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Tuesday, November 08, 2022

The early bird may just get the worm

Verbal intelligence – normally linked to evening types – may be superior in morning risers despite previous thinking

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

The early bird may just get the worm — IMAGE: DR. STUART FOGEL, A COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENTIST, PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA’S SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY, AND RESEARCHER AT THE ROYAL’S INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH AND DIRECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA SLEEP RESEARCH LABORATORY. view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

Night owls may be looking forward to falling back into autumn standard time but a new study from the University of Ottawa has found Daylight Saving Time may also suit morning types just fine.

Research from Dr. Stuart Fogel, a cognitive neuroscientist, professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology, and researcher at the Royal’s Institute for Mental Health Research, is shedding light into how the impact of a person’s daily rhythm and activity levels during both wake and sleep relate to human intelligence. Contrary to the adage “the early bird gets the worm,” previous work suggests that evening types, or “owls,” have superior verbal intelligence.

Yet, “once you account for key factors including bedtime and age, we found the opposite to be true, that morning types tend to have superior verbal ability,” says Stuart Fogel, Director of the University of Ottawa Sleep Research Laboratory. “This outcome was surprising to us and signals this is much more complicated that anyone thought before.”

Fogel’s team identified individual’s chronotype – their evening or morning tendencies – by monitoring biological rhythms and daily preferences. A person’s chronotype is related to when in the day they prefer to do demanding things, from intellectual pursuits to exercise.

Young individuals are typically “evening types” while older individuals and those more regularly entrenched in their daily/nightly activities are likely “morning types”. The juxtaposition here is that morning is critical for young people, especially school aged children and adolescents, who have their schedules set by their morning-type parents and their routines. This might be doing youngsters a disservice.

“A lot of school start times are not determined by our chronotypes but by parents and work-schedules, so school-aged kids pay the price of that because they are evening types forced to work on a morning type schedule,” says Fogel.

“For example, math and science classes are normally scheduled early in the day because whatever morning tendencies they have will serve them well. But the AM is not when they are at their best due to their evening type tendencies. Ultimately, they are disadvantaged because the type of schedule imposed on them is basically fighting against their biological clock every day.”

The study enlisted volunteers from a wide age range, who were rigorously screened to rule out sleep disorders and other confounding factors. They outfitted volunteers with a monitoring device to measure activity levels.

Establishing the strength of a person’s rhythm, which drives intelligence, is key to understanding the results of this nuanced study, says Fogel, with a person’s age and actual bedtime proving important factors.

“Our brain really craves regularity and for us to be optimal in our own rhythms is to stick to that schedule and not be constantly trying to catch up,” adds Fogel.

JOURNAL

Current Research in Behavioral Sciences

DOI

10.1016/j.crbeha.2022.100083

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Does the early bird really get the worm? How chronotype relates to human intelligence

Surgery is best to prevent amputations in certain people with poor leg circulation

American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2022, Abstract 19587

Reports and Proceedings

AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

CHICAGO, Nov. 7, 2022 — People with severe peripheral artery disease, or PAD, who received bypass surgery to improve blood flow to their legs and feet had 65 percent fewer repeat procedures and 27% fewer amputations than those who had minimally invasive procedures such as angioplasty and stenting, according to preliminary late-breaking research presented today at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022. The meeting, held in person in Chicago and virtually, Nov. 5-7, 2022, is a premier global exchange of the latest scientific advancements, research and evidence-based clinical practice updates in cardiovascular science.

PAD occurs when the arteries that carry blood away from the heart to the head, arms, legs and feet become narrow due to a build-up of fatty plaque. It affects more than 200 million people worldwide, and its prevalence is increasing because people are living longer, and more people have Type 2 diabetes, a major risk factor for PAD. The artery build-up results in ischemia, or poor blood flow, to the legs and feet. People with severe PAD may develop chronic limb-threatening ischemia (CLTI), which leads to a high risk for limb amputation and causes pain even while at rest, nonhealing wounds or ulcerations, and tissue damage to the foot and leg.

Re-opening or bypassing the blocked arteries, also called revascularization, is imperative for people with CLTI; without treatment, 20-40% of those with CLTI risk having a major leg amputation. The risk of death also increases for people with CLTI who do not receive proper treatment.

CLTI is treated with bypass surgery, which creates a passage around the blocked arteries using a patient’s leg vein or an artificial blood vessel, or a minimally invasive endovascular procedure such as angioplasty and stenting. In this procedure, a thin balloon-tipped catheter is inserted into the blockage to widen it, and a stent is placed to keep the artery open.

The study authors note, however, that while both procedures are considered standard of care, there is little data or guidance on which revascularization procedure is better for these patients. A 2021 American Heart Association scientific statement highlighted the need for more studies comparing surgical vs. endovascular treatment for PAD and CLTI.

“Procedure preference may vary by institution and by health care professional based on expertise and training, or availability of technology,” said principal investigator Alik Farber, M.D., M.B.A., an associate chief medical officer for surgical services and chief of the division of vascular and endovascular surgery at Boston Medical Center. “As minimally invasive techniques became more available two decades ago, there was a trend toward less bypass surgery. However, it is not clear what is best for people with chronic limb-threatening ischemia in whom the stakes are high.”

The Best Endovascular versus Best Surgical Therapy for Patients with Chronic Limb Threatening Ischemia (BEST-CLI) Trial enrolled 1,830 people with CLTI in 150 centers in the U.S., Canada, Italy, Finland and New Zealand beginning in 2014. Researchers compared the clinical, safety, quality of life and cost outcomes between those who had bypass surgery and those who had endovascular treatment. The study aimed to clarify the appropriate role for both treatment strategies to determine an evidence-based standard for this patient population.

The study participants were an average age of 67 years, 28% were female and 72% were white. Participants included 36% who smoked; 69% with diabetes (with and without insulin dependence); and 11% with end-stage kidney disease. About 22% of study participants reported leg pain at rest as a primary symptom.

The study divided patients into groups and subgroups:

Group 1 included 1,434 patients whose large leg veins (great saphenous veins) were suitable for bypass surgery. The people in Group 1 were then randomly assigned into two subgroups by their treatment team to undergo either bypass surgery or an endovascular procedure to restore blood flow to the leg.

Group 2 included 396 patients who did not have saphenous veins that were suitable for surgery. Each participant in Group 2 was then randomly assigned to one of two subgroups to either have bypass surgery using an arm vein or artificial blood vessel or undergo an endovascular procedure.

The researchers compared the outcomes of the subgroups within each larger group. The study was not designed to compare results between Group 1 (those with suitable leg veins) and Group 2 (without suitable leg veins). Major adverse limb events were compared, including the number of major repeat vascular procedures or amputations above the ankle on the limb that had been treated. The study also measured safety by assessing the rate of death, heart attacks or strokes among participants. Participants were followed up to seven years in Group 1, and up to five years in Group 2.

The study found:

Group 1 results: Among the participants who received bypass surgery using their great saphenous vein, there was a 33% reduction in major adverse limb events compared to the group who received endovascular treatment. There were 65% fewer major interventions and 27% fewer above-ankle amputations than in the endovascular subgroup. There was no difference in the number of patient deaths, heart attacks or strokes between the two subgroups.

Group 2 results: There was no statistical difference in repeat interventions or amputations between the people who had bypass surgery using an arm vein or an artificial blood vessel and those who had endovascular procedures.

“The results we found within Group 1 are interesting in that there were significantly fewer amputations and major reoperations performed in the people who had bypass surgery, and there was no difference between the treatment groups in the number of patient deaths,” said Farber, who is also a professor of surgery and radiology at Boston University School of Medicine. “This information debunks the idea that CLTI patients who need revascularization should have an endovascular procedure first due to concern that bypass surgery may be potentially more dangerous. In this group of people, who were at acceptable risk for surgery and had a good vein available, we determined that surgical bypass led to better outcomes.”

The study did have some limitations. The results may have been influenced by selection bias because each study location chose which patients were good candidates for revascularization. Additionally, each investigator selected the specific equipment and methods of treatment, therefore, the surgical and endovascular techniques were somewhat diverse. In addition, the percentage of females in the study was less than expected.

Co-principal investigators are Matthew Menard, M.D.; Kenneth Rosenfield, M.D.; Taye Hamza, Ph.D.; Mark J. Cziraky, Pharm.D., FAHA; and Niteesh Choudhry, M.D., Ph.D. Authors’ disclosures are listed in the abstract.

The study was funded initially by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Funding during the follow-up period (2019-2021) was provided by Vascular InterVentional Advances (VIVA), the Society for Vascular Surgery, the New England Society for Vascular Surgery, the Western Vascular Society, the Eastern Vascular Society, the Midwest Vascular Surgery Society, the Southern Association of Vascular Surgeons, the Canadian Society for Vascular Surgery, the Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery, the Society of Interventional Radiology, the Vascular and Endovascular Surgery Society, the Society for Vascular Medicine; Janssen; Gore; Becton Dickinson and Company; Medtronic; Cook; Boston Scientific; Abbott; Cordis; and Cardiovascular Systems, Inc.

Statements and conclusions of studies that are presented at the American Heart Association’s scientific meetings are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the Association’s policy or position. The Association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. Abstracts presented at the Association’s scientific meetings are not peer-reviewed, rather, they are curated by independent review panels and are considered based on the potential to add to the diversity of scientific issues and views discussed at the meeting. The findings are considered preliminary until published as a full manuscript in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, device manufacturers and health insurance providers and the Association’s overall financial information are available here.

Additional Resources:

Multimedia is available on the right column of the release link https://newsroom.heart.org/news/surgery-is-best-to-prevent-amputations-in-certain-people-with-poor-leg-circulation?preview=7be2ba374b61d61964d758f73b218eb8
Link to abstract; and AHA Scientific Sessions 2022 Online Program Planner
2016 AHA/ACC Guideline on the Management of Patients With Lower Extremity Peripheral Artery Disease: Executive Summary
AHA health information: Peripheral Artery Disease
PAD Personal Stories
For more news at AHA Scientific Sessions 2022, follow us on Twitter @HeartNews #AHA22

The American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022 is a premier global exchange of the latest scientific advancements, research and evidence-based clinical practice updates in cardiovascular science. The 3-day meeting will feature more than 500 sessions focused on breakthrough cardiovascular basic, clinical and population science updates occurring Saturday through Monday, November 5-7, 2022. Thousands of leading physicians, scientists, cardiologists, advanced practice nurses and allied health care professionals from around the world will convene virtually to participate in basic, clinical and population science presentations, discussions and curricula that can shape the future of cardiovascular science and medicine, including prevention and quality improvement. During the three-day meeting, attendees receive exclusive access to more than 4,000 original research presentations and can earn Continuing Medical Education (CME), Continuing Education (CE) or Maintenance of Certification (MOC) credits for educational sessions. Engage in Scientific Sessions 2022 on social media via #AHA22.

About the American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public’s health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.

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Rice, Baylor to study how screen use affects young children

Rice engineers creating app to gather objective data about children’s screen use

Grant and Award Announcement

RICE UNIVERSITY

Dr. Teresia O’Connor — IMAGE: TERESIA O’CONNOR IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE NUTRITION DIVISION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PEDIATRICS AT BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE AND ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR FOR HUMAN SCIENCES AT HOUSTON’S CHILDREN’S NUTRITION RESEARCH CENTER. view more
CREDIT: COURTESY OF BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE

HOUSTON – (Nov. 7, 2022) – Children are captivated by the electronic screens of televisions, laptops, smartphones and other devices, and researchers from Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and Northern Illinois University have begun an innovative study of young children’s screen use and its potential effects on their physical and cognitive development. The research is funded by a $6.2 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

The average child in the U.S. spends an estimated 2.5 hours a day in front of electronic screens, which is more than double the amount of screen time pediatricians suggest. Despite the pervasiveness of screens and their appeal, it has been difficult for researchers to determine how they impact children’s development.

“Research so far has been done using parents’ reports about what their children typically do when it comes to screen use,” said Baylor College of Medicine pediatrician Dr. Teresia O’Connor, the principal investigator on the NIH grant. “While parents are well-meaning, there are problems with conducting research that uses parent reports on typical use as the only source of information.”

O’Connor, an associate professor in the nutrition division of Baylor’s Department of Pediatrics and associate director for human sciences at Houston’s Children’s Nutrition Research Center, said it is easy for parents to overlook or forget how much time their children spend on screens each day, and inaccuracies in parent-provided data makes it very difficult for researchers to establish correlations between children’s screen usage and their health and developmental outcomes.

Rice engineers led by Ashok Veeraraghavan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of Rice’s Scalable Health Laboratories, are creating an open source system called FLASH — an acronym for Family Level Assessment of Screen use in the Home — to objectively and automatically measure children’s screen-viewing behaviors.

O’Connor said objective FLASH data could allow health professionals to make more informed recommendations for parents about children’s screen media use.

“If there are associations with poorer outcomes, we hope to provide guidance on how to reduce risk,” O’Connor said. “If there are no associations, we hope to put parents’ minds at ease that some screen use, with age-appropriate content, doesn’t put their child at risk.”

The Rice team that’s developing FLASH is drawing on advances in imaging, facial recognition, computer vision, signal processing and other technologies, said Anil Vadathya, the project’s lead engineer.

“We’re creating two versions of the system,” Vadathya said. “One will measure screen use on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets. The other is for TVs and will measure both TV viewing and game console use.”

The five-year grant includes funding for three long-term studies of the impacts of screen use on young children. In the first, researchers will measure preschool-aged children’s screen use for one year and investigate potential impacts on sleep and physical growth. The second will follow the same group of children for one year to examine associations between screen use, learning and memory. It will also investigate how parents can help children use screens in a way that supports brain development. The third study will follow preschool-aged children over the course of a few weeks and examine how the use of screens at varying times prior to a child’s bedtime impacts their sleep and circadian rhythms.

“FLASH could have a significant impact on public health and clinical research regarding screen media use,” Veerarghavan said. “This could really change how scientists assess health outcomes of screen use and how they design interventions to address those outcomes.”

Houston’s Children’s Nutrition Research Center, one of six U.S. human nutrition research centers funded by the Department of Agriculture, is operated by Baylor in cooperation with Texas Children’s Hospital and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.

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Rice University engineers Ashok Veeraraghavan (left) and Anil Vadathya are creating an open source system called FLASH to objectively and automatically measure children’s screen-viewing behaviors.

CREDIT

Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Grant information:

“Development and Validation of an Automated Measurement of Child Screen Media Use: FLASH” | Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development | NIH Project No. 5R01DK113269-05

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/BneOYHrJk0K9RDKO-D-K9w/project-details/10128438

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/11/1107-SCREENTIME-main-lg.jpg
CAPTION: U.S. children average 2.5 hours of screen time per day, more than double the amount pediatricians recommend. (Image courtesy of 123rf.com)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/11/1107-SCREENTIME-toB-lg.jpg
CAPTION: Dr. Teresia O’Connor is an associate professor in the nutrition division of Baylor College of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics and associate director for human sciences at Houston’s Children’s Nutrition Research Center. (Photo courtesy of Baylor College of Medicine)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2022/11/1107-SCREENTIME-aval29-lg.jpg
CAPTION: Rice University engineers Ashok Veeraraghavan (left) and Anil Vadathya are creating an open source system called FLASH to objectively and automatically measure children’s screen-viewing behaviors. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

New materials could enable longer-lasting implantable batteries

Pacemakers and other medical devices, as well as long-distance drones and remote sensors, could require fewer battery replacements with new approach.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

High-energy batteries — IMAGE: TIME-LAPSE SERIES OF IMAGES SHOWS THE NEW TYPE OF BATTERY BECOMING FULLY DISCHARGED OVER A PERIOD OF DAYS. IN THE PROCESS OF DISCHARGING, THE NEW "CATHOLYTE" MATERIAL IN THE BATTERY CELL GETS CHEMICALLY COVERTED INTO A REDDISH COMPOUND, SO THE COLOR GETS DARKER THE MORE IT DISCHARGES. view more
CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF HAINING GAO, ALEJANDRO SEVILLA, AND BETAR GALLANT, ET. AL

For the last few decades, battery research has largely focused on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which are used in everything from electric cars to portable electronics and have improved dramatically in terms of affordability and capacity. But nonrechargeable batteries have seen little improvement during that time, despite their crucial role in many important uses such as implantable medical devices like pacemakers.

Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a way to improve the energy density of these nonrechargeable, or “primary,” batteries. They say it could enable up to a 50 percent increase in useful lifetime, or a corresponding decrease in size and weight for a given amount of power or energy capacity, while also improving safety, with little or no increase in cost.

The new findings, which involve substituting the conventionally inactive battery electrolyte with a material that is active for energy delivery, are reported today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper by MIT Kavanaugh Postdoctoral Fellow Haining Gao, graduate student Alejandro Sevilla, associate professor of mechanical engineering Betar Gallant, and four others at MIT and Caltech.

Replacing the battery in a pacemaker or other medical implant requires a surgical procedure, so any increase in the longevity of their batteries could have a significant impact on the patient’s quality of life, Gallant says. Primary batteries are used for such essential applications because they can provide about three times as much energy for a given size and weight as rechargeable batteries.

That difference in capacity, Gao says, makes primary batteries “critical for applications where charging is not possible or is impractical.” The new materials work at human body temperature, so would be suitable for medical implants. In addition to implantable devices, with further development to make the batteries operate efficiently at cooler temperatures, applications could also include sensors in tracking devices for shipments, for example to ensure that temperature and humidity requirements for food or drug shipments are properly maintained throughout the shipping process. Or, they might be used in remotely operated aerial or underwater vehicles that need to remain ready for deployment over long periods.

Pacemaker batteries typically last from five to 10 years, and even less if they require high-voltage functions such as defibrillation. Yet for such batteries, Gao says, the technology is considered mature, and “there haven’t been any major innovations in fundamental cell chemistries in the past 40 years.”

The key to the team’s innovation is a new kind of electrolyte — the material that lies between the two electrical poles of the battery, the cathode and the anode, and allows charge carriers to pass through from one side to the other. Using a new liquid fluorinated compound, the team found that they could combine some of the functions of the cathode and the electrolyte in one compound, called a catholyte. This allows for saving much of the weight of typical primary batteries, Gao says.

While there are other materials besides this new compound that could theoretically function in a similar catholyte role in a high-capacity battery, Gallant explains, those materials have lower inherent voltages that do not match those of the remainder of the material in a conventional pacemaker battery, a type known as CFx. Because the overall output from the battery can’t be more than that of the lesser of the two electrode materials, the extra capacity would go to waste because of the voltage mismatch. But with the new material, “one of the key merits of our fluorinated liquids is that their voltage aligns very well with that of CFx,” Gallant says.

In a conventional CFx battery, the liquid electrolyte is essential because it allows charged particles to pass through from one electrode to the other. But “those electrolytes are actually chemically inactive, so they’re basically dead weight,” Gao says. This means about 50 percent of the battery’s key components, mainly the electrolyte, is inactive material. But in the new design with the fluorinated catholyte material, the amount of dead weight can be reduced to about 20 percent, she says.

The new cells also provide safety improvements over other kinds of proposed chemistries that would use toxic and corrosive catholyte materials, which their formula does not, Gallant says. And preliminary tests have demonstrated a stable shelf life over more than a year, an important characteristic for primary batteries, she says.

So far, the team has not yet experimentally achieved the full 50 percent improvement in energy density predicted by their analysis. They have demonstrated a 20 percent improvement, which in itself would be an important gain for some applications, Gallant says. The design of the cell itself has not yet been fully optimized, but the researchers can project the cell performance based on the performance of the active material itself. “We can see the projected cell-level performance when it’s scaled up can reach around 50 percent higher than the CFx cell,” she says. Achieving that level experimentally is the team’s next goal.

Sevilla, a doctoral student in the mechanical engineering department, will be focusing on that work in the coming year. “I was brought into this project to try to understand some of the limitations of why we haven’t been able to attain the full energy density possible,” he says. “My role has been trying to fill in the gaps in terms of understanding the underlying reaction.”

One big advantage of the new material, Gao says, is that it can easily be integrated into existing battery manufacturing processes, as a simple substitution of one material for another. Preliminary discussions with manufacturers confirm this potentially easy substitution, Gao says. The basic starting material, used for other purposes, has already been scaled up for production, she says, and its price is comparable to that of the materials currently used in CFx batteries. The cost of batteries using the new material is likely to be comparable to the existing batteries as well, she says. The team has already applied for a patent on the catholyte, and they expect that the medical applications are likely to be the first to be commercialized, perhaps with a full-scale prototype ready for testing in real devices within about a year.

Further down the road, other applications could likely take advantage of the new materials as well, such as smart water or gas meters that can be read out remotely, or devices like EZPass transponders, increasing their usable lifetime, the researchers say. Power for drone aircraft or undersea vehicles would require higher power and so may take longer to be developed. Other uses could include batteries for equipment used at remote sites, such as drilling rigs for oil and gas, including devices sent down into the wells to monitor conditions.

The team also included Gustavo Hobold, Aaron Melemed, and Rui Guo at MIT and Simon Jones at Caltech. The work was supported by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Army Research Office.

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Written by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Additional background

Paper: “Fluoro-Organosulfur Catholytes to Boost Lithium Primary Battery Energy”

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2121440119