Tuesday, August 03, 2021

Is reducing opioids for pain patients linked to higher rates of overdose and mental health crisis?

UC Davis Health study warns of risks associated with opioid dose tapering

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS HEALTH

Alicia Agnoli — IMAGE: DR. ALICIA AGNOLI, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF FAMILY AND COMMUNITY MEDICINE AT UC DAVIS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE view more
CREDIT: UC REGENTS

Opioid therapy is complex. In recent years, a rise in opioid-related deaths and changing prescribing guidelines and regulatory policies have led many physicians to reduce daily doses for patients prescribed stable opioid therapy for chronic pain.

Some patients have reported that this dose reduction process – called tapering –has been difficult, sometimes involving worsened pain, symptoms of opioid withdrawal and depressed mood.

In a study published Aug. 3 in JAMA, a team of UC Davis Health researchers examined the potential risks of opioid dose tapering. Their study found that patients on stable opioid therapy who had their doses tapered had significantly higher rates of overdose and mental health crisis, compared to patients without dose reductions.

“Prescribers are really in a difficult position. There are conflicting desires of ameliorating pain among patients while reducing the risk of adverse outcomes related to prescriptions,” said Alicia Agnoli, assistant professor of Family and Community Medicine at UC Davis School of Medicine and first author on the study. “Our study shows an increased risk of overdose and mental health crisis following dose reduction. It suggests that patients undergoing tapering need significant support to safely reduce or discontinue their opioids.”

De-prescribing opioids for patients on long-term therapy

The study used enrollment records and medical and pharmacy claims for 113,618 patients prescribed stable higher opioid doses (the equivalent of at least 50 morphine milligrams per day) for a one-year baseline period and at least two months of follow-up.

It looked at emergency department visits or inpatient hospital admissions for any drug overdose, alcohol intoxication, or drug withdrawal and for mental health crisis events such as depression, anxiety, or suicide attempts.

The researchers compared outcomes for patients after dose tapering to those for patients before or without tapering. They found a 68% increase in overdose events and a doubling of mental health crises among tapered as compared to non-tapered patients. The risks of tapering were greater in patients who had faster dose reductions and higher baseline doses.

To taper or not to taper

Guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advise clinicians to monitor patients carefully during tapering and provide psychosocial support. They caution about the potential hazards of rapid dose reduction, including withdrawal, transition to illicit opioids, and psychological distress.

“Our study results support the recent federal guidelines for clinicians considering opioid dose reduction for patients,” said Joshua Fenton, professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and senior author on the study. “But I fear that most tapering patients aren’t receiving close follow-up and monitoring to make sure they’re coping well on lower doses.”

The researchers emphasized the need for clinicians and patients to carefully weigh the risks and benefits of both opioid continuation and tapering in decisions regarding ongoing opioid therapy.

“We hope that this work will inform a more cautious and compassionate approach to decisions around opioid dose tapering,” Agnoli said. “Our study may help shape clinical guidelines on patient selection for tapering, optimal rates of dose reduction, and how best to monitor and support patients during periods of dose transition.”

Other collaborators on this research include Guibo Xing, Daniel Tancredi, Anthony Jerant, and Elizabeth Magnan, from UC Davis Health. The study was supported by a University of California–OptumLabs Research Credit, the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UC Davis, and the UC Davis School of Medicine Dean’s Office (Dean’s Scholarship in Women’s Health Research).

Article: Agnoli et al. (2021) Association of dose tapering with overdose or mental health crisis among patients prescribed long-term opioids, JAMA, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2021.11013/

JOURNAL

JAMA

DOI

10.1001/jama.2021.11013/

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Association of dose tapering with overdose or mental health crisis among patients prescribed long-term opioids

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Aug-2021

Study sheds light on why oral vaccines sometimes fail in resource-poor countries

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

HealthyvsEEDgut — IMAGE: HEALTHY MOUSE INTESTINE WITH LONG, FINGER-LIKE VILLI (LEFT) AND INTESTINE OF MOUSE WITH ENVIRONMENTAL ENTERIC DYSFUNCTION WITH SHORTENED VILLI (RIGHT). view more
CREDIT: AMRITA BHATTACHARJEE

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 3, 2021 – A chronic gut disorder that occurs in regions with poor sanitation disrupts intestinal immune responses and impairs oral vaccine effectiveness in a mouse model of the disease, according to research led by UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists.

The finding, published today in Immunity, is important because oral vaccines delivered by liquid drops to the mouth, such as polio and rotavirus vaccines, are especially useful in low-income countries that may not have health care workers trained in administering vaccines through needles. They may also stimulate better local immunity in the gut, which is key for fending off diseases contracted by contaminated food and water — including some of the very infections that contribute to the gut disorder, called environmental enteric dysfunction, or EED.

“It is tragic that the exact vaccines that might help prevent EED don’t work in children who have the disease,” said Timothy Hand, Ph.D., senior author of the study and assistant professor of pediatrics and immunology at the R.K. Mellon Institute for Pediatric Research at UPMC Children’s and director of Pitt’s Gnotobiotic Core.

EED is caused by malnutrition and chronic gastrointestinal infection from contaminated food and water. Infection with viruses, parasites or bacteria combined with poor diet can trigger gut inflammation and damage the finger-like projections called villi that help absorb nutrients from food.

“EED can affect anyone, but it’s a major problem in children because they’re still developing,” said Hand. “The result is that children with EED are stunted. They end up shorter in stature. But perhaps more importantly, it can significantly affect brain development: These children have less cognitive ability. And this is a lifelong problem; you can’t restore that development later in life.”

To learn more about the mechanisms behind oral vaccine failure, Hand and his team developed a mouse model of the disease. They induced EED-like symptoms by feeding the rodents a diet deficient in fat and protein and inoculating them with a strain of E. coli bacteria that invades gut cells.

Like humans with the disease, EED mice had stunted growth, shifts in the gut microbiome composition, elevated gut inflammation and shortened gut villi compared with control mice that received a normal diet with adequate fat and protein or animals that received a normal diet and bacteria or a poor diet without bacteria.

After giving the mice an oral vaccine, the researchers found that immune responses were severely compromised in those with EED. Vaccine-specific CD4+ T cells in the small intestine were about 18 times lower than in control mice.

Further experiments indicated that oral vaccine failure in EED mice was mediated by their gut microbiome. In response to microbiome-associated inflammation, T regulatory (Treg) cells accumulate in the small intestine of EED mice.

“Treg cells arise because there’s too much inflammation and they help tamp down that inflammation,” said Hand. “But unfortunately, a side effect is that they prevent local accumulation of vaccine-specific CD4+ T cells.”

When the team used antibiotics to eliminate gut bacteria, vaccine effectiveness was restored in EED mice.

According to Hand, these findings support the idea that targeting the microbiome could help treat EED and improve vaccine success in children.

“Judicious use of antibiotics in these children might be able to reset the small intestinal microbiome, reduce inflammation in the small intestine and reduce those Tregs,” he said.

EED is rare in resource-rich countries but common in poorer countries that lack sewage systems and sanitation. About 150 million children worldwide live in conditions that put them at risk of getting the disease.

“If we could get flush toilets and plumbing to the world, we wouldn’t have this disease,” said Hand. “What’s causing these chronic infections is that people are either drinking contaminated water or flies are transporting diseases from sewage to food.”

In the future, Hand and his team plan to collaborate with researchers in countries where EED is a problem to better understand vaccine outcomes in children with this disease.

Additional authors on the research are Amrita Bhattacharjee, Ph.D., Ansen H.P. Burr, Abigail E. Overacre-Delgoffe, Ph.D., Justin T. Tometich and Brydie R. Huckestein, all of Pitt or UPMC, or both; Deyi Yang, of UPMC and Central South University, China; Jonathan L. Linehan, Ph.D., Sean P. Spencer, M.D., Ph.D., Jason A. Hall, Ph.D., Oliver J. Harrison, Ph.D., Denise Morais da Fonseca, Ph.D., and Yasmine Belkaid, PhD., all of the National Institutes of Health; and Elizabeth B. Norton, Ph.D., of Tulane University.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health awards R21AI142051, 2015/25364-0 and T32AI089443, the R.K. Mellon Institute for Pediatric Research and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

# # #

About UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
Regionally, nationally, and globally, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh is a leader in the treatment of childhood conditions and diseases, a pioneer in the development of new and improved therapies, and a top educator of the next generation of pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists. With generous community support, UPMC Children’s Hospital has fulfilled this mission since its founding in 1890. UPMC Children’s is recognized consistently for its clinical, research, educational, and advocacy-related accomplishments, including ranking in the top 10 on the 2021-2022 U.S. News Honor Roll of America’s Best Children’s Hospitals. UPMC Children’s also ranks 15th among children’s hospitals and schools of medicine in funding for pediatric research provided by the National Institutes of Health (FY2019).

About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
As one of the nation’s leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.

Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region’s economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see www.medschool.pitt.edu.

www.upmc.com/media

JOURNAL

Immunity

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Aug-2021

UK

Patients who miss multiple GP appointments stay missing from healthcare

University research tracking people across the health service shows that patients who miss multiple GP appointments don’t use Emergency Departments as an alternative: they continue to miss out on healthcare.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BATH

VIDEO: DR DAVID ELLIS DISCUSSES HIS RESEARCH ON 'MISSINGNESS' IN HEALTHCARE view more

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF BATH - DR DAVID ELLIS

Research into the healthcare journey shows that patients who miss appointments with their GP are also less likely to attend hospital outpatient appointments.  

 Patients who missed more than two GP appointments (on average) per year, were at least three times more likely to miss outpatient appointments compared to those who missed no GP appointments.  

 Missingness from outpatient mental health services was especially high and it was also associated with ‘irregular discharge’ from in-patient care.  

 However, the surprising finding is that patients who miss GP appointments do not use Emergency Departments instead. 

 “There’s often a belief that people who miss GP appointments must be clogging up A&E departments, but that’s not what this research shows,” said Dr David Ellis from the University of Bath’s School of Management.  

 “Missing multiple health care appointments may be linked to other factors including frailty, neurodevelopmental problems such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, neurodegenerative disease or psychological trauma. These factors individually or in combination may impact a person’s ability to organise, attend, or follow through on offers of care and require further research.” 

 The study, carried out by the Universities of Bath, Glasgow and Aberdeen examined over half a million patients’ appointment histories in Scotland over a three-year period from September 2013 to September 2016. 

 A previous research paper from the same team demonstrated links between missed GP appointments and early death, and received a Research Paper of the Year award from the Royal College of General Practitioners.  

 “This research pre-dates Covid times- however it’s a very pertinent reminder that as we attempt to reconfigure acute services there is not a level playing field in terms of engaging patients in that recovery,” said Dr Andrea Williamson the study’s principal investigator from the University of Glasgow. 

“Because patients have a much higher risk of early death, identifying patients at higher risk of missingness and taking steps to ensure patients attend should be part of the recovery strategy.

“Missingness in healthcare often focuses on what it means for a service, particularly in terms of financial expense, however our work suggests that missed appointments have serious impacts for patients. 

“Policymakers, health service planners and clinicians should consider the role and contribution of ‘missingness’ in health care to improving patient safety and care.” 

Missingness in health care: Associations between hospital utilization and missed appointments in general practice. A retrospective cohort study is published in PLOS ONE  

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253163 

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/0253163

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

ARTICLE TITLE

‘Missingness’ in health care: Associations between hospital utilization and missed appointments in general practice. A retrospective cohort study

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Jun-2021

Study shows users banned from social platforms go elsewhere with increased toxicity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Users banned from social platforms go elsewhere with increased toxicity, according to a new study featuring researchers from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

When people act like jerks on social media, one permanent response is to ban them from posting again. Take away the digital megaphone, the theory goes, and the hurtful or dishonest messages from those troublemakers won’t post a problem there anymore.

What happens after that, though? Where do those who have been “deplatformed” go, and how does it affect their behavior in future?

An international team of researchers — including Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn and PhD candidate Esraa Aldreabi from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Computer Science — explores those questions in a new study called “Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks.”

The research performed by iDRAMA Lab collaborators at Binghamton University, Boston University, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany was presented in June at the 2021 ACM Web Science conference.

Researchers developed a method to identify accounts belonging to the same person on different platforms and found that being banned on Reddit or Twitter led those users to join alternate platforms such as Gab or Parler where the content moderation is more lax.

Also among the findings is that, although users who move to those smaller platforms have a potentially reduced audience, they exhibit an increased level of activity and toxicity than they did previously.

“You can’t just ban these people and say, ‘Hey, it worked.’ They don’t disappear,” Blackburn said. “They go off into other places. It does have a positive effect on the original platform, but there’s also some degree of amplification or worsening of this type of behavior elsewhere.”

The deplatforming study collected 29 million posts from Gab, which launched in 2016 and currently has around 4 million users. Gab is known for its far-right base of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, anti-Semites and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Using a combination of machine learning and human labeling, researchers cross-referenced profile names and content with users that had been active on Twitter and Reddit but were suspended. Many who are deplatformed reuse the same profile name or user info on a different platform for continuity and recognizability with their followers.

“Just because two people have the same name or username, that’s not a guarantee,” Blackburn said. “There was a pretty big process of going through creating a ‘ground truth’ data set, where we had a human say, ‘These have to be the same people because of this reason and that reason.’ That allows us to scale things up by throwing it into a machine learning classifier [program] that will learn the characteristics to watch for.”

The process was not unlike how scholars determine the identity of authors for unattributed or pseudonymous works, checking for style, syntax and subject matter, he added.

In the dataset analyzed for this study, about 59% of Twitter users (1,152 out of 1,961) created Gab accounts after their last active time on Twitter, presumably after their account was suspended. For Reddit, about 76% (3,958 out of 5,216) of suspended users created Gab accounts after their last post on Reddit.

Comparing content from the same users on Twitter and Reddit versus Gab, users tend to become more toxic when they are suspended from a platform and are forced to move to another platform. They also become more active, increasing the frequency of posts.

At the same time, the audience for Gab users’ content is curtailed by the reduced size of the platform compared to the millions of users on Twitter and Reddit. This might be seen as a good thing, but Blackburn cautioned that much of the planning for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol happened on Parler, a platform similar to Gab with a smaller user base that skews to the alt-right and far-right.

“Reducing reach probably is a good thing, but reach can be easily misinterpreted. Just because someone has 100,000 followers doesn’t mean they’re all followers in the real world,” he said.

“The hardcore group, maybe the group that we’re most concerned about, are the ones that probably stick with someone if they move elsewhere online. If by reducing that reach, you increase the intensity that the people who stay around are exposed to, it’s like a quality versus quantity type of question. Is it worse to have more people seeing this stuff? Or is it worse to have more extreme stuff being produced for fewer people?”

A separate study, “A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network,” also included Blackburn among researchers from New York University, the University of Illinois, University College London, Boston University and the Max Planck Institute.

Presented at the AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media last month, it analyzed 183 million Parler posts made by 4 million users between August 2018 and January 2021, as well as metadata from 13.25 million user profiles. The data confirm that users on Parler — which briefly shut down and was taken off of Apple and Google app stores in response to the Capitol riot — overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda.

“Regardless of what Parler might have said, publicly or not, it was very clearly white, right-wing, Christian Trump supporters,” Blackburn said. “Again, unsurprisingly, it got its largest boost right at the 2020 election — up to a million users joining. Then around the attack at the Capitol, there was another big bump in users. What we can see is that it was very clearly being used as an organization tool for the insurrection.”

So if banning users is not the right answer, what is? Reddit admins, for example, have a “shadow-banning” capability that allows troublesome users to think they’re still posting on the site, except no one else can see them. During the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter added content moderation labels to tweets that deliberately spread disinformation.

Blackburn is unsure about all the moderation tools that social media platforms have available, but he thinks there need to be more “socio-technical solutions to socio-technical problems” rather than just outright banning.

“Society is now fairly firmly saying that we cannot ignore this stuff — we can’t just use the easy outs anymore,” he said. “We need to come up with some more creative ideas to not get rid of people, but hopefully push them in a positive direction or at least make sure that everybody is aware of who that person is. Somewhere in between just unfettered access and banning everybody is probably the right solution.”

ARTICLE TITLE

Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

24-Jun-2021

Semi-natural habitat patches complement flower strips in protecting pollinators

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG

At the moment, many flower strips are buzzing and humming: cornflowers, poppies, wild carrots and many other flowers attract numerous insects. The field edges covered by these flowers typically bloom between mid-May and mid-August. Complementary habitats are needed to support pollinator insects in agricultural landscapes throughout the year. Semi-natural small structures, such as ditches, banks, hedgerows, or overgrown fences, could provide such a complement. “Researchers have already shown many times how important natural habitats are for pollinators. Almost always, however, only large-scale structures have been researched for this purpose, for example, wide meadows or pastures. Studies on what small structures mean for pollinators and which species particularly benefit from them are rare,” says Vivien von Königslöw from the Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Freiburg. As a result, together with Dr. Anne-Christine Mupepele and Prof. Dr. Alexandra-Maria Klein, she studied flower strips as well as semi-natural habitat patches in the Lake Constance area over a period of two years, a place in which there is a particular interest in pollinating insects due to large-scale fruit cultivation. The researchers published their results in the journal Biological Conservation.

Semi-natural habitats attract more bees

“Our goal was to find out how the diversity of wild bees and hoverflies can be promoted in the vicinity of large-scale orchards,” says von Königslöw. To do this, their study compared the occurrence of bees and hoverflies in flower strips and in existing flower-rich habitats, each located on the edge of conventional apple orchards in southern Germany. Their analysis showed that the different flowering times and plant species in the semi-natural habitats, such as hedgerows and small groves, mainly benefit solitary and oligolectic bees, i.e. those that collect only one pollen species. The existing biotope areas attracted bee species with a different pollen specialization than the sown flower strips. At the same time, the researchers found a greater number of pollinators in the flower strips and counted more species than in the small structures. “Thus, semi-natural habitats complement existing flower strips,” von Königslöw concludes.

For their research, the ecologists established flower strips at the edge of private orchards in 2018. Semi-natural small structures, including drainage ditches, embankments and overgrown fences, were already in place. The researchers monitored the bees and hoverflies at least once a month from spring to late summer.

Effective and cost-efficient

“Semi-natural habitat patches can play an important role in protecting pollinators because they help ensure that flowers are available all year round,” says Klein, head of the Chair of Nature Conservation and Landscape Ecology at the University of Freiburg. They also provide potential retreats and nesting sites, which are important for overwintering bumblebees, for example. “For effective and cost-efficient protection of pollinating insects, the focus should not only be on flower strips," Klein concludes. “Existing small structures of spontaneous vegetation, plant species that grow on their own from existing seeds in the soil, are also attractive to insects and should be preserved.” The Freiburg scientist explains that at present, however, there are hardly any incentives for farmers to develop and preserve small semi-natural habitat patches.

JOURNAL

Biological Conservation

DOI

10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109263

ARTICLE TITLE

Overlooked jewels. Existing habitat patches complement sown flower strips to conserve pollinators

Getting smart about off-grid desalination

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KING ABDULLAH UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (KAUST)

Getting smart about off-grid desalination — IMAGE: THE PERFORMANCE OF A DEVICE THAT CAN DESALINATE WATER USING WASTE HEAT FROM SOLAR CELLS, FIRST DEVELOPED BY KAUST SCIENTISTS IN 2019, CAN BE BOOSTED BY SMALL CHANGES IN MEMBRANE DESIGN. view more
CREDIT: © 2021 KAUST

Small changes in membrane design can have a large impact on the performance of a new technology developed at KAUST that uses waste heat from solar cells for seawater desalination.

Solar panels can become incredibly hot — more than 40 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding air temperature in arid regions. These conditions arise because silicon photovoltaic cells typically convert only one-quarter of absorbed solar energy into electricity while the remainder heats up the cell. Extreme operating temperatures reduce the cell’s efficiency and lifespan even further.

Even with water cooling, however, the team found that the operating temperature of their photovoltaic panel remained stubbornly high. To remedy this, researchers Wenbin Wang and Sara Aleid helped develop a theoretical model to explore the relationship between certain membrane parameters, such as thickness and porosity, to the solar cell hotness.

“Realizing a lower solar-cell temperature relies on regulating heat transfer through the hydrophobic membrane in the multistage device,” explains Wang. “Simply by modulating the membrane parameters, we found that utilizing a thinner hydrophobic membrane with higher porosity enables higher desalination performance and lower solar-cell temperature to be achieved simultaneously.”

Taking these results from the laboratory to real-world environments required the team to minimize the energy needs and waste by-products associated with desalination. Taking inspiration from infusion technology used in intravenous lines, the researchers developed a gravity-driven system that feeds seawater into the solar-cell device without external pumps. In addition, a special fabric wicks away solid salts and minerals, avoiding the release of toxic liquid brine.

“Because our device aims to desalinate seawater and provide electricity for off-grid communities, relying on a mechanical pump to control the flow rate of source water is not a good choice,” explains Wang.

Experiments, including outdoor tests on the sunny KAUST campus, revealed that the new membrane design boosted electricity generation by 8 percent while also doubling previous rates of freshwater generation.

In 2019, Peng Wang and his team realized that waste solar-cell heat could be used for water purification. They developed a device that attaches under a photovoltaic panel and draws seawater into a series of layered channels. Water vaporized in the uppermost channel by solar-cell heat passes through a porous membrane to a lower layer, where it is redistilled. After three layers of purification, freshwater is produced at rates close to 1.6 liters per hour.

JOURNAL

Joule

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2021.05.010

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

ARTICLE TITLE

Integrated solar-driven PV cooling and seawater desalination with zero liquid discharge

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Jun-2021

Harmful algal blooms jeopardize health of reptiles, songbirds

UToledo study identifies the inconsistent response of wildlife to harmful algal blooms in the Great Lakes region

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

Harmful Algal Blooms Jeopardize Health of Reptiles, Songbirds — IMAGE: DR. JEANINE REFSNIDER, AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES AT UTOLEDO, LED THE STUDY THAT IDENTIFIED THE INCONSISTENT RESPONSE OF WILDLIFE TO HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOMS IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION. view more
CREDIT: DANIEL MILLER, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

Toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes region cause mixed reactions in wildlife, from higher stress levels to weaker immune systems.

“We looked at four different species and found four different results,” said Dr. Jeanine Refsnider, an associate professor of environmental sciences at The University of Toledo. “Although we are making substantial inroads toward understanding how microcystin affects human health, less is known about effects of microcystin on wildlife exposed to harmful algal blooms.”

The UToledo research published in the journal Science of the Total Environment finds that physiological stress levels were higher in songbirds and snakes, and immune function was higher in snakes but lower in turtles, impacting their ability to fight off pathogens.

“While harmful algal blooms aren’t directly causing exposed wildlife to die, the research suggests they are causing reptiles and birds to have generally worse health, putting their system at a disadvantage,” Refsnider said. “The reptiles and birds are ramping up their response which can be harmful if you have a constantly elevated stress level in your body.

“In humans, if you have chronically high stress, you have distressed immune system. The indirect effects that stress has on other functions can be negative, such as lower reproductive output and population decline.”

The research team, which included UToledo undergraduate students who are co-authors on the study, collected blood samples from two bird species and two reptile species in two locations: around Lake Erie wetlands before algal bloom season begins and Grand Lake St. Marys during algal bloom season.

The wildlife included in the study are barn swallows, red-winged blackbirds, Northern watersnakes and painted turtles.

Brittany Holliker, who graduated from UToledo in May 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, worked in the lab staining blood from watersnakes and tadpoles and analyzed them with a microscope to identify and record numbers of white blood cells.

“It is incredible that my undergraduate research is now part of a published study that can be used for wildlife conservation,” said Holliker, who worked as an avian field technician in Mississippi after graduating from UToledo and is moving to Kansas to be a scaled quail field technician. “My experience at UT definitely helped me launch my career in wildlife biology by giving me the opportunity to become involved in interesting scientific research and by giving me knowledgeable professors who helped prepare me for the science field.”

While the study found that turtles had weaker immune systems, snakes in the algal bloom site had stronger immune systems and birds showed no difference in immune function.

“Snakes are putting more energy into their immune system to fight off infection, but the extra immune energy has to come from somewhere else — maybe they’re skinnier or maybe not reproducing quite as much,” Refsnider said. “If they’re increasing immune functioning to deal with the harmful algal bloom, that comes at a cost to something we haven’t identified yet.”

After identifying the inconsistent response of wildlife to harmful algal blooms, Refnsider next wants to track the movements of the animals through satellite or acoustic transmitters to see if they are changing their travel patterns to avoid experiencing the negative impacts.

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.147790

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Effects of harmful algal blooms on stress levels and immune functioning in wetland-associated songbirds and reptiles

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Sep-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS an

New method to detect impact of sea level rise

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

Sampling mangrove-salt marsh environments at Sandy Point, North of Adelaide. — IMAGE: EMILY LEYDEN SAMPLING MANGROVE-SALT MARSH ENVIRONMENTS AT SANDY POINT, NORTH OF ADELAIDE. view more
CREDIT: EMILY LEYDEN.

University of Adelaide scientists have developed a new simple, inexpensive and fast method to analyse sulfur isotopes, which can be used to help investigate chemical changes in environments such as oceans, and freshwater rivers and lakes.

Published in Talanta, the research opens up potential for new environmental applications of the method, such as tracing the effect of sea level rise, including detection of seawater intrusion into freshwater systems.

“Sulfur isotopes can tell us a great deal about Earth cycles both now and in the past,” said lead author PhD student Emily Leyden from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences.

“Different water sources have different levels of sulfur isotopes within them. The processes that occur within an environment such as the intrusion of seawater into freshwater systems, and oxidation of acid sulfate soils, can change these ratios. By analysing sulfur isotope ratios we can gain important insights into how environments are changing.”

The traditional method of measuring sulfur isotopes is known as mass spectroscopy (MS), where samples are ionized (split into their ions) and the ions of interest in the samples are measured depending on their mass to charge ratio, which differs between isotopes of the same chemical element.

The traditional method has been notoriously difficult, as the mass to charge ratio amongst ions can disperse and overlap, which can make the results hard to differentiate. Sulfur can usually only be measured reliably if there is complex chemical purification before analysis, which is time consuming, difficult and expensive.

As part of Ms Leyden’s PhD study, a team including members from the University of Adelaide’s Metal Isotope Group with the School of Physical Sciences, the School of Biological Sciences and Adelaide Microscopy, with scientists at Flinders University, worked together to develop a novel method to measure sulfur isotopes using an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) MS instrument.

The new instrument enabled the team to solve the overlapping issue (known as spectral interference) by combining sulfur with another element (oxygen in this case) to increase the mass to charge ratio in order to lower the risk of spectral interference. The sulfur isotopes can then be measured accurately without the need for complex and time consuming sample purification.

In the study, the University of Adelaide scientists simulated how the method would work in a real world scenario by tracing seawater flooding into a range of different coastal environments in South Australia.

Following flooding, the original sulfur isotope of the soil water clearly changed to that of the seawater isotope. The sulfur isotope ratios of the samples also gave clues to their individual and unique makeup before seawater flooding. For example, acid sulfate soil impacts were detected in two soils, and the signature of historical upstream silver sulfide mining could be detected from a site in the upper Onkaparinga River.

Co-author and Principal PhD Supervisor Associate Professor Luke Mosley from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute and School of Biological Sciences says, the new method opens up sulfur isotope measurement to a range of new environmental applications for scientists across many different disciplines.

“Using this new method, scientists can measure sulfur isotopes in environmental samples easily following only simple dilution of the sample of interest,” said Associate Professor Mosley.

“It is particularly timely and important given there is rapid global environmental change, and the method enables easier detection of seawater intrusion into freshwater systems due to sea-level rise.”

aerial view of mangrove-salt marsh area at Sandy Point, North of Adelaide, South Australia. (VIDEO)

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

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CAPTION

Drone footage provides an aerial view of mangrove-salt marsh area at Sandy Point, North of Adelaide, South Australia.

CREDIT

Emily Leyden`

USAGE RESTRICTIONS

JOURNAL

Talanta

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.talanta.2021.122708

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A simple and rapid ICP-MS/MS determination of sulfur isotope ratios (34S/32S) in complex natural waters: A new tool for tracing seawater intrusion in coastal systems

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Jul-2021