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)
Wednesday, July 03, 2024
States with highest COVID-19 vaccination rates showed steepest decline in pediatric asthma prevalence
Study suggests COVID-19 vaccination might have broader benefits for children living with asthma
NEMOURS
WILMINGTON, Del. (July 3, 2024) — States with high rates of COVID-19 vaccination saw more pediatric asthma patients get a break from their symptoms, according to new research published today in JAMA NetworkOpen by leaders from Nemours Children’s Health and Endeavor Health.
“Asthma is one of the most common chronic illnesses among children in the United States, with about 4.7 million children experiencing symptoms each year,” said lead author Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, Executive Vice-President, Enterprise Physician-in-Chief and Chief Scientific Officer of Nemours Children’s Health. “Whether asthma is mild or severe, it affects children’s quality of life. So anything we can do to help kids avoid flare-ups is beneficial.”
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, social distancing and school closures are thought to have resulted in fewer flares of asthma for many pediatric patients. Dr. Davis and coauthor Lakshmi Halasyamani, MD, Chief Clinical Officer of Endeavor Health in Evanston, Illinois, wondered whether that benefit extended into 2021, as the first vaccines against COVID-19 were being widely administered to adults and then children.
In the study, Drs. Davis and Halasyamani compared the change in parent-reported childhood asthma symptoms between 2018-2019 and 2020-2021. They combined that data with state COVID-19 vaccination rates for people ages 5 and up in 2020-2021, as reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The researchers found that with each increase of 10 percentage points in COVID-19 vaccination coverage, parent-reported child asthma symptoms decreased by .36 percentage points.
States in the highest quarter of COVID-19 vaccination rates overall had a decrease in asthma symptoms of 1.7 percentage points—an almost 3 times more favorable impact than states in the lowest quarter of COVID-19 vaccination rates overall, which saw an average decrease in asthma symptoms of only 0.6 percentage points in 2020-2021, compared with 2018-2019.
The coauthors explained that several factors could have contributed to the reduction in asthma symptoms. Community-level immunity, also called “herd immunity,” in states with higher vaccination rates may have helped reduce children’s risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing asthma complications. Another possibility is that children living in states with higher COVID-19 vaccination rates may have been more likely to get the shots soon after immunizations were approved for their age groups.
According to the coauthors, these findings also raise the possibility that COVID-19 vaccinations may effectively fight other illnesses that stem from coronaviruses, including the common cold.
“Ongoing vaccination against COVID-19 may offer direct benefits for children with a history of asthma, but this must be confirmed with further research,” said Dr. Halasyamani. “It also raises the question of whether broader population-level COVID-19 vaccination among children and adults can help protect children with asthma, too.”
The coauthors pointed out that one limitation of the study is that it did not measure vaccination rates specifically in children with asthma. In addition, while parent-reported data is considered a meaningful measure of patient experience, additional data such as hospital stays or emergency department visits could be used to verify these findings.
Nemours Children’s Health is one of the nation’s largest multistate pediatric health systems, which includes two freestanding children's hospitals and a network of more than 70 primary and specialty care practices. Nemours Children's seeks to transform the health of children by adopting a holistic health model that utilizes innovative, safe, and high-quality care, while also addressing children’s needs well beyond medicine. In producing the highly acclaimed, award-winning pediatric medicine podcast Well Beyond Medicine, Nemours underscores that commitment by featuring the people, programs and partnerships addressing whole child health. Nemours Children's also powers the world’s most-visited website for information on the health of children and teens, Nemours KidsHealth.org.
The Nemours Foundation, established through the legacy and philanthropy of Alfred I. duPont, provides pediatric clinical care, research, education, advocacy, and prevention programs to the children, families and communities it serves. For more information, visit Nemours.org.
About Endeavor Health
Endeavor Health℠ is a Chicagoland-based integrated health system driven by the mission to help everyone in their communities be their best. Illinois’ third-largest health system and third-largest medical group serves an area of more than 4.2 million residents across seven northeast Illinois counties. More than 27,000 team members and more than 7,100 physician and advance practice provider partners deliver seamless access to personalized, pioneering, world-class patient care across more than 300 ambulatory locations and nine hospitals, including eight Magnet-recognized acute care hospitals – Edward (Naperville), Elmhurst, Evanston, Glenbrook (Glenview), Highland Park, Northwest Community (Arlington Heights), Skokie and Swedish (Chicago) and Linden Oak Behavioral Health Hospital (Naperville). For more information, visit www.endeavorhealth.org.
JOURNAL
JAMA Network Open
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Association of COVID-19 Vaccination with Parent-Reported Symptomatic Child Asthma Prevalence
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
3-Jul-2024
FOR WOMEN, THE WORKPLACE REFLECTS THE HOME
Women in the healthcare workforce are more likely than men to experience verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and bullying, while men experience more physical violence, per global scoping review
PLOS
Women in the healthcare workforce are more likely than men to experience verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and bullying, while men experience more physical violence, per global scoping review.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Measuring body language
A large international and interdisciplinary research team led by by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, develop software to measure the objective kinematic features of movements that express emotions
MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT
Is it possible to decode how we feel from our movements? How can emotions be studied “from the outside” by using empirical methods? To answer these questions, a large international and interdisciplinary research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has developed an integrative scientific methodology. Using artistic and digital means such as motion capture technology, the researchers developed the EMOKINE software to measure the objective kinematic features of movements that express emotions. The results of the study have recently been published in the journal Behavior Research Methods.
The team had a professional dancer repeat short dance choreographies in front of a green screen. She was asked to express different emotions through her movements: anger, contentment, fear, happiness, neutrality, and sadness. To capture the dance movements as “data,” the scientists dived into the MPIEA’s technology pool: the dancer wore a full-body motion capture suit from XSENS®, equipped with a total of 17 highly sensitive sensors. In combination with a film camera, the dynamic body movements were measured and recorded. The researchers then extracted the objective kinematic characteristics (movement parameters) and programmed the software EMOKINE, which provides these movement parameters from data sets at the touch of a button.
Computerized Tracking for Whole-Body Movement
A total of 32 statistics from 12 movement parameters were compiled and extracted from a pilot dance dataset. The kinematic parameters recorded were, for example, speed, acceleration, or contraction of the limbs.
“We identified 12 kinematic features of emotional whole-body movements that have been discussed separately in the literature about previous research. We then extracted all of them from one same data set, and subsequently fed the features into the EMOKINE software,” reports first author Julia F. Christensen of the MPIEA.
Movement tracking has been used in many areas in recent years because the objective recording of movement parameters can provide insights into people's intentions, feelings and state of mind. However, this research requires a theory-based methodology so meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the recorded data.
“This work shows how artistic practice, psychology, and computer science can work together in an ideal way to develop methods for studying human cognition,” says co-first author Andrés Fernández of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany.
The methodological framework that accompanies the software package, and which explicitly uses dance movements to study emotions, is a departure from previous research approaches, which have often used video clips of “emotional actions,” such as waving hands or walking.
“We are particularly excited about the publication of this work, which involved so many experts, for example from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, the University of Glasgow, and a film team from WiseWorld Ai, Portugal. It brought together disciplines from psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and empirical aesthetics, but also from dance and film,” summarizes senior author Gemma Roig, Professor of Computer Science, Computational Vision, and AI Lab at Goethe University.
The Open-Source Software Package
EMOKINE is freely available on ZENODO and GitHub and can be adapted to other motion capture systems with minor modifications. These freely available digital tools can be used to analyze the emotional expression of dancers and other groups of artists, and also everyday movements.
The researchers now hope that the EMOKINE software they have developed will be used in experimental psychology, affective neuroscience, and in computer vision—especially in AI-assisted analysis of visual media, a branch of AI that enables computers and systems to extract meaningful information from digital images, videos, and other visual inputs. EMOKINE will help scientists answer research questions about how kinematic parameters of whole-body movements convey different intentions, feelings, and states of mind to the observer.
Forty million years before the first dinosaurs evolved, a ferocious predator lurked in swampy waters. Its skull alone was over two feet long. It lay in wait, its jaws open wide, preparing to clamp down its interlocking jaws on any prey unwise enough to swim past. Meet Gaiasia jennyae, the swamp creature with a toilet seat-shaped head. Scientists described the newly-discovered fossil in a paper in the journal Nature.
“Gaiasia jennyae was considerably larger than a person, and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes. It's got a big, flat, toilet seat-shaped head, which allows it to open its mouth and suck in prey. It has these huge fangs, the whole front of the mouth is just giant teeth,” says Jason Pardo, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago and the co-lead author of the Nature study. “It’s a big predator, but potentially also a relatively slow ambush predator.”
The fossil is named for the Gai-as Formation in Namibia where it was found, and for Jenny Clack, a paleontologist who specialized in the evolution of early tetrapods-- the four-limbed vertebrates that evolved from lobe-finned fishes and gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Pardo’s co-lead author, Claudia Marsicano of the University of Buenos Aires and her colleagues found the fossil. “When we found this enormous specimen just lying on the outcrop as a giant concretion, it was really shocking. I knew just from seeing it that it was something completely different. We were all very excited,” said Marsicano. “After examining the skull, the structure of the front of the skull caught my attention. It was the only clearly visible part at that time, and it showed very unusually interlocking large fangs, creating a unique bite for early tetrapods.”
The team unearthed several specimens, including one with a well-preserved, articulated skull and spine. “We had some really fantastic material, including a complete skull, that we could then use to compare with other animals from this age and get a sense of what this animal was and what makes it unique,” says Pardo. It turns out, there’s a lot about the creature that makes it special.
While today, Namibia is just north of South Africa, it was even further south 300 million years ago. It was near the 60th parallel, almost even with the northernmost point of Antarctica today. And at that time, the Earth was nearing the end of an ice age. The swampy land near the equator was drying up and becoming more forested, but closer to the poles, the swamps remained, potentially alongside patches of ice and glaciers.
In the warmer, drier parts of the world, animals were evolving to new forms. Early four-legged vertebrates, called stem tetrapods, branched out and split into lineages that would one day become mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. But on the fringes, in places like what’s now Namibia, more ancient forms remained.
“Gaiasia is a stem tetrapod-- it’s a holdover from that earlier group, before they evolved and split into the groups that would become mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians, which are called crown tetrapods,” says Pardo. “It’s really, really surprising that Gaiasia is so archaic. It was related to organisms that went extinct probably 40 million years prior.”
What’s more, for an oddball holdover from an even more ancient time, Gaiasia seemed to be doing pretty well for itself. “There are some other more archaic animals still hanging on 300 million years ago, but they were rare, they were small, and they were doing their own thing,” says Pardo. “Gaiasia is big, and it is abundant, and it seems to be the primary predator in its ecosystem.”
And while Gaiasia jennyae is just one species, it yields big-picture information for paleontologists studying how the world was changing during the Permian period. “It tells us that what was happening in the far south was very different from what was happening at the Equator. And that’s really important because there were a lot of groups of animals that appeared at this time that we don’t really know where they came from,” says Pardo. “The fact that we found Gaiasia in the far south tells us that there was a flourishing ecosystem that could support these very large predators. The more we look, we might find more answers about these major animal groups that we care about, like the ancestors of mammals and modern reptiles.”
Fossil skeleton, including the skull and backbone, of Gaiasia jennyae.
CREDIT
Credit: C. Marsicano.
Gaiasia jennyae as was found in the field with C. Marsicano.
Giant stem tetrapod was apex predator in Gondwanan late Palaeozoic ice age
Web-based cognitive behavioral treatment for bulimia nervosa
JAMA NETWORK
About The Study: In this randomized clinical trial, a web-based cognitive behavioral self-help intervention effectively decreased eating disorder symptoms and illness-related burden in individuals with bulimia nervosa, underlining the potential of digital interventions to complement established treatments.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
JOURNAL
JAMA Network Open
New compound could supercharge naloxone in fight against opioid overdoses
New compound supercharges naloxone
STANFORD MEDICINE
IMAGE:
NALOXONE (ORANGE) TREATS OPIOID OVERDOSE BY KICKING OUT OPIOIDS (PINK) FROM THE OPIOID RECEPTOR (TEAL). THE NEWLY DISCOVERED COMPOUND 368 (PURPLE) STRENGTHENS THE BINDING OF NALOXONE TO THE OPIOID RECEPTOR, MAKING IT A MORE EFFECTIVE LIFE-SAVING MEDICINE.
Every great superhero needs a sidekick. Now, scientists may have found a drug-busting partner for naloxone.
Naloxone is an opioid antidote that has saved tens of thousands of lives by rapidly reversing opioid overdoses in more than 90% of cases in which it is used. But its powers are temporary, lasting only 30 to 90 minutes. The rise of potent, long-acting opioids such as fentanyl means that someone brought back from the brink can still overdose after the naloxone wears off.
In a new study, Stanford Medicine scientists and collaborators have discovered a novel compound that can work alongside naloxone, supercharging its life-saving effects.
When tested in mice, adding the compound to a miniscule dose of naloxone made it as powerful as the conventional dosage, with the added benefit of milder withdrawal symptoms.
Naloxone, which is given as a nasal spray or injection, works by seizing opioid receptors, kicking out opioids and taking their place. (Naloxone has no addictive properties of its own.) The researchers found that the new compound — known for now as compound 368 — binds next to naloxone on opioid receptors and helpfully holds naloxone in place.
The findings will be published July 3 in Nature.
“Naloxone binding to an opioid receptor turns it mostly off, but not all the way,” said Evan O’Brien, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in molecular and cellular physiology and the lead author of the new study. “Our data shows that compound 368 is able to increase the binding of naloxone and turn the receptor off more completely.”
The senior authors of the study are Brian Kobilka, MD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology and the Hélène Irwin Fagan Chair in Cardiology at Stanford Medicine; Jay McLaughlin, PhD, professor of pharmacodynamics at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy; and Susruta Majumdar, PhD, professor of anesthesiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
A new type of drug
The new compound belongs to an unusual class of drugs that don’t directly target the active site on receptors. Instead, they bind elsewhere on the receptor but trigger a structural change that alters the active site. Known as allosteric modulators (allos meaning “other” in Greek), they create new possibilities in drug development, but are trickier to identify, O’Brien said.
“Allosteric modulators are not common yet, and they’re a lot more difficult to discover and to work with,” he said.
Compound 368 is the first known allosteric modulator that can help turn off opioid receptors.
The researchers picked out compound 368 from a library of 4.5 billion compounds. Using advanced high-throughput techniques, they were able to screen the entire molecular library in just two days. To identify potential allosteric modulators that could cooperate with naloxone, they selected for compounds that bind only to receptors already saturated with naloxone.
Compound 368 — an otherwise rather unremarkable compound, O’Brien said — stood out for its ability to tightly bind to opioid receptors only in the presence of naloxone. Like a loyal sidekick, it doesn’t work with other drugs, and it doesn’t work alone.
Powers combined
When researchers exposed cells with opioid receptors to compound 368, they found that the compound alone made little difference. But when cells were given the compound with naloxone, the combination was a powerful deterrent against opioid binding.
The more compound 368 they added, the better naloxone was able to block opioids, including morphine and fentanyl.
“The compound itself doesn’t bind well without naloxone,” O’Brien said. “We think naloxone has to bind first, and then compound 368 is able to come in and cap it in place.”
Indeed, using cryoEM imaging to visualize frozen molecular structures, the researchers found that compound 368 docks right next to naloxone on the opioid receptor, forming bonds that secure the drug in place and slow its natural degradation by the body.
Boosting naloxone
Next, collaborators in McLaughlin’s lab tested the new compound in mice that had been given morphine. Because opioids reduce pain sensation, the researchers observed how quickly a mouse removed its tail from hot water. The stronger the opioid antidote, the faster a mouse would take its tail out of the water.
When mice on morphine were treated with compound 368 alone, nothing changed.
“The compound in mice, at least from the assays we’ve run, does nothing on its own,” O’Brien said. “We don’t observe any off-target effects. We don’t see anything happen to the mice even when we inject a massive amount of compound 368.”
This was exactly what the researchers had predicted from their molecular work and a good sign of the compound’s safety, he added.
When they also gave the mice a small dose of naloxone — an amount that typically would have no effect — the pairing with compound 368 dramatically improved naloxone’s effects.
“When we start to give them more and more of compound 368 with that low dose of naloxone, they take their tail out of the water pretty quickly,” O’Brien said.
Other effects of opioids, such as respiratory depression (the usual cause of death in opioid overdoses), were also reversed by a small dose of naloxone enhanced with the new compound.
Remarkably, the combination of compound 368 with a half dose of naloxone was strong enough to counter fentanyl, which is about 100 times more potent than morphine and the main culprit of overdoses in the United States.
By requiring less naloxone, the new compound could also ease the withdrawal symptoms that opioid users experience after overdose treatment. These symptoms — including body aches, shivering, nausea and diarrhea — are immediate and can be extremely uncomfortable, O’Brien said.
The researchers found that a low dose of naloxone plus compound 368 could reverse the effects of opioids with much milder withdrawal symptoms — in mice, this meant less teeth chattering, jumping and diarrhea.
Saving lives
The team, with the Majumdar lab’s expertise in medicinal chemistry, is now tweaking compound 368 so it can help naloxone counter strong opioids for longer durations.
“We’re still working on optimizing the compound’s properties for those longer-lasting effects,” O’Brien said. “But first showing that it works cooperatively with these low doses of naloxone suggests that we’re on the right track.”
O’Brien is optimistic that this track will lead to trials in humans. Overdoses from synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, continue to surge, killing nearly 74,000 Americans in 2022. “The more tools at our disposal, the better we’ll be able to fight this epidemic of fentanyl overdoses,” he said.
Researchers from Kurume University, SLAC National Acceleration Laboratory, Princeton University and University of Copenhagen also contributed to the work.
The study received funding from an American Diabetes Association Postdoctoral Fellowship, an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health (grant RO1DA057790) and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
# # #
About Stanford Medicine
Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu.
JOURNAL
Nature
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
3-Jul-2024
Experimental drug supercharges medicine that reverses opioid overdose
Adding newly ID’d compound makes naloxone more potent, longer lasting, mouse study shows
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
The ongoing opioid epidemic in the U.S. kills tens of thousands of people every year. Naloxone, sold under the brand name Narcan, has saved countless lives by reversing opioid overdoses. But new and more powerful opioids keep appearing, and first responders are finding it increasingly difficult to revive people who overdose.
Now, researchers have found an approach that could extend naloxone’s lifesaving power, even in the face of ever-more-dangerous opioids. A team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Stanford University and the University of Florida have identified potential drugs that make naloxone more potent and longer lasting, capable of reversing the effects of opioids in mice at low doses without worsening withdrawal symptoms. The study is published July 3 in Nature.
“Naloxone is a lifesaver, but it’s not a miracle drug; it has limitations,” said co-senior author Susruta Majumdar, PhD, a professor of anesthesiology at Washington University. “Many people who overdose on opioids need more than one dose of naloxone before they are out of danger. This study is a proof of concept that we can make naloxone work better — last longer and be more potent — by giving it in combination with a molecule that influences the responses of the opioid receptor.”
Opioids such as oxycodone and fentanyl work by slipping inside a pocket on the opioid receptor, which is found primarily on neurons in the brain. The presence of opioids activates the receptor, setting off a cascade of molecular events that temporarily alters how the brain functions: reducing the perception of pain, inducing a sense of euphoria and slowing down breathing. It is this suppression of breathing that makes opioids so deadly.
The molecular compound described in the paper is a so-called negative allosteric modulator (NAM) of the opioid receptor. Allosteric modulators are a hot area of research in pharmacology, because they offer a way to influence how the body responds to drugs by fine-tuning the activity of drug receptors rather than the drugs themselves. Co-author Vipin Rangari, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Majumdar lab, did the experiments to chemically characterize the compound.
Naloxone is an opioid, but unlike other opioids, its presence in the binding pocket doesn’t activate the receptor. This unique feature gives naloxone the power to reverse overdoses by displacing problematic opioids from the pocket, thereby deactivating the opioid receptor. The problem is that naloxone wears off before other opioids do. For example, naloxone works for about two hours, while fentanyl can stay in the bloodstream for eight hours. Once naloxone falls out of the binding pocket, any fentanyl molecules that are still circulating can re-attach to and re-activate the receptor, causing the overdose symptoms to return.
The research team — led by co-senior authors Majumdar; Brian K. Kobilka, PhD, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University; and Jay P. McLaughlin, PhD, a professor of pharmacodynamics at the University of Florida — set out to find NAMs that strengthen naloxone by helping it stay in the binding pocket longer and suppress the activation of the opioid receptor more effectively.
To do so, they screened a library of 4.5 billion molecules in the lab in search of molecules that bound to the opioid receptor with naloxone already tucked into the receptor’s pocket. Compounds representing several molecular families passed the initial screen, with one of the most promising dubbed compound 368. Further experiments in cells revealed that, in the presence of compound 368, naloxone was 7.6 times more effective at inhibiting the activation of the opioid receptor, partly because naloxone stayed in the binding pocket at least 10 times longer.
“The compound itself doesn’t bind well without naloxone,” said Evan O’Brien, PhD, the lead author on the study and a postdoctoral scholar in Kobilka’s lab at Stanford. “We think naloxone has to bind first, and then compound 368 is able to come in and cap it in place.”
Even better, compound 368 improved naloxone’s ability to counteract opioid overdoses in mice and enabled naloxone to reverse the effects of fentanyl and morphine at 1/10th the usual doses.
However, people who overdose on opioids and are revived with naloxone can experience withdrawal symptoms such as pain, chills, vomiting and irritability. In this study, while the addition of compound 368 boosted naloxone’s potency, it did not worsen the mice’s withdrawal symptoms.
“We have a long way to go, but these results are really exciting,” McLaughlin said. “Opioid withdrawal likely won’t kill you, but they’re so severe that users often resume taking opioids within a day or two to stop the symptoms. The idea that we can rescue patients from overdose with reduced withdrawal might just help a lot of people.”
Compound 368 is just one of several molecules that show potential as NAMs of the opioid receptor. The researchers have filed a patent on the NAMs, and are working on narrowing down and characterizing the most promising candidates. Majumdar estimates that it will be 10 to 15 years before a naloxone-enhancing NAM is brought to market.
“Developing a new drug is a very long process, and in the meantime new synthetic opioids are just going to keep on coming and getting more and more potent, which means more and more deadly,” Majumdar said. “Our hope is that by developing a NAM, we can preserve naloxone’s power to serve as an antidote, no matter what kind of opioids emerge in the future.”
Negative allosteric modulation of the μ-opioid receptor
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
3-Jul-2024
COI STATEMENT
B.K.K. is a founder and consultant for ConfometRx. S.M. is a founder of Sparian Biosciences. E.S.O, K.K., V.A.R, S.M. and B.K.K. have filed a patent around the new NAM compound acting through μOR. The authors declare no other competing interests. B.J.K. is an employee of Lotus Separations.
Disclaimer: AAAS and
Environmental toxicant exposure and depressive symptoms
JAMA NETWORK
About The Study:
The results of this study suggest that many common environmental toxicants are associated with depressive symptoms. This research provides insight into selecting environmental targets for mechanistic research into the causes of depression and facilitating efforts to reduce environmental exposures.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Jing Li, Ph.D., email jing.li@hsc.pku.edu.cn.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
JOURNAL
JAMA Network Open
Texas A&M center receives $7.6 million grant to promote research in environmental health
The center will focus on research in climate change and health, environment and metabolism, environmental justice and policy, and environmental stressors and their responses
CREDIT: JASON NITSCH/TEXAS A&M SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES
The Texas A&M Center for Environmental Health (TiCER), a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Environmental Health Sciences Core Center, will be returning to the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) with a $7.6 million grant for the center’s new funding cycle.
Under the new leadership of Dr. Weston Porter, a VMBS professor in the Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology, the center will promote research in four areas of environmental health — climate change and health, environment and metabolism, environmental justice and policy, and environmental stressors and their responses.
The center also will offer several tiers of research funding to encourage scientists to engage with community organizations, while also making funding more accessible for junior faculty.
“On the basic science side, we’re looking at tissues to see how chemicals found in the environment impact the body on a cellular level,” said Dr. Natalie Johnson, TiCER associate director and an associate professor in the Texas A&M Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. “On the community side, we’re looking at how exposures impact people and how we can advise them to stay safe.”
Core Centers like TiCER exist to facilitate collaboration between researchers across different scientific disciplines, even those whose main focus may not be environmental health. TiCER is one of only 26 Core Centers in the United States, and funding renewals are highly competitive.
Funding from the new grant cycle will support research projects in the center’s four major themes of environmental health, including small research vouchers and larger pilot grants intended to support large sections of a project.
“In addition to continuing support for current members of the center, one of our goals is to bring new people into the NIEHS and encourage them to apply for grants,” Porter said. “This is especially true for early-career scientists who may have new ideas worth trying but need resources to make them happen.”
The return of TiCER will also make Texas A&M one of the only universities — and the VMBS the only veterinary school in the nation — to house all three of the top NIEHS environmental health programs. These include grants supporting the Texas A&M Superfund Research Center and the Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award.
Research That Serves Texans
At TiCER, scientists are teaming up with community organizations to both share important health information and learn from Texans where they need to direct their research next.
“Working with the community is an essential part of how TiCER operates,” Johnson said. “The established way that basic science often gets translated to public health is one-directional — from ‘bench to bedside,’ or, from the lab bench to the hospital. But we want to interrupt that pattern so that people don’t have to go to the hospital in the first place. For us, research is from bench to the community and back.
“For example, in my own research, I look at how air pollution impacts the developing fetus. I ask questions like, ‘What does it mean for an infant’s immune system development when the mom breathes in pollution during pregnancy?’” she said. “It’s great to understand the science, but then we need to get the message back to the community, so people know what precautions to take, and work with them to understand how they are impacted.”
Having TiCER at the VMBS is ideal because of Texas A&M’s location in College Station, which is right in the center of the Texas Urban Triangle, a region that connects Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio and Austin.
“Because we’re a state institution, it’s really part of our mission as faculty and researchers to reach as many Texans as possible. Our location will allow us to have access to some of the most heavily populated areas of Texas as well as rural communities in between,” Johnson said.
Opening Doors For New Research
One major goal for TiCER’s new leadership is to make sure junior faculty and those who have not worked with the NIEHS before feel like they, too, can participate in environmental health research.
“Once you get one grant to fund part of your research, it’s easier to get others that will help you continue,” Porter said. “But for junior faculty, it can be difficult to get that first project stage started. We hope that TiCER will help generate grants and make it more possible for early career scientists to get started. These grants will also benefit researchers at any point in their careers who have new ideas they want to test before applying for larger amounts.”
TiCER has multiple levels of grants, including pilot project awards for up to $50,000, as well as smaller vouchers that can award $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000. The different amounts allow TiCER to fund a variety of projects in different stages, whether researchers need to kickstart a small study or fund a major part of a larger project.
“We also help scientists look at their work from an environmental and public health angle to help them with funding,” Porter said. “By helping researchers make connections between the work they do and the impact it has on people’s health, we can make it more likely that they will get the funding they need to continue.”
For more information about TiCER, visit tx.ag/TiCER.
By Courtney Price, Texas A&M University School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
