Tag: 6/5/22

Genetic Risk Score for Hip or Knee Replacements

A Monash University-led research team has developed a risk score based on individuals’ genetic data to predict their likelihood of needing hip or knee replacement surgery for osteoarthritis. The team validated the score’s predictive ability in a study published in Arthritis & Rheumatology.  

The score incorporates 10 genetic sequence variants for predicting a person’s risk of needing knee replacement surgery and 37 genetic sequence variants for predicting the risk of needing hip replacement surgery.  

Among 12093 individuals of European genetic descent aged 70 years or older, 1422 (11.8%) had knee replacements and 1,297 (10.7%) had hip replacements. Participants with high risk scores had a 1.44-times higher odds of knee replacement and a 1.88-times higher odds of hip replacement, compared with those with low risk scores.   

 “Genetic scores, such as the one we developed, do not change over a person’s life. They provide an individual  with further information about their risk of severe osteoarthritis in later life and have the potential to improve prevention of severe knee and hip osteoarthritis by identifying those who may benefit from early intervention,” said senior author Flavia Cicuttini, PhD, of Monash University.  

Source: Wiley

Striking Eastern Cape Paramedics Face Dismissal

Photo by Camilo Jimenez on Unsplash

The Eastern Cape Department of Health has served more than 200 paramedics with letters of intention to dismiss them for embarking on a strike.

Long-standing problems with access to ambulances in parts of the Eastern Cape have worsened over the last three weeks as paramedics have stopped work in Buffalo City Municipality, Amahlathi and Raymond Mhlaba Local Municipality. The paramedics are demanding fully equipped ambulances, with valid licence discs, and cellphones. 

They want electrocardiography (ECG ) monitors, batteries, spine boards, blankets, head blocks, cervical collars, and baby cribs.

The workers are members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) which maintains that the paramedics are not on strike but are exercising their right to safety at work. The paramedics come to work everyday in full uniform and wait at their work places until their shifts are over.

One of the workers, who has been a paramedic for six years, told GroundUp: “The service we offer to the public is very poor. Our ambulances have no equipment. There are no machines to check diabetes and high blood pressure. Our radios don’t function because we work in deep rural areas where there is a network problem. We use our cellphones to respond to the calls and communicate with our control room.”

“These issues have been raised for many years with the department but it has always been empty promises. If we transport a patient in an ambulance which is not fully equipped the department shifts the blame on us if something wrong happens to the patient. We are not on strike, because we come daily to work.”

“The Department is threatening to fire us but it’s fully aware that it is failing its workers and patients.”

When GroundUp visited Fort Beaufort Provincial Hospital on Tuesday, we found patients being transported in private vehicles.

Thando Ntsume from Hillside dropped a patient in casualty with his private vehicle. “I could see that she was in severe pain and battling to breathe. Her family had been calling for an ambulance since the morning but it never arrived.”

“I know from my own experience that there are no ambulances available in this hospital. Three months ago I was stabbed and admitted to this hospital. Doctors transferred me to Cecilia Makiwane Hospital but they told me I should find my own transport because ambulances are not available. My brother had to take me with his car to East London.”

Patients outside the Fort Beaufort Provincial Hospital casualty department complain about the lack of ambulances. Photo: Mkhuseli Sizani

Mihlali Matshoba says the ambulance crisis has been going on for a long time. “On 7 October I gave birth at home because ambulances are not available here in Fort Beaufort. Sometimes they are hours late or we are told there is only one ambulance operating.”

Nolly Oliphant had to borrow money to put fuel in her car to take her son to Cecilia Makiwane Hospital after he injured his hand.

“I drove with him to Fort Beaufort Provincial Hospital. The doctors treated him and told me that I should take him with my own transport to Cecilia Makiwane Hospital. “I had to borrow R1,200 for fuel because ambulances are not available.”

“The strike has been devastating,” said one of the Fort Beaufort doctors. “We had to ventilate a patient in Fort Beaufort for over 24 hours because of the strike. Eventually we managed to get a private ambulance to come. The hospitals have been using their bakkies to transport patients.”

Regional NEHAWU coordinator Mzamane Mgwantashe says the workers are not on strike. “Over 200 workers are coming everyday to work. But they cannot perform their duties because ambulances are faulty and not fully equipped. In February, ambulances were fully equipped by the Department in order to obtain service compliance certificates. The same day after the assessment was done the equipment was stripped by the Department. We don’t know why that was done and we don’t know where that equipment was taken.”

He said workers had been told cellphones had been bought for them, but they had never received them. “Instead the Department bought ‘push-to-talk’ devices without consulting the workers.”

Mkhululi Ndamase, spokesperson for Health MEC Nomakhosazana Meth, confirmed the notices to dismiss over 200 workers who had embarked on an unprotected strike. He said the department had addressed the issues raised by the union.

“All vehicles are licensed annually and a certificate of fitness is issued before a vehicle is put on the road. We are in agreement that if a vehicle does not carry the valid licence and/or the certificate of fitness displayed, it should not be used. There are more than enough vehicles in the pool even while vehicles may be grounded whilst being repaired. The rough terrain of our predominantly rural areas and high volume usage does make them vulnerable to breakdowns.”

He said the vehicles were replaced every 300,000 km.

On the issue of cellphones, he said the department had issued “push-to-talk devices” earlier this year and most paramedics had accepted them. Responding to the complaint about equipment being put in the ambulances just to get licence approval, Ndamase said this was being investigated.

“None of these issues are considered valid reasons to suspend services to the communities we serve.”

The department was using private ambulances to respond to emergency calls, which was costly. Two of these ambulances had been stoned, he said.

Ndamase said a rule of no work no pay would apply.

Written by Mkhuseli Sizani for GroundUp.

Source: GroundUp

This article is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Closure Threat for SA’s COVID Vaccine Plant as Orders Dry up

Female scientist in laboratory
Photo by Gustavo Fring on Pexels

South Africa’s COVID vaccine production plant, the first of its kind in Africa is at risk of closure after failing to secure a single according to a report from Reuters. President Cyril Ramaphosa is reported to be in talks with three other African nations in effort to save the venture.

The World Health Organization had called the licensing deal between Johnson & Johnson and Aspen Pharmacare to manufacture the Aspenovax COVID vaccine, a “transformative moment” in the pursuit of equitable access to vaccines. The vaccine is the J&J adenovirus vector vaccine sold under the Aspen brand.

However, after initial vaccine delivery shortfalls, the African continent is now well stocked with vaccines, while the poor infrastructure hampers vaccine distribution.

“There’ve been no orders received for Aspenovax,” Reuters reported, citing a phone conversation with Aspen senior director Stavros Nicolaou.

“If we don’t get orders, we would have to repurpose these lines back into other things that we were previously doing,” he told CapeTalk.

There are several other such vaccine plants in various stages, as the African Union aims at 60% of locally produced vaccines for continent locally by 2040, up from the current 1%.

“If Aspen doesn’t get production, what chance is there for any of the other initiatives?” Nicolaou remarked.

Regarding possible options, he said: “We are exploring various options. It is our medium-to-long-term objective to look at providing a sterile [processing] platform and solutions for the continent but the short-term needs to be sorted out.”

Moderna announced an agreement with Kenya to set up its first mRNA manufacturing facility in Africa with the aim of producing up to 500 million doses a year.

Source: Seeking Alpha

Social Media Breaks Relieve Mental Health and Free up Time

Photo by Freestocks on Unsplash

Advising people to take a week-long social media break could lead to significant improvements in their wellbeing, depression and anxiety and could become a recommended part of maintaining mental health, according to the authors of a study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

University of Bath researchers studied the mental health effects of a week-long social media break. Some participants were able to free up 9 hours a week of time otherwise spent scrolling Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

Their results suggest that just one week off social media improved individuals’ overall level of well-being, as well as reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety.

For the study, the researchers randomly allocated 154 individuals aged 18 to 72 who used social media every day into either an intervention group, where they were asked to stop using all social media for one-week or a control group, where they could continue scrolling as normal. At the beginning of the study, baseline scores for anxiety, depression and wellbeing were taken.

At the start of the study, average time spend on social media was 8 hours per week. After one week, the participants who were asked to take the one-week break had significant improvements in wellbeing, depression, and anxiety than those who continued to use social media, suggesting a short-term benefit.

Participants asked to take a one-week break reported using social media for an average of 21 minutes’ use compared to seven hours for the control group, with screen usage stats used to confirm adherence to the break. Lead researcher from Bath’s Department for Health, Dr Jeff Lambert explained: “Scrolling social media is so ubiquitous that many of us do it almost without thinking from the moment we wake up to when we close our eyes at night.

“We know that social media usage is huge and that there are increasing concerns about its mental health effects, so with this study, we wanted to see whether simply asking people to take a week’s break could yield mental health benefits.

“Many of our participants reported positive effects from being off social media with improved mood and less anxiety overall. This suggests that even just a small break can have an impact.

“Of course, social media is a part of life and for many people, it’s an indispensable part of who they are and how they interact with others. But if you are spending hours each week scrolling and you feel it is negatively impacting you, it could be worth cutting down on your usage to see if it helps.”

The team’s next steps include investigating short breaks in different populations (eg younger people) and to increase follow up time. If benefits persist, they speculate that this could help in mental health management.

Over the past 15 years, social media has undergone explosive growth. In the UK the number of adults using social media increased from 45% in 2011 to 71% in 2021. As many as 97% of 16 to 44-year-olds use social media, with scrolling being most frequent online activity.

Feeling ‘low’ and losing pleasure are core characteristics of depression, whereas anxiety is characterised by excessive and out of control worry. Wellbeing refers to an individual’s level of positive affect, life satisfaction and sense of purpose. According to the UK mental health organisation Mind, one in six people experience a common mental health problem like anxiety and depression in any given week.

Source: University of Bath

Sex-differentiation Genes Also Contribute to Disease Risks

Man and woman about to sprint
Source: Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels

Some physical traits that differ between sexes are known to be linked to certain single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) outside the X and Y chromosomes. New research now suggests that many of these ‘sex-heterogenous’ SNPs also contribute to a person’s risk for a variety of diseases. Michela Traglia and colleagues at the University of California San Francisco presented their findings in PLOS Genetics.

Millions of SNPs are in each genome, with each SNP representing a difference in a certain DNA building block in a particular stretch of DNA. Many associations have been uncovered between certain SNPs and people’s distinct traits. Understanding SNPs has a number of applications, such as predicting individual treatment effectiveness or disease risks.

Traglia and colleagues previously found that SNPs associated with certain differences in physical traits between men and women, such as waist-hip ratio and basal metabolic rate, may also affect the biology of autism spectrum disorder and other complex diseases. Building on this work with two large genomic datasets, the identified an updated list of 2320 sex-heterogeneous SNPs.

Analysis of these SNPs revealed that they are also associated with a variety of health-related traits and diseases, some with strong sex bias and some without, including schizophrenia, type 2 diabetes, anorexia, heart failure, and ADHD.

These SNPs are located in stretches of DNA that are either within or near genes involved in skeletal and muscle development in a growing embryo. In addition, these SNPs appear to play a role in regulating gene expression and DNA methylation, which are fundamental processes by which a person’s DNA is translated into their distinct biology and traits.

Overall, the researchers conclude that the identified SNPs play a role in early-life biological processes shaping sex-distinct traits and which also affect health and disease risk later in life. More work is needed to understand the mechanisms behind these sex-heterogeneous SNPs.

“We found that genetic alleles with differing effects on measured physical traits in men and women also play an outsized role in health risks,” remarked study co-author Lauren Weiss. “We hope this work helps us to understand the genetic underpinnings of sexual dimorphism and its relationship with both early development and later disease risk.”

Source: EurekAlert!