It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, September 09, 2023
ROBOTICS
Autonomous robot for subsea oil and gas pipeline inspection being developed at University of Houston
Technology makes process safer, more cost effective
With an increasing number of severe accidents in the global oil and gas industry caused by damaged pipelines, University of Houston researchers are developing an autonomous robot to identify potential pipeline leaks and structural failures during subsea inspections. The transformative technology will make the inspection process far safer and more cost effective, while also protecting subsea environments from disaster.
Thousands of oil spills occur in U.S. waters each year for a variety of reasons. While most are small, spilled crude oil can still cause damage to sensitive areas such as beaches, mangroves and wetlands. When larger spills happen, pipelines are often the culprit. From 1964 through 2015, a total of 514 offshore pipeline–related oil spills were recorded, 20 of which incurred spill volumes of more than 1,000 barrels, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
The timely inspection of subsea infrastructure, especially pipelines and offshore wells, is the key to preventing such disasters. However, current inspection techniques often require a well-trained human diver and substantial time and money. The challenges are exacerbated if the inspection target is deep underwater.
The SmartTouch technology now in development at UH consists of Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) equipped with multiple stress wave-based smart touch sensors, video cameras and scanning sonars that can swim along a subsea pipeline to inspect flange bolts – bolted connections have accelerated the rate of pipeline accidents that result in leakage, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE).
The BSEE is funding the project with a $960,493 grant to UH researchers Zheng Chen, Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Gangbing Song, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who are working in collaboration with Oceaneering International and Chevron.
“By automating the inspection process with this state-of-the art robotic technology, we can dramatically reduce the cost and risk of these important subsea inspections which will lead to safer operations of offshore oil and gas pipelines as less intervention from human divers will be needed,” said Chen, noting that a prototype of the ROV has been tested in his lab and in Galveston Bay. The experiments demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach for inspecting the looseness of subsea bolted connections. Preliminary studies were funded by UH’s Subsea Systems Institute.
Oil and gas pipelines fail for a variety of reasons including equipment malfunctions, corrosion, weather and other natural causes, or vessel-related accidents which account for most large leaks. Toxic and corrosive fluids leaked from a damaged pipe can lead to devastating environmental pollution.
“Corrosion is responsible for most small leaks, but the impacts can still be devastating to the environment. Therefore, our technology will be highly accurate in monitoring corrosion and will also help mitigate the chances of pipeline failure from other factors,” said co-principal investigator Gangbing Song, who has conducted significant research in piezoelectric-based structural health monitoring. His prior research efforts include numerous damage detection applications, such as crack detection, hydration monitoring, debonding and other structural anomalies.
The UH researchers are collaborating with Oceaneering International, an industrial leader in ROV development, non-destructive testing and inspections, engineering and project management, and surveying and mapping services. Additionally, Chevron, a major oil and gas operator, will evaluate the technology’s future commercialization.
The SmartTouch sensing solution will open the doors for inspection of other kinds of subsea structures, according to the researchers, by forming a design template for future robotic technologies.
“Ultimately, the project will push the boundaries of what can be accomplished by integrating robotics and structural health monitoring technologies. With proper implementation, the rate of subsea pipeline failure and related accidents will decrease, and subsea operations will be free to expand at faster rate than before,” added Chen.
IMAGE: RESEARCHERS WHO CREATED A SOFT ROBOT THAT COULD NAVIGATE SIMPLE MAZES WITHOUT HUMAN OR COMPUTER DIRECTION HAVE NOW BUILT ON THAT WORK, CREATING A “BRAINLESS” SOFT ROBOT THAT CAN NAVIGATE MORE COMPLEX AND DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS. ONE HALF OF THE ROBOT IS SHAPED LIKE A TWISTED RIBBON THAT EXTENDS IN A STRAIGHT LINE, WHILE THE OTHER HALF IS SHAPED LIKE A MORE TIGHTLY TWISTED RIBBON THAT ALSO TWISTS AROUND ITSELF LIKE A SPIRAL STAIRCASE. THIS ASYMMETRICAL DESIGN MEANS THAT ONE END OF THE ROBOT EXERTS MORE FORCE ON THE GROUND THAN THE OTHER END.view more
CREDIT: JIE YIN, NC STATE UNIVERSITY
Researchers who created a soft robot that could navigate simple mazes without human or computer direction have now built on that work, creating a “brainless” soft robot that can navigate more complex and dynamic environments.
“In our earlier work, we demonstrated that our soft robot was able to twist and turn its way through a very simple obstacle course,” says Jie Yin, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. “However, it was unable to turn unless it encountered an obstacle. In practical terms this meant that the robot could sometimes get stuck, bouncing back and forth between parallel obstacles.
“We’ve developed a new soft robot that is capable of turning on its own, allowing it to make its way through twisty mazes, even negotiating its way around moving obstacles. And it’s all done using physical intelligence, rather than being guided by a computer.”
Physical intelligence refers to dynamic objects – like soft robots – whose behavior is governed by their structural design and the materials they are made of, rather than being directed by a computer or human intervention.
As with the earlier version, the new soft robots are made of ribbon-like liquid crystal elastomers. When the robots are placed on a surface that is at least 55 degrees Celsius (131 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hotter than the ambient air, the portion of the ribbon touching the surface contracts, while the portion of the ribbon exposed to the air does not. This induces a rolling motion; the warmer the surface, the faster the robot rolls.
However, while the previous version of the soft robot had a symmetrical design, the new robot has two distinct halves. One half of the robot is shaped like a twisted ribbon that extends in a straight line, while the other half is shaped like a more tightly twisted ribbon that also twists around itself like a spiral staircase.
This asymmetrical design means that one end of the robot exerts more force on the ground than the other end. Think of a plastic cup that has a mouth wider than its base. If you roll it across the table, it doesn’t roll in a straight line – it makes an arc as it travels across the table. That’s due to its asymmetrical shape.
“The concept behind our new robot is fairly simple: because of its asymmetrical design, it turns without having to come into contact with an object,” says Yao Zhao, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at NC State. “So, while it still changes directions when it does come into contact with an object – allowing it to navigate mazes – it cannot get stuck between parallel objects. Instead, its ability to move in arcs allows it to essentially wiggle its way free.”
The researchers demonstrated the ability of the asymmetrical soft robot design to navigate more complex mazes – including mazes with moving walls – and fit through spaces narrower than its body size. The researchers tested the new robot design on both a metal surface and in sand. A video of the asymmetrical robot in action can be found at https://youtu.be/aYpSwuij2DI?si=tNEtvt60_uKkdEsw.
“This work is another step forward in helping us develop innovative approaches to soft robot design – particularly for applications where soft robots would be able to harvest heat energy from their environment,” Yin says.
The paper, “Physically Intelligent Autonomous Soft Robotic Maze Escaper,” will be published Sept. 8 in the journal Science Advances. First author of the paper is Yao Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher at NC State. Hao Su, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, is co-corresponding author. Additional co-authors include Yaoye Hong, a recent Ph.D. graduate of NC State; Yanbin Li, a postdoctoral researcher at NC State; and Fangjie Qi and Haitao Qing, both Ph.D. students at NC State.
The work was done with support from the National Science Foundation under grants 2005374, 2126072, 1944655 and 2026622.
IMAGE: FROM LEFT: COMPUTER SCIENCE DOCTORAL STUDENTS SAI HANEESH ALLU AND NINAD KHARGONKAR WITH DR. YU XIANG, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARE SHOWN WITH RAMP, A ROBOT THEY ARE TRAINING TO RECOGNIZE AND MANIPULATE COMMON OBJECTS.view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS
A robot moves a toy package of butter around a table in the Intelligent Robotics and Vision Lab at The University of Texas at Dallas. With every push, the robot is learning to recognize the object through a new system developed by a team of UT Dallas computer scientists.
The new system allows the robot to push objects multiple times until a sequence of images are collected, which in turn enables the system to segment all the objects in the sequence until the robot recognizes the objects. Previous approaches have relied on a single push or grasp by the robot to “learn” the object.
The team presented its research paper at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference July 10-14 in Daegu, South Korea. Papers for the conference are selected for their novelty, technical quality, significance, potential impact and clarity.
The day when robots can cook dinner, clear the kitchen table and empty the dishwasher is still a long way off. But the research group has made a significant advance with its robotic system that uses artificial intelligence to help robots better identify and remember objects, said Dr. Yu Xiang, senior author of the paper.
The UTD researchers’ technology is designed to help robots detect a wide variety of objects found in environments such as homes and to generalize, or identify, similar versions of common items such as water bottles that come in varied brands, shapes or sizes.
Inside Xiang’s lab is a storage bin full of toy packages of common foods, such as spaghetti, ketchup and carrots, which are used to train the lab robot, named Ramp. Ramp is a Fetch Robotics mobile manipulator robot that stands about 4 feet tall on a round mobile platform. Ramp has a long mechanical arm with seven joints. At the end is a square “hand” with two fingers to grasp objects.
Xiang said robots learn to recognize items in a comparable way to how children learn to interact with toys.
“After pushing the object, the robot learns to recognize it,” Xiang said. “With that data, we train the AI model so the next time the robot sees the object, it does not need to push it again. By the second time it sees the object, it will just pick it up.”
What is new about the researchers’ method is that the robot pushes each item 15 to 20 times, while the previous interactive perception methods only use a single push. Xiang said multiple pushes enable the robot to take more photos with its RGB-D camera, which includes a depth sensor, to learn about each item in more detail. This reduces the potential for mistakes.
The task of recognizing, differentiating and remembering objects, called segmentation, is one of the primary functions needed for robots to complete tasks.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that leverages long-term robot interaction for object segmentation,” Xiang said.
Ninad Khargonkar, a computer science doctoral student, said working on the project has helped him improve the algorithm that helps the robot make decisions.
“It’s one thing to develop an algorithm and test it on an abstract data set; it’s another thing to test it out on real-world tasks,” Khargonkar said. “Seeing that real-world performance — that was a key learning experience.”
The next step for the researchers is to improve other functions, including planning and control, which could enable tasks such as sorting recycled materials.
Other UTD authors of the paper included computer science graduate student Yangxiao Lu; computer science seniors Zesheng Xu and Charles Averill; Kamalesh Palanisamy MS’23; Dr. Yunhui Guo, assistant professor of computer science; and Dr. Nicholas Ruozzi, associate professor of computer science. Dr. Kaiyu Hang from Rice University also participated.
The research was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance program, which develops AI technologies to help users perform complex physical tasks by providing task guidance with augmented reality to expand their skill sets and reduce errors.
Researchers at Michigan State University have shown that table salt outperforms other expensive catalysts being explored for the chemical recycling of polyolefin polymers, which account for 60% of plastic waste.
The research, published in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems, shows that sodium chloride could provide a safe, inexpensive and reusable way to make plastics more recyclable.
The team also showed that table salt and other catalysts could be used in the recycling of metallized plastic films — like those used in potato chip bags — which are currently not recyclable.
EAST LANSING, Mich. – Muhammad Rabnawaz, an associate professor in Michigan State University’s top-ranked School of Packaging and recent inductee into the National Academy of Inventors, has always believed that the most brilliant solution is also the simplest.
Rabnawaz and his colleagues showed that sodium chloride — table salt — can outperform much more expensive materials being explored to help recycle plastics.
“This is really exciting,” Rabnawaz said. “We need simple, low-cost solutions to take on a big problem like plastics recycling.”
Although plastics have historically been marketed as recyclable, the reality is that nearly 90% of plastic waste in the United States ends up in landfills, in incinerators or as pollution in the environment.
One of the reasons plastics have become so disposable is that the materials recovered from recycling aren’t valuable enough to spend the money and resources required to get them.
According to the team’s projections, table salt could flip the economics and drastically reduce costs when it comes to a recycling process known as pyrolysis, which works through a combination of heat and chemistry.
Although Rabnawaz expected salt to have an impact because of how well it conducts heat, he was still surprised by how well it worked. It outperformed expensive catalysts — chemicals designed to spur reactions along — and he believes his team has just started tapping into its potential.
Furthermore, the work is already getting attention from big names in industry, he said.
In fact, the research was partially supported by Conagra Brands, a consumer packaged goods company. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and MSU AgBioResearch also helped finance the work.
A catalyst worth its salt
Pyrolysis is a process that breaks down the plastics into a mixture of simpler, carbon-based compounds, which come out in three forms: gas, liquid oil and solid wax.
That wax component is often undesirable, Rabnawaz said, yet it can account for more than half of products, by weight, of current pyrolysis methods. That’s even when using catalysts, which are helpful, but they often can be toxic or prohibitively expensive to be applied in managing waste plastics.
Platinum, for example, has very attractive catalytic properties, which is why it’s used in catalytic converters to reduce harmful emissions from cars. But it’s also very pricey, which is why thieves steal catalytic converters.
Although bandits are unlikely to rob platinum-based materials from a sweltering pyrolysis reactor, attempting to recycle plastics with those catalysts would still require a hefty investment — millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars, Rabnawaz said. And current catalysts aren’t efficient enough to justify that cost.
“No company in the world has that kind of cash to burn,” Rabnawaz said.
In earlier work, Rabnawaz and his team showed that copper oxide and table salt worked as catalysts to break down a plastic known as polystyrene. Now, they’ve shown table salt alone can eliminate the wax byproduct in the pyrolysis of polyolefins — polymers that account for 60% of plastic waste.
“That first paper was important, but I didn’t get excited until we worked with polyolefins,” Rabnawaz said. “Polyolefins are huge, and we just outperformed expensive catalysts.”
When using table salt as a catalyst to pyrolyze polyolefins, the team produced mostly liquid oil containing hydrocarbon molecules similar to what’s found in diesel fuel, Rabnawaz said. Another perk of the salt catalyst, the researchers showed, is it can be reused.
“You can recover salt by simply washing the obtained oil with water,” Rabnawaz said.
The researchers also showed that table salt aided in the pyrolysis of metallized plastic films, which are commonly used in food packaging, like potato chip bags, which isn’t currently recycled.
Although pure table salt didn’t outperform a platinum-alumina catalyst the team also tested with metallized films, the results were similar, and the salt is a fraction of the cost.
Rabnawaz, however, stressed that metallized films, while useful, are inherently problematic. He envisions a world where such films are no longer needed, which is why his team is also working to replace them with more sustainable materials.
The team will also continue working to further its pyrolysis project.
For instance, the team has yet to fully characterize the gas products of pyrolysis with table salt. And Rabnawaz believes the team can improve this approach so that the liquid products contain chemicals with more valuable applications than being burned as fuel.
Still, the early returns of the team’s new table salt tactics are encouraging. Based on a quick, preliminary economic analysis, the team estimated a commercial pyrolysis reactor could triple its profits just by adding salt.
Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 165 years. One of the world's leading research universities, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery to make a better, safer, healthier world for all while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 400 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.
IMAGE: ADNAN RAJIB, LEFT, AND QIANJIN ZHENGview more
CREDIT: UT ARLINGTON
A University of Texas at Arlington hydrologist’s study in the Nature journal Scientific Data provides the first-ever global estimate of human destruction of natural floodplains. The study can help guide future development in a way that can restore and conserve vital floodplain habitats that are critical to wildlife, water quality and reducing flood risk for people.
Adnan Rajib, a UT Arlington assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, was the lead author on the published study, “Human Alterations of the Global Floodplains.”His doctoral student, Qianjin Zheng, played a significant role in developing the research.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists Charles Lane, Heather Golden and Jay Christensen; Itohaosa Isibor of Texas A&M University-Kingsville; and Kris Johnson of The Nature Conservancy collaborated on the study. The work was funded through NASA and the National Science Foundation.
“The bottom line is that the world is at greater flood risk than what we realized, especially considering what effect human development has had on floodplains,” Rajib said. “In 27 years, between 1992 and 2019, the world has lost a dramatic 600,000 square kilometers of floodplains due to human disturbances, which include infrastructure development, industry and business construction and expansion of agriculture.”
The team used satellite remote sensing data and geospatial analytics in studying 520 major river basins of the world, discovering previously unknown spatial patterns and trends of human floodplain alterations.
“Mapping the world’s floodplains is relatively new. While there is increasing awareness to map floodplains accurately and understand flood risks, an attempt to map human disturbances in those floodplains at a global scale never existed,” said Rajib, who also is the director of the UT Arlington Hydrology and Hydroinformatics Innovation Lab. “It’s been done in smaller regions around the world and certainly in the United States and Europe, but not in data-poor regions of the world.”
The study concludes that wetland habitats are in danger and that one-third of the total global loss of floodplain wetlands occurred in North America. Rajib said the magnitude of risk for floodplains is much larger than what was previously understood. He and the team examined satellite pictures of those floodplain areas taken over the past 27 years.
“We wanted to look at floodplains at the neighborhood level,” Zheng said. “We wanted to see the impact of development on someone who lives adjacent to or near a floodplain. Some of the changes in these pictures are good, like when trees are planted or parks are built. But many of the pictures reveal disturbing outcomes. For instance, we saw a dramatic increase in the development of parking lots or the construction of buildings without adequate stormwater runoff allowances.”
Johnson, a co-author on the paper, said that “worldwide, floodplains are biodiversity hotspots that also provide a wide range of ecosystem services for people. We hope this study sheds light on this critical habitat we’re losing as well as ways in which we can reverse the trend.”
Melanie Sattler, chair and professor of the Department of Civil Engineering, said this study should give planners a vital tool to reduce flood risks for people.
“Rajib’s work can be our lens to help guide future development in order to decrease susceptibility to floods in a changing climate,” Sattler said. “And, in some cases, we hope this study can help us correct mistakes we’ve made through past development decisions.”
IMAGE: ERIN MCCREARY, PHARM.D., CLINICAL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF MEDICINE’S DIVISION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES AND DIRECTOR OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES IMPROVEMENT AND CLINICAL RESEARCH INNOVATION AT UPMCview more
CREDIT: UPMC
A program designed to ensure fairness and that people living in the most disadvantaged U.S. neighborhoods would be offered a scarce, potentially life-saving medication proved feasible in a large health system. The approach can improve equity in receipt of the drug by people disproportionately affected by disease, according to a new analysis published today in JAMA Health Forum by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC scientist-clinicians.
However, the study revealed that more work needs to be done in building trust with and improving the ability to contact Black patients to ensure they ultimately receive scarce medications and other health care resources at rates comparable to their white counterparts.
“Equitable allocation of a resource is not the same as equitable receipt of that resource,” said lead author Erin McCreary, Pharm.D., clinical assistant professor in the Pitt School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases and director of infectious diseases improvement and clinical research innovation at UPMC. “I’m incredibly proud to share how UPMC – with a lot of hard work and dedicated people – was able to equitably allocate a scarce medication in a very short amount of time and achieve equity in its receipt amongst our most disadvantaged patients, but it is clear that we have more work to do in terms of receipt by race.”
Just before Christmas 2021, UPMC was awarded its first doses of Evusheld, a medication given to prevent COVID-19 in immunocompromised people who do not produce enough immunity in response to vaccination. But those 450 doses from the federal government were enough only for a quarter of a percent of the 200,000 eligible UPMC patients.
Health system leaders knew that patients from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, who are disproportionately racial minorities, were most likely to suffer worse outcomes if they contracted COVID-19. So, to promote equity and maximize the life-saving potential of its Evusheld allocation, UPMC first winnowed its list to 10,834 of its most immunocompromised patients. Then the health system created a “weighted” lottery system that assigned double the odds of selection to patients living in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Pennsylvania did not allow allocation by race.
The approach used the national Area of Deprivation Index, which ranks neighborhoods on a scale of 1 (least disadvantaged) to 100 (most disadvantaged) based on factors that include education, employment, housing quality and poverty. Patients whose addresses were in neighborhoods that scored 80 or above were entered into the lottery twice.
For the analysis, McCreary and her team ran simulations to determine the demographics of patients who would have been offered Evusheld without the weighted lottery and compared those to the real-world results. Without the weights, 16.7% of patients allocated Evusheld would have been from a disadvantaged neighborhood, compared with 29.1% who were allocated it in the weighted lottery. For Black individuals, the allocation went from 7.1% without the weights to 9.1% in actuality.
UPMC implemented multiple efforts to mitigate disparities in patients’ ability to receive Evusheld once offered it. By establishing 22 infusion centers that could administer the drug, the health system minimized patient drive time. UPMC also arranged transportation for patients who lacked it and allowed home infusion for patients who couldn’t travel. Call center staff contacted each patient multiple times if they didn’t answer initially and allowed time for patients to consult with their physicians before deciding if they wanted the drug. A central lottery team was used to alleviate physician burden – UPMC did not want to ask doctors to choose amongst their patients and wanted to ensure every eligible patient was entered into the lottery at least once. Staff who contacted patients provided information designed for people with lower health literacy levels. Patients received financial assistance if they were uninsured or the co-pay for the infusion service presented a hardship.
When it came to receiving the drug they were allocated, most people declined, with only 131 of the initial 450 people contacted coming in for their infusions. While disappointing, this wasn’t surprising since the medication was newly approved under an emergency use authorization, McCreary noted, and it was understandable that patients would hesitate to be first. There is also generally less uptake in preventive measures compared to treatments.
People from disadvantaged neighborhoods received the drug at a rate of 27.5%, nearly the same as those from more advantaged neighborhoods, who received it at 27.9%. But Black individuals received Evusheld at a far lower rate of 7.3% – or 3 of the 41 Black patients offered it – compared to 29.3% for their white counterparts. There were not enough data on patients from other minoritized backgrounds to run analyses.
Inability to contact the patient – meaning they didn’t answer or return repeated phone calls to the number UPMC had in the patient record – and declining the medication were the primary reasons Black patients did not receive the treatment.
“The weighted lottery and UPMC’s efforts to remove barriers to care worked to get Evusheld to many patients who otherwise likely would have been unable to receive it,” said senior author Douglas White, M.D., professor and UPMC Endowed Chair for Ethics in Critical Care Medicine at Pitt’s School of Medicine and UPMC intensivist. “But we also learned that we must continue to enhance efforts to remove barriers to care if we are ever to close the considerable gap in racial equity during times of scarcity.”
After several weeks, enough Evusheld was available that any qualifying patient who wanted it could receive it and the lottery was discontinued. In January 2023, Evusheld stopped being offered because the virus had mutated to the point that the drug was no longer effective.
Additional authors on this research are Utibe Essien, M.D., M.P.H., of Pitt and the University of California Los Angeles; Chung-Chou H. Chang, Ph.D., Rachel A. Butler, M.H.A., M.P.H., Ashley Steiner, Maddie Chrisman, P.T., D.P.T., and Derek C. Angus, M.D., M.P.H., all of Pitt, UPMC or both; Parag Pathak, Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tayfun Sonmez, Ph.D., and M. Utku Unver, Ph.D., of Boston College.
About The Study: The results of this study suggest that a weighted lottery to allocate scarce resources is feasible and may result in more drug allocation to individuals who reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods and who identify as Black; however, Black individuals allocated the drug may be less likely to accept allocation and receive it.
Authors: Erin K. McCreary, Pharm.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is the corresponding author.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
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About JAMA Health Forum: JAMA Health Forum is an international, peer-reviewed, online, open access journal that addresses health policy and strategies affecting medicine, health and health care. The journal publishes original research, evidence-based reports and opinion about national and global health policy; innovative approaches to health care delivery; and health care economics, access, quality, safety, equity and reform. Its distribution will be solely digital and all content will be freely available for anyone to read.
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Talk therapy with other moms an effective treatment for postpartum depression, McMaster research shows
HAMILTON, ON (Aug. 31, 2023) – An innovative model of care that offers new mothers psychotherapy delivered by other mothers who have also experienced post-partum depression (PPD) should be implemented in clinical practice, according to researchers at McMaster University.
Researchers worked with nearly 200 mothers over a year and a half, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and found those receiving treatment from their peers were 11 times more likely to experience remission of their major depressive disorder. The findings of the randomized control trial are published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.
PPD and its associated symptoms affect up to one in five new mothers, yet only 10 per cent receive evidence-based care. Left untreated, PPD increases the risk of future depressive episodes, family problems, and cognitive, emotional, and behavioural problems in the child.
“This is the first time anyone has shown that peers can deliver effective group online psychotherapy for mothers with postpartum depression,” says Ryan Van Lieshout, lead author of the study, associate professor of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University and the Canada Research Chair in Perinatal Mental Health.
“Given the number of individuals who have experienced and recovered from postpartum depression, and since this treatment is scalable and deliverable online, it has the potential to substantially improve access to effective treatment for mothers with postpartum depression,” says Van Lieshout.
Researchers recruited 183 mothers from across Ontario from Aug. 2020 and Feb. 2022 to either receive nine weeks of group cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) delivered online from peers who had once experienced PPD and had since recovered, or to receive treatment as usual. The individuals in the treatment as usual group received the peer-delivered group CBT after being on a waitlist.
Participants in the peer-led CBT group manifested clinically significant improvements in postpartum depression and anxiety, as well as better social support, less anxiety about their child, and improvements in their infant's temperament. These changes persisted up to five months after participants started treatment.
Sixty-four per cent of participants in the treatment group met the criteria for major depressive disorder at time of enrollment, compared to six per cent after receiving the nine-week peer-led CBT program. Sixty-six per cent of participants in the waitlist group met the criteria for major depressive disorder at time of enrollment, compared to 43 per cent nine weeks later.
In advance of the program, peer facilitators underwent a three-day training program for individuals with no prior formal psychiatric training and observed the nine-week intervention delivered by experts in the hospital setting which it was developed. Facilitators delivered the intervention online in pairs.
“As somebody who has recovered, if I had this support nine and 11 years ago, I might not have had postpartum depression with my second child. I would have had resources and the opportunity to try to get ahead of it if I could,” says Lee-Anne Mosselman-Clarke, who was one of the peer facilitators.
“I think the program allows for an openness in talking and hearing others’ experiences, which takes away a very large part of the shame and the guilt around struggling with postpartum depression and anxiety.”
Recent research by Van Lieshout showed group CBT for PPD delivered by public health nurses with little to no previous psychiatric training led to clinically significant improvements in depression and worry. The outcome was stable up to six months post-treatment.
The study was supported by the Ontario Brain Institute’s Growing Expertise in Evaluation and Knowledge Translation Program.
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To arrange an interview with Ryan Van Lieshout, please contact him at vanlierj@mcmaster.ca
Hearing impairment may cause difficulties in social interactions, but new research indicates that social struggles experienced by deaf individuals are likely not due to brain alterations but rather due to non-supportive environments. The findings, which are published in Human Brain Mapping, suggest that deafness does not affect the mechanisms and brain circuits supporting social skills.
For the research, investigators analyzed published neuroimaging studies focusing on social perception in deaf versus hearing participants. Results indicated that both deaf and hearing participants recruited the same brain regions when performing different social tasks. Deaf individuals showed greater activation in regions involved in processing social information from visual inputs (such as signs and lip reading).
“Promoting learning of sign language in hearing individuals, as well as providing salient visual cues in social situations, would facilitate social inclusion of deaf individuals,” the authors wrote.
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About the Journal Human Brain Mapping is a functional neuroanatomy and neuroimaging journal where all disciplines of neurology collide to advance the field. The journal offers basic, clinical, technical and theoretical research in the rapidly expanding field of human brain mapping. Proudly accessible, every issue is open to the world.
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