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Obesity affects around 42% of the adult population in the United States and leads to the beginning of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cancer, and other ailments. While common healthy diet mantras warn against midnight snacking, few studies have thoroughly studied the combined impacts of late dining on the three key actors in body weight control and consequently obesity risk: calorie intake management, calorie burn, and biochemical alterations in fat tissue. A new study provides experimental evidence that late eating reduces energy expenditure, increases appetite, and changes in adipose tissue, all of which may raise the risk of obesity.

“We wanted to test the mechanisms that may explain why late eating increases obesity risk,” explained senior author Frank A. J. L. Scheer, PhD, Director of the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “Previous research by us and others had shown that late eating is associated with increased obesity risk, increased body fat, and impaired weight loss success. We wanted to understand why.”

“In this study, we asked, ‘Does the time that we eat matter when everything else is kept consistent?'” said first author Nina Vujovic, PhD, a researcher in the Medical Chronobiology Program in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “And we found that eating four hours later makes a significant difference for our hunger levels, the way we burn calories after we eat, and the way we store fat.”

Vujovic, Scheer and their team studied 16 patients with a body mass index (BMI) in the overweight or obese range. Each participant completed two laboratory protocols: one with a strictly scheduled early meal schedule, and the other with the exact same meals, each scheduled about four hours later in the day. In the last two to three weeks before starting each of the in-laboratory protocols, participants maintained fixed sleep and wake schedules, and in the final three days before entering the laboratory, they strictly followed identical diets and meal schedules at home. In the lab, participants regularly documented their hunger and appetite, provided frequent small blood samples throughout the day, and had their body temperature and energy expenditure measured.

To measure how eating time affected molecular pathways involved in adipogenesis, or how the body stores fat, investigators collected biopsies of adipose tissue from a subset of participants during laboratory testing in both the early and late eating protocols, to enable comparison of gene expression patterns/levels between these two eating conditions.

Obesity risk

Results revealed that eating later had profound effects on hunger and appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin, which influence our drive to eat. Specifically, levels of the hormone leptin, which signals satiety, were decreased across the 24 hours in the late eating condition compared to the early eating conditions. When participants ate later, they also burned calories at a slower rate and exhibited adipose tissue gene expression towards increased adipogenesis and decreased lipolysis, which promote fat growth. Notably, these findings convey converging physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying the correlation between late eating and increased obesity risk.

Vujovic explains that these findings are not only consistent with a large body of research suggesting that eating later may increase one’s likelihood of developing obesity, but they shed new light on how this might occur. By using a randomized crossover study, and tightly controlling for behavioral and environmental factors such as physical activity, posture, sleep, and light exposure, investigators were able to detect changes the different control systems involved in energy balance, a marker of how our bodies use the food we consume.

In future studies, Scheer’s team aims to recruit more women to increase the generalizability of their findings to a broader population. While this study cohort included only five female participants, the study was set up to control for menstrual phase, reducing confounding but making recruiting women more difficult. Going forward, Scheer and Vujovic are also interested in better understanding the effects of the relationship between meal time and bedtime on energy balance.

“This study shows the impact of late versus early eating. Here, we isolated these effects by controlling for confounding variables like caloric intake, physical activity, sleep, and light exposure, but in real life, many of these factors may themselves be influenced by meal timing,” said Scheer. “In larger scale studies, where tight control of all these factors is not feasible, we must at least consider how other behavioral and environmental variables alter these biological pathways underlying obesity risk. ”

Also Read: Researchers find how biological markers predict risk of postpartum depression

To explore therapies for neurological illnesses, medical experts have found how to manufacture more precise, consistent brain organoids.

“Right now, it’s like the Wild West because there is no standard method for generating mini-brain organoids,” said Bennett Novitch, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and the senior author of a new paper on the topic.

“Every neuroscientist wants to make a brain organoid model of their favorite disease, and yet everyone’s organoids do not always look alike.” In fact, because there is no common protocol for their production and a lack of quality-control guidelines, organoids can vary from lab to lab — and even from batch to batch — which means that a finding made in one organoid may not hold true in another.

“If my lab and another lab down the hall were to conduct drug screens using mini-brain organoid models of the same disorder, we could still get different results,” said Momoko Watanabe, the new paper’s first author and an assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology at UC Irvine. “We won’t know whose findings are correct because the differences we’re seeing could be reflections of how our models differ rather than reflections of the disease.”

Novitch, Watanabe, and their colleagues provide guidelines based on their findings in their new article, published today in Stem Cell Reports, that can assist scientists overcome two main challenges standing in the way of these organoids’ full potential: disparities in uniformity and structure.

Having organoids that accurately and consistently recreate the structure and cellular makeup of specific sections of the brain is especially important for studying disorders like schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder, in which affected people’s brains often appear structurally identical to neurotypical brains but exhibit marked differences in function.

“We’ll never be able to identify the subtle differences in brain structure and function — things that are relevant for patients with neurological disorders — if our organoids have the wrong balance of cell types or grossly irregular structure,” said Novitch, who is also director of the UCLA Brain Research Institute’s Integrated Center for Neural Repair.

To produce mini-brain organoids, which can range from 1 to 5 millimeters in diameter, scientists first take human skin or blood cells and reprogram them to become induced pluripotent stem cells — cells that can differentiate into any cell type in the body. They then direct these iPS cells to create neural stem cells, which can produce most cell types found in the brain.

As the neural stem cells are forming, they can be coaxed to aggregate into 3D organoids. Simple enough. But why do some organoids better resemble the human brain than others?

To answer this question, the team collaborated with pluripotency experts Kathrin Plath and Amander Clark from the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center. They discovered that the developmental maturity of the stem cells from which an organoid is grown influences its quality, much as the freshness of ingredients influences the quality of a culinary dish.

“In human embryonic development, the nervous system is one of the first structures to form, so it makes sense that stem cells that are early in development are best at producing brain organoids,” said Watanabe, who is also a member of the UCI Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.

Human brain

The researchers then found that the best way to keep human stem cells in an early developmental state suitable for organoid formation was to grow them in a dish with mouse skin cells, referred to as fibroblast feeders, since these provide essential chemical signals and structural support that helps stem cells expand and preserve their immaturity over time.

Unfortunately, they also discovered that using mouse cells could make organoids less suitable for the development of cellular therapies to replace diseased or damaged neural tissues. Further, these feeder-supported methods are more laborious than the stem cell growth methods many labs commonly use.

The team next turned to RNA sequencing and computational analysis in an attempt to pinpoint genetic differences between stem cells that produce good organoids and those that don’t. This enabled them to identify four molecules — all belonging to the transforming growth factor beta superfamily of molecules — that were responsible for keeping stem cells in a less-developed state.

Adding these four molecules to stem cells growing in a dish kept them in an immature state and enabled these cells to produce high-quality, well-structured organoids.

“We found a way to have our cake and eat it, too,” Novitch said. “We have taken mouse cells out of the equation while retaining some of their benefits for organoid formation, bringing us closer to our goals of studying and developing treatments for complex neurological diseases.”

Also Read: Researchers find how biological markers predict risk of postpartum depression

A group of scientists revealed that cell communication is disrupted in pregnant women who suffer postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth.

The findings of a study headed by Johns Hopkins Medicine were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Premature deliveries, gestational diabetes, toxic maternal high blood pressure, and other pregnancy-related disorders have previously been linked to changes in extracellular RNA transmission, a recently discovered cell signalling pathway. The current study’s researchers studied maternal blood to see if there were any noticeable alterations in this extracellular communication pathway during PPD.

The extracellular RNA communication changes identified in the study suggest that women who develop PPD are unable to efficiently remove aging and defective cell components. This process, called autophagy, is also known to malfunction in the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. “Potentially, postpartum depression could be treated using certain Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease medications that induce autophagy,” says Sarven Sabunciyan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the paper’s senior author.

One in nine new mothers has postpartum depression, a condition marked by periods of sadness, loneliness and inability to care for their newborns that last longer than two weeks. “With postpartum depression, there are many potential negative outcomes, such as a high rate of suicide among mothers or a disruption in the baby’s cognitive, emotional and social development,” says Sabunciyan. “If we could identify mothers who may be more at risk ahead of the birth, we might prevent these adverse events.”

Efforts have been underway for decades to identify genetic or other biological markers for PPD.

In the new study, the research team specifically investigated the messenger RNA (mRNA) content of extracellular vesicles (EVs) — fatty sacs of genetic material that is essential to communication among cells. During pregnancy, Sabunciyan says, this communication system ramps up to address needs for embryo implantation and growth. A mother’s placenta also releases RNA vital for immune system development that protects the growing fetus from viruses.

Sabunciyan, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center whose work focuses on the root causes of psychiatric disorders, says the research team collected blood samples from 42 women who were pregnant and were seen at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Newly developed sequencing and computational analysis methods were used to measure the level of thousands of different mRNAs that are packaged into EVs in the blood of 14 participants during the second and third trimester of pregnancy and up to six months after giving birth. Seven of the participants were diagnosed with postpartum depression after childbirth, receiving a score of 13 or above on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (a standard tool to identify women with the condition). None of these women had signs of depression during pregnancy.

The mRNA levels identified to change the most robustly in participants who had PPD using this analysis were then measured in the blood of an additional 28 women during pregnancy. Fourteen of these women were diagnosed with PPD and five of them exhibited signs of depression during pregnancy. The changes in mRNA levels identified in those who developed PPD in the first set of 14 participants, replicated in the second group of 28 women, confirming the validity of the sequencing findings. Of the 42 women in the study, 34 were white, four were Asian or Pacific Islander, two were Black and two identified as another race. All were in their late 20s or early 30s, and had live births.

The research team says this analysis revealed that extracellular RNA communication levels during pregnancy and the postpartum period were “extensively altered” in women who developed postpartum depression. The researchers found that the level of 2,449 mRNAs changed (1,010 increased and 1,439 decreased) between those who went on to develop PPD compared with those who did not. On average, there was nearly a twofold difference in individual mRNA levels between the two groups. The vast majority of these changes occurred during the pregnancy instead of the postpartum period.

The researchers also discovered that EV mRNA levels associated with autophagy were decreased in women who later developed PPD — meaning the cells were not cleaning out excessive, damaged or defective parts. In addition, they found that EV mRNAs associated with PPD originated from white blood cells known as monocytes and macrophages.

The researchers caution that their study was limited by small numbers and a lack of racial diversity. But they say if further studies confirm the findings, they could potentially develop a blood test that can identify women who are pregnant who are at risk for developing PPD after delivery. The research may also advance development of therapies for PPD.

“If we can identify those at risk early, and get them into proper treatment, we’re likely to be able to prevent a lot of serious effects of postpartum depression,” Sabunciyan says.

Also Read: Social media usage associated with depression: Research

India recorded 1,968 new COVID cases in the last 24 hours, informed the Ministry of Health and Family Affairs on Tuesday.
India’s active caseload currently stands at 34,598 which accounts for 0.08 per cent of the total cases.

The national COVID-19 recovery rate increased to 98.74 per cent, the health ministry said.

As many as 3,481 recoveries were made in the last 24 hours increases taking the total number of recoveries to 4,40,36,152

The daily positivity rate was recorded at 0.94 per cent while the weekly positivity rate was 1.29 per cent.

Covid vaccines

Under the nationwide vaccination drive so far, 218.80 crore total vaccine doses have been given with 94.87 crore receiving second dose and 21.43 crore are precaution doses. A total of 3,44,525 doses have been administered in the last 24 hours, the ministry said.

As part of the nationwide vaccination drive, the Government of India supported the States and Union Territories by providing them with COVID-19 vaccines free of cost.

Earlier, ‘COVID Vaccination Amrit Mahotsava’, launched on July 15 this year to give an impetus to Precaution Dose as part of the national COVID vaccination drive, concluded on Friday after administrating over 15.92 crores of precaution doses, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

The Ministry of Health said that over 13.01 lakh Special COVID vaccination camps were organized during these 75 days.

“In 75 days, across all states and UTs, 11,104 camps were organized at bus stations, 5,664 camps at railway stations, 511 camps at airports, over 1,50,004 camps at various schools and colleges, 4,451 camps at routes of religious yatras, and over 11,30,044 camps were organized at various private and government workplaces and industrial establishments,” the statement from the ministry read.

The Ministry claimed that more than 76.18 lakh first dose, 2.35 crore second dose and 15.92 crore precaution dose had been administered in this period of 75 days.

“More than 24.73 lakh doses per day have been administered including 20.68 lakh doses precaution dose per day,” it said, adding that with the intervention of 75 days long free vaccination campaign, 27 per cent of the eligible population have now received their precaution dose as it was only 8 per cent earlier at the start of the initiative.

Under the COVID Vaccination Amrit Mahotsava, all States and UTs were urged to run the campaign as a ‘Jan Abhiyan’ with massive mass mobilization, through a camp approach. Multiple special vaccination camps in the routes of Char Dham Yatra (Uttarakhand), Amarnath Yatra (Jammu and Kashmir), Kanwar Yatra (all States and UTs of North-India) as well as major Melas and congregations were organized.

Further, Special Vaccination Camps were organized at office complexes, industrial establishments, railway stations, inter-state bus stations, schools and colleges.

Also Read: Study suggests how setting a sleep schedule can help adolescents get more sleep

Researchers in public policy and education have revealed that young adults who use social media more often, regardless of personality type, are considerably more likely to acquire depression within six months.

Published in the Journal of Affective Disorders Reports, the study, “Associations between social media use, personality structure, and development of depression,” was co-authored by Renae Merrill, a doctoral student in the Public Policy Program at the University of Arkansas. Merrill wrote the paper with the dean of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University, Brian Primack, and Chunhua Cao, an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Alabama.

“Previous research has linked the development of depression with numerous factors,” the authors noted. “However, the literature has been lacking in studies that focus on how various personality characteristics may interact with social media use and depression. This new study addressed these important research questions, finding strong and linear associations of depression across all personality traits.”

The study discovered that those with high agreeableness were 49% less likely to develop depression than people with low agreeableness. Furthermore, while utilising more than 300 minutes of social media every day, people with high neuroticism were twice as likely as those with low neuroticism to acquire depression. More significantly, social media use was highly related with the development of depression for each personality type.

The sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 to 30 was from 2018 data collected by Primack and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh.

Depression and social media

Depression was measured using the Patient Health Questionnaire. Social media was measured by asking participants how much daily time was spent using popular social media platforms, and personality was measured using the Big Five Inventory, which assessed openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The authors suggest that problematic social comparison can enhance negative feelings about oneself and others, which could explain how the risk of depression increases with increased social media use. Engaging primarily in negative content can also enhance these feelings. And lastly, engaging in more social media reduces opportunities for in-person interactions and activities outside of the home.

Depression has been noted as the leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide. This makes these findings even more pronounced for creating health interventions and prevention efforts.

“Findings from this study are important during a time of technology expansion and integration,” Merrill said. “Connecting to people virtually may increase the risk of miscommunication or misperception that leads to relationship difficulties and potential risk for developing mental health problems.”

“People have innate emotional needs for social connection and understanding,” Merrill added. “For example, social media experiences can be improved by becoming more aware of our emotions and our connection with others in various life circumstances. This awareness helps improve relationship quality by simply reaching shared meaning and understanding through more effective communication and concern for others and ourselves. Despite our differences, we have the ability to create a culture of empathy and kindness.”

Also Read: Did you know? Practising weight exercise every day lowers your chance of death?

A survey of Nagoya inhabitants in central Japan found evidence of the harmful impact of higher evening summer temperatures on population health.

Over the summers of 2011 and 2012, more than 1,200 people completed a sleep quality questionnaire. The results revealed that when the daytime temperature climbed above 24.8 degrees Celsius, sleep disruption increased at night. The research was published in the journal Sleep and Biological Rhythms. The number of population health years lost was equivalent to the consequence of heatstroke when using the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) assessment. This emphasises the significance of not just managing rising daytime temperatures, but also of finding methods to attain appropriate overnight temperatures so people may sleep properly.

Hot summer nights might be nice when you’re on holiday, but in Japan, things have been getting a bit too warm for comfort. Talk to a neighbour and the most common greeting will be, “It’s hot, isn’t it!” It’s uncomfortable, to say the least, but what other impacts are these hotter and longer summers having on Japan’s sweltering residents?

Researchers from the University of Tokyo conducted a survey with residents from Nagoya to find out how rising summer temperatures might be affecting their sleep. Located in the centre of Japan, the city is an urban heat island which has experienced the largest temperature rise among Japan’s three major metropolitan areas (comprising also Tokyo and Osaka).

In total, 574 adults in 2011 and 710 adults in 2012, representative of the age and sex ratio of Nagoya’s population, completed an online survey over about 10 days each year.

“The survey, called SQIDS2 (sleep quality index for daily sleep) was a revised and simplified version of a widely used, standardized sleep survey called PSQI (the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index).

It assessed seven components, including subjective sleep quality, how quickly people fell asleep and use of sleep medication,” explained Associate Professor Tomohiko Ihara from the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences. “Unlike with PSQI, the new SQIDS2 survey allowed us to correlate overall sleep quality with daily temperature.”

The team found that the daily prevalence of sleep disturbance increased when the daytime minimum temperature went above 24.8 degrees Celsius. There was also a significant difference in sleep disturbance between age groups for the male participants, with younger men having more trouble getting a good night’s sleep than older men.

Using the results from SQIDS2, the team calculated the DALY — disability-adjusted life year — for the city’s more than 2.2 million residents. DALY is a measure of time lost through premature death and time lived in states of less-than-optimal health at a population level (rather than for individuals).

Used by the World Health Organization (WHO), DALY helps to quantify loss from hundreds of different diseases, injuries and risk factors, which can then be used to help improve health care systems.

“We calculated that the DALY score for heat-related sleep disturbance was 81.8 years in 2012, which is similar to the score for heatstroke. That means that the damage to health caused by sleep disorders due to rising temperatures is comparable to that of heatstroke and must be addressed,” said Ihara. “Sleep disorders increase when the minimum daily temperature exceeds 25 degrees Celsius.”

There were several limitations to the study, not only due to the target population size and restricted age range (children were not involved and the number of respondents over 70 years was relatively small) but also because other influences on sleep quality were not investigated, such as the mental health of the participants or whether they used an air conditioner.

However, this study is a step towards quantifying the damage caused by climate change to sleep health, and the researchers hope it will help climate change legislators recognize the significant impact of high nighttime temperatures and be used to provide guidance for better sleep.

“Air conditioners are widely installed in Japan and so their appropriate use may be one solution. I try to acclimate my body to the heat as much as possible, but when it is unbearable, I turn on the air conditioner both day and night,” said Ihara. “But this option is not available to everyone and in the long run, promoting measures to reduce outdoor temperatures, both during the day and at night, will be needed.”

Also Read: Did you know? Practising weight exercise every day lowers your chance of death?

A study of older persons discovered that regular weight-training exercise is associated with a decreased risk of mortality from any cause, except cancer.

According to the studies, sticking to a weekly training routine that incorporates both weights and aerobic activity has an added advantage. The study’s findings were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine online.

Current physical activity guidelines prescribe at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise per week, 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity per week, or an equivalent mix of the two (known as MVPA) for all persons (moderate to vigorous physical activity).

All adults should also integrate activities that work all of the major muscle groups. While aerobic exercise has been linked to a decreased risk of mortality, it is uncertain if weight training has the same effect.

To overcome this information gap, the researchers set out to investigate the potential impact of weight training and aerobic exercise on the risk of mortality in older people, both independently and in combination.

They selected participants from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial (PLCO). This research, which began in 1993, includes 154,897 men and women aged 55 to 74 from 10 different cancer centres in the United States.

In 2006, 104,002 people were asked if they had exercised with weights in the preceding year, and if so, how frequently—anywhere from once a month to several times a week.

They were also polled on their frequency and duration of moderate and extreme intensity physical exercise throughout the preceding year.

Severe activity was defined as “exercise that produced a heavy perspiration or raised your breathing and heart rate to very high levels.” Moderate activity was defined as “exercise that produced a light sweat or raised your breathing and heart rate to moderately high levels,” while moderate activity was defined as “exercise that produced a heavy perspiration or raised your breathing and heart rate to moderately high levels.”

Four activity groups were formed based on total weekly minutes of MVPA: (1) inactive, 0 minutes; (2) insufficient aerobic MVPA, 1-149 minutes; (3) sufficient, 150+ minutes of moderate, or equivalently vigorous, activity; and (4) highly active, 301 or more minutes of moderate, or equivalently vigorous, activity.

The final research included 99,713 replies, with 28,477 deaths occurring over an average of 912 years of monitoring. At the start of the monitoring period, their average age was 71, and their average body mass index (BMI) was 27.8 kg/m2, suggesting that they were overweight.

Almost one-quarter (23%) of respondents said they did some weightlifting, and 16% said they worked out with weights one to six times per week.

Nearly one-third (32%) were sufficiently aerobically active, meeting (24%) or above (8%) MVPA standards.

Weight training and aerobic MVPA were both linked to a decreased risk of mortality from any cause, as well as heart disease, but not cancer.

Working out with weights was associated with a 9-22% reduced risk of mortality in the absence of MVPA, depending on the amount: using weights once or twice a week, for example, was associated with a 14% lower risk.

Similarly, aerobic MVPA was connected to a 24-34% lower risk of mortality from any cause among those who did not exercise with weights, compared to those who reported neither MVPA nor weight training.

Those who reported practising both forms of physical exercise, on the other hand, had the lowest chance of dying.

Those who reported meeting the necessary weekly levels of MVPA and exercising with weights once or twice a week, for example, had a 41-47% reduced risk of mortality than those who were physically inactive.

Educational attainment, smoking, BMI, race, and ethnicity had no influence on the observed connections, but gender did: women had stronger links.

This is an observational research, therefore no causation can be established, and it is based on personal memory and data from a single point in time.

There were no specifics on training intensity, training load, volume (sets and repetitions), or how long individuals had been lifting weights, which might have impacted the results.

The researchers included callisthenics (push-ups and squats), Pilates, and plyometric activities (tuck jumps and burpees) as alternative forms of muscle building workouts in their study.

Weight training can aid in weight loss: total lean mass is independently associated with a decreased risk of mortality, according to the researchers as an explanation for their findings. And, if done in a gym, it may be highly sociable—yet another factor associated with having a longer, healthier life.

“Our finding that people who did both forms of exercise had the lowest mortality risk gives good support for current recommendations to do both aerobic and muscle-strengthening workouts,” they write.

“Older folks would undoubtedly benefit from adding weightlifting activities to their physical activity programmes,” they conclude.

Also Read:  Blood testing may aid in detection of long covid in patients: Research

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A blood test performed at the time of Covid-19 infection, according to studies, can help determine whether a person is likely to develop long-term Covid.

The study, published in the journal Lancet eBioMedicine, examined proteins in the blood of healthcare workers infected with SARS-CoV-2 and compared them to samples from uninfected healthcare workers. Protein levels in the body are usually steady. However, the researchers discovered a significant variation in the levels of several of the proteins up to six weeks after infection, suggesting that a number of critical biological processes were disrupted.

They established a “signature” in the amount of several proteins using an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that correctly predicted whether or not the person would go on to report persistent symptoms a year after infection.

According to the researchers, if these findings are replicated in a larger, independent group of patients, a test that predicts the chance of getting long Covid might possibly be administered alongside a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.

“Human work reveals that even modest or asymptomatic Covid-19 affects the composition of proteins in our blood plasma,” stated lead author Dr Gaby Captur (MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL).

This suggests that even modest Covid-19 has a profound effect on normal biological processes for at least six weeks following infection.

“Our technique for predicting long Covid has to be verified with a broader, independent sample of patients. Using our technique, however, a test that predicts long Covid at the time of first infection might be swiftly and cost-effectively implemented.

“The technology we chose is widely available in hospitals and has a high throughput, which means it can analyse hundreds of samples in an afternoon.”

“If we can identify people who are likely to develop long Covid, this opens the door to trialling treatments such as anti-virals at this earlier, initial infection stage, to see if it can reduce the risk of later long Covid,” said senior author Dr Wendy Heywood (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital).

Researchers compared blood plasma samples obtained every week for six weeks in spring 2020 from 54 healthcare workers who had PCR, or antibody-confirmed infection, to samples taken during the same period from 102 healthcare workers who were not sick.

They examined how Covid-19 altered these proteins over the course of six weeks using targeted mass spectrometry, a type of study that is particularly sensitive to small changes in the amount of proteins in blood plasma.

The researchers discovered unusually high amounts of 12 proteins out of the 91 examined in SARS-CoV-2 patients, and the degree of abnormality correlated with the severity of symptoms.

The researchers discovered that aberrant levels of 20 proteins tested at the time of the first infection predicted persisting symptoms after a year. The majority of these proteins were shown to be involved in anti-coagulant (anti-clotting) and anti-inflammatory actions.

Also read: Know what connects human senses and thinking

A machine learning system based on the participants’ protein profiles was able to differentiate all 11 infected healthcare professionals who reported at least one persistent symptom after a year from infected healthcare workers who did not report persistent symptoms after a year. Another machine learning technique was employed to predict the chance of mistake, and it estimated that this strategy may have a 6% error rate.

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The neocortex of the human brain is in charge of our ability to think, determine, recall recent events, and so on. Important parts of the processes underpinning these roles have now been revealed by neuroscientists. Their findings may one day assist in the treatment of various neuropsychiatric diseases and brain injury.

Scientists have long known that the neocortex combines feedforward and feedback information streams. The sensory systems of the brain transmit information from the periphery (our senses) to higher-order portions of the neocortex. The feedback input from these high-level brain areas is then transmitted to change and adjust sensory processing. This two-way communication allows the brain to focus, store short-term memories, and make decisions.

“A simple example is crossing a busy road,” explained corresponding author Gyorgy Lur, PhD, an associate professor of neurobiology and behaviour in the School of Biological Sciences. “There are trees, people, moving automobiles, traffic lights, signage, and other elements. Your higher-level neocortex instructs your sensory system which objects deserve your attention while selecting when to cross.”

The interplay of higher- and lower-level systems also helps us to recall what we observed when we looked both directions to obtain information. “Without that short-term memory, you’d just keep staring back and forth and never move,” he explained. “In fact, if our feedforward and feedback streams weren’t continually interacting, we’d accomplish very nothing but react reflexively.”

Until today, scientists had no idea how neurons in the brain engage in these complex processes. Lur and colleagues discovered that feedforward and feedback signals concentrate on single neurons in the parietal areas of the neocortex. The researchers also revealed that various types of cortical neurons process the two streams of information on vastly different time scales. They discovered the cellular and circuit architecture that supports these differences.

“Scientists have long known that combining many senses improves neural responses,” Lur said. “When you merely see or hear something, your response time is slower than when you experience it with both senses at the same time. We’ve discovered the fundamental mechanics that allow this to happen.”

The same criteria apply whether one input stream is sensory and the other is cognitive, according to the study findings.

Understanding these pathways is critical for developing future therapies for neuropsychiatric disorders such as sensory processing issues, schizophrenia, and ADHD, as well as strokes and other neocortical injuries.

Lur is affiliated with the UC Irvine Centers for Neurobiology of Learning & Memory, Neural Circuit Mapping, and Hearing Research.

Also Read: Link between inflammation and cognitive difficulties in breast cancer survivors!

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