Culture

JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE TEAM TESTS MEDICAL MARIJUANA AS POSSIBLE THERAPY FOR CHRONIC ITCH

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/research-story-tip-johns-hopkins-medicine-team-tests-medical-marijuana-as-possible-therapy-for-chronic-itch

Media Contact: Sheree-Monet Wisdom, swisdom1@jhmi.edu

Chronic itch -- known clinically as chronic pruritus -- is characterized as an unrelenting and sometimes even debilitating sensation to itch, and often lowers the quality of life for those who suffer with it. Treating the condition has been difficult because there are few Food and Drug Administration-approved therapies. Now, a recent case study by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers provides evidence that a promising option for patients with chronic itch may already be available: medical marijuana (cannabis).

A report on the team's findings was published April 9, 2021, in JAMA Dermatology.

"Chronic itch can be an especially difficult condition to treat, with off-label therapeutics often utilized," says Shawn Kwatra, M.D., assistant professor of dermatology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "With the increased utilization of medical marijuana and our knowledge of the role of the endocannabinoid system [a complex cell-signaling system that regulates a variety of functions in the body] in chronic itch, we decided to try medical marijuana with a patient who failed several therapies and had few options left."

Kwatra and his colleagues examined an African American woman in her 60s with a 10-year history of chronic itch. The patient initially arrived at the Johns Hopkins Itch Center with complaints of extreme pruritus on her arms, legs and stomach. Upon a skin examination, numerous hyperpigmented, raised skin lesions were revealed. Several treatments were offered to the patient -- including several systemic therapies, centrally acting nasal sprays, steroid creams and phototherapy -- but they all failed.

Kwatra says that using medical marijuana -- either by smoking or in liquid form --provided the woman with nearly instantaneous improvement.

"We had the patient rate her symptoms using a numerical rating scale, where 10 is the worst itch and zero is no itch at all," Kwatra says. "She started at 10 but dropped to 4 within 10 minutes after initial administration of the medical marijuana. With continued use of the cannabis, the patient's itch disappeared altogether."

The researchers believe that one of the active ingredients in medical marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol -- commonly known by its abbreviation THC -- attaches itself to brain receptors that influence the nervous system. When this occurs, inflammation and nervous system activity decrease, which also could lead to a reduction in skin sensations such as itchiness.

Kwatra says that although conclusive studies have yet to be done to validate medical marijuana as an effective measure for the relief of previously unmanageable itch, he believes it warrants further clinical trials.

"Controlled studies are needed to determine dosing, efficacy and safety for medical marijuana in the treatment of various human itch subtypes, and once those are performed, we will better understand which patients are most likely to benefit from this therapy," he says.

Kwatra is available for interviews.

JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE PUTS FAT TO GOOD USE AS STEM CELL SOURCE FOR SPINAL FUSION SURGERY

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/research-story-tip-johns-hopkins-medicine-puts-fat-to-good-use-as-stem-cell-source-for-spinal-fusion-surgery

Media Contact: Michel Morris, melben1@jhmi.edu

Adipose cells, better known as fat, may be the least popular component of the human body. However, most people don't realize that fat actually has many important functions in establishing and maintaining good health -- providing energy, insulating the body against heat loss and protecting nerves, just to name a few. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine suggest there's another role for the poor maligned adipose cell: a practical and plentiful source of stem cells for use in spinal fusion surgeries.

Spinal fusion, used to correct problems in the spine, is the "welding" together of two or more vertebrae so that they heal into a single, solid bone. Unfortunately, the surgery -- using bone taken from other parts of the patient's body -- fails in up to one out of every five procedures. Researchers have found that stem cells, harvested from a patient's marrow and allowed to mature into bone cells, can yield successful outcomes when used in spinal fusions. However, the aspiration method for extracting stem cells from the marrow carries a risk of infection and often is painful.

In a study published in the May 2021 issue of the journal Spine, Timothy Witham, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Neurosurgery Spinal Fusion Laboratory, Alexander Perdomo-Pantoja, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Christina Holmes, Ph.D., a former Johns Hopkins Medicine postdoctoral fellow now at Florida State University, worked together with colleagues to try out adipose cells rather than bone marrow as a source for the stem cells.

Performing spinal fusion procedures in rats, the researchers found that freshly isolated stem cells from fat worked just as well as the more commonly used bone marrow stem cells. The researchers say this suggests the technique could be a candidate for human clinical trials.

"Bone marrow stem cells are isolated in human patients from the hip," says Holmes. "But using a huge needle to take out bone marrow is a painful procedure, and we can only get a limited number of cells, so we've found an alternative source by using stem cells from fat."

Perdomo-Pantoja says spinal fusion procedures are used to treat many different conditions.

"Spinal fusions are used for anything that causes spinal instability, which usually produces significant mechanical pain," he says. "You see it frequently when we get older as the intervertebral discs, ligaments and muscles in the spine deteriorate. But these procedures can also be used to treat instability when it is caused by tumors, fractures, deformities or trauma."

In this study, Witham, Perdomo-Pantoja, Holmes and their team isolated stem cells from fat and bone marrow, and then implanted them into rat spines. For the adipose-derived stem cells, the researchers chose to use freshly isolated cells to see if they could make the procedure simpler and faster.

Currently, stem cells from either bone marrow or fat are frequently grown in a laboratory culture to get them mature enough for a spinal fusion. During culturing, there is some risk of contamination or transformation into unusable bone. Holmes says that freshly isolating cells avoids these problems, along with being less labor intensive and cheaper because expensive processing materials are not needed.

While stem cells from fat are commonly used in cosmetic procedures, they are not often used in spinal fusions, she adds.

"We feel that fat cells are a logical alternative to bone marrow cells because most patients have an adequate supply of fat cells," Witham says. "Fat also is much more accessible during surgery and can be harvested with less stem cell death than bone marrow. Spinal fusion is a very common procedure, and we feel this approach could be applied across a wide cohort of spinal fusion patients."

The researchers also were pleased to see the quality of the bone created by both forms of stem cells. They found significantly more bone formation and blood supply in the fresh adipose-derived stem cells compared with what they observed in previous studies with cultured cells from both fat and bone marrow.

Witham and his team hope to further their research by next identifying which cells are the most advantageous for spinal fusions and then characterizing them.

Witham is available for interviews.

NEW AUTOMATED INSULIN INFUSION SYSTEM MAY POTENTIALLY REDUCE MEDICAL ERRORS, IMPROVE CARE

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/research-story-tip-new-automated-insulin-infusion-system-may-potentially-reduce-medical-errors-improve-care

Media Contact: Marisol Martinez, mmart150@jhmi.edu

Nurses traditionally manage insulin intake for critically ill patients by following precise steps to manually calculate the correct dose for each person. Looking for ways to improve this process, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality recently tested a "smart agent" system that integrates electronic health records and infusion pumps to automate insulin dose selection.

The study showed that Smart Agent -- developed as a joint effort between the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine -- may reduce errors and provide faster insulin delivery when compared with manual dosing calculation. In turn, the researchers say, this could free up nurses and clinicians to focus their attention on other patient care priorities.

The findings, published online March 10, 2021, in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety, suggest that a smart agent system could potentially optimize safety and efficiency of insulin infusion practices in intensive care unit settings.

"Glucose management improves outcomes for critically ill patients; however, current insulin infusion protocols are work-intensive for nurses and may be error prone," says study lead author Michael Rosen, Ph.D., M.A., associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The current infusion process requires a nurse to manage insulin doses hourly, based on the patient's condition. Because neither the patient's medical record nor the infusion pump's operating data communicate electronically, a nurse is required to first retrieve the patient's blood glucose level from the health record. Then, he or she must manually calculate the medication rate change using an algorithm to determine the new insulin dosage. A second nurse double checks this process before it's documented in the medical record, and finally, the new dose is manually programed into the infusion pump to administer insulin to the patient.

For the study, 20 critical care nurses at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, tried a specific smart agent system in a simulation-based setting between May and July 2018. Participants completed 12 mock situations, in four blocks of three scenarios each. Each block was performed with either the manual protocol or Smart Agent.

Nurses were surveyed after each session to get their impressions of safety levels (rates of errors), efficiency (time to complete each task), perceived workload, trust in the system and usability.

The researchers say their findings show that the automated system was significantly better in dosing accuracy calculation compared with manual calculation. In 120 scenarios, nurses never made a calculation error when using the smart agent system compared with 20 errors (16.6%) made using the manual system.

Smart Agent enabled the nurses to complete the process an average of 29 seconds faster than the manual system, along with reducing their overall workload. The tasks that consumed the most time using the manual system were retrieving information from the electronic health record and performing manual calculations -- neither of which is required in a smart agent system. The nurses also found that after using Smart Agent at least twice, they trusted it more than doing the manual calculations.

In general, Smart Agent received positive remarks from all 20 nurses. Most found it to be helpful and more efficient than the manual system, and 18 (90%) found it easier to use. Fifteen (75%) nurses believed that the automated system was safer than the manual process, while five (25%) were unsure or believed both systems were about as safe.

"This approach can be applied to improve a fragmented and inefficient health care IT infrastructure through design, testing and system integration," says senior study author Adam Sapirstein, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The researchers believe that Smart Agent can serve as a template for similar systems that use algorithms built directly into electronic medical records so that they can be integrated with devices for automatically delivering medication to patients.

This study was done in collaboration with University Hospitals of Cleveland.

Rosen and Sapirstein are available for interviews.

Many people live with chronic pain, and in some cases, cannabis can provide relief. But the drug also can significantly impact memory and other cognitive functions. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Medicinal Chemistry have developed a peptide that, in mice, allowed Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main component of Cannabis sativa, to fight pain without the side effects.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 20% of adults in the U.S. experienced chronic pain in 2019. Opioids, the mainstay for severe pain management, are effective, but patients can easily become addicted to them. In some studies, medical marijuana has been helpful in relieving pain from migraines, neuropathy, cancer and other conditions, but the side effects present hurdles for widespread therapeutic use. Previously, researchers identified two peptides that disrupt an interaction between a receptor that's the target of THC and another receptor that binds serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates learning, memory and other cognitive functions. When the researchers injected the peptides into the brains of mice, the mice had fewer memory problems caused by THC. Now, this team, led by Rafael Maldonado, David Andreu and colleagues, wanted to improve these peptides to make them smaller, more stable, orally active and able to cross the blood-brain barrier.

Based on data from molecular dynamic simulations, the researchers designed two peptides that were less than half the length of the original ones but preserved their receptor binding and other functions. They also optimized the peptide sequences for improved cell entry, stability and ability to cross the blood-brain barrier. Then, the researchers gave the most promising peptide to mice orally, along with a THC injection, and tested the mice's pain threshold and memory. Mice treated with both THC and the optimized peptide reaped the pain-relieving benefits of THC and also showed improved memory compared with mice treated with THC alone. Importantly, multiple treatments with the peptide did not evoke an immune response. These findings suggest that the optimized peptide is an ideal drug candidate for reducing cognitive side effects from cannabis-based pain management, the researchers say.

The abstract that accompanies this paper can be viewed here.

The authors acknowledge funding from Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and La Caixa Foundation.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS' mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world's scientific knowledge. ACS' main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
 

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Alexandria, Va., USA -- COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020 and given an incomplete understanding of the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at that time, the American Dental Association recommended that dental offices refrain from providing non-emergency services. As a result, 198,000 dentists in the United States closed their doors to patients. The study "Sources of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Microorganisms in Dental Aerosols," published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), sought to inform infection-control science by identifying the source of bacteria and viruses in aerosol generating dental procedures.

Researchers at The Ohio State University College of Dentistry, Division of Periodontology, Columbus, USA, tracked the origins of microbiota in aerosols generated during treatment of 28 patients undergoing ultrasonic scaling, implant osteotomy or restorative procedures by combining reverse transcriptase qPCR, to identify and quantify SARS-CoV-2, and 16S sequencing, to characterize the entire microbiome, with fine-scale enumeration and source-tracking. Thirty minutes following the procedure, condensate was collected from the operator and assistant's face shield, the patient's chest and an area 6-feet distant from the site of operation.

The results show that it is possible to trace the source of contamination through DNA microbiome analysis and that the major source of microbes in aerosols came from the dental irrigant. Saliva did not significantly contribute as infection control measures such as pre-operative mouthrinses and intra-oral high-volume evacuation were used. The authors conclude that the risk for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory pathogens from aerosolized saliva in dental operatories is moderately low and that current infection control practices are adequately robust to protect personnel and patients alike.

"Understanding the sources of microbial load in aerosols is important, not only for infection control in dental operatories during the COVID pandemic, but also to inform best practices in aerosol reduction, mitigation and abatement in the long term." said JDR Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Jakubovics, Newcastle University, England. "While further studies are needed with larger sample sizes, this study sets the stage for future work on risk of microbial transmission in oral health care settings."

Are you empathic, generous and altruistic? In short, do you possess that specific personality trait defined as agreeableness in the language of psychologists? New research from SISSA recently published in the journal NeuroImage sheds light on brain mechanisms underlying this trait.

The study showed that detached and individualistic subjects seem to process information associated with social and non-social contexts in similar ways, as demonstrated by similar activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex, whereas in more agreeable subjects the activation patterns arising from social and non-social situations show more differences. This suggests that individuals with high levels of agreeableness are able to discern social contents that are important, and particularly informative, for achieving successful interactions with others. This should not be surprising, since individual agreeableness is associated with characteristics, such as empathy, cooperation and generosity, which require the ability to recognise the cognitive, emotional and motivational aspects of others in social situations. These findings could contribute to future development of more objective and sensitive personality tests, including individuals' brain responses to stimuli varying in social content as a measure of agreeableness. The research was carried out by Dr. Sandra Arbula and Elisabetta Pisanu, and coordinated by Professor Raffaella I. Rumiati.

Visual tests and functional magnetic resonance imaging

"Personality traits reflect key aspects of variability among individuals. Understanding the mechanisms that give rise to these differences requires an in depth investigation of the behaviors associated with such traits, and their underlying neural sources" explain the scientists. The SISSA team recruited dozens of volunteers for their research according to their degree of agreeableness, one of the five major dimensions of personality, assessed with a questionnaire. "Participants were presented with short animations of different shapes that moved randomly or interacted in a socially meaningful way. Their brain activity was then recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which enables detection of brain areas activated while they perform a given task, and has application in both research and clinical fields".

An important link between neural mechanisms and social behaviour

"Our results suggest something particularly interesting about agreeableness" explain Arbula and Rumiati. "We observed that representations of social information extracted form visual scenes are formed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex: based on their distinctiveness we are able to predict individual variations in agreeableness. The present finding reveals the link between neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying this specific personality trait" conclude Arbula and Rumiati. "Additionally, these sorts of connections provide new opportunities for the development of more objective personality measures".

When Museums closed their doors in March 2020 for the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK a majority moved their activities online to keep their audiences interested. Researchers from WMG, University of Warwick have worked with OUMNH, to analyse the success of the exhibitions, and say the way Museums operate will change forever.Caption: Compton Verney's homepage for the Cranach exhibition which opened in March 2020 Credit: Compton Verney

The cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been analysed by researchers from WMG, University of Warwick in collaboration with OUMNH (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) who in the paper, 'Digital Responses of UK Museum Exhibition to the COVID-19 Crisis March-June 2020' published in the journal Curator: The Museum Journal, have analysed the success of online museum exhibitions, and investigated what the future of Museums holds.

Researchers analysed 21 museums who had temporary exhibitions due to open between March and June 2020, and decided to go ahead with the exhibition virtually. The analysis included noting how COVID was considered, how content was presented, and discussing themes of access, embodiment, and human connection.

The research team found that in May-June Museums had more online content for their exhibitions, suggesting there was time to prepare the transfer of exhibition online. All exhibitions were different, with some hosting podcasts, some doing filmed walk-arounds and some hosting a virtual room where you click on exhibits.

Although digital exhibitions were a success, researchers concluded online exhibitions do not provide the same social and embodied experience as the physical museum, as you miss the travelling there, welcome from staff, chatting with other visitors and the gift shop or coffee shop after.

They did however highlight that extra material was provided for online content which isn't traditionally presented in the Museum, this included behind the scenes videos for example. Researchers say this suggests Museums were trying to give their audiences some exclusives that they would not receive from a normal visit.

Lead author, PhD Student Ellie King from WMG, University of Warwick comments:

"The COVID-19 lockdowns have created a crucial turning point in the Museum sector, as they now see themselves working in a physical-digital overlap. It is interesting to note how in being forced to shut, museums focused their online provisions around existing physical exhibitions.

"Museums and galleries will continue to adapt in light of a post?COVID world where practices, both digital and physical, will undoubtedly shift. It is important to see the digital exhibition world as an opportunity to provide unseen materials and attract audiences who may not be able to visit in person."

Although it's likely there will be more online material generated by Museums and galleries from now on due to the pandemic, there is the issue of staff having the digital skills to manage a new arena of engagement.

Professor Mark Williams, from WMG, University of Warwick explains:

"One of the major tasks of converting to online is the financial implications, 30% of museums have changed staff tasks to provide services online. Despite this, there are concerns that staff teams are not fully equipped to handle such monumental changes.

"This highlights the practical challenge of enabling the rise of digital content for museums, which will be dif?cult for the sector in such a stretched resource environment."

Professor Paul Smith, Director at the Oxford Museum of Natural History adds:

"The first COVID-19 lockdown imposed a real-time stress test on museums, and their ability to respond in an agile way to events. The paper highlights the creative ways in which some museums were able to adapt to the unique and unprecedented circumstances they faced."

This research is part of a wider interest of the CiMAT team in WMG to engage with subject areas beyond engineering. Based on previous research into User Experience, the research group is seeking to apply concepts into areas of the arts and humanities. The research has blossomed with the collaboration between WMG and Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This research, which analyses how visitors experience museums online, is a welcome starting point. The researchers stress to Museums that with this rising atmosphere of change on the horizon, it is important they consider such conceptual issues and evaluate audience needs rigorously when developing online offerings to maintain such cultural importance.

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are highly localized surface waves on the interface between metal and dielectric in the optical frequency band. SSPs do not naturally exist in the microwave and terahertz frequencies, so "spoof" surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) are necessary for operations in those lower frequency bands.

Like optical SPPs, microwave SSPPs exhibit highly localized electromagnetic fields, subwavelength resolution, and extraordinary field confinement. Therefore, SSPP transmission lines (TLs) have been proposed as novel types of microwaveguides that offer new solutions for miniaturization, signal integrity, and low crosstalk in compact circuits for use in wireless communications and wearable electronics.

Recently, a research team from Southeast University in China applied a typical form of higher symmetry called "glide symmetry" in dual-strip SSPP TLs to achieve flexible control of modal fields, dispersion characteristics, and mutual coupling between TLs. As reported in Advanced Photonics, they constructed a hybrid TL array with a nonglide symmetric TL and a glide symmetric TL, in which a misalignment of half period is observed between the upper and lower strips. A broadened working bandwidth resulted from the glide symmetric TL, and the team demonstrated that the glide symmetry helps suppress channel crosstalk significantly without requiring extra space or feeding networks.

In their experimental demonstration, the cutoff frequency of the fundamental mode increases from 5 GHz (for a nonglide symmetric TL) to 9.5 GHz (for a glide symmetric TL). Because the fundamental mode of the glide symmetric TL is totally different from that of the nonglide one, the coupling coefficient between them is significantly lower than that between two uniform SSPP TLs. The team noted that, due to the mode mismatch in the hybrid array, a very limited portion of energy could be coupled to the neighboring TL.

Four-port model composed of two channels: one is the nonglide symmetric transmission line channel, and the other is the glide symmetric one. Credit: Xiao Tian Yan et al., doi 10.1117/1.AP.3.2.025001

Tie Jun Cui, professor at Southeast University's Institute of Electromagnetic Space, remarks, "Glide symmetry offers powerful and flexible control of SSPPs and may bring about new solutions in future integrated circuits." Cui envisions that when serious line-to-line interference damages the performance of circuits, an alternating arrangement of glide and nonglide symmetric TLs can restore and guarantee signal accuracy. Cui notes, "No extra space or design of circuits is needed when the nonglide symmetric TL is replaced with a glide one." This space-saving solution may supply significant improvements to future integrated circuits and systems.

Read the open access article: Xiao Tian Yan et al., "Glide symmetry for mode control and significant suppression of coupling in dual-strip SSPP transmission lines," Adv. Photon. 3(2), 026001 (2021), doi 10.1117/1.AP.3.2.025001.

Journal

Advanced Photonics

DOI

10.1117/1.AP.3.2.026001

BOSTON - During the development and progression of Alzheimer's disease, a protein called tau accumulates and spreads in the brain. Understanding the mechanisms behind tau spread--and its consequences--may point to new prevention and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. New insights now come from research that was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and involves an anesthetic known to affect cognitive function. The findings are published in Communications Biology.

The scientists note that inflammation plays an important role in Alzheimer's disease, and microglia--immune cells that reside in the brain--are thought to be involved in this process by producing an inflammatory molecule called interleukin-6. To see if tau stimulates microglia to drive the development of Alzheimer's disease pathology, the MGH investigators and their colleagues conducted experiments with an inhaled anesthetic called sevoflurane. Their previous work showed that sevoflurane can cause a change (specifically, phosphorylation, or the addition of phosphate) to tau that leads to cognitive impairment in mice. Other researchers have also found that sevoflurane and certain other anesthetics may affect cognitive function.

In this current study, the team developed a novel method to measure tau levels, called nanobeam-sensor technology. "The nanobeam sensor is ultrasensitive, requires a small volume, and can measure low concentrations of molecules, including tau and phosphorylated tau," says co-lead author Feng Liang, MD, PhD, an instructor in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine (DACCPM) at MGH.

The group conducted experiments in mice and cells and discovered that sevoflurane causes tau to leave neurons and enter microglia, where it stimulates the cells' production of interleukin-6, which in turn leads to inflammation and cognitive impairment. The trafficking of tau from neurons to microglia involves tau phosphorylation and membrane-bound carriers called extracellular vesicles that are released from cells.

"These data demonstrate anesthesia-associated tau spreading and its consequences," says senior author Zhongcong Xie, MD, PhD, director of the Geriatric Anesthesia Research Unit in the DACCPM. "This tau spreading could be prevented by inhibitors of tau phosphorylation or extracellular vesicle generation."

Sevoflurane did not increase the release of lactate dehydrogenase, a molecule with a similar size and weight as tau, from neurons. "This finding indicates that neuronal cell membranes and cell viability were not compromised by sevoflurane treatment and that the sevoflurane-induced leaking of tau was not a passive process," says co-lead author Yuanlin Dong, MD, a research fellow in the department.

Another inhaled anesthetic called desflurane did not have the same effects as sevoflurane. "Our results suggest that the anesthetics sevoflurane and desflurane may have different impacts on tau phosphorylation and tau spreading. More important, sevoflurane may be used as a clinically relevant tool to study tau spreading and its underlying mechanisms," says Xie. "We hope this work will lead to more research on anesthesia, tau proteins, and Alzheimer's disease pathology that will ultimately improve care for patients."

NEW YORK, NY--While there was extensive use of drug repurposing throughout the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was substantial heterogeneity over the types of drugs used for treatment purposes globally. Some drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, saw sharp declines in use, while adjunctive therapies grew into a more relied upon method for patient management.

In a number of cases, scientific discovery overturned misconceptions proclaimed via press conferences and social media.

The OHDSI network study "Use of repurposed and adjuvant drugs in hospital patients with covid-19: multinational network cohort study," published May 11 by The BMJ, provides a global view of drug utilization in routine practice of more than 303,000 hospitalized patients from China, South Korea, Spain and the United States. The study highlights the need for future research on the safety and efficacy of the more commonly used treatments.

"At the start of the pandemic, when we knew little about COVID-19 and how to treat it, there were many differences between hospitals around the world on how health professionals were treating it," said study co-lead Albert Prats-Uribe, a DPhil candidate and Research Assistant in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford.

"This was also influenced by political and social media pressures that spread misinformation," said senior author Dani Prieto-Alhambra, Professor of Pharmaco- and Device Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. "Once reliable evidence from well-designed and performed studies came in, the situation quickly improved, and hospitals stopped using the ineffective treatments and turned to more effective ones."

Deidentified patient data from 11 databases across three continents (Asia, Europe and North America) showed that more than 3,400 different medicines were used in the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Among the most popular in the earliest stages of the pandemic was hydroxychloroquine, which was heavily promoted without the backing of reliable evidence and later revoked from emergency approval status following both randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and related studies, including an OHDSI study showing dangerous risk of combining hydroxychloroquine with another early popular prescribed COVID-19 therapeutic, azithromycin.

Heterogeneity in drug therapy choice was dramatic across databases around the world. For example, lopinavir-ritonavir was used 50% of the time in one Spanish setting (HM Hospitals), 35% of the time in a South Korean setting (HIRA), and 0% of the time in a U.S. setting (Department of Veterans Affairs).

Adjunctive therapies developed into popular forms of management for supportive care, with the most recognized being corticosteroids and anti-cytokines, both of which have been shown to reduce mortality in more serious cases. While these were lightly used early in the pandemic, results from the RECOVERY RCT showed efficacy in reducing death on hospitalized patients with severe respiratory disease.

Scientific discovery through observational data often reversed false information being distributed through political channels and/or social media. This study highlights the role observational studies can fit into informing clinical decision-making moving forward.

"The use of ineffective medicines and potentially harmful combinations started with information from promising in vitro analyses, and were fueled by poorly performed observational studies, as well as misinformation campaigns in social and traditional media with clearly political intentions," Prats-Uribe said. "This would have taken a long time to counter in the traditional scientific timings. With the work of a community of people around the world producing reliable evidence using observational data, we were able to shift these tendencies and influence decision-making to improve COVID-19 patients."

The study was developed and executed by the OHDSI (Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics) community, a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary network that collaborates globally to bring out the value of health data through open science and large-scale analytics.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Young people with diverse gender identities may be bullied and victimized up to three times more often than peers who identify as male or female, a new study of more than 4,464 adolescents in Illinois found.

The students were part of a statewide survey of eighth- through 12th-grade youths in Illinois schools.

"Transgender youths reported the highest rates of all forms of peer victimization, which were double to nearly triple those of males and up to 2.6 times higher than those of females," said social work professor Rachel Garthe of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who led the research.

"Slightly more than half of transgender youths reported verbal abuse such as peers calling them names or spreading rumors about them. About one in three of these youths reported cyber victimization, and slightly fewer reported psychological dating violence," such as a romantic partner denigrating or trying to control them, Garthe said.

Gender-expansive youths - students who don't identify as male, female or transgender - experienced disproportionately higher rates of all forms of bullying and dating violence.

Among these students, 41% experienced verbal abuse, nearly 32% were cyberbullied and 19% experienced physical violence, according to the study.

Garthe said the findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, are very concerning and underscore the need for supportive policies and practices for students with diverse gender identities who may need help coping with psychological and physical violence from peers and romantic partners.

Additionally, she said more programs are needed in schools that prevent these types of violence from being perpetrated.

Equal numbers of male, female, transgender and gender-expansive students were included in the research. The study was novel in that it included a large sample of transgender individuals and the experiences of gender-expansive individuals were explored as a distinct group, Garthe said.

The students in the current study were a subset of the participants in the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, a biennial survey that gathers data on a variety of social, behavioral and health indicators from youths in schools throughout Illinois. The Center for Prevention Research and Development, a unit within the U. of I. School of Social Work, conducts the survey.

Despite growing numbers of schools implementing anti-bullying policies that include protections based on sexual or gender identity, rates of victimization remain high among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youths, research has shown.

However, LGBTQ students report feeling safer and more connected at school and experience fewer gender-related negative remarks from peers when resources such as LGBTQ-inclusive curricula are taught, according to the study.

When anti-bullying policies with LGBTQ protections are implemented, students are less likely to be forced to use bathrooms that match their assigned sex or wear clothing incongruent with their gender identity or expression, Garthe said.

"To enhance the effectiveness of these policies and further support these students, anti-transphobic education for teachers, administrators and students is needed, along with the use of pronouns that reflect individuals' gender identity," Garthe said.

Can a protein found in a mosquito lead to a better understanding of the workings of our own brains? Prof. Ofer Yizhar and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science's Neurobiology Department took a light-sensitive protein derived from mosquitos and used it to devise an improved method for investigating the messages that are passed from neuron to neuron in the brains of mice. This method, reported today in Neuron, could potentially help scientists solve age-old cerebral mysteries that could pave the way for new and improved therapies to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions.

Yizhar and his lab team develop so-called optogenetic methods - research techniques that allow them to "reverse engineer" the activity of specific brain circuits in order to better understand their function. Optogenetics uses proteins known as rhodopsins to control the activity of neurons in the mouse brain. Rhodopsins are light-sensing proteins - they are most known for their role in organs like the retina rather than in the dark inner reaches of the body. But the rhodopsins in the brains of Yizhar's mice enable him to control the activity of specific neurons when he and his team shine a minuscule beam of light into the mouse's brain. He is especially interested in communication between neurons: What signals are getting passed through the synapses, those gaps over which the brain's signals move? "We can detect the presence of the various neurotransmitters, but different neurons 'read' those neurotransmitters differently," he says. "Optogenetics enables us to not only see the 'ink,' but really to decipher the 'message'."

While optogenetic methods have produced a number of breakthrough results in labs around the world in recent years, they can be a bit finicky. In particular, the rhodopsins used for optogenetic studies tend to be imperfect when it comes to controlling the activity of synapses, the tiny junctions between neurons.

Yizhar and a large team of his trainees, including Dr. Mathias Mahn, Dr. Inbar Saraf Sinik and Pritish Patil, believed they could create a better version of the rhodopsins than those currently available. "We decided to look around and see what natural solutions exist out there," says Yizhar. And nature, it turns out, contains a multitude of variations on the rhodopsin molecule - not only in animal eyes but also fish, insects, and even mammals carry them in various body parts; some possibly for regulating their circadian cycles, others for purposes as yet unknown. Thus, the team started out with a long list of potential rhodopsin proteins, and their first job involved assessing which ones were most likely to fill their experimental requirements, which primarily included light-gated proteins that are able to modulate synaptic activity. Eventually the researchers winnowed their list down to two - one taken from a pufferfish and one from a mosquito.

It was the mosquito rhodopsin that turned out to be the most suitable. To evaluate the efficacy of the new mosquito-derived tool, the researchers tested their method against a drug that is known to reduce the strength of the communication between neurons in the brain. They found that the interference was just as effective, and much more stable with the mosquito rhodopsin.

More than that: Unlike a conventional drug that affects numerous parts of the brain and is hard to control, the researchers found that since only neurons that produce the mosquito sensor are affected by the light, the modulatory effect on the brain's synapses can be precisely controlled in both space and time - just by switching the light on or off in specific brain regions. They then validated the utility of the new tool by using it to block the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine on one side of the brain only: Illuminating the hemisphere expressing the mosquito rhodopsin with green light led to a one-sided bias in the behavior of these mice. In other words, they had created a tool that was precise, selective, and controllable.

"One of the major advantages of the mosquito rhodopsin is that it's bistable - that is, it does not need refreshing - and it is potentially very specific, so that we can control just the precise synapses in which we are interested," says Yizhar. "This is a very exciting technology, since it will allow us to discover the roles of specific pathways in the brain in a way that was not possible before. We think this mosquito protein could open the way to developing a whole family of new optogenetic tools for use in neuroscience research." These scientific endeavors will receive a great boost within the framework of the new Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences - Weizmann Institute's flagship project that is expected to bring together leading research groups from various fields, which will join efforts to unfold the mysteries of the brain.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - As climate change threatens global food security, researchers at Michigan State University are building better beans crucial to human nutrition by tapping into the genetics of the more heat-resistant tepary bean.

The tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius A. Gray) is a sister of the common bean which includes kidney, pinto and navy beans. "The common bean is the number one source of protein and nutrients for many people living in Central America and Africa," said Robin Buell, a professor of plant biology in MSU's College of Natural Science and former director of the Plant Resilience Institute.

Her research on bean genetics was published May 11 in Nature Communications.

"Mother nature has already made plants that are adapted to different climates," said Buell, who is also a faculty member with MSU's AgBioResearch. We can use that knowledge to adapt our modern agriculture; we don't need to reinvent it. "As climate change heats up the air and land, making them hotter and dryer, warmer nighttime temperatures make it more difficult to grow beans. To identify the genes that support bean growth in the desert, Buell and her team sequenced the genome of the tepary bean.

"The tepary bean has evolved over time to grow in the Sonoran Desert," Buell said. "We could lay the genomes for both types of beans next to each other and compare them. If we know this gene on the tepary genome protects it from heat, then, we can add the gene to the common bean."

There are genes from the common bean that are being introduced into the tepary bean to make it easier to grow and there are genes from the tepary bean that are being introduced into the common bean to make it more heat and pest resistant.

"The goal is to grow a bean that gives a good yield, grows in dry, hot climates and is nutritious." Buell said. "We want to create an accelerated path to breed better tepary and common beans."

Michigan is the number two bean producer in the nation. For over 40 years, MSU has been a leader in bean breeding and with help from MSU's expertise in plant resilience, a research partnership was formed over the tepary bean.

Severe symptoms of COVID-19, leading often to death, are thought to result from the patient's own acute immune response rather than from damage inflicted directly by the virus. Immense research efforts are therefore invested in figuring out how the virus manages to mount an effective invasion while throwing the immune system off course. A new study, published today in Nature, reveals a multipronged strategy that the virus employs to ensure its quick and efficient replication, while avoiding detection by the immune system. The joint labor of the research groups of Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Dr. Nir Paran and Dr. Tomer Israely of the Israel Institute for Biological, Chemical and Environmental Sciences, this study focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms at work during infection by SARS-CoV-2 at the cellular level.

During an infection, our cells are normally able to recognize that they're being invaded and quickly dispatch signaling molecules, which alert the immune system of the attack. With SARS-CoV-2 it was apparent early on that something was not working quite right - not only is the immune response delayed, enabling the virus to quickly replicate, unhindered, but once this response does occur it's often so severe that instead of fighting the virus it causes damage to its human host.

"Most of the research that has addressed this issue so far concentrated on specific viral proteins and characterized their functions. Yet not enough is known today about what is actually going on in the infected cells themselves," says Stern-Ginossar, of the Molecular Genetics Department. "So we infected cells with the virus and proceeded to assess how infection affects important biochemical processes in the cell, such as gene expression and protein synthesis."

When cells are infected by viruses, they start expressing a series of specific anti-viral genes - some act as first-line defenders and meet the virus head on in the cell itself, while others are secreted to the cell's environment, alerting neighboring cells and recruiting the immune system to combat the invader. At this point, both the cell and the virus race to the ribosomes, the cell's protein synthesis factories, which the virus itself lacks. What ensues is a battle between the two over this precious resource.

The new study has elucidated how SARS-CoV-2 gains the upper hand in this battle: It is able to quickly, in a matter of hours, take over the cell's protein-making machinery and at the same time to neutralize the cell's anti-viral signaling, both internal and external, delaying and muddling the immune response.

The researchers showed that the virus is able to hack the cell's hardware, taking over its protein-synthesis machinery, by relying on three separate, yet complementary, tactics. The first tactic the virus uses is to reduce the cell's capacity for translating genes into proteins, meaning that less proteins are synthesized overall. The second tactic is that it actively degrades the cell's messenger RNAs (mRNA) - the molecules that carry instructions for making proteins from the DNA to the ribosomes - while its own mRNA transcripts remain protected. Finally, the study revealed that the virus is also able to prevent the export of mRNAs from the cell's nucleus, where they are synthesized, to the cell's main chamber, where they normally serve as the template for protein synthesis.

"By employing this three-way strategy, which appears to be unique to SARS-CoV-2, the virus is able to efficiently execute what we call 'host shutoff' - where the virus takes over the cell's protein-synthesis capacity," Stern-Ginossar explains. "In this way, messages from important anti-viral genes, which the cell rushes to produce upon infection, do not make it to the factory floor to be translated into active proteins, resulting in the delayed immune response we are seeing in the clinic." The good news is that this study was also successful in identifying the viral proteins involved in the process of host shutoff by SARS-CoV-2, which could spell new opportunities for developing effective COVID-19 treatments.

New science about the fate of freshwater ecosystems released today by the journal Sustainability finds that only 17 percent of rivers globally are both free-flowing and within protected areas, leaving many of these highly-threatened systems¬--and the species that rely on them --at risk.

"Populations of freshwater species have already declined by 84 percent on average since 1970, with degradation of rivers a leading cause of this decline. As a critical food source for hundreds of millions of people, we need to reverse this trend," said Ian Harrison, freshwater specialist at Conservation International, adjunct professor at Northern Arizona University and co-editor of the journal issue.

As the world looks to establish new conservation targets at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting later this year, scientists are calling on policymakers to prioritize increasing protection of freshwater ecosystems and species and to better integrate land and water conservation.

Free-flowing rivers and other naturally functioning freshwater ecosystems sustain biodiversity and the food supply chain, drinking water, economies and cultures for billions of people worldwide. Therefore, their protection is critical to sustain these values," said Jonathan Higgins, senior freshwater science advisor at The Nature Conservancy

A newly formed coalition of water resource experts--including representatives from academia as well as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, among other entities-- coordinated this first-of-its-kind collection of papers focused exclusively on durable protections for free-flowing rivers, with the aim of offering a blueprint to policymakers so they can integrate the best available science into environmental action plans. There is no global framework focused specifically on river protection, and freshwater protection receives less attention and funding than comparable efforts for marine and terrestrial systems.

The collection of 15 studies with authors from throughout the world offers examples of free-flowing river protections through the application of scientific research, law, policy and on-the-ground implementation of restoration and management strategies.

It is co-edited by Denielle Perry, a water resource geographer who leads the Free-flowing Rivers Lab in the School of Earth and Sustainability at NAU, and Harrison, who also is co-chair of the Freshwater Conservation Committee of IUCN's Species Survival Commission. Both are founding members of the Durable River Protection Coalition, which is working to enable scientific research and policy proposals to help local communities, national governments, international institutions and private and public investors better protect these valuable but vulnerable resources.

"These ecosystems are among the most understudied and under-protected in the world, and they are at risk from further severe alteration and degradation by a range of threats, including poorly sited dam construction, overfishing, excessive water extraction and pollution," Perry said. "This first-of-its-kind collection addresses growing calls to protect rivers as corridors in a changing climate and for the important role they play in providing ecosystem services and livelihoods around the world. We are at a moment when climate change and policy will shape the path of development, and the management of our riverine resources. We must act to protect rivers now because failing to do so will have lasting consequences for decades to come."

The article topics range from global assessments to local case studies, including discussion of a framework that defines durable river protection, safeguarding free-flowing rivers through various policy mechanisms, adaptive management of the Malkumba-Coongie Lakes Ramsar site in Australia, the biological and cultural importance of sustainable floodplains in North Africa and more. The issue also features rivers in India, Mongolia, Mexico, China and the United States. Several articles take an in-depth look at a specific freshwater ecosystems and offer insights that can be applied elsewhere.

"The recommendations made in this special issue for more forward-thinking protections and wise use of our inland aquatic resources are timely. Wetlands are a powerful nature-based solution to the many challenges the world is facing. Taking action now for wetlands is foundational for creating the future we want," said Martha Rojas Urrego, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

As policymakers gather virtually this month to develop new global conservation goals, experts are calling for improved global targets for river protection. There is clear scientific evidence for the value of free-flowing rivers, including their ability to sustain migratory fish and to deliver the sediment needed to maintain river deltas--home to 500 million people and some of the most productive agricultural land on the planet--and prevent them from sinking and shrinking. Due to these values, researchers are calling for increased protections for free-flowing rivers as part of river basin management strategies.

"While 17 percent of all free-flowing rivers are within protected areas, in most countries the level of protection for large rivers is far lower," said Jeff Opperman, WWF's global lead freshwater scientist. "It's these large rivers that are most crucial for supporting fisheries that support rural communities."

Quick: Pick your three favorite fast-food restaurants.

If you're like many people, McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King may come to mind--even if you much prefer In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.

A new study from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and UC San Francisco's Department of Neurology found that when it comes to making choices, we surprisingly often forget about the things we like best and are swayed by what we remember. The paper, publishing this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines insights from economics and psychology with decision-making experiments and fMRI brain scans to examine how our imperfect memories affect our decision making.

"Life is not a multiple-choice test," says Berkeley Haas Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, director of UC Berkeley's Neuroeconomics Laboratory, who co-wrote the paper with Dr. Andrew Kayser, associate professor of neurology at UCSF, and lead author Zhihao Zhang, a Haas postdoctoral scholar. "Yet researchers traditionally give people a menu of options and ask them to choose."

The findings break away from traditional economic models that assume people make rational decisions from all available options. In most situations, rather than choosing from a ready-made list, we conjure choices from our memory.

"While everyone knows that human memory is limited--and there's a thriving market for reminder apps and Post-it Notes--scientists know surprisingly little about how this limit impacts our decisions," says Zhang. Answering this question could hold implications for everything from conducting consumer research and crafting public policy to managing neurodegenerative diseases.

To measure the influence of memory on decisions, the researchers examined people's choices for different types of consumer goods, such as fast food, fruit, sneakers, and salad dressing. For each, they asked one group of participants to name as many favorite brands or items in the category as they could. They asked a second group to choose their preferences from a menu of options. Based on those results, they created a mathematical method to predict which items people would choose in an open-ended situation.

The most surprising takeaway was just how often people seemed to forget to mention items they liked best, choosing less-preferred, but more easily remembered items. "A lot of people name McDonald's as their favorite, but many of those people don't actually like McDonald's as much as other brands," says Kayser. In an open-ended situation, 30% of people said McDonald's is their preferred fast food; yet for those given a list of restaurants, only half that many (15%) chose the Golden Arches, with the other half instead choosing restaurants such as In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.

The researchers found similarly large differences between people's preferences in open ended versus list-based choices in all the other types of consumer goods tested, both branded and non-branded items, such as fruit. "The magnitude of these changes was very surprising," says Hsu. "The fact that so many people don't mention their favorites really argues against the notion that we usually act in our own best interest, as standard economic models might have us believe."

To gain a deeper scientific understanding of how memory impacts decisions, the researchers next constructed a new mathematical model that combines economic models of decision-making with psychological models of memory recall. "Very little attention has been paid to connecting these two areas," says Zhang. "By taking the best features of each, we found that we could make amazingly accurate predictions of how often people fail to choose their more preferred options due to their imperfect memories."

In fact, the predictions were so accurate that the researchers thought they had made a mistake. "We only came to trust the findings after checking and repeating the experiments multiple times," he said.

Understanding the role memory plays in decision making has implications for millions of people managing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, says Kayser, who researches behavioral neurology.

"We know that memory declines as Alzheimer's disease progresses. We also see that decision-making capacity diminishes in areas such as financial management. But we don't yet have good models of how they might be linked, or even good ways to measure changes in decision-making capacity," he says. "For neurologists, these are urgent questions."

To nail down the role of memory retrieval in decision making, the researchers scanned the brains of a group of participants using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). Past neuroscientific research has shown that decision-making--which involves valuation--and memory are served by different brain systems.

"When people made open-ended choices in our experiments, we saw increased activity in memory retrieval regions of the brain and enhanced communication with valuation regions," says Zhang. That didn't happen when participants simply picked choices from a list: The valuation part lit up, but memory systems showed much less activity.

This provides neural evidence for the direct involvement of memory systems in open-ended decisions, and sheds light on the nature of suboptimal decisions in these situations.

"Based on these findings, it's possible that Alzheimer's patients are particularly vulnerable when decisions are open-ended," says Kayser, "If so, this could motivate development of decision support systems that can alleviate these vulnerabilities."

The research could also provide a more targeted way of designing "nudges" that help people expand their options without mandating specific choices. For example, "If we want consumers to switch to more sustainable species of fish, it might help to find a way to get people to consider other types of seafood they may have overlooked otherwise," says Hsu.

Autoimmune diseases have something in common with horses, bachelor's degrees and daily flossing habits: women are more likely to have them.

One reason for autoimmune diseases' prevalence in women may be sex-based differences in inflammation. In a new study, West Virginia University researcher Jonathan Busada investigated how sex hormones affect stomach inflammation in males and females. He found that androgens--or male sex hormones--may help to keep stomach inflammation in check.

"Stomach cancer is primarily caused by rampant inflammation," said Busada, an assistant professor in the School of Medicine and researcher with the Cancer Institute. "The overarching theme of my lab is to understand what's controlling the balance between a protective immune response, which is just targeting the infection, and a pathogenic immune response, which is like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum and damaging everything. It looks like androgens may be really important in tipping that balance toward a protective response."

His findings appear in Gastroenterology.

Busada's study focused on testosterone, the primary male sex hormone.

The study also considered glucocorticoids--steroid hormones that the adrenal glands secrete. Unlike testosterone, glucocorticoids are not sex hormones. Their production doesn't differ substantially between women and men.

Glucocorticoids are "the chief anti-inflammatory hormones that your body produces," Busada said. "You can think of them as the brake pedal to the immune system."

In researching mice without either glucocorticoids or testosterone, Busada, his research partner John Cidlowski--a senior investigator with the National Institutes of Health--and their colleagues observed that males' stomach inflammation increased as much as the females' did.

What's more, when he and his team gave testosterone to the female mice, their inflammation vanished.

"We were able to completely rescue them from their stomach inflammation," Busada said. "We proved that androgens were the hormones giving male mice that double layer of protection from inflammation. In the females, the only anti-inflammatory hormone was glucocorticoids. In males, it could be either glucocorticoids or androgens. This study potentially explains why women have a much higher incidence of autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases."

For instance, celiac disease is two to three times as common in women as in men. Multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis are three times as common. Thyroid problems? Five to eight times.

"Actually, eight out of 10 individuals with autoimmune disease are women," Busada said.

Based on these research findings, clinicians may consider if disruptive glucocorticoid or androgen signaling is contributing to their patients' stomach-inflammatory diseases.

"If someone presents with stomach inflammation, it might be worth it for clinicians to investigate what's going on with their endocrine system," Busada said.

And that's not only the case if the patient is a woman. Even though women are more susceptible to chronic stomach-inflammatory diseases, men are more susceptible to stomach cancer, of which inflammation is the biggest cause.

Worldwide, stomach cancer is the fifth most common form of cancer and the third leading cause of cancer deaths.

"Persistent, smoldering inflammation over the course of many, many years is the fertile ground for stomach cancer to grow." Busada said. "It's an important, and understudied, human health issue."

"These findings may help us understand how inflammation promotes cancer development, but we can't make any direct inferences about stomach cancer from this body of work," he said. "That's the direction we're moving in, though. We're currently studying how sex affects carcinogenesis using an actual cancer model."