Cost of cancer treatment can impact health of survivors

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MEDICAL COLLEGE OF GEORGIA AT AUGUSTA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: DRS. STEVEN COUGHLIN, FROM LEFT, JORGE CORTES AND BIPLAB DATTA view more 

CREDIT: MICHAEL HOLAHAN, AUGUSTA UNIVERSITY

AUGUSTA, Ga. (Sept. 15, 2022) – A significant number of people who have survived cancer are living in poverty, which can have negative effects on their physical and mental health, according to researchers at the Medical College of Georgia and the Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University.

Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains data from people across the US regarding health-related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions and their use of preventive services, they found that 12% of some 28,000 cancer survivors were living in poverty.

“The high cost of oncology care in the United States and its adverse effects on cancer survivors is of increasing concern,” they write in the journal JCO Oncology Practice. “The financial burden of cancer often persists years after diagnosis, due to ongoing costs of cancer care and late effects of cancer treatment, as well as incurred debt, lost income and inability to work.”

Many cancer treatments now total $100,000 or more annually, and without health insurance, those costs can be entirely out-of-pocket.

“We are always focused on curing cancer. That is our goal. That is our first objective when we are finding therapies and discussing treatment options and executing the treatment plan,” says Dr. Jorge Cortes, director of the Georgia Cancer Center and the paper’s senior author. “The problem we also need to address is what comes next.”

Looking to replicate findings from pilot studies in breast cancer, the research team looked at patients with leukemia and lymphoma from the national dataset and identified the same issues. As in the national dataset, many leukemia and lymphoma survivors at the Georgia Cancer Center are low-income and struggle to make ends meet.

“We found that cancer survivors who are low income, living below the federal poverty line, are much more likely to have poorer physical health, as compared to the higher income survivors,” says corresponding author Dr. Steven S. Coughlin, interim chief of the Division of Epidemiology in the MCG Department of Population Health Sciences. “They are also more likely to have poor mental health and to not have health insurance.”

Among those they studied, the prevalence of self-reported poor health conditions was significantly higher among low-income cancer survivors compared to higher-income survivors — 59% for low-income compared to 27% for high. Low-income survivors were also more than three times as likely to report the inability to see a doctor because of the associated cost.

“There is an association between financial hardship and worse symptoms, increased pain, psychological distress, poorer quality of life and higher mortality,” the authors write.

Cancer-related financial hardship can be the result of anything from the cost of treatment to reduced income from missing work or unemployment. Cancer survivors also may experience medical debt and diminished consumer credit, which is especially true for racial and ethnic minorities and low-income individuals, the authors say.

“We’ve cured their cancer, but now they have much less capability to take care of themselves, to put food on the table, to see a doctor, to pay for their medications — all these other elements,” Cortes says. “The victory against cancer has less of an impact.”

The effects can be felt by both individuals and their communities.

“When you have catastrophic financial consequences from fighting cancer, what do you do? You cut back,” explains co-author Dr. Biplab Datta, a health economist in the Augusta University Institute of Public and Preventive Health. “You don’t shop at the local grocery store. You don’t go to local restaurants. You cannot spend your money in the community, which also impacts other people living in the community. It’s a domino effect. We cannot thrive alone. We thrive as a community.”

To help combat the problem, health care providers should screen oncology patients for financial hardship the first time they see them and, when necessary, refer them to appropriate resources like social workers and financial counselors.

“There may be resources or solutions they’re not aware of,” Coughlin says. “For instance, there may be provisions a hospital’s business office can make. Financial education is also an important part of the solution. A lot of people also put medical debt on a credit card, for example, and you end up paying a lot of interest on that. It’s much better to use other means like a personal loan.”

The interdisciplinary research team also believes that health care system reform is necessary.

“We need to make sure there are support networks for patients who have survived cancer, not just those that have cancer,” Cortes says. “We need to develop more awareness of what comes next, which is what this paper is doing, and then try to develop those support networks and structures.”

Read the full study.

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JOURNAL

JCO Oncology Practice

ARTICLE TITLE

Characteristics of Cancer Survivors Living in Poverty in the United States: Results From the 2020 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey

Bats’ midnight snacks reveal clues for managing endangered species

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

URBANA, Ill. – How do we bring threatened and endangered animals back from the brink? The task is never easy or simple, but one thing is undeniably true: If we don’t understand these animals and what they need to survive, we have little chance of success.

Saving bats, then, is arguably a trickier endeavor than for other species. After all, the cryptic critters only emerge at night and are highly mobile, making it difficult to track their movements and behavior.

In a first-of-its-kind study, University of Illinois and Brown University scientists reveal the diets of endangered Indiana bats and threatened northern long-eared bats, providing clues to effectively manage both species and their habitats. 

“This was an in-depth study of these two imperiled species in landscapes where they co-occur. Nobody's done that before. This investigation gives us a much better sense of how bats not only coexist, but also how they benefit our forests and how we can thus manage the forest to provide bats with better habitat,” says Joy O’Keefe, an assistant professor and wildlife extension specialist in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

Previous research into these bats’ diets relied on older, outdated technologies that could miss important prey species. And no study had yet investigated how the two species divvy up their prey resources to coexist.

“When you have two closely related species sharing the same habitat, that means they're probably built similarly and need similar places to live and things to eat. This brings up a lot of questions about how they’re doing that. Are they competing? Or is there some system in place where they're able to divide resources? Our job was to figure that out,” says Tim Divoll, a data scientist in the Center for Computation & Visualization at Brown who completed his doctoral research with O’Keefe.

Divoll and O’Keefe humanely captured bats and collected fecal samples at two Indiana locations – a large managed forest and an area with small forest patches near a major airport – over four summers. The researchers identified insect prey from DNA in the bat feces and added a size classification as a more practical way of looking at insect prey.

“If a bat sees two moths that are the same size and have the same flight pattern, the bat’s not going to distinguish what species they are. It’s going to eat whatever moth it can catch,” Divoll says. “I wanted to use an analysis that better aligned with how bats might perceive their prey. We tend to assume that genetic classifications of prey are the most meaningful, but bats don’t study taxonomy.

“But the taxonomic identification can be very interesting. For example, maybe there are some insects in the dataset that require specific host plants. We want to help managers recognize that so they can manage for a diversity of plant types that host a diversity of insects, leading to healthier forests and more food options for bats.”

Overall, the two bat species ate a lot of the same insects, including moths, beetles, crickets, wasps, mosquitoes, and more. They also ate a significant number of agricultural and forest pest species, displaying their role as providers of beneficial ecosystem services.

Somewhat surprisingly, the northern long-eared bats, the smaller of the two, picked up slightly larger prey items. According to the researchers, that’s likely because the northern is a gleaner, meaning it grabs prey off surfaces, at least some of the time. O’Keefe says bats that use a gleaning strategy would likely have an easier time locating larger insects on bark or leaves. That’s in contrast to aerial hawkers, bats that take prey mid-flight; they’ll detect and go after anything moving in the air, whether it’s large or small.

That slight difference in prey size preference and feeding style may be enough for the bats to avoid direct competition, but the researchers can't be sure from this study alone.

“It’s difficult to say whether they’re in direct competition without measuring the availability of different insect types, and we didn’t measure that in our study. But our earlier research in the same forested site showed northern long-eared bats use much less space when foraging than Indiana bats. And they're selecting habitat slightly differently. At the end of the night, they might end up eating all the same things, but they're finding them differently,” Divoll says.

The bats’ diets were so similar that there were greater differences between sites – forest or airport – than between bat species.

“This tells us that, at some level, they are generalizing on whatever is available at a given site. They might be flexible and specialize at certain times, but these two bats are going to go after whatever is predominantly there,” Divoll says. “They may use different hunting techniques and search different heights of the forest, but they both likely capture easy targets while searching for preferred prey.”

The study, “Prey size is more representative than prey taxa when measuring dietary overlap in sympatric forest bats,” is published in Environmental DNA [DOI: 10.1002/edn3.354]. Authors include Tim Divoll, Veronica Brown, Gary McCracken, and Joy O’Keefe. Funding was provided by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Forestry Division and Purdue University, the US Fish & Wildlife Service and Wildlife Management Institute, and the Indianapolis Airport Authority.

The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences is in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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JOURNAL

Environmental DNA

DOI

10.1002/edn3.354 

Cowbird chicks do best with two warbler nest mates – not four, not zero, study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, NEWS BUREAU

 

IMAGE: A COWBIRD NESTLING PEERS OUT FROM A WARBLER NEST. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY NICHOLAS ANTONSON

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Brown-headed cowbirds are generalist brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of many other bird species and letting the host parents raise their young. A new study seeks to understand the strategies cowbird chicks use to survive in prothonotary warbler nests when they hatch with different numbers of warbler nestlings. The study reveals that a cowbird chick does better with two than with four or zero warbler nest mates. 

The researchers report their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

If a cowbird ends up in a prothonotary warbler nest with four host chicks, the cowbird either perishes or the number of warbler chicks drops, usually to two, the study found. This suggests that cowbirds engage in what the naturalist Charles Darwin called “niche construction,” modifying their environment to enhance their own survival, the researchers said.

“Brood parasites like brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of so many different species, we wanted to know about one really important aspect of how they make a go of it in a world that, when they hatch, could be any one of 200 different scenarios,” said Nicholas Antonson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the study with Mark Hauber, a U. of I. professor of evolution, ecology and behavior. “We focused on what happens when a cowbird hatches into a nest with different numbers of host nestlings.”

Cowbird chicks never eject eggs from host nests or directly kill host young. This differentiates them from another brood parasite, the common cuckoo, which will kill all other chicks in the nest and claim all the food the foster parents can provide, Antonson said. A previous study from Hauber’s own postdoctoral research showed that this strategy does not work for cowbirds in the nests of another host bird: the Eastern phoebe. In that study, cowbirds actually got less food from host parents when there were no nest mates than when there were two host chicks.

“Cowbirds have adapted to live with host nest mates,” Hauber said. “They outcompete them, they raise their heads higher, and they beg more loudly and for longer periods of time, but they do not actively displace the host nest mates.”

To better understand these dynamics, the team deployed nest boxes that were attractive to warblers and cowbirds in a southern Illinois swamp forest. The boxes were designed to exclude ground predators like snakes and raccoons, and aerial predation by hawks and owls. By changing out the bedding in the boxes four days after the eggs hatched, the team also reduced the threat from invertebrate parasites like blowflies.

A new study tested the interactions between brown-headed cowbirds, which are nest parasites, and prothonotary warblers, one of their hosts. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Antonson prepares a nest box to accommodate a prothonotary warbler nest.

CREDIT

Photo by Nicholas Antonson

A bird’s eye view from the nest box of researcher Nicholas Antonson.

CREDIT

Photo by Fred Zwicky

The team followed nests with and without cowbird parasites and manipulated the number of host chicks in the nests by moving warbler eggs or chicks between nests. All the nests parasitized by cowbirds had either zero, two or four warbler nest mates. Control nests containing only warbler chicks were matched for the total number of young.

Previous studies had quantified the amount of food the host parents brought into the nest and what proportion of the food the cowbird nestling received. In general, cowbirds hatch earlier than their nest mates. They tend to be bigger and more aggressive than warbler chicks and extract more than their fair share of food from the host parents, Antonson said. Cowbirds need more food because they grow two-to-three times larger in the nest than the warbler chicks.

“One of the unique aspects of our study is that we also quantified how many cowbirds survived to fledging in each of these different scenarios,” Antonson said. “We found that cowbirds survive best in the nests where they hatch with two host nestlings. That’s better than when they hatch with four host nestlings or with zero host nestlings. Cowbirds raised with more than that optimal number of two host nestlings appear to reduce the host brood sizes down to two.”

The reduction seen in host nestling numbers when cowbirds are present doesn’t occur in the control warbler nests with no cowbird nestlings, the researchers found.

“We think that the cowbirds are manipulating the host numbers to reduce them to the optimal so that they can grow best,” Hauber said. Stealing food meant for the other nestlings is the likely means by which they do that. Further studies will be needed to confirm that hypothesis.

The Animal Behavior Society, Humboldt Foundation and National Science Foundation supported this research.

Brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, forcing the host parents to raise their young alongside the hosts’ own offspring. Here, a cowbird egg, lower right, sits in a nest with five prothonotary warbler eggs.

CREDIT

Photo by Nicholas Antonson

The prothonotary warbler adult tends to its nestlings in a nest box made from a milk carton.

CREDIT

Photo by Nicholas Antonson

CAPTION

Cowbirds tend to be larger than the host nestlings. They open their mouths wider and hold their heads higher than other birds, allowing them to consume more of the food brought to the nest by the host parents.

CREDIT

Photo by Nicholas Antonson

The site of the study, a forested wetland in the Cache River watershed of southern Illinois.

CREDIT

Photo by Nicholas Antonson 

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Niche construction through a Goldilocks principle maximizes fitness for a nest-sharing brood parasite

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2022

Divorce is more common in albatross couples with shy males, study finds

In a long-studied population of wandering albatrosses, females are less likely to stick with a shy mate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: A WANDERING ALBATROSS DISPLAYING TO POTENTIAL MATES. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE: SAMANTHA PATRICK

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The wandering albatross is the poster bird for avian monogamy. The graceful glider is known to mate for life, partnering up with the same bird to breed, season after season, between long flights at sea.

But on rare occasions, an albatross pair will “divorce” — a term ornithologists use for instances when one partner leaves the pair for another mate while the other partner remains in the flock. Divorce rates vary widely across the avian world, and the divorce rate for wandering albatrosses is relatively low.

Nevertheless, the giant drifters can split up. Scientists at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found that, at least for one particular population of wandering albatross, whether a pair will divorce boils down to one important factor: personality. 

In a study appearing today in the journal Biology Letters, the team reports that an albatross couple’s chance of divorce is highly influenced by the male partner’s “boldness.” The bolder and more aggressive the male, the more likely the pair is to stay together. The shyer the male, the higher the chance that the pair will divorce.

The researchers say their study is the first to link personality and divorce in a wild animal species.

“We thought that bold males, being more aggressive, would be more likely to divorce, because they would be more likely to take the risk of switching partners to improve future reproductive outcomes,” says study senior author Stephanie Jenouvrier, an associate scientist and seabird ecologist in WHOI’s FLEDGE Lab. “Instead we find the shy divorce more because they are more likely to be forced to divorce by a more competitive intruder. We expect personality may impact divorce rates in many species, but in different ways.”

Lead author Ruijiao Sun, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says that this new evidence of a link between personality and divorce in the wandering albatross may help scientists predict the resilience of the population.

“The wandering albatross is a vulnerable species,” Sun says. “Understanding the effect of personality on divorce is important because it can help researchers predict the consequences for population dynamics, and implement conservation efforts.”

The study’s co-authors include Joanie Van de Walle of WHOI, Samantha Patrick of the University of Liverpool, and Christophe Barbraud, Henri Weimerskirch, and Karine Delord of CNRS- La Rochelle University in France.

 

Repeat divorcées

The new study concentrates on a population of wandering albatross that return regularly to Possession Island in the Southern Indian Ocean to breed. This population has been the focus of a long-term study dating back to the 1950s, in which researchers have been monitoring the birds each breeding season and recording the pairings and breakups of individuals through the years.

This particular population is skewed toward more male individuals than females because the foraging grounds of female albatrosses overlap with fishing vessels, where they are more prone to being accidentally caught in fishing lines as bycatch.  

In earlier research, Sun analyzed data from this long-term study and picked up a curious pattern: Those individuals that divorced were more likely to do so again and again.

“Then we wanted to know, what drives divorce, and why are some individuals divorcing more often,” Jenouvrier says. “In humans, you see this repetitive divorce pattern as well, linked to personality. And the wandering albatross is one of the rare species for which we have both demographic and personality data.”

That personality data comes from an ongoing study that began in 2008 and is led by co-author Patrick, who has been measuring the personality of individuals among the same population of wandering albatross on Possession Island. In the study of animal behavior, personality is defined as a consistent behavioral difference displayed by an individual. Biologists mainly measure personality in animals as a gradient between shy and bold, or less to more aggressive.

In Patrick’s study, researchers have measured boldness in albatrosses by gauging a bird’s reaction to a human approaching its nest, from a distance of about 5 meters. A bird is assigned a score depending on how it reacts (a bird that does not respond scores a zero, being the most shy, while a bird that lifts its head, and even stands up, can score higher, being the most bold).

Patrick has made multiple personality assessments of the same individuals over multiple years. Sun and Jenouvrier wondered: Could an individual’s personality have anything to do with their chance to divorce?

“We had seen this repetitive divorce pattern, and then talked with Sam (Patrick) to see, could this be related to personality?” Sun recalls. “We know that personality predicts divorce in human beings, and it would be intuitive to make the link between personality and divorce in wild populations.”

 

Shy birds

In their new study, the team used data from both the demographic and personality studies to see whether any patterns between the two emerged. They applied a statistical model to both datasets, to test whether the personality of individuals in an albatross pair affected the fate of that pair.

They found that for females, personality had little to do with whether the birds divorced. But in males, the pattern was clear: Those that were identified as shy were more likely to divorce, while bolder males stayed with their partner.

“Divorce does not happen very often,” Jenouvrier says. “But we found that the shyer a bird is, the more likely they are to divorce.”

But why? In their study, the team puts forth an explanation, which ecologists call “forced divorce.” They point out that, in this particular population of wandering albatross, males far outnumber females and therefore are more likely to compete with each other for mates. Males that are already partnered up, therefore, may be faced with a third “intruder” — a male who is competing for a place in the pair.

“When there is a third intruder that competes, shy birds could step away and give away their mates, where bolder individuals are aggressive and will guard their partner and secure their partnership,” Sun explains. “That’s why shyer individuals may have higher divorce rates.”

The team is planning to extend their work to examine how the personality of individuals can affect how the larger population changes and evolves. 

“Now we’re talking about a connection between personality and divorce at the individual level,” Sun says. “But we want to understand the impact at the population level.”

 

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This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

 

 

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DOI

10.1098/rsbl.2022.0301 

Study tracks waterbird use of Chicago-area wetlands

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, NEWS BUREAU

 

IMAGE: LEAST BITTERN view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY STEVE ARENA/USFWS

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A three-year study in northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana found that – even at small scales – emergent wetlands or ponds support many wetland bird species. The study also found that, at least in the years surveyed, the level of urbanization had little effect on most of the studied species’ use of such sites, provided the right kinds of habitat were available.

The new findings are reported in the journal Ecosphere.

Emergent wetlands are shallow-water sites usually found along the banks of rivers, ponds or bogs, where plants like cattails, sedges and rushes grow. Many wetland birds rely on emergent wetlands for shelter, nesting material and food – in the form of fish, reptiles, algae and invertebrates like worms or crayfish. Wetland birds differ in their habitat needs, however, said Illinois Natural History Survey ornithologist Anastasia Rahlin, who led the research in collaboration with Sarah Saunders, a quantitative ecologist with the National Audubon Society; and Stephanie Beilke, a senior conservation science manager with Audubon Great Lakes, which is based in Chicago.

For example, black-crowned night herons often hunt in low light at pond edges in early morning or at dusk, opportunistically foraging for fish, snakes or frogs, Rahlin said.

“Virginia rails nest on floating mats surrounded by dense, emergent vegetation and quietly pick their way along marsh edges and mud flats in search of insects, spiders, slugs and small fish,” she said. “Some of the 17 species we targeted, such as the marsh wren, are more vocal than others, and some, like rails, are difficult to spot,” she said.

The researchers wrote that wetland birds in North America “have experienced declines of approximately 22% since 1970. Due to the diversity of habitat requirements, life history strategies and food sources of wetland birds, it is likely that individual species will respond to landscape characteristics across a variety of spatial scales.”

To better understand the relationship between wetland features and the likelihood of finding wetland birds there, the researchers surveyed 60 wetland complexes within the highly urbanized landscape surrounding Chicago. Survey locations were visited three times between May 1 and June 15 each year from 2017-19. In addition to conducting visual surveys, the team used intermittent audio broadcasts of targeted wetland bird calls to coax birds that might be hiding on site to call in response. The team estimated the occupancy probability of each of 17 species of wetland birds detected by sight or sound.

The researchers used National Wetlands Inventory data to calculate the proportion of each of several wetland types, including emergent, riverine and shrub/forested wetlands; and the extent of freshwater ponds, which are preferred by some species of wetland bird. They used data from the Global Urban Footprint to calculate the amount of urbanization at each locale.

Of the 17 wetland bird species targeted in the survey, 10 species had enough detections for deeper analysis, the team reported.

“Because of their elusive behavior, many wetland bird species are difficult to detect, limiting our ability to estimate their relationships with landscape characteristics,” Beilke said. “But being able to do this for 10 species is a great step, and with more years of data collection, we will be able to add more species to this type of analysis.”

“We looked at what factors had an effect on each species’ presence at each site,” Rahlin said. “We used occupancy models to determine if the proportion of different wetland types influenced whether the birds were using that particular wetland or not.”

The researchers determined which species made use of wetlands of different sizes and whether the proportion of urbanization influenced their presence or absence at each site. They also examined the role of proximity to Lake Michigan.

“There are different wetland habitat types as you move toward the lake,” Rahlin said. “There are dune and swale wetlands, which are very different than inland wetlands, so we wanted to account for that as well.”

The majority of sites were not hydrologically connected to Lake Michigan, she said.

The analysis revealed that three species – the least bittern, common gallinule and swamp sparrow – were “sensitive to wetlands at large spatial scales,” Rahlin said. They were less likely to be seen in smaller wetlands, suggesting these birds would only make use of larger wetland sites.

Other wetland birds, including Virginia rails and soras, were more likely to be detected in smaller wetlands.  These areas could be as small “as the footprint of a house,” Rahlin said.

“To me, it’s a hopeful message that yes, restoration does work and is important even in small urban wetlands,” she said.

Rahlin said she was surprised to see that a majority of species seemed to be unaffected by the degree of urbanization.

“Of the 10 species we modeled, we saw that the occupancy of pied-billed grebes and swamp sparrows was negatively affected as urbanization increased,” she said. The years surveyed were high-water years, however, and the pattern might change in drought years, she said.

A few of the species, including snowy egrets, American bitterns and yellow-headed blackbirds, were very rarely seen, suggesting that they must be studied on a larger scale to understand their habitat needs, Rahlin said.

“The amount of wetland habitat that’s available in Illinois is just vanishingly small,” she said. “More than 90% of wetland habitat in Illinois has been lost to development and conversion to agriculture.” This may lead wetland bird species to concentrate in any remaining wetlands. More research will be needed to see how successfully they’re breeding to ensure their continuing presence in the state.

To that end, the Audubon Great Lakes’ Marsh Bird Monitoring Hub is collecting and sharing wetland bird data with land managers and the public to promote wetlands restoration and maintenance in the region.

The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, Indiana Department of Resources, The Nature Conservancy, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service supported this research.

Editor’s notes: 

To reach Anastasia Rahlin, email rahlin1@illinois.edu;

The paper “Spatial drivers of wetland bird occupancy within an urbanized matrix in the Upper Midwestern United States” is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau.

DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.4232

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JOURNAL

Ecosphere

DOI

10.1002/ecs2.4232 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Spatial drivers of wetland bird occupancy within an urbanized matrix in the Upper Midwestern United States

Researchers develop painless tattoos that can be self-administered

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: A MAGNIFIED VIEW OF A MICRONEEDLE PATCH WITH GREEN TATTOO INK. view more 

CREDIT: GEORGIA TECH

Instead of sitting in a tattoo chair for hours enduring painful punctures, imagine getting tattooed by a skin patch containing microscopic needles. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed low-cost, painless, and bloodless tattoos that can be self-administered and have many applications, from medical alerts to tracking neutered animals to cosmetics.

“We’ve miniaturized the needle so that it’s painless, but still effectively deposits tattoo ink in the skin,” said Mark Prausnitz, principal investigator on the paper. “This could be a way not only to make medical tattoos more accessible, but also to create new opportunities for cosmetic tattoos because of the ease of administration.”

Prausnitz, Regents’ Professor and J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, presented the research in the journal iScience, with former Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Song Li as co-author.

Tattoos are used in medicine to cover up scars, guide repeated cancer radiation treatments, or restore nipples after breast surgery. Tattoos also can be used instead of bracelets as medical alerts to communicate serious medical conditions such as diabetes, epilepsy, or allergies.

Various cosmetic products using microneedles are already on the market — mostly for anti-aging — but developing microneedle technology for tattoos is new. Prausnitz, a veteran in this area, has studied microneedle patches for years to painlessly administer drugs and vaccines to the skin without the need for hypodermic needles.

“We saw this as an opportunity to leverage our work on microneedle technology to make tattoos more accessible,” Prausnitz said. “While some people are willing to accept the pain and time required for a tattoo, we thought others might prefer a tattoo that is simply pressed onto the skin and does not hurt.” 

Transforming Tattooing

Tattoos typically use large needles to puncture repeatedly into the skin to get a good image, a time-consuming and painful process. The Georgia Tech team has developed microneedles that are smaller than a grain of sand and are made of tattoo ink encased in a dissolvable matrix.

“Because the microneedles are made of tattoo ink, they deposit the ink in the skin very efficiently,” said Li, the lead author of the study.

In this way, the microneedles can be pressed into the skin just once and then dissolve, leaving the ink in the skin after a few minutes without bleeding.  

CAPTION

A microneedle patch tattoo is pressed to the skin

CREDIT

Georgia Tech

Tattooing Technique

Although most microneedle patches for pharmaceuticals or cosmetics have dozens or hundreds of microneedles arranged in a square or circle, microneedle patch tattoos imprint a design that can include letters, numbers, symbols, and images. By arranging the microneedles in a specific pattern, each microneedle acts like a pixel to create a tattoo image in any shape or pattern.

The researchers start with a mold containing microneedles in a pattern that forms an image. They fill the microneedles in the mold with tattoo ink and add a patch backing for convenient handling. The resulting patch is then applied to the skin for a few minutes, during which time the microneedles dissolve and release the tattoo ink. Tattoo inks of various colors can be incorporated into the microneedles, including black-light ink that can only be seen when illuminated with ultraviolet light.

Prausnitz’s lab has been researching microneedles for vaccine delivery for years and realized they could be equally applicable to tattoos. With support from the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs, Prausnitz’s team started working on tattoos to identify spayed and neutered pets, but then realized the technology could be effective for people, too.

The tattoos were also designed with privacy in mind. The researchers even created patches sensitive to environmental factors such as light or temperature changes, where the tattoo will only appear with ultraviolet light or higher temperatures. This provides patients with privacy, revealing the tattoo only when desired.

The study showed that the tattoos could last for at least a year and are likely to be permanent, which also makes them viable cosmetic options for people who want an aesthetic tattoo without risk of infection or the pain associated with traditional tattoos. Microneedle tattoos could alternatively be loaded with temporary tattoo ink to address short-term needs in medicine and cosmetics.

Microneedle patch tattoos can also be used to encode information in the skin of animals. Rather than clipping the ear or applying an ear tag to animals to indicate sterilization status, a painless and discreet tattoo can be applied instead.

“The goal isn’t to replace all tattoos, which are often works of beauty created by tattoo artists,” Prausnitz said. “Our goal is to create new opportunities for patients, pets, and people who want a painless tattoo that can be easily administered.”

Prausnitz has co-founded a company called Micron Biomedical that is developing microneedle patch technology, bringing it further into clinical trials, commercializing it, and ultimately making it available to patients. 

Prausnitz and several other Georgia Tech researchers are inventors of the microneedle patch technology used in this study and have ownership interest in Micron Biomedical. They are entitled to royalties derived from Micron Biomedical’s future sales of products related to the research. These potential conflicts of interest have been disclosed and are overseen by Georgia Institute of Technology. 

  

CAPTION

A microneedle patch tattoo is held by inventor, Mark Prausnitz

CREDIT

Georgia Tech

JOURNAL

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2022.105014 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

Microneedle patch tattoos

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Sep-2022