Author: Futurity (National Geo)

The usual stereotypes about who experiences eating disorders are false, research shows.

The study finds that boys living in disadvantaged circumstances—not just girls from wealthy backgrounds—are at increased risk of disordered eating, particularly if they have underlying genetic risk factors.

“This is critical information for health care providers who might not otherwise screen for or recognize disordered eating in this population,” said Megan Mikhail, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in the Michigan State University clinical psychology program. “It is also important for the public to recognize that eating disorders can affect everyone, including people who do not fit the historical stereotypes.”

The study published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, is the first to look at associations between multiple forms of disadvantage and risk for disordered eating in boys, as well as how disadvantage may interact with biological risks to affect disordered eating in boys.

Using a large population-based sample of male twins from the Michigan State University Twin Registry, the researchers found that boys from more disadvantaged backgrounds reported greater disordered eating symptoms and had earlier activation of genetic influences on disordered eating, which could lead to increased long-term risk.

The population-based sample allowed the researchers to avoid overlooking individuals who may not be able to afford access to mental health care. They examined factors such as parental income, education, and neighborhood disadvantage to see how those factors related to disordered eating symptoms in the boys. Since all the participants were twins, researchers were also able to study genetic influences on disordered eating.

“This research is particularly relevant following the COVID-19 pandemic when many families experienced financial hardship,” says Kelly Klump, professor of psychology and coauthor of the study. “Those financial stressors are putting many young people at risk for an eating disorder, so it’s vital that there be increased screening and access to care for these young people.”

Source: Michigan State University

People experiencing long-lasting effects from COVID-19—known as “long COVID” or post-COVID conditions—are susceptible to developing only seven health symptoms for up to a year following the infection.

They are: fast-beating heart, hair loss, fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, joint pain, and obesity.

To develop their findings, researchers reviewed Oracle Cerner real-world data from electronic medical records containing de-identified information for medical research purposes.

After examining data from a total of 52,461 patients at 122 health care facilities across the United States, the researchers selected the top 47 most commonly reported health symptoms from long COVID to examine for the study.

Then, the researchers looked for any comparisons in the reported health symptoms—many also shared by other viral respiratory infections—among people in three different subgroups:

• People diagnosed with COVID-19 but do not have any common viral respiratory infections like influenza or pneumonia
• People with common viral respiratory infections but do not have COVID-19
• People who do not have COVID-19 or any other common viral respiratory infections.

“Despite an overwhelming number of long COVID symptoms previously reported by other studies, we only found a few symptoms specifically related to an infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19,” says Chi-Ren Shyu, director of the University of Missouri Institute for Data Science and Informatics and corresponding author of the study, published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

“Before we examined the data, I thought we would find an ample amount of the symptoms to be specifically associated with long COVID, but that wasn’t the case.”

Shyu, who is also a professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department, says the results could benefit ongoing efforts by fellow researchers to study various impacts of COVID-19.

“Now, researchers will be able to better understand how SARS-CoV-2 may mutate or evolve by creating new connections that we may not have known about before,” Shyu says. “Going forward we can use electronic medical records to quickly detect subgroups of patients who may have these long-term health conditions.”

The findings will give health care providers much-needed information about what to ask and look for when visiting with a patient who has symptoms of long COVID, says coauthor Adnan Qureshi, a professor of neurology in the School of Medicine, and doctor of neurology with MU Health Care.

Qureshi says the study’s results could also benefit researchers examining other aspects of COVID-19, such as the impact of the virus on the brain or the immune system. He says the concept of long COVID was developed after clinicians started noticing a group of people who were dubbed “survivors” of COVID-19 were “not necessarily normal anymore.”

“The survivors still have symptoms that are at times disabling and preventing them from going back to work or the activities of their daily life,” Qureshi says.

“This is not because the COVID-19 infection is still active, but instead the infection has caused long-term consequences, or sequelae, in the form of a post-COVID syndrome that could persist for months or even years. Our research was able to identify long-term sequelae that are distinctive to COVID-19 and separate the post-COVID syndrome from other post-viral syndromes.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Minnesota and the University of Missouri.

The National Institutes of Health supported the work. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

Source: University of Missouri

A new effort significantly reduces the number of unnecessary CT scans in children, limiting exposure to harmful radiation and reducing health care costs with no negative effect on outcomes.

Every time a child gets a computed tomography (CT) scan from a hospital they are exposed to radiation that—according to research—creates a 1-in-1,000 risk of developing a fatal tumor later in life.

These CT scans—which use several x-ray images and computer processing to create cross sectional images—are important to get a precise diagnosis in specific situations, but carry extra risks and additional costs that are best avoided if other methods are possible.

“Clinicians often feel compelled to do a CT scan and not risk missing something really important,” says Derek Wakeman, associate professor in the departments of surgery and pediatrics at the Pediatric Trauma Center at the University of Rochester Medicine Golisano Children’s Hospital (GCH).

“But, there are alternative ways to rule out conditions without a CT scan. If a child is awake and alert, we don’t necessarily need a CT scan to determine concussion risk. If blood work looks normal and the child does not have significant abdominal pain, we can often omit an abdominal CT. For possible cervical spine injuries, x-rays can help pick up significant injuries.”

For the initiative, described in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, the researchers adapted existing CT scan guidelines and developed new ones around four areas of the body: head, neck, chest, and abdomen/pelvis.

“Guidelines have always been available for these areas, but the methods in which our department rigorously applied them, tracked the results, and looked to continuously improve are unique,” says Wakeman.

After adapting guidelines for these four body regions, clinicians examined the CT scanning rates prior to the initiative (01/2016-06/2017) and after implementation (07/2017-08/2021) to determine how many scans were not indicated by the guidelines.

Before the program launched, 61 patients underwent 171 CT scans, of which 87 scans (51%) were not indicated by guidelines. Post-implementation, 363 patients had 531 scans and only 134 CTs (25%) were not indicated.

This significant reduction of CT scans has multiple benefits for patient safety and operational efficiency, Wakeman says. “It reduces a lot of waste in the system and more importantly minimizes exposure to radiation, as young children are at a much greater risk of injury from this exposure than adults.”

The study estimated that a total of 146 children were spared excessive radiation with no clinically significant missed injuries since the guidelines were implemented. The GCH clinical teams achieved this by using alternative means of diagnosis, while still applying best-practices, for the different areas of the body. Existing guidelines were more widely adapted for head, neck, and abdomen/pelvis, while new guidelines were developed at GCH for the chest area.

In addition to preventing unnecessary exposure to radiation, charges related to scans in the GCH emergency department decreased from $1,490.31 per patient to $408.21 per patient, saving an estimated $218,000 in total medical costs for this group of children.

Implementing these changes required a collective education effort among all the teams to review and revise guidelines, and then the guidelines were integrated into the technological process to diagnose patients.

“It’s built into the culture now. People know it’s safe to utilize this approach and they’re not going to miss clinical injuries,” says Wakeman.

Source: University of Rochester

Researchers have developed a flying device that can land on tree branches to take samples.

This opens up a new dimension for scientists previously reserved for biodiversity researchers.

Ecologists are increasingly using traces of genetic material left behind by living organisms in the environment, called environmental DNA (eDNA), to catalogue and monitor biodiversity. Based on these DNA traces, researchers can determine which species are present in a certain area.

Obtaining samples from water or soil is easy, but other habitats—such as the forest canopy—are difficult for researchers to access. As a result, many species remain untracked in poorly explored areas.

Researchers at ETH Zurich; the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research WSL; and the company SPYGEN partnered to develop the special drone.

The drone is equipped with adhesive strips. When the aircraft lands on a branch, material from the branch sticks to these strips. Researchers can then extract DNA in the lab, analyze it, and assign it to genetic matches of the various organisms using database comparisons.

But not all branches are the same: they vary in terms of their thickness and elasticity. Branches also bend and rebound when a drone lands on them. Programming the aircraft in such a way that it can still approach a branch autonomously and remain stable on it long enough to take samples was a major challenge for the roboticists.

“Landing on branches requires complex control,” explains Stefano Mintchev, professor of environmental robotics at ETH Zurich and WSL. Initially, the drone does not know how flexible a branch is, so the researchers fitted it with a force sensing cage. This allows the drone to measure this factor at the scene and incorporate it into its flight maneuver.

Researchers have tested their new device on seven tree species. In the samples, they found DNA from 21 distinct groups of organisms, or taxa, including birds, mammals, and insects. “This is encouraging, because it shows that the collection technique works,” says Mintchev, coauthor of the study.

The researchers now want to improve their drone further to get it ready for a competition in which the aim is to detect as many different species as possible across 100 hectares of rainforest in Singapore in 24 hours.

To test the drone’s efficiency under conditions similar to those it will experience at the competition, Mintchev and his team are currently working at the Zoo Zurich’s Masoala Rainforest.

“Here we have the advantage of knowing which species are present, which will help us to better assess how thorough we are in capturing all eDNA traces with this technique or if we’re missing something,” Mintchev says.

For this event, however, the collection device must become more efficient and mobilize faster. In the tests in Switzerland, the drone collected material from seven trees in three days; in Singapore, it must be able to fly to and collect samples from 10 times as many trees in just one day.

Collecting samples in a natural rainforest, however, presents the researchers with even tougher challenges. Frequent rain washes eDNA off surfaces, while wind and clouds impede drone operation.

“We are therefore very curious to see whether our sampling method will also prove itself under extreme conditions in the tropics,” Mintchev says.

The research appears in Science Robotics.

Source: ETH Zurich

Researchers have uncovered how a unique, fast synapse keeps us from falling over.

The sensory organs that allow us to walk, dance, and turn our heads without dizziness or loss of balance contain specialized synapses that process signals faster than any other in the human body, they report.

In a discovery more than 15 years in the making, the neuroscientists, physicists, and engineers describe the mechanism of the synapses. Their work paves the way for research that could improve treatments for vertigo and balance disorders that affect as many as 1 in 3 Americans over age 40.

The new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes the workings of “vestibular hair cell-calyx synapses,” which are found in organs of the innermost ear that sense head position and movements in different directions.

“Nobody fully understood how this synapse can be so fast, but we have shed light on the mystery,” says Rob Raphael, a Rice University bioengineer and coauthor of the study.

Synapses are biological junctions where neurons can relay information to one another and other parts of the body. The human body contains hundreds of trillions of synapses, and almost all of them share information via quantal transmission, a form of chemical signaling via neurotransmitters that requires at least 0.5 milliseconds to send information across a synapse.

Prior experiments had shown a faster, “nonquantal” form of transmission occurs in vestibular hair cell-calyx synapses, the points where motion-sensing vestibular hair cells meet afferent neurons that connect directly to the brain. The new research explains how these synapses operate so quickly.

In each, a signal-receiving neuron surrounds the end of its partner hair cell with a large cuplike structure called a calyx. The calyx and hair cell remain separated by a tiny gap, or cleft, measuring just a few billionths of a meter.

“The vestibular calyx is a wonder of nature,” says coauthor Anna Lysakowski of the University of Illinois Chicago. “Its large cup-shaped structure is the only one of its kind in the entire nervous system. Structure and function are intimately related, and nature obviously devoted a great deal of energy to produce this structure. We’ve been trying to figure out its special purpose for a long time.”

From the ion channels expressed in hair cells and their associated calyces, the authors created the first computational model capable of quantitatively describing the nonquantal transmission of signals across this nanoscale gap. Simulating nonquantal transmission allowed the team to investigate what happens throughout the synaptic cleft, which is more extensive in vestibular synapses than other synapses.

“The mechanism turns out to be quite subtle, with dynamic interactions giving rise to fast and slow forms of nonquantal transmission,” Raphael says. “To understand all this, we made a biophysical model of the synapse based on its detailed anatomy and physiology.”

The model simulates the voltage response of the calyx to mechanical and electrical stimuli, tracking the flow of potassium ions through low-voltage-activated ion channels from pre-synaptic hair cells to the post-synaptic calyx.

Raphael says the model accurately predicted changes in potassium in the synaptic cleft, providing key new insights about changes in electrical potential that are responsible for the fast component of nonquantal transmission; explained how nonquantal transmission alone could trigger action potentials in the post-synaptic neuron; and showed how both fast and slow transmission depend on the close and extensive cup formed by the calyx on the hair cell.

Coauthor Ruth Anne Eatock of the University of Chicago says, “The key capability was the ability to predict the potassium level and electrical potential at every location within the cleft. This allowed the team to illustrate that the size and speed of nonquantal transmission depend on the novel structure of the calyx. The study demonstrates the power of engineering approaches to elucidate fundamental biological mechanisms, one of the important but sometimes overlooked goals of bioengineering research.”

Coauthor Imran Quraishi of Yale University began constructing the model and collaborating with Eatock in the mid-2000s when he was a graduate student in Raphael’s research group and she was on the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine.

His first version of the model captured important features of the synapse, but he says gaps in “our knowledge of the specific potassium channels and other components that make up the model was too limited to claim it was entirely accurate.”

Since then, Eatock, Lysakowski, and others discovered ion channels in the calyx that transformed scientists’ understanding of how ionic currents flow across hair cell and calyx membranes.

Quraishi says, “The unfinished work had weighed on me,” and he was both relieved and excited when Chenrayan Govindaraju, a PhD student in applied physics at Rice, joined Raphael’s lab and resumed work on the model in 2018.

“By the time I started on the project, more data supported nonquantal transmission,” Govindaraju says. “But the mechanism, especially that of fast transmission, was unclear. Building the model has given us a better understanding of the interplay and purpose of different ion channels, the calyx structure, and dynamic changes in potassium and electric potential in the synaptic cleft.”

Raphael says, “One of my very first grants was to develop a model of ion transport in the inner ear. It is always satisfying to achieve a unified mathematical model of a complex physiological process. For the past 30 years—since the original observation of nonquantal transmission—scientists have wondered, ‘Why is this synapse so fast?’ and, ‘Is the transmission speed related to the unique calyx structure?’ We have provided answers to both questions.”

He says the link between the structure and function of the calyx “is an example of how evolution drives morphological specialization. A compelling argument can be made that once animals emerged from the sea and began to move on land, swing in trees and fly, there were increased demands on the vestibular system to rapidly inform the brain about the position of the head in space. And at this point the calyx appeared.”

Raphael says the model opens the door for a deeper exploration of information processing in vestibular synapses, including research into the unique interactions between quantal and nonquantal transmission.

He says the model could also be a powerful tool for researchers who study electrical transmission in other parts of the nervous system, and he hopes it will aid those who design vestibular implants, neuroprosthetic devices that can restore function to those who have lost their balance.

The research had support from the National Institutes of Health, the Hearing Health Foundation, and a seed grant from Rice University’s ENRICH program.

Source: Rice University

Coffee with milk may have an anti-inflammatory effect in humans, a new study shows.

Researchers found that a combination of proteins and antioxidants doubles the anti-inflammatory properties in immune cells. They hope to be able to study the health effects on humans.

Whenever bacteria, viruses, and other foreign substances enter the body, our immune systems react by deploying white blood cells and chemical substances to protect us.

This reaction, commonly known as inflammation, also occurs whenever we overload tendons and muscles and is characteristic of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

Antioxidants known as polyphenols are found in humans, plants, fruits, and vegetables. This group of antioxidants is also used by the food industry to slow the oxidation and deterioration of food quality and thereby avoid off flavors and rancidity. Polyphenols are also known to be healthy for humans, as they help reduce oxidative stress in the body that gives rise to inflammation.

But much remains unknown about polyphenols. Relatively few studies have investigated what happens when polyphenols react with other molecules, such as proteins mixed into foods that we then consume.

In a new study, researchers investigated how polyphenols behave when combined with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The results have been promising.

“In the study, we show that as a polyphenol reacts with an amino acid, its inhibitory effect on inflammation in immune cells is enhanced,” says Marianne Nissen Lund, a professor in the food science department at the University of Copenhagen, who headed the study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

“As such, it is clearly imaginable that this cocktail could also have a beneficial effect on inflammation in humans. We will now investigate further, initially in animals. After that, we hope to receive research funding which will allow us to study the effect in humans.”

Twice the inflammation-fighting power

To investigate the anti-inflammatory effect of combining polyphenols with proteins, the researchers applied artificial inflammation to immune cells. Some of the cells received various doses of polyphenols that had reacted with an amino acid, while others only received polyphenols in the same doses. A control group received nothing.

The researchers observed that immune cells treated with the combination of polyphenols and amino acids were twice as effective at fighting inflammation as the cells to which only polyphenols were added.

“It is interesting to have now observed the anti-inflammatory effect in cell experiments. And obviously, this has only made us more interested in understanding these health effects in greater detail. So, the next step will be to study the effects in animals,” says senior author Andrew Williams of the veterinary and animal sciences department.

Anti-inflammatory coffee and milk

In previous studies, the researchers demonstrated that polyphenols bind to proteins in meat products, milk, and beer. In another new study, they tested whether the molecules also bind to each other in a coffee drink with milk. Indeed, coffee beans are filled with polyphenols, while milk is rich in proteins.

“Our result demonstrates that the reaction between polyphenols and proteins also happens in some of the coffee drinks with milk that we studied. In fact, the reaction happens so quickly that it has been difficult to avoid in any of the foods that we’ve studied so far,” says Nissen Lund.

Therefore, the researcher does not find it difficult to imagine that the reaction and potentially beneficial anti-inflammatory effect also occur when other foods consisting of proteins and fruits or vegetables are combined.

“I can imagine that something similar happens in, for example, a meat dish with vegetables or a smoothie, if you make sure to add some protein like milk or yogurt,” says Nissen Lund.

Industry and the research community have both taken note of the major advantages of polyphenols. As such, they are working on how to add the right quantities of polyphenols in foods to achieve the best quality. The new research results are promising in this context as well.

“Because humans do not absorb that much polyphenol, many researchers are studying how to encapsulate polyphenols in protein structures which improve their absorption in the body,” says Nissen Lund. “This strategy has the added advantage of enhancing the anti-inflammatory effects of polyphenols.”

Additional coauthors are from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany. Independent Research Fund Denmark funded the work.

Source: University of Copenhagen

Male alcohol use has a significant negative influence on in vitro fertilization success rates, increasing patient financial burden and emotional stress, new research indicates.

The new study in Molecular Human Production is part of a research program focused on understanding how male drinking prior to conception contributes to the development of alcohol-induced birth defects and disease.

The researchers say this particular study highlights the importance of expanding fertility and pre-pregnancy messaging to emphasize the reproductive danger of alcohol use by both parents, not just the mother.

Couples struggling with fertility are increasingly using assisted reproductive technologies (ART) like in vitro fertilization (IVF) to have children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 2% of all babies born in the United States are conceived using ART, which would mean one in 50 babies were conceived using ART in 2021, according to the CDC’s provisional births data.

These statistics highlight the growing importance of looking at both parents’ contributions to fertility and pregnancy outcomes, says Michael Golding, an associate professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences’ veterinary physiology and pharmacology department at Texas A&M University.

“We say to the woman, ‘You need to be careful of what you eat. You need to stop smoking. You need to be doing all these different things to improve fertility,’” Golding says. “We don’t say anything to the man, and that’s a mistake, because what we’re seeing here is that the couple’s odds of success with their IVF procedure are increasing simply by addressing both parents’ health habits.”

Golding’s research used a mouse model to determine the effects of a potential father’s drinking on IVF pregnancy outcomes. The model included a control group that represented males who do not drink, a group that represented males who participate in chronic drinking at the legal limit, and a group that represented males who participate in chronic drinking at one-and-a-half times the legal limit.

The results reveal that the more a male drinks before providing sperm for an IVF pregnancy, the less likely the pregnancy will be successful.

“Seeing the negative effects in both the legal limit group and the group drinking at one-and-a half times the legal limit revealed that as alcohol dose increases, things get worse,” Golding says. “That really surprised me. I didn’t think that it would be that cut and dry. That really emphasized that even very modest levels of exposure were breaking through and having an impact on conception, implantation, and overall IVF pregnancy success rates.”

Alexis Roach, a PhD candidate helping conduct research in Goldings’ lab and the study’s first author, says their findings and other research conducted in Golding’s lab challenge the primarily maternal-focused narrative of previous IVF research. She also says it’s important to make the findings of this research accessible to the public.

“The most important aspect of this research is that it makes it clear that everybody plays a role in achieving successful pregnancy outcomes, even though the general assumption is that it’s just women,” Roach says. “The most important thing to take away from this is that if you’re a male considering having a family, abstain from alcohol until your wife gets pregnant.”

The research concludes that male alcohol use hinders an embryo’s ability to successfully implant in the uterus and reduces IVF embryo survival rates. The research also reveals more questions about fetal development and paternal drinking.

Golding’s lab is continuing to research these questions and the paternal aspects of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, a group of conditions that can occur when a person is exposed to alcohol before birth. His work aims to provide a holistic look at understanding fetal development and pregnancy by examining the father’s role.

For now, he says the next step in improving IVF pregnancy outcomes is getting the discoveries from this research into the hands, eyes, and ears of the people considering ART to help start their own families.

“It is important to remember that couples struggling with fertility who have chosen to pursue IVF are under intense emotional and financial pressure, which is associated with a feeling of helplessness,” Golding says.

“Our study demonstrates that drinking alcohol is an unrecognized factor that negatively impacts IVF pregnancy success rates. Therefore, as alcohol use is easily changed, our study identifies a shared action item that can empower the couple to work together toward their goal of becoming pregnant.”

Source: Rachel Knight for Texas A&M University

Non-native plants are spreading rapidly to higher altitudes along transport routes worldwide, a monitoring study shows.

Many mountain ranges contain semi-natural habitats experiencing little human interference. They are home to many animal and plant species, some of them endemic and highly specialized. Mountains have also been largely spared by invasions of these alien plant species or neophytes.

The new study shows that the pressure of neophytes on mountain ecosystems and their unique vegetation is intensifying worldwide: Invasions of alien plants into higher elevations increased in many of the world’s mountains between 2007 and 2017. The study appears in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Researchers observed that the number of alien plant species surveyed in each region has increased by a global average of 16% within the past ten years. In addition, in ten out of the eleven mountain regions studied, the scientists found neophytes at significantly higher elevations than ten or even five years ago.

However, first author Evelin Iseli from the Institute of Integrative Biology at ETH Zurich was not surprised that the neophytes are occurring higher up. “We were surprised, however, that their spread is proceeding so rapidly and that the number of alien species has increased so much within a decade,” she says. “Normally, it takes several decades for species to become established and widespread in an area.”

“This trend cannot be attributed to climate change,” she says. Alien plants are usually introduced in the lowlands. From there, they spread to higher elevations until it becomes too cold for them to reproduce. So, the neophytes simply colonize the niches that match their climatic preferences. “The plants manage to do this even without global warming,” Iseli emphasizes.

Climate has indeed warmed in some of the regions during the period of the study, but this was not related to the magnitude of neophyte expansion. “Warming temperatures set the stage for neophytes to spread to even higher elevations in the future because their ecological niche is also shifting upward,” says Iseli.

Humans, whether deliberately or unintentionally, often introduce alien plants in lowlands, then plants spread from their starting point to higher elevations, particularly along roads, which is why the researchers focused on traffic routes. Along roads, neophytes have a particularly easy time because propagules are readily dispersed by people and because the natural vegetation is disturbed; competition with native species that have adapted to the prevailing climate is, therefore, weakened.

In intact mountain habitats further from roads, on the other hand, biological invaders have a tougher time, as Iseli points out. “If the original vegetation is intact, it takes much longer for neophytes to establish themselves and spread.”

The study is based on almost 15,000 observations of 616 non-native plant species from 651 study plots and are collected worldwide using the same procedure. The researchers record the alien species in T-shaped study plots, i.e., a 50-meter-long strip (164 feet) along mountain roads and a perpendicular strip of 100 meters (324 feet). The study areas are distributed at regular intervals along multiple mountain roads in each region.

The vegetation surveys took place in southern and central Chile, two regions of Australia, Tenerife, Switzerland, two regions of the western United States, Hawaii, Kashmir, and Norway.

The first time such data were collected was in 2007 in six of the regions, and 2012 in the rest of the regions. Vegetation surveys are repeated every five to ten years. The researchers participate in this project voluntarily, funding the research from their own resources.

The Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN), which was founded in 2005, conducts the study. Its goal is to scientifically study “redistributions” of both alien and native species in mountain areas and to provide a basis for neophyte management. Jake Alexander, senior scientist in the Plant Ecology group at ETH Zurich, was co-chair of MIREN from 2015 to 2019.

“The current study makes it clear that we need to expand biodiversity monitoring programs worldwide and take action to avert any negative consequences for mountain ecosystems and their flora and fauna,” Alexander emphasizes. “The time to act is now because we can literally see our mountain environments changing.”

Source: ETH Zurich

Obstructive sleep apnea may be linked to low bone mineral density in adults, according to a new study.

The findings are crucial for individuals with sleep apnea, as low bone mineral density is an indicator of osteoporosis—a condition in which bones become weak and brittle.

In addition to increasing the risk of fractures, low bone mineral density also affects oral health, causing teeth to become loose and dental implants to fail, says senior author Thikriat Al-Jewair, associate professor of orthodontics in the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine and director of the school’s Advanced Education Program in Orthodontics.

For the study, published in the Journal of Craniomandibular and Sleep Practice, the researchers used cone beam computed tomography (CBCT)—a type of X-ray—to measure bone density in the head and neck of 38 adult participants, half of whom had obstructive sleep apnea.

When controlling for age, sex, and weight, the participants with obstructive sleep apnea had significantly lower bone mineral density than the participants without the condition.

Obstructive sleep apnea, which is characterized by difficulty breathing while asleep, can cause hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the body), inflammation, oxidative stress, and shortened breathing patterns. Each of these symptoms may have a chronic negative effect on bone metabolism and, ultimately, bone density, says Al-Jewair.

“While the link between obstructive sleep apnea and low bone mineral density has yet to be fully explored, this study offers new evidence on their connection that could have several implications for orthodontic treatment,” says Al-Jewair, who is also assistant dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the UB School of Dental Medicine.

“If a patient has been diagnosed with sleep apnea, this can influence treatment planning and management. CBCT imaging has become an integral part of daily orthodontic practice and could be used as a screening tool for low bone mineral density,” she says.

“Orthodontists could then inform their patients of their propensity for low bone mineral density and encourage them to seek further consultation with their physician, as well as warn the patient of possible adverse outcomes, increased risks and effects on treatment time.”

Future research with larger sample sizes is needed, says Al-Jewair.

Source: University at Buffalo