MINDFULNESS

Five minutes of prayer reduces pain and anxiety in primary care patients, randomized trial finds

New UMSOM study suggests in-person intercessory prayer is a safe, low-cost complement to standard medical treatment

University of Maryland School of Medicine

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A randomized controlled trial conducted at the University of Maryland School of Medicine has found that a five-minute session of proximal intercessory prayer (PIP) — in-person prayer offered by a trained volunteer — significantly reduced pain and anxiety in primary care patients compared to a music control group. The findings, published in the May/June 2026 issue of Annals of Family Medicine, suggest that proximal intercessory prayer may offer a practical, non-pharmacologic complement to conventional care, particularly for underserved populations.

Researchers enrolled 180 patients from a university family medicine practice who reported clinically significant pain (having a score ≥4 on a 0–10 scale) or anxiety (as measured on the GAD-7 scale). After their medical appointments, participants were randomly assigned to receive either five minutes of Christian intercessory prayer from a trained volunteer — incorporating laying-on-of-hands — or five minutes of soft music as a control. Participants were followed up at two and six weeks.

Key Findings

• Pain: Prayer group participants reported significantly greater pain reductions immediately after the session and at the two-week follow-up compared to the music group. The difference was not statistically significant at six weeks.
• Anxiety: Prayer group participants showed significantly greater reductions in anxiety scores immediately after their treatment. This effect persisted at two and six weeks suggesting durable effects lasting at least a month and a half.
• Safety and acceptance: No participants reported adverse events. Ninety-seven percent of prayer recipients were neutral, agreeable, or strongly agreeable to having PIP available as part of future medical visits.
• Who benefited most: Black participants reported larger reductions in both pain and anxiety following prayer — a finding the authors consider particularly meaningful given documented inequities in pain treatment and the high rates of prayer use as complementary medicine among Black Americans.

Why It Matters

Prayer is the most common form of complementary medicine in the United States, used by 43% of Americans with 62% of this group identifying as Christian. Despite this widespread use, rigorous clinical trials of in-person intercessory prayer have been scarce. This study is among the first well-powered randomized controlled trials of proximal intercessory prayer conducted in a standard primary care setting.

"Proximal intercessory prayer was safe, effective, and well-received as complementary treatment for pain and anxiety," said lead author Katherine Jacobson, MD, Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "It may be a low-cost, non-pharmacologic, effective adjunct to standard care with particular relevance for underserved populations."

“The prayer intervention was effective regardless of the patient’s faith or no faith,” said co-author Joshua W. Brown, PhD, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University and Director and Co-founder of the Global Medical Research Institute. “Our findings add to research showing how prayer changes brain function in ways that promotes health.”

Dr. Brown is the author of the newly released book Proving a Miracle (Harper, 2026). He was diagnosed with a brain tumor over 20 years ago while just starting his career as a neuroscientist. That sparked his interest in whether prayer has medical benefits and led to numerous medical studies of healing prayer around the world, as he describes in his new book.

Context and Limitations

The study population was predominantly Black, female, and low-income — reflective of the clinic's patient base but limiting broader generalizability. Because blinding participants or prayer practitioners is not possible without undermining the ecological validity of the intervention, placebo effects and non-specific factors such as human presence and touch cannot be fully ruled out. The authors note that future studies should include a control condition with interpersonal contact and touch but without prayer, to better isolate PIP's specific effects.

About the Study

The trial was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT07565142) and approved by the University of Maryland Baltimore Institutional Review Board. Funding was provided by a Global Medical Research Institute MESH Grant. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Indiana University, and the Global Medical Research Institute.

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Journal

The Annals of Family Medicine

DOI

10.1370/afm.250302 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Prayer for Pain and Anxiety in a Primary Care Setting: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Article Publication Date

26-May-2026

COI Statement

Conflicts of interest: J.W.B. reports a financial interest in MiracleSeries.com and has received appearance fees; and has a book contract for title Proving a Miracle. C.G.B. reports a financial interest in MiracleSeries.com and has received appearance fees.

Got beef with beans? SFU study explains why shoppers don’t buy more plant‑based proteins

Incorporating more plant-based proteins could help people save on their grocery bill, but new research has found that it's not so simple when it comes to choices at the supermarket

Simon Fraser University

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Incorporating more plant-based proteins could help people save on their grocery bill, but new research has found that it's not so simple when it comes to choices at the supermarket.

Simon Fraser University researchers peeked into more than 87,000 grocery carts in Canada and Finland to study how much price influenced the type of protein people bought: animal-based or plant-based. Researchers discovered that while the price had to be right, having a variety of options also played a role. 

“When prices rose, people bought less, and that was true for both animal-based and plant-based proteins. What surprised us was that price differences hit meat purchases harder than plant-based ones,” says Cameron McRae, lead author of the study.

“Price has often been described as a major barrier to buying plant-based foods, but our data suggests the relationship is more complicated.”

Key findings

• Used real grocery purchase data from more than shoppers in 58,000 in Canada and 29,000 shoppers in Finland
• Price differences hit meat purchases harder than plant‑based ones
• Income and education widened price gaps mainly for animal‑based foods
• Income drives plant-based choices more than education
• A larger variety of affordable plant‑based foods could help more people switch to a more climate‑friendly diet

Published in Nature, the study used loyalty‑card records to collect grocery purchase data from 58,000 shoppers Canada and 29,000 shoppers in Finland over two-year periods. This approach let them look at what people actually bought, not what they said they might buy or remembered buying.

Researchers tracked monthly purchases of seven plant‑based protein categories (such as legumes, beverages like soy, almond and oat milks, tofu, and other meat substitutes) and 14 animal‑based categories (including beef, pork, poultry, eggs, and dairy).  

Then, they measured how changes in price influenced each kind of purchase. 

The study found that people adjusted their meat purchases more than their plant‑based protein purchases when prices rose or fell. People with lower socioeconomic status were more price sensitive overall.  

But the gap between high‑ and low‑income shoppers was smaller for plant‑based products than for animal‑based ones, which indicates both pricing and product variety play important roles in who can realistically access more sustainable food options. 

Ultimately, plant-based food is climate-friendly food, and we need to give people more variety and flexibility of affordable options if we want them to eat more of it, McRae says. 

“With meat, shoppers can usually trade down when prices are higher, choosing ground beef instead of steak, for example. If there are only two or three plant-based options on the shelf, consumers who want those products have fewer cheaper alternatives to switch to,” he explains. “If sustainability is the goal, plant-based foods can’t remain a premium option.”

The study calls for more competitive pricing between animal- and plant-based proteins, which means shoppers would see similar prices for a two-litre carton of dairy milk and a plant-based alternative, for example.  

Discounts or subsidies for plant-based purchases could also help more people green up their grocery carts. In the meantime, shoppers may find instant savings simply by swapping meat protein for legumes just a couple times a week. 

“One-to-one substitution, like plant-based cheese instead of dairy cheese, are often where grocery bills increase. Whole foods tell a very different story,” McRae explains.  

“If people focus less on highly processed plant-based substitutes and more on whole foods like beans, lentils and peas, a plant-forward diet can actually be less expensive overall.”

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s44458-026-00040-y 

Article Title

Plant-based protein foods are less sensitive to price changes than animal-based ones, with differences across income and education levels

Gladstone launches Center for PhAIge Therapy to harness AI in the fight against drug-resistant infections

The center, funded by an NIH grant, will become one of three national centers dedicated to accelerating the development of phage therapy.

Gladstone Institutes

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A team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes—including Katie Pollard (left), Melanie Ott (center), Seth Shipman (right), and Sukrit Silas (absent from the photo)—will lead one of three new national centers dedicated to accelerating the development of phage therapy.

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Credit: Photo: Michael Short/Gladstone Institutes

SAN FRANCISCO—When a bacterial infection stops responding to antibiotics, doctors have few options to treat it. Phages—viruses that naturally infect and kill bacteria—have long intrigued clinicians as a potential weapon against these infections. But translating these tiny bacteria hunters into drugs has been slow and unreliable.

Now a new effort, powered by engineering and artificial intelligence, could change that.

Gladstone Institutes has received an initial award of $2 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with additional funding of up to a total of $10 million available over the proposed 5-year project period. This grant will establish the Center for PhAIge Therapy, a research center that will develop new phage-based treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

The five-year grant makes Gladstone one of three institutions across the country selected to lead this coordinated effort. Together, the new Centers for Accelerating Phage Therapy to Combat ESKAPE Pathogens (CAPT-CEP) will advance the therapeutic use of phages.

The Center for PhAIge Therapy will be directed by Gladstone Investigator Seth Shipman, PhD, with projects and core components led by an interdisciplinary team of other Gladstone scientists.

“Phages have the potential to treat drug-resistant infections, but for patients to benefit from that potential, we need to be able to predict which phage to use for which patient, and design phages that are more effective than what we have today,” says Shipman. “That’s what this center is designed to do.”

Tackling Critical Threats to Modern Medicine

Every year, about 5 million deaths around the world are associated with antibiotic-resistant infections.

People with weakened immune systems, including those with cancer who are receiving immune therapies, are particularly vulnerable because they rely heavily on effective antibiotics. But antibiotic resistance is no longer confined to high-risk patients—it’s increasingly affecting the broader hospital population as well.

Among the leading causes of these deaths are major hospital “superbugs” called the ESKAPE pathogens—Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species.

These bacterial species appear on the World Health Organization’s list of priority pathogens. They are considered critical threats to modern medicine not only because they resist drugs, but they swap defense mechanisms and quickly adapt after being exposed to new antibiotics.

Given that phages have evolved the ability to kill bacteria in distinct and targeted ways, they have attracted growing interest as a potential weapon against ESKAPE pathogens and other antibiotic-resistant infections.

So far, despite promising results in individual patients, phage therapy has remained difficult to use at a larger scale, in part because it has required so much trial and error for each patient.

The new Center for PhAIge Therapy will build the preclinical tools and models needed to overcome this obstacle and make phages a more reliable treatment for infections.

Gladstone scientists have developed AI tools to predict which phages can work against a particular strain of bacteria, but the models are lacking the right data to make the predictions accurate. So, the researchers will run massive experiments using engineered phages and bacteria to better understand, step by step, how bacteria are killed.

“The goal of our center is to generate an unprecedented amount of data and train AI models to identify the right phage for any patient’s infection,” says Shipman.

Deploying Phages Against Drug-Resistant Pathogens

Shipman’s lab has already developed tools to precisely edit phage genomes in a highly effective way, giving them the ability to engineer new phages.

The Center for PhAIge Therapy will allow the team to build on that technology and develop new tools to accelerate research on how best to optimize and deploy phages against ESKAPE pathogens.

They will build high-throughput assays to measure how individual parts of phages contribute to their activity against bacteria. The project will ultimately generate the data needed to rationally design and select phages effective against Klebsiella pneumoniae.

In healthcare settings, Klebsiella pneumoniae can cause serious infections—including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and meningitis—among patients on ventilators or intravenous catheters. These bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, even the last lines of defense used against bacterial infections, and drive over 600,000 deaths per year.

In parallel to Shipman’s work, Gladstone Investigator Sukrit Silas, PhD, will characterize how Klebsiella pneumoniae strains vary in their susceptibility to phages, with the goal of identifying phage combinations most likely to work against specific strains.

Powering both projects will be close collaborations with Katie Pollard, PhD, director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology, and Melanie Ott, MD, PhD, director of the Gladstone Infectious Disease Institute.

Pollard will lead the development of new algorithms to predict the compatibility of phage-bacteria pairs and to optimize natural phages into drugs. Using human lung organoids that more closely mimic human tissues than traditional animal models, Ott’s team will study how the body’s environment impacts phage behavior and treatment outcomes, something that can’t be captured in conventional laboratory models.

“What excites me about this collection of projects is that we’re creating a system where the data and the AI build off each other with each iteration,” says Shipman. “We’re not just studying phages using the same methods as in the past; we’re making an infrastructure to rationally predict how we can use phages with success in the future.”

In addition to the Gladstone Center for PhAIge Therapy, the CAPT-CEP network will also be supporting the Center for Phage Pharmaceuticals at Stanford University, which will focus on phage delivery to the lung, and the Pitt Center for Accelerating Phage Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh, which will develop assays for designing and dosing phage cocktails for patients. The three centers will share assays, materials, and data.

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About the Grant

The Center for PhAIge Therapy at Gladstone will receive $10,239,795 over five years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as part of the Centers for Accelerating Phage (Bacteriophage) Therapy to Combat ESKAPE Pathogens (CAPT-CEP). The grant P01AI195327 was awarded as a result of the funding call RFA-AI-24-069.

About Gladstone Institutes

Gladstone Institutes is an independent, nonprofit life science research organization that uses visionary science and technology to overcome disease. Established in 1979, it is located in the epicenter of biomedical and technological innovation, in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. Gladstone has created a research model that disrupts how science is done, funds big ideas, and attracts the brightest minds.

 

Conditional Medicaid expansion and mental health outcomes in Georgia

JAMA Network Open

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About The Study: 

In this difference-in-differences analysis of national surveillance data, Georgia’s Pathways to Coverage program was associated with worsening mental health among low-income adults. These findings suggest that conditioning Medicaid eligibility on work or community engagement requirements may create additional barriers to coverage and mental health care access, with potential implications for population health and equity.

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Sezen O. Onal, PhD, email Sezen.OzcanOnal@downstate.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.13934)

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.

#  #  #

Media advisory: This study is being presented at the 2026 Academy Health Annual Research Meeting.

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article 

  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.13934?guestAccessKey=1b34668e-afe8-4888-aa3d-dd05b3b83eff&utm_source=for_the_media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=060226

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.

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Journal

JAMA Network Open

 

Sharks thrive in hot spots of prey

Florida International University

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Caribbean reef sharks and fish.

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Credit: Andy Mann

Sharks need healthy habitats, and some have a strong preference for locations jam-packed with food, according to FIU research.

A recent study in Animal Conservation of Caribbean reef sharks in the Bahamas, where shark fishing has been banned for years, shows the sharks don’t seem to like places where prey are hard to find. Instead, they prefer to live where prey is most abundant, but just having a lot of prey is not enough, according to Alastair Harborne, associate professor of biological sciences and lead author of the study. The sharks appear to like a lot of prey that are densely populated in small reef areas — maybe meaning less work for a tasty meal. In addition to making mealtimes more efficient, hunting in these more strategic spots could help sharks access other habitats and from not becoming food themselves, the researchers said. Bigger shark species may tend to hang out in larger reef areas with abundant prey and Caribbean reef sharks likely want to avoid those bigger sharks.

With these findings, the researchers say food abundance should be a consideration for conservation in conjunction with fishing bans.

“We know that large predators, like sharks, are threatened by hunting and fishing, but know less about whether we should also be thinking about protecting their prey for effective conservation”  Harborne said. “This study shows that prey abundance is an important factor linked to the presence of Caribbean reef sharks and that we need to take a more holistic approach to shark conservation — overfishing can affect shark populations both directly and indirectly. This work further underscores how reef health, particularly maintaining a complex structure that prey fish love to hide in, is important both for sustainable fisheries and providing sharks with enough food.”

With the use of 631 underwater cameras, researchers tracked where the sharks showed up and measured how much prey fish was available in different areas. The researchers then built statistical models to see if sharks would show up more often in places that had more prey or if other factors were more important. The findings also indicated that sharks are creatures of habit and were found most often near steep reef walls and on deeper reefs, which matches their known behavior.

This finding is important because although the banning of shark fishing is vital to their survival, it is not enough on its own. Having enough prey for the sharks to feast on is also essential. If the sole focus is stopping the capture of sharks, populations can still remain low if the protected sharks don’t have an accessible buffet of prey. So, when it comes to sharks, prey conservation helps advance shark conservation.

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Journal

Animal Conservation

DOI

10.1111/acv.70067 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

The Need to Manage Prey Fish Biomass to Support Shark Conservation

 

Research reveals mechanisms for plant cell stability in drought

Stanford University

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In brief

• Water deficit conditions stress plants by causing their cells to shrink, but tiny anchor points between the membrane and the wall resist these effects – a response botanist Karl Hecht described in 1912.
• Stanford researchers identified two opposing protein systems that determine the number of these anchors: The cellulose-making machinery installs them while a separate complex limits the number installed.
• Plants with more anchor points recover better from water stress, highlighting a previously unrecognized lever for engineering stress-resilient crops.

Water deficit resistance in plants has long been a topic of interest for cultivating reliable crops. Some plants can alter their above-ground structure to lock in moisture, while others develop deep, industrious roots that find hard-to-reach water sources. While such responses are obvious to the naked eye, we know little about how responses to environmental stress occur at the microscopic, cellular level.

Over a hundred years ago, a German botanist named Karl Hecht documented plant cell membranes peeling away from the cell wall when deprived of water. Yet parts of the membrane remained attached to the wall and created a strange web of anchor points, which became known as “Hechtian structures.” The material and purpose of these structures mystified scientists until recently.

Now, a Stanford-led team has shown that these anchor points keep the membrane connected to the wall during water loss and that plant cells with more of them recover better once water returns.

The study, published June 2 in Cell, describes how the “molecular machine” that builds the cell wall also forges these critical anchor points in the membrane. Achieving this in-depth look at the structures required lead author and postdoctoral scholar Yue Rui to examine the cells of plant roots through live-cell imaging, protein mapping, and comparison of genetic mutations.

“I find it very satisfying to take a process that has been characterized now for over 100 years and establish what the molecular basis of it is,” said José Dinneny, professor of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the study. “The images are beautiful and the ability of Yue to resolve very fine-scale changes in cellular structure has been a joy and a gift to watch.”

Conducting ‘mutant surveys’

Rui began exploring the purpose of Hechtian structures by comparing responses to water stress across wild type and genetically mutated varieties of Arabidopsis – a small, weedy plant with many similarities to common food and bioenergy crops. Like cells in our own bodies, plant cells are defined by a plasma membrane that holds the internal components that perform important cellular functions. In addition, plant cells are encased in a cell wall, like “a balloon in a box,” according to Dinneny. Normally, the balloon is inflated with water and solutes that press against the wall.  When the plant cell is exposed to stress and loses water, it’s like the pressure is released from the balloon. However, in plant cells, the membrane does not fully separate and parts of the balloon remain tethered to the walls of the box.

A plant cell can be modeled as a balloon in a box, where the plasma membrane and inner cell content are the balloon and its contents and the cell wall is the glass box. Under non-stress conditions the balloon is oppressed to the cell wall and held in place by cell wall-membrane connections. Under water deficit stress, water leaves the cell, here modeled as a balloon that has been partially deflated, but remaining partially inflated due to the presence of the attachment sites. However, when these attachment sites are removed, the cell loses more water, here modeled as a balloon that deflates more completely. | José Dinneny using ChatGPT

To look more closely at these sticky tethers, Rui partnered with Peter Dahlberg, assistant professor in the Photon Science Directorate at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford’s Department of Structural Biology in the School of Medicine, to conduct cryogenic electron tomography (cryoET) scans, an imaging technique that allows for 3D reconstructions of samples at near-atomic levels of detail.

“The cryoET imaging in this paper reflects the most advanced ways of exploring cell biology at the nanometer scale,” said Dinneny. “So this paper nicely bookends the utilization of advanced microscopy in biology from the initial observations of Karl Hecht to the observations of Hechtian structures using CryoET.”

Weaving resilience

Rui observed that plants able to maintain greater numbers of tethers during stress recovered much better than those with fewer strands.

Clues to the molecular identity of the tethers came from characterizing differences between genetic strains. Plants with a cellulose deficiency mutation showed minimal root growth and the least resilience to stress, leading Rui and Dinneny to believe cellulose and the enzymes producing it were a key component in these anchoring threads. Live cell imaging, genetics, and protein mapping revealed the roles of two key proteins: the cellulose synthase complex (CSC) and remorins (REMs). These proteins work in opposite ways, with CSC strengthening the membrane’s attachment to the cell wall, while REMs act as a brake, limiting how many CSC proteins are present at each attachment site.

CSCs act like nanoscale weavers, stitching a thread of cellulose around the cell like a cocoon. As CSC lays down the cellulose threads, it also tethers the membrane to the wall during the stitching process. REMs, on the other hand, act as a hand that pulls them out, controlling how many stitches hold at any given time. When REM is missing, the number of CSCs in the membrane increases and more firmly anchors the membrane to the wall during stress. Identifying each protein’s role in this survival strategy opens up possibilities in bioengineering better crops. Cellular water loss is present in drought, salinity, heat, and freezing conditions, so understanding how plant cells cope with such water loss is more urgent than ever as climate swings grow more severe.

“For me, the next interesting direction is to observe this mechanism in species that are even more tolerant to drought and see if they have more stable or more dense membrane attachment sites,” said Rui. Future studies may also include examining these attachments in Arabidopsis across different stages of its life cycle, such as in dried seeds that can sit on a shelf for years yet still grow into plants later.

Overall, Dinneny is fascinated to find that these plant cells use cellulose both as a building material and as a lifeline.

“There’s a tinkering nature to life and to how organisms evolve,” said Dinneny. “Plant cells using the same protein machinery to build their cell walls but also to maintain cellular resilience under water deficit stress points to the multi-faceted creativity that is abundant in nature.”

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For more information

Additional Stanford co-authors are SLAC/Stanford graduate students Magda Zaoralová and William Dwyer. Additional co-authors are from Carnegie Institution for Science, Aarhus University, Rutgers University, the University of Freiburg, and the University of North Carolina. Dahlberg is also a principal investigator at the Stanford PULSE Institute and a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Dinneny is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of Stanford Bio-X.

This research was funded by the Life Sciences Research Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences, the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy, the Simons Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the German Research Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Carnegie endowment fund to the Carnegie mass spectrometry facility.

 

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Journal

Cell

DOI

10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.009 

Article Title

Plant cell wall-plasma membrane attachments mediate stress resilience through cellulose synthase complexes and remorins

Article Publication Date

2-Jun-2026