Thursday, May 28, 2026

OHSU study: Veterans with cancer face ongoing suicide risk

Large, national study finds suicide attempt risk among veterans is highest after diagnosis, remains elevated for years; highlights need for continued mental health support

Oregon Health & Science University

Veterans diagnosed with cancer face a higher risk of suicide attempts — especially in the months following diagnosis — and that risk can persist for years, found a large, national study led by Oregon Health & Science University and the Veterans Health Administration.

The study, published in JAMA Oncology, analyzed nearly a decade of data from more than 292,000 veterans with cancer. It found that overwhelming distress tied to diagnosis, treatment and long-term effects of the disease continues to put many patients at risk well into survivorship.

“Our findings really show that suicide risk doesn’t end when treatment ends,” said Donald R. Sullivan, M.D., M.A., M.C.R., associate professor of medicine in the OHSU School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “For some patients, especially younger veterans and those with certain cancers, the risk remains elevated for years.”

Risk beyond diagnosis

Researchers examined both fatal and nonfatal suicide attempts, known collectively as suicidal self-directed violence, among veterans diagnosed with cancer between 2014 and 2023. Most previous studies have focused only on deaths by suicide, missing the far more common nonfatal attempts.

Of the 2,400 suicide-related events identified, nearly 90% were nonfatal attempts. Overall, veterans with cancer experienced suicide attempts at a rate of 203 per 100,000 — significantly higher than the general population.

The risk was highest in the first six months after diagnosis, but it remained persistently elevated for up to five years.

“A cancer diagnosis is often a profound shock,” Sullivan said. “Even cancers with good survival rates can trigger an immediate fear of death. That initial moment, combined with pain, treatment side effects, anxiety or depression, can be incredibly destabilizing.”

Overlooked groups

The study identified several groups with higher-than-average risk for suicide attempts: veterans who were younger than 45, women, those who were unmarried, and veterans who were American Indian or Alaska Native.

Certain cancer types also carried greater risk, including cancers of the brain and central nervous system, pancreas, head and neck, liver and thyroid.

“Younger veterans really stood out,” Sullivan said. “They may be dealing with careers, family responsibilities or financial stress on top of a cancer diagnosis. That combination can be overwhelming.”

Women veterans and those with thyroid cancer — often considered a more treatable disease — also experienced notably higher rates of nonfatal attempts, a finding Sullivan said underscores the importance of screening all cancer patients, not just those with poor prognoses.

Survivorship challenges

Veterans with chronic mental illness, high pain levels or severe frailty were also among those at highest risk. Prescription medications — including opioids — were the most common method used in nonfatal suicide attempts, while firearms accounted for most fatal attempts.

“These results reinforce the need for better support not just during treatment, but after treatment ends,” Sullivan said. “Survivorship often comes with lasting physical symptoms, emotional distress and fear of recurrence — and we don’t always do enough to address those challenges.”

The study also found that veterans who received palliative care — or specialized medical care for people with serious, complex or terminal illness — had lower rates of suicide-related events, suggesting early supportive services may help reduce risk.

“Every care provider can help veterans who are struggling with the burden of both cancer and suicidal ideation. This study provides important insights into how caregivers can provide critically needed mental health support to veterans,” said OHSU President Shereef Elnahal, M.D., M.B.A. “In my time as Under Secretary for Health in the VA, preventing veteran suicides was our top clinical priority, and it should continue to be a focal point for veteran care.”

Improving screening, support

Because the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, maintains a comprehensive suicide surveillance system, researchers were able to identify patterns that are invisible in most other health systems.

“This kind of data simply doesn’t exist for nonveterans,” Sullivan said. “But what we’re seeing here almost certainly applies beyond the VA.”

The authors say routine suicide risk screening should begin at diagnosis and continue through survivorship, tailored to individual risk factors such as age, cancer type, pain and mental health history.

“Cancer care can’t just focus on treating tumors,” Sullivan said. “We have to care for the whole person — their mental health, their quality of life and the existential distress that comes with serious illness.”

If you or someone you know is having a mental health crisis or suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Hotline at 9-8-8. You can also go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.

This research was supported by Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Services Research and Development Small Award Initiative for Impact, the Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care, VA Portland Health Care System, Portland, OR, and the National Center for Lung Cancer Screening, Washington. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Government or any other funders.

Journal

JAMA Oncology

DOI

10.1001/jamaoncol.2026.1459

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Longitudinal Risk for Suicidal Self-Directed Violence Among Veterans With Cancer

Article Publication Date

28-May-2026

Widely used ‘gold standard’ for identifying mental health conditions not as reliable as previously believed, new study finds

McMaster University

Diagnostic interviews are widely used by mental health professionals to identify conditions such as anxiety, bipolar disorder and depression in adults, but new research led by McMaster University shows that the long considered “gold standard” may not be as consistent as previously thought.

The meta-analysis, published in JAMA Network Open on May 28, found that standardized diagnostic interviews are only moderately consistent when the same person is assessed more than once. In some cases, individuals were identified as having different diagnoses when interviews were repeated just days apart. Further, this consistency varies considerably depending on which disorder is being assessed.

The study’s conclusion is particularly concerning as inconsistent diagnoses can lead to over‑ or under‑treatment, delayed care, or inappropriate interventions, highlighting the need for improvements in diagnostic tools and for greater caution when relying on a single interview to define psychiatric disorders.

“Our findings show that these interviews are not as reliable or consistent as many people believe,” said senior author Laura Duncan, assistant professor with McMaster’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and a researcher at the Offord Centre for Child Studies. “If we give the same interview to the same person twice, we would like to think the interview would produce the same result, but that’s not always the case.”

The study found diagnostic interviews were more consistent for substance use disorders than for many mental disorders. Researchers say this may be because conditions such as anxiety, depression or psychotic disorders are more subjective experiences and for this reason, standardized interviews should be used with recognition of their limitations. .

“These differences suggest that structured interviews work better for conditions with clearer behaviours or timelines than for disorders that rely heavily on personal experiences and interpretation,” Duncan says. “But we should reconsider treating them as a “gold standard” of assessment. Reliable diagnosis likely requires combining standardized tools with knowledge about the course and complexity of disorders that could impact how reliably they can be assessed. .”

Standardized diagnostic interviews are structured assessment tools commonly used to diagnose mental health disorders. As part of the interview, a person is asked about their mood, behaviour changes, along with questions about frequency and severity of symptoms and sometimes how much their symptoms impact their day-to-day life.

To conduct the study, researchers meta-analyzed 57 studies involving more than 8,000 adults from 26 countries. The research focused on test–retest reliability, a measure of whether an interview gives the same result when repeated with the same person and same interview under similar conditions, usually after 7-14 days.

The study was supported by collaborators with the University Hospital Copenhagen, UMass Chan Medical School, and St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton.

No external funding was reported for this study.

For interviews, contact Duncan directly at duncanlj@mcmaster.ca.

For any other assistance, contact Adam Ward, media relations officer with McMaster's Faculty of Health Sciences, at warda17@mcmaster.ca.

Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.15039

Article Title

Test-Retest Reliability of Standardized Diagnostic Interviews for Common Adult Psychiatric Disorders

Article Publication Date

28-May-2026

Multinational firms drive growth but can come with steep environmental costs, study finds

Tracking firms across borders reveals ripple effects on forests, crops and local economies

University of British Columbia

Multinational companies can boost local economies but often come with higher environmental costs than domestic firms, according to new research by UBC faculty of land and food systems associate professor Dr. Frederik Noack in Nature Climate Change. Based on data from across Africa, the study links multinational activity to greater deforestation and biodiversity loss, even as it drives economic growth.

We spoke to Dr. Noack about the findings.

What were you trying to understand through this research?

There’s a long-running debate about multinational firms. Some argue they bring investment, jobs and new technologies. Others say they shift environmentally harmful activities to countries with weaker regulation.

The challenge is that firms go where resources and opportunities exist. If environmental damage occurs where they operate, it’s not clear whether they caused it or simply followed it.

We wanted to isolate that effect: what actually happens when multinational activity increases, all else equal? We tracked multinational firms through their global networks and looked at how shocks to their headquarters—like changes in access to credit—affect how much they expand abroad. Because those changes are unrelated to local conditions, they gave us a way to isolate what happens to the environment when multinational activity increases.

What did you find?

We found a clear pattern: as multinational firms expand, environmental damage increases.

Using data across Africa, we linked millions of firms to satellite measurements of forest cover and land use. Areas with more multinational activity saw about 24 per cent more deforestation, along with declines in forest cover. We also see a 0.6-per-cent drop in crop diversity, a key indicator of biodiversity and food security. These effects also persist over time.

There are economic gains as well. Each new multinational affiliate increases local GDP by about 0.3 per cent—roughly $106 million.

But those gains come with significant environmental costs. The associated forest loss is equivalent to about 10,200 hectares per additional affiliate, and when accounting for carbon emissions and related damage, the cost is roughly $693 million—several times larger than the economic gains.

How do multinationals compare to domestic firms?

Even after accounting for size and activity, multinational firms have a much larger environmental impact than domestic firms.

This is partly because multinational firms are more concentrated in sectors like mining, large-scale agriculture and manufacturing—activities that reshape land and ecosystems.

Another reason is that because these firms operate across countries, they can shift production to places with less stringent environmental rules, known as the “pollution haven” effect. So, multinationals may be especially harmful to the environment in the least regulated places.

We see clear evidence of this: stronger regulation is associated with lower impacts, while weaker regulation is linked to higher environmental damage.

What do these findings mean beyond Africa?

While the study focused on Africa, the underlying mechanism applies more broadly: multinational firms respond to differences in environmental regulation across countries.

For countries, including Canada, this suggests that stronger environmental standards don’t necessarily stop investment, but they do shape the kind of investment a country attracts. Stricter rules can reduce the likelihood of attracting the most environmentally damaging activities.

At the same time, governments often worry that stricter regulation will put them at a disadvantage. One way to address that is through policies like those used in the European Union, where some imports—such as agricultural products or fish—must meet sustainability standards, including limits on deforestation. Products that don’t meet those standards cannot enter the market. This reduces the incentive for firms to relocate production to avoid environmental rules, because they still have to meet those standards to sell their goods.

The broader takeaway is that attracting investment and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive—but the outcome depends on how policies are designed.

Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-026-02637-6

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The environmental impact of multinational firms in Africa.

Article Publication Date

22-May-2026

The mystery of Utah’s deep quakes

University of Utah researchers uncover evidence of earthquakes occurring in Earth’s mantle beneath the Intermountain West, confirming rare seismic events once thought impossible

University of Utah

Deep quake graphic — image:
Map of the Wyoming Craton region. The yellow stars are continental mantle earthquakes (CMEs) from 1979 to 2023. The orange stars are six recently identified CMEs that occurred between 2007 and 2010. The white stars are four suspected CMEs located by the U of U Seismograph Stations in 2025, and the red star is the location of the 2025 Maeser earthquake. The black thick line indicates the approximate lithospheric keel boundary of the Wyoming Craton.
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Credit: University of Utah Seismograph Stations

Nearly 50 years ago, a puzzling earthquake beneath northern Utah jolted scientists’ understanding of how Earth works. Now, research from the University of Utah confirms that the mysterious event was real, and part of a rare class of earthquakes occurring far deeper beneath the continental crust than scientists once believed possible.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 1979, the University of Utah Seismograph Stations recorded the earthquake under Randolph, a Utah town near the Idaho and Wyoming borders. No one reported feeling the quake, despite its magnitude 3.8 heft, and the accompanying seismic data didn’t make sense.

George Zandt, then a postdoctoral seismology researcher at the U, took a closer look at the seismic readings and pinpointed this quake’s focal depth at a jaw-dropping 90 kilometers below sea level. Such a depth was not thought possible, placing its hypocenter far below Earth’s crust well into the upper mantle.

“The deep depth explained why it wasn’t felt by people at the surface,” said Zandt, who went on to a long career on the University of Arizona’s geology faculty. “I did some other analysis that convinced me of the reality of the deep depth but it was hard to convince others of the highly anomalous mantle earthquake occurring in a region where none should exist.”

Fresh look at old data

He wrote an abstract about the Randolph quake for Earthquake Notes, but Zandt’s findings remained largely unnoticed until last year. That's when a new generation of U seismologists re-evaluated waveform data from the 1979 quake and eight other suspected deep earthquakes that have since occurred in northern Utah and southwest Wyoming.

This study, led by U geology professor Keith Koper, confirmed locations for all nine well below Earth’s crust, proving the existence of what are called "continental mantle earthquakes," or CMEs. Then on Sept. 10, 2025, another one struck at around 6 p.m. outside Maeser in Utah’s Uinta Basin, clocking in at magnitude 4.1 with a focal depth of 68 kilometers.

That’s more than 20 kilometers below the Mohorovičić discontinuity, the boundary separating Earth's crust from underlying mantle, better known as the Moho. Koper’s team characterized the Maeser quake an “archetypal continental mantle event” in a subsequent study published last month in The Seismic Record.

“This is an example of an earthquake that's nucleating in very unusual conditions, the high temperature, the high pressure, and almost all the material at that depth is going to flow. It’s more like taffy, it’s taffy on long time scales, like millions of years,” said Koper, a one-time protege of Zandt’s and now the director of the U of U Seismograph Stations. “Nevertheless, you can still see it in rocks that have made their way back up to the surface, you can see how they were stretched.”

Zandt came out of retirement to work on this study, which lists him as a co-author.

A completely different kind of earthquake

To locate the spots where earthquakes originate, seismologists analyze how long it takes different types of seismic waves to reach seismographs on the surface. The differences in arrival times provide vital clues. The Seismograph Stations has long preserved such data, creating a valuable archive that Koper’s graduate student Sean Hutchings tapped to analyze known deep quakes and find several others that had been mischaracterized as crustal quakes.

“It’s sort of a mystery in terms of fundamental physics. How in the world can these things happen?” Koper said. “Another reason why it's a big deal is that we have no idea how big they can be. With crustal earthquakes, we can measure what we think their maximum size is going to be. We measure the faults that we can map out near the surface. We can measure the length of a fault segment and that clues us into how big it can be, which helps us estimate seismic hazard.”

The research revealed striking patterns. Unlike typical earthquakes, these deep events occur in isolation, without foreshocks or aftershocks. They cluster near the western edge of the Wyoming Craton, an ancient block of Earth’s lithosphere that underlies parts of Wyoming and neighboring states, and accompanied by extremely high temperatures, often exceeding 700 degrees Celsius.

Cratons are ancient cohesive blocks of Earth’s lithosphere, which Koper likens to icebergs. Instead of bobbing in the ocean, however, craton rest in Earth’s mantle like the keel of a boat in water. Located at the boundary of the tectonically active Western U.S. and the stable interior of the North American plate, the Wyoming Craton has been heavily eroded, resulting in a heterogeneous structure and an overall thinning of the lithosphere westward across Idaho and Utah. This is where the deep quakes have occurred.

“On the scale of millions of years, the mantle is hitting the craton and then flowing around it,” Koper said. “It's that interaction where that mantle flow is being diverted around this hard cratonic root that's causing the increased strain rate, the increased deformation and it's also creating extra stresses. We think it's that interaction between the keel of the iceberg and the medium around it that's leading to these earthquakes.”

The research described here appeared April 10 in The Seismic Record, under the title “The 10 September 2025 4.1 Earthquake in Northeastern Utah, United States: An Archetypal Continental Mantle Event,” and on May 5, 2025 in Geophysical Research Letters under the title, “Upper Mantle Earthquakes Along the Edge of the Wyoming Craton.” Co-authors include Sean J. Hutchings, Fan-Chi Lin, Qicheng Zeng, Relu Burlacu, Katherine Whidden and Valerie Springer of the University of Utah’s Geology & Geophysics Department. This work is supported by the State of Utah, U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Journal

The Seismic Record

DOI

10.1785/0320260006

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The 10 September 2025 4.1 Earthquake in Northeastern Utah, United States: An Archetypal Continental Mantle Event

Worker bumble bees help determine which baby bee will become queen

Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Every bumble bee colony has a queen, but a new study led by researchers at Penn State suggests the process of determining which baby bee reigns supreme may be less monarchal than the royal title suggests.

The study, published in the journal Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, explored why some bumble bee larvae become workers and others become queens, despite coming from the same eggs.

The team found that juvenile hormone — a hormone in insects responsible for insect development, molting and reproduction — was key to this process. When researchers administered the hormone to worker bees, they passed it to all the larvae through feeding. The more hormone the larvae received, the more likely they were to become queens.

It’s the first study to show that bumble bee caste is determined by the workers, shifting the understanding of the colony from a top-down hierarchy to a decentralized system where the caregivers can alter the future of baby bees, the researchers said.

Etya Amsalem, associate professor of entomology in the College of Agricultural Sciences and corresponding author on the study, said that understanding larval fate is key to understanding social behavior in the insects, which rely on reproductive division of labor: some females reproduce while others help.

“Since all these females share the same DNA, it’s a striking example of how the same genotype can produce very different forms,” she said. “It’s also a practical question since bumble bees are important for pollination, so knowing how to produce queens could improve commercial breeding and management.”

Queen bees and worker bees don’t just have different social roles, they are also physically very different, the researchers said. Bumblebee queens are large, long-lived and reproductive, while workers are smaller and do not reproduce.

Seyed Ali Modarres Hasani, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State and lead author on the paper, said that previously, scientists knew hormones were involved in the process that determined whether larvae become workers or queens, but the exact mechanisms were unknown.

“A single female egg in bumblebees holds the blueprint for two completely different life paths: the giant, reproductive queen or the small, sterile worker,” he said. “We wanted to understand what triggers the change in the female life trajectory, when does it happen and who controls the process.”

For the study, the researchers combined hormonal manipulation with chemical tracing in a tightly controlled setup: three worker bees and a cluster of larvae. They applied juvenile hormone at different doses and times, either to workers or directly to larvae, and traced the hormone’s movement using chemical labels and advanced chromatography techniques at the Huck Institutes for the Life Sciences’ Metabolomics Core Facility. They then measured larval mass and recorded which individuals became queens or workers.

“Every colony will produce many new queens at the end of the season,” Amsalem said. “These queens will leave the colony, mate and go into winter diapause, and then each queen will start a new colony in the next spring. In that sense, producing as many queens — and males —at the end of the season is the ultimate purpose of the colony.”

The researchers found that when juvenile hormone was applied directly to the larvae, not only did they not turn into queens, but the worker bees actually eliminated most of these larvae.

However, when workers were treated with the hormone, they incorporated it into the food they make for the larvae. These larvae ingested the hormone, ending up heavier and much more likely to become queens as a result.

“We also determined that larvae are only sensitive to this hormone on days seven and eight of their development,” Hasani said. “By tracing the juvenile hormone, we saw that the workers pass the hormone into the food they make from nectar and pollen.”

Amsalem said their results suggest that queen production is linked to how the colony progresses through the warmer months until it collapses in the fall.

“Bumblebee workers do not reproduce when the colony is young, but they can activate their ovaries and produce males as the colony ages, which causes an increase in juvenile hormone levels,” she said. “As a result, over time, they feed larvae more of the hormone. When enough workers do this simultaneously, usually towards the end of the season, larvae receive doses that are high enough during the critical window to develop into queens.”

The researchers said the findings provide a framework for understanding hormonal regulation of caste in social insects and could eventually help improve bumblebee management. More broadly, the work could also help explain how complex insect societies evolve and how social and hormonal signals interact to shape colony structure.

Nathan Derstine, postdoctoral scholar in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State, and Priscila Santos, postdoctoral fellow at Utah State University, were also co-authors on the study.

The U.S. National Science Foundation helped support this research.

Journal

Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.ibmb.2026.104558

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

The making of a queen: Hormonal regulation of female caste in the social bee Bombus impatiens

Study finds awe-inspiring nature helps people connect to science

North Carolina State University

A new study finds that when people engage in participatory science activities that involve awe-inspiring natural phenomena, such as an eclipse, they more closely identify with science and feel a greater sense of belonging. Participatory science, also called citizen science, refers to projects in which members of the public contribute to the scientific process.

“Participatory sciences have led to many discoveries that scientists couldn’t have made on their own,” says Caren Cooper, co-author of a paper on the work and a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University. “Another great thing is that, by making observations, participants not only change what’s known, they change in personal ways too.”

“Although research has shown that engaging in participatory science increases the way people relate to science, there has been very little work on why,” says Kelly Lynn Mulvey, corresponding author of the paper and a professor of psychology at NC State.

“We wanted to explore that area and also evaluate whether awe is a mechanism that changes the way people involved in participatory science projects think of themselves with regard to science.”

The researchers focused on two concepts that are considered important for understanding how we can broaden science participation: science identity and science belonging. Science identity is the extent to which people see science as being part of who they are. Science belonging is the extent to which people feel like they fit in when engaged in science-related activities.

For this study, the researchers developed a participatory science project and worked with 528 people, ages 8 to 80, who volunteered to record the behavior of animals during the day of the total solar eclipse that traversed North America in 2024. Participants also completed a detailed survey designed to capture their sense of awe during the eclipse, their feelings of science belonging, and how their sense of science identity changed after making animal behavior observations.

“First of all, we saw increases in science identity and belonging for study participants who took part in this project,” Mulvey says. “We also found that awe played a powerful role.”

The researchers measured the role of awe and examined if participants felt more or less awe depending on whether they saw a partial eclipse or the totality – in which the sun was completely eclipsed.

“Participants who witnessed the totality reported significantly greater awe,” Mulvey says. “And the greater the sense of awe that people reported, the greater the reported increase in science identity and belonging.”

Another interesting aspect of the findings involved animal behavior. Study participants were given online training to identify animal behaviors, but were not experts in animal behavior. Thus, participants recorded behaviors before, during and after the eclipse, and the research team deduced whether and to what extent the behaviors changed.

“Once the observed activities were analyzed, we found that the sense of awe was greater for those study participants who also recorded unusual behavior by animals – even if the study participants didn’t realize they were recording unusual behavior,” says Mulvey.

“One exciting take-away here is that even a single experience can lead to meaningful changes in how you identify with science and whether you feel like you belong when engaging with science,” says Mulvey. “These changes in science identity and belonging didn’t require formal training or participation in a long-term study.

“It was also remarkable that everyone from small children to older adults felt a sense of awe and had an increased sense of science identity and belonging,” says Mulvey.

“The big takeaway here is that doing science during an awesome experience made people feel more connected to science,” says Adam Hartstone-Rose, co-author of the paper and a professor of biological sciences at NC State. “We think it’s important to get people engaged with STEM fields, and anything we can do to increase feelings of identity and belonging with regard to science is valuable.”

“It’s also worth noting that you don’t need a solar eclipse to feel awe,” Mulvey says. “Small moments of awe can occur in your own neighborhood. And there are a wide variety of participatory science projects that people can connect with. For example, our project was hosted on SciStarter – and you can find thousands of other participatory science opportunities there.”

The paper, “Awe in Nature Fosters Science Identity and Belonging in Participatory Scientists During an Eclipse,” will be published May 27 in the journal People and Nature. The paper was co-authored by former NC State undergraduates Rhianna Absher, Nhaturie Atkinson and Brandon Wilson; NC State graduate students Martha Batul and Lara Martens; Ashley Deutsch of the New York Institute of Technology; and Jacqueline Cerda-Smith of Illinois State University.

Journal

People and Nature

DOI

10.1002/pan3.70347

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Awe in Nature Fosters Science Identity and Belonging in Participatory Scientists During an Eclipse

Article Publication Date

27-May-2026