A paralyzed 56-year-old Cleveland man has purportedly become the first person ever to regain the use of his hand and arm with the assistance of a brain-computer interface, according to new led by doctors from Case Western Reserve University and two Ohio-based hospitals.
The patient’s name is Bill Kochevar, and according to NPR, he was paralyzed after suffering a bicycle accident in his 40s. He had been unable to move any part of his body below the shoulder for eight years, but a pair of temporary implanted technologies has helped to change all that.
Kochevar suffered damage to his spine in that accident, and as a result, there was no way for his brain to deliver signals to his limbs. However, researchers from Case Western, the Cleveland VA Medical Center, and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center have helped him regain arm and hand movement thanks to an experimental piece of technology called BrainGate2.

BrainGate2, the university explained in a statement, is a brain-computer interface with recording electrodes placed under the patient’s skull, and a functional electrical stimulation (FES) unit that activates his arm and hand, allowing his brain and paralyzed muscles to reconnect. The result, as seen in a YouTube video, is that Kochevar could move his arm simply by thinking about it.
Using the technology, Kochevar was able to eat a pretzel and a bowl of mashed potatoes, drink a cup of coffee, and scratch his nose. “For somebody who’s been injured eight years and couldn’t move, being able to move just that little bit is awesome to me,” he said. “It’s better than I thought it would be.”

‘A major step forward’ in treating paralysis, say doctors

As the doctors explained in a paper published Wednesday in The Lancet, Kochevar was 53 years of age and suffering from a cervical spinal cord injury when he was recruited into the BrainGate2 clinical trial. He received two intracortical microelectrode arrays in the hand region of his motor cortex, followed by three dozen implanted percutaneous electrodes in his upper arm.
Those electrodes, the study authors explained, were designed to stimulate his hand, elbow, and shoulder muscles. Kochevar used a motorized mobile arm support for assistance, and the device was able to decode neural signals from the brain and perform the desired movements. His case is believed to mark the first time that a person suffering from severe chronic paralysis was able to use his or her own brain activity to perform functional hand and arm movements.
The first implant occurred in December 2014, and while muscle atrophy from eight years of inactivity required extensive rehab, Kochevar was able to begin point-to-point target acquisition sessions 311 days later, first with a virtual arm and then later with his own limb. Four-hundred and 63 days later, he was successful in 11 of 12 attempts to reach for a coffee cup, and 717 days after the implant, he was feeding himself, the doctors reported in their study.
“He’s really breaking ground for the spinal cord injury community,” senior author Bob Kirsch, chairman of Case Western’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and executive director of the FES Center, said in a statement. “This is a major step toward restoring some independence.”
“Every day, most of us take for granted that when we will to move, we can move any part of our body with precision and control in multiple directions and those with traumatic spinal cord injury or any other form of paralysis cannot,” added Benjamin Walter, medical director of the Deep Brain Stimulation Program at UH Cleveland Medical Center. “The ultimate hope of any of these individuals is to restore this function. By restoring the communication of the will to move from the brain directly to the body this work will hopefully begin to restore the hope of millions of paralyzed individuals that someday they will be able to move freely again.”
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Image credit: Cleveland FES Center

While breastfeeding provides many health benefits, including an infant’s risk of contracting an infectious disease, diarrhea or earache, research published Monday in the journal Pediatrics has found that it is unlikely to have any long-term positive influence on their intelligence.
In fact, according to NPR and the Huffington Post, study author  Lisa-Christine Girard, a child-development researcher at University College Dublin, and her colleagues reported no significant difference in the standardized test scores of breast-fed school kids and those who were not.
Girard told NPR that her team looked at 8,000 youngsters from Ireland who underwent testing at the ages of 3 and 5. While they found that while breast-fid kids scored slightly higher, the overall difference “wasn’t big enough to show statistical significance” and that they were unable “to find a direct causal link between breast-feeding and children’s cognitive outcomes.”
While, after adjusting for socio-economic differences, they found only minor differences among breast-fed and non-breast-fed kids in terms of vocabulary and problem-solving, the study authors did find that those who received mother’s milk did appear to be less hyperactive at age 3. By the age of 5, however, those differences had all but vanished.

Mother’s milk is still best for infants, say experts

As part of their study, the UC-Dublin team recruited approximately 8,000 families selected from the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal infant cohort study. They collected data on the cognitive abilities, vocabulary and behavior issues of the participating children through parent and teacher reports and standardized tests. Breastfeeding information was provided by the mothers.
Of the 13 possible benefits of breastfeeding they were evaluating, they only found a statistically significant result on one of them – children’s hyperactivity levels for those measured that the age of 3 – and even those benefits disappeared once the kids started school, they noted.
Girard told NPR that the findings were “not overly surprising,” despite the fact that, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, breast milk contains a pair of nutrients, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA), which are known to support brain development in growing kids.
The study authors explained that there are multiple factors that influence a child’s development, cognitive and otherwise, and emphasize that their study is not meant to discourage breastfeeding. “The medical benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and child are considered numerous and well documented,” they wrote. “These findings do not contradict” those benefits.
In a commentary accompanying the study, Dr. Lydia Furman of Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, added that research has proven that breastfeeding has “an array of life-saving maternal, child, and societal benefits, even if childhood behavioral outcomes are not affected.”
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Originally marketed as an anesthetic and often used recreationally, a drug known to produce out-of-body experiences and hallucinations is gaining support among scientists for the treatment of people suffering from depression, according to a variety of recently-published reports.
Ketamine, which was first introduced in the 1960s, is frequently used by veterinarians but often is given to human emergency room patients as a sedative or pain reliever, according to the CBC. Also called “Special K,” the substance is also often used illegally but is nonetheless considered an essential medicine by the World Health Organization.
Now, doctors from around the world have increasingly been touting ketamine’s benefits in the treatment of patients suffering from severe depression, and one doctor has even gone so far as to call it “the biggest breakthrough since the introduction of anti-depressants.”
That doctor, Dr. Pierre Blier from the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, has been studying the use of ketamine as a treatment for depression since at least 2015, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail, and recently concluded an 18-month clinical trial that had promising outcomes.
“We’ve seen the rapid antidepressant effect in treatment-resistant patients,” Dr. Blier said during a recent interview with the CBC. “But what is striking is that we also saw a very important effect in decreasing or completely making the suicidal ideation disappear. And what we unveiled in our research is that the anti-suicide ideation effect is independent of the antidepressant effect.”

Ketamine could be commercially available by 2019

More than half of the patients treated during his team’s trial reported reduced depression-related symptoms after receiving ketamine, but even those who did not show such a response wound up being less likely to want to kill themselves, Dr. Blier added during the CBC interview.
According to the Globe and Mail, his study involved a total of 34 patients, and the majority said that using ketamine helped them, even though they had tried an average of six other medications for their depression with no prior success. Nine-tenths reported a decrease in suicidal thoughts.
Dr. Blier is not the only one experimenting with ketamine as an anti-depressant, according to an NPR report published earlier this month – Yale University psychiatry professor Gerard Sanacora has treated hundreds of patients suffering from severe depression using low doses of the drug.
Sanacora told NPR that doctors often ask him how he could offer the potentially dangerous drug to his patients, without knowing the potential long-term risks. His response? “If you have patients that are likely to seriously injure themselves or kill themselves within a short period of time, and they’ve tried the standard treatments, how do you not offer this treatment?”
Based on various media reports, ketamine treatment is currently offered by dozens of clinics in both the US and Canada, and Sanacora claimed that more than 3,000 patients have been treated with the drug thus far. Dr. Blier is reportedly in the process of researching both an intravenously administered and an intra-nasal version of the drug that could be commercially available in about two years.
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Being poor increases your likelihood of a premature death more than high blood pressure, high alcohol consumption, and even obesity, according to a new study led by researchers at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland and published in the medical journal The Lancet.
In the study, Dr. Silvia Stringhini of the hospital’s Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine and her colleagues reviewed 48 different studies involving individuals from the US, UK, France, Australia, Switzerland, Portugal, and Italy to investigate the various causes of early mortality.
They found that low socioeconomic status reduced life expectancy by an average of 2.1 years. In comparison, hypertension only reduced expectancy by 1.6 years, obesity reduced life expectancy by 0.7 years and high alcohol consumption reduced life expectancy by 0.5 years.
“Given the huge impact of socioeconomic status on health, it’s vital that governments accept it as a major risk factor and stop excluding it from health policy,” Dr. Stringhini, who is also a part of the hospital’s Departments of Psychiatry and Internal Medicine, told the Huffington Post.
“Reducing poverty, improving education and creating safe home, school, and work environments are central to overcoming the impact of socioeconomic deprivation.” she added. “By doing this, socioeconomic status could be targeted and improved, leading to better wealth and health for many.”

Health policies need to include social rank, authors argue

Dr. Stringhini’s team set out to compare the relative contribution to mortality of socioeconomic status and conventional risk factors, including smoking, obesity, and non-communicable disease. They looked at data from 48 different studies that included information about income, as well as conventional risk factors and mortality for more than 1.7 million men and women.
Based on their data, the subjects (who were 54% female) lost an average of 4.8 years to smoking, 3.9 years to diabetes and 2.4 years to an inactive or sedentary lifestyle. Only those three potential risk factors rated higher than socioeconomic status on the list, which seems to indicate that being poor could be more hazardous to your health than obesity or alcoholism.
“Socioeconomic status is important because it is a summary measure of lifetime exposures to hazardous circumstances and behaviors, that goes beyond the risk factors for non-communicable diseases that policies usually address,” senior author Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “Our study shows that it should be included alongside these conventional risk factors as a key risk factor for ill health.”
“Having low social rank means being powerless to determine your own destiny, deprived of material resources, and limited in the opportunities open to you, which – the authors imply – shapes both your lifestyle and your life chances,” added New Zealand-based Dr. Martin Tobias. “The authors’ key message is clear: social rank deserves consideration alongside the established … risk factors” for mortality.
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Cancer is brought on by errors in genetic material, and two-third of all cancer-causing errors come from arbitrary mistakes, not as a result of heredity or ecological factors, according to a new report in the journal Science.
The errors, or mutations, cause cancer because even a small error in genetic material can make cells grow out of control, the study said.
Past research has shown two big factors play a role in the generation of cancer-causing mutations: Either the mutation was passed down, or it was brought on by external factors that harm DNA, like cigarette smoke or radioactivity.
However, cancer can also arise from arbitrary errors. When a cell divides to reproduce, it duplicates its DNA so that each one of the new cells will have its own copy of the genetic code. However, every time this copying occurs, there is a chance for a mistake to happen. In many cases, these errors can lead to cancer.
“It is well-known that we must avoid environmental factors such as smoking to decrease our risk of getting cancer. But it is not as well-known that each time a normal cell divides and copies its DNA to produce two new cells, it makes multiple mistakes,” study author Cristian Tomasetti, assistant professor of biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, said in a statement. “These copying mistakes are a potent source of cancer mutations that historically have been scientifically undervalued, and this new work provides the first estimate of the fraction of mutations caused by these mistakes.”

Looking at Cancerous Mutations

To reach their conclusion, the researchers looked at the mutations that cause abnormal cell growth in 32 cancer types. Then, the created a mathematical model using DNA sequencing information from The Cancer Genome Atlas and epidemiologic information from the Cancer Research UK database.
The study team’s mathematical model showed the driving forces behind many cancer types. For instance, 77 percent of key mutations in pancreatic cancers are as a result of arbitrary DNA copying errors, 18 percent to environmental factors, like smoking, and the final 5 percent to heredity.
The researchers say their method is similar to efforts to figure out why typos happen when typing a book. They might be due to a bad keyboard (hereditary issues), typing while tired (environmental issues) or random chance.
“You can reduce your chance of typographical errors by making sure you’re not drowsy while typing and that your keyboard isn’t missing some keys,” said study author Dr. Bert Vogelstein, co-director of the Ludwig Center at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.”But typos will still occur because no one can type perfectly. Similarly, mutations will occur, no matter what your environment is, but you can take steps to minimize those mutations by limiting your exposure to hazardous substances and unhealthy lifestyles.”
He added that people who develop cancer despite avoiding known risk factors should not feel guilty, based on the study’s findings.
“It’s not your fault,” Vogelstein said. “Nothing you did or didn’t do was responsible for your illness.”
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Image credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Source

A new, low-cost oral vaccine against rotavirus that could prevent 600 to 1,300 children per day from dying as a result of the diarrheal disease has proven effective in clinical trials, according to new research published earlier this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The randomized, placebo-controlled trial, led by Doctors Without Borders and conducted in the Maradi region of Niger, showed that three doses of the oral vaccine BRV-PV had an efficacy of 66.7% against severe rotavirus gastroenteritis in trials involving more than 3,500 infants.
During an interview with The Guardian, Doctors Without Borders medical director Dr. Micaela Serafini called the study “a game changer,” in part because the vaccine is heat resistant and can survive for several months at a time in desert-like conditions. “We believe that the new vaccine can bring protection against rotavirus to the children who need it most,” she added.
BRV-PV, the researchers explained, can remain stable for up to one year at temperatures of 98 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) or for six months at 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) without being refrigerated. Furthermore, it costs only $2.50 (£2) to produce and is most effective against the rotavirus strain found in sub-Saharan Africa, the UK newspaper noted.

Vaccine could provide treatment where it is needed most

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), diarrhea is the second leading cause of death among infants and children worldwide, and youngsters who live in lower-income countries are most affected due to the lack of clean water and proper sanitation.
In fact, The Guardian reported that more than four-fifth of all global rotavirus deaths take place in the world’s poorest countries, as the highly contagious pathogen is spread due to contaminated objects such as toys or surfaces, or through tainted food or water. However, they noted, vaccines have been proven to reduce diarrhea-related fatalities by up to 50 percent.
While, as NPR explained, this is not the first rotavirus vaccine, it is the first designed specifically for use in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Niger trial is the first to have been approved in an African country. The study found no significant safety concerns with the treatment, and experts hope that it will help overcome the lack of availability of alternatives that require refrigeration.
“This is a fantastic new development,” Zulfiqar Bhutta, a global health expert from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto who was not involved in the trial, told NPR. “You don’t have to lug a cold box scores of kilometers to reach kids in very rural places. This is important for increasing the reach of the vaccine, for reaching those who need the vaccine the most – the poorest of the poor.”
“The success of this trial shows that research and development into vaccines that are specifically adapted for use in low-income countries yield results,” Dr. Serafini added, according to CBS News. “The quicker this vaccine is prequalified by the WHO, the sooner it can be used to prevent the deaths of thousands of children in the countries where it is needed most.”
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In what could be a significant anti-aging breakthrough, researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands have discovered a molecule that could restore the stamina, coat of fur, and in some cases, even organ function in elderly laboratory mice.
According to BBC News, Dr. Peterde Keizer and his colleagues discovered that by using a specific type of peptide (a short chain of amino acid monomers linked by covalent chemical bonds), they could reverse aspects of aging by flushing out cells which no longer divide.
Specifically, as the study authors reported Thursday in the journal Cell, they used a modified FOXO4-p53 interfering peptide to combat retired or “senescent” cells that tend to accumulate with age and have been linked to heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and other conditions.
De Keizer’s team was reportedly studying how these senescent cells manage to survive when they made a startling discovery: while these damaged cells should be cleared out of the body by a protein called p53, a second protein, FOX04, was preventing that process from happening.
The FOX04 protein, explained Science, latched onto the p53 protein and kept it from doing its job. However, De Keizer’s team designed a new peptide that carried a shortened segment of the FOX04 protein. Doing so would keep the second protein from preventing p53 from doing its job, allowing senescent cells to die off normally while causing no harm to healthy cells.

Experts call it ‘a landmark advance’ while urging caution

The researchers tested the peptide by injecting it into mice that were genetically altered to age rapidly and found that the molecule increased the density of their fur, allowed them to run in an exercise wheel for longer periods of time, and even reversed early signs of kidney damage.
Next, they tested the molecule in normal elderly mice and found similar results – it helped their fur and kidney function, and even made them more willing to explore their surroundings, Science explained. De Keizer told BBC News that they found no evidence of side effects and believe that the peptide would have little to no effect on normal, healthy tissues.
He and his colleagues said that they are hopeful that the treatment will have similar benefits in humans, and that they are planning to conduct human trials sometime in the near future. Stem cell scientist Dr. Dusko Ilic of King’s College London told BBC News that the work was “impossible to dismiss,” it was “better to be reserved” until “more high-quality research is done.”
“It’s definitely a landmark advance in the field,” cell and molecular biologist Francis Rodier of the University of Montreal in Quebec, who like Dr. Ilic was not involved in the study, added in an interview with Science. “This is the first time that somebody has shown that you can get rid of senescent cells without having any obvious side effects.”
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Image credit: Britta Campion

While women who wait until they are older to have children are often warned by their doctors that doing so could increase the risk of miscarriage or other complications during pregnancy, a team from Denmark’s Aarhus University has found that there are also benefits to doing so.

Writing in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, Professor Dion Sommer and his colleagues explained that older women are less likely to severely scold or to physically discipline their children than younger mothers – an approach that can have long-lasting benefits.

According to The Independent, a randomized sample of nearly 4,800 mothers living in Denmark found that a child’s understanding of language and social development improved from birth until adolescence as the age of their mother increased, regardless of their education or background.

Furthermore, between the ages of seven and 11, children born to older mothers appeared to have fewer social and/or emotional problems, although the authors found that this link seemed to stop sometime around the age of 15. At least through the first half of the teenage years, however, this study found that children born to older women seem to be happier and more well-adjusted.

Weighing the health risks with the potential benefits

The Aarhus team looked at both maternal age and the emotional and social development of these children at the ages of 7, 11 and 15. They discovered that, at ages 7 and 11, older mothers were less likely to use verbal and physical sanctions to punish their children, and those youngsters had fewer behavioral, social and emotional difficulties.

So what are the reasons for these phenomena? “We know that people become more mentally flexible with age, are more tolerant of other people and thrive better emotionally themselves,” Professor Sommer explained in a statement. “That’s why psychological maturity may explain why older mothers do not scold and physically discipline their children as much.”

“This style of parenting can thereby contribute to a positive psychosocial environment which affects the children’s upbringing,” he added. While older mothers are more likely to have stable relationships, are more education and have better access to resources, the researchers noted that even if those factors are taken into account, these women compared favorably to younger moms.

The findings should be good news to women who choose to delay starting a family in order to pursue other career-related or educational opportunities – although, as the study authors pointed out, older women still face an increased risk of giving birth prematurely, having a miscarriage or giving birth to a child with deformities.

While declining fertility and the potential physical health risks should not be entirely discounted, Sommer noted that the potential benefits to the children should also be factored into the decision. “When estimating the consequences of the rising maternal age,” the professor explained, “it’s important to consider both the physical and psychosocial pros and cons.”

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A baby is recovering in Chicago after successfully undergoing surgery to remove a parasitic twin sibling from her back and shoulder, an extremely rare phenomenon that made it appear as though the girl was born with two extra legs and feet, various media outlets reported on Tuesday.

According to BBC News, the girl – identified only as Dominique due to privacy concerns – was supposed to have a twin, but the sibling never fully developed. Instead her twin fused to her own body, becoming parasitic and depending solely on the baby girl’s body in order to survive.

Dr. John Ruge observes the child’s extra limbs

In addition to appearing as though she had an extra set of legs out of her back, Dominique had a second spine and was born with her twin’s waist growing out of her back, CNN noted. She came from the Ivory Coast and traveled to Chicago’s Advocate Children’s Hospital, where five doctors performed a surgery to carefully remove to parasitic twin without causing her any harm.

Dr. John Ruge, who led the surgery, told BBC News that the biggest challenge faced by his team was to make sure that Dominique was not paralyzed after the operation. His colleague, Dr. Frank Vicari, said that the surgery was essential due to the strain Dominique’s twin put on her heart and lungs, which were ill-equipped to “provide nourishment to another almost individual.”

Patient is doing well after the six-plus hour procedure

Dr. Vicari went on to explain that the surgeons used “an enormous amount” of special imaging technology that let them differentiate between Dominique’s own anatomy and that of her parasitic twin. This allowed them to “anticipate the problems we might see… so that we could pre-plan what we intended to do and minimize any opportunity for a surprise during surgery.”

Prior to her surgery on March 8, Dominique underwent an MRI, an MRA (magnetic resonance angiography), a CAT scan, a CT myelogram and several X-rays to identify her native anatomy and to find out exactly how her parasitic twin was connected to her, CNN explained. Next, the doctors created 3D models of her two spines and discovered a second bladder behind her extra limbs that also needed to be removed.

Along with the five surgeons involved in the operation, Dr. Ruge’s team included more than 50 different specialists who worked together to ensure that the procedure went smoothly. It took six hours, but the doctors were able to completely remove the parasitic twin, carefully disconnecting nerves and blood vessels to keep from harming or paralyzing Dominique.

Dominique was two pounds lighter after the surgery, CNN said, and while she experienced some swelling after the operation, she is expected to suffer no long-term ill effects. In fact, doctors said that she recovered faster than they had expected. She was sitting up the next day and was able to leave the hospital just five days after the surgery. She still has her second spine, and although Dr. Ruge’s team will continue to monitor Dominique’s condition, they do not anticipate the need for any additional operations.

“Like any child, she needs to be cared for and watched for developmental issues,” Dr. Ruge told CNN. “She has slightly more risk because she is built slightly more different than other children. But she looks great. We had 100 worries before surgery, and risks were high, so we’re pleased with how she’s doing.”

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Image credit: Reuters

If you’ve ever gotten out of bed after a great night’s sleep and said that your “felt like a million bucks,” you may not be that far off, new research led by a University of  Warwick psychologist and published online and in the March print edition of the journal Sleep has discovered.

As part of the new study, Dr. Nicole Tang and her colleagues studied the sleep patterns of more than 30,000 UK residents over the span of four years, and found that quality sleep leads to levels of mental and physical health comparable to winning a lottery jackpot of nearly $250,000.

But, as the authors emphasized, it isn’t how much sleep you get that is important. Their research showed that quality, not quantity, of slumber is what matters. Quality sleep can lead to improved mental and physical wellbeing, while a lack of sleep, poor quality sleep and increased use of any sleep medications can cause a person’s mental and emotional states to worsen.

“We are far from demonstrating a causal relationship,” Dr. Tang, an associate professor in the Warwick Department of Psychology, said in a statement. “But the current findings suggest that a positive change in sleep is linked to better physical and mental wellbeing further down the line.”

“It is refreshing to see the healing potential of sleep outside of clinical trial settings, as this goes to show that the benefits of better sleep are accessible to everyone and not reserved for those with extremely bad sleep requiring intensive treatments,” she added. “An important next step is to look at the differences between those who demonstrate a positive and negative change in sleep over time, and identify what lifestyle factors… are conducive to promoting sleep.”

Despite intent, sleep medication linked to lower quality slumber

Each of the participants in Dr. Tang’s study completed the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), a test used by mental health experts to monitor their patients’ psychological well-being. Over the course of their research, they found that patients who reported improved sleep scored an average of two points higher on the diagnostic.

This two-point improvement is equal to that experienced by patients who took participated in an eight-week , mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program designed to improve a person’s well-being psychologically, the study authors said. They also discovered that these same patients had shown improvement on a separate test that measured their physical and emotional health.

“In raising the public’s awareness of sleep and health, although the emphasis on protecting a critical amount of sleep is important, the focus of the message should be broadened to include the importance of getting sleep of good quality and of reducing dependence on sleep medication,” Dr. Tang and her colleagues wrote, noting that patients who increased their use of sleep medications “reported worse outcomes despite the intended purpose of the medication.”

“Overall, the current study has provided fresh evidence in support of a temporal effect of sleep changes on health and well-being,” they added. “This relationship applies to both negative and positive changes in sleep duration, sleep quality, and use of sleep medication. Sleep is, therefore, a logical and feasible target for preventative health intervention.”

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While scientists have long hoped that stem cell therapy could be used to help patients suffering from neurodegenerative conditions, diabetes, heart disease, and other disorders, such treatments are not without risk, as several women have recently and very tragically discovered.

According to NPR and the New York Times, three elderly females with macular degeneration, a condition which causes vision loss, were suffered severe and permanent damage to their eyes and are now blind after undergoing an unproven series of stem cell treatments at a Florida clinic.

As reported Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the women, a 72-year-old, went completely blind after doctors injected stem cells into her eye in an attempt to cure the disease. The others, ages 78 and 88, suffered some visual impairment but did not lose their sight completely – they could reportedly see well enough to drive, the Times explained.

Each of the patients went to a private clinic in Sunrise, Florida, where they paid $5,000 each to receive stem cell injections. Doctors used liposuction to remove fat from their bellies, then extracted stem cells from that fat into the patients’ eyes. The result was severe vision loss.

“In these three patients, the last documented visual acuity… before the injection ranged from 20/30 to 20/200,” the authors wrote. “The patients’ severe visual loss after the injection was associated with ocular hypertension, hemorrhagic retinopathy, vitreous hemorrhage, combined traction and rhegmatogenous retinal detachment, or lens dislocation. After 1 year, the patients’ visual acuity ranged from 20/200 to no light perception.”

Why this happened, and how you can avoid similar problems

According to the Times, the clinic was affiliated with a company then called Bioheart, which is now known as US Stem Cell. That firm’s chief science officer, Kristin C. Comella, told the paper that the clinic was not required to obtain FDA approval because it was treating patients with their own cells, which are not drugs, in a procedure similar to a patient receiving a skin graft.

The women said that they found US Stem Cell through a listing on clinicaltrials.gov, a website provided by the National Institutes of Health, and two of them later told doctors that they thought that they were participating in government-supported research. However, as the Times explained, clinical trials do not need government approval to approve on the clinicaltrials.gov site.

No trials ever actually took place, and while two of the patients filed now-settled lawsuits against the clinic, it faced no other penalties. Comella said that the clinic no longer treats eyes, but still uses stem cells to treat up to 20 other patients per week for problems such as degenerating spinal discs and torn knee cartilage. The case, NPR explained, is renewing calls for the FDA to address clinics that offer unproven stem cell treatments for vision loss and other medical conditions.

“One of the big mysteries about this particular case and the mushrooming stem cell clinic industry more generally is why the FDA has chosen to effectively sit itself out on the sidelines even as this situation overall grows increasingly risky to patients,” Paul Knoepfler, a  stem cell researcher, told NPR via email. “The inaction by the FDA… puts many patients at serious risk from unproven stem cell offerings.”

NPR contacted the FDA, and was told by a spokeswoman that the agency is currently finalizing a series of new guidelines regulating how clinics could use stem cells for treatment purposes. In the meantime, the agency is encouraging those adversely affected by such procedures “to contact FDA and the appropriate state authorities in their jurisdictions to report any potentially illegal or harmful activity related to stem cell based products.”

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Image credit: Dr. Thomas Albini

Young adults who use social media such as Facebook or Twitter more frequently or for longer periods of time are more likely to feel alone, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) reported this week in a new study.

In fact, according to BBC News, the authors surveyed more than 1,700 Americans between the ages of 17 and 32, and found that those using social media for more than two hours per day were twice as likely to report experiencing feelings of social isolation than those spending a maximum of 30 minutes per day on such websites as Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr.

The results, which were measured using a validated assessment tool known as the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System, also revealed that individuals who made at least 58 visits to various social media platforms per week were three times more likely to have feelings of perceived social isolation than peers who do did less than 10 times per week.

“This is an important issue to study because mental health problems and social isolation are at epidemic levels among young adults,” lead author Dr. Brian A. Primack, director of Pitt’s Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health and the assistant vice chancellor for health and society in Pitt’s Schools of the Health Sciences, explained in a statement. “We are inherently social creatures, but modern life tends to compartmentalize us instead of bringing us together.”

“While it may seem that social media presents opportunities to fill that social void, I think this study suggests that it may not be the solution people were hoping for,” Dr. Primack added. His team’s findings were published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

So what causes these social media users to feel isolated?

The link between frequent, prolonged social media use and feelings of isolation persisted even when the researchers controlled for a variety of social and demographic factors, and they have a number of theories as to why spending more time on Twitter and Facebook might make younger adults feel alone.

One theory is that social media use displaces traditional interactions, meaning that those who spend more time online have less time for socializing in the real world, they explained. It could also be that seeing things such as photos where friends are having a good time without them could make that person feel excluded from the group.

Another possibility is that consuming highly idealized versions of their friends’ lives on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or similar platforms could make people envious and convince them that the rest of the world is leading happier, more successful lives than they are. Whatever the root cause, the authors said that their findings indicate that social media is not a cure-all to reduce perceived social isolation in individuals feeling as those they lack strong social relationships.

“We do not yet know which came first – the social media use or the perceived social isolation,” said senior author Elizabeth Miller, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pediatrics at Pitt and chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at UMPC Children’s Hospital.

“It’s possible that young adults who initially felt socially isolated turned to social media. Or it could be that their increased use of social media somehow led to feeling isolated from the real world. It also could be a combination of both. But even if the social isolation came first, it did not seem to be alleviated by spending time online, even in purportedly social situations,” she added.

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Even though people are more open to discussing sex these days than they were a generation ago, they don’t appear to be engaging in the activity any more frequently, according to the results of a new study published online this week in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

In fact, San Diego State University psychology professor Dr. Jean M. Twenge and her colleagues found that Americans who were either married or living together had sex 16 fewer times per year on average from 2010 to 2014 than similar couples did between the years 2000 and 2004.

Furthermore, data collected from the General Social Survey (a nationally representative sample of more than 26,000 US adults who were asked about their sexual behavior dating back to 1989) revealed that overall, Americans had sex a total of about nine fewer times per year between 2010 and 2014 than they did between 1995 and 1999.

“These data show a major reversal from previous decades in terms of marriage and sex. In the 1990s, married people had sex more times per year than never-married people, but by the mid-2000s that reversed, with the never-married having more sex,” Dr. Twenge said in a statement.

So why are Americans having less sex?

According to the authors, the results of the study are due in part to the higher percentage of men and women who do not have partners, and who thus have sex less often as a result. In addition, even though sexual frequency among unpartnered people remained constant, it declined among married and cohabitating couples, meaning that those individuals made love less often.

These decreases in sexual frequency were consistent across genders, races, regions, educational levels, and work status, and were largest among those in their 50s, those with school-age children and those who did not watch pornography, the researchers found. The differences were based on generation, with those born in the 1930s having sex the most often while those born in the 1990s tended to have sex the least often.

“Age had a strong effect on sexual frequency: Americans in their 20s had sex an average of about 80 times per year, compared to about 20 times per year for those in their 60s,” Dr. Twenge and her colleagues wrote. “The results suggest that Americans are having sex less frequently due to two primary factors: An increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners.”

“Despite their reputation for hooking up, millennials and the generation after them (known as iGen or Generation Z) are actually having sex less often than their parents and grandparents did when they were young,” explained Dr. Twenge. “That’s partially because fewer iGen’ers and millennials have steady partners.”

“Older and married people are having sex less often – especially after 2000. In a previous paper, we found that the happiness of adults over age 30 declined between 2000 and 2014. With less sex and less happiness, it’s no wonder that American adults seem deeply dissatisfied these days,” she added, noting that working longer hours isn’t to blame, as those who spent more time on the job actually tended to have sex more frequently on the whole.

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Despite a decrease in US air pollution production, smog levels are still on the rise in the western part of the country, and now new research has found that an influx of impurities originating from Asia has been making its way across the Pacific Ocean and might be to blame.

The study, which was led by scientists from Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and published last week in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, found that Asian air pollution contributed up to two-thirds of increasing western ozone in recent years, according to NPR reports.

Lead author Meiyun Lin, a scientist at GFDL and a research scholar at Princeton’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department, and her colleagues found that ozone levels measured in rural areas of the west have increased over the past 25 years, even though there has been a 50 percent reduction in local production of smog-forming chemicals such as nitrogen oxides (NOx).

Further analysis traced the increase in ozone in the western US to pollution from China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, India and other South Asian nations. Collectively, NOx emissions in this region have more than tripled since 1990, the study authors explained in a statement.

“Increasing background ozone from rising Asian emissions leaves less room for local production of ozone before the federal standard is violated,” said Lin. She and her colleagues noted that their study underscores the importance of continuing domestic policies governing emissions given off by motor vehicles and power plants while also taking a globalized approach to air quality.

Eastern US ozone expected to worsen due to climate change

Lin’s team discovered the decrease in pollution in the western US and the increases from Asian sources while analyzing the sources of smog, also known as ground-level ozone, from the 1980s through 2014. Their findings explain why springtime ozone levels in Yellowstone National Park and other nearby parks have increased over the past 25 years, they said.

In fact, their study found a “significant” increase in springtime ozone levels of 5 to 10 parts per billion. Since smog is hazardous to human health, especially for those with asthma or other types of respiratory problems, and can harm some trees and crops, federal regulations require that these emissions be capped at 70 ppb. Increases in Asian pollution could make that difficult.

“Twenty years ago scientists first speculated that rising Asian emissions would one day offset some of the United States’ domestic ozone reductions,” said Owen Cooper, a senior researcher at the University of Colorado and the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory who was familiar with the study but was not one of its authors. “This study takes advantage of more than 25 years of observations… to comprehensively demonstrate that these early predictions were right.”

The study also found that while smog levels in the eastern US had fallen over the past quarter-century, ozone levels in this part of the country can rise during increasingly common heat waves. However, since periods of extreme heat and drought can trap pollution, and because these events are expected to become more common, the study predicts that smog in the eastern US will likely worsen in the near future.

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A French teenager with sickle cell disease, a condition caused by a faulty gene that affects the development of red blood cells, is now in complete remission thanks to an experimental therapy that has altered his DNA and enables his bone marrow to produce healthy hemoglobin.

According to CNN and BBC News reports, the teenager began treatment at Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris at the age of 13, and 15 months later, there is no sign of the inherited condition in his blood cells. He is in complete remission and is currently not taking any medication, said a case study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Study co-author Dr. Philippe Leboulch, a professor of medicine at the University of Paris, said that this breakthrough serves as proof of concept that the therapy works in humans. The patient, he told CNN, “hasn’t had any pain, any complications” since receiving the treatment. “He is free of any transfusions… plays sports and goes to school. So we are quite pleased with the results.”

“All the biological tests we perform lead us to think he is cured,” added senior author Dr. Marina Cavazzana, head of Necker’s biotherapy department. Her team won’t know that for sure until the “longer follow-up,” she said, but they remain hopeful that other sickle-cell patient may be able to undergo this treatment within “the next five years.”

Case study gives ‘hope’ to caregivers around the world

Sickle cell disease is a lifelong condition that primarily affects people of African, Asian, Eastern Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern origins, said BBC News. Most of the cases of this lifelong genetic disorder are in sub-Saharan Africa and regions where malaria is common.

Patients who have SCD typically face a greater risk of contracting serious infections or becoming anemic, in which case their hemoglobin is unable to carry enough oxygen throughout their body, causing them to feel tired and have difficulty breathing. Some of them receive blood transfusions once every three to four weeks to help treat the condition, the British news outlet noted.

According to CNN, more than 275,000 infants worldwide are born with sickle cell disease every year, and an estimated 100,000 people in the US currently have the disease. An estimated one in 365 American children of African ancestry or who identify as black are born with the disease per year, they added. The life expectancy is currently 40 to 60 years.

Sia Evelyn Nyandemo of the Sickle Cell Carers Awareness Network (SCCAN), who has lost a pair of children as a result of sickle cell and has a third daughter currently suffering from the disease, told the BBC Newsday program that the French teen’s case “gives me hope that one day it will happen to our children. At last we are going to get relief. At last there is hope.”

“We live with fear because of the outcome of having sickle cell,” she added. “Every time this child falls ill, we just think that this might be the day. And for the life-threatening episodes we have gone through every time she is sick or in a crisis, it is like this is and that is not a good thing for any parent to go through.”

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While researchers have long known that people who have sex more often tend to be happier than those who engage in intercourse less frequently, the phenomenon appears to have very little to do with the actual act of making love itself, according to a study published earlier this week.

In fact, a team led by Dr. Anik Debrot of the University of Fribourg has found that the time that couples spent cuddling after making love and post-sex conversations, not the ecstasy of reaching climax, were what led to an increase in long-term happiness, said Medical Daily.

The research, which was published Wednesday in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that it was post-intercourse expressions of affection that led to an increase in both immediate and long-term happiness among couples that made love at least once a week, and that the positive effects of sex lasted for several hours after the act itself was finished.

“When engaging in sex, people not only seek an intimate connection, but indeed experience more affection, both when having sex and in the next several hours,” the study authors told the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. “Hence sex seems not only beneficial because of its physiological or hedonic effects, but because it promotes a stronger and more positive connection with the partner.”

Affection, not biological participation in the act, most beneficial

As part of their research, Dr. Debrot’s team conducted a pair of surveys using different groups. The first involved 335 predominantly heterosexual participants who were currently involved in a romantic relationship and who were recruited online, while the second involved both members of 74 couples who were recruited in California’s San Francisco Bay region .

Each of the participants were asked how often they had sex, as well as the amount of affectionate touch (kissing, hugging, cuddling, etc.) they participated in, how often they typically experienced joy and other positive emotions, and how satisfied they were overall with their lives.

The surveys revealed a correlation with greater life satisfaction and experiencing more positive emotions, Research Digest reports, but once the amount of affection was accounted for, the link between sex and happiness mostly disappeared, leading them to believe that making love more often resulted in more happiness because it tended to promote affection between couples.

A follow-up “experience-sampling” study found similar results: having sex during the previous 24 hours was associated with experiencing more positive emotions during the morning, but this link was reduced significantly when affection over the previous 24 hours was accounted for. The findings again suggested that it was what happened after sex, not the intercourse itself, that was responsible for the positive emotions experienced by the participants.

“Although the media (and past research) tends to emphasize biological, physical or mechanical aspects of sex, our research shows the importance of the emotional or affectionate connection experienced with the partner in understanding why sexual activity is good for you,” study co-author Dr. Amy Muise wrote in a story for Science of Relationships. “Affection and the quality of the connection with a partner are a crucial part of the positive effects of sex in romantic relationships.”

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For the first time, scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) have released a list of the most problematic antibiotic-resistant disease-causing microbes on the planet – a move they hope will encourage the development of new ways to combat these “priority pathogens.”

“This list is a new tool to ensure R&D responds to urgent public health needs,” Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation, explained in a statement. “Antibiotic resistance is growing, and we are fast running out of treatment options. If we leave it to market forces alone, the new antibiotics we most urgently need are not going to be developed in time.”

“New antibiotics targeting this priority list of pathogens will help to reduce deaths due to resistant infections around the world,” added Professor Evelina Tacconelli, an infectious disease expert from the University of Tübingen who contributed to the list’s development. “Waiting any longer will cause further public health problems and dramatically impact patient care.”

These pathogens, dubbed “the dirty dozen” by NPR, include three families of multidrug resistant bacteria which post a critical threat – especially in hospitals and nursing homes, according to the WHO. This group includes Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas and Enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli, all of which can result in severe and potentially deadly pneumonia and blood infections.

The bacteria in this category, which also often affect patients whose care requires devices like blood catheters or ventilators, have become resistant to a vast number of antibiotics, the agency noted. That includes carbapenems and third-generation cephalosporins, which are currently the best medications available for the treatment of multi-drug resistant bacteria.

List also includes staph infections, salmonella, gonorrhea

In addition to those pathogens deemed critical, the WHO’s list also included several disease-causing agents deemed to be high priority, including gonorrhea (which is both cephalosporin- and fluoroquinolone-resistant), staph infections (which is methicillin-resistant and vancomycin-intermediate and resistant) and salmonella (which is fluoroquinolone-resistant).

“These are perhaps the bugs most likely to give you severe disease,” Dr. Elizabeth Tayler, a senior technical officer for Antimicrobial Resistance with WHO in Geneva, told NPR during an interview. “They spread very easily and we don’t have any other way of preventing them.”

High-priority pathogens also include Enterococcus faecium (vancomycin-resistant), Helicobacter pylori (clarithromycin-resistant) and Campylobacter spp. (fluoroquinolone-resistant). Rounding out the “dirty dozen” are Streptococcus pneumoniae (penicillin-non-susceptible), Haemophilus influenzae (ampicillin-resistant) and Shigella spp. (fluoroquinolone-resistant), all of which have been categorized as “medium” priority due to the availability of other treatment options.

While immunization and other methods can be used to help combat these pathogens, Dr. Tayler emphasized that they should not be underestimated. “The ‘medium’ are still very nasty bugs that can make you very sick and kill you,” she told NPR. While the WHO said that research leading to new treatment options is “vital,” it added that “better prevention of infections and appropriate use of existing antibiotics in humans and animals,” were also essential to slowing the spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes.

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