A Brain Stimulator That Powers with Breath Instead of Batteries

UConn researchers have developed a way of charging deep brain stimulators that don't require the battery power that's currently standard
Credit/Source: University of Connecticut Contributed Illustration

Implantable deep brain stimulators can help many people with neurological and psychiatric disease when traditional treatments fail. But surgery every time the batteries need to be changed is a major drawback. Now, UConn researchers report in Cell Reports Physical Sciences a new way to charge the devices using a person’s own breathing movements.

Deep brain stimulators are becoming more common, with about 150,000 new devices implanted each year. They are normally placed under the skin in the chest area and their electrodes implanted within the brain. The electrodes zap the brain with electrical pulses multiple times per second to regulate the brain’s abnormal electrical activity. Deep brain stimulators can help people with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders to regain control over their muscle motions. Research has also shown the technique can significantly reduce the symptoms for psychiatric conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Just like a pacemaker, deep brain stimulators are battery powered. While most pacemaker batteries last from 7-10 years, deep brain stimulator batteries typically require changing every 2-3 years because of their high energy consumption. And each battery change requires surgery.

UConn chemists Esraa Elsanadidy, Islam Mosa, James Rusling, and their collaborators have developed a deep brain stimulator that never needs its batteries changed.

Summer camps promote altruism in children

After two weeks of camp, the participants’ level of altruism had increased significantly, while that of the other children had decreased.
Photo Credit: Anna Samoylova

Being able to control oneself, cooperate or help others: having socio-emotional abilities is essential for those who wish to interact positively with their peers. These skills are largely acquired during childhood and can be trained in different contexts, such as school, family or leisure. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has shown that holiday camps Favour their development. They found an increase in altruism among children returning from camps, unlike those who did not participate in this type of stay during their holidays. These results can be found in the journal PLOS ONE.

Knowing how to recognize and manage our own emotions, as well as those of others, and adapting our behavior accordingly: socio-emotional abilities play a key role in our daily lives. They enable us to make decisions that are beneficial to our own well-being and that of our peers, and to establish quality relationships with them. Fostering the development of children, from an early age, is therefore essential.

These skills can be acquired and trained directly or indirectly. They can also be learned in a variety of contexts, such as school, family or leisure. By stimulating prosocial acts such as altruistic behavior, they are a prime target for the prevention of antisocial behavior, i.e. behavior that is confrontational towards others and society. A team from the UNIGE has studied the development of these abilities in a specific context: holiday camps.

First ever clinical trial underway of laboratory grown red blood cells being transfused into another person

Microscope image Example of a RESTORE laboratory grown young red blood cell
Image Credit: NHS Blood and Transplant

The manufactured blood cells were grown from stem cells from donors. The red cells were then transfused into volunteers in the RESTORE randomized controlled clinical trial.

This is the first time in the world that red blood cells that have been grown in a laboratory have been given to another person as part of a trial into blood transfusion.

If proved safe and effective, manufactured blood cells could in time revolutionize treatments for people with blood disorders such as sickle cell and rare blood types. It can be difficult to find enough well-matched donated blood for some people with these disorders.

Chief Investigator Professor Cedric Ghevaert, Professor in Transfusion Medicine and Consultant Haematologist at the University of Cambridge and NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “We hope our lab grown red blood cells will last longer than those that come from blood donors. If our trial, the first such in the world, is successful, it will mean that patients who currently require regular long-term blood transfusions will need fewer transfusions in future, helping transform their care.”

The RESTORE trial is a joint research initiative by NHS Blood and Transplant and the University of Bristol, working with the University of Cambridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, NIHR Cambridge Clinical Research Facility, and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It is part-funded by a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) grant.

Limiting antibiotics for cows may create a new dairy market

Photo Credit: David Mark

Consumers would be willing to buy milk from cows only treated with antibiotics when medically necessary – as long as the price isn’t much higher than conventional milk, according to researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine.

The findings suggest conventional farmers could tap a potentially large market for this type of milk if they can find the right price point – and that dairy consumers can help slow the rise of antimicrobial resistance.

“Most of the antibiotics produced throughout the world are used for animal agriculture. Therefore, reducing antibiotic use in animals, including dairy cattle, is necessary to tackle antibiotic resistance at a global scale,” said Dr. Renata Ivanek, professor in the Department of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences. She is senior author on the study, which was published Nov. 4 in the Journal of Dairy Science.

In the paper, the researchers propose a new label for milk that indicates responsible antibiotic use (RAU), which would leverage consumer preferences to reduce the use of antibiotics on commercial dairy farms. The study showed that, although a consumer’s willingness to pay for the RAU-labeled milk was comparable to how much they would pay for the unlabeled milk, they strongly preferred the RAU-labeled milk over the unlabeled milk option. Therefore, the researchers hypothesize this new RAU label would entice farmers to minimize antibiotics more than they do for conventional, unlabeled milk.

Therapeutic HIV vaccine with Oxford technology achieves encouraging results

Artist illustration of the HIV virus.
Illustration Credit: Darwin Laganzon

A phase I/IIa clinical trial that the University of Oxford collaborated on has demonstrated that a T-cell therapeutic HIV vaccine was associated with better control of the virus rebound when antiretroviral therapy (ART) was temporarily withdrawn.

Researchers carrying out the AELIX-002 study, whose results have been published in Nature Medicine, reported that two fifths of participants without any genetic background associated with spontaneous HIV control were able to stay off ART for the six-month duration of the supervised ART pause.

The vaccine in the study – developed by AELIX Therapeutics – delivered the HIVACAT T-cell Immunogen (HTI) using a combination of DNA vector, modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) vector and simian adenovirus vector ChAdOx1. The latter two vaccines were constructed at Oxford.

Tomáš Hanke, Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the Jenner Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, who leads on HIV vaccine development, said:

‘This result provides further encouragement that active immunization against HIV may be possible, slowing HIV replication, providing a window of treatment holidays for people living with HIV and eventually leading to HIV cure. T cells/T-cell vaccines are likely to play an important part in the final package for HIV cure and, perhaps, other advanced therapies for difficult diseases.’

Endangered Devils Hole pupfish is one of the most inbred animals known

A curious, captive-raised Devils Hole pupfish at the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility in Nevada. The facility maintains a refuge population of pupfish as a backup to the wild population, which fluctuates over decades and once dipped to a mere 35 individuals.
Resized Image using AI by SFLORG
Photo Credit: Olin Feuerbacher/USFWS

As its name implies, the Devil’s Hole pupfish lives in a truly hellish environment.

Confined to a single deep limestone cave in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, 263 of them live in water that hovers around 93 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with food resources so scarce that they are always on the edge of starvation, and with oxygen levels so low that most other fish would die immediately. The pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, lives in the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate.

New research now documents the extreme effect that these harsh and isolated conditions have had on this fish’s genetic diversity.

In a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, University of California, Berkeley, biologists report the first complete genome sequences of eight pupfish species from the American Southwest — 30 individuals in all, including eight Devils Hole pupfish. Astoundingly, the Devils Hole pupfish is so inbred that 58% of the genomes of these eight individuals are identical, on average.

“High levels of inbreeding are associated with a higher risk of extinction, and the inbreeding in the Devils Hole pupfish is equal to or more severe than levels reported so far in other isolated natural populations, such as the Isle Royale wolves in Michigan, mountain gorillas in Africa and Indian tigers,” said lead researcher Christopher Martin, UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology and curator of ichthyology in the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “Although we were not able to directly measure fitness, the increased inbreeding in these pupfish likely results in a substantial reduction in fitness.”

Waikīkī Beach studies reveal why shoreline is chronically eroding

Waikīkī Beach is at the center of Hawaiʻi’s tourism hub, with a valuation of $2.2 billion, according to a 2016 study. Two published studies from researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Climate Resilience Collaborative (CRC) provide new understanding of how and why the iconic beach is chronically eroding—enabling coastal managers and policymakers to more effectively manage the coastline.

During a two-year study from 2018 to 2020 published in the journal Marine Geology that included weekly surveys, a research team led by CRC Geospatial Analyst Anna Mikkelsen, found that the beach is primarily dominated by longshore transport, meaning that sand is moved from one end of the beach to another. This is contrary to standard beach models that predict cross-shore transport where sand is moved from nearshore to an offshore section of the beach.

“Another surprising finding was that we did not find any clear seasonal signal,” said Mikkelsen. “Instead of seeing high volumes of sand in summer, and low volumes in winter, we saw consistently increasing beach volume the first 12 months of the study and then erosion of the beach the following 10 months.”

The researchers discovered that the primary environmental drivers controlling the amount of sand present and the width of the beach include wave energy from south swell and trade-wind generated waves, and the water level.

Researchers identify protein linked to heart failure in chemo patients: Finding could save millions of lives

Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum from the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences
Source: University of Manitoba

A team led by Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum from the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences and St. Boniface Hospital Research has identified a protein called TRAF2 that stops functioning in cancer patients taking the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, which can result in heart failure.

“The finding could lead to new drugs that save cancer patients,” said Kirshenbaum, lead investigator and UM Canada Research Chair in molecular cardiology and director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, St. Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre.

While doxorubicin is used to treat many types of cancer, particularly breast and ovarian cancer, some patients who receive the drug develop heart problems that lead to heart failure.

Using a variety of state-of-the-art approaches, the researchers discovered that doxorubicin impairs the activity of TRAF2 in the heart which leads to heart failure. The team also showed that interventions that restored the TRAF2 activity suppressed the unwanted side effects and heart failure induced by doxorubicin treatment.

“This is a significant finding that we are very excited about,” said Kirshenbaum, professor of physiology & pathophysiology and pharmacology & therapeutics, Max Rady College of Medicine, University of Manitoba. “We discovered that TRAF2 was consistently down-regulated in cancer patients with heart failure who had received doxorubicin treatment. Our pre-clinical study showed that by restoring TRAF2, we could prevent injury to the heart muscle and heart failure induced by doxorubicin.”

Substance use disorders linked to poor health outcomes in wide range of physical health conditions

Photo Credit: Concord90

In a study published today in The Lancet Psychiatry, researchers looked at the risk of mortality and loss of life-years among people who developed 28 different physical health conditions, comparing those who had previously been hospitalized with substance use disorder against those who had not.

They found that patients with the most health conditions were more likely than their counterparts to die during the study period if they had been hospitalized with substance use disorder prior to the development of these conditions. For most subsequent health conditions, people with substance use disorders also had shorter life-expectancies than did individuals without substance use disorders.

One in twenty people worldwide aged 15 years or older lives with alcohol use disorder, while around one in 100 people have psychoactive drug use disorders. Although substance use disorders have considerable direct effects on health, they are also linked to a number of physical and mental health conditions. Consequently, the presence of these contributes to higher risk of mortality and shorter lifespan in people with substance use disorders.

To explore this link further, researchers analyzed patient records from Czech nationwide registers of all-cause hospitalizations and deaths during the period from 1994-2017. They used a novel design, estimating the risk of death and life-years lost after the onset of multiple specific physical health conditions in individuals with a history of hospitalization for substance use disorders, when compared with matched counterparts without substance use disorder but with the same physical health condition.

Characterizing the ‘Noisy Life of a Musician’: Risks and Benefits for Brain Aging

Skoe's study will gather information about participants' noise environments, both while playing music and doing other daily activities.
Credit: Pixabay

As a child growing up in Germany, Erika Skoe taught herself to play German songs on the piano before she was comfortable speaking the language. Skoe, now an associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences at UConn and self-described lapsed musician has made a career studying hearing and brain function in people young to old, with a special focus on language and music.

Previous research has shown that regular exposure to noise may accelerate brain aging. But other work shows older musicians’ brain and cognitive function resembles that of somebody much younger. To Skoe, these independent lines of research seemed at odds: if noise exposure is harmful to the brain, why are older musicians neurologically sharper than non-musicians, given that musicians are at higher risk of experiencing dangerous noise levels?

In a new $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, titled “The Noisy Life of the Musician: Implications for Healthy Brain Aging,” Skoe will lead an effort to reconcile the health benefits and hazards of being a musician and their interplay as people age. This study was funded through the NIH Sound Health initiative, a program supporting research on health applications of music.