Culture

ITHACA, N.Y. - Placing rodent traps and bait stations based on rat and mouse behavior could protect the food supply more effectively than the current standard of placing them set distances apart, according to new research from Cornell University.

Rodents cause billions of dollars in losses to the food supply each year, and carry pathogens that can sicken and kill humans, including salmonella, E. coli and Leptospira.

In the 1940s and 50s, scientists recommended that farmers, food manufacturers and distributors evenly space rodent traps or bait boxes in their facilities. But in fact, a new study finds placement based on rat and mouse behavior is more effective.

"From there, it just became a mantra without anybody scientifically evaluating it to see whether this was working," said first author Matt Frye, community extension educator with the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program (NYSIPM) based at Cornell.

"For a long time, inspectors would actually bring tape measures with them and measure the distance between devices," he said. "If it was different from the guidelines, the facilities would get penalized. The yardstick approach makes it very easy for facilities and auditors to implement programs, but it doesn't really lead to effective pest management."

In the new study, Frye and Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, senior extension associate at NYSIPM, found traps placed near areas with attractive features, like warmth and shelter, captured more rodents, while more than half of traps never caught anything.

In addition to smarter trap placements, the researchers also recommend fewer traps - a counterintuitive suggestion that pest control companies and food safety auditors may balk at -because both technicians and rodents can develop "device fatigue." Rodents may avoid devices that have been in the same place for too long because they're no longer interesting to explore.

Researchers found the south and, especially, west sides of buildings, motors and refrigeration compressors all provide warmth and are attractive to pests, and should be a focus of pest management efforts.

Researchers hope this work will help food suppliers to adopt the stricter standards of the Food Safety Modernization Act, which emphasizes preventing food contamination instead of just responding to it.

When people see a toothbrush, a car, a tree -- any individual object -- their brain automatically associates it with other things it naturally occurs with, allowing humans to build context for their surroundings and set expectations for the world.

By using machine-learning and brain imaging, researchers measured the extent of the "co-occurrence" phenomenon and identified the brain region involved. The findings appear in Nature Communications.

"When we see a refrigerator, we think we're just looking at a refrigerator, but in our mind, we're also calling up all the other things in a kitchen that we associate with a refrigerator," said corresponding author Mick Bonner, a Johns Hopkins University cognitive scientist. "This is the first time anyone has quantified this and identified the brain region where it happens."

In a two-part study, Bonner and co-author, Russell Epstein, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, used a database with thousands of scenic photos with every object labeled. There were pictures of household scenes, city life, nature -- and the pictures had labels for every mug, car, tree, etc. To quantify object co-occurrences, or how often certain objects appeared with others, they created a statistical model and algorithm that demonstrated the likelihood of seeing a pen if you saw a keyboard, or seeing a boat if you saw a dishwasher.

With these contextual associations quantified, the researchers next attempted to map the brain region that handles the links.

While subjects were having their brain activity monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, the team showed them pictures of individual objects and looked for evidence of a region whose responses tracked this co-occurrence information. The spot they identified was a region in the visual cortex commonly associated with the processing of spatial scenes.

"When you look at a plane, this region signals sky and clouds and all the other things," Bonner said. "This region of the brain long thought to process the spatial environment is also coding information about what things go together in the world."

Researchers have long-known that people are slower to recognize objects out of context. The team believes this is the first large-scale experiment to quantify the associations between objects in the visual environment as well as the first insight into how this visual context is represented in the brain.

"We show in a fine-grained way that the brain actually seems to represent this rich statistical information," Bonner said.

In a new study assessing the potential of a single-dose, intranasal COVID-19 vaccine, a team from the University of Iowa and the University of Georgia found that the vaccine fully protects mice against lethal COVID-19 infection. The vaccine also blocks animal-to-animal transmission of the virus. The findings were published July 2 in the journal Science Advances.

"The currently available vaccines against COVID-19 are very successful, but the majority of the world's population is still unvaccinated and there is a critical need for more vaccines that are easy to use and effective at stopping disease and transmission," says Paul McCray, MD, professor of pediatrics-pulmonary medicine, and microbiology and immunology at the UI Carver College of Medicine, and co-leader of the study. "If this new COVID-19 vaccine proves effective in people, it may help block SARS-CoV-2 transmission and help control the COVID-19 pandemic."

Unlike traditional vaccines that require an injection, this vaccine is administered through a nasal spray similar to those commonly used to vaccinate against influenza. The vaccine used in the study only requires a single dose and it may be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures for up to at least three months. Because it is given intranasally, the vaccine may also be easier to administer, especially for those who have a fear of needles.

"We have been developing this vaccine platform for more than 20 years, and we began working on new vaccine formulations to combat COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic," says Biao He, PhD, a professor in the University of Georgia's Department of Infectious Diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine and co-leader of the study. "Our preclinical data show that this vaccine not only protects against infection, but also significantly reduces the chances of transmission."

The experimental vaccine uses a harmless parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5) to deliver the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into cells where it prompts an immune response that protects against COVID-19 infection. PIV5 is related to common cold viruses and easily infects different mammals, including humans, without causing significant disease. The research team has previously shown that this vaccine platform can completely protect experimental animals from another dangerous coronavirus disease called Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

The inhaled PIV5 vaccine developed by the team targets mucosal cells that line the nasal passages and airways. These cells are the main entry point for most SARS-CoV-2 infections and the site of early virus replication. Virus produced in these cells can invade deeper into the lungs and other organs in the body, which can lead to more severe disease. In addition, virus made in these cells can be easily shed through exhalation allowing transmission from one infected person to others.

The study showed that the vaccine produced a localized immune response, involving antibodies and cellular immunity, that completely protected mice from fatal doses of SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine also prevented infection and disease in ferrets and, importantly, appeared to block transmission of COVID-19 from infected ferrets to their unprotected and uninfected cage-mates.

A new study has linked a July 2015 ceasefire of conflict violence in Colombia with better pregnancy outcomes for women who conceived after the ceasefire began. Giancarlo Buitrago of Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia, and Rodrigo Moreno-Serra of the University of York, U.K., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.

Previous research has suggested the possibility that women living in areas with armed violence experience adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, methodological problems or inappropriate data have hampered prior investigations into these associations.

To better understand these associations, Buitrago and Moreno-Serra examined pregnancy outcome data for women who conceived before and after a ceasefire of conflict violence was declared in Colombia on July 20, 2015. The ceasefire called for a halt in violence by the guerrilla group FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), which was later followed by a final peace agreement between the government and FARC.

The analysis included data for more than 3 million women living across Colombia who were pregnant between 2013 and 2017. It found that the women were indeed exposed to fewer conflict events, on average, after the ceasefire began, and this reduction was associated with lower risks of stillbirths and perinatal mortality--death of the child before or shortly after birth.

In areas with greater numbers of FARC-related conflict violence events, stillbirths decreased by up to 9.53 deaths per 1,000 pregnancies, and perinatal mortality decreased by up to 10.69 deaths per 1,000 pregnancies. No statistically significant associations were found between miscarriages and reduced exposure to conflict violence.

These findings are in line with other evidence for the benefits of reduced exposure to conflict violence in early pregnancy, and suggest that the peace process in Colombia is contributing to better population health. The authors note that their findings also highlight the need for countries with long-running armed conflict to make special efforts to protect pregnant women.

The authors add: "The results in our paper uncover some less researched consequences of armed conflicts for health. We find that, beyond the tragic loss of life amid armed conflicts, which in Colombia is estimated to have reached over 200,000 deaths, exposure to conflict violence is also linked to worse pregnancy outcomes. Pregnancies of women exposed to more intense conflict violence in Colombia were more likely to result in a stillbirth or perinatal death, particularly if mothers were exposed to violence during the early stages of pregnancy. This has often been an undocumented, "invisible" health penalty associated with protracted conflicts. While we still need further research to fully understand the most important biological pathways linking violence exposure to pregnancy outcomes, our study has important implications for policy. First, it suggests that the de-escalation in violence brought about by the ongoing Colombian peace process has been contributing to better health, and therefore that the peace process in the country should be protected and strengthened. Second, it indicates the high relevance of devising focused health policies that can protect pregnant women in contexts of protracted violence, as these women represent a particularly vulnerable group in those settings."

Scientists at the University of Groningen have trained an Artificial Intelligence system to recognize a specific pattern in skin biopsies of patients with the blistering disease epidermolysis bullosa acquisita. The pattern is characteristic of a specific variant of the disease which can cause scarring of the skin and mucous membranes and may lead to blindness. The new system is easy to use and is better than most doctors in making the diagnosis. A description of this AI system is published in the American Journal of Pathology.

In patients with epidermolysis bullosa, layers of the skin get detached, causing large blisters. There are different forms of blistering diseases affecting different layers of the skin. One of these, epidermolysis bullosa acquisita (EBA), is an autoimmune disease through which a patient's own antibodies attack the skin. It usually starts around middle age and the blisters can form scars. Scarring on the skin may lead to limiting the movement of joints but scars can also form in mucous membranes. When this happens in the eye, for example, it may lead to blindness. Early diagnosis is required to prevent the damage caused by scarring.

Pattern

'At the moment, it can take months to years before the diagnosis of EBA is confirmed', explains Joost Meijer, a dermatologist at the University Medical Center Groningen and joint first author of the paper. Diagnosing EBA happens through skin biopsies, where fluorescent markers attach to the autoantibodies in the basal layer of the epidermis. This produces a serrated U-shaped pattern, typical for EBA. 'However, you need to find and recognize this pattern in a relatively large microscopic slide', Meijer continues. The pattern may only be present in small parts of the slide. To give an idea of how small it is, if the microscopic image is digitized as a picture of 20,000 x 12,000 pixels, the pattern could only take up a 30 x 30 pixel space.

Meijer wrote his Master's thesis on diagnostic techniques to recognize this pattern. He then went on to study the problem in his PhD research, in which he teamed up with fellow PhD student Astone Shi at the University of Groningen's Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Shi, the other joint first author of the paper, works with Convoluted Neural Networks (CNNs), a type of system that works with deep learning and is particularly suited for pattern recognition.

Patients

'One challenge was that there is no standard training program for this particular pattern', says Shi. He had to find the best type of CNN and the best way to train it. 'There are millions of parameters in these neural networks, and we had to find the ones that work best.' Another problem is finding data with which to train the CNN. Patients with EBA are rare; at the moment, there are only around 5 to 10 patients diagnosed per year in the Netherlands. Meijer and Shi were able to use biopsies from 46 patients; 42 to train the networks and the remaining four to validate the system.

After training nine different CNNs and repeating the procedure 10 times, the AI system was able to recognize EBA with both specificity and sensitivity equal to 89.3 per cent. This is better than the numbers published by a group of pathologists and dermatologists, and just below the accuracy of a small number of highly trained specialists. Shi: 'This means that our system outperforms most doctors.' The reason for this is probably that the human eye only takes a relatively small portion of a microscopic slide into account. Meijer: 'Observers get a first impression from this, and then search the slide for confirmation. The AI system analyses the entire slide, which results in a more accurate diagnosis.'

European study

The main advantage of this digital system is that it would be easy to use. Meijer: 'We envisage a system where you upload an image and then get a diagnosis from the AI algorithm.' However, it could also be used to train doctors in recognizing the specific U-serrated pattern of EBA. Although the system worked well in this research project, the results need to be confirmed for a new, larger dataset. For this purpose, a prospective European study has been started. Meijer: 'It will take a year to collect the data of new skin biopsies, which will be able to validate the system. Hopefully, we will then have a quicker and easier way to diagnose EBA and prevent the sometimes debilitating scarring.'

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- When it comes to what users share on Twitter, women and users who never attended college voluntarily disclose more personal information than users from other socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds -- potentially making these populations more susceptible to online privacy threats, according to a recent study led by the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Additionally, the researchers unexpectedly found that neither socioeconomic status nor demographics is a significant predictor of the use of account security features such as two-factor login authentication, and that users from all backgrounds actually shared less personal information than they recalled.

"We didn't find a strong correlation between people's stated attitudes and their observed behaviors, which is pretty contradictory to what privacy literature has explained about people's digital inequality and privacy divide," said Jooyoung Lee, doctoral student of information sciences and technology and lead author on the research paper.

In the exploratory study, the researchers set out to understand whether socio-demographic factors impact the usage of login verification, a user's likeliness to share personal information online, and whether topics of self-disclosure vary across socio-demographic groups.

"There is a robust literature on self-disclosure, but purely data-driven approaches typically don't allow us access to users' gender, education, occupation, race and other sensitive information," said Sarah Rajtmajer, assistant professor of information sciences and technology. "At the same time, there is growing concern about the inequitable distribution of privacy risk amongst different socio-demographic groups with respect to online information sharing. The experimental approach taken in this work allowed us a first attempt to bridge the gap."

According to Shomir Wilson, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, the researchers were motivated to expand on past work that indicated that people in lower socio-economic brackets had more difficulty understanding online privacy controls.

"The original thing we were expecting to see based on the survey methods and prior work actually didn't bear out in that we got negative results on the socio-economic status," said Wilson. "But we got some other results that surprised us and are leading us into next steps."

The Penn State study is novel in that it explores the contents of personal information in self-disclosure along socio-demographic lines. In prior work, only gender and age variables have been primarily explored.

The researchers surveyed 110 active Twitter users and monitored their posting behaviors in more than 6,900 tweets over the course of a month. Then, using statistical analysis methods, they examined the tweets for mentions of topics in 12 categories of self-disclosure -- such as marital status, or location -- and labeled which of the categories, if any, the tweet fit.

Those categories were then measured against six socio-demographic factors -- income, gender, age, education level, race/ethnicity and occupation -- to analyze users' login verification settings, quantity of self-disclosure, and self-disclosure by topic. Finally, a post-study survey was sent to participants to collect their recollection of self-disclosure, which the researchers measured against their actual posts.

"A key distinction between our work and prior work was that prior work surveyed people for their attitudes and beliefs," said Wilson. "We took this a step further: we not only gave people surveys, but we followed them on Twitter to see how they were behaving and if their behaviors actually correlated with what they thought they were doing. And we found that people were sharing less than they thought they were sharing."

Added Lee, "People don't always remember what they share on social media, which could be a really big problem. Reminding people of their sharing behaviors could be a good solution to help them keep track of what kind of data they're sharing publicly."

Rajtmajer added that this is particularly true about the combined information of what they've shared over time, which led the researchers to ask survey participants whether they remembered sharing specific pieces of personal information.

"We know that, most often, the critical worries derive from inferences about an individual made possible by the aggregation of all the various, and often seemingly harmless, details they share," she said. "These inferences can be used to profile, monetize, manipulate and surveil. Already-vulnerable groups in many cases are most at risk."

According to Wilson, there are also scenarios where users don't realize that they are sharing posts containing personal information with an audience that includes their co-workers or the general public. Conversely, there are cases where people might not share enough, not realizing that there are certain pieces of information that their friends and followers might want to know.

"Aligning those two things helps people better understand their public persona and gives people a greater sense of security when they use online social networks," Wilson said. "And that in itself is valuable."

The study unveils that users often can't accurately construct a mental model of their sharing behaviors over a month-long period, which could potentially lead to design updates for social networks to implement features that help users keep track of their sharing behaviors.

"This provides context to how people use these tools, both for the users and for the people creating them," said Wilson.

Eesha Srivatsavaya, an undergraduate data sciences student at the College of IST, was also involved with the project. The team's paper appears in the July 2021 Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The work was supported in part by an Accelerator Award from the Center for Social Data Analytics at Penn State.

Rude behavior is a common form of insensitive and disrespectful conduct that harms employees' performance in the workplace. In a new study, researchers examined the impact of rude behavior on how individuals make critical decisions. The study found that in certain situations, these behaviors can have deadly consequences.

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Florida (UF), the University of Maryland, Envision Physician Services, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

The researchers looked at the effect of rudeness on workers' tendency to engage in a judgment bias called anchoring, which is the tendency to rely too heavily or fixate on one piece of information when making a decision.

"While small insults and other forms of rude behavior might seem relatively harmless compared to more serious forms of aggression, our findings suggest that they can have serious consequences," says Binyamin Cooper, a Postdoctoral Fellow at CMU's Tepper School of Business and a member of the Collaboration and Conflict Research Lab, who led the study. "Our work demonstrates how dangerous these seemingly minor behaviors can be, whether they are experienced directly or even if people just observer incidental rudeness.

"Let's say that a doctor walks into a patient's room for the first time, and a family member says 'I think he's having a heart attack,'" says Cooper. "Our findings suggest that if on the way to see the patient, the doctor witnessed a rude event between two other people, he or she would be significantly more likely to settle on a diagnosis of a heart attack, even if that is incorrect."

Cooper and his colleagues tested the effects of rudeness on anchoring in four studies across different settings--from medical simulations to negotiations and general judgment tasks. In one study, anesthesiology residents participated in a simulation on life-sized anatomical human models. The simulation was set up to suggest that a patient could have an allergic reaction to one of his medications, which served as the anchor. Before the simulation started, half the residents witnessed a senior doctor enter the room and yell at their instructor for missing a meeting, while the other half witnessed a neutral interaction.

When the patient's condition began to deteriorate later in the simulation, the residents who were exposed to the rude interaction were more likely to diagnose allergic shock, when in reality the patient was bleeding internally, and the diagnosis affected how they administered care. The study also showed that the reason rudeness was so harmful was that it is related to increased high arousal of negative emotions (such as irritability and distress), which predicted the tendency to engage in anchoring.

The practical implications of the study's findings are many, the authors note. For example, physicians exposed to rudeness may incorrectly treat patients for ailments they do not have, while being unaware of their incorrect diagnosis or the reasons underlying it. "Making the wrong decision at a critical moment means that people end up spending too much time going down the wrong path," explains Cooper. "If there's not enough time to realize the error and make up for it, this could be deadly."

In demonstrating that encounters with rudeness cause anchoring, the authors call on managers and organizations to take steps to reduce rudeness among employees, particularly in high-stakes situations where consequences of judgment errors associated with anchoring can be catastrophic. The authors also identified steps organizations can take to mitigate the effects of rudeness.

For example, organizations can train employees to use two skills--perspective taking and information elaboration--to better equip them to deal with the pernicious effects of exposure to rudeness. Because exposure to rude behavior makes people more likely to narrow their perspectives on their own personal experience, having employees imagine themselves viewing the same problem from another's point of view distances them from the strong feelings that they would overwise experience, according to the authors.

Another option is to practice information elaboration by having employees practice identifying the task at hand, and then taking a few moments to stop and think what information they need to help them make a decision.

"These active steps may seem small, but our work shows that organizations can use them to mitigate the harmful consequences associated with rudeness, which can make a big difference," suggests Cooper. "And they can be used in fields other than medicine, including negotiations, legal sentencing, financial forecasting, social exchange relationships, and pricing decisions."

The authors acknowledge several limitations to their study. First, they focused on anchoring as one of the most common decisions-making biases, but it remains to be seen if the effect of rudeness affects other decision-making biases. Second, except for perspective taking and information elaboration, their study did not examine empathy, experience, or other dispositional and contextual factors that may influence the relationship between rudeness and negative emotions.

Proactive, frequent rapid testing of all students for COVID-19 is more effective at preventing large transmission clusters in schools than measures that are only initiated when someone develops symptoms and then tests positive, Simon Fraser University researchers have found. Professors Caroline Colijn and Paul Tupper used a mathematical model to simulate COVID-19's spread in the classroom and published their research results today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

The simulations showed that, in a classroom with 25 students, anywhere from zero to 20 students might be infected after exposure, depending on even small adjustments to transmission rates for infected individuals or environments.

"When schools have reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, in some places there have been large clusters of infections, and in others very little transmission," says Colijn, SFU mathematics professor and Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health. "In our simulations, we explored what factors affect cluster size, and what interventions can be used to prevent large clusters."

The researchers tested the effectiveness of two different transmission control strategies.

In the first, when a student (or teacher/staff member) develops symptoms, they are told to stay home, tested using a PCR test, and if the test result is positive, control measures are introduced in the classroom, such as telling the infected individual's close contacts to stay home.

In the second strategy, all students in the class are tested using rapid tests on a regular basis, whether they have symptoms or not. When a student tests positive, there is an intervention to prevent further transmission.

The researchers found that in scenarios with high transmission rates, interventions used in the first control strategy, where preventive actions took effect after a positive test result, were too slow to prevent large outbreaks. Using rapid tests to screen the whole population and catch infections before symptoms developed, as in the second strategy, led to preventing large outbreaks.

"We found that interventions that only took effect after someone developed symptoms and tested positive were too slow to prevent large clusters; only regular monitoring of asymptomatic individuals could prevent the worst outcomes," says Colijn.

Their study is timely as B.C. is expected to enter Step 4 of its reopening in September and concerns remain about a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall. Regular screening for COVID-19 in the form of rapid testing has not been widely used in B.C. schools, though Alberta and Saskatchewan have plans to deploy rapid testing in schools in the fall, and Nova Scotia has long embraced rapid testing in a variety of settings.

Tupper says they hope to use data on transmission and cluster sizes in schools to estimate key unknowns about COVID-19 in schools, such as the rate of transmission, and how much it varies from classroom to classroom.

"We could then see how transmission depends on preventative measures that are put in place, such as mask use, improved ventilation and hand washing," he says. "This would inform which interventions, after a case is detected, would be the most effective."

The research results could be applied to other settings in which people spend multiple hours per day with the same group of approximately 20-30 others.

"Our results were based on simulations of a classroom, but the same considerations apply to other settings such as workplaces, or communal living settings such as long-term care homes," says Tupper, noting that their previous work points to the effectiveness of regular rapid testing in protecting residents of long-term care homes.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have shown that a type of echocardiogram, a common test to evaluate whether a person's heart is pumping properly, may be useful in predicting which patients with COVID-19 are most at risk of developing atrial fibrillation -- an irregular heartbeat that can increase a person's risk for heart failure and stroke, among other heart issues. The new findings, published online May 30 in the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography, also suggest that patients with COVID-19 who go on to develop atrial fibrillation more commonly have elevated levels of heart-related proteins called troponin and NT-proBNP in blood test samples.

If further studies confirm the findings, "this could lead to new therapies to prevent strokes and heart attacks in certain COVID-19 patients who are at the highest risk," says Allison Hays, M.D., medical director of echocardiography programs at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and senior author of the published paper.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 170 million people around the world, and previous studies of complications and long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection have found that patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have more than double the rate of arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter, a similar rapid rhythm that can lead to heart failure and stroke.

But exactly how the virus causes these heart complications, and who is most at risk of developing atrial fibrillation because of COVID-19, has been poorly understood.

In this study, Hays and her colleagues compared 80 patients with COVID-19 with 34 patients who did not have COVID-19 who were also treated at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the intensive or intermediate care units for respiratory issues. None of the patients had a history of heart arrhythmia.

In the study, carried out between March and June 2020, the researchers analyzed echocardiograms of hospitalized patients, applying a special kind of analysis called speckle-tracking strain to determine how well the left atrium of the heart moves with each heartbeat.

The team found that, overall, patients with COVID-19 had reduced function of their left atrium, the chamber of the heart that receives oxygenated blood from the lungs. Left atrial strain -- a measure of the movement of the left atrium's walls -- was significantly lower in patients with COVID-19 (28.2% compared with 32.6%, p=0.026; normal >38%) and left atrial emptying fraction -- a measure of how much blood the atrium empties with each contraction -- was also lower in the patients with COVID-19 (55.7% compared with 64.1%, p

Moreover, left atrial strain was even lower among the 30% of patients with COVID-19 who developed atrial fibrillation or flutter during their hospital stay compared with other patients with COVID-19 (22.3% compared to 30.4%, p

"A lot of patients already get echocardiograms while in the hospital; the addition of strain analysis requires no extra scanning of the patient," says Erin Goerlich, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and first author of the new paper. "So this is a safe and affordable new data point that can clue us in about who might develop atrial fibrillation." Echocardiograms cost on average about $2,000, and are generally covered by health insurance.

When the researchers looked at the blood of patients with COVID-19 who developed atrial fibrillation, they saw some differences compared with other patients with COVID-19. People who developed atrial fibrillation had higher levels of troponin (0.07 versus 0.03, p=0.011) and NT-proBNP (946 versus 231, p=0.0007), two known markers of heart stress.

"This tells us that COVID-19 patients with high levels of these biomarkers should be followed more closely and may benefit from an echocardiogram," says Goerlich.

Hays cautioned that the current study didn't test whether treating patients with COVID-19 with blood thinners could help prevent the complications that can result from atrial fibrillation, which has been suggested by some clinicians. Blood thinners are generally prescribed to atrial fibrillation patients to lower the risk of blood clots and strokes.

However, the new study suggests that treating certain people -- those with especially low left atrial strain, for instance -- could be one path forward. More research is needed in this area, Hays says.

"We're also actively studying how these effects on the heart might persist after SARS-CoV-2 infection," she adds. "It's important to know whether those measures of strain and emptying fraction improve over time."

Our gut microbiome -- the ever-changing "rainforest" of bacteria living in our intestines -- is primarily affected by our lifestyle, including what we eat or the medications we take, most studies show.

But a University of Notre Dame study has found a much greater genetic component at play than was once known.

In the study, published recently in Science, researchers discovered that most bacteria in the gut microbiome are heritable after looking at more than 16,000 gut microbiome profiles collected over 14 years from a long-studied population of baboons in Kenya's Amboseli National Park. However, this heritability changes over time, across seasons and with age. The team also found that several of the microbiome traits heritable in baboons are also heritable in humans.

"The environment plays a bigger role in shaping the microbiome than your genes, but what this study does is move us away from the idea that genes play very little role in the microbiome to the idea that genes play a pervasive, if small, role," said Elizabeth Archie, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and a principal investigator on the study who is also affiliated with the Eck Institute for Global Health and the Environmental Change Initiative.

The gut microbiome performs several jobs. In addition to helping with food digestion, it creates essential vitamins and assists with training the immune system. This new research is the first to show a definitive connection with heritability.

Previous studies on the gut microbiome in humans showed only 5 to 13 percent of microbes were heritable, but Archie and the research team hypothesized the low number resulted from a "snapshot" approach to studying the gut microbiome: All prior studies only measured microbiomes at one point in time.

In their study, the researchers used fecal samples from 585 wild Amboseli baboons, typically with more than 20 samples per animal. Microbiome profiles from the samples showed variations in the baboons' diets between wet and dry seasons. Collected samples included detailed information about the host, including known descendants, data on environmental conditions, social behavior, demography and group-level diet at the time of collection.

The research team found that 97 percent of microbiome traits, including overall diversity and the abundance of individual microbes, were significantly heritable. However, the percentage of heritability appears much lower -- down to only 5 percent -- when samples are tested from only a single point in time, as is done in humans. This emphasizes the significance of studying samples from the same host over time.

"This really suggests that in human work, part of the reason researchers haven't found that heritability is because in humans they don't have a decade and half of fecal samples in the freezer, and they don't have all the initial host (individual) information they need to tease these details out," said Archie.

The team did find evidence that environmental factors influence trait heritability in the gut microbiome. Microbiome heritability was typically 48 percent higher in the dry season than in the wet, which may be explained by the baboons' more diverse diet during the rainy season. Heritability also increased with age, according to the study.

Because the research also showed the significant impact of environment on the gut microbiomes in baboons, their findings agreed with previous studies showing that environmental effects on the variation in the gut microbiome play a larger role than additive genetic effects. Combined with their discovery of the genetic component, the team plans to refine its understanding of the environmental factors involved.

But knowing that genes in the gut microbiome are heritable opens the door to identifying microbes in the future that are shaped by genetics. In the future, therapies could be tailored for people based on the genetic makeup of their gut microbiome.

The Amboseli Baboon Project, started in 1971, is one of the longest-running studies of wild primates in the world. Focused on the savannah baboon, the project is located in the Amboseli ecosystem of East Africa, north of Mount Kilimanjaro. Research teams have tracked hundreds of baboons in several social groups over the course of their entire lives. Researchers currently monitor around 300 animals, but have accumulated life history information on more than 1,500 animals.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada's Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid.

A trove of fossils and rock layers formed on that ancient ocean floor have now been unearthed by an international team of scientists along the banks of the Peel River a few hundred miles south of the Arctic's Beaufort Sea. The discovery reveals oxygen changes at the seafloor across nearly 120 million years of the early Paleozoic era, a time that fostered the most rapid development and diversification of complex, multi-cellular life in Earth's history.

"It's unheard of to have that much of Earth's history in one place," said Stanford University geological scientist Erik Sperling, lead author of a July 7 study detailing the team's findings in Science Advances. Most rock formations from the Paleozoic Era have been broken up by tectonic forces or eroded over time. "There's nowhere else in the world that I know of where you can study that long a record of Earth history, where there's basically no change in things like water depth or basin type."

Oxygen was scarce in the deep water of this and other oceans at the dawn of the Paleozoic, roughly 541 million years ago. It stayed scarce until the Devonian, roughly 405 million years ago, when, in a geological blink - no more than a few million years - oxygen likely rocketed to levels close to those in modern oceans and the diversity of life on Earth exploded. Big, predatory fish appeared. Primitive ferns and conifers marched across continents previously ruled by bacteria and algae. Dragonflies took flight. And all of this after nearly four billion years of Earth's landscapes being virtually barren.

Scientists have long debated what might have caused the dramatic shift from a low oxygen world to a more oxygenated one that could support a diverse web of animal life. But until now, it has been difficult to pin down the timing of global oxygenation or the long-term, background state of the world's oceans and atmosphere during the era that witnessed both the so-called Cambrian explosion of life and the first of Earth's "Big Five" mass extinctions, about 445 million years ago at the end of the Ordovician.

"In order to make comparisons throughout these huge swaths of our history and understand long-term trends, you need a continuous record," said Sperling, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Context for past life

With permission from the Na Cho Nyak Dun and Tetlit Gwitch'in communities in Yukon, Sperling's team, which included researchers from Dartmouth College and the Yukon Geological Survey, spent three summers at the Peel River site. Arriving by helicopter, the research team hacked through brush with machetes beside Class VI rapids to collect hundreds of fist-sized samples of rock from more than a mile of interbedded layers of shale, chert and lime mudstone.

Back at Sperling's lab at Stanford, a small army of summer undergraduates and graduate students worked over five summers to help analyze the fossils and chemicals entombed in the rocks. "We spent a lot of time splitting open rocks and looking at graptolite fossils," Sperling said. Because graptolites evolved a vast array of recognizable body shapes relatively quickly, the pencil-like markings left by the fossils of these colony-dwelling sea creatures give geologists a way to date the rocks in which they're found.

Once the researchers had finished identifying and dating graptolite fossils, they ground the rocks in a mill, then measured iron, carbon, phosphorous and other elements in the resulting powder to assess the ocean conditions at the time and place where the layers formed. They analyzed 837 new samples from the Peel River site, as well as 106 new samples from other parts of Canada and 178 samples from around the world for comparison.

Winners and losers

The data show low oxygen levels, or anoxia, likely persisted in the world's oceans for millions of years longer than previously thought - well into the Phanerozoic, when land plants and early animals began to diversify. "The early animals were still living in a low oxygen world," Sperling said. Contrary to long-held assumptions, the scientists found Paleozoic oceans were also surprisingly free of hydrogen sulfide, a respiratory toxin often found in the anoxic regions of modern oceans.

When oxygen eventually did tick upward in marine environments, it came about just as larger, more complex plant life took off. "There's a ton of debate about how plants impacted the Earth system," Sperling said. "Our results are consistent with a hypothesis that as plants evolved and covered the Earth, they increased nutrients to the ocean, driving oxygenation." In this hypothesis, the influx of nutrients to the sea would have given a boost to primary productivity, a measure of how quickly plants and algae take carbon dioxide and sunlight, turn them into new biomass - and release oxygen in the process.

The change probably killed off graptolites. "Although more oxygen is really good for a lot of organisms, graptolites lost the low oxygen habitat that was their refuge," Sperling said. "Any environmental change is going to have winners and losers. Graptolites might have been the losers."

Tooth loss is a risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia--and with each tooth lost, the risk of cognitive decline grows, according to a new analysis led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and published in JAMDA: The Journal of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine. However, this risk was not significant among older adults with dentures, suggesting that timely treatment with dentures may protect against cognitive decline.

About one in six adults aged 65 or older have lost all of their teeth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prior studies show a connection between tooth loss and diminished cognitive function, with researchers offering a range of possible explanations for this link. For one, missing teeth can lead to difficulty chewing, which may contribute to nutritional deficiencies or promote changes in the brain. A growing body of research also points to a connection between gum disease--a leading cause of tooth loss--and cognitive decline. In addition, tooth loss may reflect life-long socioeconomic disadvantages that are also risk factors for cognitive decline.

"Given the staggering number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and dementia each year, and the opportunity to improve oral health across the lifespan, it's important to gain a deeper understanding of the connection between poor oral health and cognitive decline," said Bei Wu, PhD, Dean's Professor in Global Health at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and co-director of the NYU Aging Incubator, as well as the study's senior author.

Wu and her colleagues conducted a meta-analysis using longitudinal studies of tooth loss and cognitive impairment. The 14 studies included in their analysis involved a total of 34,074 adults and 4,689 cases of people with diminished cognitive function.

The researchers found that adults with more tooth loss had a 1.48 times higher risk of developing cognitive impairment and 1.28 times higher risk of being diagnosed with dementia, even after controlling for other factors.

However, adults missing teeth were more likely to have cognitive impairment if they did not have dentures (23.8 percent) compared to those with dentures (16.9 percent); a further analysis revealed that the association between tooth loss and cognitive impairment was not significant when participants had dentures.

The researchers also conducted an analysis using a subset of eight studies to determine if there was a "dose-response" association between tooth loss and cognitive impairment--in other words, if a greater number of missing teeth was linked to a higher risk for cognitive decline. Their findings confirmed this relationship: each additional missing tooth was associated with a 1.4 percent increased risk of cognitive impairment and 1.1 percent increased risk of being diagnosed with dementia.

"This 'dose-response' relationship between the number of missing teeth and risk of diminished cognitive function substantially strengthens the evidence linking tooth loss to cognitive impairment, and provides some evidence that tooth loss may predict cognitive decline," said Xiang Qi, a doctoral candidate from NYU Meyers.

"Our findings underscore the importance of maintaining good oral health and its role in helping to preserve cognitive function," said Wu.

DALLAS, July 8, 2021 -- The stress of experiencing discrimination in multiple ways, including transphobia, interpersonal discrimination, violence and public policies specifically targeting transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people, is linked to higher rates of heart disease among the TGD population, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association, published today in Circulation, the Association's flagship journal. A scientific statement is an expert analysis of current research and may inform future guidelines.

The statement, Assessing and Addressing Cardiovascular Health in People Who Are Transgender and Gender Diverse, examines existing research about TGD-specific cardiovascular health disparities, identifies research gaps and provides suggestions for systematically improving overall heart health and care of TGD people. The statement writing group suggests improving overall heart health within the TGD community will require a multi-pronged approach that includes health care professionals, educators, researchers and policymakers.

In terms of health, transgender, gender diverse and gender non-conforming people are considered "gender minorities." Expanding on the minority stress theory, statement writing group members documented how chronically high levels of stress faced by members of stigmatized, underrepresented populations associate with poor health outcomes and health disparities. They concluded that higher rates of cardiovascular prevalence and deaths among TGD people, while related to traditional cardiovascular risk factors, are also significantly driven by psychosocial stressors across the lifespan at multiple levels, including structural violence, discrimination, lack of affordable housing and access to health care.

"Heart health of transgender and gender diverse people is an important and understudied topic, and it's critical we highlight what we know and what we need to know about heart health among these populations," said Carl G. Streed, Jr., M.D., M.P.H., chair of the writing group for the statement, an assistant professor of internal medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and the research lead at the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Boston Medical Center. "Addressing these issues will require a focus on 'traditional' risk factors for heart attack and stroke, and a commitment to fight transphobia in order to decrease the additional stress experienced by this population."

This statement, specific to TGD persons, builds upon the Association's 2020 scientific statement, Assessing and Addressing Cardiovascular Health in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (or Questioning) Adults, which noted that more than half (56%) of LGBTQ adults and 70% of those who are transgender or gender non-conforming reported experiencing some form of discrimination from a health care professional.

The new statement notes a growing body of research indicates TGD populations may be at a significantly greater risk for cardiovascular disease compared to their cisgender peers. Transgender men are twice as likely to have a heart attack than cisgender men and four times as likely than cisgender women. TGD people are also more likely to experience blood clots when undergoing estrogen hormone therapy. The writing group points out more investigation is urgently needed to explain these disparities.

TGD populations also face unique psychological stressors, including gender non-affirmation (e.g., being called by the incorrect pronoun), discrimination, rejection or concealment of gender identity and violence based on gender identity. These factors contribute to higher overall levels of stress, which, in turn, negatively affect heart health. Additionally, TGD people who are also part of historically excluded racial or ethnic groups experience multiple layers of stress, such as lower income levels or limited access to health care. Research on how these complex and intertwined factors affect heart health within TGD populations is limited.

Most gender identification options in a clinical or research setting include only "male" and "female," so while population-based studies can help in understanding some cardiovascular health risk factors, data on TGD people is scarce. The statement suggests studies should standardize measures of gender identity and expression to collect larger samples of underrepresented groups among TGD populations.

Data collected through electronic health records (EHRs) does present an advancement in terms of data access, however, EHRs often lack the ability to capture sociocultural factors relevant to heart health among TGD persons. It's important to note that TGD individuals who do not regularly access health care services are less likely to be included in EHR data, and TGD people who are uncomfortable disclosing gender identity to health care professionals will be unlikely to be identified as TGD in EHR systems.

While the ability to document sexual orientation and gender identity has been required for electronic health records since 2018, additional steps are needed to ensure culturally responsive and supportive care. The statement details the critical need for researchers and clinicians to use gender-affirming pronouns and obtain an anatomy inventory where appropriate, noting that assumptions about a TGD person's identity or anatomy may negatively impact clinical decisions.

The writing group suggests increased training across health professions would enhance clinical practices and foster more compassionate care for TGD persons. While many institutions acknowledge the need for TGD educational content, efforts to include these topics into clinical curricula have not progressed. The statement suggests a collaborative effort with organizational-level mandates across governing bodies is needed to create a curriculum that encompasses gender affirming hormone therapy, surgical procedures, anatomy-based preventive health, social determinants of health and the proper assessment of sex and gender in health care settings.

While the statement emphasizes existing data is limited, it reviews research on disparities among TGD people as it relates to the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 to measure ideal heart health and how hormone therapy may affect heart health for TGD people. Current research on blood pressure, lipid profiles or blood sugar levels for TGD persons is too sparse and inconclusive, although the writing group does suggest several areas of Life's Simple 7 that are directly linked to heart attacks and strokes. The evaluation of existing research found:

TGD people are more likely (24%) to report tobacco use than the remainder of the U.S. population (18%).

Transgender men are less likely to exercise, especially in older age.

TGD persons undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy are more physically active, which may be because they report being more satisfied with their bodies.

TGD youth report eating more fast food and using unsafe ways of trying to manage their weight (e.g., diet pills, fasting or laxative abuse).

TGD people report overall higher body mass index (BMI), yet they may experience additional stress about their weight since many surgeons have strict BMI cut-offs above which they will not perform gender-affirming surgeries.

"Discrimination also contributes to disparities in social determinants of health among TGD populations, and many TGD persons are at even greater risk of heart disease and stroke due to transphobia and experiences of discrimination based on gender non-conformity," said Lauren B. Beach, Ph.D., J.D., vice-chair of the statement writing group and research assistant professor in the department of medical social sciences at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "Systematic transphobic discrimination results in a higher burden of workplace discrimination, job loss and unemployment among TGD populations. Combined with experiences of discrimination in health care settings, lack of access to a stable income further limits health care access among TGD people. These structural factors combine to result simultaneously in higher levels of chronic stress and in lower levels of resources to prevent or manage a broad variety of health conditions including cardiovascular disease."

The writing group also cited studies showing that TGD persons experience disproportionate burdens of additional cardiovascular risk factors, including living with HIV, vascular dysfunction, trouble sleeping and alcohol abuse.

The writing group acknowledges limited data and encourages further research to understand the numerous and complex issues faced by TGD individuals and as a community. The statement emphasizes available information does illustrate that TGD people often experience challenges due to unique stressors, including internalizing gender identity, sexual victimization and concerns about hormone therapies and gender-affirming surgeries.

"Data specific to transgender and gender diverse persons lag behind what is needed to understand and improve individual and community heart health. The information available is rapidly improving, though," Streed said. "This statement summarizes the available evidence showing that addressing traditional cardiovascular risk factors and decreasing stigma-linked stress, together, would improve the heart health of TGD people. By focusing on the unique issues affecting the well-being of transgender and gender diverse persons, we have the potential to do better for everyone."

In women in their mid-40s to early 50s, endometriosis--a condition in which tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside the uterus--was linked with poor work ability and more sick days, but not with unemployment or early retirement.

The findings, which are published in Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica and stem from a population-based group of Finnish women across all employment sectors, provide insights on how endometriosis can impact women's professional lives.

"To our knowledge, this is the first general population-level study on the association between endometriosis and work ability, including a life course approach to disability retirement," the authors wrote.

We're currently living in what many scientists are calling the Anthropocene, the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. An article published in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development discusses how counselors can promote environmental justice during this time.

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."

The article accomplishes three goals:

It builds awareness about climate change and the Anthropocene among counselors.

It expands knowledge regarding how climate change may exacerbate issues of social inequality.

And it demonstrates how counselors can address environmental justice issues affecting clients and their communities.

The article's author, Alexander J. Hilert, PhD, LPC, CCTP, of William & Mary, provides examples of how counselors can make a difference, noting that they can use their skills, such as group facilitation, to help educate communities on the climate crisis or to help environment activists process their grief to help prevent burnout. Also, counselor educators can help lead the way by focusing research on the implications of the climate crisis on marginalized communities.

"As counselors, it is our ethical duty to respond to issues of systemic injustice that affect the lives of our clients," said Hilert. "Using the framework of environmental justice, counselors can better understand the disproportionate impacts of climate change on communities experiencing marginalization and oppression, and how we can respond through advocacy and outreach."