Culture

The eruption of the Laacher See volcano in the Eifel, a low mountain range in western Germany, is one of Central Europe's largest eruptions over the past 100,000 years. The eruption ejected around 20 cubic kilometers of tephra and the eruption column is believed to have reached at least 20 kilometers in height, comparable to the Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. Technical advances in combination with tree remains buried in the course of the eruption now enabled an international research team to accurately date the event. Accordingly, the eruption of the Laacher See volcano occurred 13,077 years ago and thus 126 years earlier than previously assumed. This sheds new light on the climate history of the entire North Atlantic and European region and requires an adaptation of the European climate archives. "We can now precisely date a drop in temperature at the end of the last glacial period, so that the information coincides with that observed from the Greenland Ice Sheet cores," said Dr. Frederick Reinig, a dendrochronologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (JGU). An international research team with experts in archeology, climatology, ecology, radiocarbon dating, and volcanology was involved in this study. The research results were published in the renowned scientific journal Nature.

Charred remains of birch and poplar wood have been preserved to this day

The eruption of the Laacher See volcano was a natural disaster that affected large parts of Europe. The ash rain reached as far as northern Italy in the south and Saint Petersburg in the Northeast. In the immediate vicinity and the neighboring Rhine Valley, mighty deposits of ash and pumice formed, which buried all life beneath them. "During the eruption, pyroclastic flows buried the local vegetation around the Laacher See volcano. The trees were partially charred within the ash deposits and have been preserved to this day," explained Reinig, describing the eruption process that took place over several weeks in late spring to early summer and which now enables scientists to precisely date the event. "These wooden contemporary witnesses are very rare, and they are difficult to recover," said Reinig, first author of the study.

"The regional effects of the volcanic eruption have been well studied. What we have been missing so far is the certainty of when exactly this happened," emphasized Professor Ulf Büntgen, co-author of the Nature publication from the University of Cambridge. This was now determined based on samples from buried birch and poplar trees.

The analysis of tree rings reveals the precise date of the eruption

The volcanic sediments not only preserved the wood for over 13,000 years but also allowed to identify the individual tree rings. "The tree rings enable us to exactly determine the age of the samples," said Professor Jan Esper from Mainz University. In a joint initiative of the Federal Research Institute for Forests, Snow and Landscape WSL in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, together with the Archaeological Research Center and Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution MONREPOS in Neuwied, both newly discovered samples and older finds were analyzed. For this purpose, the Laboratory for Ion Beam Physics at ETH Zurich carried out radiocarbon measurements on 157 individual tree rings of the examined trees. Calibration of these results against a Swiss reference chronology then resulted in the precise dating. "The constant advances in radiocarbon measurement technology and the calibration methods used, as well as the careful handling of the sensitive samples, were the key to establish this dating with an uncertainty of less than ten years," said Lukas Wacker from ETH Zurich.

Revised dating of the volcanic eruption has consequences for the synchronization of European climate archives and the understanding of large-scale climate dynamics

According to the description in Nature, the eruption of the Laacher See volcano took place 13,006 years before 1950, with an uncertainty of nine years. That is 126 years earlier than the generally accepted dating based on sediments in the Meerfelder Maar from the Eifel region in Germany.

This difference has far-reaching consequences for the synchronization of European climate archives and the understanding of North Atlantic and European climate history. Laacher See eruption ashes were widespread over large areas of Central and Northern Europe as a result of the volcanic eruption and represent an important time marker for paleoenvironmental archives. Due to the new dating, the European archives now have to be temporally adapted. At the same time, a previously existing temporal difference to the data from the Greenland ice cores was closed.

This means that the massive cooling at the beginning of the Younger Dryas - i.e., the last Ice Age intermezzo lasting around 1,300 years before the currently prevailing warm phase, the Holocene - also occurred in Central Europe 130 years earlier, around 12,870 years ago respectively. This is in line with the onset of the cooling in the North Atlantic region identified in ice cores from Greenland. During the Younger Dryas period, temperatures in Central Europe fell by up to 5 degrees Celsius. This strong cooling did not take place time transgressively, as previously thought, but rather synchronously over the entire North Atlantic and Central European region," said Frederick Reinig. The results of the interdisciplinary research team not only set a precise date for the eruption of the Laacher See in the Eifel. The revised age of the ash deposits and the associated shift in the European climate archives now sheds new light on the climate history of the entire North Atlantic region.

Scientists at the University of Helsinki have found an essential factor from the extracellular matrix that regulates functionality of the breast tissue for instance during pregnancy.

Extracellular matrix (ECM) has previously been recognised as an important element for the growth of various epithelial cells, but rather as a scaffold. A new study shows that ECM can also regulate the function of epithelial cells.

Our tissues constitute of differentiated cell types, which perform specific tasks that are tightly controlled. Normal growth and functioning of tissues is possible only when the various differentiated cell types interact appropriately. Differentiation and function of breast epithelium is guided by a group of cells responsive for estrogen and progesterone hormones. In the recent study it was found that these cells produce an ECM protein into their surroundings, and it regulates the growth and differentiation of the epithelium from outside the cells. Especially, the production of this protein, Lama5, was found to strengthen the functionality of these cells.

Hormone responsive cells can sense growth signals, such as cues from hormones and growth factors, and relay them into neighboring cells. When Lama5 gene was deleted from these cells, they became unable to relay these signals and halted the growth of the entire epithelium.

"This study shows that the extracellular environment produced by the cells themselves is an important factor for the identity and function of epithelial cells, and therefore for the whole tissue", says assistant professor Pekka Katajisto from University of Helsinki. The study was conducted in his laboratory.

Development during pregnancy and milk production is impaired

Hormone responsive cells were previously not known to participate in generating the surrounding ECM or even having ECM contacts.

"We observed that surprisingly, the hormone sensing cells were producing Lama5, which is critical for the proper function of these cells. Without expression of Lama5 gene, the hormone sensing cells will lose their identity, and can't support growth of the epithelium for instance during pregnancy", says Doctor Johanna Englund, the main author of the study.

The study was conducted using for example organoid culture of isolated epithelial cells from mouse mammary glands. The organoids can in specific conditions be induced to produce milk.

"Our results suggest that lack of ECM factor Lama5 impairs also milk production", Englund says.

Results from this study can help to understand how breast cancer is initiated. 70-80% of breast cancers arise from the hormone sensing cells, and it is conceivable that these cancer cells are also dependent on Lama5 for their growth.

An important function of our vision is to segregate relevant figures from the irrelevant background. When we look at a visual stimulus, it drives a cascade of neural activity from low-level to higher level visual brain areas. The higher areas also provide feedback to the lower areas, where figures elicit more activity than the background, as if figures in the brain are highlighted with extra activity. Researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience (NIN) now showed that feedback causes the extra neuronal activity in low-level areas and that the extra activity is essential for figure-ground perception. The findings were published in Science Advances on the 30th June.

Silencing the brain with light to change perception

The primary visual cortex, also known as V1, is the first cortical brain area that receives visual information from the eyes and sends the information on to 'higher' brain areas for further processing. The research team, led by Pieter Roelfsema and Matthew Self, used optogenetics, a technique using light to silence nerve cells, in V1 in mice who had been trained to detect visual stimuli.

Disrupting the conversation between brain areas renders objects invisible

Critically, the researchers silenced only the late part of V1's response, allowing V1 to pass the visual information on to higher areas but preventing the feedback from higher areas back to V1. The result was dramatic and surprising: "When we allowed V1 to activate the higher areas, but curtailed feedback, mice only detected simple stimuli, but not stimuli on a complex background. This shows that feedback to V1 is necessary for figure-ground segregation" explained Lisa Kirchberger, the lead researcher on the project.

The researchers then silenced activity in the higher visual areas and found that it reduced the enhanced activity elicited by figures. "The results show that higher visual areas send information about objects back to V1 in the form of feedback. V1 and the higher areas are engaged in a conversation and if we disrupt the conversation by silencing V1 we can render objects invisible".

The paper represents a major step forward in our understanding of the role that feedback and sustained neural activity play in allowing us to see the world. Mice have very comparable visual systems to humans and it is likely that these results will help us to understand what happens when the visual system makes mistakes, such as in the hallucinations and visual distortions present in diseases such as schizophrenia.

The tiny beetle Triamyxa coprolithica is the first-ever insect to be described from fossil faeces. The animal the researchers have to thank for the excellent preservation was probably the dinosaur ancestor Silesaurus opolensis, which 230 million years ago ingested the small beetle in large numbers.

In a recently published study in Current Biology, vertebrate palaeontologists from Uppsala University and entomologists from National Sun Yat-sen University (Taiwan), Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Germany), and Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico) used synchrotron microtomography to 3D-reconstruct the beetles while they were still trapped within the fossilised faecal matter. The coprolite contained abundant beetle body parts, most belonging to the same small species. A few specimens were found nearly complete, with much of the delicate legs and antennae still intact. The well-preserved state of these fossils made it possible to produce a detailed description of the new beetle genus and to compare it with more modern ones. Triamyxa coprolithica represents a previously unknown extinct lineage of the suborder Myxophaga, whose modern representatives are small and live on algae in wet environments.

"We were absolutely amazed by the abundance and fantastic preservation of the beetles in the coprolite fragment. In a way, we must really thank Silesaurus, which likely was the animal that helped us accumulating them," says Martin Qvarnström, researcher at Uppsala University and one of the co-authors of the paper.

Silesaurus opolensis - the probable producer of the coprolite - was a relatively small dinosaur ancestor with an estimated body weight of 15 kilograms that lived in Poland approximately 230 million years ago. In a previous study, the authors assigned coprolites with disarticulated beetle remains to Silesaurus based on the size and shape of the coprolites as well as several anatomical adaptations in the animal. Silesaurus possessed a beak at the tip of its jaws that could have been used to root in the litter and perhaps peck insects off the ground, somewhat like modern birds. But although Silesaurus ingested numerous individuals of Triamyxa coprolithica, the beetle was likely too small to have been the only targeted prey. Instead, Triamyxa likely shared a habitat with larger beetles, which are represented by disarticulated remains in the coprolites, and other prey, which never ended up in the coprolites in a recognisable shape.

"I never thought that we would be able to find out what the Triassic precursor of the dinosaurs ate for dinner," says Grzegorz Nied?wiedzki, palaeontologist at Uppsala University and one of the co-authors of the paper.

The preservation of the beetles in the coprolite is similar to specimens from amber, which normally yield the best-preserved insect fossils. Amber, however, was mainly formed during relatively recent geological time. This study shows that coprolites may be valuable for studying early insect evolution and, at the same time, the diet of extinct vertebrates.

The synchrotron scanning was carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble.

MINNEAPOLIS - A new study suggests that even when differences in socioeconomic status are taken into consideration, Black people with multiple sclerosis (MS) may be more negatively impacted by the disease than white people with MS. The research is published in the June 30, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that Black people with MS had lower scores on certain measures of neurological health, like dexterity and walking tests and showed more evidence of disease progression on brain scans.

"While lower socioeconomic status appears to be linked to doing worse on tests of neurologic performance in white people with MS, we do not see that for Black people with MS, at least at the single time point we examined," said study author Lana Zhovtis Ryerson, MD, of NYU Langone Health in New York City, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.

The study looked at 1,214 people who identified as Black and 7,530 people who identified as white. Researchers also took a more detailed look at socioeconomic status based on neighborhood for 288 of the Black people in the study and 1,046 of the white people.

Researchers also looked at common neurological tests for people with MS. In a 50-question cognitive processing test, the Black people with MS, on average, scored five points lower than white people with MS. For physical tests like the 25-foot walking test, Black people with MS were an average of 0.66 seconds slower. In a manual dexterity test, Black people with MS were an average of 2.11 seconds slower.

When looking at brain lesions, which can indicate disease progression, researchers found that Black people had, on average, larger lesion volumes on their brain scans compared to white people.

Researchers then looked at the smaller group of people, using a more detailed measure of socioeconomic status. For white people with MS, lower household income was associated with slower cognitive processing and walking speeds, while a worse score on the socioeconomic test was associated with slower cognitive processing and manual dexterity speeds. For Black people in the study, lower income was only associated with less manual dexterity. Having worse socioeconomic scores was not associated with differences in cognitive processing, walking or manual dexterity speeds.

"Future studies should consider the role of unmeasured factors like systemic racism to see if they may play a role in greater disability among Black people with MS," Zhovtis Ryerson said. "These results also reinforce the need for more diverse clinical trials and research focusing on treatment strategies specifically for Black people to identify whether certain therapies or more aggressive early treatment could help slow down disability over time."

A limitation of the study is that it was based on one point in time and may not reflect associations over time.

Researchers have found that eating disorder behaviors, such as binge-eating, alter the brain's reward response process and food intake control circuitry, which can reinforce these behaviors. Understanding how eating disorder behaviors and neurobiology interact can shed light on why these disorders often become chronic and could aid in the future development of treatments. The study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

"This work is significant because it links biological and behavioral factors that interact to adversely impact eating behaviors," said Janani Prabhakar, Ph.D., of the Division of Translational Research at the National Institute of Mental Health, part of NIH. "It deepens our knowledge about the underlying biological causes of behavioral symptom presentation related to eating disorders and will give researchers and clinicians better information about how, when, and with whom to intervene."

Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that can lead to severe complications, including death. Common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. Behaviors associated with eating disorders can vary in type and severity and include actions such as binge-eating, purging, and restricting food intake.

In this study, Guido Frank, M.D., at the University of California San Diego, and colleagues wanted to see how behaviors across the eating disorder spectrum affect reward response in the brain, how changes in reward response alter food intake control circuitry, and if these changes reinforce eating disorder behaviors. The study enrolled 197 women with different eating disorders (including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder, and other specified feeding and eating disorders) and different body mass indexes (BMIs) associated with eating disorder behaviors, as well as 120 women without eating disorders.

The researchers used cross-sectional functional brain imaging to study brain responses during a taste reward task. During this task, participants received or were denied an unexpected, salient sweet stimulus (a taste of a sugar solution). The researchers analyzed a brain reward response known as "prediction error," a dopamine-related signaling process that measures the degree of deviation from the expectation, or how surprised a person was receiving the unexpected stimulus. A higher prediction error indicates that the person was more surprised, while a lower prediction error indicates they were less surprised. They also investigated whether this brain response was associated with ventral-striatal-hypothalamic circuitry, a neural system associated with food intake control.

The researchers found that there was no significant correlation between BMI, eating disorder behavior, and brain reward response in the group of women without eating disorders. In the group of women with eating disorders, higher BMI and binge-eating behaviors were associated with lower prediction error response. Further, for the women with eating disorders, the direction of ventral striatal-hypothalamic connectivity was the reverse of those without eating disorders, with connectivity directed from the ventral striatum to the hypothalamus. This connectivity was positively related to the prediction error response and negatively related to feeling out of control after eating.

These results suggest that for the women with eating disorders, eating disorder behaviors and excessive weight loss or weight gain modulated the brain's dopamine-related reward circuit response, altering brain circuitry associated with food intake control, and potentially reinforcing eating disorder behaviors. For example, women with anorexia nervosa, restrictive food intake, and low BMIs had a high prediction error response. This response may strengthen their food intake-control circuitry, leading these women to be able to override hunger cues. In contrast, the opposite seems to be the case for women with binge-eating episodes and higher BMIs.

"The study provides a model for how behavioral traits promote eating problems and changes in BMI, and how eating disorder behaviors, anxiety, mood, and brain neurobiology interact to reinforce the vicious cycle of eating disorders, making recovery very difficult," said Dr. Frank.

Overall, this study suggests that behavioral traits, including food intake behavior, contribute to eating disorder maintenance and progression by modulating one's internal reward response and altering food intake control circuitry. However, further research is needed to investigate treatments that could target and change behaviors for individuals with eating disorders to achieve lasting recovery.

The Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean has long been considered by researchers to have been the 'first international age,' especially the period from 1600-1200 BC, when powerful empires from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt set up large networks of subordinate client kingdoms in the Near East. These empires fought, traded, and corresponded with one another, and ancient texts from the period reveal rich economic and social networks that enabled the movement of people and goods.

A new study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geneticists, and isotope experts, and published in PLOS ONE, investigated the movement of people in this period at a single regional center, a Bronze Age city-state called Alalakh in present-day southeastern Turkey. Their results indicate that the majority buried at Alalakh were raised locally and descended from people who lived in the region.

The team's goal was to see if the high levels of interregional connectivity evidenced by the architecture, texts, and artifacts found at the site during 20 years of excavations, sponsored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, could be detected among the population buried at the city.

To do so, they conducted strontium and oxygen isotope analyses on tooth enamel, which can detect whether an individual grew up locally at Alalakh or moved there only during adulthood. The genetic data on the other hand can be used to determine where a person's recent ancestors came from.

The isotope analysis identified several non-local individuals. However, their DNA showed an ancestry that was local to Alalakh and neighbouring regions. "There are two possible explanations for our findings," said co-lead author Stefanie Eisenmann from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "Either these individuals are short-distance migrants from the region or return-migrants, people whose parents or grandparents originally came from Alalakh."

Only one sampled individual, an adult woman, was not part of the local gene pool, instead showing ancestry that most closely matched groups in Central Asia. However, her isotopic signatures suggested a local upbringing. "We expected the isotope analysis to show that this person immigrated to Alalakh, since her genetic data was so different from the rest of the population, so we were surprised to see that she was likely native to Alalakh. It could have been her parents or grandparents who made the move, instead," explained Tara Ingman, the other lead-author of the study from Koç University.

While different types of mobility were identified, including short-distance, long-distance, and return migration, there were no complete foreigners in the dataset. Most people were born and raised at Alalakh and also their ancestors came from the region.

"There are several ways to explain this. It is possible that far less long-distance migrants were living at Alalakh than we had previously thought. Another possibility is that we haven't found their graves, yet. Perhaps most individuals that came from far away were not buried directly at Alalakh, or in a way we cannot trace," said Murat Akar, director of the excavations.

University of Leeds news
Embargo: Wednesday 30 June, 7pm GMT
Bereavement care lacking for ethnic minorities
Grieving friends and relatives from ethnic minority backgrounds are suffering from a lack of appropriate help to cope with the loss of a loved one, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers say.
And the scarcity of data on the services that are available means providers do not know how support should be delivered to ensure they are suitable for different groups of people.
The researchers, led by the University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield, reviewed evidence on UK bereavement care for ethnic minority communities to determine how easy it was to access, what it looked like, and what the outcomes were.
They say people representing those communities need to be involved when services are developed and delivered to ensure that groups get the support they need.
Senior author and research co-lead Dr Matthew Allsop, from the School of Medicine, said: "The increased risks from covid-19 among minority ethnic groups prompted this review. We were keen to understand what research had been conducted that could inform how bereavement care should be delivered for people during the pandemic. We found a stark lack of evidence focusing on people from minority ethnic groups with only seven studies published over the last 25 years.
"The limited studies highlighted multiple challenges faced in accessing bereavement care. There is an urgent need for research and evidence to understand how bereavement support can be developed to ensure they meet the specific needs and preferences of different minority ethnic groups."
The team reviewed feedback about bereavement services between 1995 and 2020,which was provided by bereaved adults and children from UK ethnic minority populations, and people grieving the death of a person from an ethnic minority group.
Ethnic minorities include White minorities, such as Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller groups.
Services reviewed included hospital-based palliative care teams, hospital based neonatal teams, and community support.
Healthcare workers surveyed included doctors, nurses, chaplains and unspecified participants in UK neonatal units.
Seven studies were included, comprising 721 participants who completed surveys and took part in interviews and focus groups.
The review revealed a lack of awareness about bereavement care for ethnic minority communities among health professionals, while access to interpreters was variable, as was availability of psychological support. Two thirds of palliative care teams surveyed did not provide any form of bereavement support.
Support offered was not always needed or suitable for ethnic minority communities, with 17 or 18 participants in one study saying their family was their main source of support. Help from friends, neighbours and religious communities was also common. And one study showed personal faith and support from a religious leader was more important for bereaved people from a black Caribbean background than for people from white backgrounds.
One study revealed that other methods of support, like a memorial service, had a strong Christian theme, which may have precluded those from other faiths or cultures from attending.
Practical legal and financial support was often recognised to be needed rather than specialist interventions. One study showed black Caribbean respondents were more likely to be affected by these concerns than white respondents - and anxiety and depression was more prevalent among the black Caribbean respondents in this study.
One study described the significant financial difficulties experienced by half of the 19 Bangladeshi participants after a death, with trying to meet the costs of transporting the deceased back to Bangladesh given as an example.
Romany Gypsy and Traveller respondents described a cultural practice of not speaking about bereavement within the close-knit community, which researchers say can potentially increase the risk of poor mental health following significant loss or bereavement. Among this group there is reported stigma and shame associated with mental health illness, including bereavement related depression, resulting in a reluctance to seek formal support.
The paper, Bereavement care for ethnic minority communities: A systematic review of access to, models of, outcomes from, and satisfaction with, service provision, is published today in PLOS ONE.
The researchers say healthcare policy makers should now work with ethnic minority groups to design the most appropriate models and formats of bereavement care that meet their needs and preferences. This will improve the understanding of the role of family, friends and existing support systems, and begin to develop the evidence base underpinning current provision.
First author and research co-lead Dr Catriona Mayland, from the University of Sheffield, said: "There is a need to understand the role in bereavement care played by families, friends, faith and community-based support groups. Additionally, it is only by adopting a true partnership approach that we can understand what type, and in what way, bereavement care should be provided.
"This will enable better support for those experiencing grief from ethnic minority communities.'
Further information
For media enquiries contact University of Leeds press officer Lauren Ballinger via l.ballinger.leeds.ac.uk.
Partner institutions included University of Sheffield and Imperial College London.
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We are a top ten university for research and impact power in the UK, according to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, and are in the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings 2021.
The University was awarded a Gold rating by the Government's Teaching Excellence Framework in 2017, recognising its 'consistently outstanding' teaching and learning provision. Twenty-six of our academics have been awarded National Teaching Fellowships - more than any other institution in England, Northern Ireland and Wales - reflecting the excellence of our teaching. http://www.leeds.ac.uk
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A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital examines the associations between wealth mobility and long-term cardiovascular health. The multidisciplinary study borrowed methodology from the field of economics to analyze longitudinal changes in wealth. The team's results indicate that negative wealth mobility is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events, while positive wealth changes are associated with a decreased risk of cardiovascular events. Their results are published in JAMA Cardiology.

"Low wealth is a risk factor that can dynamically change over a person's life and can influence a person's cardiovascular health status," said Muthiah Vaduganathan, MD, MPH from the Brigham's Division of Cardiovascular Medicine. "So, it's a window of opportunity we have for an at-risk population. Buffering large changes in wealth should be an important focus for health policy moving ahead."

The retrospective study leveraged data from the RAND Health and Retirement Study (HRS). While wealth data is infrequently categorized in most studies, the HRS uniquely captures detailed information about both housing (primary residence, mortgages, home loans and more) and non-housing (vehicles, businesses, stocks, mutual funds, checking and savings accounts and more) wealth across multiple interviews. The study examined 5,579 adults 50 years or older with no cardiovascular health concerns at baseline. Between January 1992 and December 2016, the HRS research team collected data through interviews with participants about any new diagnoses they had received in terms of their overall health. For deceased participants, next of kin were interviewed and the National Death Index was consulted for additional information.

"Income and wealth, while perhaps informally used interchangeably, actually provide different and complementary perspectives," said Sara Machado, PhD, an economist at the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics. "Income reflects money received on a regular basis, while wealth is more holistic, encompassing both assets and debts. Could paying off one's debt with a large relative wealth increase be important in promoting cardiovascular health, even without changes in income?"

For the purposes of this study, upward wealth mobility was defined as an increase of at least one wealth quintile and, similarly, downward wealth mobility was defined as a decrease of at least one quintile relative to peers of similar age. Participants who were in the same wealth quintile between interviews were classified as having stable wealth. Altogether, an increase in wealth was associated with protection against cardiovascular diseases and a decrease in wealth was associated with cardiovascular risk.

"Decreases in wealth are associated with more stress, fewer healthy behaviors, and less leisure time, all of which are associated with poorer cardiovascular health," said Andrew Sumarsono, MD from University of Texas Southwestern's Division of Hospital Medicine. "It is possible that the inverse is true and may help to explain our study's findings."

In terms of limitations, all interviews and reports of new diagnoses were self-reported by the participants. Additionally, there are many factors that influence general cardiovascular health, including certain environmental and socio-demographic variables. Some of these factors were not collected by the HRS and therefore were not considered in the study.

The research team hopes that the findings of their research can inform the future of health policy and medical literature.

"Wealth and health are so closely integrated that we can no longer consider them apart," said Vaduganathan. "In future investigations, we need to make dedicated efforts to routinely measure wealth and consider it a key determinant of cardiovascular health."

Research at Baylor College of Medicine, the Texas Heart Institute and collaborating institutions is moving a novel promising gene therapy to treat heart failure closer to the clinic.

Published in Science Translational Medicine, the study showed that knocking down the Hippo signaling pathway in cardiomyocytes in the hearts of pigs after they had a heart attack, resulted in heart tissue renewal and improved function when compared with pig hearts in which the Hippo signaling pathway was not modified. Given that the pig's heart is considered a valuable model to study the human heart, the findings suggest that this gene therapy may be useful in treating human heart failure.

Heart failure remains the leading cause of mortality in the western world, causing more deaths than all cancers combined. The best current treatment for heart failure is a heart transplant, but the number of hearts available for transplant is limited, underscoring the need for alternative treatments.

"One of the interests of my lab is to develop ways to heal heart muscle by studying pathways involved in heart development and regeneration," said corresponding author Dr. James Martin, professor and Vivian L. Smith Chair in Regenerative Medicine at Baylor and director of the Cardiomyocyte Renewal Lab at the Texas Heart Institute.

Previous work has shown that when patients are in heart failure there is an increase in the activity of the Hippo signaling pathway, which acts to inhibit heart repair. Earlier work from the Martin lab revealed that turning the Hippo signaling pathway off in a mouse model that mimics advanced human heart failure resulted in the murine hearts recovering their pumping function.

"Encouraged by these results, we took the next step by testing whether turning the Hippo signaling pathway off in pig hearts would also help the injured hearts recover," said first author Dr. Shijie Liu, a postdoctoral associate in the Martin lab.

An essential first translational step before taking the gene therapy to humans

In the current study the researchers modeled in the pig what happens in a human patient that has a heart attack and assessed the effect of gene therapy knockdown of the Hippo signaling pathway on heart recovery.

"Pigs with a heart attack present a condition that is similar to what you might find in a human patient who has a blockage in the main artery of the heart, which leads to myocardial infarction," Martin explained. "After myocardial infarction in the pigs, we administered the gene therapy, to turn off Hippo directly in heart of the pigs. Finally, we compared the effects of therapy or no therapy on heart function."

"We were excited by the results," Liu said. "Three months after we treated the pigs, those that received the gene therapy had improved their heart function, showed signs that their cardiomyocytes were regenerating, had less fibrosis or scarring and had evidence that new blood vessels had formed. The procedure was shown to be safe since the pigs tolerated the therapy very well."

"Our findings support our goal to move on to human clinical trials," Martin said. "This is a potentially transformational strategy to treat human heart failure. It taps into the healing capacity of the heart, promoting heart muscle self-repair and improved function, which can make a substantial difference in the lives of those who suffer a heart attack."

What The Study Did: National survey data were used to estimate how common psoriasis is among adults in the United States and how this has changed since 2003.

Authors: April W. Armstrong, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2021.2007)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

What The Study Did: This survey study investigated the association between general surgery resident grit, which was defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and burnout and thoughts of attrition and suicide.

Authors: Karl Y. Bilimoria, M.D., M.S., of Northwestern University in Chicago, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2021.2378)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Boston - Data has historically shown that the majority of patients insured through Medicaid, as well as the uninsured, seek inpatient hospital care and services at safety-net hospitals. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to increase access to public insurance options for low-income individuals and families, as well as improve access to specialty medical care services. Results of a new study led by researchers at Boston Medical Center (BMC) show, however, that this expansion did not lead patients receiving care at safety-net hospitals to transfer their care to non-safety-net hospitals.

Published in JAMA Network Open, the national data review showed that discharges from safety-net hospitals were higher among Black and Hispanic patients living in higher-poverty zip codes compared to White patients in states that expanded Medicaid.

"While we thought that the expansion of Medicaid might lead some racial/ethnic minority patients to transfer their care to non-safety-net hospitals, where specialty care services can often be more accessible, our study results demonstrate that was not the case," said Karen Lasser, MD, MPH, an internal medicine physician at BMC who is the study's lead author.

Discharge data from 11 states that expanded Medicaid (NY, PA, NJ, KY, IL, IA, AR. CO, AZ, CA and OR) and six that did not expand Medicaid (TX, WI, FL, GA, NC and VA) between 2017 and 2021 were included in this study. This large data set included nearly 83 percent of the Hispanic population in the United States. Hospitals in the top quartile of the number of discharges among Medicaid and/or uninsured patients in 2012 were identified as safety-net hospitals. The data were grouped by age (26-64 years and over 65 years, with older individuals serving as a comparison group), zip code-poverty level, and race/ethnicity.

During the study period, the 17 states had a total of 18,289,417 Medicaid-covered and uninsured patient discharges- 59.4 percent of the discharges were in states with expanded Medicaid and 40.6 percent in non-expansion states. Among patients between 26-64 years old in expansion states, discharges at safety-net hospitals were higher among Black and Hispanic patients (38.5 percent and 39.2 percent, respectively) compared to white patients (22.6 percent), and these discharges occurred among patients from zip codes with higher poverty levels. The data did not show any systematic changes in safety-net hospitalizations among Medicaid-insured or uninsured patients in either expansion or non-expansion states, as well as among all subgroups by race/ethnicity and zip code-level poverty.

"Our study results could indicate that some patients with Medicaid are satisfied with their care and benefit from the services, such as case management and medical interpretation, available at many safety-net hospitals," added Lasser, professor of medicine and public health at Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. "However, we need to improve our understanding of what drives these patients to make decisions about where they receive care, and just as important, address the underlying structural racism that may play a role in these decisions."

Politicians use emotional resources in their speeches in parliament depending on the type of debate and use emotive rhetoric strategically and selectively, mainly to attract voters. This is one of the main conclusions of a study published in the journal American Political Science Review (APSR) involving Toni Rodon, a professor with the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences and member of the Research Group on Institutions and Political Actors, together with Moritz Osnabrügge (Durham University, as first author) and Sara B. Hobolt (London School of Economics and Political Science).

"Our research provides evidence that incentives to attract voters differ systematically depending on the type of debate"

In recent years, much research has been done showing that emotions are important in politics and that the use of emotive rhetoric, based on positive or negative language, is common during election campaigns. Research has also been conducted within political parties regarding the stance adopted and the dissent expressed in parliamentary debates, but when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in their legislative speeches has been studied less, and is now elaborated on by the authors in their work.

Emotive language usually refers to a style of communication that arouses an emotional response from the listener, thus evoking positive or negative reactions that go beyond the specific meaning of the word or phrase used. So, it can be a powerful tool to convince people of the validity of a particular message, and from the point of view of electoral competition, there is evidence linking emotion-eliciting appeals with the electoral success of certain political formations.

Analysis of two million speeches in the House of Commons and in the Dáil Éireann

The analysis included in article covers two million speeches delivered in the House of Commons and in the Dáil Éireann, the lower houses of parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, respectively. Specifically, a million parliamentary speeches, i.e., all those that were delivered in the House of Commons between 2001 and 2019, and a further one million speeches delivered in the Dáil Éireann between 2002 and 2013.

The authors chose the British Parliament because it is one of the oldest in the world, an ideal institutional environment for studying these kinds of speeches. "We focused on the House of Commons because it is the more powerful of the two legislative chambers in the UK and the debates held there differ in terms of their profile and the size of the audience, which has allowed us to compare emotive rhetoric across different types of debate", the authors assert. In a second stage, the study of the speeches delivered in the lower house of the Irish parliament has allowed confirming and generalizing their findings.

High and low profile legislative debates: two different styles of discourse

The article which, based on an analysis of how politicians use emotive rhetoric in parliament, contributes to the understanding of political competition and legislative behaviour, underlines differences with regard to incentives that legislators have according to the type of debate. "Our research provides evidence that incentives to attract voters differ systematically depending on the type of debate", the authors suggest. Thus, in high-profile legislative debates, parliamentarians have more incentives to use emotive rhetoric to attract the attention of a wider audience, which they capture by using more emotive political content and language.

It could be said that PMQs is the debate to which citizens are most exposed, and this gives incentives for MPs to use more emotive language.

In the House of Commons, this is the case of Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs), a debate held weekly. It is a convention during which the prime minister answers questions from MPs, especially the leader of the opposition. It is the parliamentary highlight of the week, broadcast live and covered extensively by the media.

It could be said that PMQs is the debate to which citizens are most exposed, and this gives incentives for MPs to use more emotive language. Other high-profile debates are the Queen's Speech, which take place annually at the start of each new year of parliament (at which the Queen reads the government's main priorities, and which also involves the prime minister and the opposition leader) or the Dáil Leaders' Questions, which are put to the Irish prime minister.

Conversely, in low-profile legislative debates, which are not so avidly followed and generate less expectation, politicians mostly address their colleagues in parliament, and therefore emotional rhetoric is less pronounced.

A new application to measure emotive rhetoric

The study presents a new methodological application to measure emotive rhetoric, and it does so by combining the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) dictionary, with word-embedding techniques that enables creating a dictionary specific to the field. Thus, the new tool categorizes emotional and neutral words via ANEW and also identifies new words used in parliamentary speeches to broaden these two categories.

Word Clouds of Emotive and Neutral Words

For example, some of the neutral words incorporated by the authors are "walkway", "diameter", "metres" and "radiators" and some of the emotional words, "appalling", "empathy", "horrific" and "admiration". With regard to areas where we find a higher average level of emotive rhetoric there is "fabric of society", "social groups" and "welfare and quality of life", and the areas where we find a lower level of emotive rhetoric, "political system" and "economy". "Our measurement technique more accurately captures the emotive use of language in a political environment", the researchers assert.

The authors conclude their work with a reminder: although emotive parliamentary speeches may have positive implications, with increased public interest in the activities of their representatives and in politics in general, there is the risk of negative consequences: "Emotive rhetoric may also increase polarization and may favour politicians who prioritize emotional appeals over competent, coherent policy, and can harm the quality of deliberation and at the same time the quality of democratic representation", they warn.

Cambridge scientists have identified 200 approved drugs predicted to work against COVID-19 - of which only 40 are currently being tested in COVID-19 clinical trials.

In a study published today in Science Advances, a team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge's Milner Therapeutics Institute and Gurdon Institute used a combination of computational biology and machine learning to create a comprehensive map of proteins that are involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection - from proteins that help the virus break into the host cell to those generated as a consequence of infection. By examining this network using artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, they were able to identify key proteins involved in infection as well as biological pathways that might be targeted by drugs.

To date, the majority of small molecule and antibody approaches for treating COVID-19 are drugs that are either currently the subject of clinical trials or have already been through clinical trials and been approved. Much of the focus has been on several key virus or host targets, or on pathways - such as inflammation - where a drug treatment could be used as an intervention.

The team used computer modelling to carry out a 'virtual screen' of almost 2,000 approved drugs and identified 200 approved drugs that could be effective against COVID-19. Forty of these drugs have already entered clinical trials, which the researchers argue supports the approach they have taken.

When the researchers tested a subset of those drugs implicated in viral replication, they found that two in particular - an antimalarial drug and a type of medicine used to treat rheumatoid arthritis - were able to inhibit the virus, providing initial validation of their data-driven approach.

Professor Tony Kouzarides, Director of the Milner Therapeutics Institute, who led the study, said: "By looking across the board at the thousands of proteins that play some role in SARS-CoV-2 infection - whether actively or as a consequence of infections - we've been able to create a network uncovering the relationship between these proteins.

"We then used the latest machine learning and computer modelling techniques to identify 200 approved drugs that might help us treat COVID-19. Of these, 160 had not been linked to this infection before. This could give us many more weapons in our armoury to fight back against the virus."

Using artificial neural network analysis, the team classified the drugs depending on the overarching role of their targets in SARS-CoV-2 infection: those that targeted viral replication and those that targeted the immune response. They then took a subset of those involved in viral replication and tested them using cell lines derived from humans and from non-human primates.

Of particular note were two drugs, sulfasalazine (used to treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease) and proguanil (and antimalarial drug), which the team showed reduced SARS-CoV-2 viral replication in cells, raising the possibility of their potential use to prevent infection or to treat COVID-19.

Dr Namshik Han, Head of Computational Research and AI at the Milner Therapeutics Institute, added: "Our study has provided us with unexpected information about the mechanisms underlying COVID-19 and has provided us with some promising drugs that might be repurposed for either treating or preventing infection. While we took a data-driven approach - essentially allowing artificially intelligent algorithms to interrogate datasets - we then validated our findings in the laboratory, confirming the power of our approach.

"We hope this resource of potential drugs will accelerate the development of new drugs against COVID-19. We believe our approach will be useful for responding rapidly to new variants of SARS-CoV2 and other new pathogens that could drive future pandemics."