Replacing social media use with physical activity

September 7, 2022

Science Daily/Ruhr-University Bochum

If you spend 30 minutes less on social media every day and engage in physical activity instead, you do a lot to improve your mental health. This is shown in a study conducted by a team from the Mental Health Research and Treatment Center at Ruhr-Universität Bochum headed by assistant professor Dr. Julia Brailovskaia. Participants who followed this advice for two weeks felt happier, more satisfied, less stressed by the Covid-19 pandemic and less depressed than a control group. These effects lasted even six months after the study had ended. The researchers published their findings in the Journal of Public Health on Sept. 2, 2022.

The downside of social media

In times of lockdowns and contact restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp ensured that we still felt connected to other people. They distracted us from the stress brought about by the pandemic, which caused many people to experience anxiety, insecurities, and hopelessness. But social media consumption has also its drawbacks. Heavy use can lead to addictive behaviour that manifests itself in, for example, a close emotional bond to the social media. In addition, fake news and conspiracy theories can spread uncontrollably on social channels and trigger even more anxiety.

"Given that we don't know for certain how long the coronavirus crisis will last, we wanted to know how to protect people's mental health with services that are as free and low-threshold as possible," explains Julia Brailovskaia. To find out whether the type and duration of social media use can contribute to this, she conducted an experimental study as part of her fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS).

A two-week experiment

She and her team recruited a total of 642 volunteers, assigning them randomly to one of four groups of roughly equal size. The first group reduced the daily social media consumption by 30 minutes during an intervention period of two weeks. Since previous studies had shown that physical activity can increase well-being and reduce depressive symptoms, the second group increased the duration of physical activity by 30 minutes daily during this period, while continuing to use social media as usual. The third group combined both, reducing social media use and increasing physical activity. A control group didn't change the behaviour during the intervention phase.

Before, during and up to six months after the two-week intervention phase, the participants responded to online surveys on the duration, intensity and emotional significance of their social media use, physical activity, their satisfaction with life, their subjective feeling of happiness, depressive symptoms, the psychological burden of the Covid-19 pandemic and their cigarette consumption.

Healthy and happy in the age of digitalisation

The findings clearly showed that both reducing the amount of time spent on social media each day and increasing physical activity have a positive impact on people's well-being. And particularly the combination of the two interventions increases one's satisfaction with life and subjective feeling of happiness and reduces depressive symptoms. The effects last for a long time: even six months after the two-week intervention phase had ended, participants in all three intervention groups spent less time on social media than before: namely about a half hour in the groups that had either reduced social media time or increased their daily exercise, and about three-quarters of an hour in the group that had combined both measures. Six months after the intervention, the combination group engaged one hour and 39 minutes more each week in physical activity than before the experiment. The positive influence on mental health continued throughout the entire follow-up period.

"This shows us how vital it is to reduce our availability online from time to time and to go back to our human roots," concludes Julia Brailovskaia. "These measures can be easily implemented into one's everyday life and they're completely free -- and, at the same time, they help us to stay happy and healthy in the digital age."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220907105433.htm

How does nature nurture the brain?

Study shows that a one-hour walk in nature reduces stress-related brain activity

September 6, 2022

Science Daily/Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Living in a city is a well-known risk factor for developing a mental disorder, while living close to nature is largely beneficial for mental health and the brain. A central brain region involved in stress processing, the amygdala, has been shown to be less activated during stress in people who live in rural areas, compared to those who live in cities, hinting at the potential benefits of nature. "But so far the hen-and-egg problem could not be disentangled, namely whether nature actually caused the effects in the brain or whether the particular individuals chose to live in rural or urban regions," says Sonja Sudimac, predoctoral fellow in the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience and lead author of the study.

To achieve causal evidence, the researchers from the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience examined brain activity in regions involved in stress processing in 63 healthy volunteers before and after a one-hour walk in Grunewald forest or a shopping street with traffic in Berlin using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results of the study revealed that activity in the amygdala decreased after the walk in nature, suggesting that nature elicits beneficial effects on brain regions related to stress.

"The results support the previously assumed positive relationship between nature and brain health, but this is the first study to prove the causal link. Interestingly, the brain activity after the urban walk in these regions remained stable and did not show increases, which argues against a commonly held view that urban exposure causes additional stress," explains Simone Kühn, head of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience.

The authors show that nature has a positive impact on brain regions involved in stress processing and that it can already be observed after a one-hour walk. This contributes to the understanding of how our physical living environment affects brain and mental health. Even a short exposure to nature decreases amygdala activity, suggesting that a walk in nature could serve as a preventive measure against developing mental health problems and buffering the potentially disadvantageous impact of the city on the brain.

The results go in line with a previous study (2017, Scientific Reports) which showed that city dwellers who lived close to the forest had a physiologically healthier amygdala structure and were therefore presumably better able to cope with stress. This new study again confirms the importance for urban design policies to create more accessible green areas in cities in order to enhance citizens' mental health and well-being.

In order to investigate benedicial effects of nature in different populations and age groups, the researchers are currently working on a study examining how a one-hour walk in natural versus urban environments impacts stress in mothers and their babies.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220906114334.htm

How the gut may help to drive COVID-19

September 3, 2022

Science Daily/Flinders University

New findings from Flinders University have demonstrated a molecular link between COVID-19 and serotonin cells in the gut.

The research could help provide further clues to what could be driving COVID-19 infection and disease severity and supports previous evidence that antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), could reduce the severity of COVID symptoms.

COVID-19 displays an array of symptoms, which can regularly include gastrointestinal issues such as diarrhoea. Recent research has indicated that these gut symptoms in COVID-19 patients worsen with the severity of the disease, and this is linked to heightened gut-derived serotonin, released to cause gut dysfunction, increasing the body's immune response and potentially worsening patient outcomes.

Published in the world's leading gastrointestinal research journal Gut, this new collaborative study involved three Flinders research teams, including teams led by ARC DECRA Fellow Dr Alyce Martin and FAME Director of Bioinformatics and Human-Microbe Interactions, Professor Robert Edwards.

"Our study endeavoured to understand whether the gut could be a site of disease transmission and what genes might be associated with the virus entering the cells lining the gut wall," says study senior author Professor Damien Keating, Deputy Director of the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute and Head of the Gut Sensory Systems research group.

The researchers looked at gene expression amongst the different cell types that line the gut wall, analysing whole genome sequences from thousands of individual cells from within the intestine.

They found specialised cells within the gut that synthesised and released serotonin had a highly enriched expression of a particular SARS-CoV-2 receptor and were the only type of cell that expressed all the genes associated with COVID-19.

"Many genes linked to COVID-19 were found expressed in the different cell types lining the gut wall but only serotonin cells expressed all three receptors for the virus," says Professor Keating.

"Expression of all three SARS-CoV-2 receptors triples the rate of cell infectivity, compared to expression of only two receptors."

With the exact sites of infection and the primary drivers of COVID-19 disease severity not yet fully understood, the authors say this study provides important information on the gut's role in the virus.

"Our study adds further evidence that COVID-19 is far more likely to infect cells in the gut and increase serotonin levels through direct effects on specific gut cells, potentially worsening disease outcomes," says Professor Keating.

"It also provides further support to emerging clinical evidence that antidepressant drugs, which block serotonin transport around the body, may serve as a beneficial treatment.

"As COVID-19 continues to circulate, further research will be required to advance our understanding of the gut's role in this virus and continue to find treatment options to work alongside vaccinations."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220901135944.htm

High blood pressure awareness, control improved with better access to primary health care

Better access to primary health care was associated with improved high blood pressure awareness and control

September 6, 2022

Science Daily/American Heart Association

Having easier access to primary care physicians may increase high blood pressure awareness and control regardless of where a person lives, according to new research published today in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association.

According to the American Heart Association, nearly half of all Americans have hypertension (high blood pressure), and many don't even know they have it. High blood pressure is often called the "silent killer" because high blood pressure often has no obvious symptoms. The best ways to protect yourself are to be aware of the risks and make healthy life changes that matter.

In a new study, researchers note that health care professionals at community clinics and primary care practices may help expand awareness and detection of high blood pressure by providing affordable treatment and management. High blood pressure is a leading preventable risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and effective blood pressure control reduces the associated cardiovascular health risks.

"Access to primary care is the key to hypertension management, however, many Americans have limited access to primary care where they live. This is especially true of people in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods or people from diverse racial and ethnic groups, particularly among African American individuals," said senior study author Brisa Aschebrook-Kilfoy, Ph.D., an associate professor of public health sciences at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

It is well known that better access to primary health care is linked to improved high blood pressure awareness and control. This study sought to clarify if people living in disadvantaged neighborhoods may benefit from better access to primary care health professionals.

In this study, neighborhood socioeconomic status was assessed using the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) created by the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) over three decades ago. The ADI was chosen because it allows for rankings of neighborhoods by socioeconomic disadvantage in a region of interest (e.g., at the state or national level), and it is valuable to inform health delivery and policy, especially for the most disadvantaged neighborhood groups. ADI is composed of 17 indicators covering income, education, employment and housing quality. In this study, socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods were defined as those in census tracts ranked in the 50th percentile and above.

"Some argue that minority health disparities are solely the product of socioeconomic factors, or that increasing the number of primary care professionals in diverse racial and ethnic neighborhoods would not reduce health disparities and improve public health. To our knowledge, there is little research to support or rebut this argument," said first study author Jiajun Luo, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute for Population and Precision Health. "We conducted this study to examine whether accessibility of primary care is associated with better hypertension control and awareness across various socioeconomic and neighborhood factors."

The study examined Chicago, one of the most racially segregated cities in the U.S. Chicago's South Side is the largest African American urban community in the U.S., with substantial challenges including poverty, violence and decreased access to fresh, healthy foods. According to the study, a 30-year gap in life expectancy has been observed between people who live in the South Side neighborhoods and Chicago's wealthier northern neighborhoods, which may be largely attributable to higher rates of high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.

The researchers analyzed the health data for more than 5,000 predominantly African American adults who participated in the Chicago Multiethnic Prevention and Surveillance Study (COMPASS) between 2013 to 2019. COMPASS is a long-term initiative at the University of Chicago exploring the health of Chicagoans, primarily those who live in communities on the South Side. MAPSCorps, a non-profit organization, provided location information for primary care professionals providing care in those Chicago neighborhoods.

More than half of the study participants were smokers, and they reported an annual household income of less than $15,000 and more than 37% were obese according to body mass index (BMI). Most of the study population resided in a Chicago neighborhood with an ADI rank higher than the 70th percentile (communities with the most disadvantages).

Researchers also evaluated spatial accessibility, which is a composite score that considers the distance between an individual's residence and local primary health care facilities; the number of physicians-to-population ratio; and the effect of distance to primary care on an individual's willingness to seek primary health care. A higher spatial accessibility score indicated better accessibility to primary care. The primary health care professionals included family physicians, general practitioners and general internists.

The research found: ®

• Nearly 80% of the COMPASS participants had documented hypertension, using the standard American Heart Association guideline-based blood pressure criteria of measures ?130 mm Hg systolic (top number) or ?80 mm Hg diastolic (bottom number).

• Nearly 38% of those with hypertension did not have their blood pressure under control (were not receiving treatment based on self-report), and 41% were not aware they had high blood pressure.

• Spatial accessibility scores ranged from 16.4 (lower access to primary care) to 86.6 (higher access) per 100,000 residents.

• Adults living in areas with the fewest primary health care professionals had 37% increased odds of having hypertension when compared to the adults living in neighborhoods with the most primary care physicians.

• The listed associations existed in both poor and wealthy neighborhoods, suggesting that residents in all neighborhoods may benefit from increasing the number of primary care professionals.

• When stratified by neighborhood type (advantaged or disadvantaged), accessibility to primary care was not associated with use of anti-hypertension medications among those who reported they had hypertension prior to enrolling in the study.

"Based on these findings, we need to encourage primary care physicians to expand access to people who live in underserved communities with the fewest primary care professionals," Aschebrook-Kilfoy said. "Mobile health units may be one approach to increase primary care service in underserved areas by eliminating the challenge of getting transportation to and from an office visit. The use of anti-hypertension medications also needs to be studied and addressed, especially as it was not linked to primary care accessibility in this study."

While the method used in this study to measure spatial accessibility can be used anywhere with sufficient location information about primary care professionals, a major limitation of this study is that these specific results may not be representative of other communities and population groups, such as middle-class urban communities or people from other diverse racial and ethnic groups, etc.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220906083550.htm

Low testosterone may increase risk of COVID-19 hospitalization for men

Boosting testosterone in men with low levels may reduce serious illness

September 2, 2022

Science Daily/Washington University School of Medicine

Among men diagnosed with COVID-19, those with low testosterone levels are more likely to become seriously ill and end up in the hospital than men with normal levels of the hormone, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

The team analyzed the cases of 723 men who tested positive for COVID-19, mostly in 2020 before vaccines were available. The data indicate that low testosterone is an independent risk factor for COVID-19 hospitalization, similar to diabetes, heart disease and chronic lung disease.

They found that men with low testosterone who developed COVID-19 were 2.4 times more likely to require hospitalization than men with hormone levels in the normal range. Further, men who were once diagnosed with low testosterone but successfully treated with hormone replacement therapy were no more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 than men whose testosterone levels had always tested in the normal range.

The findings, published Sept. 2 in JAMA Network Open, suggest that treating men with low testosterone may help protect them against severe disease and reduce the burden on hospitals during COVID-19 waves.

"It is very likely that COVID-19 is here to stay," said co-senior author Abhinav Diwan, MD, a professor of medicine at Washington University. Diwan, who treats patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, is also a professor of cell biology & physiology, and of obstetrics & gynecology. "Hospitalizations with COVID-19 are still a problem and will continue to be a problem because the virus keeps evolving new variants that escape immunization-based immunity. Low testosterone is very common; up to a third of men over 30 have it. Our study draws attention to this important risk factor and the need to address it as a strategy to lower hospitalizations."

Diwan and co-senior author Sandeep Dhindsa, MD, an endocrinologist at Saint Louis University, previously had shown that men hospitalized with COVID-19 have abnormally low testosterone levels. However, severe illness or traumatic injury can cause hormone levels to drop temporarily. Data from men who are already hospitalized with COVID-19 doesn't really answer the question of whether low testosterone is a risk factor for severe COVID-19 or a result of it. For that, the researchers needed to know whether men with chronically low testosterone levels get sicker than men with normal levels.

Diwan, Dhindsa and colleagues -- including co-author Cosette Champion, MD, an internal medicine resident at Barnes-Jewish -- conducted a chart review of patients at SSM Health and BJC HealthCare, two major hospital systems in the St. Louis area. They identified 723 men whose testosterone levels had been measured between Jan. 1, 2017, and Dec. 31, 2021, and who had documented cases of COVID-19 in 2020 or 2021. In some cases, testosterone levels were measured after the patient recovered from COVID-19. Since low testosterone is a chronic condition, men who tested low a few months after recovering from COVID-19 probably had low levels before as well, Dhindsa said.

The researchers identified 427 men with normal testosterone levels, 116 with low levels, and 180 who previously had low levels but were being successfully treated, meaning that they were on hormone replacement therapy and their testosterone levels were in the normal range at the time they developed COVID-19.

"Low testosterone turned out to be a risk factor for hospitalization from COVID, and treatment of low testosterone helped to negate that risk," Dhindsa said. "The risk really takes off below a level of 200 nanograms per deciliter, with the normal range being 300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter. This is independent of all other risk factors that we looked at: age, obesity or other health conditions. But those people who were on therapy, their risk was normal."

Men with low testosterone levels can experience sexual dysfunction, depressed mood, irritability, difficulty with concentration and memory, fatigue, loss of muscular strength and a reduced sense of well-being overall. When a man's quality of life is clearly diminished, he is typically treated with testosterone replacement therapy. When the symptoms are mild, though, doctors and patients may hesitate to treat.

The two main concerns related to testosterone therapy are an increased risk of prostate cancer and heart disease. Prostate cancer is common in older men, and it is often driven by testosterone. Boosting testosterone could possibly speed the growth of such cancers, worsening the disease. For heart disease, the evidence for risk is more ambiguous. A large clinical trial on the relationship between heart health and testosterone supplementation is expected to be completed soon.

"In the meantime, our study would suggest that it would be prudent to look at testosterone levels, especially in people who have symptoms of low testosterone, and then individualize care," said Diwan, whose specialty is cardiology. "If they are at really high risk of cardiovascular events, then the doctor could engage the patient in a discussion of the pros and cons of hormone replacement therapy, and perhaps lowering the risk of COVID hospitalization could be on the list of potential benefits."

This study is observational, so it only suggests -- not proves -- that boosting testosterone levels may help men avoid severe COVID-19, Diwan cautioned. A clinical trial would be needed to demonstrate conclusively whether such a strategy works.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220902111333.htm

COVID rekindled an appreciation of nature for many

An opportunity to rediscover why the great outdoors are so great in the first place

September 2, 2022

Science Daily/University of Connecticut

The pandemic has impacted our lives in a multitude of ways, many of which will no doubt be felt for years to come. While many of those effects are clearly negative, UConn researchers have identified at least one positive impact -- our perception of natural spaces changed. The findings are published in Nature Scientific Reports.

As people flocked to outdoor spaces for recreation in the spring of 2020, Sohyun Park, assistant professor in UConn's College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, noticed some interesting trends: more people were on the trails, and many of those people had traveled from far away to enjoy nature.

Park was also part of the team for the Connecticut Trail Census and co-wrote a paper about the trends.

Sohyun Park of the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture in her office in the W.B. Young Building. Mar. 8, 2022. (Jason Sheldon/UConn Photo)

"What's interesting was rural trail use increased compared to urban trails," Park says. "I wanted to try to find out how people were changing their mindset or their attitudes or perceptions."

To do this, Park and co-authors Seungman Kim and Jaehoon Lee of Texas Tech University, and Biyoung Heo of James Corner Field Operations, looked to social media data and machine learning techniques to help make sense of the vast quantities of information on Twitter and try to find a pattern among those data, says Park. They utilized Twitter's Application Programming Interface (API), which allows researchers to obtain aggregated data from Twitter posts.

"We wanted to know from the people who have been in greenspaces, what were they doing and what they were writing about on Twitter. We utilized very innovative and advanced levels of machine learning methods," says Park. "The machine categorized the keywords and classified them into several human-recognizable groups. One group was nature related. The second group is all traditional park-related activities and the third one is obviously the COVID-related one, so mask wearing and social distancing, and things like that."

A newfound appreciation for nature

Though what people were doing in the parks did not change significantly, the researchers noticed some significant changes in keyword usage between pre-pandemic and pandemic Twitter, with people frequently referencing nature, and their experiences within it.

"Users began to put the word 'nature' and nature-related activities or nature-related pictures on their Twitter," Park says. "It was very interesting because, in the past, there were not many keywords like that, but people used keywords like 'playing', 'walking the dog', 'baseball', and other traditional, active park activities that they were enjoying while they were there in the parks. If you look at post- 2020 Twitter, you can also see keywords thanking God or showing appreciation for nature, describing the birds singing or water sounds."

What the researchers found was people seemed to have realized a newfound appreciation for nature and greenspaces, especially true for those in urban settings. As a landscape architect, Park was interested to see if there was something more to the findings and perhaps if there might be some design implications for the results.

Common features in modern parks include benches, walking paths, and sports fields, for instance. However, Park says the results of the paper seem to suggest that natural greenspaces appeal to people differently.

"We might want to go back to the origin of public parks like those Olmsted designed," Park says. "In his time in 19th century, there was a lot of hustle and bustle in the city, and they wanted to have space for people to find respite and peace. We might want to go back to that era living with a 21st century health crisis and try to rethink about the design principles."

Park says to imagine Manhattan's Central Park, which hosts ponds, wooded areas, and meadows. Most of those natural features were introduced artificially and were not there in the first place. Compare this with contemporary parks:

"Modern parks may be well managed, maintained, and manicured, everything is clean and tidy," Park says. "There are some seating areas, paved surfaces, and structures where you can play something with your friends and family members, but not really in a naturalistic style. People can feel that in public spaces."

The outdoors as essential resource for overall well-being

Greenspaces impact mental, physical, and spiritual health, and Park reasons that these natural elements might be essential in public spaces, particularly for those who have less access to the public parks, or marginalized communities that don't have any green areas at their residences.

"I'm arguing that parks are not only recreational spaces; greenspaces and parks serve as essential amenities for all including those with low incomes or disabilities, and the elderly," Park says. "Parks need inclusive planning approaches that might be added to the current principles for park development."

Park explains that many people are involved in the planning, design, and management of parks and greenspaces. The tricky part is that the more naturalistic, garden concept for public parks may require more planning and maintenance, and therefore these design features rely more heavily on resources and budgets.

"In the long term, I think that will be the direction that we need to go and now officials and park managers need to work together with those who are living nearby so that we can have some kind of co-managing type of approaches to the future," Park says.

This study highlights the importance of those design features and their roles in our emotional and spiritual well-being, and Park says it is important for the public to advocate for our greenspaces. Research like this can inform decision-making.

"It is important for the public and decision-makers to understand that ultimately, we need to have a budget to have more natural features and nature-oriented programs in the park. We all need to be more active in terms of the things that towns are doing. That can start with joining your town's Conservation Commission or attending monthly meetings. Participate and make your voice heard. That makes a huge change and can impact big decisions. Sometimes these decision makers are really grounded by how the stakeholders are feeling so giving some input and feedback on the public decision-making should be the first step. It is empowering and more people need to be involved in public planning."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220902103241.htm

Circadian rhythm disruption found to be common among mental health disorders

Researchers spotlight links and propose investigation into molecular underpinnings

September 1, 2022

Science Daily/University of California - Irvine

Anxiety, autism, schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome each have their own distinguishing characteristics, but one factor bridging these and most other mental disorders is circadian rhythm disruption, according to a team of neuroscience, pharmaceutical sciences and computer science researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

In an article published recently in the Nature journal Translational Psychiatry, the scientists hypothesize that CRD is a psychopathology factor shared by a broad range of mental illnesses and that research into its molecular foundation could be key to unlocking better therapies and treatments.

"Circadian rhythms play a fundamental role in all biological systems at all scales, from molecules to populations," said senior author Pierre Baldi, UCI Distinguished Professor of computer science. "Our analysis found that circadian rhythm disruption is a factor that broadly overlaps the entire spectrum of mental health disorders."

Lead author Amal Alachkar, a neuroscientist and professor of teaching in UCI's Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, noted the challenges of testing the team's hypothesis at the molecular level but said the researchers found ample evidence of the connection by thoroughly examining peer-reviewed literature on the most prevalent mental health disorders.

"The telltale sign of circadian rhythm disruption -- a problem with sleep -- was present in each disorder," Alachkar said. "While our focus was on widely known conditions including autism, ADHD and bipolar disorder, we argue that the CRD psychopathology factor hypothesis can be generalized to other mental health issues, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, food addiction and Parkinson's disease."

Circadian rhythms regulate our bodies' physiological activity and biological processes during each solar day. Synchronized to a 24-hour light/dark cycle, circadian rhythms influence when we normally need to sleep and when we're awake. They also manage other functions such as hormone production and release, body temperature maintenance and consolidation of memories. Effective, nondisrupted operation of this natural timekeeping system is necessary for the survival of all living organisms, according to the paper's authors.

Circadian rhythms are intrinsically sensitive to light/dark cues, so they can be easily disrupted by light exposure at night, and the level of disruption appears to be sex-dependent and changes with age. One example is a hormonal response to CRD felt by pregnant women; both the mother and the fetus can experience clinical effects from CRD and chronic stress.

"An interesting issue that we explored is the interplay of circadian rhythms and mental disorders with sex," said Baldi, director of UCI's Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics. "For instance, Tourette syndrome is present primarily in males, and Alzheimer's disease is more common in females by a ratio of roughly two-thirds to one-third."

Age also is an important factor, according to scientists, as CRD can affect neurodevelopment in early life in addition to leading to the onset of aging-related mental disorders among the elderly.

Baldi said an important unresolved issue centers on the causal relationship between CRD and mental health disorders: Is CRD a key player in the origin and onset of these maladies or a self-reinforcing symptom in the progression of disease?

To answer this and other questions, the UCI-led team suggests an examination of CRD at the molecular level using transcriptomic (gene expression) and metabolomic technologies in mouse models.

"This will be a high-throughput process with researchers acquiring samples from healthy and diseased subjects every few hours along the circadian cycle," Baldi said. "This approach can be applied with limitations in humans, since only serum samples can really be used, but it could be applied on a large scale in animal models, particularly mice, by sampling tissues from different brain areas and different organs, in addition to serum. These are extensive, painstaking experiments that could benefit from having a consortium of laboratories."

He added that if the experiments were conducted in a systematic way with respect to age, sex and brain areas to investigate circadian molecular rhythmicity before and during disease progression, it would help the mental health research community identify potential biomarkers, causal relationships, and novel therapeutic targets and avenues.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220901200635.htm

Good face recognizers can learn faces from fragments

August 31, 2022

Science Daily/University of New South Wales

Good with faces? New research suggests that your ability might be more akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle than taking a photograph.

Psychologists at UNSW Sydney and University of Wollongong have challenged the prevailing view that people with exceptional face recognition abilities rely on processing faces holistically.

Instead, they argue, people who are great at learning and remembering new faces -- also known as super recognisers -- can divide new faces into parts, before storing them in the brain as composite images.

"It's been a long-held belief that to remember a face well you need to have a global impression of the face, basically by looking at the centre and seeing the face as a whole," said lead researcher, Dr James Dunn.

"But our research shows that super-recognisers are still able to recognise faces better than others even when they can only see smaller regions at a time. This suggests that they can piece together an overall impression from smaller chunks, rather than from a holistic impression taken in a single glance."

In a paper published today in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers described how they set up an experiment that tested both super recognisers and people with average face recognition skills to see whether revealing only small areas of a face at a time made any difference to super recognisers' superior ability to remember a face.

Not only did super recognisers continue to perform better when only seeing small parts of a face at a time, but they seemed to spend less time looking at the eyes than other participants in the test.

But according to Dr Dunn, the results don't mean that super-recognisers are necessarily doing anything differently than the rest of us.

"It seems that super-recognisers are not processing faces in a qualitatively different way from everyone else," Dr Dunn said. "They are doing similar things to normal people, but they are doing some important things more and this leads to better accuracy."

The setup

The researchers recruited 37 super-recognisers and 68 typical recognisers and sat them before a computer screen. There, they looked at faces through a 'spotlight' that captured up to 60 per cent of the face at the largest aperture, down to just 12 per cent at the smallest aperture, using eye tracking technology.

Each person had five seconds to scan an outline of a face, and only the parts of the face that their gaze illuminated was revealed in detail, with the rest blurred beyond recognition. As they looked around the face, new details of the face were revealed, while the preceding area was again obscured. They looked at a total of 12 faces.

In the next phase they were presented with 24 faces -- the 12 that they had viewed in the first part of the test, and 12 new faces -- and asked to identify the faces they had seen in the face learning phase.

Good lookers

It turned out that the super-recognisers were more accurate than typical recognisers whether the size of the aperture was large or very small. While there didn't seem to be a pattern in the features that super-recognisers gazed at compared to typical recognisers, there was a difference in the time that they spent looking at the eyes.

"We found that they actually look at the eyes less. This is despite the fact that a lot of research has been saying that looking at the eyes is such an important part of recognition and that the eyes do contain visual information that can give away a person's identity.

"So this was a bit of a mystery. One theory we have is that looking away from the eyes creates the opportunity to extract identity information from other features."

The researchers said their experiment changes the way we think about why some people are better than others at committing a face to memory.

"We think one of the things they're doing uniquely is exploring the face more to find information that is useful for remembering or recognising a person later. So when super-recognisers learn a face, it is more like putting together pieces in a jigsaw puzzle than taking a single snapshot of the whole face."

Other superpowers?

So are super-recognisers good at other tasks, like matching patterns, remembering phone numbers, or having photographic memories?

While that wasn't a subject of this particular study, Dr Dunn said that in another study recently published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Reviewthey found that those who are good at comparing images of people's faces -- like comparing someone's face to their driver's licence photo -- may also be good at comparing other types of visual patterns.

"We are starting to find evidence from super-recognisers and the public that people who were accurate when matching photographs of faces also tended to be more accurate matching other types of visual patterns, like the fingerprint and firearm samples that are analysed by forensic scientists.

"This leads us to believe that there is a general ability to compare complex visual patterns that is shared across different objects, which means that the same skills that make someone good at matching faces may also help you compare these other patterns as well," he said.

Looking ahead, Dr Dunn and his fellow researchers are keen to take super-recognising out of the lab and into the real world. They plan to have super-recognisers wear special eye-tracking glasses that record what their eyes are doing as they move about in the world and interact with people.

"We'd like to see whether some of the things we've observed in the lab about how super-recognisers learn and remember faces are the same in their day-to-day life."

The super-recognisers who were part of the study were selected after performing strongly in the online UNSW Face Test.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220831113609.htm

Your blood type could predict your risk of having a stroke before age 60

Research could lead to potential new ways to predict and prevent strokes in young adults

August 31, 2022

Science Daily/University of Maryland School of Medicine

A person's blood type may be linked to their risk of having an early stroke, according to a new meta-analysis led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers. Findings were published today in the journal Neurology. The meta-analysis included all available data from genetic studies focusing on ischemic strokes, which are caused by a blockage of blood flow to the brain, occurring in younger adults under age 60.

"The number of people with early strokes is rising. These people are more likely to die from the life-threatening event, and survivors potentially face decades with disability. Despite this, there is little research on the causes of early strokes," said study co-principal investigator Steven J. Kittner, MD, MPH, Professor of Neurology at UMSOM and a neurologist with the University of Maryland Medical Center.

He and his colleagues conducted the study by performing a meta-analysis of 48 studies on genetics and ischemic stroke that included 17,000 stroke patients and nearly 600,000 healthy controls who never had experienced a stroke. They then looked across all collected chromosomes to identify genetic variants associated with a stroke and found a link between early-onset stroke -- occurring before age 60 -- and the area of the chromosome that includes the gene that determines whether a blood type is A, AB, B, or O.

The study found that people with early stroke were more likely to have blood type A and less likely to have blood type O (the most common blood type) -- compared to people with late stroke and people who never had a stroke. Both early and late stroke were also more likely to have blood type B compared to controls. After adjusting for sex and other factors, researchers found those who had blood type A had a 16 percent higher risk of having an early stroke than people with other blood types. Those who had blood type O had a 12 percent lower risk of having a stroke than people with other blood types.

"Our meta-analysis looked at people's genetic profiles and found associations between blood type and risk of early-onset stroke. The association of blood type with later-onset stroke was much weaker than what we found with early stroke," said study co-principal investigator Braxton D. Mitchell, PhD, MPH, Professor of Medicine at UMSOM.

The researchers emphasized that the increased risk was very modest and that those with type A blood should not worry about having an early-onset stroke or engage in extra screening or medical testing based on this finding.

"We still don't know why blood type A would confer a higher risk, but it likely has something to do with blood-clotting factors like platelets and cells that line the blood vessels as well as other circulating proteins, all of which play a role in the development of blood clots," said Dr. Kittner. Previous studies suggest that those with an A blood type have a slightly higher risk of developing blood clots in the legs known as deep vein thrombosis. "We clearly need more follow-up studies to clarify the mechanisms of increased stroke risk,"he added.

In addition to Dr. Kittner and Dr. Mitchell, UMSOM faculty involved in this study included Huichun Xu, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine; Patrick F. McArdle, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine; Timothy O'Connor, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine; James A. Perry, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine; Kathleen A. Ryan, MPH, MS, Statistician; John W. Cole, MD, Professor of Neurology; Marc C. Hochberg, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine; O. Colin Stine, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health; and Charles C. Hong, MD, PhD, Melvin Sharoky MD Professor of Medicine.

A limitation of the study was the relative lack of diversity among participants. The data was derived from the Early Onset Stroke Consortium, a collaboration of 48 different studies across North America, Europe, Japan, Pakistan, and Australia. About 35 percent of the participants were of non-European ancestry.

"This study raises an important question that requires a deeper investigation into how our genetically predetermined blood type may play a role in early stroke risk," said Mark T. Gladwin, MD, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine. "It points to the urgent need to find new ways to prevent these potentially devastating events in younger adults."

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and Department of Veterans Affairs. Researchers from more than 50 institutions worldwide were co-authors on this study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220831162509.htm

Water fluoridation: Effective prevention for tooth decay and a win for the environment

August 29, 2022

Science Daily/Trinity College Dublin

Trinity College Dublin researchers collaborating with University College London have demonstrated for the first time the low environmental footprint of water fluoridation compared to other preventive measures for tooth decay. The study is published in the British Dental Journal today [Monday 29th August 2022].

Water fluoridation is regarded as one of the most significant public health interventions of the twentieth century. But as the climate crisis worsens, the contribution of healthcare and the prevention of disease to the crisis must be considered. Action is urgent.

Influenced by this urgency, researchers quantified the environmental impact of water fluoridation for an individual five year-old child over a one-year period and compared this to the traditional use of fluoride varnish and toothbrushing programmes, which take place in selected schools across the UK, and internationally.

Today, over 35% of the world's population have access to water fluoridation, with studies showing significant reductions in dental caries. Whilst data on the clinical effectiveness and cost analysis of water fluoridation are available, there has been no data regarding its environmental impact up to now.

To quantify this impact, the research team performed a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by carefully measuring the combined travel, the weight and amounts of all products and the processes involved in all three preventive programmes (toothbrushing, fluoride varnish programmes and water fluoridation). Data was inputted into a specific environmental programme (OpenLCA) and the team used the Ecoinvent database, enabling them to calculate environmental outputs, including the carbon footprint, the amount of water used for each product and the amount of land use.

The results of the study, led by Brett Duane, Associate Professor in Dental Public Health at Trinity College, concluded that water fluoridation had the lowest environmental impact in all categories studied, and had the lowest disability-adjusted life years impact when compared to all other community-level caries prevention programmes. The study also found that water fluoridation gives the greatest return on investment.

Considering the balance between clinical effectiveness, cost effectiveness and environmental sustainability, researchers believe that water fluoridation should be the preventive intervention of choice.

This research strengthens the case internationally for water fluoridation programmes to reduce dental decay, especially in the most vulnerable populations.

Associate Professor Duane said: "As the climate crisis starts to worsen, we need to find ways of preventing disease to reduce the environmental impact of our health systems. This research clearly demonstrates the low carbon impact of water fluoridation as an effective prevention tool."

Professor Paul Ashley, Senior Clinical Lecturer (Honorary NHS Consultant), UCL Eastman Dental Institute added: "Renewed efforts should be made to increase access to this intervention."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220829194742.htm

Sugar disrupts microbiome, eliminates protection against obesity and diabetes

August 29, 2022

Science Daily/Columbia University Irving Medical Cent

A study of mice found that dietary sugar alters the gut microbiome, setting off a chain of events that leads to metabolic disease, pre-diabetes, and weight gain.

The findings, published today in Cell, suggest that diet matters, but an optimal microbiome is equally important for the prevention of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and obesity.

Diet alters microbiome

A Western-style high-fat, high-sugar diet can lead to obesity, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes, but how the diet kickstarts unhealthy changes in the body is unknown.

The gut microbiome is indispensable for an animal's nutrition, so Ivalyo Ivanov, PhD, associate professor of microbiology & immunology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and his colleagues investigated the initial effects of the Western-style diet on the microbiome of mice.

After four weeks on the diet, the animals showed characteristics of metabolic syndrome, such as weight gain, insulin resistance, and glucose intolerance. And their microbiomes had changed dramatically, with the amount of segmented filamentous bacteria -- common in the gut microbiota of rodents, fish, and chickens -- falling sharply and other bacteria increasing in abundance.

Microbiome changes alter Th17 cells

The reduction in filamentous bacteria, the researchers found, was critical to the animals' health through its effect on Th17 immune cells. The drop in filamentous bacteria reduced the number of Th17 cells in the gut, and further experiments revealed that it's the Th17 cells that are necessary to prevent metabolic disease, diabetes, and weight gain.

"These immune cells produce molecules that slow down the absorption of 'bad' lipids from the intestines and they decrease intestinal inflammation," Ivanov says. "In other words, they keep the gut healthy and protect the body from absorbing pathogenic lipids."

Sugar vs. fat

What component of the high-fat, high-sugar diet led to these changes? Ivanov's team found that sugar was to blame.

"Sugar eliminates the filamentous bacteria, and the protective Th17 cells disappear as a consequence," says Ivanov. "When we fed mice a sugar-free, high-fat diet, they retain the intestinal Th17 cells and were completely protected from developing obesity and pre-diabetes, even though they ate the same number of calories."

But eliminating sugar did not help all mice. Among those lacking any filamentous bacteria to begin with, elimination of sugar did not have a beneficial effect, and the animals became obese and developed diabetes.

"This suggests that some popular dietary interventions, such as minimizing sugars, may only work in people who have certain bacterial populations within their microbiota," Ivanov says.

In those cases, certain probiotics might be helpful. In Ivanov's mice, supplements of filamentous bacteria led to the recovery of Th17 cells and protection against metabolic syndrome, despite the animals' consumption of a high-fat diet.

Though people do not have the same filamentous bacteria as mice, Ivanov thinks that other bacteria in people may have the same protective effects.

Providing Th17 cells to the mice also provided protection and may also be therapeutic for people. "Microbiota are important, but the real protection comes from the Th17 cells induced by the bacteria," Ivanov says.

"Our study emphasizes that a complex interaction between diet, microbiota, and the immune system plays a key role in the development of obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and other conditions," Ivanov says. "It suggests that for optimal health it is important not only to modify your diet but also improve your microbiome or intestinal immune system, for example, by increasing Th17 cell-inducing bacteria."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220829194721.htm