Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Road verges could be havens for pollinators

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

IMAGE: FLOWERS IN A ROADSIDE VERGE. view more

CREDIT: BEN PHILLIPS

Better-managed road verges can help boost pollinating insects, new research shows.

Pollinators such as bees, butterflies and hoverflies benefit from the plants and flowers in road verges, which form a network of "corridors" that provide food and shelter.

While there are downsides of living by the road, including exposure to pollution and the risk of being hit by vehicles, the researchers found that the benefits for insects far outweigh the costs.

The team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, reviewed more than 140 studies.

They found that verges can be dramatically improved for pollinators by measures such as creating flower-rich verges, reducing mowing and limiting the impacts of street lighting.

"There is huge untapped potential to improve road verges for pollinators through management," said lead author Ben Phillips, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"In many cases, this involves mowing less, and at the right times, to increase flowers and reduce the amount of pollinators, eggs and larvae killed.

"We can help pollinators further by reducing impacts of road pollution.

"This includes light pollution, which can be addressed by limiting how long streetlights are switched on for, as these confuse nocturnal insects."

The study was a collaboration between the universities of Exeter, East Anglia and Cambridge, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the conservation charity Buglife, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Andrew Whitehouse, from Buglife, said: "Buglife's B-Lines initiative has identified the lack of connected wildflower-rich habitats as a major contributor to the decline in our pollinating insects.

"This new research shows the potential that road verges have to help to reverse insect declines.

"By making small changes to the management of our road verge network, local authorities and others involved in road verge management can make a significant difference to support nature's recovery."

Since writing the review, verges have undergone quite a transition due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Claire Wallace, from the University of East Anglia, said: "There were lots of reports of road verges not being mown because councils and contractors weren't operating as normal.

"This gave us a brief glimpse of the benefits of wilder verges for nature, with plants such as orchids popping up all over the place where they hadn't been seen before."

A trimmed roadside verge.

Ben Phillips said: "In Cornwall, however, it is really positive that the council has just changed its policy of mowing verges in urban areas eight times per year.

"Now they will only do this twice or three times a year, so this will be a big local change."

The results of the work support an ongoing campaign by conservation charity Plantlife to save wildlife on road verges.

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The paper, published in the journal Biological Conservation, is entitled: "Enhancing road verges to aid pollinator conservation: a review."

Childhood maltreatment may be linked to heart disease in adulthood

Women appear to be particularly at risk of cardiovascular disease following child maltreatment, say researchers

BMJ

Adults who experienced various forms of maltreatment in their childhood appear to have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, suggests research published online in the journal Heart.

A team of international researchers found that women especially were more likely to have heart disease following a childhood that involved maltreatment including physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect.

Previous studies have suggested that childhood maltreatment is associated with an increased risk for many adverse mental and physical health outcomes, including cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in adulthood.

However, most studies assessed self-reported CVD, and few have used medically verified cases and/or investigated different types of CVD. There is also little evidence of how the association between maltreatment in childhood and CVD differs by sex and age.

Researchers, therefore, led by Dr Ana Gonçalves Soares from the University of Bristol's Medical School set out to assess and compare associations between childhood maltreatment and cardiovascular disease in men and women in the UK as well as possible age differences and associations with early onset CVD.

For their study, the researchers analysed responses to an online mental health questionnaire completed by 157,311 participants from the UK Biobank - an international health database designed to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses.

The people selected had information on physical, sexual or emotional abuse, or emotional or physical neglect.

CVD outcomes - defined as any cardiovascular disease, hypertensive disease, ischaemic heart disease (IHD), and cerebrovascular disease - were extracted from self-report, blood pressure measurements, hospital registers and death registers.

Emotional neglect was the most common type of childhood maltreatment (22.5%), followed by physical abuse in men (21.1%) and emotional abuse in women (17.9%).

Analysis of the results showed that all types of maltreatment were associated with increased risk of CVD and IHD in both sexes but all forms of the maltreatment were more prevalent in women except for physical abuse, which was more prevalent in men.

Women were also more likely to experience a higher number of types of childhood maltreatment - 4.6% of women experienced four or more types of maltreatment, compared with 2.7% of men.

The prevalence of childhood maltreatment decreased with increasing age, except for sexual abuse in men, which did not vary, and physical neglect, which increased across age categories.

Younger participants also reported a higher number of maltreatment types, especially women.

The occurrence of any CVD was 54.3% in men and 40.3% in women, and all CVD types were more common in men.

When only medical records and measured blood pressure were considered, the occurrence of CVD was lower, but the same sex and age patterns were observed.

The authors acknowledged some limitations to their study such as the possibility of selection bias from the participants, and those involved were predominantly white, more likely to live in less deprived areas, and healthier with lower disease rates than the general British population.

Despite this, they said they believe their work to be the largest study to date assessing the association between childhood maltreatment and CVD in both sexes and exploring different types of maltreatment and different types of CVD.

They conclude: "All types of maltreatment were associated with higher risk of CVD in both men and women, with stronger associations in the latter and in younger participants, but some age differences disappeared when only early onset CVD was considered.

"Interventions that ameliorate the negative effects of childhood maltreatment are needed, as well as more understanding of the pathways that link childhood maltreatment to CVD and whether they differ by sex, types of maltreatment and CVD types."

In an accompanying editorial, Dr Leah Li and Dr Rebecca Lacey from University College London in the UK, say: "This current study adds important knowledge to the so-far limited literature on gender difference in the life course influence of childhood maltreatment on cardiometabolic health.

"If the association indeed differs by gender, it will be crucial to further explore the mechanisms and life course pathways that may contribute to the gender-specific associations and also the timing of their emergence. This may indicate the sensitive period during which intervention could lead to improvements in adult cardiometabolic health, especially for women."

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Peer reviewed? Yes (research); No (linked editorial)
Evidence type: Observational
Subjects: People

We need to talk: Communication prevents inaction by leveraging goodwill

TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

IMAGE: WHEN FACING A COMMON PROBLEM, A GROUP OF PEOPLE MAY FALL VICTIM TO FREE RIDING IF INDIVIDUALS ARE LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES (LEFT). COMMUNICATING INDIVIDUALS, HOWEVER, STAVE OFF INACTION... view more

CREDIT: TOKYO TECH

A large-scale, multi-institutional study designed to examine human behavior has shown that communication helps groups of strangers to focus on resolving common problems, and provides new and surprising insights into what goes on when negotiation talks fail or succeed. The findings have implications for how to confront global, collective-action issues such as climate change mitigation.

Challenging global issues are frequently accompanied by shared associated risks, and without a concerted effort, resolution is hard to achieve. Climate change talks often stall when nations start accusing one another of contributing too little. When such a stalemate arises, it becomes unclear how to move forward or how to make involved parties adhere to agreed-upon terms.

Waiting for others to resolve common problems is recognized in behavioral studies as a form of free riding, which can ultimately hinder the group's chances of achieving a given goal. To examine what causes free riding, and how to stave it off, a team of international researchers coordinated by Marko Jusup from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in Japan and Zhen Wang from Northwestern Polytechnical University in China conducted a so-called social-dilemma experiment through which the team could investigate whether communication might help improve cooperativeness among strangers tasked with avoiding a shared risk.

The team organized a game experiment played by groups of three, seven, or 11 individuals. A total of 351 students from southern China, 126 students from northern China, and 112 students from 33 different nations participated in the game.

In each round of the game, players had to decide whether to invest their capital toward mitigating the shared risk, or to forgo investing and take more of the capital home, provided that the risk had not materialized. Thus, the dilemma was whether to invest one's own capital or wait for others to act.

Investment options consisted of zero, two, or four units of capital -- if everybody invested two units in every round of the game, the risk would be mitigated with certainty. Groups of, for example, seven individuals playing ten rounds of the game had to reach a target of 140 units to mitigate the risk. The initial capital consisted of 40 units per player. To make informed decisions, players could see their group's current-round investment, as well as the remaining amount towards the target. Failure to reach the target entailed losing any capital saved during the game, and going home empty-handed, with 50% probability.

Approximately half of the players engaged in games in which no communication was possible. These players relied on their own devices to decide whether to invest or not. The other half played the same games, but with limited communication. This communication took place between game rounds, in the form of five yes/no questions designed to gauge sentiment and outlook harbored by player groups.

Across all group sizes, the study found that communication increased the likelihood of reaching the target by almost two-fold. The results thus confirmed a natural expectation that communication promotes cooperativeness, but the story does not end with a more cooperative environment created simply by persuading free riders to invest.

Intriguingly, the researchers found that players who communicate are more persistent in pursuing the investment target and refuse to give up even in the face of substantial current deficits. Genuine free riders appear to pay little attention to communication. It is players who already possess prosocial tendencies that, when communicating, better endure setbacks, and thus fight off inaction as the failure looms.

"Without communication, prosocial players shut down upon seeing nothing but a widening deficit. With communication, however, these same players stay hopeful thanks to cooperation-reinforcing signals from others," write the researchers in their study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study identified two prosocial behavioral types, namely cooperators and altruists. While altruists contribute almost unconditionally, cooperators are rather more astute, weighing carefully when and how much to contribute. Too much caution, however, often leads to near-misses of the investment target, meaning that even if just a few individuals fail to give their best at crucial times, the whole effort may be in vain. This is reflected in the fact that larger groups of communicating players often come close to mitigating the risk, but ultimately fail by a narrow margin. The overall lower success of larger groups points to additional challenges in coordinating an increasing number of individuals and highlights the insidious nature of collective-risk social dilemmas.

What, then, can be done to curb free riding and improve the situation for complex issues such as climate change talks? "The key is to leverage pre-existing goodwill, especially when an otherwise contributing side starts to doubt success," says Jusup. "Persuading those who a priori have no intention to contribute is unlikely to amount to much," adds Wang. Both researchers conclude that although experimental games can help uncover the mechanisms underlying mitigation efforts, caution needs to be heeded in extrapolating the study's findings beyond experimental conditions.

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Significantly less addictive opioid may slow progression of osteoarthritis while easing pain

A Keck Medicine of USC study reveals that kappa opioids preserved cartilage in joints and eased pain

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA - HEALTH SCIENCES

IMAGE: ARTHRITIC KNEE view more

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

LOS ANGELES - A novel preclinical study by Keck Medicine of USC researchers, published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, reveals that a potential new opioid medication may have the ability to slow the progression of osteoarthritis while being less addictive than commonly prescribed opioid drugs.

The medication activates the kappa opioid receptor (KOR), which binds to opioid-like compounds in the central and peripheral nervous systems to alleviate pain, resulting in targeted pain relief with a reduced risk of addiction.

Previous research shows that some opioids that selectively activate only KORs relieve pain locally at the site of injury without crossing the blood brain barrier and inducing substance dependency, whereas commonly prescribed opioids that target other receptors in the brain are more addictive.

In this study, lead author Alexander Weber, MD, sports medicine physician and orthopaedic surgeon with Keck Medicine, and corresponding author Denis Evseenko, MD, PhD, vice chair for research and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, locally administered a kappa opioid into arthritic mice knees and measured the progression of the disease in their joints.

The researchers confirmed that the medication effectively alleviated pain, however findings also suggest that the medication prevented the loss of cartilage, the connective tissue between the joins that pads bones, and slowed the progression of osteoarthritis.

"Arthritis affects nearly a quarter of adults in the United States, many of whom take addictive opioids to manage their pain. The implications of this study may someday alter how we provide orthopaedic care to significantly reduce the number of patients experiencing long-term pain and addiction," says Weber.

More research is needed to advance toward human clinical trials, which are paramount as treatment and pain management options for osteoarthritis are limited.

"We hope that the findings of our study will lay the foundations for clinical research to further current understandings of the relationship between kappa opioids and osteoarthritis in humans to improve clinical care and quality of life," says Evseenko.

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This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health under award numbers RO1-AR-071724 and RO1-AG-058624, and by the Department of Defense under award number W81XWH-13-1-0465.

For more information about Keck Medicine of USC visit news.KeckMedicine.org

Black women often ignored by social justice movements

'Intersectional invisibility' may lead to Black women's exclusion, study finds

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Black women are often less likely to be associated with the concept of a "typical woman" and are viewed as more similar to Black men than to white women, which may lead to some anti-racist and feminist movements failing to advocate for the rights of Black women, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Black women are often overlooked in people's conversations about racism and sexism even though they face a unique combination of both of these forms of discrimination simultaneously," said lead researcher Stewart Coles, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan's Department of Communication and Media. "This 'intersectional invisibility' means that movements that are supposed to help Black women may be contributing to their marginalization."

The research was published online in the APA journal Translational Issues in Psychological Science. The study was conducted online with more than 1,000 participants from the United States who were asked whether 41 positive or negative stereotypical attributes (such as hostile, sexually promiscuous or determined) were associated with different races or genders. Participants were told that their responses were not an admission that they believed these stereotypes so they would answer honestly.

Some participants were asked about stereotypical attributes just for men and women or for Black people or white people. Then other groups were asked about a combination of race and gender (Black women, Black men, white women and white men). The clustering of the responses showed how Black women were viewed in relation to the other groups. The typical woman was considered to be much more similar to a typical white woman than a typical Black woman. Black women and Black men also were considered to be more similar to each other than to white women or white men.

"The operative word in defining how similar to other groups Black women are is more 'Black' and less 'women,'" the journal article noted.

The underdifferentiation of Black women from Black men may help explain why Black women face similar rates of racial disparities in traffic stops and arrests, but anti-racist movements often focus on Black men in the fight against police brutality, said Josh Pasek, PhD, one of the researchers on the study and associate professor of communication studies and faculty associate in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan.

"This is reflected both in terms of the victims of brutality who are highlighted and whose voices receive the most attention," said Pasek. "In this moment, we can see how much more attention has been paid to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd than the murder of Breonna Taylor."

Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was shot dead in February after being chased by three white men as he jogged through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was shot and killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment in March. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis in May. His death set off protests across the country.

Previous research has found that Blackness is associated with masculinity, leading to errors when categorizing Black women's gender or recognizing Black women's faces. Other studies have found that Black women and girls are more associated with threat and danger than are white women and girls.

Feminist movements that focus only on issues that predominantly affect white women without addressing racialized sexism ignore the needs of Black women, who face higher rates of police abuses, including sexual violence, Coles said. Previous research also has found that Black women experience much higher rates of domestic and sexual abuse from partners than white women, and Black women are less likely to report this violence than white women.

Feminist and anti-racist movements should include Black women in leadership roles and advocate for the rights of Black women, Coles said.

"The key often starts with listening to Black women about their concerns and what their needs are and then delivering accordingly," he said.

Three out of four study participants were white, while 8% were Black, 8% were Hispanic and 5% were Asian. The responses weren't analyzed based on the ethnicity or gender of the participants because the study wasn't examining whether the participants endorsed specific stereotypes themselves.

"Previous research suggests that members of marginalized groups are aware of stereotypes of their groups," Coles said. "Thus, they would likely report the same awareness of stereotypes as would members of other groups."

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Article: "Intersectional Invisibility Revisited: How Group Prototypes Lead to the Erasure and Exclusion of Black Women," by Stewart M. Coles, MA, and Josh Pasek, PhD, University of Michigan. Translational Issues in Psychological Science. Published online July 13, 2020.

Full text of the article can be found online at https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/tps-tps0000256.pdf.

Contact: Stewart M. Coles may be contacted at smcoles@umich.edu.

The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes nearly 121,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

Bat research critical to preventing next pandemic

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

PULLMAN, Wash. - The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has a likely connection to bats, and the next viral outbreak probably will too, unless scientists can quickly learn more about the thousands of viruses carried by one of the most diverse mammals on the planet.

Evidence already links different bat species to human outbreaks of SARS, MERS, some Ebola viruses as well as the Marbug, Hendra, Sosuga and Nipah viruses. Beyond these connections, there is very little known, and a recent article in Nature Reviews Microbiology calls for more research into bats' molecular biology and their ecology, to help predict, and hopefully prevent, the next pandemic.

"The more researchers have looked, the more we've found that a lot of these emerging pathogens, at one point or another, originated in bats," said Michael Letko, the lead author and an assistant professor of molecular virology at Washington State University's Paul G. Allen School of Global Animal Health. "Over time, we have accumulated a lot of information about some of the species of bats and some of the viruses they carry, but there are still these huge glaring holes in our knowledge."

With more than 1,400 species, bats represent an extremely diverse mammalian order, second only to rodents, which are also known viral hosts. However, unlike rats and mice, bats are not great lab animals. Simply keeping flying animals in labs is difficult. Also, most of the mammalian cell lines developed for research came from other animals and cannot be used to study viruses found in bats.

This knowledge gap is dangerous as the current pandemic shows. Bats are found almost everywhere scientists have looked, and with expanding human encroachment on their habitat, viral infection is almost inevitable, Letko said.

"We are coming into more contact with animal species around us in general, and then we find out these species are loaded with viruses," he said. "The COVID-19 pandemic is unfortunate, but it's not surprising. We roll the dice for 20 years not doing anything to reduce contact with these animals. It was more or less a matter of time before something like this was going to happen."

In the paper, Letko, and his co-authors including WSU assistant professor Stephanie Seifert and Vincent Munster from Rocky Mountain Laboratories, outline ways to decrease the odds of the next pandemic by increasing research into bats on the smallest, molecular level and on the broader macro-level of the environment.

While many pathogens have been identified, the authors point out the need to move beyond discovery and use the latest genetic technologies to better understand how viruses can be transmitted. This knowledge can increase the ability to develop medicines quickly after a pathogen has been found--or even better, create vaccines to protect against whole virus groups before they emerge.

Letko has already taken a step in this direction. Before the current crisis, he built a platform using synthetic coronavirus particles to test which were most likely to infect human cells. When the current pandemic began, Letko tested the SARS-Cov-2 genome as soon as the sequence was available and quickly identified the likely receptor on human cells. That study, published in Nature Microbiology on Feb. 24, was one of the first to provide functional laboratory data on the new virus, providing researchers with necessary information and tools to help determine which existing drugs might work against SARS-Cov-2 and start development on new ones as well as test various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine efficacy.

Letko is setting up his lab at WSU to continue this work, providing initial screening of bat-borne viruses to help identify those that are most likely to be transmitted to humans.

Beyond the lab, Letko and his colleagues point to the need for better understanding of bat ecology which can lead to solutions that are relatively simple to implement. The researchers cite examples such as the effort to vaccinate horses in Australia to stop the Hendra virus which was spreading from fruit bats to horses and then potentially on to humans. Another intervention in Bangladesh involved simply putting lids on palm sap containers to keep bats out and prevent human outbreaks of Nipah virus.

"Sometimes, you don't need vaccines or drugs. It's just a behavioral change that helps mitigate and reduce the contact between people and the animals," Letko said. "These are some of the kinds of interventions that we can take once we begin to understand what these viruses actually do."

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Mind the gap: Even the richest Americans lag the English on health, study finds

Lower income means poorer health in middle age in both countries, but the US has a much bigger difference in health between the top and bottom of the income ladder

MICHIGAN MEDICINE - UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

The United States won its independence from British rule 237 years ago this month, a feat celebrated with its own holiday, and even a smash Broadway musical celebrating the overthrow of a class-based government and the rise of a poor immigrant.

But a new study shows that middle-aged people living in the U.S. today have worse health than their English counterparts - and that the difference in health between rich and poor is much larger on the American side of the Atlantic.

In fact, even the top income earners in their late 50s and early 60s in the U.S. have higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and mental health conditions than their English peers, despite earning nearly twice as much in after-tax income.

But the biggest differences in health between the two nations were seen among those who make the least money. Middle-aged English people in the bottom 20% by income enjoyed better health across many measures than the poorest Americans of the same age group.

Low-income Americans were much more likely to have been diagnosed with high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes, heart problems, stroke, chronic lung disease and mental health conditions than their low-income English peers.

They were also much more likely to have a high reading on three direct measurements taken by study staff, to test their blood pressure, blood sugar and a marker for inflammation called C-reactive protein.

The new findings about disparities in health and income are reported in a new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine, by a team from the University of Michigan and University College London.

Larger gaps among Americans

Despite the differences between the two nations, the health gaps between high-income Americans and low-income Americans were even more striking - and larger than the gaps between the same groups in England.

In all self-reported measures, except history of cancer, the graphs of each health measure by income show the worst outcomes among the lowest-income Americans, sloping down to the best outcomes among those with the highest incomes.

Direct measurements of the three key health risk factors also tracked with income, though not as closely.

The researchers used data from two large, long-term studies conducted between 2008 and 2016, including interviews, income data and biomarkers from nearly 13,000 Americans and 5,700 English people. The disparities persisted even when the researchers adjusted for age, gender, race, household size, marital status, immigrant status and education level.

Paving the way for more research

The study provides the most comprehensive comparison to date of health status between two countries according to income levels - but it paves the way for many more studies using the same approach.

More than 30 countries are now collecting data in a way that will allow this kind of apples-to-apples comparison in future, through a network of studies funded in part by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers, led by HwaJung Choi, Ph.D., and Kenneth Langa, M.D., Ph.D. of the University of Michigan Medical School, focused on the age group just below the main eligibility age for Medicare health coverage in the United States. English people of all ages are covered by the National Health Service. The age of 55 was the youngest age for which nationally representative data was available for both countries.

"This approach lets us shed a lot more light on the within-country differences as well as the differences between countries," says Choi, a health economist and research assistant professor of internal medicine at U-M. "If we looked at older adults, we likely wouldn't see this level of discrepancy partly because of the effects of Medicare coverage.

"At the same time," she continues, "we may observe even greater income discrepancy in health - within and between countries -- for Americans, if we examine younger cohorts, as income inequality continues to increase in the U.S., and the health of subsequent cohorts seems even worse."

"These are remarkable results, and confirm the value of comparisons between countries," says co-author Andrew Steptoe, D.Sc., head of the Research Department of Behavioural Science and Health at University College London. "Differences in health care are part of the story, but even in England where care is free for everyone at the point of delivery, there are still marked differences in health related to income."

Implications for COVID-19

The study even yields insights that may explain some of the extra burden of COVID-19 faced by low-income Americans, says Langa, who is the Cyrus Sturgis Research Professor of Internal Medicine, and a member of the faculty in the U-M Institute for Social Research and School of Public Health.

"Our analysis provides a comprehensive view of health disparities across many key outcomes, and shines a brighter light on the large differences in health and risk for the rich and poor in our country," he says. "A number of the disparities that we found between low-income and high-income Americans - such as a higher risk of diabetes, hypertension, and higher levels of inflammation - are likely contributing to the much higher risk for COVID-related complications and death among the poor."

The study used data from the American effort called the Health and Retirement Study, based at U-M's Institute for Social Research, and from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, or ELSA. Langa is associate director of HRS, and Steptoe is director of ELSA.

Impacts of low incomes

While past studies of English and American adults have looked at health differences and economic factors, they have more-often focused on household wealth, which is different from income.

In the United States, income can make the difference between eligibility and ineligibility for health insurance programs and subsidies, especially before the expansion of Medicaid in many states in 2014.

Though the study data include two years after that expansion, the authors say they will likely not see any effects of increased health insurance coverage among lower-income Americans until more data from 2017 and beyond are made available.

The study also shows how health problems affect other aspects of life, based on income. The lowest income Americans were much more likely to have problems carrying out daily activities like shopping, cooking and managing their own money than Americans with higher incomes, and English people of similar incomes.

The financial stress that comes with a low income can feed into health issues, including worse health-related behaviors such as smoking and unhealthy diets, say the authors. This can lay the groundwork for serious health problems earlier in life - such as strokes at younger ages, which were seen most often in the low-income Americans in the study.

But even high incomes didn't protect Americans from having worse health. Even the top 10% by earnings - whose after-tax median incomes were $144,000 for Americans and $71,000 for the English - had significantly worse health on four of the 16 outcomes that were studied. Americans did not have better outcomes than English adults on any of the 16 health measures, even in the highest income group.

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In addition to Choi, Langa and Steptoe, the study's authors are U-M faculty Michele Heisler, M.D., M.P.H., Philippa Clarke, Ph.D., and Robert F. Schoeni, Ph.D., and research associate Tsai-Chin Cho, M.Sc., and Stephen Jivraj, Ph.D. of UCL. All the U-M faculty authors are members of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

The Health and Retirement Study is funded by NIA (U01 AG009741) and the research project was supported by NIA grants R21 AG054818 and R01 AG053972.

Reference: JAMA Internal Medicine, doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.2802

Potential causal role of human papilloma viruses (HPVs) in prostate cancers

BMC (BIOMED CENTRAL) NEWS RELEASE 13-JUL-2020

Human papilloma viruses (HPVs) - a common group of viruses known to cause cervical cancers - may also have a causal role in prostate cancer, according to a literature review published in the open access journal Infectious Agents and Cancer, supporting the case for universal HPV vaccination.

James Lawson and Wendy Glenn, at the University of New South Wales, Australia reviewed results from 26 previous studies on HPVs and their links to prostate cancer. They assessed the existing evidence using a common set of nine causal criteria, including the strength and consistency with which HPVs were associated with prostate cancers and whether HPVs were detected in prostate tissues that later went on to develop cancer.

James Lawson said: "Although HPVs are only one of many pathogens that have been identified in prostate cancer, they are the only infectious pathogen we can vaccinate against, which makes it important to assess the evidence of a possible causal role of HPVs in prostate cancer."

The authors found that the high risk HPV types 16 and 18, which cause the majority of cervical cancers, have been identified in normal, benign and malignant prostate tissues. In several case control studies, the prevalence of high risk HPV DNA, which indicates the presence of cancer-causing types, was significantly higher in prostate cancers compared to normal and benign prostate controls. More specifically, recent studies found that 231 of 1071 prostate cancers (21.6%) were HPV positive, whereas only 74 of 1103 benign prostate controls (6.7%) were HPV positive.

Wendy Glenn said: "Across several studies conducted in a wide range of countries and using different methods to identify HPVs, we found reasonably consistent evidence that high risk HPVs are significantly more prevalent in prostate cancers than in normal prostate tissues and benign prostate tissues. Previous studies have also shown that high risk HPVs were present in benign prostate tissues that up to ten years later developed HPV positive prostate cancer of the same HPV type."

The authors also found that in countries where mortality from cervical cancer was high, mortality from prostate cancer was also high, whereas in countries where mortality from cervical cancer was low, mortality from prostate cancer was also low.

James Lawson said: "As high risk HPV infections are associated with the majority of cervical cancers and the most frequent means of HPV transmission is probably by sexual activity, the data may indicate that HPV infection may be transmitted during sexual activity and play causal role in prostate cancer, as well as cervical cancer."

The authors suggest that the evidence for a causal role of HPVs in prostate cancer is sufficiently sound to encourage universal vaccination against HPV infections.

James Lawson said: "Many people assume that HPV infections mainly lead to cancers in women. This is not the case. HPVs are a common cause of cancers in men. These are mainly genital cancers of the anus and penis but also include cancers of the mouth, tongue and throat. It is therefore plausible that HPVs may also play a role in prostate cancer and that HPV vaccination may help prevent prostate cancer development."

The authors caution that the exact mechanisms for how HPV infection may lead to prostate cancer formation are not clear and studies exposing normal prostate cells to HPVs are needed to investigate these mechanisms. The evidence reviewed by the authors suggests that possible mechanisms may include an indirect role of HPVs in cancer formation by inhibiting the protective function of specific enzymes against virus infections. HPVs may also collaborate with other pathogens in prostate oncogenesis or play a role in inflammation of the prostate, which may lead to benign prostate enlargement and later prostate cancer.

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The authors suggest that the evidence for a causal role of HPVs in prostate cancer is sufficiently sound to encourage universal vaccination against HPV infections.

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Chemical offers new hope of finding treatments for neglected tropical diseases

UNIVERSITY OF YORK

IMAGE: TARGETING THE TRYPANOSOMA BRUCEI CELL CYCLE: THE TARGET REPRESENTS THE COMPOUND AB1, AND (THE DART) ITS PHENOTYPE SHOWED AS A PARASITE WITH CELL CYCLE DEFECTS. view more

CREDIT: MANUEL SALDIVIA AND ANDRÉS SÁNCHEZ

Scientists say they are a step closer to developing a drug to kill the trypanosome parasite that causes human African trypanosomiasis, otherwise known as sleeping sickness, paving the way for a potential cure.

The University of York researchers deciphered the mechanism by which the compound, known as AB1 works. AB1 was identified by researchers at the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases and similar compounds have been developed as an anti-cancer drug by the company.

The researchers found that AB1 blocks the division of the parasite by interfering with the function of an essential enzyme in a structure called the kinetochore. The way in which the compound kills the parasite is different from the way it kills cancer cells, such that the breakthrough could potentially lead to a cure being found for the neglected tropical disease and others including Chagas disease.

Professor Jeremy Mottram, team leader and Director of the York Biomedical Research Institute said: "Our goal is to identify unique biology in the parasite; that is the first step in the development of safe and effective new drugs to treat devastating neglected tropical diseases.

"This academic and industrial partnership has allowed us to achieve that goal and to start on the road to developing a new drug."

The work is part of an ongoing research project which in 2016 identified another chemical compound that had the potential to kill three parasites that cause Leishmaniasis, African trypanosomiasis and Chagas disease. As a result, a drug is now in clinical trials as a treatment for visceral leishmaniasis. The teams at York and Novartis then began the search for a new chemical that could have better prospects of being developed into an effective treatment for African trypanosomes. This latest study is the result of that work.

Dr Manuel Saldivia, lead scientist on the project from the Department of Biology, and who is now a staff scientist at Novartis said: "Some of the most exciting discoveries in science came from using trypanosomes as a model organism. Their divergent biology is also an attractive open door for drug hunters. Because of its therapeutic potential, our work provides a chemical tool to shed light onto one of the most fascinating events during life: cell division."

Human African Trypanosomiasis is a devastating neglected tropical disease caused by the Trypanosoma brucei parasite transmitted by infected tsetse flies. It threatens millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Chagas disease - or America trypanosomiasis - is caused by the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite. It can cause the heart and digestive system to become enlarged, which can be deadly. Chagas mostly affects people in Latin America, but has now spread to other continents.

Leishmaniasis is caused by infection with Leishmania parasites and is spread by the bite of sandflies and is found in the Americas, Africa and Asia.

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The research is in collaboration with scientists from the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases in California, the University of Glasgow and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The paper called, "Targeting the trypanosome kinetochore with CLK1 protein kinase inhibitors" is published in Nature Microbiology.

Bizarre video resurfaces featuring Trump leering over Giuliani in drag

A truly strange video featuring Donald Trump attempting to flirt with and eventually sexually harassing Rudy Giuliani dressed in drag has resurfaced on social media.

The video, which was shared by the online news outlet Meidas Touch, sees Trump in a department store when Giuliani, dressed in a long purple dress and a blonde wig, approaches him.

Trump tells Giuliani that he looks beautiful and offers to buy him a scent. Giuliani first applies the perfume to his neck which Trump smells but things go awry when Giuliani sprays another perfume onto his fake breasts causing Trump to rub his face in Giuliani's chest resulting in the president being slapped and the former mayor of New York exclaiming:

Donald, I thought you were a gentleman!

The video has been viewed more than 500,000 times on Twitter and people couldn't quite believe what they were seeing.

It appears that clip can be traced back to 2000 and was part of the Mayor’s Inner Circle Press Roast when Giuliani was still the mayor of New York City and Trump was nothing more than a property magnate and businessman.

If you want to put yourself through it again then you can watch the full clip below.

To be clear: it's neither funny nor clever to ridicule the drag community. Neither is it so to promote sexual harassment, regardless of the person's gender identity or outfit.
Quite how they interpreted this as being a joke is a little beyond us but this is Trump we are talking about...