KEY TAKEAWAYS Researchers from Mass Eye and Ear conducted a clinical trial of sodium oxybate, an oral medication used to treat narcolepsy, for the treatment of laryngeal dystonia, an often-debilitating neurological condition that impacts speech. Trial was borne out of patient reports of symptom improvements after consuming alcohol.  A single dose of sodium oxybate significantly improved symptoms for alcohol-responsive patients, with effects lasting up to 5 hours.  The trial involved participants from across the U.S., U.K., and Canada and brings hope to the laryngeal dystonia community, who currently lack effective oral ...

Highlights: Cigarette smoke exposure is associated with many different respiratory diseases. A new study shows that cigarette smoke alters the microbial community in the gut and the oropharynx. The study shows that the cigarette-smoke induced changes to the microbiota resulted in increased severity of disease in mice infected with influenza A virus. Washington, D.C.—New research has shown that cigarette smoke can induce disordered oropharyngeal microbiota that aggravates the severity of influenza A ...

Embargoed until Wednesday, Nov. 20 @ 9AM ET   New York, NY - November 20, 2024 - A groundbreaking study published today in Gastroenterology provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) prevalence in the United States. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the research, led by investigators from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Pennsylvania, estimates that more than 100,000 American youth under the age of 20 live with IBD. The study illustrates ...

Four closely related civets, a small nocturnal animal found in Africa and Asia, have made the same geographical area in the rainforests of Borneo home. Typically, closely related animal species have difficulty coexisting because they are competing for the same or similar resources. Despite eating the same figs, binturong, small-toothed palm, masked palm, and common palm civets do coexist together. To understand how they coexist, researchers used a compound-specific nitrogen isotope analysis to understand the degree of faunivory (eating animals). The results ...

Mental illness significantly increases the risk of arrest during police encounters, with 25% of those with mental health conditions reporting arrest histories. Studies reveal frequent use of excessive force and 25% of fatal police encounters involve individuals with mental illness. Traditional police training offers limited opportunities for officers to practice handling complex civilian interactions, especially with individuals experiencing mental health crises. This lack of hands-on experience leaves officers ill-prepared to navigate these situations with the necessary empathy and de-escalation ...

Recycled pacemakers can function as well as new devices, a University of Michigan-led study suggests.  These used and reconditioned devices have the potential to increase access to pacemaker therapy in low- and middle-income countries, where many patients cannot afford the treatment. Researchers from the U-M Health Frankel Cardiovascular Center reported the findings as a late-breaking abstract at the 2024 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions. The international clinical trial involved nearly 300 people across seven ...

Fiber is something that most of us get far too little of. To change that, we need to actually enjoy eating it. Food researchers from the University of Copenhagen have now invented a "disguise" that solves the problem of the dry and gritty mouth feel of fibers. Think of how it would be to drink a juice with wheat bran in it – you may imagine an unpleasant gritty sensation which would make you less prone to enjoy it. Unfortunately, this feeling is often associated with insoluble dietary fibers. ...

Antibacterial drugs are important for treating infections. But increasingly, bacterial resistance to current drugs — so they don’t work well, or even at all — means new ones are urgently needed. Building on previous work, researchers in ACS Infectious Diseases have demonstrated a potential antibacterial treatment from a modified darobactin, a compound originally from a bacterium. The team reports proof-of-concept animal trials on infections caused by bacteria, including E. coli, that are known to develop drug resistance. This study was published during the World Health Organization’s World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness ...

Residential garden produce grown near the Fayetteville Works fluorochemical plant can expose those who consume it to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to a new study conducted by researchers from North Carolina State University, East Carolina University and the Colorado School of Mines. “It is often assumed that contaminated drinking water is the main pathway through which we are exposed to PFAS,” says Detlef Knappe, professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering at NC State and a lead investigator of the study. “An important goal of our study was to determine whether people ...

Carnegie Mellon University Africa announced today that it will expand its digital public infrastructure initiative across the continent. Called the Upanzi Network, this Africa-based collaboration of engineering research labs will work toward a secure and resilient digital transformation by focusing on innovation across the entire pipeline of open standard technologies for the public good. The initiative was launched in 2021 with the creation of a research laboratory at CMU-Africa in Kigali, Rwanda. Since its launch, the laboratory has made progress in capacity building, knowledge transfer, and digital public infrastructure governance and deployment. It performs research in ...

With most donated clothes exported or thrown away, experts are calling for a shakeup of how we deal with the growing fashion waste issue. A first of its kind study, published in Nature Cities, analysed what happens to clothes and other textiles after consumers no longer want them in Amsterdam, Austin, Berlin, Geneva, Luxembourg, Manchester, Melbourne, Oslo and Toronto. Across most western cities from Melbourne to Manchester it found the same pattern of textile waste being exported, going to landfill or being dumped in the environment. Global textiles waste each year weighs 92 million tonnes and this could double by 2030. Charity shops handle a large amount of used clothes, but the study ...

The human skin is home to a wide variety of bacteria. The composition of the community of bacteria—called the “skin microbiota”—has serious implications for skin health. A healthy balance between different species of bacteria on the skin often translates to healthy skin. The loss of this balanced skin microbiota can lead to diseases such as atopic dermatitis, acne, and psoriasis. Since the skin microbiota can vary based on various factors such as age, sex, climate, and an individual’s ...

As populations age, the prevalence of sarcopenia—a progressive loss of muscle mass and function—has become an increasingly urgent public health concern. Sarcopenia increases the risk of falls and frailty, reduces the quality of life for older adults, and heightens the likelihood of requiring long-term care. Preventing sarcopenia is, therefore, crucial for alleviating this healthcare burden.   A pioneering study conducted by researchers from Juntendo University in Japan sheds light ...

An enzyme called EZH2 has an unexpected role in driving aggressive tumor growth in treatment-resistant prostate cancers, according to a new study by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine. The results could potentially lead to new therapies for patients with limited options and add to the significant progress the teams have made in understanding how advanced prostate cancer develops resistance to treatments that target androgen receptors. Prostate cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death in men, claiming over 30,000 lives annually in the United States. While most prostate cancers initially respond ...

CHICAGO – Nov. 20, 2024 – Northwestern Medicine, West Health, and the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute have announced a new collaboration that will make accessing care to evidence-based mental health services faster and easier for primary care patients across Northwestern Medicine. This $8.6 million multi-year initiative from West Health will establish the Northwestern Medicine West Health Accelerator, which will provide access to comprehensive psychiatric services for primary care practices throughout Northwestern Medicine, expanding access to mental health ...

This research introduces a novel method for inferring DNA methylation patterns in non-skeletal tissues from ancient specimens, providing new insights into human evolution. As DNA methylation is a key marker of gene expression, this work allows scientists to explore changes in gene activity in the brain and other tissues that are typically absent from the fossil record. The team applied their method to the brain, offering a deeper understanding of the evolutionary processes that shaped human brain and neural functions. The findings ...

A team of researchers at the University of California San Diego has developed a new and improved wearable ultrasound patch for continuous and noninvasive blood pressure monitoring. Their work marks a major milestone, as the device is the first wearable ultrasound blood pressure sensor to undergo rigorous and comprehensive clinical validation on over 100 patients.  The technology, published on Nov. 20 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, has the potential to improve the quality of cardiovascular health monitoring in the clinic ...

Spin-out ChromaTwist has won a prestigious Innovate UK Smart grant to co-fund a £0.5m project.  The funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, covers 70% of the cost of a project that will take ChromaTwist’s novel dyes to the next level in terms of enhanced brightness and staining indices, to make cells and cellular structures stand out more clearly during bio-imaging.  The funding also allows ChromaTwist, which is raising funds, to push on with technical development and prepare for scale-up and ...

In the article published today in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, new evidence suggests how supermassive black holes, with masses of several billion times that of our Sun, formed so rapidly in less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The study, led by researchers of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), analyses a sample of 21 quasars, among the most distant ever discovered, observed in the X-rays band by the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes. The results suggest that the supermassive black holes ...

Are student-teacher relationships critical to early childhood education? With roughly 33 million students enrolled in public elementary school education throughout the United States, (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022), there is an acute need to more comprehensively understand the ways in which children’s development can be promoted through student-teacher relationships.   In a new Child Development study, researchers at The Ohio State University and University of Pennsylvania explored the significance of student-teacher relationships between kindergarten and third grade. Using the Early Childhood ...

After the June 2022 US Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to ban abortion, women of childbearing age in states where abortion became illegal reported increased rates of anxiety. That’s according to a new study published in Contemporary Economic Policy. The study relied on data from the Household Pulse Survey, a monthly online survey by the United States Census Bureau in collaboration with other federal agencies that gathers a vast array of data on representative samples of American adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Investigators analyzed information on ...

In a study published in Ecological Entomology, a journal from the Royal Entomological Society, researchers assessed whether a shortage of natural meadows in urban spaces for pollinating insects might be addressed by creating meadows where wildflowers are planted or sown among grasses. The research, which was conducted in Warsaw, Poland, showed no difference in the composition of insect-pollinated plants between these two meadow types. There was also no difference between the meadow types concerning the species richness of butterflies, bees, and hoverflies. The number of butterflies ...

Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is one of the leading causes of newborn mortality and morbidity worldwide, and lowering the baby’s body temperature—called therapeutic hypothermia—is often used as a treatment. A review in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology highlights additional therapies for HIE that are being tested with and without concomitant therapeutic hypothermia. Neonatal HIE is characterized by neurological dysfunction resulting from inadequate oxygen and blood flow to the brain near the time of birth. Therapeutic hypothermia is an established therapy in ...

New research in FEBS Open Bio reveals insights into the venom of two of the most venomous fish species on earth: the estuarine stonefish (Synanceia horrida) and the reef stonefish (Synanceia verrucosa), which are typically found in the warm and shallow regions of the Indo-Pacific region, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. Through multiple analytical techniques, investigators discovered the presence of three neurotransmitters new to stonefish venom, namely gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), choline, and 0-acetylcholine. Although these molecules ...

Through a 20-year experiment, investigators have shown how different trees adjust their strategies for acquiring nutrients through their roots as soil warms with climate change. The research, which is published in Global Change Biology, included trees that associate with different fungi that help roots absorb nutrients. Measurements showed that when exposed to warmer soils, oak trees associated with ectomycorrhizal fungi reduce interactions with soil microbes while increasing fine root exploration, whereas maple trees that associate with arbuscular mycorrhizal largely maintain ...