Predicting mortality risks using smartphones

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CARL R. WOESE INSTITUTE FOR GENOMIC BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

 

IMAGE: MEASURING HEALTH WITH A CARRIED SMARTPHONE, USING THE CHARACTERISTIC MOTION OF A HUMAN BODY THAT HAS BEEN COMPUTED FROM A PHONE SENSOR view more 

CREDIT: QIAN CHENG

Healthcare professionals have long recognized the association of physical activity with mortality risk—those who engage in more moderate-to-vigorous activity have lower mortality rates. In a new study, researchers across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have shown that smartphones suffice to monitor people’s walking activity. They used sensor data from 100,000 participants to construct models of health status and mortality risk.

Measuring physical activity usually falls into three categories: self-reported questionnaires, walking a fixed distance under timed observation, and wearing activity monitors. The first two focus on quality of movement instead of quantity. However, sensor-based methods are the most advantageous because they measure physical activity during daily living. Unfortunately, access to such wearable sensors is limited due to health inequities.  

To circumvent this problem, the researchers turned to smartphones. According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of the US population own a cell phone, and 83% possess a smartphone that contains motion sensors. Since mobile phones are often carried while walking, they could be used to measure physical activity. Although the total measure of activity over 24 hours may not be possible, smartphones can be used to measure the quality of walking.

For their study, the researchers used the UK Biobank, which is the largest national cohort with sensor records that span the last 20 years. They studied 100,000 participants who were demographically representative of the UK population. The categories that were considered included age, sex, race, health disorders, previous hospitalizations, lifestyles, education levels, and income.

Each participant wore activity monitors with motion sensors for one week. Although the wrist sensor was worn differently than how an equivalent smartphone sensor is carried, the motion sensors were able to obtain information on walking intensity from short bursts of normal walking. The researchers analyzed these datasets to model the characteristic motions of these walking sessions to predict mortality risk. The UK Death Registry was used to determine which participants had passed away over a five-year timeframe.

Using Biocluster2, a high-performance computing resource at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the team was able to successfully validate predictive models of mortality risk using only 6 minutes per day of steady walking measured by the sensor. This time period is a vast improvement over the activity monitors, which assume the participants wear the sensors for 10 hours per day. The accuracy achieved was similar to physical measures such as gait speed during short walks, as well as similar to activity monitors that measure total activity.

"Our work is a big advance in health equity,” said Bruce Schatz (EIRH), a professor of library administration in the university library. “Smartphones are ubiquitous in high-income countries and increasingly common in low-income countries. Showing that they can predict mortality as accurately as existing methods implies that health monitors at a population scale are now feasible.”  

There are limitations to the study that the researchers would like to address in their future studies. Although they chose a demographically representative population, low-income lifestyles differ from high-income lifestyles even when age and sex are the same. Consequently, walking tests may differ since the 6 minutes of steady walking was chosen to mimic walk tests for hospital patients with cardiopulmonary disorders. The researchers will also broaden their population samples to include the US Precision Medicine Initiative, where the participants will be representative of the US national population, which is more diverse than that of the UK.  Since the models rely only on machine learning from sensor inputs, other types of health status may also be accurately predictable, such as cardiac health or asymptomatic detection of infectious diseases like COVID-19.

The research team consisted of Schatz; Haowen Zhou, a visiting scholar in the Schatz group at the IGB and now a graduate student in statistics at the University of Virginia; Ruoqing Zhu (CGD), an associate professor of statistics; Anita Ung, a staff physician at the McKinley Health Center.  During this research, Schatz and Ung were faculty in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, using the IGB facility to collaborate with the Department of Statistics.

The study “Population analysis of mortality risk: Predictive models from passive monitors using motion sensors for 100,000 UK Biobank participants” was published in PLOS Digital Health and can be found at https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig….

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JOURNAL

PLOS Digital Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pdig.0000045 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Population analysis of mortality risk: Predictive models from passive monitors using motion sensors for 100,000 UK Biobank participants

MIT Press journal Open Mind is now a diamond open access publication

With the removal of all financial publishing barriers, the cognitive science journal provides free access for both readers and scholars

Business Announcement

THE MIT PRESS

The MIT Press is pleased to announce that Open Mind is now a diamond open access journal, eliminating all article processing fees for scholars. By embracing the diamond open access (OA) model, the Journal strives to encourage the publication of new research by more diverse voices and better serve the greater cognitive science community. 

Since its founding in 2017, Open Mind has been a venue for the highest quality, most innovative work in cognitive science, delivering permanent and free access to its articles for readers. The Journal covers the broad array of content areas within cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, computer science and mathematical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, comparative psychology and behavioral anthropology, decision sciences, and theoretical and experimental linguistics. With the elimination of processing fees for authors, Open Mind hopes to increase the rate of submissions across these content areas and aid researchers in publishing their scholarship open access. 

“We have seen a hurdle in the form of costs associated with publishing open access,” said Edward Gibson, editor of Open Mind and professor, department of brain & cognitive Sciences, MIT. “Even though our open access charge was very low, we think that this was a major deterrent to cognitive science researchers. We are optimistic that these changes will lead to many more submissions to Open Mind, and we hope that the rate of submissions will grow much more over the coming months.”

“We are thrilled to have Open Mind join the diamond OA scholarly ecosystem,” says Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at the MIT Press. “With this move, the Journal joins a growing number of diamond OA publications at the MIT Press that are removing financial barriers to make scholarly communications more equitable.”

In July, Samuel J. Gershman, professor of psychology, Harvard University joined Gibson as co-editor of Open Mind. With Gershman on board, Open Mind aims to better service the broader computational cognitive science community. Gershman explains, “We are hoping researchers from many more domains within cognitive science will see the Journal as a good place to report their projects. We are currently working on special issues on computational cognitive neuroscience, principles of intelligence, and information theory in cognitive systems, with the first scheduled to publish in Spring 2023.”

To support the sustainability of the diamond OA model, Open Mind will be utilizing Janeway for submission and peer review management. Janeway is an inexpensive, open source publishing platform developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, to support the goals of the Open Library of Humanities, an open access academic publisher.

To learn more Open Mind, visit https://direct.mit.edu/opmi. 

About The MIT Press
Established in 1962, The MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

UCF researchers create lunar regolith bricks that could be used to construct Artemis base camp

Using resources found in space to construct off-world structures can drastically reduce the need to transport building materials for programs like Artemis

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA

 

VIDEO: UCF MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR RANAJAY GHOSH AND GRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT PETER WARREN EXPLAIN THE PROCESS THEY USED TO CREATE CYLINDRICAL BRICKS USING SIMULATED LUNAR AND MARTIAN REGOLITH. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA.

Using resources found in space to construct off-world structures can drastically reduce the need to transport building materials for programs like Artemis.

ORLANDO, Oct. 25, 2022 – As part of NASA’s Artemis program to establish a long-term presence on the moon, it aims to build an Artemis base camp that includes a modern lunar cabin, rover and mobile home. This fixed habitat could potentially be constructed with bricks made of lunar regolith and saltwater, thanks to a recent discovery from a team of UCF researchers.

Associate Professor Ranajay Ghosh of UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and his research group found that 3D-printed bricks of lunar regolith can withstand the extreme environments of space and are a good candidate for cosmic construction projects. Lunar regolith is the loose dust, rocks and materials that cover the moon’s surface.

The results of their experiments are detailed in a recent issue of Ceramics International and were also featured in New Scientist magazine prior to publication.

“It is always an honor to be able to publish our work in a prestigious journal such as Ceramics International, and we are quite delighted that New Scientist picked our research to publish in their magazine,” Ghosh says. “Considering UCF’s special place as a space grant university, we feel privileged to contribute to the great tradition of scientific knowledge.”

To create the bricks, Ghosh’s team in the Complex Structures and Mechanics of Solids (COSMOS) Lab used a combination of 3D printing and binder jet technology (BJT), an additive manufacturing method that forces out a liquid binding agent onto a bed of powder. In Ghosh’s experiments, the binding agent was saltwater, and the powder was regolith made by UCF’s Exolith Lab.

“BJT is uniquely suitable for ceramic-like materials that are difficult to melt with a laser,” Ghosh says. “Therefore, it has great potential for regolith-based extraterrestrial manufacturing in a sustainable way to produce parts, components and construction structures.”

The BJT process resulted in weak cylindrical bricks called green parts that were then baked at high temperatures to produce a stronger structure. Bricks baked at lower temperatures crumbled, but those exposed to heat of up to 1200 degrees Celsius were able to withstand pressure of up to 250 million times the Earth’s atmosphere.

Ghosh says the work paves a path for the use of BJT in the construction of materials and structures in space. Their findings also demonstrate that off-world structures can be built using resources found in space, which can drastically reduce the need to transport building materials for missions like Artemis.

“This research contributes to the ongoing debate in space exploration community on finding the balance between in-situ extraterrestrial resource utilization versus material transported from Earth,” Ghosh says. “The further we develop techniques that utilize the abundance of regolith, the more capability we will have in establishing and expanding base camps on the moon, Mars, and other planets in the future.”

The first author of the paper is Peter Warren, Ghosh’s graduate research assistant. Co-authors include mechanical engineering doctoral candidate Nandhini Raju, mechanical engineering alumnus Hossein Ebrahimi ’21PhD, mechanical engineering doctoral student Milos Krsmanovic, and aerospace engineering professors Seetha Raghavan and Jayanta Kapat.

Ghosh joined UCF in 2016 as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and is a researcher with MAE’s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research. He manages the Complex Structures and Mechanics of Solids Laboratory, better known as the COSMOS Lab, where he and his team fabricate and design novel materials with the aid of computer models and experiments. He earned his doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell University in 2010 and is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Writer: Marisa Ramiccio, University of Central Florida

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JOURNAL

Ceramics International

DOI

10.1016/j.ceramint.2022.07.329 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Effect of sintering temperature on microstructure and mechanical properties of molded Martian and Lunar regolith

TanSat’s first attempt to detect human-caused CO2 is successful

Chinese and European satellite missions to advance global carbon dioxide monitoring

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: Ａ COORDINATE MEASUREMENT ON ANTHROPOGENIC CO2 EMISSION FROM TANSAT (CHINA) AND SENTINEL-5P (EUROPE) view more 

CREDIT: DONGXU YANG

An international research team has analyzed measurements from the TanSat mission and the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor mission to identify carbon dioxide from human activities. This is the first attempt to use TanSat measurements to detect anthropogenic, or human-caused, carbon dioxide emission signatures. Quantifying anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is one of the most important requirements needed for greenhouse gases to be monitored on a global basis.

 

The team, with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, published their research in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on October 25.

 

Carbon dioxide is recognized as the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas because of its significant impact on global warming and climate change. Because of this, a number of satellite missions dedicated to atmospheric greenhouse measurements have been developed in the last decade.

 

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in 2015, participants agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global surface temperature increases. Slowing down global warming represents a challenge faced by the global population in the 21st century. Concentrations of carbon dioxide continue to rise because of anthropogenic activities such as fossil fuel combustion and land-use change. The emissions related to the combustion of fossil fuels are particularly localized, with urban areas being the dominant contributor responsible for more than 70% of global emissions. Yet it has been especially challenging for scientists to obtain the high precision measurements they needed to study anthropogenic emissions from cities.

 

TanSat, launched in 2016, is China's first global carbon dioxide monitoring satellite. Tan is Chinese pronunciation of carbon. While TanSat has been providing researchers with data for several years, new algorithms were recently added to the TanSat instruments that greatly improved TanSat’s measurement precision.

 

The team conducted their study looking at two sets of measurements collected over two cities. The team used TanSat carbon dioxide data captured in May 2018 near Tangshan, China, and in March 2018 near Tokyo, Japan. They compared the TanSat data to nitrogen dioxide measurements captured by the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite on the same dates over the same cities.

 

 “We analyzed TanSat data in synergy with European Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor TROPOMI nitrogen dioxide observations to help the detection of anthropogenic plumes and to analyze the carbon dioxide-to-nitrogen dioxide ratio,” said Dongxu Yang, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Their two case studies show TanSat carbon dioxide measurements have the capability to capture the anthropogenic variations in the plume and have spatial patterns like that of the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument’s nitrogen dioxide observations. In addition, the carbon dioxide-to-nitrogen dioxide ratio in Tangshan, China, and Tokyo, Japan, align with the emission inventories.

 

 “This is an important step in TanSat data analysis. The next step is to infer emissions and to prepare for the TanSat-2 constellation including the joint analysis of CO2 and NO2 plumes,” said Janne Hakkarainen, from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

 

Looking ahead, the team has plans to expand this research. “The TanSat is our first attempt on global carbon monitoring. The next generation of China’s Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Satellite mission, TanSat-2, is now in the design phase,” said Yi Liu, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

According to Liu, TanSat-2’s target measurements will focus on cities with an 800–1000 kilometer wide swath to record the gradient of carbon dioxide from city central to rural areas using an imaging process and a 500 meter footprint size to improve the emission estimation accuracy. TanSat-2 will be a constellation of satellites distributed into at least two orbits in the morning and afternoon to cover a city or a point source twice a day.

 

“Our goal is to use satellite measurements to improve our knowledge on carbon cycle and to further analyze and constraint the carbon dioxide sources and sinks and their uncertainties,” said Liu.

 

The research team includes Dongxu Yang, Yi Liu, Zhaonan Cai, from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Janne Hakkarainen, Iolanda Ialongo, and Johanna Tamminen, from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

 

This research is funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Finland.

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JOURNAL

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s00376-022-2237-5 

ARTICLE TITLE

Detection of Anthropogenic CO2 Emission Signatures with TanSat CO2 and with Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) NO2 Measurements: First Results

European project to explore pathways towards post-growth economics

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

Could societies shift away from growth-oriented economics and sustain human well-being within planetary boundaries? A new international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in Switzerland will address this important question thanks to a €10 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

Over the next 6 years, ICTA-UAB researchers Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel, alongside Professor Julia Steinberger from the Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne (UNIL), will develop the project "A Post-Growth Deal" (REAL), which promises to advance ecological economics in radical new directions.

To reduce emissions fast enough to meet the Paris targets, and to reverse other ecological pressures, high-income economies will need to dramatically reduce their use of energy and material resources. But sufficient reductions may be difficult to achieve if countries continue to pursue economic growth - ever-increasing levels of industrial production - as a primary objective.

Scientists increasingly recognize the need to explore post-growth pathways. Recent calls for post-growth transition have been discussed in major reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN panel on biodiversity (IPBES), and the European Environment Agency. But the existing knowledge base cannot yet meet this demand. The REAL project will advance the science so that post-growth pathways can be fully described and successfully implemented.

To this end, the ERC has awarded them a €9.9 million Synergy Grant - a highly competitive grant and one of the most prestigious awards for advanced research in Europe. With this funding, scientists will join their respective expertise to explore “how dramatic reductions in energy and resource use can be achieved, while at the same time ending poverty and ensuring decent lives for all”. They aspire to propose new models of politics, policies and provisioning systems in a post-growth direction, and engage with questions of development in the global South. The goal here, explains Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist at ICTA-UAB, is “convergence between the global North and South, and within countries, to a level of resource use that is sufficient for high human development and compatible with planetary boundaries”.

The “Post-Growth Deal” refers to the need for a new political and institutional compact between government and citizens equivalent to that of the New Deal, or the welfare state, but now geared around the security of well-being in an era of prolonged economic stagnation and unfolding climate breakdown. Creating such a “dDea”’, requires new research, new data, and new models that the REAL project intends to develop.   

“It’s the first time that a project of such scale and scope is granted on the topic of post-growth”, says Giorgos Kallis, environmental scientist at ICTA-UAB. “This is a recognition and validation of the efforts many isolated researchers have made for years - against mainstream opposition, and with little institutional or financial support. It is an opportunity that carries significant responsibility”. Kallis emphasized also the importance of synergy: “Every time the three of us meet, we feel like the different pieces of a puzzle coming together. This is a truly inter-disciplinary project. We hope to set a new paradigm for how to approach questions of planetary importance“. 

“This project is nothing short of revolutionary”, said Julia Steinberger, ecological economist at the University of Lausanne. “It gives us what we think is the best chance to explore the transformative ideas necessary to protect humanity from the intertwined crises of the coming decades: to reorient our economies away from risky growth dependence, and towards human flourishing.”

 

Lack of access to healthy food may raise risk of death from heart failure

A new study in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure has found an association between not having healthy food available in communities and increased rates of death from heart failure

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

DALLAS, Oct. 25, 2022 — A study reviewing data from nearly 3,000 counties in the United States has found that living in a community with easy access to grocery stores and affordable, healthy food is associated with lower heart failure death rates, according to new research published today in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal.

Food insecurity occurs when healthy food is not readily available on a daily basis, due to poverty or socioeconomic challenges, causing people to go hungry or eat food that is of reduced quality, variety or desirability. While previous research has confirmed that food insecurity is associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes, little research is available about the local food environment and its potential relationship to death from heart failure. A 2019 paper published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that, on a county level in the U.S., poverty was the strongest socioeconomic factor associated with heart failure and coronary heart disease, and the association was stronger for heart failure than coronary heart disease.

“Heart failure mortality is on the rise in populations that live in socioeconomic deprivation, and, importantly, we believe that nutrition plays a role in heart failure mortality, and food insecurity may be particularly detrimental in this population,” said lead study author Keerthi T. Gondi, M.D., an internal medicine resident at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “We know that important relationships exist among food access and food affordability and heart health. This will have to be addressed in order to make changes to the burden of cardiovascular disease in populations that live in socioeconomic deprivation moving forward.”

This study is one of the first analyses to investigate the association between local food environments and heart failure mortality. Heart failure is a chronic, progressive condition in which the heart muscle becomes so weak it no longer pumps blood as it should. According to Gondi, he and his colleagues examined the death rate from heart failure because it is a consistent metric reported across all US counties, providing an ability to comprehensively evaluate heart failure outcomes at the population level. In 2019, heart failure death accounted for nearly more than 86,000 deaths in the U.S., according to the Association’s Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics Update for 2022.

The researchers sought to determine whether food environment by county level was associated with heart failure death rates. They reviewed 2018 data from the National Vital Statistics System – a database of all births and deaths in the U.S. – and examined the potential for associations among the heart failure death rates in each county with the county’s 2018 Food Insecurity Percentage score and Food Environment Index score.

The researchers collected each county’s Food Insecurity Percentage score — the percentage of the population who lack adequate, consistent access to healthy food — and Food Environment Index score — an index ranked from 0 (worst) to 10 (best) based on a composite of metrics including affordability of nutritious food, food insecurity, grocery store proximity, transportation and socioeconomic factors — from the USDA’s Food Environment Atlas and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation County Health Rankings. The Food Environment Atlas assembles statistics on food environment indicators and provides a spatial overview of a community's ability to access healthy food.

Evaluated together, the Food Insecurity Percentage and Food Environment Index provide a clear picture of a population’s food environment.

Of the 2,956 counties in the study, the analysis found:

• The average Food Insecurity Percentage was 13% for all counties, and the average Food Environment Index score was 7.8.
• Counties with a Food Insecurity Percentage above the national median of 13.7% had a higher rate of deaths from heart failure compared to counties with a Food Insecurity Percentage below the median (30.7 deaths versus 26.7 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively).
• After adjusting for a range of socioeconomic and health factors – including the poverty rate, income inequity, rural vs. urban locations, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and smoking - a 1% decrease in Food Insecurity Percentage by county was associated with a 1.3% lower heart failure death rate. Similarly, a 1-unit increase in the Food Environment Index score by county was associated with a 3.6% decrease in the heart failure death rate.
• On the county level, decreases in the Food Environment Index and increases in the Food Insecurity Percentage were found to have a stronger association with the death rate from heart failure than with the death rate for other subtypes of cardiovascular disease, as well as with the all-cause death rate.
• The strongest association between food environment and heart failure death rate was found in counties with the highest income inequity and the highest poverty rate.

“The findings of this study are unfortunate yet not surprising. These results are consistent with prior studies that have demonstrated the association of cardiovascular disease and food insecurity,” said Anne Thorndike, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA, who was not involved in this study, director of the Cardiac Lifestyle Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, immediate past chair of the Association’s Nutrition Committee and a member of the Association’s Lifestyle Council. “This study provides a robust evaluation of the food environment by U.S. counties and shows that characteristics of the food environment are strongly associated with death from heart failure.”

A limitation of the study is that it only captures data from one year, before the COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, it may have limited generalization at this time. More studies are needed to examine these associations over a longer period of time.

The study also revealed that counties with higher heart failure death rates also had fewer food stores, poorer access to healthy foods for adults older than age 65 and a lower participation rate in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the U.S. government’s program that supplements food budgets to help reduce food insecurity for families and individuals who have an annual income level at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty criteria (for a family of three, those with annual income below $29,940 quality for SNAP).

According to the Association’s Life’s Essential 8, dietary intake, which is affected by food insecurity, is one of the key contributors to cardiovascular disease risk, and the low prevalence of ideal diet drives the overall low prevalence of ideal cardiovascular health in the U.S. Better cardiovascular health helps lower the risk for heart disease, stroke and other major health problems.

“Food insecurity and lack of access to healthy food are key contributors to poor dietary quality and what is referred to as ‘nutrition insecurity,’” Thorndike said. “The American Heart Association and others are now acknowledging that to help Americans achieve ideal cardiovascular health, particularly ideal diet, we need to broaden our efforts to address both the psychological and social determinants of our health behaviors and well-being. These efforts need to include policy, health care, and community interventions that improve access to nutritious food for people at every stage of life.”

Co-authors are John Larson, M.D.; Aaron Sifuentes, M.D.; Neil B. Alexander, M.D., M.S.; Matthew C. Konerman, M.D.; Kali S. Thomas, Ph.D., M.A.; and Scott L. Hummel, M.D. Authors’ disclosures are listed in the manuscript.

The authors reported no funding sources for this study.

Statements and conclusions of studies published in the American Heart Association’s scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the Association’s policy or position. The Association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, device manufacturers and health insurance providers and the Association’s overall financial information are available here.

Additional Resources:

• Available multimedia is on right column of release link https://newsroom.heart.org/news/lack-of-access-to-healthy-food-may-raise-risk-of-death-from-heart-failure?preview=2ae30ca930314946bd1c129cf7b3ff45
• After Oct. 25, view the manuscript and editorial online.
• AHA news release: “Gateway” foods like candy, pastries and frozen treats may lead to unhealthy teen eating (September 2022)
• AHA news release: Policy recommendations offer strategies to close ‘significant gaps’ in nutrition security (May 2022)
• AHA resource: The American Heart Association Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations
• AHA resource: What is Heart Failure?
• Follow AHA/ASA news on Twitter @HeartNews
• Follow news from the AHA’s Circulation: Heart Failure journal @CircHF

About the American Heart Association

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

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JOURNAL

Circulation Heart Failure

DOI

10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.122.009651 

ARTICLE TITLE

Health of the Food Environment Is Associated With Heart Failure Mortality in the United States

Novel insecticides are bad news for bee health and their guts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MARTIN-LUTHER-UNIVERSITÄT HALLE-WITTENBERG

 

IMAGE: BEES ARE OFTEN EXPOSED TO MULTIPLE PESTICIDES IN NATURE. view more 

CREDIT: UNI HALLE / MARKUS SCHOLZ

Insecticides containing flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor can have devastating effects on honey bee health. The substances damage the insects' intestinal flora, especially when used in conjunction with a common fungicide, making them more susceptible to disease and shortening their life span. This was recently proven in a study conducted at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), as published in Science of the Total Environment. The two insecticides were considered harmless to bees and bumblebees when approved, but their use has since been severely restricted.

For the study, honey bees that were free from environmental influences were first bred in the laboratory. "We wanted to control every aspect of the bees’ lives - from their diet to their exposure to pathogens or pesticides", says Dr Yahya Al Naggar, the biologist who led the project at MLU and who now works at Tanta University in Egypt. In the first few days, all bees were given the same food: sugar syrup. They were then divided into several groups and various pesticides were added to their food. One group was given flupyradifurone, while another was given sulfoxaflor. Both substances are approved insecticides in Germany, but their use is now limited to greenhouses.

As pesticides are often used as a mixture, the scientists also took this into account in their laboratory experiment by enriching the food administered to two other groups not only with the insecticides mentioned, but also with azoxystrobin, which has been used to protect plants from harmful fungi for many decades. The concentration of the substances was well below the legal requirements in each case. "Our approach was based on the realistic concentrations that might be found in pollen and nectar from plants that have been treated with the pesticides", says Al Naggar. A control group continued to receive the normal sugar syrup without additives.

Over a period of ten days, the team observed whether the substances had any effects on the bees and, if so, what. They found that the pesticides are anything but harmless: Around half of all bees whose diet had been supplemented with flupyradifurone died during the study - and even more when combined with azoxystrobin. While sulfoxaflor produced similar effects, more insects survived the diet. 

The scientists also analysed the bees’ intestinal flora, i.e. the bacteria and fungi living in their digestive tract. "The fungicide azoxystrobin led to a significant reduction in naturally occurring fungi. That was to be expected, as fungicides are used to control fungi", says Dr Tesfaye Wubet from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), who is also a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. Over the course of the ten-day study, however, the team was able to show that the mixture of fungi and bacteria detected in the insects differed greatly from the control group depending on the substances used. According to the researchers, the bacterium Serratia marcescens was able to spread alarmingly well in the digestive tract of the treated insects. "These bacteria are pathogenic and harmful to bees’ health. They can make it harder for the insects to fight off infection, leading to premature death", explains Al Naggar. 

As the study was conducted in a laboratory in Halle to exclude the number of external influences, it is unclear whether the same results can be found in nature. "The effects of the pesticides could well be even more dramatic - or the bees might be able to fully or at least partially compensate for the negative effects", concludes Wubet. With this in mind, the team calls for the potential effects of new pesticides on beneficial insects to be researched more rigorously before they are approved and for their effects on aspects such as intestinal flora to be included as standard in the risk assessment.

The study was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with additional support via the EU-funded project "Poshbee". 

Study: Al Naggar Y., Singavarapu B., Paxton R.J. & Wubet T.. Bees under interactive stressors: the novel insecticides flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor along with the fungicide azoxystrobin disrupt the gut microbiota of honey bees and increase opportunistic bacterial pathogens. Science of the Total Environment (2022). doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157941

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JOURNAL

Science of The Total Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157941 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Bees under interactive stressors: the novel insecticides flupyradifurone and sulfoxaflor along with the fungicide azoxystrobin disrupt the gut microbiota of honey bees and increase opportunistic bacterial pathogens

NASA fieldwork studies signs of climate change in Arctic, Boreal regions

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NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: AERIAL VIEW OF ALASKA OUT THE WINDOW OF A NASA GULFSTREAM III PLANE. THE LAND IS MOSTLY LUSH AND GREEN, WITH LAKES DOTTING IT AND RIVERS SNAKING THROUGH THE LANDSCAPE. THE SKY IS BLUE AND HAS PUFFY WHITE CLOUDS. view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT: NASA / SOFIE BATES

From the window of a NASA Gulfstream III research aircraft, Alaska looks like a pristine wilderness untouched by humans. The land is covered in lush, green vegetation and dotted with bright blue lakes. Snow-capped mountains reach toward the sky, and chocolate milk-colored rivers snake across the landscape. The obvious signs of human activity – cities, roads, infrastructure – are hard to spot.

But on closer inspection, some hints of human-induced change appear to the eye. Sunken pockets of land. Abnormally tilted trees. Ponds where there used to be dry ground. Through the eyes of scientists collecting data from the ground and the air, the signal is clear: The Arctic is being affected by climate change more than most places on Earth. Since 2015, scientists participating in NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) have been studying the impacts of climate change on Earth’s far northern regions and how those changes are intertwined.

“ABoVE is a large-scale study of environmental change, not just climate change,” said Peter Griffith, a carbon cycle researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and one of the leaders of ABoVE. “And we’re doing this as only NASA can: by studying this region from leaf to orbit.”

 

Previous field and airborne campaigns focused on things like changes in plant cover and shifting animal migration patterns. In the summer of 2022, the team investigated permafrost thaw, methane emissions from lakes, and the effects of wildfires in Alaska and northwestern Canada. They did this with instruments observing from research aircraft and with scientists collecting measurements on the ground.

Studying Arctic Changes from Air and Space

One of the key components of ABoVE is the airborne campaign, which uses research aircraft like the NASA Gulfstream III airplane. This year the plane was mounted with the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, which sends out pulses of radio waves that reflect off of Earth's surface and give scientists an accurate idea of the shape of the land and water surfaces below – even when looking through clouds or thick vegetation.

 

Each year members of the ABoVE team fly over their field sites, as well as wildfire burn scars and other areas of scientific interest, allowing them to compare measurements taken from both the air and ground. They also revisit sites from year to year to see how the landscapes evolve over time.

 

UAVSAR is similar to the main instrument on an upcoming satellite. The NASA-ISRO (NISAR) satellite will be a joint mission between the Indian Space Research Organization and NASA to observe Earth’s land and ice. NISAR is also part of NASA’s upcoming Earth System Observatory.

“ABoVE and UAVSAR give the research community a really good example of what NISAR data will look like and what kind of science they can extract from these datasets,” explained Franz Meyer, a NISAR science team member who also is the chief scientist of the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks.

  

Matt Macander, with Alaska Biological Research, kneels to point at a baby spruce tree growing amidst small shrubs and fireweed three years after the 2019 Shovel Creek Fire burned near Fairbanks, Alaska.

CREDIT

Credits: NASA / Sofie Bates

NISAR will collect data globally and year-round, allowing research groups like the ABoVE team to study critical processes – the development of methane emission hotspots, how and where permafrost is thawing, long-term consequences of wildfires – even when they can't be there in person.

Thawing Permafrost is Making New Lakes, New Methane Hotspots

 

Permafrost – layers of soil that have stayed frozen for at least two years – underlie much of Alaska and northwestern Canada. In some areas, especially within the Arctic Circle, the landscape is rich with permafrost. In others, this frozen soil is found in patches. Either way, it has mostly stayed frozen for thousands of years.

 

But as our planet warms, permafrost is thawing at an accelerating rate. This is changing the shape and vegetation of landscapes and, in some cases, creating new ponds and lakes that are also hotspots for greenhouse gas emissions.

When the hard, frozen permafrost layer warms, it changes into softer, spongier ground. That mushy ground sinks and can damage roads, houses, and other infrastructure sitting on top of it. In some areas like interior Alaska, the permafrost layer also contains large chunks of ice. As permafrost thaws and this ice melts, the resulting sinkholes can fill with the meltwater and form new ponds and lakes.

 

The warmer temperatures that cause permafrost to thaw also increase the activity of microbes that digest dead plants and other thawed organic matter. This microbial decay releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that bubbles to the lake surface and enters the atmosphere.

This thawing process is happening all over Alaska and northwestern Canada, which already has millions of lakes and ponds. But most of these lakes are hundreds or thousands of years old, meaning the microbes have run out of organic matter to decompose and the lakes are no longer releasing significant amounts of methane.

 

In 2022, the ABoVE team closely examined Big Trail Lake, just outside of Fairbanks. “Lakes like Big Trail are new, young, and important because they are what’s going to happen in the future as the climate changes and permafrost thaws,” said Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks working with the ABoVE team.

Arctic and Boreal Fires are Becoming More Extreme

Year-to-year observations from the sky and the ground are especially important for understanding the evolving impacts of wildfires on Arctic and boreal landscape. Fires have long been a natural part of these ecosystems. But as Earth’s climate changes, wildfires in these areas are becoming larger, more frequent, and more severe. This can make it difficult for ecosystems to recover after a fire – changing the plants that grow back and accelerating permafrost thaw.

Fires in Alaska and northwestern Canada can be different from those in the continental United States. Sometimes the ground itself burns, as the soft, peaty layer of soil and organic material above the permafrost layer is flammable. Also, fires in remote areas are usually left to burn themselves out unless they threaten houses or other infrastructure. This gives scientists a “natural experiment” to see how fire runs its course.

 

“These tundra fires are so rare that we don’t always get a great opportunity to study them,” said Liz Hoy, a wildfire researcher at NASA Goddard and one of the lead scientists for ABoVE.

 

For several years, the ABoVE team has flown over recent wildland fires. For instance, the team flew over the site of the 2019 Shovel Creek Fire and the 2021 Yankovich Road Fire before and after they burned. Such repeat flights allow scientists to see the immediate impact of wildfire and how the ecosystems respond. This year the team flew over the site of the Contact Creek Fire, which burned in late May 2022 in a largely treeless tundra near Katmai National Park in Alaska.

The ABoVE team is interested in not only in the local impacts on the ecosystems, but also how the fires may be caused by or contribute to climate change.