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For many couples, COVID-19 quarantine has shattered the normal routine and led some to renegotiate who does what around the house. Research has shown that the way couples divide up housework and how they feel about their arrangements are related to relationship satisfaction. It's also known that communication plays a big role in relationship satisfaction.

In a new study, Daniel Carlson of the University of Utah Department of Family and Consumer Studies led a team that analyzed the role that communication plays in the division of household labor. The authors used data on 487 heterosexual couples from the 2006 Marital and Relationship Survey. They focused on two things: How partners' communication influences the division of housework, and what role partners' communication quality plays in shaping how the division of housework affects relationship satisfaction.

They found that partner communication is the most important factor linking the division of household labor to satisfaction in the relationship. But the way that the partners' communication matters depends on gender.

"Right now people are quarantined, and families have lost important supports that enabled them to work. We've lost child care and schools, and some people have lost jobs, so more responsibilities have been thrust onto parents," said Carlson, associate professor and lead author of the paper. "In these times, focusing on the division of labor and understanding what factors shape it is important."

The paper was published on June 1, 2020, in the journal Socius. Amanda Miller and Stephanie Rudd from the University of Indianapolis were co-authors of the study.

The study found that the way women communicate shapes how couples split up the housework, and when women communicate negatively, men do more. However, the negative communication causes men's relationship satisfaction to decline. Men's communication isn't implicated in how couples divide the housework. Rather, it's an outcome of how the couple shares housework. When men contribute equally to household duties, they communicate better. When women do the majority of the housework, men communicate worse.

For women, an equal division of labor is important to their relationship satisfaction. For men, it depends on how his partner communicates with him.

"The division of labor has ramifications for not only individual relationships in terms of how happy they are, but also has implications more broadly in society," said Carlson. "When societies have gender equality, people have more life satisfaction and happiness."

At first, Carlson had expected that men's communication would determine the division of labor. Traditionally, women have had difficulty gaining equality in relationships and men were the impediment to this. But in this study, that doesn't bear out.

"Women's communication driving the labor division makes a lot of sense. If change needs to happen, women tend to be the one that's going to fight for more equality. The burden of communication would fall on their shoulders," said Carlson. "It's also surprising that it's not compassionate communication that gets men to do more housework, it's the negative communication."

Carlson is now looking into how the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantines has shifted the parents' divisions of childcare and housework. In a pre-publication brief, Carlson shared his and the team's initial findings. They analyzed responses to a survey of 1,060 parents in heterosexual couples conducted in mid-April that asked them to assessed the division of labor in their household during the pandemic compared with before it began. The preliminary results suggest that men are doing more housework and child care since the pandemic began, and this has led to more equal domestic arrangements. Women are still doing the majority of the housework, however.

"A lot of families are in a position where they're in this new world where they're going to have to renegotiate their arrangements," Carlson said. "Right now, it's an important time to think about the role of communication in this, and how things might change after quarantine is over."

Living in close proximity to oil and gas operations may increase the risk of preterm birth, according to new research on births in California's primary oil-producing region. The work could inform discussions about the state's implementation of setbacks from oil and gas extraction facilities.

Researchers examined 225,000 births from mothers who lived within about six miles of oil and gas wells in the San Joaquin Valley from 1998 to 2011. The results show that women who lived near wells in the first and second trimesters were 8 to 14 percent more likely to experience a spontaneous preterm birth - one that would otherwise be unexplained - at 20 to 31 weeks. Spontaneous preterm birth, in which a pregnancy ends before 37 weeks of gestation, is the leading cause of infant death in the United States.

The study, published June 5 in Environmental Epidemiology, adds to a small body of population-based research aimed at better understanding how environmental factors may affect the health outcomes of pregnancy, and it is among the first to investigate a potential link between residential proximity to oil and gas operations and spontaneous preterm birth in California. About 17 million people in the United States live within one mile of an active oil or gas well, including 2.1 million in California.

"There's some evidence that environmental exposures increase risk of preterm birth, but this particular exposure - oil and gas - has received very little attention in California, despite having millions of people living in close proximity to wells," said lead author David Gonzalez, a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "We're getting a sense that this does potentially have an adverse effect on health outcomes of pregnancy."

The analyses focused on how exposure to wells may affect spontaneous preterm births. Therefore, the researchers excluded multiple births and women who had medical conditions associated with early delivery, like maternal preeclampsia. Of about 225,000 birth outcomes analyzed over a 13-year period, 28,000 were spontaneous preterm births. The negative impact of living near a well appeared strongest among women who were Hispanic, Black or had fewer than 12 years of education.

"For me, the higher risk for the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black women is an important signal and it makes me want to ask more questions," Gonzalez said.

The new findings differ with those from another recent study from the University of California, Berkeley, which found that living near oil and gas operations throughout the state may increase the risk of low birth weight and small gestational age - but not preterm birth. The Stanford researchers note that one thing they did differently was to look only at cases of spontaneous preterm births, which the UC Berkeley group did not do.

"The causes of preterm birth, particularly those that occur spontaneously, remain a mystery. If you group all types of preterm births together, it makes it very hard to identify possible causes," said senior author Gary Shaw, DrPH, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "We looked exclusively at spontaneous preterm with our best efforts to look at narrower slices of when babies were born."

While previous studies on birth outcomes in Pennsylvania, Texas and Colorado have focused on unconventional natural gas extraction (commonly known as fracking), most wells in California are drilled using conventional methods. The researchers only analyzed wells that were active or in the preproduction stage - when the wells were being constructed - since those are expected to have the most emissions. The analyses included about 83,000 wells, 12,000 of which were in preproduction. They included mothers living within six miles of a well into their analyses of the highest risk of exposure.

"California is considering regulating how close to sensitive sites like schools these wells should be allowed to operate. I think this paper is strong evidence that we need to think carefully about that decision," said co-author Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford Earth. "A key next step, I think, is finding out explicitly how close you need to be to a well for it to cause harm."

The researchers also hope to further explore why living near a well could be associated with a spontaneous preterm birth. Residents near wells may be exposed to a range of environmental contaminants and stressors. For example, they could be breathing in chemicals used in extraction, experiencing stress from drilling noise, drinking contaminated water or breathing in higher levels of particulate matter in the air around such sites.

"We don't understand what causes preterm birth, but we understand that certain factors increase your risk, and environmental exposures are among those factors," Gonzalez said.

The American Cancer Society has updated its guideline for diet and physical activity for cancer prevention, with adjustments to reflect the most current evidence. The updated recommendations increase recommended levels of physical activity and have an increased emphasis on reducing the consumption of processed and red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, processed foods, and alcohol. They also include evidenced-based strategies to reduce barriers to healthy eating and active living and to reduce alcohol consumption. The guideline is published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, the ACS's flagship medical journal.

ACS cancer prevention recommendations are revised regularly as evidence emerges. They are created by a volunteer committee comprising a diverse group of experts from multiple sectors. The committee reviewed the evidence on diet and physical activity on cancer risk, and studied policy and systems changes that can reduce barriers to the public's ability to eat a healthy diet and a have physically active lifestyle.

The updated recommendations are based on systematic reviews conducted by the International Agency on Cancer Research (IARC); the World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute for Cancer Research (WCRF/AICR); and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services (USDA/HHS). The latest update is consistent with the recommendations from those groups as well as other major recommending bodies.

Based on the review of the evidence, the updated guideline reflects a few key differences from the previous ACS guideline:

Physical Activity

Previous:
Adults should engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity each week.

New:
Adults should engage in 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75-150 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week; achieving or exceeding the upper limit of 300 minutes is optimal.

Diet

Previous:
Consume a healthy diet, with an emphasis on plant foods.
Choose foods and beverages in amounts that help achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
Limit consumption of processed meat and red meat.
Eat at least 2.5 cups of vegetables and fruits each day.
Choose whole grains instead of refined grain products.

New:
Follow a healthy eating pattern at all ages.
A healthy eating pattern includes:

Foods that are high in nutrients in amounts that help achieve and maintain a healthy body weight;

A variety of vegetables--dark green, red, and orange, fiber-rich legumes (beans and peas), and others;

Fruits, especially whole fruits with a variety of colors; and

Whole grains.

A healthy eating pattern limits or does not include:

Red and processed meats;

Sugar-sweetened beverages; or

Highly processed foods and refined grain products.

Alcohol

Previous:
If you drink alcoholic beverages, limit consumption. Drink no more than 1 drink per day for women or 2 per day for men.

New:
It is best not to drink alcohol. People who do choose to drink alcohol should limit their consumption to no more than 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men.

Recommendation for Community Action

Previous:
Public, private, and community organizations should work collaboratively at national, state, and local levels to implement policy and environmental changes that:

Increase access to affordable, healthy foods in communities, worksites, and schools, and decrease access to and marketing of foods and beverages of low nutritional value, particularly to youth.

Provide safe, enjoyable, and accessible environments for physical activity in schools and worksites, and for transportation and recreation in communities.

New:
Public, private, and community organizations should work collaboratively at national, state, and local levels to develop, advocate for, and implement policy and environmental changes that increase access to affordable, nutritious foods; provide safe, enjoyable, and accessible opportunities for physical activity; and limit alcohol for all individuals.

"The guideline continues to reflect the current science that dietary patterns, not specific foods, are important to reduce the risk of cancer and improve overall health," said Laura Makaroff, DO, American Cancer Society senior vice president, Prevention and Early Detection. "There is no one food or even food group that is adequate to achieve a significant reduction in cancer risk. Current and evolving scientific evidence supports a shift away from a nutrient-centric approach to a more holistic concept of dietary patterns. People eat whole foods -not nutrients--and evidence continues to suggest that it is healthy dietary patterns that are associated with reduced risk for cancer, especially colorectal and breast cancer."

Bethesda, MD (June 9, 2020) -- It is estimated that more than 3.9 million American adults have taken some form of probiotics, with many patients looking to probiotics to improve their gastrointestinal health. However, after a detailed review of available literature, the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) has released new clinical guidelines finding that for most digestive conditions there is not enough evidence to support the use of probiotics. This is the first clinical guideline to focus on probiotics across multiple GI diseases while also considering the effect of each single-strain or multi-strain formulation of probiotics independently instead of grouping them all under the single umbrella of "probiotics." These guidelines are published in Gastroenterology, AGA's official journal.

The guideline supports use of certain probiotic formulations in three settings: for the prevention of Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) infection in adults and children taking antibiotics, for the prevention of necrotizing enterocolitis in preterm, low birthweight infants, and for the management of pouchitis, a complication of inflammatory bowel disease. There was insufficient evidence to recommend probiotics for treatment of Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and C. difficile infection. For acute infectious gastroenteritis in children, AGA recommends against the use of probiotics.

"Patients taking probiotics for Crohn's, ulcerative colitis or IBS should consider stopping," says guideline panel chair Grace L. Su from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "The supplements can be costly and there isn't enough evidence to prove a benefit or confirm lack of harm. Talk with your doctor."

Given widespread use and often biased sources of information, it is essential that the public have objective guidance about the appropriate use of and indications for probiotics. AGA employed the gold-standard for guideline development, GRADE methodology, to evaluate the available evidence on clinical efficacy of probiotics.

"While our guideline does highlight a few use cases for probiotics, it more importantly underscores that the public's assumptions about the benefits of probiotics are not well-founded, and that there is also a major variation in results based on the formulation of the probiotic product," says Dr. Su.

Key guideline recommendations:

For preterm (born before 37 weeks), low birthweight ( Certain probiotics should be considered for the prevention of C. difficile infection in adults and children who take antibiotics and for the management of pouchitis, a complication of ulcerative colitis that has been treated surgically.

Probiotics do not appear to be beneficial for children in North America who have acute gastroenteritis - they should not be given routinely to children who present to the emergency room due to diarrhea.

There was insufficient evidence for AGA to make recommendations regarding the use of probiotics to treat C. difficile infection, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis or IBS. For these conditions, AGA suggests that patients consider stopping probiotics, as there are associated costs and not enough evidence to suggest lack of harm.

Well-designed clinical trials will be needed to refine these AGA recommendations on probiotics and to investigate other clinical conditions relevant to gastroenterology.?

Gastroenterologists should suggest the use of probiotics to their patients only if there is clear benefit and should recognize that the effects of probiotics are not species-specific, but strain- and combination-specific.?

Read the AGA Institute guidelines and technical review on the role of probiotics in the management of gastrointestinal diseases to review the complete recommendations.

Two exceptional strains of tuberculosis, isolated from East African patients with multi-resistant forms of the disease, have been discovered thanks to the use of a new molecular test, Deeplex-MycTB[1]. These strains belong to a so far unknown bacterial lineage, apparently limited to the African Great Lakes region. Genome analyses show that this lineage originated from an ancestral phylum which predates the branching point shared by all other lineages of common tuberculosis strains known to date. This discovery reinforces the hypothesis of an East African origin for the tuberculosis bacillus, which remains the main cause of death from infectious causes, and provides additional molecular clues about the evolution towards a pathogenic lifestyle. This work, carried out by an international team led by researchers from the Lille Centre for Infection and Immunity (CNRS/Inserm/Institut Pasteur de Lille/Université de Lille/CHU de Lille), is published on June 9th 2020 in Nature Communications.

June 9, 2020 - We announce the publication of a new research paper titled 'Dual transcriptomic and molecular machine learning predicts all major clinical forms of drug cardiotoxicity' in Frontiers in Pharmacology. The study was conducted in a collaboration between the Computational Cardiovascular Science Group of the University of Oxford and Insilico Medicine.

'Drug-induced adverse effects on the heart are a very important problem, as highlighted recently in the news regarding COVID-19 treatments. In this study, we are very excited to show how our machine learning algorithm can identify drugs that can cause 6 potential forms of cardiac adverse outcomes from gene expression data', said Professor Blanca Rodriguez.

'Thanks to the increasing power of computers and algorithms to learn, this work represents an exemplar of how AI will revolutionise the future of drug development and safety evaluation in the pharma industry. It extends previous efforts in the field to predict not only the likelihood of a drug to induce lethal arrhythmias, but all the main cardiac adverse events associated with drug action. It also establishes the need for stringent testing criteria for the effective application of AI to this critical domain of the life sciences', said Professor Alfonso Bueno-Orovio.

Computational methods can increase the productivity of drug discovery pipelines, through overcoming challenges such as cardiotoxicity identification. In this paper, researchers demonstrated the simultaneous prediction of cardiotoxic relationships for six drug-induced cardiotoxicity types using a machine learning approach on a large collected and curated dataset of transcriptional and molecular profiles. The algorithm generality is demonstrated through validation in an independent drug dataset, in addition to cross-validation.

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine comments, 'Drug-induced cardiotoxicity is one of the reasons for late-stage clinical trial failures. We see the Rodriguez group at Oxford as the world's main source of accurate cardiotoxicity predictors. The results of their work are adopted by the FDA, and many pharmaceutical companies. We are very happy to collaborate on AI-powered multi-omics cardiotoxicity prediction engines, and have one of our top AI scientists, Polina Mamoshina, defend her doctorate under one of the biggest names in computational biomedicine'.

Polina Mamoshina, is now Senior Research Scientist at Insilico Medicine. She comments, 'In silico or computational models have made great progress in past years. And one of their great features is that they can be humanized and so have increased chances for translation into drug discovery and development pipelines. The scope of this work was to predict drug adverse reactions that were shown in humans. We believe that this work can be extended to side effects manifested in other organs and tissues and that pipeline that we proposed provides a valuable benchmark for future studies'.

In the last two decades a new phenotype termed as Sarcopenic Obesity "SO" has emerged. There is still a debate regarding the negative impact of SO on health outcomes, especially in terms of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases; with the speculation that the two components of SO, namely the increase of fat deposition and the reduction in muscle mass and strength, seem to act synergistically to increase the adverse consequences on health, however this hypothesis has not been confirmed.

In this view, a group of Lebanese investigators from Beirut Arab University (Lebanon) and their colleagues from the University of Oxford (UK) and Gunma Paz University (Japan), conducted in adherence to the international PRISMA guidelines a systematic review and meta-analysis with the main scope to provide benchmark data on the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (Mets) among individuals with SO, as well as to detect the potential association between the presence of SO and the higher risk of Mets.

Of the 606 articles retrieved, 12 studies including a total of 11,308 adults with obesity of both genders met the inclusion criteria, revealing two main findings. Firstly, a similar overall prevalence of Mets in individuals with SO when compared to those without SO was identified. Second, the presence of SO appears not to increase the risk of Mets with respect to those without SO.

The principal investigator Professor Marwan El Ghoch - Chairperson of the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at the Beirut Arab University comments..."this finding has clinical implications, as health providers, especially clinicians, should be aware of the high prevalence of Mets in individuals with obesity (55-60%), however, the coexistence of sarcopenia appears not to increase the risk of Mets in this population (i.e., SO).

However, El Ghoch underlines that..."despite the fact that we were not able to find a higher prevalence of Mets among individuals with SO compared to those with only obesity (non-SO), nor an association between the latter and a higher risk of Mets; these findings should be interpreted with caution before jumping to conclusions, due to the limitations of the included studies in our systematic review, foremost the cross-sectional design of most of the included studies, our finding needs to be replicated through longitudinal studies to clarify the real effect of SO on the onset and progression of Mets before drawing any firm conclusion.

A new machine learning approach classifies a common type of brain tumour into low or high grades with almost 98% accuracy, researchers report in the journal IEEE Access. Scientists in India and Japan, including from Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), developed the method to help clinicians choose the most effective treatment strategy for individual patients.

Gliomas are a common type of brain tumour affecting glial cells, which provide support and insulation for neurons. Patient treatment varies depending on the tumour's aggressiveness, so it's important to get the diagnosis right for each individual. Radiologists obtain a very large amount of data from MRI scans to reconstruct a 3D image of the scanned tissue. Much of the data available in MRI scans cannot be detected by the naked eye, such as details related to the tumour shape, texture, or the image's intensity. Artificial intelligence (AI ) algorithms help extract this data. Medical oncologists have been using this approach, called radiomics, to improve patient diagnoses, but accuracy still needs to be enhanced.

iCeMS bioengineer Ganesh Pandian Namasivayam collaborated with Indian data scientist Balasubramanian Raman from Roorkee to develop a machine learning approach that can classify gliomas into low or high grade with 97.54% accuracy. Low grade gliomas include grade I pilocytic astrocytoma and grade II low-grade glioma. These are the less aggressive and less malignant of the glioma tumours. High grade gliomas include grade III malignant glioma and grade IV glioblastoma multiforme, which are much more aggressive and more malignant with a relatively short post-diagnosis survival time. The choice of patient treatment largely depends on being able to determine the glioma's grading.

The team, including Rahul Kumar, Ankur Gupta and Harkirat Singh Arora, used a dataset from MRI scans belonging to 210 people with high grade gliomas and another 75 with low grade gliomas. They developed an approach called CGHF, which stands for: computational decision support system for glioma classification using hybrid radiomics and stationary wavelet-based features. They chose specific algorithms for extracting features from some of the MRI scans and then trained another predictive algorithm to process this data and classify the gliomas. They then tested their model on the rest of the MRI scans to assess its accuracy.

"Our method outperformed other state-of-the-art approaches for predicting glioma grades from brain MRI scans," says Balasubramanian. "This is quite considerable."

"We hope AI helps develop a semi-automatic or automatic machine predictive software model that can help doctors, radiologists, and other medical practitioners tailor the best approaches for their individual patients," adds Ganesh.

Women who are prescribed opioids after childbirth have an increased risk of persistent opioid use or other serious opioid-related events, including overdose, in their first year postpartum, according to a new study by Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers. This is true regardless of whether the woman had a vaginal delivery or a cesarean section.

The study, published today in Annals of Internal Medicine, followed more than 160,000 pregnant women ages 18-44 enrolled in TennCare who had no history of opioid prescriptions or opioid use disorder within 180 days before their delivery.

Alarmingly, more than half of the women who delivered vaginally and 91% of women who delivered via C-section filled at least one opioid prescription following childbirth. More than 10% of vaginal births and 24% of C-sections also involved filling a second opioid prescription in the postpartum period.

According to Sarah Osmundson, MD, MS, assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at VUMC and lead investigator for the study, increasing the number of postpartum opioid prescriptions also increased a woman's risk for experiencing a serious opioid-related event, including opioid-related death, persistent use and a diagnosis of opioid use disorder.

"This work highlights serious risks associated with opioid prescribing after childbirth, especially among women who receive multiple prescriptions," said Osmundson. "Routine prescribing after vaginal birth is still common, and it is alarming to know that this may put women at risk of long-term problems with opioids for a procedure (vaginal birth) where opioids have dubious benefit."

"While prior studies have looked at persistent opioid use after surgery, including C-sections, little attention has been paid to serious opioid-related events following vaginal childbirth, leaving physicians with limited information about the associated risks," added Carlos G. Grijalva, MD, MPH, associate professor of Health Policy and senior investigator for the study. "Current clinical guidelines do not provide clear recommendations for opioid prescribing after childbirth, so this work can help inform practice."

Because the rate of women who receive opioids after vaginal delivery is high in Tennessee and other states, the researchers recommend implementing rational opioid prescribing guidelines to reduce risk and improve outcomes for women in the postpartum period.

As the next step in finding a potential targeted treatment for pancreatic cancer, researchers at the University of Cincinnati are publishing a new study revealing how a combination therapy may improve outcomes for patients with this disease.

The study, led by graduate research assistant Kombo N'Guessan, PhD, and Xiaoyang Qi, PhD, professor in the Division of Hematology Oncology at the UC College of Medicine, will be published in the June 8 online edition of the journal Molecular Therapy.

"These research findings will help us lead a clinical trial with a combination therapeutic approach to treat pancreatic cancer patients," says Qi, corresponding author on the paper and a member of the UC Cancer Center.

Researchers in this study have found that using a therapeutic compound, called SapC-DOPS, a nanovesicle (or a nanotechnology drug delivery system) made of microscopic components of a cell, to deliver a combined biomarker target therapy and standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer may show benefit to patients.

"Only a small number of promising drugs target pancreatic cancer, which is the fourth-leading cause of cancer deaths, with a five-year survival of less than six percent," Qi says. "Pancreatic cancer is usually asymptomatic in the early stages, while frequently invading lymph nodes and the liver, and less often the lungs and visceral organs. Current treatments, including surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, have failed to improve long-term survival.

"We've discovered a drug-targetable biomarker (phosphatidylserine) for pancreatic cancer cells in previous studies, and one of the first line treatments for advanced pancreatic cancer is chemotherapy, but it only provides marginal improvements for patients. We wanted to see if we could use the current first line treatment in combination with the novel nanovesicle drug delivery to improve outcomes."

In the early 2000s, Qi developed SapC-DOPS, a combination of a cell protein, SapC, and a phospholipid, DOPS, that assembled into tiny cavities can selectively target cells and deliver therapies while sparing all other unaffected cells and tissues. In the past, he has studied that nanovesicle in cancer animal models looking at brain, lung, skin, prostate, blood, breast and pancreatic cancers. It is currently being studied in clinical trials for brain cancers.

In this study, researchers used both animal models and human cancer cells to test this theory and found that the combination of these therapies together helped to target the biomarker on cancer cell surface at various points in their life cycle, ultimately inhibiting tumor growth and potentially increasing survival, in comparison to the treatments alone.

"This study shows that the combination treatment using the nanovesicles and a standard chemotherapy could be beneficial for patients with pancreatic cancer, possibly extending lives and helping a subset of patients with cancer that don't have many options," Qi says.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, USA - Brain bleeds called intracerebral hemorrhages remained stable in incidence among all age groups over the past 30 years, but they increased in people 75 and older, according to a new analysis of the Framingham Heart Study. The findings are in JAMA Neurology.

Use of anticoagulants also increased in senior adults threefold over the period, but authors cautioned against making too much of it.

"We are not advocating that people stop taking statins or anticoagulants," said report senior author Sudha Seshadri, MD, neurologist in the Long School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. "Those therapies reduce the risk of ischemic strokes, which represent approximately nine of every 10 strokes, with intracerebral hemorrhages representing the other tenth."

Because of the increase in life expectancy and aging of the population, health care systems will likely see an increase in the number of patients with brain hemorrhages, said Dr. Seshadri, who is senior investigator of the Framingham Heart Study and at UT Health San Antonio directs the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Imaging and medications

The report's lead author, Vasileios-Arsenios Lioutas, MD, a stroke neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, designed the study to assess trends in the incidence of intracerebral hemorrhages in 10,333 Framingham participants from 1948 to 2016. Of the participants, 129 experienced such a hemorrhage during study follow-up.

The years were divided into three periods: 1948-1986, 1987-1999 and 2000-2016.

"We wanted to account for changes in diagnostic approaches, and one of the main advancements was the CT scan, which started being used around 1980," Dr. Lioutas said. "Many things that could not previously be diagnosed as bleeds could be seen very easily after that time."

The late 1990s saw increased prescribing of blood thinners such as warfarin, which a series of trials showed to be effective at preventing clots arising from atrial fibrillation, a heart rhythm abnormality. In the 2000s, further preventative practices and additional medications were added.

"One of the possible explanations for why we saw more bleeds in older Framingham participants is that, by using these anticoagulant medications, we prevented adverse events that would potentially have killed them earlier in life," Dr. Lioutas said. "We prolonged their life expectancy and then, because we did, they were at risk to have a hemorrhage later in life."

"It's a bit of a balancing act," Dr. Seshadri said. "We want to be careful what message we send about this. Statins and anticoagulants have value in preventing life-altering or fatal events."

Hypertension's role

The study also examined risk factors for two types of brain hemorrhages. Lobar intracerebral hemorrhages occur closer to the surface of the brain, whereas deep intracerebral hemorrhages occur deeper within the brain matter and involve different structures.

Hypertension, previously thought to be more important as a risk factor in deep intracerebral hemorrhages, increased risk in both types, the study found.

Deep intracerebral hemorrhages are associated with changes in the very small vessels of the brain that are the consequence of longtime exposure to hypertension, Dr. Lioutas said.

Lobar hemorrhages also feature changes in small vessels, but the vessels are near the brain surface. Deposits of amyloid protein - best known for being linked to Alzheimer's disease - are believed to be a culprit in these hemorrhages.

"As was the case in previous research, we saw that these lines of distinction are not so clear," Dr. Lioutas said. "Especially in lobar hemorrhage, we saw that many people also had hypertension, so we now believe hypertension plays a role in both deep and lobar intracerebral hemorrhages."

The study shows that while clinical advances have been successful in decreasing stroke rates in developed countries, the decline is mostly for clot-related strokes and not in hemorrhagic strokes.

"We saw an increase in intracerebral hemorrhages in the older Framingham population, in a demographic group that is growing larger year by year in America and worldwide," Dr. Seshadri said. "We should find new means of prevention of these strokes, and at the same time health care systems should be ready to treat more hemorrhages in the future."

A group of researchers has determined how different proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2 - the virus that causes COVID-19 - generate immune responses when given to rabbits as immunizations. According to the authors, the results provide "a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of immune response generated by different vaccine antigens ... which could greatly benefit the development and evaluation of SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics and vaccines." In the ongoing quest for a COVID-19 vaccine, scientists have identified the viral spike protein complex - the surface structure that allows the virus to enter human cells through the ACE2 receptor - as the most promising base for a successful vaccine. But researchers still do not fully understand how the spike protein generates responses from the immune system, and whether these responses correlate with protection. Seeking insight, Supriya Ravichandran and colleagues immunized rabbits with one of four SARS-CoV-2 spike protein antigens similar to those being used in clinical trials. The authors observed that antibodies from animals immunized with the receptor-binding domain (RBD, which is key for the virus' ability to bind ACE2 and has been included in most spike protein vaccines), the S1 domain, or the S1+S2 ectodomain neutralized as many as 98% of SARS-CoV-2 virions after two vaccinations. Importantly, the RBD immunization was the most effective option, as it generated more high-affinity antibodies than the vaccines based on either S1 or the S1+S2 ectodomain. The researchers did not directly test their vaccine's protective capabilities in the rabbits, but say that the ability to elicit high-affinity antibodies may enhance the protective properties of vaccines for COVID-19.

Durham, NC - A new study released today in STEM CELLS addresses a significant problem that has been confronting human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) therapy. While hundreds of clinical trials involving thousands of patients are under way to test hMSCs' ability to treat everything from heart disease to brain injury, there has been no way to determine prior to the donor undergoing a painful and expensive surgical harvesting of bone marrow whether or not it would be worth the effort. However, this new study, conducted by scientists at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, identifies a potential biomarker for prescreening donors for their MSCs' growth capacity and potency.

"With the global stem cell market predicted to reach over US$270 billion by 2025 (according to a report published by Transparency Market Research), there is a pressing need for effective biomarkers to be used in the screening of stem cells from prospective donors. This need is boosted by the rapid growth of regenerative medicine, with its pallet of cells, genes and engineered tissues," said Dr. Simon Cool, of A*STAR's Institute of Medical Biology and co-corresponding author of the study. That is what sparked this new investigation.

In an earlier study, this same laboratory had classified hMSCs from age and sex-matched human donors into high- and low-growth capacity groups and established criteria for identifying stem cells with enhanced potency. "These hMSCs showed increased proliferative potential that correlated with enhanced clonogenicity, a higher proportion of smaller-sized cells with longer telomeres, elevated expression of certain cell surface markers, and most importantly, improved ability to mediate ectopic bone formation," said the study's co-corresponding author, Lawrence Stanton, Ph.D., who at the time of the study was a member of A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore (and is now with Qatar Biomedical Research Institute).

The team's latest investigation sought to build upon that information by performing molecular analyses of these cells to better understand what accounted for their improved utility. Microarray analysis revealed that hMSCs with a genomic deletion of glutathione S-transferase theta (GSTT1) -- part of a superfamily of genes that bring together glutathione and toxins to safely remove them from the body -- show high-growth capacity. The GSTT1-null hMSCs also exhibit an enhanced ability to clone themselves and grow into full colonies, and they have longer telomeres. Both of these factors are important determinants of MSC potency.

"We believe our study highlights the utility of GSTT1 as a potential biomarker for MSC scalability and may prove useful in selecting potential donors for the creation of high quality hMSC cell banks to improve stem cell therapies," Dr. Cool said.

"The ability to pre-screen donors for a marker that corresponds to better growth of MSCs in vitro is truly important", said Dr. Jan Nolta, Editor-in-Chief of STEM CELLS. "Many teams have sought screening tools like this, which could prevent lot failure for clinical batches of MSCs that don't expand robustly. Until now, there has been no way to evaluate that prior to marrow harvest."

Persistently engaging in negative thinking patterns may raise the risk of Alzheimer's disease, finds a new UCL-led study.

In the study of people aged over 55, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, researchers found 'repetitive negative thinking' (RNT) is linked to subsequent cognitive decline as well as the deposition of harmful brain proteins linked to Alzheimer's.

The researchers say RNT should now be further investigated as a potential risk factor for dementia, and psychological tools, such as mindfulness or meditation, should be studied to see if these could reduce dementia risk.

Lead author Dr Natalie Marchant (UCL Psychiatry) said: "Depression and anxiety in mid-life and old age are already known to be risk factors for dementia. Here, we found that certain thinking patterns implicated in depression and anxiety could be an underlying reason why people with those disorders are more likely to develop dementia.

"Taken alongside other studies, which link depression and anxiety with dementia risk, we expect that chronic negative thinking patterns over a long period of time could increase the risk of dementia. We do not think the evidence suggests that short-term setbacks would increase one's risk of dementia.

"We hope that our findings could be used to develop strategies to lower people's risk of dementia by helping them to reduce their negative thinking patterns."

For the Alzheimer's Society-supported study, the research team from UCL, INSERM and McGill University studied 292 people over the age of 55 who were part of the PREVENT-AD cohort study, and a further 68 people from the IMAP+ cohort.

Over a period of two years, the study participants responded to questions about how they typically think about negative experiences, focusing on RNT patterns like rumination about the past and worry about the future. The participants also completed measures of depression and anxiety symptoms.

Their cognitive function was assessed, measuring memory, attention, spatial cognition, and language. Some (113) of the participants also underwent PET brain scans, measuring deposits of tau and amyloid, two proteins which cause the most common type of dementia, Alzheimer's disease, when they build up in the brain.

The researchers found that people who exhibited higher RNT patterns experienced more cognitive decline over a four-year period, and declines in memory (which is among the earlier signs of Alzheimer's disease), and they were more likely to have amyloid and tau deposits in their brain.

Depression and anxiety were associated with subsequent cognitive decline but not with either amyloid or tau deposition, suggesting that RNT could be the main reason why depression and anxiety contribute to Alzheimer's disease risk.

"We propose that repetitive negative thinking may be a new risk factor for dementia as it could contribute to dementia in a unique way," said Dr Marchant.

The researchers suggest that RNT may contribute to Alzheimer's risk via its impact on indicators of stress such as high blood pressure, as other studies have found that physiological stress can contribute to amyloid and tau deposition.

Co-author Dr Gael Chételat (INSERM and Université de Caen-Normandie) commented: "Our thoughts can have a biological impact on our physical health, which might be positive or negative. Mental training practices such as meditation might help promoting positive- while down-regulating negative-associated mental schemes.

"Looking after your mental health is important, and it should be a major public health priority, as it's not only important for people's health and well-being in the short term, but it could also impact your eventual risk of dementia."

The researchers hope to find out if reducing RNT, possibly through mindfulness training or targeted talk therapy, could in turn reduce the risk of dementia. Dr Marchant and Dr Chételat and other European researchers are currently working on a large project to see if interventions such as meditation may help reduce dementia risk by supporting mental health in old age.

Fiona Carragher, Director of Research and Influencing at Alzheimer's Society, said: "Understanding the factors that can increase the risk of dementia is vital in helping us improve our knowledge of this devastating condition and, where possible, developing prevention strategies. The link shown between repeated negative thinking patterns and both cognitive decline and harmful deposits is interesting although we need further investigation to understand this better. Most of the people in the study were already identified as being at higher risk of Alzheimer's disease, so we would need to see if these results are echoed within the general population and if repeated negative thinking increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease itself.

"During these unstable times, we are hearing from people every day on our Alzheimer's Society Dementia Connect line who are feeling scared, confused, or struggling with their mental health. So it's important to point out that this isn't saying a short-term period of negative thinking will cause Alzheimer's disease. Mental health could be a vital cog in the prevention and treatment of dementia; more research will tell us to what extent."

Virus DNA left on a hospital bed rail was found in nearly half of all sites sampled across a ward within 10 hours and persisted for at least five days, according to a new study by UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).

The study, published as a letter in the Journal of Hospital Infection, aimed to safely simulate how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, may spread across surfaces in a hospital.

Instead of using the SARS-CoV-2 virus, researchers artificially replicated a section of DNA from a plant-infecting virus, which cannot infect humans, and added it to a millilitre of water at a similar concentration to SARS-CoV-2 copies found in infected patients' respiratory samples.

Researchers placed the water containing this DNA on the hand rail of a hospital bed in an isolation room - that is, a room for higher-risk or infected patients - and then sampled 44 sites across a hospital ward over the following five days.

They found that after 10 hours, the surrogate genetic material had spread to 41% of sites sampled across the hospital ward, from bed rails to door handles to arm rests in a waiting room to children's toys and books in a play area. This increased to 59% of sites after three days, falling to 41% on the fifth day.

Dr Lena Ciric (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering), a senior author of the study, said: "Our study shows the important role that surfaces play in the transmission of a virus and how critical it is to adhere to good hand hygiene and cleaning.

"Our surrogate was inoculated once to a single site, and was spread through the touching of surfaces by staff, patients and visitors. A person with SARS-CoV-2, though, will shed the virus on more than one site, through coughing, sneezing and touching surfaces."

The highest proportion of sites that tested positive for the surrogate came from the immediate bedspace area - including a nearby room with several other beds - and clinical areas such as treatment rooms. On day three, 86% of sampled sites in clinical areas tested positive, while on day four, 60% of sampled sites in the immediate bedspace area tested positive.

Co-author Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering), Lead Healthcare Scientist at GOSH, said: "People can become infected with Covid-19 through respiratory droplets produced during coughing or sneezing. Equally, if these droplets land on a surface, a person may become infected after coming into contact with the surface and then touching their eyes, nose or mouth.

"Like SARS-CoV-2, the surrogate we used for the study could be removed with a disinfectant wipe or by washing hands with soap and water. Cleaning and handwashing represent our first line of defence against the virus and this study is a significant reminder that healthcare workers and all visitors to a clinical setting can help stop its spread through strict hand hygiene, cleaning of surfaces, and proper use of personal protective equipment (PPE)."

SARS-CoV-2 will likely be spread within bodily fluid such as cough droplets, whereas the study used virus DNA in water. More sticky fluid such as mucus would likely spread more easily.

One caveat to the study is that, while it shows how quickly a virus can spread if left on a surface, it cannot determine how likely it is that a person would be infected.