link between low oxygen in the womb and impaired memory function in the adult offspring. It also finds that anti-oxidant supplements during pregnancy may protect against this. Low oxygen in the womb - known as chronic fetal hypoxia - is one of the most common complications in human pregnancy. It can be diagnosed when a routine ultrasound scan shows that the baby is not growing properly and is caused by a number of conditions including pre-eclampsia, infection of the placenta, gestational diabetes or maternal obesity. The new results show that chronic fetal hypoxia leads to a reduced density of blood vessels, and a reduced number of nerve cells and their connections in parts of the ...

Handwashing is shaping communities of bacteria that live and grow in the plumbing of domestic sinks, scientists have found. In the largest study of sink bacteria conducted outside of hospitals, scientists at the University of Reading discovered communities of similar bacteria that largely remain down our drains after hand washing. The researchers found that there are significant differences between families of dominant bacteria depending on the location in the sink drains, and that plumbing systems such as P-trap or U-bend provides ideal environments for bacteria to grow. Dr Hyun Soon Gweon, Lecturer in Bioinformatics for Genomics at the University of Reading, said: "The mantra to 'wash your hands' to fight coronavirus transmission has highlighted the importance of ...

COVID-19 could pass into people's lungs from saliva with the virus moving directly from mouth to bloodstream - particularly if individuals are suffering from gum disease, according to new research. Evidence shows that blood vessels of the lungs, rather than airways, are affected initially in COVID-19 lung disease with high concentrations of the virus in saliva and periodontitis associated with increased risk of death. The researchers propose that dental plaque accumulation and periodontal inflammation further intensify the likelihood of the SARS-CoV-2 virus reaching the lungs and causing more severe cases of the infection. Experts say this discovery could make effective oral healthcare ...

General anaesthesia is widely used for surgery and diagnostic interventions, to ensure the patient is completely unconscious during these procedures. However, in a paper published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) ethics and anaesthesia experts from the University of Oxford say that general anaesthesia should be more widely available for patients at the end of their lives. Painkilling medications (analgesia) are commonly given to dying patients. But they may not be enough, leading to the use of continuous deep sedation (also known as "palliative" or "terminal" sedation). "However, for some patients these common interventions are not enough. Other patients may express a clear desire to be completely unconscious as they die," explains ...

In 2003 in Haiti, a 20-year-old in treatment for HIV could have expected to live to 34. But as of 2017, life expectancy for a 20-year-old in treatment for HIV in Haiti is now 61, compared to 70 for Haiti's general population. A research team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and institutions across Latin America today reports what looks to be far the largest study to date of life expectancy for people living with HIV infection in low-income or middle-income countries. With a focus on 30,688 people treated for HIV between 2003 and 2017 in seven Latin American countries, the study, published ...

Study of 30,000 adults living with HIV receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Latin America and the Caribbean finds life expectancy has increased to within 10 years of the general population in these countries over the last two decades. Disparities in life expectancy due to demographic and clinical factors at the point participants began ART (including sexual HIV transmission risk, low CD4 cell count, and history of tuberculosis) highlight an ongoing need to reach vulnerable populations in the region. Life expectancy among adults living with HIV receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) ...

When disease outbreaks happen, response time in developing and distributing treatments is crucial to saving lives. Unfortunately, developing custom drugs as countermeasures is often a slow and difficult process. But researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have created a platform that can develop effective and highly specific peptide nucleic acid therapies for use against any bacteria within just one week. The work is detailed in Nature Communications Biology and could change the way we respond to pandemics and how we approach increasing cases of antibiotic resistance globally. The Facile Accelerated Specific Therapeutic (FAST) platform was created by Associate Professor Anushree Chatterjee ...

Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä highlight how the struggles caused by the COVID-19 pandemic can guide us towards an equitable use of our shared environment and a transition towards sustainability. COVID-19 crisis has emphasized how poorly prepared humanity is to cope with global disasters and to face the new ecological norm under climate change, degraded ecosystems, and biodiversity loss. The final consequences of COVID-19 crisis on sustainability are not yet known. However, this crisis offers a unique opportunity to move towards a greener, ...

Coral reefs around the world are under threat from rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification, disease and overfishing, among other reasons. Tracking signs of stress and ill health is difficult because corals -- an animal host coexisting with algae, bacteria, viruses and fungi -- are dynamic organisms that behave differently depending on what's happening in their environment. Some scientists wonder if recording changes in coral movements over time could help with monitoring a coral reef's health. This is not always a straightforward task. Some coral species wave and pulse in ...

Just as e-cigarette ingredients can vary from one region to another, the health effects of vaping can have regional characteristics as well. A new study out of West Virginia University suggests that rural e-cigarette users are older--and often get sicker--than their urban counterparts. Researchers with the WVU School of Medicine are investigating severe lung injuries occurring among e-cigarette users in rural Appalachia. In a recent study, Sunil Sharma--section chief of pulmonary/critical care and sleep medicine at the School of Medicine--and his colleagues present a case study of patients with EVALI (electronic cigarettes and vaping-associated lung injury) admitted to WVU hospitals from August 2019 to March 2020. ...

Like a stern bodyguard for the central nervous sytem, the blood-brain barrier keeps out anything that could lead to disease and dangerous inflammation--at least when all is functioning normally. That may not be the case in people with schizophrenia and other mental disorders, suggest new findings from a team led by researchers from the School of Veterinary Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). In these individuals, a more permissive barrier appears to allow the immune system to get improperly involved in the central nervous system, the researchers showed. The inflammation that arises likely contributes to the clinical manifestations of neuropsychiatric conditions. "Our hypothesis was that, if the immune function of the blood-brain ...

WASHINGTON -- Researchers have developed new x-ray optics that can be used to harness extremely fast pulses in a package that is significantly smaller and lighter than conventional devices used to modulate x-rays. The new optics are based on microscopic chip-based devices known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). "Our new ultrafast optics-on-a-chip is poised to enable x-ray research and applications that could have a broad impact on understanding fast-evolving chemical, material and biological processes," said research team leader Jin Wang from the U.S Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. "This could aid in the development of more efficient solar cells and batteries, advanced computer storage materials and devices, ...

Engineered, autonomous machines combined with artificial intelligence have long been a staple of science fiction, and often in the role of villain like the Cylons in the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot, creatures composed of biological and engineered materials. But what if these autonomous soft machines were ... helpful? This is the vision of a team of Penn State and U.S. Air Force researchers, outlined in a recent paper in Nature Communications. These researchers produced a soft, mechanical metamaterial that can "think" about how forces are applied to it and respond via programmed reactions. ...

People who regularly use psychoactive substances report experiencing a variety of negative impacts since the COVID-19 pandemic began, including increased usage and fear of relapse or overdose, highlighting the need for improved supports and services, including better access to safe supply programs, according to a new CAMH survey published in the International Journal of Drug Policy. "People who use drugs have been negatively impacted by the pandemic in ways that put them at greater risk for experiencing substance and health-related harms, including overdoses and a decreased ability to mitigate risk behaviours," ...

Leesburg, VA, April 20, 2021--An award-winning Scientific Electronic Exhibit to be presented at the ARRS 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting found non-contrast pituitary MRI for central precocious puberty (CPP), growth hormone deficiency (GHD), and short stature (SS) has similar diagnostic yield compared to the standard contrast-enhanced protocol. "Microadenomas, a common justification for contrast administration, may not influence management in this patient population," wrote first author Jennifer Huang of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, adding "minimal inconvenience would be added for the few patients who would need to return for contrast-enhanced MRI for definitive diagnosis." Huang and colleagues performed a retrospective review of pediatric pituitary MRI studies from 2010-2019 ...

Leesburg, VA, April 20, 2021--An award-winning Scientific Electronic Exhibit to be presented at the ARRS 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting found no statistically significant threshold for increased renal transplant biopsy risk based on systolic (SBP), diastolic (DBP), or mean arterial (MAP) blood pressure alone. "When these metrics are combined," first author Winston Wang of the Mayo Clinic Arizona cautioned, "the risk of complication is significantly higher when the SBP is >= 180 mm Hg, DBP is >= 95 mm Hg, and MAP is >= 116 mm Hg." Wang and team's review of consecutive ...

Researchers have found a causal link between caesarean section birth, low intestinal microbiota and peanut sensitivity in infants, and they report the effect is more pronounced in children of Asian descent than others, in a recently published paper in the journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "It's important to know what predicts or increases risk of food sensitivities because they predict which infants will go on to develop asthma and other types of allergies," said Anita Kozyrskyj, pediatrics professor in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry ...

Professor Bin He's team at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, has discovered that fast oscillations in scalp-recorded electroencephalography can pinpoint brain tissues responsible for epileptic seizures. The collaborative research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), leverages noninvasive EEG technology along with the development of a novel machine learning algorithm to automatically identify and delineate concurrent high-frequency oscillations and epileptiform spikes, a key link related to epilepsy. In the near future, these findings may be harnessed to rethink imaging and treatment options for epilepsy patients. More than ...

An expansive project led by Michigan State University's Lars Brudvig is examining the benefits, and limits, of environmental restoration on developed land after humans are done with it. Experts estimate there are up to 17 million square miles of land worldwide that have been altered by humans -- through cultivation say -- and then abandoned. That's more than four times the size of the continental United States. Once humans change a landscape, their impacts linger long after they've moved on. However, humans can heal some of that damage by working to restore the land to its natural state. ...

The familiar murkiness of waters in the Gulf of Mexico can be off-putting for beachgoers visiting Galveston Island. Runoff from the Mississippi River makes its way to local beaches and causes downstream water to turn opaque and brown. Mud is one factor, and river runoff is another. However, concern tends to ratchet up a notch when pollution enters the river runoff discussion on a national scale, specifically when smaller, navigable intrastate bodies of water push pollution into larger interstate waters often involved in commerce (i.e. the Mississippi River, Great Lakes, Ohio River). A recently published research analysis in the journal Science, co-authored by Victor Flatt, Dwight Olds Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law ...

Published in the Advanced Functional Materials, University of Minnesota researcher Hongbo Pang led a cross-institutional study on improving the efficacy of nucleotide-based drugs against prostate cancer and bone metastasis. In this study, Pang and his research team looked at whether liposomes, when integrated with the iRGD peptide, will help concentrate antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) into primary prostate tumors and its bone metastases. Liposomes are used as a drug carrier system, and ASOs are a type of nucleotide drug. More importantly, they investigated whether this system helps more drugs across the vessel wall and deeply into the tumor tissue. This is critical because, although nucleotide drugs offer unique advantages ...

Mass extinctions are known as times of global upheaval, causing rapid losses in biodiversity that wipe out entire animal groups. Some of the doomed groups linger on before going extinct, and a team of scientists found these "dead clades walking" (DCW) are more common and long-lasting than expected. "Dead clades walking are a pattern in the fossil record where some animal groups make it past the extinction event, but they also can't succeed in the aftermath," said Benjamin Barnes, a doctoral student in geosciences at Penn State. "It paints the pictures of a group consigned to an eventual extinction." The scientists found 70 of the 134 orders of ancient sea-dwelling invertebrates they examined could ...

The observation that most of the viruses that cause human disease come from other animals has led some researchers to attempt "zoonotic risk prediction" to second-guess the next virus to hit us. However, in an Essay publishing April 20th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr Michelle Wille at the University of Sydney, Australia with co-authors Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, it is proposed that these zoonotic risk predictions are of limited value and will not tell us which virus will cause the next pandemic. Instead, we should target the human-animal interface for intensive viral surveillance. So-called zoonotic viruses ...

In many species, including humans and mice, the fluctuating levels of the hormones progesterone and estrogen determine whether the female is fertile or not. And in the case of mice, whether she's sexually receptive or not. The change in receptivity is striking. Female mice shift from accepting sexual partners to aggressively rejecting them across a cycle of six short days. How can the female reproductive hormones bring about such a radical behavioural change? When searching for an explanation, the team of Susana Lima, a principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal, came across an intriguing discovery. "Our experiments revealed that a brain area important for female receptivity, called the VMH (ventromedial ...

A chemist from Purdue University has found a way to synthesize a compound to fight a previously "undruggable" cancer protein with benefits across a myriad of cancer types. Inspired by a rare compound found in a shrub native to North America, Mingji Dai, professor of chemistry and a scientist at the Purdue University Center for Cancer Research, studied the compound and discovered a cost-effective and efficient way to synthesize it in the lab. The compound -- curcusone D -- has the potential to help combat a protein found in many cancers, including some forms of breast, brain, colorectal, prostate, lung and liver cancers, among others. The protein, dubbed BRAT1, had previously been deemed "undruggable" for its chemical properties. In collaboration with Alexander Adibekian's ...