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)
Friday, July 09, 2021
Research encourages re-evaluation of special nerve treatment for chronic pain
Study examines impact of Paravertebral blocks on health care utilization and opioid prescriptions
LAWSON HEALTH RESEARCH INSTITUTE
VIDEO: DR. ELDON LOH EXPLAINS NEW RESEARCH THAT ASSESSED THE USE OF A SPECIALIZED TREATMENT FOR CHRONIC PAIN AND ITS IMPACT ON HEALTH CARE USE AND OPIOID PRESCRIBING.view more
CREDIT: LAWSON HEALTH RESEARCH INSTITUTE
LONDON, ON - Hospital researchers from Lawson Health Research Institute have published a recent study that assessed the use of a specialized treatment for chronic pain and its impact on health care use and opioid prescribing.
Paravertebral blocks (PVBs) belong to a broader group of procedures called "nerve blocks." A recent Toronto Star report noted that OHIP has been billed $420 million for nerve block procedures since 2011. PVBs involve injecting medication around the nerves where they exit the bones of the spine, at different locations depending on the patient and the chronic pain they are experiencing.
The regular use of these procedures has been questioned by health care providers due to the high cost and limited evidence of their benefit in reducing chronic pain. While the effectiveness of PVBs has been examined in trauma, cancer pain and regional anesthesia during surgery, they have not been evaluated for use in chronic pain despite widespread use in Ontario.
It is estimated that one in five Canadians live with chronic pain. Pain that persists can affect all aspects of someone's life and health, particularly when it is not being managed.
This new study from London researchers found that 66,310 patients had a PVB between July 2013 and March 2018, and 47,723 patients were included in the study. In the year after a patient's first PVB, there was a significant increase in the number of physician visits. Additional PVBs were frequently performed after the first treatment, with over 26 per cent of patients receiving a PVB ten or more times in one year, with almost eight per cent of patients receiving 30 or more. No overall change was found in opioid dosage in the year after PVB was initiated compared to the year before.
"Frequent use of PVB is common. Initiating treatment with PVCs is associated with marked increases in health care utilization, which includes physician visits and other injection procedures," explains Dr. Eldon Loh, Lawson Associate Scientist and Physiatrist at St. Joseph's Health Care London.
This research provides a broad perspective on the use of PVBs in Ontario, and on the use of nerve blocking treatments in general. There has been a concern for several years about the over use of these procedures; however, this is the first study to systematically document the impact on health care utilization and opioid use.
"We hope that from this study, the appropriate use of PVBs and other pain interventions will be re-evaluated at a provincial level to ensure the use of health resources is being properly managed and we achieve the best outcome for patients," Dr. Loh adds.
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The study, "A Retrospective Cohort Study of Healthcare Utilization Associated with Paravertebral Blocks for Chronic Pain Management in Ontario," published in the Canadian Journal of Pain.
Inhaled COVID-19 vaccine prevents disease and transmission in animals
In a new study assessing the potential of a single-dose, intranasal COVID-19 vaccine, a team from the University of Iowa and the University of Georgia found that the vaccine fully protects mice against lethal COVID-19 infection. The vaccine also blocks animal-to-animal transmission of the virus. The findings were published July 2 in the journal Science Advances.
"The currently available vaccines against COVID-19 are very successful, but the majority of the world's population is still unvaccinated and there is a critical need for more vaccines that are easy to use and effective at stopping disease and transmission," says Paul McCray, MD, professor of pediatrics-pulmonary medicine, and microbiology and immunology at the UI Carver College of Medicine, and co-leader of the study. "If this new COVID-19 vaccine proves effective in people, it may help block SARS-CoV-2 transmission and help control the COVID-19 pandemic."
Unlike traditional vaccines that require an injection, this vaccine is administered through a nasal spray similar to those commonly used to vaccinate against influenza. The vaccine used in the study only requires a single dose and it may be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures for up to at least three months. Because it is given intranasally, the vaccine may also be easier to administer, especially for those who have a fear of needles.
"We have been developing this vaccine platform for more than 20 years, and we began working on new vaccine formulations to combat COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic," says Biao He, PhD, a professor in the University of Georgia's Department of Infectious Diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine and co-leader of the study. "Our preclinical data show that this vaccine not only protects against infection, but also significantly reduces the chances of transmission."
The experimental vaccine uses a harmless parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5) to deliver the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into cells where it prompts an immune response that protects against COVID-19 infection. PIV5 is related to common cold viruses and easily infects different mammals, including humans, without causing significant disease. The research team has previously shown that this vaccine platform can completely protect experimental animals from another dangerous coronavirus disease called Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
The inhaled PIV5 vaccine developed by the team targets mucosal cells that line the nasal passages and airways. These cells are the main entry point for most SARS-CoV-2 infections and the site of early virus replication. Virus produced in these cells can invade deeper into the lungs and other organs in the body, which can lead to more severe disease. In addition, virus made in these cells can be easily shed through exhalation allowing transmission from one infected person to others.
The study showed that the vaccine produced a localized immune response, involving antibodies and cellular immunity, that completely protected mice from fatal doses of SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine also prevented infection and disease in ferrets and, importantly, appeared to block transmission of COVID-19 from infected ferrets to their unprotected and uninfected cage-mates.
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In addition to McCray, UI researchers involved in the study included Kun Li, PhD, and associate research scientist, who helped lead the small animal studies at Iowa, documenting the vaccine's efficacy, and David Meyerholz, PhD, UI professor of pathology.
The research was supported by CyanVac LLC, a startup company based at University of Georgia that is developing vaccines based on the PIV5. McCray, who does not have a financial relationship with CyanVac, also received support from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases
Regular rapid testing detects COVID-19 soon enough to stop transmission in schools
Professors Caroline Colijn and Paul Tupper used a mathematical model to simulate COVID-19's spread in the classroom
Proactive, frequent rapid testing of all students for COVID-19 is more effective at preventing large transmission clusters in schools than measures that are only initiated when someone develops symptoms and then tests positive, Simon Fraser University researchers have found. Professors Caroline Colijn and Paul Tupper used a mathematical model to simulate COVID-19's spread in the classroom and published their research results today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
The simulations showed that, in a classroom with 25 students, anywhere from zero to 20 students might be infected after exposure, depending on even small adjustments to transmission rates for infected individuals or environments.
"When schools have reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, in some places there have been large clusters of infections, and in others very little transmission," says Colijn, SFU mathematics professor and Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health. "In our simulations, we explored what factors affect cluster size, and what interventions can be used to prevent large clusters."
The researchers tested the effectiveness of two different transmission control strategies.
In the first, when a student (or teacher/staff member) develops symptoms, they are told to stay home, tested using a PCR test, and if the test result is positive, control measures are introduced in the classroom, such as telling the infected individual's close contacts to stay home.
In the second strategy, all students in the class are tested using rapid tests on a regular basis, whether they have symptoms or not. When a student tests positive, there is an intervention to prevent further transmission.
The researchers found that in scenarios with high transmission rates, interventions used in the first control strategy, where preventive actions took effect after a positive test result, were too slow to prevent large outbreaks. Using rapid tests to screen the whole population and catch infections before symptoms developed, as in the second strategy, led to preventing large outbreaks.
"We found that interventions that only took effect after someone developed symptoms and tested positive were too slow to prevent large clusters; only regular monitoring of asymptomatic individuals could prevent the worst outcomes," says Colijn.
Their study is timely as B.C. is expected to enter Step 4 of its reopening in September and concerns remain about a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall. Regular screening for COVID-19 in the form of rapid testing has not been widely used in B.C. schools, though Alberta and Saskatchewan have plans to deploy rapid testing in schools in the fall, and Nova Scotia has long embraced rapid testing in a variety of settings.
Tupper says they hope to use data on transmission and cluster sizes in schools to estimate key unknowns about COVID-19 in schools, such as the rate of transmission, and how much it varies from classroom to classroom.
"We could then see how transmission depends on preventative measures that are put in place, such as mask use, improved ventilation and hand washing," he says. "This would inform which interventions, after a case is detected, would be the most effective."
The research results could be applied to other settings in which people spend multiple hours per day with the same group of approximately 20-30 others.
"Our results were based on simulations of a classroom, but the same considerations apply to other settings such as workplaces, or communal living settings such as long-term care homes," says Tupper, noting that their previous work points to the effectiveness of regular rapid testing in protecting residents of long-term care homes.
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Tupper's research was supported by an NSERC (Canada) Discovery Grant. Colijn was supported by a Genome BC grant (COV142) and by the Canada 150 Research Chairs program of the Federal Government of Canada. The researchers also thank Covid Écoles Québec for the data on cluster sizes in Québec schools.
MRI can cut overdiagnoses in prostate-cancer screening by half
IMAGE: MARTIN EKLUND, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE DEPARTMENT OF MEDICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY AND BIOSTATISTICS AT KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET, AND TOBIAS NORDSTRÖM, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF UROLOGY AT THE DEPARTMENT OF CLINICAL SCIENCES, DANDERYD HOSPITAL... view more
CREDIT: STEFAN ZIMMERMAN
Most countries have not introduced nationwide prostate-cancer screening, as current methods result in overdiagnoses and excessive and unnecessary biopsies. A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which is published in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that screening by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and targeted biopsies could potentially cut overdiagnoses by half. The results are presented today at the European Association of Urology Congress.
"Our results from a large, randomised study show that modern methods for prostate cancer screening maintain the benefits of screening, while decreasing the harms substantially. This addresses the greatest barrier to the introduction of nationwide screening," explains Tobias Nordström, associate professor of Urology at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital at Karolinska Institutet, who is in charge of the STHLM3MRI study.
Yearly, approximately 1,4 million men get a prostate cancer diagnosis and 375,000 men die from the disease. Previous studies have shown that organised screening can result in earlier detection and thereby reduce the risk of prostate-cancer deaths.
Current screening methods - PSA (prostate-specific antigen) tests combined with traditional biopsies - result in unnecessary biopsies, and the detection of numerous minor low-risk tumours. Consequently, no country except Lithuania has chosen to introduce a nationwide prostate-cancer screening programme, as the benefits do not exceed the disadvantages.
"Refined screening methods are required to reduce overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk tumours, and prevent unnecessary biopsies and biopsy-related side-effects," explains Martin Eklund, associate professor at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, with joint responsibility for the STHLM3MRI study.
The results of the STHLM3MRI study indicate that overdiagnoses can be halved by substituting traditional prostate biopsies with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and targeted biopsies. The number of unnecessary biopsies and the identification of minor low-risk tumours is reduced, while the new method can detect just as many clinically significant tumours.
STHLM3MRI is a randomised study conducted between 2018 and 2021 with participants from Stockholm County, which included 12,750 men. The participants first provided a blood sample for PSA analysis, as well as analysis by the new Stockholm3 test, developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet. Men whose tests showed elevated levels were then randomly selected for traditional biopsies or MRI. In the MRI group, biopsies were conducted strictly on suspected tumours identified by MRI.
The study proceeded thereafter by investigating how the Stockholm3 test could be combined with MRI to further improve the method for prostate-cancer screening.
"We will soon present the second of the two main reports from the STHLM3MRI trial where we assess the role of a novel blood test as adjunct to MRI in prostate cancer screening. The future of prostate cancer diagnostics probably includes both improved blood tests and MRI. Nationwide screening for breast and cervical cancer among women has been available in the Western world for some time. We are finally able to show that men can also reduce their risk of malignant cancer through nationwide prostate-cancer screening that utilises modern methods," Tobias Nordström concludes.
Professor Hendrik Van Poppel, Adjunct Secretary General of the European Association of Urology (EAU) said: "It is exciting to see breakthroughs such as this in the field of early detection of prostate cancer. An innovation such as STHLM3MRI makes an even more compelling case for the European Commission to ensure a risk stratified approach to early detection of prostate cancer is adopted across the whole of Europe. The EAU is working hard to ensure that early detection of prostate cancer is addressed in the implementation of Europe's Beating Cancer Plan in order to reduce mortality of Europe's most common male cancer while also dealing with the challenges of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. We are really looking forward to seeing how STHLM3MRI can continue to contribute to this aim".
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The research was financed by the Swedish Cancer Society, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare, Karolinska Institutet, Hagstrandska Minnesfonden, Region Stockholm, the Swedish Order of Druids, the Åke Wiberg Foundation, the Swedish e-Science Research Center (SeRC) and Prostatacancerförbundet (the Prostate Cancer Association). Henrik Grönberg, Martin Eklund and Tobias Nordström are partners of the company A3P Biomedical AB, which holds the development rights of the Stockholm3 test.
Publication: "MRI-targeted or standard biopsy in prostate cancer screening", M. Eklund, F. Jäderling, A. Discacciati, M. Bergman, M. Annerstedt, M. Aly, A. Glaessgen, S. Carlsson, H. Grönberg, T. Nordström, for the STHLM3 consortium. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), online 9 July 2021, doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2100852.
Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's leading medical universities. Our vision is to advance knowledge about life and strive towards better health for all. Karolinska Institutet accounts for the single largest share of all academic medical research conducted in Sweden and offers the country's broadest range of education in medicine and health sciences. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet selects the Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine.
About EAU21:
Europe's biggest urology congress will take place from 8th-12th July 2021 in a virtual setting. With over 1,500 abstracts presented and moderated live, the Annual Congress of the European Association of Urology (EAU21) will be amongst Europe's biggest medical congresses in 2021.
Clinicians, scientists, and patients will meet to discuss topics such as:
Prostate cancer: new developments to improve treatments of the most common male cancer
Urinary incontinence: a growing concern for the elderly population
Practice changing treatments for both bladder and kidney cancer
Prevention and treatment of urinary stones; 1 in 10 people (55 million adults in Europe) will form a stone at some point
Special track for representatives of patient advocacy group on Friday 9 July
...and many other conditions related to the male and female urinary tract system and male reproductive organs. Review the full scientific programme on https://eaucongress.uroweb.org/
Researchers overcome winking, napping pigs to prove brain test works
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
IMAGE: ADAM JONES, RESEARCH COORDINATOR FOR THE PIGLET NUTRITION AND COGNITION LABORATORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, SETTLES PIGLET INTO A CUSTOM-BUILT HAMMOCK BEFORE TESTING ITS EYEBLINK REFLEX, A SIMPLE ASSAY... view more
CREDIT: COLLEGE OF ACES, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
URBANA, Ill. - If you've ever been to an eye doctor, there's a good chance you've felt the sudden puff of air to the eye that constitutes a traditional test for glaucoma. It's no one's favorite experience, but the puff is non-invasive and harmless.
Scientists use a similar method to test learning and memory in animals and humans. Like Pavlov's classic experiments linking a neutral stimulus with a physiological response, the eyeblink test pairs a light or sound with a quick puff of air to the eye. With repetition, the animal learns to close its eye, or blink, in response to the light or sound only. It's called associative learning, and the response is ruled by a brain region known as the cerebellum.
While the eyeblink test has been around since 1922, it had never been attempted in pigs until now. In a new study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, researchers prove the eyeblink test works in 3-week-old pigs, a model species for nutritional neuroscience research in human infants.
"The idea is, if we can improve structural development in the brain through nutritional interventions, it should take pigs fewer trials to learn the rule. We're in the process of assessing the nutrition piece now, but we had to get the test to work first," says Ryan Dilger, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois and co-author on the study.
Dilger specializes in the effects of nutrition on the developing brain, with much of his work feeding directly into the infant formula industry. He uses neonatal pigs because, unlike rodents, their brain anatomy and structure, gut physiology, and nutritional requirements are strikingly similar to human infants.
Dilger's team typically studies pig brain response to new ingredients through magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which focuses on the structure and size of various brain regions. They also rely on well-validated behavioral tasks, such as novel object recognition, that reflect activity in the hippocampus and striatum, some of the brain regions related to learning and memory.
But Dilger wanted a tool to specifically assess cognitive processing in the cerebellum. That's when he turned to Henk-Jan Boele and Sebastiaan Koekkoek, eyeblink specialists and neuroscientists at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands.
Although humans and all sorts of animals have undergone the eyeblink test, the behavioral paradigm had never been validated for pigs.
"For human and mouse eyeblink conditioning, we use completely different systems," says Boele, a postdoctoral researcher with dual appointments at Erasmus and Princeton University. "Humans are easy to instruct, usually are very cooperative, and sit still during the experiment, which makes it easy to deliver the puff and measure the eyelid. Mice are mostly head-fixed during the experiment, which makes it easy to deliver the air puff and measure the eyelid. Pigs, instead, were a challenge because we did not want to fixate their head. It was really difficult to reliably deliver the air puff and measure the eyelid responses.
"We tried video cameras, diodes, and all kinds of things, to capture the blink. And we had to use a piece of equipment to deliver the air puff that was very close to the eye to avoid any delays. We need really sharp, short puffs that are not invasive for the animal but are still very precisely timed. So that was a challenge," he says.
The solution was taping a short piece of air tubing next to one eye, and pasting magnetic sensors on the forehead and eyelid to record the blink. The system measured the eyeblink down to the millisecond.
And yes, Boele puffed himself in the eye to test out the system. It worked. "Oh yes, I blinked," he laughs.
To ensure the pigs had free head movement but didn't get up and run around, the researchers placed them in a custom-built sound-dampening box fitted with a pig-sized hammock.
It was apparently very comfy.
Sangyun Joung, a doctoral student in the Neuroscience Program at Illinois and co-author on the study, says, "Each pig had five days of training to habituate them to the hammock and the testing environment. By day three, they were very relaxed, to the point where some of them were literally falling asleep. That was a little challenge for us during the analysis, because that definitely influenced their responses. But it also told us this whole behavior paradigm is not stressful for them. For us, it was interesting and frustrating at the same time."
Once the pigs were used to the setup, the real work began. The pigs did a series of eight tests in a row. The first was the air puff only, to measure the eyeblink reflex. The next six tests paired a small blue LED light with the air puff. The light came on for half a second, 500 milliseconds, and right at the end, with the light still on, the air puff was delivered. That last part, with both the light on and the air puffing, lasted a tiny 50 milliseconds. The final test was the light only - no puff.
The researchers repeated each set of eight tests five times on each of five consecutive days. The time between tests varied a bit to keep the pigs guessing.
"It wasn't just on and off, once per second. The system waits until the eye is in a stable place, and then repeats the test at random times so the pigs can't anticipate the puff," Dilger says.
But they did learn, over the course of the five-day experiment, to anticipate the puff. Pretty soon, pigs were closing their eyes at exactly the 500-millisecond mark during the eighth trial - the one with a light but no puff.
"The timing is perfect. If you look at the conditioned eyelid responses, you can see that the eyelid is closed exactly at the moment the puff would have been delivered," Boele says. "Just perfect motor timing, down to the millisecond. That's beautiful."
The research team learned something else about pigs they hadn't known before.
"We learned that pigs can just close one eye at a time; they can wink. We weren't sure about that, actually," Dilger says. "But because they are pigs, they will frustrate you all day long. Some pigs would just lay there with their one eye closed, which meant we couldn't use that that particular subject. They're smart creatures."
The eyeblink test specifically targets activity in the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for making quick, unconscious predictions. These predictions relate to motor responses, such as where to step while you're walking; and cognitive processes, such as predicting what someone is going to say next in a conversation.
"The cerebellum is making short-term predictions all the time, continuously. It's essential to interact with our environment. When we think about learning and memory, often we think about really complex cognitive things, but most of our daily life behavior is just smooth, automatic interactions with our environment," Boele says. "In eyeblink conditioning, your cerebellum basically solves the problem for you. You don't have to think about it. It's making this short-term prediction, and that's what we are studying."
Pigs are born with a more developed cerebellum than human babies. That's clear from eyeblink conditioning tests Boele has done with six-to-eight-month-old infants; they don't typically learn the task at that age.
Unlike humans, pigs need to be able to make motor and cognitive predictions right away, since they can get up and walk around minutes after birth. When Dilger studies the pig cerebellum using MRI, which focuses mostly on structure, he typically doesn't see much change due to nutritional interventions. That's because the cerebellum is more developed at birth in the pig, which makes them a precocial species. But nutritional changes might alter the functioning of the brain region. That is what the eyeblink test will tell him in future studies.
"Often, function follows structure, but not always. Having a nutritional deficiency may show a deficit in eyeblink conditioning, this associative learning task," he says. "We want to be able to use a nutritional intervention as a relatively non-invasive way of understanding cerebellar development here."
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The study, "Young domestic pigs (Sus scrofa) can perform Pavlovian eyeblink conditioning," is published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience [DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2021.690019]. Current and former University of Illinois authors include Sangyun Joung, Joanne Fil, Austin Mudd, Stephen Fleming, and Ryan Dilger. Co-authors Sebastiaan Koekkoek and Henk-Jan Boele are affiliated with Erasmus Medical Center.
The Department of Animal Sciences is in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.
Reporting of adverse effects in drug trials has only improved slightly in 17 years, new study shows
Researchers, including academics from the University of York, analysed systematic reviews of 1,200 Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to assess whether reporting had improved over time.
However, the information the researchers needed to assess what adverse effects were reported (and how they were reported) was only included in less than half of the RCTs they analysed.
Co-author Dr Su Golder from the Department of Health Sciences, said: "Drug trials are conducted to give clinicians information on the benefits and adverse effects of treatments. Our study shows that, disappointingly, there's only been a slight improvement in reporting the adverse effects in trials over the last 17 years."
The study argues that many trials focus on the benefits, rather than the adverse effects of the drug being trialled.
"There is also a tendency to focus only on those harms that are either common, or defined as serious which cause hospitalisation, disability or death. Yet other seemingly minor harms which may be important to patients - everything from diarrhoea and insomnia to rashes, coughs and muscle aches - may be important to capture, especially since it may stop people taking medication," Dr Golder added.
Randomised Control Trials authors were also at times selective about which harms they reported, the study went on to say.
Dr Golder added: "We also need to know if a particular drug affected people differently, for example if it affected females more than males, or if a particular harm increased with age."
The study concluded that the lack of reporting or selective reporting of adverse effects in published clinical trials can promote a false impression of safety and misinform clinical and policy decisions and that the NHS, policy makers and patients all need reliable information about the benefits and adverse effects of treatments to make good, informed decisions.
In 2004, major new guidelines on reporting Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) were published, with the aim of improving the reporting of adverse effects in trials.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- When it comes to what users share on Twitter, women and users who never attended college voluntarily disclose more personal information than users from other socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds -- potentially making these populations more susceptible to online privacy threats, according to a recent study led by the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
Additionally, the researchers unexpectedly found that neither socioeconomic status nor demographics is a significant predictor of the use of account security features such as two-factor login authentication, and that users from all backgrounds actually shared less personal information than they recalled.
"We didn't find a strong correlation between people's stated attitudes and their observed behaviors, which is pretty contradictory to what privacy literature has explained about people's digital inequality and privacy divide," said Jooyoung Lee, doctoral student of information sciences and technology and lead author on the research paper.
In the exploratory study, the researchers set out to understand whether socio-demographic factors impact the usage of login verification, a user's likeliness to share personal information online, and whether topics of self-disclosure vary across socio-demographic groups.
"There is a robust literature on self-disclosure, but purely data-driven approaches typically don't allow us access to users' gender, education, occupation, race and other sensitive information," said Sarah Rajtmajer, assistant professor of information sciences and technology. "At the same time, there is growing concern about the inequitable distribution of privacy risk amongst different socio-demographic groups with respect to online information sharing. The experimental approach taken in this work allowed us a first attempt to bridge the gap."
According to Shomir Wilson, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, the researchers were motivated to expand on past work that indicated that people in lower socio-economic brackets had more difficulty understanding online privacy controls.
"The original thing we were expecting to see based on the survey methods and prior work actually didn't bear out in that we got negative results on the socio-economic status," said Wilson. "But we got some other results that surprised us and are leading us into next steps."
The Penn State study is novel in that it explores the contents of personal information in self-disclosure along socio-demographic lines. In prior work, only gender and age variables have been primarily explored.
The researchers surveyed 110 active Twitter users and monitored their posting behaviors in more than 6,900 tweets over the course of a month. Then, using statistical analysis methods, they examined the tweets for mentions of topics in 12 categories of self-disclosure -- such as marital status, or location -- and labeled which of the categories, if any, the tweet fit.
Those categories were then measured against six socio-demographic factors -- income, gender, age, education level, race/ethnicity and occupation -- to analyze users' login verification settings, quantity of self-disclosure, and self-disclosure by topic. Finally, a post-study survey was sent to participants to collect their recollection of self-disclosure, which the researchers measured against their actual posts.
"A key distinction between our work and prior work was that prior work surveyed people for their attitudes and beliefs," said Wilson. "We took this a step further: we not only gave people surveys, but we followed them on Twitter to see how they were behaving and if their behaviors actually correlated with what they thought they were doing. And we found that people were sharing less than they thought they were sharing."
Added Lee, "People don't always remember what they share on social media, which could be a really big problem. Reminding people of their sharing behaviors could be a good solution to help them keep track of what kind of data they're sharing publicly."
Rajtmajer added that this is particularly true about the combined information of what they've shared over time, which led the researchers to ask survey participants whether they remembered sharing specific pieces of personal information.
"We know that, most often, the critical worries derive from inferences about an individual made possible by the aggregation of all the various, and often seemingly harmless, details they share," she said. "These inferences can be used to profile, monetize, manipulate and surveil. Already-vulnerable groups in many cases are most at risk."
According to Wilson, there are also scenarios where users don't realize that they are sharing posts containing personal information with an audience that includes their co-workers or the general public. Conversely, there are cases where people might not share enough, not realizing that there are certain pieces of information that their friends and followers might want to know.
"Aligning those two things helps people better understand their public persona and gives people a greater sense of security when they use online social networks," Wilson said. "And that in itself is valuable."
The study unveils that users often can't accurately construct a mental model of their sharing behaviors over a month-long period, which could potentially lead to design updates for social networks to implement features that help users keep track of their sharing behaviors.
"This provides context to how people use these tools, both for the users and for the people creating them," said Wilson.
Eesha Srivatsavaya, an undergraduate data sciences student at the College of IST, was also involved with the project. The team's paper appears in the July 2021 Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The work was supported in part by an Accelerator Award from the Center for Social Data Analytics at Penn State.
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Researchers study anxiety differences between females and males
Feeling anxious about health, family or money is normal for most people--especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. But for those with anxiety disorders, these everyday worries tend to heighten even when there is little or no reason to be concerned.
Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine recently studied the behaviors associated with anxiety--published in Psychopharmacology--examining how biological factors impact anxiety disorders, specifically in females. They found that anxiety in females intensifies when there's a specific, life-relevant condition.
The team, led by Thatiane De Oliveira Sergio, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Woody Hopf, PhD, professor of psychiatry and primary investigator at Stark Neurosciences Research Institute, studied male and female rodent models to better understand sex differences in biological responses related to anxiety.
Anxiety disorders occur in twice as often in women than men, and social and cultural factors likely play an important role in the development of anxiety in females, De Oliveira said.
The COVID-19 pandemic heavily influenced anxiety in people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in June 2020--a few months into the pandemic--13 percent of Americans started using or increasing substance use to cope with their emotions and stress due to the unknowns at that time about the pandemic.
Knowing that women have more incidence of anxiety than men, De Oliveira said the roles for many women have amplified during the pandemic--working remotely, teaching children in virtual school, everyday tasks, errands. She said these life-relevant conditions could have increased their anxiety.
"This work is giving us a foundation to start and explore anxiety behaviors that are very important and even more relevant now," De Oliveira said.
While anxiety in humans is complex, anxiety in animals is based solely on biology.
"Biological factors play an important role in these types of mood disorders, but it can be hard to untangle the mechanisms that drive anxiety in humans," De Oliveira said. "This rodent work is important to do to help develop more effective and personalized treatments."
Through studying both male and female rodent models, they found that females and males were very different in their response to the most life-relevant aspects related to anxiety, Hopf said.
In one of the behavioral tasks, rodents had to grab pellets of food which were in the brightly lit center of a big arena. Rats don't like the light, so this creates an anxious conflict. In this task, female rats took longer to touch the food and ate less food relative to males.
The researchers also gave the rodents diazepam--a drug used to treat anxiety--and it greatly reduced anxiety in females, but it had little effect in males when interacting with food. There were also other measures that showed similarities between males and females, Hopf said, including how many times a rat approached the lit center and how long it remained there. Thus, only the parts of the task that were most life-relevant--in this case food--showed sex differences.
Previous studies support the idea that anxiety in females is focused on the most life-relevant aspects of a situation, Hopf said, which aligned with their findings. For example, females--more than males in both studies--showed greater responses to the urine of a predator and had higher anxiety when in the presence of a second rat that was free to wander around.
"Knowing that anxiety can manifest from different concerns in males and females, with females particularly attuned to the most life-relevant conditions, is a valuable step towards seeking better treatments based on sex differences," De Oliveira said.
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This research was funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsi
Protein supplements work for women and not men, during fasted carb-restricted training
Consuming a protein supplement, specifically protein hydrolysate, during carbohydrate-restricted training was helpful for improving training intensity in women, but not in men.
That's according to new research which will be part of a presentation this week at The Physiological Society's Annual Conference Physiology 2021.
Most nutrition guidelines for athletes are based on research in men only. This study, by Tanja Oosthuyse and her colleagues, emphasizes that this shouldn't be the case, because nutritional research findings in men don't always apply to women.
While the protein supplement helped training intensity in women, it did not improve training intensity and instead resulted in modest negative effect in men. It made exercise feel harder for them because their bodies were working harder to break down the supplement, as compared to when they were drinking just plain water.
The conclusion from this research is that women should ingest protein supplements during fasted carbohydrate-restricted exercise, while men should be aware that it will increase their perception of effort.
Future studies need to determine whether ingesting protein hydrolysate supplements during carbohydrate-restricted training over a longer time frame of weeks or months will be beneficial.
In this study, the researchers did not consider menstrual phase. Follow up studies are needed to determine whether the improved training intensity when ingesting a protein hydrolysate compared with placebo-water is specific to menstrual phase.
Commenting on the study, first author Tanja Oosthuyse said,
"The application of the findings from our study are purely for the specialised training tactic of overnight fasted carbohydrate-restricted exercise that aims to enhance training.
Racing nutrition, however, is very different and at the moment guidelines are standard for both men and women. We need to specify potential differences so that both men and women can train and race at the highest possible calibre."
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Peer reviewed Experimental study People
Better pregnancy outcomes linked to reduction of armed conflict in Colombia
Study highlights adverse pregnancy outcomes in pregnant women living in areas with conflict violence
A new study has linked a July 2015 ceasefire of conflict violence in Colombia with better pregnancy outcomes for women who conceived after the ceasefire began. Giancarlo Buitrago of Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia, and Rodrigo Moreno-Serra of the University of York, U.K., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.
Previous research has suggested the possibility that women living in areas with armed violence experience adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, methodological problems or inappropriate data have hampered prior investigations into these associations.
To better understand these associations, Buitrago and Moreno-Serra examined pregnancy outcome data for women who conceived before and after a ceasefire of conflict violence was declared in Colombia on July 20, 2015. The ceasefire called for a halt in violence by the guerrilla group FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), which was later followed by a final peace agreement between the government and FARC.
The analysis included data for more than 3 million women living across Colombia who were pregnant between 2013 and 2017. It found that the women were indeed exposed to fewer conflict events, on average, after the ceasefire began, and this reduction was associated with lower risks of stillbirths and perinatal mortality--death of the child before or shortly after birth.
In areas with greater numbers of FARC-related conflict violence events, stillbirths decreased by up to 9.53 deaths per 1,000 pregnancies, and perinatal mortality decreased by up to 10.69 deaths per 1,000 pregnancies. No statistically significant associations were found between miscarriages and reduced exposure to conflict violence.
These findings are in line with other evidence for the benefits of reduced exposure to conflict violence in early pregnancy, and suggest that the peace process in Colombia is contributing to better population health. The authors note that their findings also highlight the need for countries with long-running armed conflict to make special efforts to protect pregnant women.
The authors add: "The results in our paper uncover some less researched consequences of armed conflicts for health. We find that, beyond the tragic loss of life amid armed conflicts, which in Colombia is estimated to have reached over 200,000 deaths, exposure to conflict violence is also linked to worse pregnancy outcomes. Pregnancies of women exposed to more intense conflict violence in Colombia were more likely to result in a stillbirth or perinatal death, particularly if mothers were exposed to violence during the early stages of pregnancy. This has often been an undocumented, "invisible" health penalty associated with protracted conflicts. While we still need further research to fully understand the most important biological pathways linking violence exposure to pregnancy outcomes, our study has important implications for policy. First, it suggests that the de-escalation in violence brought about by the ongoing Colombian peace process has been contributing to better health, and therefore that the peace process in the country should be protected and strengthened. Second, it indicates the high relevance of devising focused health policies that can protect pregnant women in contexts of protracted violence, as these women represent a particularly vulnerable group in those settings."
Funding: RMS was supported by a research grant from the UK Medical Research Council (MR/R013667/1). GB was supported by the School of Medicine at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and University of York (CHE Research Fellowship). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Citation: Buitrago G, Moreno-Serra R (2021) Conflict violence reduction and pregnancy outcomes: A regression discontinuity design in Colombia. PLoS Med 18(7): e1003684. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003684
