Tag: 3/11/20

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Brain Swelling Has an Unexpected Protective Effect

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Animal studies have shown that swelling in the brain can protect it in the longer term. Dangerous brain activity can take place after a brain injury (such as from blunt trauma), where neural network activity can surge to dangerous levels, resulting in seizures and tissue injury for months or years after the original injury. Swelling may reduce this long-term effect, an unexpected protective benefit.

At the University of Utah, Punam Sawant-Pokam, PhD, and KC Brennan, MD, investigated the effects of cerebral injury and swelling. They examined the brains of mice subjected to injury with a range of advanced tools for brain recording and electrical activity, 

When observations were made 48 hours after injury, when maximum swelling usually appears, untreated mice brains showed swollen neurons but their neuronal activity had surprisingly dropped. Mice that were given drugs to reduce swelling showed that the neurons continued to show over-activity.

“This data prompts a pretty big reconsideration of how we view edema after brain injury,” Brennan said. “When oedema is about to cause death, it is the number one priority. We’re not saying this is not true. But we’re opening up more nuance to the phenomenon in a way that might allow us to eventually get to more specific treatments and better outcomes.

“It’s very exciting to know that neuronal oedema is not only reducing cellular excitability, it’s also protecting the brain from dangerous network events,” Sawant-Pokam said.

The findings suggest that patients could benefit from more targeted approaches to dealing with cerebral oedema.

Source: Medical Xpress

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Healthy Country Childhood: The Protective “Farm Effect” on Asthma

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The presence of a diverse gut microbiome appears to exert a protective effect against asthma, which may explain the largely protective “farm effect” on asthma.

European researchers analysed faecal samples from over 700 infants raised on farms, and found a strong environmental effect. It was anticipated that nutrition would be a strong contributor to gut microbiome maturation, but there were unanticipated environmental effects such as exposure to animal sheds.

Researchers found that faecal butyrate (related to butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid), which is already known to protect against asthma in mice, had an inverse association with asthma. They ascribed this to gut bacteria such as Roseburia and Coprococcus which have the potential of producing short chain fatty acids. Children with more matured gut microbiomes had Roseburia and Coprococcus present.

“Our study provides further evidence that the gut may have an influence on the health of the lung. A mature gut microbiome with a high level of short chain fatty acids had a protective effect on the respiratory health of the children in this study. This suggests the idea of a relevant gut-lung axis in humans,” said Dr. Markus Ege, professor for clinical-respiratory epidemiology at the Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital. “This also means, however, that an immature gut microbiome may contribute to the development of diseases. This emphasizes the need for prevention strategies in the first year of life, when the gut microbiome is highly plastic and amenable to modification.”

Source: News-Medical.Net

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Extreme “Super-spreader” Events Boost COVID Spread

On By ModernMedia

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has a reproduction number of three, indicating that on average it will infect three other individuals over the course of the infection. However, a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that extreme “super-spreader” events, such as the one that happened at a White House event in September, seem to generate more infections than would otherwise be expected due to random distributions.

“Super-spreading events are likely more important than most of us had initially realized. Even though they are extreme events, they are probable and thus are likely occurring at a higher frequency than we thought. If we can control the super-spreading events, we have a much greater chance of getting this pandemic under control,” said James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering, and the senior author of this study. 

The researchers analysed a number of documented “super-spreader events” that have taken place over the COVID pandemic. When they ran statistical analyses on super-spreader events, they found that instead of the expected “bell curve” of normal distribution, they found a “fat tail” of extreme events.

Lead author, MIT postdoc Felix Wong said, “This means that the probability of extreme events decays more slowly than one would have expected. These really large super-spreading events, with between 10 and 100 people infected, are much more common than we had anticipated.”

Source: Medical Xpress

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UV Key to Seasonality of Airborne Respiratory Diseases

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It has long been observed that flu seasons in the northern hemisphere tend to last over autumn and winter, while in regions closer to the equator, they tend to have a year-round prevalence.

A group of Italian researchers believe that the sun – specifically its UV rays, which are known to inactivate various pathogens – holds the key. This periodic change in UV radiation over the seasons resonates with another cyclical event – the loss of resistance in the host over half a year of antigenic drift. The researchers incorporated these effects into a series of models, which reflect the seasonality of airborne respiratory diseases.

“From an epidemiologic point of view, these models clarify an important and long-standing mystery: why do influenza epidemics disappear every year when the number of susceptible individuals is still very far from that needed to trigger the herd immunity mechanism?” said Mario Clerici, Immunologist at the University of Milan and the Don Gnocchi Foundation.
“The Italian data of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemics can also be described accurately by our model,” said Fabrizio Nicastro, INAF researcher and PI of the work, “but the predictive power of the model depends critically (other than on the implementation of new restriction measures) on the exact UV-B/A lethal doses for the COVID-19 virus, which our collaboration is about to measure.”

Source: Medical Xpress

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Speech Recognition AI Detects COVID in Coughs

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An AI system originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to research speech patterns in people with Alzheimer’s was repurposed when the COVID pandemic hit to become an indicator for COVID in asymptomatic patients. 

“The sounds of talking and coughing are both influenced by the vocal cords and surrounding organs,” says research scientist Brian Subirana of MIT.
“This means that when you talk, part of your talking is like coughing, and vice versa. It also means that things we easily derive from fluent speech, AI can pick up simply from coughs, including things like the person’s gender, mother tongue, or even emotional state. There’s in fact sentiment embedded in how you cough.”

The system was based on a neural network that was trained on a thousand hours of human speech, then on a database on words spoken in different emotional states and finally a database of coughs. The result was a system that could detect a cough in an asymptomatic person with COVID with 97.1% accuracy. However, this is not a true test of COVID but an enhanced early indicator. The advantage of this technology is that it can be developed as an early warning system that can be incorporated into something as ubiquitous as a smartphone.

Source: Science Alert