Month: July 2023

Categories : CancerTags :

Scientists Find a Protein That Keeps Melanoma Hidden from the Immune System

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3D structure of a melanoma cell derived by ion abrasion scanning electron microscopy. Credit: Sriram Subramaniam/ National Cancer Institute

New research has helped explain how melanoma evades the immune system and may guide the discovery of future therapies for the disease. The study found that a protein known to be active in immune cells is also active inside melanoma cells, helping promote tumour growth. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, suggest that targeting this protein with new drugs may deliver a powerful double hit to melanoma tumours.

“The immune system’s control of a tumour is influenced by both internal factors within tumour cells, as well as factors from the tumour’s surroundings,” says first author Hyungsoo Kim, PhD, a research assistant professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys in the lab of senior author Ze’ev Ronai, PhD. “We found that the protein we’re studying is involved in both, which makes it an ideal target for new cancer therapies.”

“Immunotherapy is the first-line therapy for several cancers now, but the success of immunotherapy is limited because many cancers either don’t respond to it or become resistant over time,” says Kim. “An important goal remains to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy.”

To find ways to boost immunotherapy in melanoma, the research team analysed data from patient tumours to identify genes that may coincide with patients’ responsiveness to immunotherapy. This led to the identification of a protein that helps tumours evade the immune system – called NR2F6 – which was found not only in tumour cells, but also in the surrounding noncancerous cells.

“Often we find that a protein has the opposite effect outside of tumours compared to what it does within a tumour, which is less effective for therapy,” says Kim. “In the case of NR2F6, we found that it elicits the same change in the tumour and in its surrounding tissues, pointing to a synergistic effect. This means that treatments that block this protein’s activity could be twice as effective.”

In a mouse model, the researchers then deleted the NR2F6 protein in both melanoma tumours and in the tumours’ environment. This inhibited melanoma growth more strongly, compared to when this effect occurs in either the tumour or its microenvironment alone. The cancer’s response to immunotherapy was also enhanced upon loss of NR2F6 in both tumours and their microenvironment.

“This tells us that NR2F6 helps melanoma evade the immune system, and without it, the immune system can more readily suppress tumour growth,” adds Kim.

To help advance their discovery further, the team is working with the Institute’s Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics to identify new drugs that can target NR2F6.

“Discovering drugs that can target this protein are expected to offer a new way to treat melanomas, and possibly other tumours, that would otherwise resist immunotherapy,” says Kim.

Source: Sanford Burnham Prebys

Categories : Obstetrics & Gynaecology PaediatricsTags :

Multidisciplinary Approach Reduced Hypothermia in NICU Babies During and After Surgery

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Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash

After implementation of a multidisciplinary quality improvement project, the percentage of infants from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) experiencing hypothermia upon operating room (OR) arrival and at any point during the operation decreased from 48.7% to 6.4% and 67.5% to 37.4%, respectively. Conducted at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, the successful project and was featured in the journal Pediatric Quality and Safety.

About one-third of infants admitted to children’s hospitals’ NICUs require surgery and are at increased risk for intraoperative hypothermia due to environmental heat loss, anaesthesia, and inconsistent temperature monitoring. Hypothermic infants are at risk for infection, excessive bleeding, increased oxygen consumption, the need for cardiorespiratory support, and mortality.

Upon return to the NICU, the percentage of infants experiencing postoperative hypothermia decreased from 5.8% to 2.1% while postoperative hyperthermia increased from 0.8% to 2.6%.

“Intraoperative hypothermia is more prevalent than postoperative hypothermia, yet the problem appears to be recognized less. Several improvement projects have addressed postoperative hypothermia, however, few have focused on reducing intraoperative hypothermia,” said senior author Gustave Falciglia, MD, MSCI, MSHQPS, neonatologist at Lurie Children’s. “The strengths of our project were the large cohort of infants and the use of continuous, secure and automated data to ensure normal temperature for infants before, during and after an operation. Using our current approach, however, further decreasing intraoperative and postoperative hypothermia may not be possible without further increasing postoperative hyperthermia.”

Dr Falciglia and colleagues from Lurie Children’s Center for Quality and Safety, anaesthesiology, NICU and OR nursing, surgery, neonatology and Data Analytics and Reporting succeeded in reducing rates of intraoperative hypothermia by standardising temperature monitoring, the transport process to the OR and intraoperative warming.

“In this project, we used improvement science methodology to understand the barriers to maintaining normal temperature in NICU infants before, during and after surgery, and then to design and implement solutions,” said lead author Abbey Studer from the Center for Quality and Safety at Lurie Children’s. “We found variation in processes that contributed to intraoperative hypothermia, so we focused on standardizing temperature monitoring and thermal support during the infant’s transport and operation. Automated monitoring using a preoperatively placed continuous temperature probe enhanced providers’ situational awareness of infant temperature and guided clinical adjustments.”

For this improvement project, the hospital’s Center for Quality and Safety coordinated care and resources between multiple departments. It achieved consensus and buy-in from providers despite competing factors such as perspiring surgeons and busy anaesthesia providers transporting all infants to the OR. It identified key participants who were vested in revising processes and facilitated adoption with their colleagues, following up on missed opportunities and gaps in the processes identified through observation and surveys. The centre provided data analysts who worked iteratively with providers to generate valid, actionable, and real-time data.

“Although medicine prizes specialisation, our success relied upon individuals with various talents sharing their skills and knowledge,” said Dr Falciglia. “Working together we can continue to improve the care of infants in the NICU who need surgery.”

Source: Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago

Categories : Lab Tests and Imaging Obstetrics & GynaecologyTags : 1 Comment

Researchers Discover a Lipid Biomarker that can Identify Preeclampsia Risk

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Photo by Shvets Production on Pexels

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have discovered a lipid biomarker to identify pregnant women at risk of preeclampsia, complications from which are the second-leading cause of maternal death around the world. Their findings are published in the Journal of Lipid Research.

The UVA scientists, led by Charles E. Chalfant, PhD, say that their finding opens the door to simple blood tests to screen patients. Further, the approach worked regardless of whether the women were on aspirin therapy, which is commonly prescribed to women thought to be at risk.

“Clinicians have been seeking simple tests to predict risk of preeclampsia before symptoms appear. Although alterations in some blood lipid levels have been known to occur in preeclampsia, they have not been endorsed as useful biomarkers. Our study presents the first comprehensive analysis of lipid species, yielding a distinctive profile associated with the development of preeclampsia,” said Chalfant. “The lipid ‘signature’ we described could significantly improve the ability to identify patients needing preventative treatment, like aspirin, or more careful monitoring for early signs of disease so that treatment could be initiated in a timely fashion.”

Preeclampsia affects up to 7% of all pregnancies. Symptoms typically appear after 20 weeks and include high blood pressure, kidney problems and abnormalties in blood clotting. The condition is associated with dangerous complications such as kidney and liver dysfunction and seizures, as well as a lifelong increased risk of heart disease for the mothers. An estimated 70 000 women around the world die from preeclampsia and its complications each year.

Doctors commonly recommend low-dose aspirin for at-risk women, but it works for only about half of patients, and it needs to be started within the first 16 weeks of pregnancy – well before symptoms appear. That makes it all the more important to identify women at risk early on, and to better understand preeclampsia in general.

Chalfant and his team wanted to find ‘biomarkers’ in the blood of pregnant women that could reveal their risk of developing preeclampsia. They examined blood plasma samples collected from 57 women in their first 24 weeks of pregnancy, then looked at whether the women went on to develop preeclampsia. The researchers found significant differences in ‘bioactive’ lipids in the blood of women who developed preeclampsia and those who did not.

This, the researchers say, should allow doctors to stratify women’s risk of developing preeclampsia by measuring lipid changes in their blood. The changes represent an important ‘lipid fingerprint’, the scientists say, that could be a useful tool for identifying, preventing and better treating preeclampsia.

“The application of our comprehensive lipid profiling method to routine obstetrical care could significantly reduce maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality,” Chalfant said. “It represents an example of how personalised medicine could address a significant public health challenge.”

Source: University of Virginia Health System

Categories : Mental HealthTags :

Generic Ketamine Performs Strongly for Treatment-resistant Depression

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Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

A low-cost version of ketamine to treat severe depression has performed strongly in a placebo-controlled double-blind trial. Results published in the British Journal of Psychiatry showed that more than one in five participants achieved total remission from their symptoms after a month of bi-weekly injections, while a third had their symptoms improve by at least 50%.

“For people with treatment-resistant depression – so those who have not benefitted from different modes of talk-therapy, commonly prescribed antidepressants, or electroconvulsive therapy – 20 per cent remission is actually quite good,” lead researcher Professor Colleen Loo says.

“We found that in this trial, ketamine was clearly better than the placebo – with 20 per cent reporting they no longer had clinical depression compared with only 2 per cent in the placebo group. This is a huge and very obvious difference and brings definitive evidence to the field which only had past smaller trials that compared ketamine with placebo.”

How the trial worked

The researchers, led by UNSW Sydney and the affiliated Black Dog Institute, recruited 179 people with treatment-resistant depression. All were given an injection of either a generic form of ketamine that is already widely available in Australia as a drug for anaesthesia and sedation – or placebo. Participants received two injections a week in a clinic where they were monitored for around two hours while acute dissociative and sedative effects wore off, usually within the first hour. The treatment ran for a month and participants were asked to assess their mood at the end of the trial and one month later.

In this double-blind trial, a placebo was chosen that also causes sedation, to improve treatment masking. Midazolam is a sedative normally administered before a general anaesthetic, while in many previous studies the placebo was saline.

“Because there are no subjective effects from the saline, in previous studies it became obvious which people were receiving the ketamine and which people received placebo,” Prof Loo says.

“In using midazolam – which is not a treatment for depression, but does make you feel a bit woozy and out of it – you have much less chance of knowing whether you have received ketamine, which has similar acute effects.”

Other features of the recent trial that set it apart from past studies included accepting people into the trial who had previously received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

“People are recommended ECT treatment for their depression when all other treatments have been ineffective,” Prof. Loo says.

“Most studies exclude people who have had ECT because it is very hard for a new treatment to work where ECT has not.”

Another difference about this trial was that the drug was delivered subcutaneously (injected into the skin) rather than by drip, thus greatly reducing time and medical complexity. The study is also the largest in the world to date that compares generic ketamine with placebo in treating severe depression.

Much more affordable

Apart from the positive results, one of the standout benefits of using generic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression is that it is much cheaper than the patented S-ketamine nasal spray currently in use in Australia. Where S-ketamine costs about AUS$800 (R9 600) per dose, the generic ketamine is a mere fraction of that, costing as little as AUS$5 (R60), depending on the supplier and whether the hospital buys it wholesale. On top of the cost for the drug, patients need to pay for the medical care they receive to ensure their experience is safe – which at Black Dog Institute clinics, comes to AUS$350 (R4200) per session.

“With the S-ketamine nasal spray, you are out of pocket by about AUS$1200 for every treatment by the time you pay for the drug and the procedure, whereas for generic ketamine, you’re paying around AUS$300-350 for the treatment including the drug cost,” Prof Loo says.

She adds that for both S-ketamine and generic ketamine treatments, the positive effects often wear off after a few days to weeks, so ongoing treatment may be required, depending on someone’s clinical situation. But the prohibitive costs of the drug and procedure make this an unsustainable proposition for most.

The researchers will next be looking at larger trials of generic ketamine over longer periods, and refining the safety monitoring of treatment.

Source: University of New South Wales

Categories : Hospitals Surgeries & ProceduresTags :

Cancellation of Operations at the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital

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The Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital (CMJAH) would like to dismiss the misleading information shared by Mr Jack Bloom regarding cancelled operations.

CMJAH would like to put it on record that there were no “more than 50 elective cases cancelled due to the cold weather conditions”. The statement by Mr Bloom creates the impression that all elective cases were cancelled, which is not true.

There were 53 operations scheduled for Monday, 10 July 2023, and 26 cases were done, while only 15 were cancelled due to low temperatures at theatres and 12 were cancelled for reasons not related to low temperatures.

Out of the 15 cancelled cases, 3 were for Thoracic, 6 were for Trauma Orthopaedic, 2 were for Paeds Orthopaedic, 1 was for Paeds plastics, and 3 were for Ear, Nose, & Throat.

The problem of temperature control has been a challenge for the facility for years, but it became worse in the last two years due to the copper theft which took place during the period when the facility was evacuated for months after the fire incident. This affected the central heating system of the facility, which regulates the level of acceptable temperatures in the entire hospital, but mostly in the theatres.

To remedy the situation, the process of installing Schedule 40 pipes, which are less susceptible to theft as they do not have an attractive market value as copper does, has started. During the installation process, the theatres and intensive care units (ICU) were prioritised. From the date of appointment, 28 June 2023, to date, the contractor has completed the installation of schedule 40 pipes for Blocks 2, 3 and 4. The installation process at Block 5 has already started and the work is progressing well, ahead of schedule.

The water system is currently running, with close monitoring, at all three blocks where the schedule 40 pipes were installed to check for any possible leaks as the system has not been running for the past two years.

The facility would like to apologise to the public for any inconvenience this might have caused. The installation of the schedule 40 pipes is a necessary project that would address the issue of copper theft and the central heating system.

The facility would further like to assure the public that this matter is getting the urgency it deserves, and cancelled cases are being attended to.

News release issued by the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital

Categories : Immune SystemTags :

Adaptive Immune Memory Resides in the Shape of DNA

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Scanning electron micrograph of a human T lymphocyte (also called a T cell) from the immune system of a healthy donor. Credit: NIAID

One of the adaptive immune system’s most intriguing abilities of the is its memory: upon first contact with antigens, it takes around two weeks to respond, but responses afterwards are much faster, as if the cells ‘remembered’ the antigen. But how is this memory attained? In a recent publication in Science Immunology, a team of researchers examined epigenetic and the structure of DNA for possible clues.

In their research paper, first author Anne Onrust-van Schoonhoven and colleagues compared the response of immune cells that had never been in contact with an antigen (called naïve cells) with cells previously exposed to antigen (memory cells) and sort of knew it. They focused on the differences in the epigenetic control of the cellular machinery and the nuclear architecture of the cells, two mechanisms that could explain the quick activation pattern of memory cells.

While all the cells in an individual have the same genetic information, different cell types access to different parts of the DNA. The term ‘epigenetics’ encompasses the mechanisms that dynamically control this access. The results revealed a particular epigenetic signature in memory T helper (TH)2 cells, resulting in the rapid activation of a crucial set of genes compared to naïve cells. These genes were much more accessible to the cellular machinery, in particular to a family of transcription factors called AP-1. Like athletes before a race, these genes had essentially been ‘warming up’ ever since the cell’s first contact with the antigen.

However, this epigenetic signature was just the tip of the iceberg. It is known that the position of the DNA in the nucleus is not random and reflects the cell’s activation state. The researchers found that, indeed, the 3D distribution of DNA in the nucleus is different between naïve and memory immune cells. Key genes for the early immune response are grouped together and under the influence of the same regulatory regions, called enhancers. Keeping with the racing metaphor, the genes are not only warmed-up, but also gathered together at the starting line.

Although most of the research has focused on healthy cells, the scientific team wondered whether any of the mechanisms found could, when altered, explain actual diseases in which the immune system plays an important role. To address this question, they analysed immune cells from chronic asthma patients and found that the circuits identified as key for an early and strong immune response were overactivated.

The epigenetic control of the immune system is a blossoming field and discoveries like the ones by Dr Stik and colleagues are setting the stage for the next generation of epigenetic drugs and treatments, targeting autoimmune diseases and cancer.

Source: Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute

Categories : HospitalsTags :

Staff at Chatsworth Hospital Picket over Poor Working Conditions

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Staff, including nurses, at RK Khan Hospital in Chatsworth, Durban, picketed on Wednesday over poor working conditions at the facility. Photo: Tsoanelo Sefoloko

By Tsoanelo Sefoloko

Nurses, administration staff and general workers brought parts of RK Khan Hospital in Chatsworth, Durban, to a standstill for about an hour on Wednesday. They protested outside the hospital to highlight what they say are poor working conditions. 

Protesting nurses say they are forced to perform cleaning duties in addition to patient care because the hospital has not employed enough cleaners. Other workers complained of staff shortages in the administration and general units.

Workers say they met with the management in February. Union leaders had asked the facility to commit to resolving their complaints.

Nurse Zizakele Ndlovu said they were told by the union leaders that working conditions would improve. But nothing changed, she said.

“The conditions we work under at the hospital are not good. We end up having to work more hours, and we don’t get paid for overtime. Sometimes I even work as a clerk,” she said.

“The department treats us as if we don’t know our job, and we don’t deserve what we are asking for. We lost many workers to Covid; some retired and others resigned. Those vacancies have not been filled. Even at top management there are lots of vacancies and this leads to poor service.”

Chairperson at the hospital of the National Education, Health and Allied and Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) David Mpongose said they had engaged management and had been promised that the situation would improve.

“Our bosses are arrogant. They really don’t take us seriously. Each time they make empty promises, so we decided to protest for the provincial government to assist us,” said Mpongose.

Xolani Mnguni, a cleaner, said he earned R7800 per month under the hospital’s previous contractor, but now only earns R3000 under the current contractor. He also said he has to do jobs other than cleaning.

Hospital CEO Linda Sobekwa accepted the workers’ memorandum and signed it on behalf of the provincial health department. She promised to ensure that the department responded within ten days as requested.

Agiza Hlongwane, spokesperson for the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health, said officials would consider the workers’ demands and respond to them.

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Source: GroundUp

Categories : Ophthalmology PaediatricsTags :

Atropine Eyedrops Fail to Slow Myopia Progression in US Children

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Photo by Jeffrey Riley on Unsplash

Use of low-dose atropine eyedrops (concentration 0.01%) was no better than placebo at slowing myopia progression and elongation of the eye among children treated for two years, according to a randomised controlled trial conducted in the US. The trial aimed to identify an effective way to manage this leading and increasingly common cause of refractive error, which can cause serious uncorrectable vision loss later in life. Results from the trial, published in JAMA Ophthalmology, contradict those from recent trials in East Asia.

The study was conducted by the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group (PEDIG) and funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI).

“The overall mixed results on low-dose atropine show us we need more research. Would a different dose be more effective in a US population? Would combining atropine with other strategies have a synergistic effect? Could we develop other approaches to treatment or prevention based on a better understanding of what causes myopia progression?” said Michael F. Chiang, MD, director of the NEI, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Identifying an optimal approach for preventing high (advanced) myopia is urgently needed given the escalating prevalence of myopia overall and the risk of it progressing to high myopia. By 2030, it’s predicted that 39 million people in the U.S. will have myopia. By 2050, that number is expected to grow to 44 million in the U.S. and to 50% of the global population.

Much stronger concentrations of atropine eyedrops (0.5-1.0%) have long been used by pediatric eye doctors to slow myopia progression. While effective, such doses cause light sensitivity and blurry near vision while on the nightly eyedrops. Thus, there is interest in clinical studies assessing lower concentrations that have been shown to have fewer side effects.

“The absence of a treatment benefit in our US-based study, compared with East Asian studies, may reflect racial differences in atropine response. The study enrolled fewer Asian children, whose myopia progresses more quickly, and included Black children, whose myopia progresses less quickly compared with other races,” noted the study’s lead co-author, Michael X. Repka, M.D., professor of ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins University.

For the study, 187 children ages 5 to 12 years with low-to-moderate bilateral myopia were randomly assigned to use nightly atropine (0.01%) (125 children) or placebo (62 children) eyedrops for two years. Study participants, their parents, and the eye care providers were masked to the group assignments.

After the treatment period, and 6 months after treatment stopped, there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of changes in degree of myopia compared with baseline. Nor were there significant differences in axial length within the two groups when compared with baseline measurements.

“It’s possible that a different concentration of atropine is needed for US children to experience a benefit,” noted the study’s other lead co-author, Katherine K. Weise, OD, professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Clinical researchers could evaluate new pharmaceuticals and special wavelengths of light in combination with optical strategies, like special glasses or contact lenses, to see what works in reducing the progression of myopia.”

Among children, myopia will stabilise in about half of children around age 16 years, and among an increasingly larger percentage as they get older. By their early twenties, about 10% of individuals with myopia will continue to grow more nearsighted, and by age 24 years that percentage is 4%.

“Vision scientists may help us figure out what’s different about the myopic eye, even among different races and ethnicities, to help create new treatment strategies,” she said. It will take a real convergence of eye research to solve the environmental, genetic, and structural mystery of myopia.”

Source: NIH/National Eye Institute

Categories : Ethics and Law Surgeries & ProceduresTags :

Plastic Surgeon Loses Medical Licence for Streaming Surgeries on TikTok

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Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unspalsh

A plastic surgeon in the US has had her medical licence permanently revoked for livestreaming parts of her surgeries and causing harm to her patients while doing so, according to the Washington Post.

Dr Katherine Grawe, who was also fined US$4500, streamed her operations with between 100 000 and 500 000 viewers at a time, speaking to the camera and on occasion answering viewers’ questions.

Three of her patients whose surgeries she had streamed experienced complications – infections, a perforated intestine and a loss of brain function – that required further medical care. She told the Washington Post that she did not believe that her livestreaming her surgeries had resulted in harm to her patients.

“Nobody wants a complication, and we never want things to go poorly, but any complications that happened with me were not because I was not paying attention,” Grawe said. “My whole goal in life is to give these people confidence and make them more beautiful. And, unfortunately, they suffered these complications, and I feel very sad for them. I would never want anything bad to happen to them.”

She specialised in cosmetic surgery for women’s breasts, as well as tummy tucks and other procedures, Grawe said. She is also being sued by the three patients who had complications. Since she started practising in 2010 with her Dr Roxy practice, she built up a social media following and eventually began livestreaming on TikTok in an effort to break down “this scary wall” between patients and doctors. Her patients all signed consent forms for their procedures to be livestreamed.

Grawe’s licence was suspended in November, and she pleaded with the board, saying that she would never livestream her surgeries again. The board was not moved by her appeal. “Dr Grawe’s social media was more important to her than the lives of the patients she treated,” the board stated.

The board had warned her in 2018 over patient confidentiality concerns in her livestreaming, and again in 2021.

Surgeries conducted in front of an audience are nothing new in medicine; medical students and clinicians alike observe procedures to learn and share knowledge. Some operating theatres are specially designed to host audiences behind windows overlooking the operating table. In the 21st century, it has become commonplace for educational livestreaming of surgeries, with considerable benefits for surgeons and increased anatomy knowledge scores.

There is also some evidence of risks to patients: one review found no increased risk of harm in urology, but this was not true for other surgical fields. Thirteen

Unlike in-person viewing of surgeries, data protection considerations must be employed as operating on a patient often may reveal identifiable information even if not livestreaming to a wide audience. Certain video conferencing platforms may not be secure, and recordings of the procedure may inadvertently be accessible to others, eg being stored on network drives, on the cloud without password protection and so on. There are secure communication apps that can be used to confidentially view and share patient data, such as TigerConnect, Medic Bleep, Forward Health and Siilo.

Categories : NeurologyTags :

Simple Oxygen Therapy can Boost Motor Skills Rehabilitation

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Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

Scientists studying the impact of oxygen supplementation on motor learning have found a promising treatment that could help patients who have experienced neurological trauma recover lost motor skills.

“A simple and easy to administer treatment with 100% oxygen can drastically improve human motor learning processes,” said Dr Marc Dalecki, now at the German University of Health and Sports in Berlin, senior author of the study in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Repurposing a frontline treatment

Brains have a high oxygen demand, and hypoxia causes cognitive function to decrease, while in high-oxygen contexts it recovers, and the delivery of 100% oxygen is already used to help preserve as much of the brain as possible in patients with neurological injuries.

Motor learning is particularly dependent on oxygen-reliant information processing and memory functions: humans learn by trial and error, so the ability to remember and integrate information from previous trials is critical to efficient and effective motor learning. So could supplementing oxygen while learning a motor task help people learn faster and more effectively, offering hope for neurorehabilitation patients?

“I had this idea in my mind for almost a decade and promised myself to investigate it once I got my own research lab,” said Dalecki, who led the experimental research at the School of Kinesiology at Louisiana State University. “And with Zheng Wang, now Dr Zheng Wang, I had the perfect doctoral student to run it – a keen physiotherapist with a clinical background and stroke patient experience.”

Hand-eye coordination

Dalecki and Wang recruited 40 participants, 20 of whom received 100% oxygen at normobaric pressure and 20 of whom received medical air (21% oxygen) through a nasal cannula during the “adaptation” or learning phase of a task.

Dalecki and Wang selected a simple visuomotor task which involved drawing lines between different targets on a digital tablet with a stylus. The task was designed to test how quickly the participants were able to integrate information from the eye and hand, a crucial part of motor learning. After the task had been learned, the alignment of the cursor and the stylus was altered to see how effectively the participants adapted to the inconsistency, and then realigned for a final session to see how they adapted to the realignment.

“The oxygen treatment led to substantially faster and about 30% better learning in a typical visuomotor adaptation task,” said Wang, first author of the study and now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. “We also demonstrate that the participants were able to consolidate these improvements after the termination of the oxygen treatment.”

Oxygen improved learning by 30%

The scientists found that the participants who had received oxygen learned faster and performed better, improvements which extended into later sessions of the task when oxygen was not administered.

The oxygen group moved the pen more smoothly and more accurately, and when the cursor was adjusted in a deliberate attempt to throw them off, they adapted more quickly. They also made bigger mistakes when the alignment of the stylus was corrected, suggesting they had integrated the previous alignment more thoroughly than the other group.

Dalecki and Wang plan to investigate the long-term effects of this supplementation on learning and test the intervention with other motor learning tasks: it is possible that the relevant brain functions for this task in particular benefit from high ambient oxygen levels, leading to the observed advantages in performance. They also hope to bring the oxygen treatment to elderly and injured people, in the hope that it will help them re-learn motor skills.

“Our future plan is to investigate whether this treatment can also improve motor recovery processes following brain trauma,” said Dalecki. “Since it worked in the young healthy brain, we expect that the effects may even be larger in the neurologically impaired, more vulnerable brain.”

Source: Medical Xpress