Culture

EVANSTON, Ill. -- Every year, 15 million babies are born too early, with 1 million never making it to their next birthday. And in low-resource settings, the outlook is even more dire. Half of babies born at 32 weeks or earlier will die; whereas in high-resource settings, almost all of these babies survive.

To help bridge this gap, an interdisciplinary team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new wireless, battery-charged, affordable monitoring system for newborn babies that can easily be implemented to provide clinical-grade care in nearly any setting.

The new devices also exceed the capabilities of existing, wired monitoring technologies to provide information beyond traditional vital signs, including crying, movement, body orientation and heart sounds. These soft, flexible sensors also are far gentler on newborns' fragile skin, and their wireless capabilities allow for more skin-to-skin contact with parents.

Not only can this technology lower risks by monitoring premature babies, it can also is monitor pregnant women during labor to ensure a healthy and safe delivery and reduce risks of maternal mortality. By closely monitoring the most vulnerable patients, physicians can be alerted to intervene before the infant or mother become seriously ill.

Details about the technology will be published March 11 in the journal Nature Medicine, with extensive tests on newborns at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago. The sensors described in the paper also are now being tested on newborns at Aga Khan University Hospital Nairobi, Kenya and on pregnant mothers in the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia.

'From the hospital to the home to the field'

Led by Northwestern's John A. Rogers, a pioneer in the emerging field of bio-integrated electronics, the research team developed the sensors last year and tested them on babies in the United States. Now, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Save the Children, his team is deploying the devices internationally, starting with hospitals in Ghana, India, Kenya and Zambia.

"We designed our technology to offer affordable, clinical-grade monitoring capabilities for use anywhere in the world -- from the hospital to the home to the field," Rogers said. "Using advanced concepts in soft electronics, we achieved devices that are safe, easy to use and patient-centric. We included in our research a focus on features to allow application in low-resource settings in the developing world, where this type of technology has the greatest potential to improve and possibly save lives."

"The new technology represents a monumental advance in neonatal and pediatric care," said Dr. Debra Weese-Mayer, a pediatrician in autonomic medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who co-led the study with Rogers. "This is not strictly about making critical care systems 'wireless', this is about thinking expansively about what non-traditional variables we need to incorporate to more fully study health and ensure stability."

Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberley Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and professor of neurological surgery in Feinberg. He also is executive director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bio-electronics at Northwestern. Weese-Mayer is the Beatrice Cummings Mayer Professor of Pediatric Autonomic Medicine at Feinberg and chief of pediatric autonomic medicine at Lurie Children's Hospital.

Reliable in areas without stable power

The new study builds on previous research conducted in the Rogers lab. Last February, Rogers and his collaborators published results from a study conducted at Lurie Children's Hospital and Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago. Here, researchers tested a pair of wireless, battery-free, flexible sensors on premature babies. The sensors proved to be as precise and accurate as traditional wire-based monitoring devices that interfere with parent-baby cuddling and physical bonding.

To move these platforms from Chicago into the developing world, Rogers' team added a small, thin, rechargeable battery to give the device stable, reliable power for operation in rural settings and to improve the wireless operating range. The team also added extra sensing capabilities to monitor crying, movement and heart sounds.

"We couldn't just drop our existing technology into other countries and different settings without taking their specific needs into account," Rogers said. "We wanted to understand the broader landscape and to develop a technology that is easy-to-use, helpful and practical. We knew that we needed to build the foundations for highly robust, reusable devices, applicable in regions with limited facilities and resources."

"Some areas experience rolling blackouts every day and uneven internet coverage," said Dr. Shuai (Steve) Xu, a Northwestern Medicine dermatologist and co-first author of the study who leads deployment of the system on the ground. "People in these areas need a practical device that works and is cheaper to manufacture."

Sensors send data to mobile devices

The sensors use radio frequencies to wirelessly transmit data from the baby to nurses' station displays. They also can send data directly to a smartphone or tablet.

"The beauty of the technology is that it can operate with a wide range of mobile devices without sacrificing accuracy, relative to the most sophisticated systems used in hospitals today," Xu said. "You don't need expensive equipment that requires a specialized bioengineer and I.T. department to install. You pull out your mobile device, connect to our sensors, and you're taking care of patients."

Implementing technology abroad

Xu, the medical director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bio-electronics, assistant professor of dermatology and pediatrics at Feinberg and assistant professor of biomedical engineering at McCormick, has spent the past six months leading a team of engineers in setting up the technology in hospitals in Kenya and Zambia, working with nurses and physicians. The program will involve testing the sensors on 15,000 pregnant women and 500 newborn babies by mid-2021.

"This is a collaborative team effort," Xu said. "We've spent a lot of time working with and listening to physicians, nurses and health care workers in each location. We want to make sure that our technology is useful and helps solve problems they face every day. It's been incredibly motivating."

So far, 42 babies in Kenya have worn the wireless sensors alongside gold-standard, traditional monitoring systems so researchers could do a side-by-side, quantitative comparison. After validating the device at Aga Khan University Hospital, the team plans to move the technology to low-resource hospitals in rural Africa, where the need is greatest.

"The urgency of need in Nairobi is significant, but nothing compared to that in the rural areas," Rogers said. "There's room for improvement everywhere, but the added value of making affordable health care monitoring systems is so much higher in these settings."

Collaborating with nurses abroad

Rogers and Xu said the early feedback from hospital nurses has been invaluable. The sensors work in pairs -- one on the chest and one wrapped around a foot. In an earlier version of the technology, nurses worried that the chest sensor might be too large for small, fragile newborns. Rogers and his team immediately responded to this feedback to make a smaller, thinner chest device.

"The nurses have been enthusiastic about the new iteration," Rogers said. "These latest platforms also are giving us great data. When we put the sensor on the baby, it starts working immediately, in nearly any setting or location."

Nurses also have struggled with perfecting the foot sensor's alignment. If the sensor is not correctly wrapped around the foot, then the data are not as accurate.

"It takes some practice to quickly align the foot sensor," Rogers said. "So we designed a system that lights up as red, yellow or green -- incorrect, close or in the right place -- depending on the accuracy of the alignment, to provide feedback to the caregiver."

'Mothers love our sensors'

The team also has received encouraging feedback from parents, who benefit from more physical bonding or "kangaroo care." Dennis Ryu, a Ph.D. student in the Rogers lab, spent six weeks on the ground at Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya and University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia with plans to return this spring.

"Mothers love our sensors because they can have more skin-to-skin contact with their babies," Ryu said. "Kangaroo care has profound benefits for the mother and baby, including bonding, better sleep and less stress."

"Suggestions come directly from speaking to people on the ground and directly observing how our sensors are used," Xu added. "It really is a bi-directional information flow."

What's next?

With an exclusive license to the technology from Northwestern, Rogers and Xu launched Sibel Health to scale the technology and to earn FDA approval later this year, with a focus on maternal, fetal, neonatal and pediatric health. More recently, Sibel announced a strategic partnership with Dräger, a leading international safety and medical technology company that focuses on products that protect, support and save lives.

Next, Rogers and Xu plan to incorporate artificial intelligence into the sensors to extract insights from the data and provide health care professionals with recommendations for care.

"These systems are generating half a gigabyte of data for one patient a day. That's a lot of physiological information," Xu said. "We'd like to use clinically validated algorithms that could, for example, tell us if a baby is likely to develop sepsis within the next 24 hours based on their vital signals. Then we could have ventilators and antibiotics ready to escalate care almost proactively. For pregnant women, we're working with Dr. Jeffrey Stringer -- the director of the division of Global Women's Health at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to more quickly identify danger signals in low-resource settings."

Rogers estimates these new wireless sensors could appear in U.S. hospitals within the next year. His team also expects to send sensors to more hospitals in countries around the world as part of an ongoing international effort to improve affordable health care monitoring.

"We believe that our technology could significantly enhance the quality of neonatal care around the world," Rogers said. "We think in terms of a 'NICU of the future,' available anywhere."

"The vision is bold," Xu said. "We want to see these sensors in every country, monitoring the first heartbeat to the last in our most vulnerable patients."

What The Study Did: Researchers used French electronic health data to investigate how risk of colorectal cancer compared among obese adults who had weight-loss surgery and who didn't.

Authors: Laurent Bailly, M.D., Ph.D., Universite Cote d'Azur, Nice, France, and coauthors.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2020.0089)

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

The ability of crocodiles to survive mass extinctions could be in part due to their more hands-on approach to parenting, say scientists at the University of Bath's Milner Centre for Evolution.

Crocodiles are one of the oldest surviving lineages on Earth, having survived two extinctions - the mass extinction in the late Cretaceous period that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and another smaller extinction event in the Eocene period 33.9 million years ago that wiped out huge numbers of marine and other aquatic life.

The reasons for their remarkable resilience to extinctions are poorly understood. Previous studies have suggested that diet, their aquatic nature, and behaviours that help them cope with harsh environmental conditions all factor in their ability to survive.

A new study published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society suggests that crocodiles' unique reproductive biology may also play a part.

Similar to their turtle relatives, crocodylians have no sex chromosomes; instead the sex of hatchlings is determined by the temperature at which they are incubated. Each of these species has a threshold temperature at which the ratio of males to females is roughly equal.

For crocodylians, the higher the temperature, the more males are produced. For turtles, the reverse is true. Climate change is already causing some turtle populations to become over 80% female, which in the future could lead to devastating consequences for their populations. The researchers wanted to determine whether there was a similar effect on crocodylian species.

The scientists analysed data from 20 different species of crocodiles from across the world to see the relationship between their latitude and a variety of characteristics including body size and reproductive data including egg mass, clutch size and incubation temperature.

They found (with some notable exceptions) that smaller species tend to live at latitudes close to the equator, with larger species generally living in temperate climes in the higher latitudes. More surprisingly, they found that, in contrast to turtles, the threshold incubation temperatures don't correlate with the latitude.

Whilst turtles are critically endangered by the increase in temperatures due to climate change, this study suggests crocodiles may be slightly more resilient because of the ways they look after their young.

Turtles always return to the same beach to nest and lay eggs regardless of the local environmental conditions, leaving their young to hatch alone and fend for themselves.

The authors suggest that the geographical location doesn't affect the incubation temperatures as much as in turtles because crocodiles select their nesting sites carefully and bury their nests in rotting vegetation or earth which insulates them against temperature fluctuations.

However, crocodiles are still threatened by other human activities and some species will likely succumb to the current mass extinction faced by the planet.

Rebecca Lakin, first author of the study and PhD student at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, said: "Crocodylians are keystone species in their ecosystems. They are the last surviving archosaurs, a group that once inhabited every continent and has persisted for at least 230 million years.

"They show a remarkable resilience to cataclysmic climate change and habitat loss, however half of all living crocodile species are threatened with extinction and the rate of vertebrate species loss will soon equal or even exceed that of the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs.

"Whilst their parenting skills and other adaptations brace them for climate change, they aren't immune. They are still vulnerable to other human-induced threats such as pollution, the damming of rivers, nest flooding and poaching for meat or skin.

"Climate change could encourage these great survivors to relocate to other areas that are close to densely human populated areas, putting them at even greater threat."

City dwellers take more antibiotics than people in rural areas; children and the elderly use them more often than middle-aged people; the use of antibiotics decreases as education increases, but only in rich countries: These are three of the more striking trends identified by researchers of the NRW Forschungskolleg "One Health and Urban Transformation" at the University of Bonn in a recent study. They evaluated 73 publications on the use of antibiotics in the outpatient sector around the world. The subject is of great importance: Too many antibiotics are still being administered. Possible consequences are resistances: Already there are hardly any effective drugs available against some bacteria. The study will be published in May in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, but is already available online.

Most antibiotics are taken by patients whose illness does not require hospitalization. In Germany, these cases account for about 85 percent of all prescriptions; EU-wide the rate is even slightly higher. But what factors promote the use of antibiotics in the outpatient health sector? Scientists have been interested in this question for some time. It is largely undisputed that too many antibiotics are used overall. This promotes the development of resistances and thus ensures that these weapons, which are actually the sharpest tools against bacterial infections, are gradually blunted.

The current study summarizes the present state of knowledge on this issue. The scientists involved evaluated a total of 73 publications on the driving factors of antibiotic use in the general population. "We were interested not only in individual parameters such as age or education, but also in geographical contexts and socio-cultural factors," explains Dennis Schmiege, who is pursuing his doctorate at the University of Bonn (Center for Development Research (ZEF)) under supervision of Prof. Mariele Evers (Department of Geography) and Prof. Thomas Kistemann (Institute for Hygiene and Public Health).

600 possible influencing variables evaluated

Together with his colleague Dr. Timo Falkenberg, he evaluated almost 600 variables and arranged them into about 45 groups. For each of the groups, the review paper lists whether they are to be considered potentially influencing factors according to current findings. There is relatively good evidence that children and seniors are more likely to take antibiotics than middle-aged people. In contrast, a higher level of education tends to have a restraining effect. However, this association is reversed in poorer countries - "probably because there it is more likely to be the well-educated people who either have access to the health system or who can afford to visit a doctor or buy a drug in the first place," assumes Schmiege.

Among the geographical parameters the discrepancy between urban and rural areas stands out: Several publications show that the use of antibiotics is higher in urban areas. "We suspect that this has something to do with better access to doctors' surgeries and pharmacies," explains Schmiege. The concentration of doctors indeed appears to be also one of the driving factors. In contrast, higher drug prices reduce the amount of antibiotics sold.

There is still comparatively little research on which socio-cultural parameters promote the use of antibiotics. National culture seems to have a certain influence: For example, citizens of "masculine" societies, which are considered to be more competitive, use more antibiotics on average. The situation is similar in societies that are traditionally considered to avoid uncertainty. "Overall, however, we still see a clear need for research in this area," emphasizes Dennis Schmiege.

Elsewhere, the study situation also shows a clear imbalance: Lower- and middle-income countries are clearly underrepresented compared to richer ones, which is another point that future research projects should help to remedy, the scientist believes.

For connoisseurs of wines and spirits, part of the enjoyment is noting the various flavors and scents that are revealed with each sip. Aging transforms alcohol's aroma further, especially in cognac, a type of twice-distilled fortified wine. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have identified a few compounds not previously known to contribute to an aged cognac's complex aroma.

Smell plays a key role in the perception of flavor, and in alcoholic spirits these aromas are a result of an array of volatile organic compounds that transform over time. Unlike other liquors, cognacs are aged for upwards of several decades before they are blended into a final product, giving them a unique profile that can be difficult to characterize. Previous research has focused on "young" cognac distillates, which have floral, fruity notes, but little is known about how aging contributes to aroma. The aging process is impacted by compounds from the oak barrels used to house the cognac distillate, as well as evaporation of ethanol over time, known as "the angels' share." To further uncover what olfactory factors are at play in aging cognac, Fannie Thibaud, Marie Courregelongue and Philippe Darriet combined analytical and sensory technologies. 

The researchers began with a series of cognac distillates from a well-known producer, ranging from just under a decade to nearly 50 years in age. From there, they used a combination of gas chromatography/olfactometry and mass spectrometry to separate and smell the various components of the distillates, as well as to identify and measure them. Of the myriad volatile compounds found with this method, several terpenoids -- which give wines their floral notes -- were identified for the first time in cognac. Finally, using the collected data, the team conducted a sensory panel to see how some of the cognac compounds, when mixed together, contribute to aging aromas. For example, they found that (Z)-whisky lactone and (E)-β-damascenone enhanced the sensation of a mix of terpenes found in aged distillates, but these compounds did not appear to have an effect on a terpene mix typical of younger distillates. These results provide new insights into what makes cognac tick, and could help manufacturers develop better-tasting liquors. 

It's one of the biggest economic changes in recent decades: Workers get a smaller slice of company revenue, while a larger share is paid to capital owners and distributed as profits. Or, as economists like to say, there has been a fall in labor's share of gross domestic product, or GDP.

A new study co-authored by MIT economists uncovers a major reason for this trend: Big companies that spend more on capital and less on workers are gaining market share, while smaller firms that spend more on workers and less on capital are losing market share. That change, the researchers say, is a key reason why the labor share of GDP in the U.S. has dropped from around 67 percent in 1980 to 59 percent today, following decades of stability.

"To understand this phenomenon, you need to understand the reallocation of economic activity across firms," says MIT economist David Autor, co-author of the paper. "That's our key point."

To be sure, many economists have suggested other hypotheses, including new generations of software and machines that substitute directly for workers, the effects of international trade and outsourcing, and the decline of labor union power. The current study does not entirely rule out all of those explanations, but it does highlight the importance of what the researchers term "superstar firms" as a primary factor.

"We feel this is an incredibly important and robust fact pattern that you have to grapple with," adds Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics in MIT's Department of Economics.

The paper, "The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms," appears in advance online form in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. In addition to Autor, the other authors are David Dorn, a professor of economics at the University of Zurich; Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University; Christina Patterson, PhD '19, a postdoc at Northwestern University who will join the faculty at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business in July; and John Van Reenen, the Gordon Y. Billard Professor of Management and Economics at MIT.

An economic "miracle" vanishes

For much of the 20th century, labor's share of GDP was notably consistent. As the authors note, John Maynard Keynes once called it "something of a miracle" in the face of economic changes, and the British economist Nicholas Kaldor included labor's steady portion of GDP as one of his often-cited six "stylized facts" of growth.

To conduct the study, the researchers scrutinized data for the U.S. and other countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The scholars used U.S. Economic Census data from 1982 to 2012 to study six economic sectors that account for about 80 percent of employment and GDP: manufacturing, retail trade, wholesale trade, services, utilities and transportation, and finance. The data includes payroll, total output, and total employment.

The researchers also used information from the EU KLEMS database, housed at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, to examine the other OECD countries.

The increase in market dominance for highly competitive top firms in many of those sectors is evident in the data. In the retail trade, for instance, the top four firms accounted for just under 15 percent of sales in 1981, but that grew to around 30 percent of sales in 2011. In utilities and transportation, those figures moved from 29 percent to 41 percent in the same time frame. In manufacturing, this top-four sales concentration grew from 39 percent in 1981 to almost 44 percent in 2011.

At the same time, the average payroll-to-sales ratio declined in five of those sectors -- with finance being the one exception. In manufacturing, the payroll-to-sales ratio decreased from roughly 18 percent in 1981 to about 12 percent in 2011. On aggregate, the labor share of GDP declined at most times except the period from 1997 to 2002, the final years of an economic expansion with high employment.

But surprisingly, labor's share is not falling at the typical firm. Rather, reallocation of market share between firms is the key. In general, says Autor, the picture is of a "winner-take-most setting, where a smaller number of firms are accounting for a larger amount of economic activity, and those are firms where workers historically got a smaller share of the pie."

A key insight provided by the study is that the dynamics within industry sectors has powered the drop in the labor share of GDP. The overall change is not just the result of, say, an increase in the deployment of technology in manufacturing, which some economists have suggested. While manufacturing is important to the big picture, the same phenomenon is unfolding across and within many sectors of the economy.

As far as testing the remaining alternate hypotheses, the study found no special pattern within industries linked to changes in trade policy -- a subject Autor has studied extensively in the past. And while the decline in union power cannot be ruled out as a cause, the drop in labor share of GDP occurs even in countries where unions remain relatively stronger than they do in the U.S.

Deserved market power, or not?

As Autor notes, there are nuances within the findings. Many "superstar" firms pay above-average wages to their employees; it is not that these firms are increasingly "squeezing" their workers, as he puts it. Rather, labor's share of the economic value added across the industrial sectors in the study is falling because market-leading "superstar" firms are now a bigger piece of all economic activity.

On a related note, Autor suggests that the growth in market power is related to technological investment by firms in many sectors.

"We shouldn't presume that just because a market is concentrated -- with a few leading firms accounting for a large fraction of sales -- it's a market with low productivity and high prices," Autor says. "It might be a market where you have some very productive leading firms." Today, he adds, "more competition is platform-based competition, as opposed to simple price competition. Walmart is a platform business. Amazon is a platform business. Many tech companies are platform businesses. Many financial services companies are platform businesses. You have to make some huge investment to create a sophisticated service or set of offerings. Once that's in place, it's hard for your competitors to replicate."

With this in mind, Autor says we may want to distinguish whether market concentration is "the bad kind, where lazy monopolists are jacking up prices, or the good kind, where the more competitive firms are getting a larger share. To the best we can distinguish, the rise of superstar firms appears more the latter than the former. These firms are in more innovative industries -- their productivity growth has developed faster, they make more investment, they patent more. It looks like this is happening more in the frontier sectors than the laggard sectors."

Still Autor adds, the paper does contain policy implications for regulators.

"Once a firm is that far ahead, there's potential for abuse," he notes. "Maybe Facebook shouldn't be allowed to buy all its competitors. Maybe Amazon shouldn't be both the host of a market and a competitor in that market. This potentially creates regulatory issues we should be looking at. There's nothing in this paper that says everyone should just take a few years off and not worry about the issue."

"We don't think our paper is in any sense the last word on the topic," Autor notes. "We think it adds useful paragraphs to the conversation for everybody to listen to and grapple with. We've had too few facts chased by too many theories. We need more facts to allow us to adjudicate among theories."

Support for the research project was provided by Accenture LLC, the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Research Council, IBM Global Universities Programs, the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, the National Science Foundation, Schmidt Futures, the Sloan Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

March 11 , 2020 - A set of updated, evidence-based guidelines defining safe levels of exposure to high-frequency electromagnetic fields (EMF) has been published in Health Physics, official journal of the Health Physics Society. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

The report by an expert Project Group of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) seeks "to establish guidelines for limiting exposure to EMFs that will provide a high level of protection for all people against substantiated adverse health effects from exposures to both short- and long-term, continuous and discontinuous radiofrequency EMFs." After a public consultation period, the guidelines were approved by ICNIRP earlier this year.

Report Outlines Evidence-Based Recommendations for Safe Exposure to EMFs

Electromagnetic fields in the high-frequency or radiofrequency range - 100 kilohertz (kHz) to 300 gigahertz (GHz) - are widely used in technologies including communications (such as cell phones and Wi-Fi networks) and home appliances (microwave ovens). They are also used in medical devices, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, as well as radiofrequency ablation equipment used in medical and surgical treatments.

Replacing previous ICNIRP documents, the new guidelines make recommendations for safe exposure to EMF fields in the high-frequency range. Exposure limits are based on independently verified reports "of sufficient scientific quality and consistent with current scientific understanding." For each substantiated effect identified, the "adverse effect threshold" - the lowest exposure level known to cause the health effect - was identified.

Tissue heating is the main potential harmful effect of high-frequency EMF exposure. Electromagnetic fields can penetrate the body, causing vibration of charged or polar molecules thus leading to kinetic energy and heat. The new guidelines seek to avoid any possible harmful effects by setting limits below the threshold at which any EMF-induced adverse effect can occur. The adverse effects with the lowest thresholds are increased deep body temperature, and excessive local heating. Separate exposure limits are recommended for the whole body, as well as for the head and torso region, and the limbs.

The guidelines include a set of "basic restrictions" on EMF exposure at differing frequencies and times, based on the thresholds known to cause harmful effects. To further protect the general public, the basic restrictions are reduced by factors ranging from 10 to 50. The guidelines also include a set of more easily-assessed "reference levels," calculated to ensure that threshold levels for high-frequency EMF exposure are never exceeded.

The document also includes guidance for "contact currents" which can potentially cause harm when a person touches a conducting object within an electric or magnetic field. It also addresses guidance related to mitigating the risk of harmful exposure to EMF in occupational settings - emphasizing the need for an appropriate workplace health and safety program.

The revised guidelines come at a time of public reports of concerning but generally unsubstantiated harmful health effects of high-frequency EMF exposure - below the exposure thresholds that could cause body or tissue heating effects. As stated in an ICNIRP public information page, "Acute and long-term effects of HF exposure below the thermal threshold have been studied extensively without showing any conclusive evidence of adverse health effects."

CHAPEL HILL, NC - March 11, 2020 - People with multiple sclerosis (MS) often have a greatly increased risk of falling and injuring themselves even when they feel they're able to walk normally. Now a team led by scientists from the UNC School of Medicine has demonstrated what could be a relatively easy method for the early detection of such problems.

The researchers, in a study published in PLoS One, used a virtual reality (VR) system to trick subjects into thinking they were falling as they walked on a treadmill. The scientists found clear differences in reactions between people with MS and people of the same age without MS. These differences were not evident between the groups when they walked in a normal way without the "falling" illusion.

The researchers believe that a VR-based test like this, after further study and development, could be made portable and used widely in neurology clinics to alert MS patients earlier to their balance impairments, allowing them to adopt measures to reduce their risk of falling.

"Our promising results suggest that one can use VR to detect balance problems that usually go undetected until the individual starts experiencing real falls at home or work," said study principal investigator Jason Franz, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC/NC State Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering.

MS is a brain disease that affects about 400,000 people in the United States and more than 2 million worldwide. It's widely thought to be caused by inappropriate immune cell activity in the brain and features the loss of the insulating layer of myelin protein around nerve fibers - a loss that degrades the fibers' abilities to conduct nerve signals. Signs and symptoms of MS include fatigue, numbness and tingling, cognitive impairments, mood instability, and balance and gait problems.

The latter can manifest unexpectedly. People who have MS and show little or no disability may already be at twice the risk of falling, on average, compared to people who don't have MS. Studies also have found that people who have an MS diagnosis fall at least once per year on average. Many of these falls occur during activities such as walking.

Franz and his colleagues sought to develop a test that would reveal balance and gait impairments even in people with MS who may not be aware of these problems or display them during normal walking.

"When we walk around, our brains use a variety of sensory feedback channels, including force sensors in our feet, to guide our movements and make corrections from one step to the next," Franz said. "But in people with MS, those force sensors can become less reliable, so people need to rely more on other channels, especially vision."

Franz and colleagues employed a VR device that allows the experimental manipulation of visual perception. Their laboratory device is a like a semi-circular theatre screen that subjects watch while walking on a treadmill. The VR scene depicted a hallway down which the subject seemed to be walking, at the same speed that the subject walked on the treadmill. Sometimes side-to-side wobbles in the scene created the illusion for each subject that he or she was becoming unstable, triggering a corrective reaction that could be measured as a change in gait and foot placement. Franz's hypothesis was that the MS subjects with balance impairments would differ clearly from normal subjects in these corrective reactions.

The scientists tested 14 people with MS and 14 age-matched non-MS participants. They found that there was indeed a clear difference between the groups in their reactions, but this only became clear when using the VR balance challenge.

"During normal walking without VR - even with our sophisticated lab equipment including a battery of 3D motion capture cameras - we could not effectively distinguish people with MS from the healthy, age-matched individuals," Franz said. "So this perturbed-walking approach could have a lot of important clinical and translational applications."

He and his colleagues now are adapting their system for use with consumer-grade VR headsets as a routine diagnostic tool to be used in neurologists' clinics to detect balance impairments that would otherwise go unrecognized.

They also hope to develop the VR system as a tool of physical therapy to help MS patients improve their balance and thus reduce the risk of falls.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - Older children respond more strongly to rewarding experiences and less strongly to negative experiences later in the day, which may lead to poor decision-making at night, according to research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

"When children transition into adolescence, they begin to chase rewards/pleasing experiences more and respond to losses/punishment less. How responsive someone is to rewards varies depending on time of day because of circadian rhythms," said Aliona Tsypes, a graduate student in psychology at Binghamton University. "So we wanted to see how time of day might affect reward responsiveness in children and how this might vary depending on their age. This is important to better understand (and prevent) teenage risk-taking, particularly because the rates of psychological problems increase dramatically during one's transition to adolescence. This is also important for us and other researchers who study reward to know, to make sure we consider the timing of our study sessions as a potentially influential factor." 

Tsypes and Brandon Gibb, professor of psychology and director of the Mood Disorders Institute at Binghamton University, recruited 188 healthy children between the ages of 7 and 11 and had them complete a commonly used simple guessing task on a computer. In this task, they see two doors on the screen and guess which one has money behind it. Each time they guess correctly, they win 50 cents and each time they are incorrect, they lose 25 cents. During the task, the researchers measured children's brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) to examine neural responses to wins and losses.

"One way to objectively assess someone's responsiveness to reward and loss is to measure their brain activity while they play a computer game during which they receive feedback about winning or losing money," said Gibb. "In our study, we were primarily interested in how these responses to gains versus losses may differ throughout the day in children."

The researchers found that older children had stronger neural responses to rewards/pleasing experiences than losses/punishments later in the day (after around 5:15 p.m.), whereas younger children showed the reverse pattern. These findings suggest that early adolescents might experience greater urges to engage in rewarding/pleasing experiences, even if such experiences are unhealthy or dangerous, later in the day.

"Heightened reward responsiveness in early adolescents later in the day may contribute to greater risk for making poor decisions in the evenings (e.g., choosing to engage in risky behaviors)," said Gibb. "This may help to explain why adolescence is a period of increased risk for developing psychopathology and substance use problems."

"If there are times during which children who approach adolescence are particularly responsive to rewards and particularly unresponsive to losses/punishment, these might be important times to particularly watch out for, to prevent dangerous behaviors," said Tsypes.

Tsypes continues to study reward-related processes, particularly as they relate to suicidal and self-harming thoughts and behaviors (STBs). She hopes to better understand the influences of circadian rhythms on reward and how this affects the risk for STBs. 

"It is important to note that time-of-day effects are not strictly circadian, so future research should also examine additional relevant variables with a circadian rhythm (e.g., cortisol) to better distinguish reward-related processes from other cyclic processes within the human nervous system," said Tsypes.

CLEVELAND-- Everyone knows that losing your job hurts, but the negative effects are not solely experienced by the displaced worker and his or her family. Newly published research by a Case Western Reserve University economist finds that involuntary job loss also causes a dramatic increase in criminal behavior.

The study, published in the journal Labour Economics, is one of the first to establish a causal link between individual job loss and subsequent criminal activity.

"Layoffs lead to an increase of criminal charges against displaced workers, while also decreasing their future earnings and full-time opportunities," Mark Votruba, co-author of the study and an associate professor of economics in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve.

One important mechanism behind these effects appears to be the disruptive effect of job loss on daily schedules. For both violent crimes and drug/alcohol-related crimes, the charge rates increased much more on weekdays than on weekend.

"The old adage that idle hands are the devil's workshop appears to have some truth to it," said Votruba. "This unfortunate link (to weekday crimes) highlights the importance of psychological factors--such as mental distress, self-control, financial concerns and frustration--in determining counterproductive behavior."

The research utilized data of more than 1 million laid-off Norwegian workers, ages 18-40, of which nearly 84,000 experienced an involuntary job loss over the period of analysis. Such records linking criminal and employment activity are not available in the U.S.

According to the study, workers who were let go through no fault of their own experienced:

a 60% jump in property crimes charges in the year after a downsizing;

a decrease in earnings by 10 to 15% in the immediate years following displacement;

a substantial increase in the likelihood of remaining unemployed or working less than full-time;

an overall 20% increase in criminal-charge rates in the year after a layoff;

and a dramatic increase in non-property crimes--violent and serious traffic offenses, as well as drug/alcohol-related acts--committed on weekdays.

"The criminal response is not just about workers' replacing lost income. These results suggest other important factors are at work, including the psychological effects of job loss," said Votruba.

Whether displaced workers in the US exhibit a similar crime response to those in Norway remains an open question, though there is reason to believe the effects would be stronger in the U.S., according to researchers.

"Norway has a strong social safety net that makes job loss less painful there than in the U.S. Both the income and psychological effects of job loss are likely more severe in the U.S.," said Votruba, a research associate at Statistics Norway during the study.

The study authors believe their findings can help policymakers better understand the relationship between job loss and crime, and design policy interventions that minimize the cost that displacement imposes on individuals and society.

"The US is probably never going to provide as much income support to displaced workers, but programs designed to discourage alcohol and drug abuse among displaced young men or keep them engaged in productivity activities while unemployed could be effective policy tools for reducing crime," said Votruba.

The data allowed researchers to follow men for more than 15 years during the 1990's and 2000's; there was not enough crime among women to include in the study.

The study's co-authors were Mari Rege, of the University of Stavanger; Torbjørn Skardhamar, of the University of Oslo; and Kjetil Telle, of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

What drives people seek to high social status? A common evolutionary explanation suggests men do so because, in the past, they were able to leverage their social position into producing more children and propagating their genes.

Indeed, much evidence shows that high social status grants men a number of benefits, not the least of which is increased access to sexual partners. Consider Genghis Khan, who, according to some historical estimates, fathered upwards of 1,000 children with his numerous wives and over 500 concubines.

And more recently, there's Winston Blackmore, the leader of the polygamous Latter-Day Saints group in British Columbia, who is said to have 149 children with his 27 "spiritual wives."

But what about women, for whom fertility is biologically constrained? Pregnancy, after all, is a nine-month endeavor, followed, in traditional societies, by another several years of breastfeeding. Realistically, over the course of her childbearing years a woman can't expect to give birth to more than 20 or so children, and that's assuming she devotes herself entirely to reproduction.

Given these biological limitations, how might women benefit from high status? Do women have the same motivations for status striving as men do?

New research by anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara suggests that a woman's status does pay off, but in the form of better health outcomes for her children. Studying the Tsimane, a population indigenous to the Bolivian Amazon, the researchers found that the children of politically influential mothers are less likely to be sick, and more likely to be of healthy weight and height for their age. Their work appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"When we think about social status, it's often linked -- for men at least -- to more wealth and sexual partners and to higher fertility in places without birth control," said Sarah Alami, a doctoral student in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and the paper's lead author. "But since women can never have as many children as men can, does this mean that status striving is an exclusively male privilege?"

The answer, according to the researchers, is no. "Women may just have different motivations for seeking status than men," Alami continued. "This paper proposes that women may be more likely to leverage their status into greater resources in a way that can benefit their existing children."

To measure status in a context of minimal material wealth, the researchers asked men and women to rank all the people in their community in terms of who has the greatest political influence, whose voice carries the most weight during community meetings, who is best at leading community projects and who garners the most respect.

When they compared those rankings against several measures of health for children, they found children of politically influential women fare better than others, those children grow faster and also are less likely to be diagnosed with common illnesses such as respiratory infections, gastrointestinal diseases and anemia. Respiratory infections are a source of morbidity and mortality in the Tsimane population.

"So much work on status focuses only on men because male status striving, leadership and power wrangling is so in-your-face," said Michael Gurven, a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, co-director of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project and the paper's senior author. "We wanted to measure women's status in a relatively egalitarian society, even where most formal leaders are men, to see how variable it might be, and how it matters in daily life."

The study goes beyond simple correlations between status and health, Gurven continued. "Maybe there's no causal relationship -- perhaps healthier people just have healthier children. Such an explanation doesn't require extra resource access or others' deference," he said.

"But if it was just a matter of having good genes, we'd expect similar effects from both mother and father -- since each contributes genes," he went on. "But we don't see that. Dad's status has a positive effect on child health, but it's relatively weak and disappears once we include mom's in the same statistical model. So that suggests either the mother's influence has a stronger effect on their children, or the father's influence works through the mother's."

So, how does a woman's political influence lead to better health outcomes for her children? The authors first tested whether greater material assets, schooling, wages and kin connections could explain the relationship. While status exerts some of its effects on child health via these mediating forms of wealth, combined they explain relatively little. A number of other tests and control variables also did not alter the relationship between women's status and child health. Instead, the authors propose that a woman's publicly recognized influence affects her ability to be heard within her household. And having a voice can directly benefit children.

The researchers collected data on the amount of power husbands think their wives have. This includes men's opinion about the decision-making authority of their wives in different domains, and their attitudes toward women in general, women working and women being educated. "We found women's political influence was correlated with their husbands having more gender-egalitarian views, their husbands thinking, for example, that it's okay for a woman to have opinions that differ from her husband's," Alami said. "And women's influence was also correlated with their husbands thinking their wives have a say in household decisions such as where to live, when to travel and how to spend household money."

Added Alami, "The fact is that even in a context where women have nine kids and where her efforts aren't flashy or accorded much cultural value, women can still be well respected and have high status."

A lot of this work, Gurven commented, is inspired by evolutionary or "ultimate-level" questions. "Of course we don't crave status because we're consciously thinking about increasing reproductive success," he said. "Women are not walking around saying, 'I'm going to become influential so that I can improve my children's health and survival.'

"But any discussion here would be lacking without considering the costs and benefits of climbing the status ladder," he continued. "What's the point of putting so much time and effort into something elusive like status if there's not some benefit? We're saying that payoffs are there for women, too, and that women may have similar status motivations as men -- we just find that fitness payoffs for women are not from greater sexual access, but instead improved health and other outcomes for children."

One of the strengths of this study comes from the researchers' ability to measure status -- a challenging thing to do. "I can measure your height or your weight, and I can ask how much money you make. But status -- what others think of you -- is not so straightforward to measure," Gurven explained. "But it is really important in human social lives, affecting so many of our behaviors and motivations."

Added Alami, "Everyone was rated by a representative group of village residents. That means all were judged by the same yardstick. And it turned out the average woman did rank lower than most men in terms of social status, but there was substantial overlap between men and women And in a previous recent study, we showed that the sex difference in political influence disappears once you account for a person's size, formal education and number of cooperation partners -- suggesting that these factors, rather than gender per se, lead to high status."

Coincidentally, the authors' paper appears during Women's History Month in the United States, shortly after International Women's Day and in the wake of six female Democratic presidential contenders having vied for their party's nomination. While the work cannot explain why far fewer women than men hold positions of power, it is consistent with studies showing that more female political participation is desirable for improving child welfare. For example, a critical mass of women's political representation in low- and middle-income countries has been shown to lower infant mortality (https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/pol.6.2.164) and increase vaccination rates (https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/91/2/531/2235851).

The current study suggests that even in isolated, rural traditional populations, and without holding formal leadership positions, women have motivations for taking on those positions. But they face different constraints.

"There are these trade-offs and divisions of labor that are influenced by cultural context," said Alami. "If women were able with more flexibility to have children and yet maintain the same social networks and obtain the same educational and work opportunities, you would see less of a difference in perceived status between men and women."

How would you feel if a large carnivore roamed in your backyard?

Now what if this animal was a threatened species, and efforts to protect it were underway? This is the situation in Alberta, Canada, where conservation projects are helping the threatened grizzly bear population to recover, but not without local controversy. But is this controversy simply because people fear these bears, or is there more to it?

A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution has investigated the perspectives and experiences that local people have about grizzly bear conservation policies. The findings suggest that accounting for local perspectives when designing conservation policies may be the key to increasing community support in conservation projects, and thereby improving their success.

Grizzly bears were once considered at risk of extinction in Alberta. In 2010, they were declared a threatened species with only an estimated 700 bears across the entire province. The major culprits underlying the fall in bear numbers include habitat loss and death because of conflict, illegal hunting and vehicle collisions.

In response, government authorities in Alberta introduced a hunting ban, educational outreach, actions to reduce conflict between people and bears, and managed human access to bear habitat. Although these policies have been in place for some time, they are still controversial among local people and officials, and frequently provoke anger and frustration.

Seen by some people as a symbol of the Canadian wilderness, grizzly bears also incite fear as they can sometimes pose a risk to personal safety. Dr. Courtney Hughes of the Government of Alberta wanted to investigate if people's frustrations with bear conservation policies were rooted in how the policies were designed and implemented, rather than simply their attitudes towards bears.

"I wanted to dig into what makes grizzly bear recovery so challenging," said Hughes. "While we already know a lot about how to protect bears from a biological and ecological perspective, we still don't understand enough about why species recovery is so controversial at a local level."

To investigate this, Hughes and her colleagues conducted a study of Alberta's grizzly bear recovery strategy from 2012-2014, and interviewed people who live and work in bear-populated areas to gauge their perspective on conservation policies. The people who participated included ranchers and farmers, wildlife enforcement officers, biologists, petroleum and forestry workers, and people working for environmental NGOs.

Interestingly, there was significant overlap in the frustrations of all the interviewees with the conservation policies. These included technical issues such as a lack of clarity in the policies, inconsistencies in how they are applied, and a lack of funding and staff numbers. People also felt that their opinions weren't adequately considered when the conservation policies were designed and implemented, and they weren't involved enough in the decision-making process.

"People felt disconnected from the conservation policies and frustrated by them, and yet these are the very people who we, as conservationists, expect to implement them," said Hughes. "In future, local people need to be an active part of decision-making processes, and not just paid lip service in engagement processes, or 'check the box' consultation. People want to share their voice and be heard, whether that's government staff, researchers, ranchers, farmers or industry personnel, and more often than not, everyone."

The researchers hope that sharing the decision-making burden among local people could help them to feel more invested in the policies, meaning that they would be more likely to comply with the rules they helped design. This approach could also help to reduce conflict when the conservation policies are implemented, ensuring that they work well for everyone, bears and humans alike.

Importantly, the lessons learned here about engaging local people in decision making may help conservation efforts globally as countries struggle to stop the declining populations of large animals worldwide.

Populations of some common bird species, including the familiar Mourning Dove, have been on the decline for decades in North America. Agricultural lands can support bird populations, but agricultural intensification can also cause populations to decline -- so what role are changes in American agriculture playing for Mourning Doves? New research published in The Condor: Ornithological Applications shows that relatively small changes in the amount of land used for different types of agriculture may be related to big changes in how many young doves are produced.

Pennsylvania State University's David Muñoz and David Miller based their study on more than 150,000 Mourning Dove wings submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service between 2014 and 2018. A Mourning Dove's age can be estimated from the molt pattern of the wing feathers, and the age ratios of birds killed by hunters let researchers estimate doves' reproductive output in different regions. They found that although the specifics varied between locations, small changes in land cover were linked to large differences in reproductive output. In the central U.S., for example, the ratio of juvenile to adult Mourning Doves was 37.5% higher in counties with the highest proportion of small-grain agriculture such as oats, than in counties with no small-grain land cover. In the eastern U.S., nearly the same reproductive gains were seen with even a smaller increase in small-grain agriculture from 0% to 5% across counties. Greater proportions of intensive corn and soybean agriculture, on the other hand, were tied to lower reproductive output in the eastern U.S.

"As the human population keeps growing, it is important we find ways to use our land effectively for human benefit and wildlife. One way to do that is to understand the demographic responses of birds to these changes," says Muñoz. "Although agricultural production has been tied to bird reductions across the globe, we found that it is important to distinguish between certain types of agriculture, and that the patterns varied regionally across the United States. This means that in one part of the country, a certain type of land cover may be beneficial, but in a different part, it may not be. This makes it challenging to make generalizations between bird demography and response to global land-use change."

Still, Muñoz is hopeful that approaches like his can lead to meaningful changes in how conservation is practiced in agricultural landscapes. "By characterizing the relationship between land cover and reproduction, we believe that conservation efforts can focus on practices that improve reproductive habitat," he says. "Effective conservation will need to continue incorporating economic market pressures and policies that affect development and agricultural practices. Without doing so, it may be hard to influence conservation in human-dominated landscapes."

Alcoholics Anonymous, the worldwide fellowship of sobriety seekers, is the most effective path to abstinence, according to a comprehensive analysis conducted by a Stanford School of Medicine researcher and his collaborators.

After evaluating 35 studies -- involving the work of 145 scientists and the outcomes of 10,080 participants -- Keith Humphreys, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and his fellow investigators determined that AA was nearly always found to be more effective than psychotherapy in achieving abstinence. In addition, most studies showed that AA participation lowered health care costs.

AA works because it's based on social interaction, Humphreys said, noting that members give one another emotional support as well as practical tips to refrain from drinking. "If you want to change your behavior, find some other people who are trying to make the same change," he said.

The review will be published March 11 in Cochrane Database of Systematic Review. Cochrane requires its authors to undertake a rigorous process that ensures the studies represented in its summaries are high-quality and the review of evidence is unbiased.

"Cochrane Reviews are the gold standard in medicine for integration of all the research about a particular intervention," Humphreys said. "We wanted to do this work through Cochrane because of its rigor and reputation."

The other co-authors are a researcher from Harvard Medical School and a researcher from the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Though well-known, AA faces skepticism

Although AA is well-known and used by millions around the world, mental health professionals are sometimes skeptical of its effectiveness, Humphreys said. Psychologists and psychiatrists, trained to provide cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy to treat patients with alcohol-use disorder, can have a hard time admitting that the lay people who run AA groups do a better job of keeping people on the wagon.

Early in his career, Humphreys said, he dismissed AA, thinking, "How dare these people do things that I have all these degrees to do?"

Humphreys noted that counseling can be designed to facilitate engagement with AA -- what he described as "an extended, warm handoff into the fellowship." For the review article, Humphreys and his colleagues evaluated both AA and 12-step facilitation counseling.

AA began in 1935 when two men in Akron, Ohio, were searching for a way to stay sober; they found it by forming a support group. They later developed the 12 steps, the first being accepting one's inability to control drinking; the last, helping others sustain sobriety by becoming a sponsor of a new member. The AA model -- open to all and free -- has spread around the globe, and now boasts over 2 million members in 180 nations and more than 118,000 groups.

Though the fellowship has been around for more than eight decades, researchers have only recently developed good methods to randomize trial participants and measure its effectiveness, Humphreys said.

For the Cochrane review, the researchers found 57 studies on AA; of those, 35 passed their rigorous criteria for quality. The studies used various methods to measure AA's effectiveness on alcohol use disorder: the length of time participants abstained from alcohol; the amount they reduced their drinking, if they continued drinking; the consequences of their drinking; and health care costs.

AA shines

Most of the studies that measured abstinence found AA was significantly better than other interventions or no intervention. In one study, it was found to be 60% more effective. None of the studies found AA to be less effective.

In the studies that measured outcomes other than complete abstinence, AA was found to be at least as effective. For the studies that considered costs, most showed significant savings associated with AA participation: One found that AA and 12-step facilitation counseling reduced mental health costs by $10,000 per person.

The researchers looked only at studies of AA; they excluded Narcotics Anonymous and organizations focused on addiction to other substances. While it was beyond the scope of their study, Humphreys said the AA review is "certainly suggestive that these methods work for people who use heroin or cocaine."

Humphreys noted that the findings were consistent whether the study participants were young, elderly, male, female, veterans or civilians; the studies in the review were also conducted in five different countries. "It absolutely does work," he said of AA's method.

He added that he feels validated in giving advice to so many patients to try AA: "That was really good advice, and that continues to be good advice," he said.

Could the ability of cancer cells to quickly alter their genome be used as a weapon against malignant tumours? Researchers at Uppsala University have succeeded in developing a substance that has demonstrated promising results in experiments on both animal models and human cancer cells. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

It is typical of cancer cells that they can quickly alter their DNA; however, in their haste to acquire new mutations, they carelessly discard many of their inherited genetic variations. This may lead to cancer cells only retaining a defective allele of a gene from one parent, whereas healthy cells also have a functioning allele from the other parent. This characteristic of cancer cells may well be an Achilles heel that can be utilised in the development of new drugs.

"We searched for genes of which many people carry both a functioning and defective allele in their DNA. One such gene, NAT2, produces a protein that metabolises a number of drugs and is of particular interest as one allele is often lost during the development of colon and rectal cancer," explains Tobias Sjöblom of Uppsala University's Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology.

Based on their discovery, the researchers developed a substance that kills cells lacking NAT2 and were also able to demonstrate that it can be used to treat animal models of cancer and tumour cells from patients.

"The conditions for treatment exist in 50,000 of the colorectal cancer patients diagnosed globally each year and we will therefore continue working to identify substances with even better properties for pharmaceutical development," says Tobias Sjöblom.