Physical activity reduces stress-related brain activity to lower cardiovascular disease risk

New research indicates that physical activity lowers cardiovascular disease risk in part by reducing stress-related signaling in the brain.

In the study, which was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, people with stress-related conditions such as depression experienced the most cardiovascular benefits from physical activity.

To assess the mechanisms underlying the psychological and cardiovascular disease benefits of physical activity, Ahmed Tawakol, MD, an investigator and cardiologist in the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues analyzed medical records and other information of 50,359 participants from the Mass General Brigham Biobank who completed a physical activity survey.

A subset of 774 participants also underwent brain imaging tests and measurements of stress-related brain activity.

Over a median follow-up of 10 years, 12.9% of participants developed cardiovascular disease. Participants who met physical activity recommendations had a 23% lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease compared with those not meeting these recommendations.

Individuals with higher levels of physical activity also tended to have lower stress-related brain activity. Notably, reductions in stress-associated brain activity were driven by gains in function in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in executive function (i.e., decision making, impulse control) and is known to restrain stress centers of the brain. Analyses accounted for other lifestyle variables and risk factors for coronary disease.

Moreover, reductions in stress-related brain signaling partially accounted for physical activity's cardiovascular benefit.

As an extension of this finding, the researchers found in a cohort of 50,359 participants that the cardiovascular benefit of exercise was substantially greater among participants who would be expected to have higher stress-related brain activity, such as those with pre-existing depression.

"Physical activity was roughly twice as effective in lowering cardiovascular disease risk among those with depression. Effects on the brain's stress-related activity may explain this novel observation," says Tawakol, who is the senior author of the study.

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EVs that go 1,000 km on a single charge: Gel makes it possible

Futuristic advancements in AI and healthcare stole the limelight at the tech extravaganza Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024. However, battery technology is the game-changer at the heart of these innovations, enabling greater power efficiency. Importantly, electric vehicles are where this technology is being applied most intensely. Today's EVs can travel around 700km on a single charge, while researchers are aiming for a 1,000km battery range. Researchers are fervently exploring the use of silicon, known for its high storage capacity, as the anode material in lithium-ion batteries for EVs. However, despite its potential, bringing silicon into practical use remains a puzzle that researchers are still working hard to piece together.

Enter Professor Soojin Park, PhD candidate Minjun Je, and Dr. Hye Bin Son from the Department of Chemistry at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). They have cracked the code, developing a pocket-friendly and rock-solid next-generation high-energy-density Li-ion battery system using micro silicon particles and gel polymer electrolytes.

This work was published on the online pages of Advanced Science on the 17th of January.

Employing silicon as a battery material presents challenges: It expands by more than three times during charging and then contracts back to its original size while discharging, significantly impacting battery efficiency.

Utilizing nano-sized silicon (10-9m) partially addresses the issue, but the sophisticated production process is complex and astronomically expensive, making it a challenging budget proposition.

By contrast, micro-sized silicon (10-6m) is superbly practical in terms of cost and energy density.

Yet, the expansion issue of the larger silicon particles becomes more pronounced during battery operation, posing limitations for its use as an anode material.

The research team applied gel polymer electrolytes to develop an economical yet stable silicon-based battery system.

The electrolyte within a lithium-ion battery is a crucial component, facilitating the movement of ions between the cathode and anode.

Unlike conventional liquid electrolytes, gel electrolytes exist in a solid or gel state, characterized by an elastic polymer structure that has better stability than their liquid counterparts do.

The research team employed an electron beam to form covalent linkages between micro-silicon particles and gel electrolytes.

These covalent linkages serve to disperse internal stress caused by volume expansion during lithium-ion battery operation, alleviating the changes in micro silicon volume and enhancing structural stability.

The outcome was remarkable: The battery exhibited stable performance even with micro silicon particles (5μm), which were a hundred times larger than those used in traditional nano-silicon anodes.

Additionally, the silicon-gel electrolyte system developed by the research team exhibited ion conductivity similar to conventional batteries using liquid electrolytes, with an approximate 40% improvement in energy density.

Moreover, the team's system holds significant value due to its straightforward manufacturing process that is ready for immediate application.

Professor Soojin Park stressed: "We used a micro-silicon anode, yet, we have a stable battery. This research brings us closer to a real high-energy-density lithium-ion battery system."

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Dangerous chatbots: AI chatbots to be approved as medical devices?

"Large Language Models are neural network language models with remarkable conversational skills. They generate human-like responses and engage in interactive conversations. However, they often generate highly convincing statements that are verifiably wrong or provide inappropriate responses. Today there is no way to be certain about the quality, evidence level, or consistency of clinical information or supporting evidence for any response. These chatbots are unsafe tools when it comes to medical advice and it is necessary to develop new frameworks that ensure patient safety," said Prof. Stephen Gilbert, Professor for Medical Device Regulatory Science at Else Kröner Fresenius Center for Digital Health at TU Dresden.

Challenges in the regulatory approval of large language models

Most people research their symptoms online before seeking medical advice. Search engines play a role in decision-making process. The forthcoming integration of LLM-chatbots into search engines may increase users' confidence in the answers given by a chatbot that mimics conversation. It has been demonstrated that LLMs can provide profoundly dangerous information when prompted with medical questions.

LLM's underlying approach has no model of medical "ground truth," which is inherently dangerous. Chat interfaced LLMs have already provided harmful medical responses and have already been used unethically in 'experiments' on patients without consent. Almost every medical LLM use case requires regulatory control in the EU and US. In the US their lack of explainability disqualifies them from being 'non devices'. LLMs with explainability, low bias, predictability, correctness, and verifiable outputs do not currently exist and they are not exempted from current (or future) governance approaches.

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New research reveals the impact of different species and their traits on human wellbeing

New research has revealed for the first time that well-functioning ecosystems are crucial to human health and wellbeing, with human-biodiversity interactions delivering wellbeing gains equating to substantial healthcare cost-savings, when scaled-up across populations.

The University of Kent-led study, which is part of the European Research Council-funded project 'Relating Subjective Wellbeing to Biodiversity' (RELATE), set out to understand which components of nature and biodiversity played a particular role in human wellbeing.

The team, which was led by Kent's Professor Zoe Davies, analysed the effects of species' traits, based on people's feedback following a series of workshops, to identify those that generate different types of wellbeing e.g., physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and 'global', the latter being akin to 'whole-person health'.

The team found that, in general, the vast majority of species and traits are beneficial to human wellbeing. They also discovered that each species may support multiple traits, potentially with different impacts. For example, the colours of brambles (black, pink, red) are linked to multiple positive physical, emotional and social wellbeing types, but their prickly texture generated negative emotional wellbeing. The numerous traits from across an ecological community can elicit a multitude of wellbeing responses, illustrating the true complexity of how people relate to biodiversity.

Professor Davies, a biodiversity conservationist at Kent's Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), said: 'While we know that spending time in natural environments can improve our health and wellbeing, we still need to know more about which species, or traits of species (such as colours, sounds, smells, textures and behaviours), deliver these benefits -- and how people's relationships with biodiversity are both contextually and culturally specific. Understanding how people experience biodiversity is therefore key to successfully managing biodiversity to facilitate human wellbeing.'

Study co-author, Professor Martin Dallimer, from the School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, said: 'For the first time, through analysing people's own words and reflections, we are able to explicitly link that feeling of wellbeing with species and their traits. How people respond to biodiversity is hugely varied and if we want people's wellbeing to benefit from spending time in nature, then it is essential to make sure we are maintaining and restoring high quality biodiverse spaces for wildlife and for people. Our aim is that these findings really drive home how important biodiversity is in underpinning wellbeing benefits, particularly to healthcare and public sectors who include 'spending time in nature' as an element of mental health and wellbeing.'

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Human and ocean health impacts of ocean plastics

For the first time, leading researchers from the fields of healthcare, ocean science, and social science have collaborated to quantify plastic's considerable risks to all life on Earth. The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health report, released today, presents a comprehensive analysis showing plastics as a hazard at every stage of their life cycle.

The report was led by scientists at the Minderoo Foundation, the Centre Scientifique de Monaco, and Boston College. Researchers Mark Hahn and John Stegeman at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were lead authors on a section focusing on the impacts of plastics on the ocean.

The Commission's key findings include:

•     Plastics cause disease, impairment, and premature mortality at every stage of their life cycle, with the health repercussions disproportionately affecting vulnerable, low-income, minority communities, particularly children.
•     Toxic chemicals that are added to plastics and routinely detected in people are, among other effects, known to increase the risk of miscarriage, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancers.
•     Plastic waste is ubiquitous in the global environment, with microplastics occurring throughout the ocean and the marine food chain.

"It's only been a little over 50 years since we've been aware of the presence of plastics throughout the ocean," said John Stegeman, a senior scientist the Department of Biology at WHOI. "The Minderoo-Monaco Commission's work is a significant leap forward in connecting the broad health implications of plastics -- to the ocean and to humanity."

The Commission concluded that current plastic production, use, and disposal patterns are not sustainable and are responsible for significant harm to human health, the economy, and the environment -- especially the ocean -- as well as deep societal injustices. Plastics, the report notes, account for an estimated 4 to 5% of all greenhouse gas emissions across their lifecycle, equivalent to emissions from Russia, making them a large-scale contributor to climate change.

The study also calculated the cost of the health repercussions attributed to plastic production to be $250 billion in a 12-month period, which is more than the GDP of New Zealand or Finland in 2015, the year the data were collected. In addition, health care costs associated with chemicals in plastics are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The research also noted that the ubiquity of fast food and discount stores in poorer communities increased exposure to plastic packaging, products, and associated chemicals and impacts.

"Plastic waste endangers the ocean ecosystems upon which all humanity depends for food, oxygen, livelihood, and well-being," said Dr. Hervé Raps, Physician Delegate for Research at Centre Scientifique de Monaco. "Besides their intrinsic effects, plastics can also be a vector for potentially pathogenic microorganisms and other chemicals adsorbed from polluted water. And alongside the new findings of this report, linking toxic chemicals to human harms, this is not the time to slow down our understanding of impacts in the ocean."

Although plastics' potential harm to human health might be news to some, the oceanographic and marine biology communities have been acutely aware of its negative environmental impacts for decades. Despite this head start, the Commission's findings reveal a pressing need for better understanding and monitoring of the effects of plastics and plastic-associated chemicals on marine species. The authors also highlight a significant lack of knowledge concerning the concentrations of the smallest micro- and nano-plastic particles (MNPs) in the marine environment and their potential impacts on marine animals and ecosystems, from the coasts to the abyss.

As a result of its findings, the Commission urged that a cap on global plastic production be a defining feature of the Global Plastics Treaty currently being negotiated at the UN, and that the Treaty focus beyond marine litter to address the impacts of plastics across their entire life cycle, including the many thousands of chemicals incorporated into plastics and the human health impacts. The positive news is that the Commission reports that many of plastics' harms can be avoided via better production practices, alternative design, less toxic chemicals, and decreased consumption.

"Ocean health is intimately and intricately connected to human health," said Mark Hahn, a senior scientist in the Department of Biology at WHOI. "Our attention now needs to be on creating a broadly acceptable international agreement that addresses the full life cycle of plastics in order to prioritize the health of the ocean that supports us all."

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Reducing their natural signals: How sneaky germs hide from ants

Not only humans are social, ants are too. Group members are taking care of sick ones by providing collective hygiene measures. This presents germs with a task. They must circumvent the immunity of an individual ant and avoid the group's healthcare. A new study now published in Nature Ecology & Evolution reveals that germs develop a sneaky way to escape the ant colony's defense systems by reducing their detection cues.

Pathogens are disease-causing organisms. By natural selection, they develop evading mechanisms to outsmart the host's immune system and to get the upper hand. One way to support the immune system and fight back is medical intervention. However, this can lead to unwanted adaptions of pathogens as seen in antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Another strategy is social intervention. Some social groups like ants are trying to fight infection with "social immunity," the collective hygiene and health care measures to avoid spreading throughout the community. If and how pathogens can respond to this kind of group behavior, is still unknown.

The latest study by Professor Sylvia Cremer and her research team at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) shows the extraordinary effects of these kinds of host-parasite interactions. Together, with chemical ecologists at the University of Würzburg in Germany, the scientists took a close look at social ants, to see how pathogenic fungi respond to their hosts' social care intervention during infection. The results reveal that fungi reduce their chemical detection signals to outplay social immunity. The study is published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

More spores but less grooming

"Fungi infect the ants from the body surface and grow inside, but nestmates groom off many of the spores before they can even cause internal infection," explains Barbara Milutinović, one of the lead authors, former postdoc in the Cremer Group and now Marie Curie Sklodowska Fellow at Ruđer Bošković Institute in Croatia. The scientists set up an experiment where Argentine ants (Linepithemahumile) were infected with pathogenic Metarhizium fungi either in the absence or presence of caregiving colony members. "We found that the fungi fundamentally changed in response to the ant workers' caregiving," Milutinović continues. Over ten infection cycles, fungi which experienced grooming nestmate ants boosted their spore production compared to fungi accompanied by only individual ants. "Producing more spores will help the fungus counteract the spore-removal by helping nestmates. Yet, we were surprised to see that the ants showed less grooming against the spores," Sylvia Cremer adds. "This suggests, that the spores have become more difficult to detect by the ants."

Fungi lose their typical chemical profile

To check why ant workers had difficulties sensing fungi and to analyze possible fungal detection cues, the scientists teamed up with a chemical ecologist from the University of Würzburg. Local Professor Thomas Schmitt explains: "The fungi, that adapted to social hosts were perceived less strongly, due to a strong reduction of a fungi-specific compound called ergosterol." Ergosterol is an essential membrane compound, that all fungi have. By exposing the ants to pure fungal ergosterol or the slightly different non-fungal vertebrate equivalent, the researchers showed, that only the fungal compound induced intense grooming. Milutinović summarizes: "This demonstrates that fungal pathogens react to the presence of caregiving ants by reducing their characteristic fungal signals. They are no longer recognized as a disease threat and can escape the social immunity of the colony."

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Most dog breeds highly inbred

Dog breeds are often recognized for distinctive traits -- the short legs of a dachshund, wrinkled face of a pug, spotted coat of a Dalmatian. Unfortunately, the genetics that give various breeds their particular attributes are often the result of inbreeding.

In a recent study published in Canine Medicine and Genetics, an international team of researchers led by University of California, Davis, veterinary geneticist Danika Bannasch show that the majority of canine breeds are highly inbred, contributing to an increase in disease and health care costs throughout their lifespan.

"It's amazing how inbreeding seems to matter to health," Bannasch said. "While previous studies have shown that small dogs live longer than large dogs, no one had previously reported on morbidity, or the presence of disease. This study revealed that if dogs are of smaller size and not inbred, they are much healthier than larger dogs with high inbreeding."

Inbreeding affects health

The average inbreeding based on genetic analysis across 227 breeds was close to 25%, or the equivalent of sharing the same genetic material with a full sibling. These are levels considered well above what would be safe for either humans or wild animal populations. In humans, high levels of inbreeding (3-6%) have been associated with increased prevalence of complex diseases as well as other conditions.

"Data from other species, combined with strong breed predispositions to complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune diseases, highlight the relevance of high inbreeding in dogs to their health," said Bannasch, who also serves as the Maxine Adler Endowed Chair in Genetics at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

The researchers partnered with Wisdom Health Genetics, a world leader in pet genetics, to obtain the largest sample size possible for analysis. Wisdom Health's database is the largest dog DNA database in the world, helping researchers collect data from 49,378 dogs across 227 breeds -- primarily from European sources.

Some breeds more inbred

So, what makes a dog breed more inbred than others? Bannasch explained that it's often a combination of a small founding population followed by strong selection for particular traits in a breed -- often based on looks rather than purpose. While she has always had an interest in the population structure of some of these breeds, she became particularly interested in the Danish-Swedish farmdog several years ago. She fell in love with their compact size, disposition and intelligence, and ended up importing one from Sweden.

Bannasch discovered that Danish-Swedish farmdogs have a low level of inbreeding based on their history of a relatively large founding population of 200, and being bred for function, rather than a strong artificial selection for looks. And according to the insurance health data on breeds collected from Agria Insurance Sweden and hosted online by the International Partnership for Dogs, the farmdog is one of the healthiest breeds.

The study also revealed a significant difference in morbidity between brachycephalic (short skull and snout) and non-brachycephalic breeds. While that finding wasn't unexpected, the researchers removed brachycephalic breeds from the final analysis on effects of inbreeding on health.

Preserving genetic diversity

In the end, Bannasch said she isn't sure there is a way out of inbred breeds. People have recognized that creating matches based solely on pedigrees is misleading. The inbreeding calculators don't go back far enough in a dog's genetic line, and that method doesn't improve overall high levels of population inbreeding.

There are other measures that can be taken to preserve the genetic diversity and health of a breed, she said. They include careful management of breeding populations to avoid additional loss of existing genetic diversity, through breeder education and monitoring of inbreeding levels enabled by direct genotyping technologies.

Outcrosses are being proposed or have already been carried out for some breeds and conditions as a measure to increase genetic diversity, but care must be taken to consider if these will effectively increase overall breed diversity and therefore reduce inbreeding, Bannasch said. In particular, in the few breeds with low inbreeding levels, every effort should be made to maintain the genetic diversity that is present.

Read more at Science Daily

Prehistoric mums may have cared for kids better than we thought

A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed the death rate of babies in ancient societies is not a reflection of poor healthcare, disease and other factors, but instead is an indication of the number of babies born in that era.

The findings shed new light on the history of our ancestors and debunk old assumptions that infant mortality rates were consistently high in ancient populations.

The study also opens up the possibility mothers from early human societies may have been much more capable of caring for their children than previously thought.

"It has long been assumed that if there are a lot of deceased babies in a burial sample, then infant mortality must have been high," lead author Dr Clare McFadden, from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology, said.

"Many have assumed that infant mortality was very high in the past in the absence of modern healthcare.

"When we look at these burial samples, it actually tells us more about the number of babies that were born and tells us very little about the number of babies that were dying, which is counterintuitive to past perceptions."

The researchers examined United Nations (UN) data from the past decade for 97 countries that looked at infant mortality, fertility and the number of deaths that occurred during infancy. The analysis revealed that fertility had a much greater influence on the proportion of deceased infants than the infant mortality rate.

Because there is very little known about early human societies, the UN data helped the researchers make interpretations about humans from the past 10,000 years.

"Archaeology has often looked at the proportion of deceased infants to learn something about infant mortality. There was an assumption that nearly half, 40 per cent, of all babies born in prehistoric populations died within the first year of their lives," Dr McFadden said.

After analysing the UN data, Dr McFadden found no evidence to support this assumption.

"Burial samples show no proof that a lot of babies were dying, but they do tell us a lot of babies were being born," she said.

"If mothers during that time were having a lot of babies, then it seems reasonable to suggest they were capable of caring for their young children."

The ANU findings could help researchers understand more about humans that inhabited the Earth tens of thousands of years ago and in particular, how mothers in ancient societies cared for and interacted with their children.

Dr McFadden said as we piece together more clues about the history of humans, it's important we "bring some humanity" back to our ancestors.

"Artistic representations and popular culture tend to view our ancestors as these archaic and incapable people, and we forget their emotional experience and responses such as the desire to provide care and feelings of grief date back tens of thousands of years, so adding this emotional and empathetic aspect to the human narrative is really important," she said.

The researchers would also like to see greater emphasis placed on the stories of women in past populations, which they say have long been neglected in favour of male stories.

"We hear a lot of stories about conflict involving males and even narratives around colonisation and expansion of populations tend to have a focus on men and I think it's really important to be telling these stories of women in the past and what the female experience was like, including the roles they played in the community and as a mother," Dr McFadden said.

Read more at Science Daily

New report aims to improve VR use in healthcare education

A new report that could help improve how immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are used in healthcare education and training has been published with significant input from the University of Huddersfield.

Professor David Peebles, Director of the University's Centre for Cognition and Neuroscience, and Huddersfield PhD graduate Matthew Pears contributed to the report -- 'Immersive technologies in healthcare training and education: Three principles for progress' -- recently published by the University of Leeds with input from range of academics, technologists and health professionals.

The principles have also been expanded upon in a letter to the prestigious journal BMJ Simulation and Technology Enhanced Learning.

The Huddersfield contribution to the report stems from research conducted over several years, which involved another former Huddersfield PhD researcher, Yeshwanth Pulijala, and Professor Eunice Ma, now with Falmouth University.

"Yeshwanth had an interest in technology and education, and in using VR for dentistry training. Matthew was looking at soft skills and situation awareness, which could be applied to investigating how dentists were able to keep a track of what was going on around them. They were similar subjects, although with different emphases, and so it seemed a natural area for collaboration."

With only a relatively small number of dental schools in the UK, the quartet visited seven dental schools in India in early 2017, with support from travel grants from Santander Bank, to test their VR-based training materials on students. The experience gained from that visit contributed to both researchers' PhDs, and ultimately led to the involvement of Professor Peebles and Matthew Pears in the new report.

The report argues for greater standardisation of how to use immersive technologies in healthcare training and education. As Professor Peebles explains, "It's about developing a set of principles and guidelines for the use of immersive technology in medical treatment. Immersive technology is becoming increasingly popular and, as the technology is advancing, it's becoming clear that there is great potential to make training more accessible and effective.

"It is important, however, that research is driven by the needs of the user and existing evidence rather than the technology. Rather than thinking 'we have a new bit of VR or AR kit, what can we do with it?', we should be looking at the problem that needs solving -- what are the learning needs, so how do we use technology to solve it?

"Developing immersive training materials can be very time-consuming and difficult to evaluate properly. Getting surgeons and medical students to take time out to test your VR training is challenging. In our case we were lucky to have a surgeon, Professor Ashraf Ayoub, a Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Glasgow, who granted us permission to film a surgical procedure that was then transformed into a 3D environment to train students about situation awareness while in the operating theatre."

Professor Peebles hopes the work so far will provide a basis for more investigations that could help get the most from the potential that VR and immersive technology have to offer.

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Study with healthcare workers supports that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is long-lasting

One year after infection by SARS-CoV-2, most people maintain anti-Spike antibodies regardless of the severity of their symptoms, according to a study with healthcare workers co-led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), the Catalan Health Institute (ICS) and the Jordi Gol Institute (IDIAP JG), with the collaboration of the Daniel Bravo Andreu Private Foundation. The results suggest that vaccine-generated immunity will also be long-lasting.

One of the key questions to better predict the pandemic's evolution is the duration of natural immunity. A growing number of studies suggest that most people generate a humoral (antibody) and cellular (T cells) response that is maintained during several months, maybe years.

During the first wave of the pandemic, the team at ICS/IDIAP JG in collaboration with Carlota Dobaño's team at ISGlobal started a follow-up study of a cohort of healthcare workers with COVID-19 -- a total of 173 people working in healthcare centers of central Catalonia. Most infections were mild to moderate, although some cases required hospitalization.

The research team took regular blood samples from September 2020 onwards to measure the level and type of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies in these patients. This work was possible thanks to the support of the Daniel Bravo Foundation, which equipped ISGlobal with the latest technology and necessary resources to perform the study and rapidly reach conclusions during the subsequent waves.

"The results obtained until now lead us to believe that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will last longer than we originally thought. Being a new virus, it is very important to understand how it behaves and affects different people," says Anna Ruiz Comellas, researcher at the Catalan Institute of Health and co-author of the study.

No significant decay in antibody levels was observed over the first five months, and at 9 months, 92.4% of peoples remained seropositive -- 90% of them had IgG, 76% had IgA and 61% had IgM recognising the Spike protein or the receptor binding domain (RBD). The results were similar among healthcare workers who had not been vaccinated in April (95% had IgG, 83% IgA and 25% IgM).

"These data confirm that IgG have a longer duration, but IgM levels, which are supposed to last less, were unexpectedly quite sustained over time," says Gemma Moncunill, ISGlobal researcher and senior co-author of the study, together with Ruíz-Comellas. Hospitalization, fever, and loss of smell and taste were associated with higher antibody levels at five or nine months.

Four reinfections were observed among the participants. Two of them were symptomatic and occurred in seronegative individuals. Another asymptomatic reinfection occurred in a subject with very low antibody levels. These results indicate that anti-Spike antibodies protect against symptomatic infections. "They also indicate that people who have not been previously infected should be prioritised for vaccination, since those who have already been infected may be protected for at least one year," says Anna Ramírez-Morros, first co-author of the study.

Read more at Science Daily

Walking in their shoes: Using virtual reality to elicit empathy in healthcare providers

Research has shown empathy gives healthcare workers the ability to provide appropriate supports and make fewer mistakes. This helps increase patient satisfaction and enhance patient outcomes, resulting in better overall care. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, published by Elsevier, multidisciplinary clinicians and researchers from Dalhousie University performed an integrative review to synthesize the findings regarding virtual reality (VR) as a pedagogical tool for eliciting empathetic behavior in medical radiation technologists (MRTs).

Informally, empathy is often described as the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of another. Empathy is essential to patient-centered care and crucial to the development of therapeutic relationships between carers (healthcare providers, healthcare students, and informal caregivers such as parents, spouses, friends, family, clergy, social workers, and fellow patients) and care recipients. Currently, there is a need for the development of effective tools and approaches that are standardizable, low-risk, safe-to-fail, easily repeatable, and could assist in eliciting empathetic behavior.

This research synthesis looked at studies investigating VR experiences that ranged from a single eight-minute session to sessions lasting 20-25 minutes in duration delivered on two separate days, both in immersive VR environments where participants assumed the role of a care recipient, and non-immersive VR environments where the participants assumed the role of a care provider in a simulated care setting. The two types of studies helped researchers gain an understanding of what it is like to have a specific disease or need and to practice interacting with virtual care recipients.

"Although the studies we looked at don't definitively show VR can help sustain empathy behaviors over time, there is a lot of promise for research and future applications in this area," explained lead author Megan Brydon, MSc, BHSc, RTNM, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

The authors conclude that VR may provide an effective and wide-ranging tool for the learning of care recipients' perspectives and that future studies should seek to determine which VR experiences are the most effective in evoking empathetic behaviors. They recommend that these studies employ high order designs that are better able to control biases.

From Science Daily

Detecting trace amounts of multiple classes of antibiotics in foods

 Widespread use of antibiotics in human healthcare and livestock husbandry has led to trace amounts of the drugs ending up in food products. Long-term consumption could cause health problems, but it's been difficult to analyze more than a few antibiotics at a time because they have different chemical properties. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have developed a method to simultaneously measure 77 antibiotics in a variety of foods.

Antibiotics can be present at trace amounts in meat, eggs and milk if the animals aren't withdrawn from the drugs for a sufficient period of time before the products are collected. Also, antibiotics can accumulate in cereals, vegetables and fruits from manure fertilizer or treated wastewater applied to crops. Consuming these foods over a long period of time could lead to increased antibiotic resistance of bacterial pathogens or to an imbalance in the gut microbiome. However, most previous monitoring methods for antibiotics in foods have been limited to a few compounds at a time, usually within a single class of antibiotics with similar structures and chemical properties. Other methods have analyzed multiple antibiotics in only a single food type, such as eggs or milk. Yujie Ben and colleagues wanted to develop a time- and cost-effective method that could detect a wide range of antibiotics in different types of foods.

The researchers added trace amounts of 81 antibiotics from seven categories to vegetable samples and tested 20 different methods for extracting the drugs from the food. Only one extraction process, which involved treating freeze-dried, homogenized food samples with an acidified acetonitrile solution and a mixture of magnesium sulfate and sodium acetate, allowed the researchers to isolate 77 of the antibiotics. After establishing that their method was sensitive and accurate with spiked antibiotics in several foods, the team applied it to store-bought samples of wheat flour, mutton, eggs, milk, cabbage and bananas, detecting a total of 10 antibiotics. One of them, roxithromycin, was detected at trace amounts in all six food types. The new method should help with understanding, monitoring and regulating antibiotic levels in foods, the researchers say.

From Science Daily