Author Interviews, Critical Care - Intensive Care - ICUs, JAMA, Mental Health Research / 22.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “hospital.” by Bethany Satterfield is licensed under CC BY 2.0Mark van den Boogaard, PhD, RN, CCRN Assistant Professor Department of Intensive Care Medicine Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen Netherlands  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response:  Delirium is affecting many of our intensive care unit (ICU) patients which is impacting their recovery on the short-term as well as on the long-term. Therefore we were very interested to investigate if the use prophylactic haloperidol would be beneficial for the ICU patients. Especially because there were indications that it would be effective in ICU delirium prevention and also because this drug is being used in daily practice to prevent ICU delirium although there is no clear evidence. The overall finding of our large-scale well designed study is that we didn’t find any beneficial effect of prophylactic haloperidol in ICU patients. Moreover, this finding is very consistent over all groups of patients.  (more…)
Addiction, Author Interviews, Opiods, Vaccine Studies / 22.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Syringe and Vaccine” by NIAID is licensed under CC BY 2.0Candy Hwang, Ph.D. The Scripps Research Institute La Jolla, CA 92037 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Our heroin vaccine is designed to stimulate antibodies to recognize and bind heroin, preventing passage of drug molecules to the brain. By essentially blocking the “high” from heroin, we believe this will assist recovering addicts from relapsing. Last year, we reported a heroin vaccine that was shown to be effective in both mouse and non-human primate models. In this current study, we were interested in enhancing our heroin vaccine by exploring different vaccine components and dosages. Once we discovered the most promising vaccine formulations, we wanted to see if our vaccines would be stable under different storage conditions. We found that our heroin vaccine was shelf stable under different temperatures and as a powder or in liquid form, meaning that the vaccine will remain stable for transport and storage. The best vaccine formulation from these studies showed protection against lethal doses of heroin. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, Duke, Electronic Records, JAMA / 21.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Barak Richman JD, PhD Bartlett Professor of Law and Business Administration Duke University  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: The US not only has the highest health care costs in the world, we have the highest administrative costs in the world. If we can reduce non-value added costs like the ones we document, we can make substantial changes in the affordability of health care without having to resort to more draconian policy solutions. Our paper finds that administrative costs remain high, even after the adoption of electronic health records.  Billing costs, for example, constituted 25.2% of professional revenue for ED departments and 14.5% of revenue for primary care visits.  The other numbers are captured below. (more…)
Annals Internal Medicine, Author Interviews, Pain Research, Rheumatology / 21.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Sarah Kingsbury PhD Osteoarthritis Strategic Lead Deputy Section Head, Musculoskeletal Medicine and Imaging Leeds Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Medicine University of Leeds MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Osteoarthritis of the hand is a painful and disabling condition, estimated to effect up to 31 per cent of people aged over 70. It can stop people from carrying out everyday activities and can limit their quality of life. The first-line pharmacological treatments for hand osteoarthritis, including paracetamol and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, are often not effective and are associated with side effects. Doctors have used hydroxychloroquine, an established treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, as an off-label alternative, supported by increasing evidence that inflammation is a factor in osteoarthritis. Until now, there has not been a large-scale study into whether using hydroxychloroquine works. HERO was a 12 month randomised, double-blind, placebo controlled, pragmatic trial, designed with a view to replicate anecdotal reports of hydroxychloroquine use in clinical practice, and  powered to detect a moderate effect equivalent to that for NSAIDs in this population. The study involved 248 patients at 13 NHS hospitals in England: all had the condition for at least 5 years, had changes to the joints in their hands consistent with osteoarthritis and reported moderate to severe pain on at least half of the days in the previous three months to the study commencing. Participants were randomised 1:1 to either hydroxychloroquine or placebo and followed up at 3 monthly intervals for 12 months. The study found that patients initially reported a small reduction in the severity of pain before the improvement plateaued. However, a similar amount of change was seen in both the group receiving hydroxychloroquine medication and the group taking the placebo. (more…)
Alcohol, Author Interviews, Cognitive Issues, Lancet / 21.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “undefined” by Iñaki Queralt is licensed under CC BY 2.0Michaël Schwarzinger, MD, PhD Translational Health Economics Network (THEN) Paris MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The association of heavy drinking with dementia has been known for decades. For instance, there is about no Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome without heavy drinking and the syndrome was described in 1890. But this type of dementia is very rare. Also, heavy drinking is knowingly associated with multiple risk factors for dementia onset such as hypertension or diabetes. But heavy drinkers generally refuse to participate to cohort studies and declaration of alcohol use among participants is generally biased downward... So the study rationale is very strong, but supporting empirical evidence is quite scarce. This nationwide study included all 31+ million adults discharged from hospitals over 6 years, i.e., 50% of the French population before 65 years old and 80% above that age. Of 1.1+ million adults diagnosed with dementia, one in twenty had an early-onset (before 65 years old). Heavy drinking was recorded in most (56%) early-onset dementia cases: two-third in men; one-third in women. In addition, the association of heavy drinking with dementia goes far beyond 65 years old, both directly (>3 times higher risk for dementia onset after controlling for more than 30 known risk factors for dementia) and indirectly as heavy drinking was associated with all other independent risk factors for dementia onset. Accordingly, heavy drinking had the largest effect on dementia risk of all independent modifiable risk factors such as hypertension or diabetes. The effects were found whatever dementia case definition or population studies. (more…)
Author Interviews, Diabetes, Heart Disease, JACC, Surgical Research / 21.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Jayan Nagendran MD, PhD, FRCSC Director of Research, Division of Cardiac Surgery Associate Professor, Department of Surgery Division of Cardiac Surgery University of Alberta MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The primary modalities of treatment of symptomatic coronary artery disease (coronary heart disease) are either percutaneous coronary intervention (coronary stunting) or coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. There are well designed clinical trials that guide clinical practice for the treatment of patients with diabetes requiring coronary revascularization and there are trials that examine the best modality of coronary revascularization in patients with left ventricular dysfunction. However, there is a lack of evidence for patients with both diabetes and left ventricular dysfunction. As such, we performed a propensity matched study of patients with diabetes and left ventricular dysfunction undergoing either percutaneous coronary intervention compared to coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. We used our provincial database that captures >100,000 patients undergoing coronary angiography to attain our two cohorts for comparison. (more…)
ASCO, Author Interviews, Biomarkers, Prostate Cancer / 20.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: https://cellmaxlife.com/Atul Sharan Co-Founder & CEO at CellMax  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Approximately 30 million men in the United States take the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) screening test. Recent studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine have established that PSA screenings have resulted in reduced mortality from prostate cancer. However, the problem with the PSA test is that many patients will receive indeterminate results. Only one in five of patients who have taken the test will have a positive biopsy for prostate cancer, but 33 percent of these patients could suffer from biopsy related side effects, and 1 percent will require hospitalization. This study showed that the CellMax CTC blood test can predict which patients in the gray zone will need/have a positive prostate biopsy with a much lower false positive rate than current standard of care tests, potentially reducing unnecessary biopsies in this group by up to 90 percent. At the same time, the sensitivity of this test at 80 percent was comparable to the current standard of care tests, meaning this test was also accurate in ruling out biopsy in patients.  (more…)
Accidents & Violence, Author Interviews, JAMA, Pediatrics / 20.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Guoqing Hu, PhD Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics Xiangya School of Public Health Central South University Changsha, Hunan, China    On behalf of the authors MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We've known for some time that suffocation is a leading cause of death for American infants - in fact, it is the cause of over 3/4 of the injury deaths to babies under 12 months of age. We've also known that there are strategies, such as "safe sleeping", that can greatly reduce the risk of a baby suffocating to death. The surprise in our study is that the suffocation rate for infants under 12 months of age appears to be increasing in the United States over the past 15 years. More babies are dying from suffocation today than in the 1990s, and that is a significant public health concern. Think about the implications of each one of those deaths to the infant's parents and loved ones. There are few things more devastating than losing a baby to an unintentional, or "accidental" death. There are ways we can prevent unintentional suffocations, and we need to work together to inform parents and ensure babies are kept safe to reduce those deaths, especially as rates in the US appear to be increasing. (more…)
Author Interviews, Breast Cancer, Genetic Research / 19.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Amanda Toland, PhD, Cancer biology and genetics researcher of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center -- Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The Breast Information Core (or BIC) is a database that catalogs BRCA1 and BRCA2 sequenced variants.  The BIC is hosted by the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH and has a steering committee that oversees the BIC and has members from Europe, the middle East, Australia and the US.  In BIC SC discussions, we learned that there are differences in how BRCA1/2 clinical is testing between countries. To characterize this variation, we performed an international survey of 86 genetic testing labs from around the world. Our main findings are that there were many variations between testing laboratories.  These include: technologies differed for finding “large” genetic sequence variants, what parts of the genes were assessed, how genetic variants were classified as disease associated or not being associated with diseases, if genetic sequencing information was shared in public databases and testing volume. (more…)
Author Interviews, Radiology, Technology / 17.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Eric Karl Oermann, MD Instructor Department of Neurosurgery Mount Sinai Health System New York, New York 10029  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: Supervised machine learning requires data consisting of features and labels. In order to do machine learning with medical imaging, we need ways of obtaining labels, and one promising means of doing so is by utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to extract labels from physician's descriptions of the images (typically contained in reports). Our main finding was that (1) the language employed in Radiology reports is simpler than normal day-to-day language, and (2) that we can build NLP models that obtain excellent results at extracting labels when compared to manually extracted labels from physicians.  (more…)
Author Interviews, BMC, Pediatrics, Tobacco / 17.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Summer Sherburne Hawkins, PhD, MS Associate Professor School of Social Work Boston College Summer Sherburne Hawkins, PhD, MS Associate Professor School of Social Work Boston College MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Increasing cigarette taxes has been a major policy driver to decrease smoking, including adolescent smoking, while taxes on other tobacco products have received less attention. Taxes on cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and cigars are all fiscal policies, but they are not all equal. While state taxes on cigarettes have increased substantially over the past decade, there has been little change in policies governing alternative tobacco products. Realsitcally, everyone wants to pay as little tax as they can, which is why Tax software deals are so great for helping people pay the right amount. The aim of our study was to evaluate the impact of chewing tobacco and cigar taxes, cigarette taxes, and the enactment of smoke-free legislation on adolescent male and female use of smokeless tobacco and cigars. (more…)
Alzheimer's - Dementia, Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Neurology / 16.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Joseph Therriault Integrative Program in Neuroscience  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: Neurologists have known for a long time that Anosognosia, or unawareness of illness, appears in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. For example, these patients will have diminished awareness of their memory loss, and will also engage in dangerous behaviors, such as leaving the house to go for a walk, without knowing they are at high risk of getting lost. However, it was not known if decreased awareness of cognitive problems existed in the pre-dementia phase of Alzheimer’s disease. In our study, we compared the ratings of cognitive decline from the patient and their close relative, who also filled out the same questionnaire. When a patient reported having no cognitive problems but the family member reported significant difficulties, the patient was considered to have poor awareness of illness. We found that patients who are less aware had increased disease pathology, and were nearly three times as likely to progress to dementia within two years, even when taking into account other factors like genetic risk, age, gender and education. The increased progression to dementia was mirrored by increased brain metabolic dysfunction in regions vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease. (more…)
Author Interviews, Blood Pressure - Hypertension, Heart Disease, JAMA / 16.02.2018

“Doctors” by Tele Jane is licensed under CC BY 2.0MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Apostolos Tsimploulis, Chief Medical Resident Dr. Phillip H. Lam, Chief Cardiology Fellow The Washington, DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Georgetown University, and MedStar Washington Hospital Center, Washington, DC  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Hypertension is a major risk factor for the development of new heart failure (HF). Findings from multiple randomized controlled trials in hypertension have consistently demonstrated that controlling systolic blood pressure (SBP) to normal levels such as to SBP <120 mm Hg reduces the risk of developing new HF. However, interestingly, once patients develop heart failure, those with a normal SBP value such as SBP <120 mm Hg tend to have poor outcomes. This paradoxical association – also called reverse epidemiology – although poorly understood – has been described with other HF risk factors such as smoking and obesity. Regarding poor outcomes associated with lower SBP in HF patients with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF – pronounced Hef-ref), it has been suggested that it may be a marker of weak heart muscle that is unable to pump enough blood. However, less is known about this association in patients with HF and preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF – pronounced Hef-pef) –– the heart muscle is not weak in the traditional sense. This is an important question for a number of reasons: nearly half of all heart failure patients have HFpEF which accounts for about 2.5 to 3 million Americans. These patients have a high mortality similar to those with HFrEF – but unlike in HFrEF few drugs have been shown to improve their outcomes. Thus, there is a great deal of interest in improving their outcomes. One of those approaches is to control . systolic blood pressure and the 2017 ACC/AHA/HFSA Focused Update of the HF guidelines recommend that SBP “should be controlled in patients with HFpEF in accordance with published clinical practice guidelines to prevent morbidity.” Thus, our study was designed to answer that simple question: do patients with HFpEF and SBP <120 mmHg, which is considered to be normal SBP, have better outcomes than those with SBP ≥120 mmHg. Using a sophisticated approach called propensity score matching we assembled two groups of patients with HFpEF – one group with SBP <120 mmHg and the other groups had SBP ≥120 mmHg – and patients in both groups were similar in terms of 58 key baseline characteristics. In this population of balanced patients with HFpEF, those with a normal systolic blood pressure had a higher risk of mortality – starting 30 days post-discharge up to about 6 years. Finding from our restricted cubic spline plots suggest that compared with SBP <120 mm Hg, SBP values ≥120 mm Hg (up to 200 mm Hg) was not associated with a higher risk of death. (more…)
Author Interviews, Autism, Pharmaceutical Companies, Roche, Vanderbilt / 16.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Kevin Sanders, MD Principle Medical Director-Product Development Neuroscience Assistant Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics Vanderbilt University  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this announcement?  Response: The FDA has granted Roche Breakthrough Therapy Designation for its investigational oral medicine balovaptan (previously known as RG7314), a vasopressin 1a (V1a) receptor antagonist for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for balovaptan is primarily based on efficacy findings in the VANILLA (Vasopressin ANtagonist to Improve sociaL communication in Autism) study, a Phase II trial of balovaptan in adults with ASD. Trial results were first presented at the International Congress for Autism Research (IMFAR) in May 2017. Treatment effects were observed on the Vineland-II (secondary endpoint) and also demonstrated that balovaptan was safe and well tolerated by the subjects in the study. The Vineland-II is a scale that measures socialization, communication and daily living skills. This data was presented to the FDA and is part of the basis of the Breakthrough Designation.  (more…)
Author Interviews, PLoS, Sexual Health, Zika / 16.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Yogy Simanjuntak PhD Postdoctoral Research Fellow Institute of Biomedical Sciences Academia Sinica, Taiwan  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Despite the low case fatality, Zika virus infection has been associated with microcephaly in infants and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Primarily transmitted by Aedes species mosquitoes, Zika also can be sexually transmitted in humans. By August 2016, the sexual transmission of Zika had been documented in 11 countries worldwide and most of the cases were from male to female. Infectious Zika in semen has been reported. Moreover, unlike in serum or urine samples, Zika RNA can still be detected in semen up to 188 days after the onset of symptoms. In the absence of approved antiviral drugs or vaccines for Zika infection, preventing the disease transmission is critical. We observed Zika progressively damaged testes by gaining access to testicular cells including sperm. Notably, Zika caused signs of increased testicular oxidative stress and inflammation, characterized by high levels of reactive oxygen species and pro-inflammatory cytokines. Our data indicate that these factors may contribute to testicular damage as well as successful sexual transmission of Zika; thus, we speculate antioxidants might display beneficial effects to alleviate these disease outcomes. We found that antioxidant ebselen both alleviated testicular damage and prevented sexual transmission of Zika via sperm from infected male mice to uninfected female mice. (more…)
Author Interviews, Dengue, Genetic Research, PLoS / 16.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Luisa Pereira PhD Institute for Research and Innovation in Health University of Porto  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: By using admixture mapping along the genome in Thai cohorts, we were able to identify new candidate genes conferring protection/susceptibility to dengue fever. A very interesting result was that the set of genes differed with the dengue phenotype: genes coding proteins that may link to the virus, conditioning its entrance in the host cells and mobility therein were associated with the less severe phenotype; genes related with blood vessels permeability were associated with the dengue shock syndrome.  (more…)
ASCO, Author Interviews, Cancer Research / 16.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Prof. Michael B. Atkins, MD Deputy Director, Georgetown-Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center William M. Scholl Professor and Vice-Chair Department of Oncology and Professor of Medicine Georgetown University Medical Center  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Prior studies combining programmed death-1 (PD-1) checkpoint inhibitors with tyrosine kinase inhibitors of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-pathway have been characterized by excess toxicity precluding further development. We hypothesized that axitinib, a more selective VEGF inhibitor would combine safely with pembrolizumab (anti-PD-1) and yield antitumour activity in treatment-naïve patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma. (more…)
Author Interviews, Hematology, Novo Nordisk, Surgical Research / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Stephanie Seremetis, M.D. Corporate Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Biopharmaceuticals at Novo Nordisk MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this announcement? Response: We’re proud and excited to make Rebinyn® (Coagulation Factor IX (Recombinant), GlycoPEGylated) available as a new extended half-life treatment for hemophilia B management. Rebinyn® is an injectable medicine used to treat and control bleeding in adults and children with hemophilia B. It can be used to treat bleeds when they occur and to manage bleeding during surgery. Rebinyn® is not used for routine prophylaxis or for immune tolerance induction in patients with hemophilia B. Hemophilia B is a serious, chronic, inherited bleeding disease that affects about 5,000 people in the U.S. People living with hemophilia B have low levels of clotting Factor IX protein in the blood, often resulting in prolonged or spontaneous bleeding, especially into the muscles, joints or internal organs.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Endocrinology, Environmental Risks, PLoS, Weight Research / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Gang Liu, PhD Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Nutrition Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Although many approaches can be used to achieve a short-term weight loss, maintenance of weight loss has become a key challenge for sustaining long-term benefits of weight loss. Accumulating evidence has suggested that certain environmental compounds may play an important role in weight gain and obesity development. The potential endocrine-disrupting effects of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), which are extensively used in many industrial and consumer products including food packaging, paper and textile coatings, and non-stick cookware, have been demonstrated in animal studies, but whether PFASs may interfere with body weight regulation in humans is largely unknown. In a 2-year POUNDS Lost randomized clinical trial that examined energy-restricted diets on weight changes, baseline plasma concentrations of major PFASs were measured among 621 overweight and obese participants aged 30-70 years. Body weight was measured at baseline, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months. Resting metabolic rate (RMR) and other metabolic parameters, including glucose, lipids, thyroid hormones, and leptin, were measured at baseline, 6, and 24 months. We found that higher baseline levels of PFASs were significantly associated with a greater weight regain, primarily in women. On average, women in the highest tertile of PFASs regained 1.7-2.2 kg more body weight than women in the lowest tertile. In addition, higher baseline plasma PFAS concentrations, especially perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), were significantly associated with greater decline in RMR during the first 6 months and less increase in RMR during weight regain period.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Fertility, Sugar / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Elizabeth E. Hatch, PhD Professor, Epidemiology School of Public Health Boston University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: We are conducting a large, ongoing, preconception cohort study, PREgnancy STudy Online or PRESTO http://sites.bu.edu/presto/   in the U.S. and Canada of couples who are planning a pregnancy.  The overall goal of the study is to identify factors that affect fertility, measured by the time taken to conceive, and factors that affect the risk of miscarriage.  Since many women are postponing pregnancy until the later reproductive years, we would like to help find behavioral and environmental factors that might either help or harm fertility so that couples can avoid the stress and expense of infertility workups and treatment.  As part of the larger study, we looked at consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) by both the male and female partner, since some previous research suggested that sugar-sweetened beverages might harm semen quality and ovulation. For this analysis, we included 3,828 women aged 21 to 45 and 1,045 of their male partners. We asked both males and females (in separate baseline questionnaires) about their usual consumption of SSBs over the last month, and we had a drop-down menu with names of individual sodas (both sugar-sweetened and diet) and energy drinks.  We also asked general questions about the frequency of fruit juice and ‘sports drink’ consumption.   In our analysis, we controlled for multiple factors that might ‘confound’ the associations, such as body mass index, education, caffeine, smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as a measure of overall diet quality. (more…)
Author Interviews, Education, Gender Differences / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: David C. Geary, Ph.D. Curators' Distinguished Professor Thomas Jefferson Fellow Department of Psychological Sciences Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program University of Missouri Columbia, MO 65211-2500  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response:   We were interested in international variation in the percentage of women who obtain college degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, focusing on degrees in inorganic areas, such as physics and computer science (topics that do not deal with living things).  There is no sex difference in the life sciences, but there is in these fields. The gap is about 3 to 1 in the U.S. and has been stable for decades. We wanted to link international variation in these degrees to student factors, including their best subject (e.g., science vs. reading) and their interests in science, as well as to more general factors such as whether the country provided strong economic opportunities and its rating on gender equality measures. (more…)
Author Interviews, NYU, PLoS / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Glenn N. Saxe, MD Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Child Study Center, One Park Avenue New York, NY 10016  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Would you briefly explain what is meant by brain entropy and how it relates to intelligence? Response: Think of human intelligence as the capacity for a human being to understand their complex and ever-changing world. The world of a person is really complex and constantly in flux so the human brain must be ready to understand whatever may come – when there is no way beforehand to predict what might come. How does the brain understand its world? It creates specific models of the information it receives through specific patterns of neuronal connection. These are called brain states. The way the brain understands its world is largely through using such models, or brain states, to accurately predict what comes next. So you can see that for an intelligent brain to properly understand and predict events in the world, it will need to have access to a very, very large number of brain states. And this is how entropy is defined. Entropy is a very old and very powerful concept in the history of science. Not only is it fundamental for thermodynamics – what we learned in high school physics – but it is also fundamental for the nature of information and it’s processing. Entropy is defined as the number of states – or distinct configurations – any system has access to at any point in time. High entropy means access to a very large number of states. Low entropy means access to a very small number of states. A solid is a phenomenon with very low entropy. A gas is a phenomenon with very high entropy. Life, and the brain, are somewhere in between. Although it is impossible to precisely measure the number of states a brain has access to at any one moment, there is a highly related concept that can be measured. A system with access to a very high number of possible states (like a gas) has components with behavior that is highly unpredictable. A system with access to very few possible states (like a solid) has components whose behavior is highly predictable. We measured brain entropy through the predictability of the brains components at the smallest scale we had access to: what are called voxels in an fMRI scan. These are 3mm cubes of neurons in a functional MRI scan, and there are many thousands of these voxels in our measurement and each of these voxels contains information on the activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons. We measured the predictability of each of these voxels and then found clusters of voxels where their predictability - or entropy - was related to intelligence. (more…)
Author Interviews, Neurology / 15.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jan R. Wessel, Ph.D. Asst. Professor Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Department of Neurology Iowa Neuroscience Institute University of Iowa  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: We found that the occurence of unexpected events, such as sudden, surprising sounds lead to an automatic engagement of a well-known brain network for action-stopping, thereby leading to a suppression of ongoing motor activity. Specifically, we found that when participants had to stop an action, their ability to do so was significantly improved when the cue to stop was accompanied by a sudden, unexpected sound. This improvement was accompanied by an amplification of the brain activity that is related to action-stopping, and was also accompanied by an increase of suppression of excitability of the motor cortex.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Social Issues / 14.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Marriage” by Susan Nicole Cinci Csere is licensed under CC BY 2.0Ashley LeBaron Brigham Young University Provo  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: This study was a really fun one for me. Previous research had linked materialism with lower marital satisfaction. However, no one had really looked into why that is--what is it about materialism that tends to facilitate less-happy marriages? As I thought about it and explored different theories, I came to the hypothesis that perhaps it is a matter of competing values. Perhaps those who highly value money and possessions are less likely to highly value their marriage, and then subsequently do not put into their relationship the time, effort, etc. needed for high marital satisfaction. And that's exactly what our findings show! Perception of marriage importance mediated (i.e., explained) the negative association between materialism and marital satisfaction. Of course it is more complex than this and there are likely other mediators out there, but I think this was an important contribution to the couple finance field.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Exercise - Fitness, Weight Research / 14.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Elliptical Stationary Bikes GVSU Winter Hall Exercise Center 2-4-15” by Steven Depolo is licensed under CC BY 2.0Jennifer L. Kuk, PhD Associate Professor York University School of Kinesiology and Health Science Sherman Health Science Research Centre Toronto, Ontario MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? - The benefits of fitness are well know, but it was unclear whether the benefits applied to those with severe obesity. This is even more important give that the health risks associated with severe obesity are exponentially higher than in mild obesity. Fitness in this study was defined as the top 80% of a normal population.This means that unfit is the bottom 20%. In the past, research has shown that this threshold of fitness is associated with the biggest health benefits. - We see that 40% of individuals with mild obesity are fit, while 11% of those with severe obesity are fit. Individuals with high fitness had no differences in health risk, despite the large differences in obesity (~50-100 pounds). Conversely, those within the unfit group did have significantly higher glucose, blood pressure and lipids with higher obesity levels. In other words, fitness was able to protect individuals with severe obesity from many of the expected negative health consequences. (more…)
Author Interviews, Stroke, Technology / 14.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with E. Paul Zehr PhD Professor & Director Centre for Biomedical Research, Rehabilitation Neuroscience Laboratory, McKinnon Division of Medical Sciences Exercise Science, Physical & Health Education International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD)| Affiliate, Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, UBC MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: For many years we explored the role of the spinal cord in regulating rhythmic arm and leg movements like we do during walking, running and swimming.  Although we humans tend to move and locomote around on our two legs as bipeds, we are basically quadrupeds in terms of how our nervous system controls our limbs during walking. We have an extensive network of brain and spinal cord connections that help coordinate our limbs while we move. A lot of our work showed that using the arms rhythmically, like during arm cycling, strongly affected the activity of the spinal cord controlling leg muscles. Getting the spinal cord for leg muscles more coordinated and activated is a major goal of rehabilitation  of walking after neurotrauma so we wanted to see if training the arms could help with this. This is particularly important because a lot of the time, the arms are not engaged at all in rehabilitation training for the legs. We found that after only 5 weeks of arm cycling (3 x 30 minutes each week), neural excitability, strength, and leg function were increased along with enhanced clinical tests of balance and walking ability. (more…)
Author Interviews, Lancet, Melanoma, Weight Research / 14.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jennifer McQuade, M.D., lead author Melanoma Medical Oncology The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Melanoma is the most deadly of the common skin cancers, and for many years we lacked effective therapies for patients with disease that had spread (metastatic). Over the past 7 years, there has been FDA approval of 2 new classes of drugs that have dramatically improved the survival of patients with metastatic melanoma. Checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies “take the brakes” off patients’ immune system to allow the immune system to eliminate the cancer. Targeted therapies turn off key molecules expressed by some tumors (BRAF mutant) that they rely on for sustained growth and division. While these types of therapies can result in dramatic long-term disease control in some patients, others may not have any shrinkage of their tumors. Some differences may lie in the tumors themselves, but there is also increasing evidence that “host” factors such as the microbiome and lifestyle choices might influence outcomes in cancer patients. Obesity has been associated with an increased risk of many cancers, and is in fact poised to overtake smoking as the leading preventable cause of cancer. One of the ways that obesity may increase tumor growth is by increasing levels of insulin and other growth factors which then activate a pathway called the PI3K pathway that leads to continued tumor growth. As that PI3K pathway has also been shown to cause resistance to targeted and immune therapies in melanoma, we hypothesized that obesity would be associated with worse outcomes in patients with metastatic melanoma treated with these therapies. (more…)
Author Interviews, Hepatitis - Liver Disease, Imperial College, Technology / 14.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Marcus Dorner, PhD Non-Clinical Senior Lecturer in Immunology Wellcome Trust Investigator Imperial College London Department of Medicine, Section of Virology School of Medicine London United Kingdom  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response:  Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection globally affects over 250 million people and is currently not curable. This infection can lead to liver cirrhosis and liver cancer and is among the leading causes for liver transplantation. Unfortunately, HBV is among the most difficult viruses to study in the laboratory, since model systems are not very good at recapitulating what happens in infected humans. We have just described the first model to effectively change this. Using an artificial “Liver-on-a-Chip”, we have developed a tool, which can potentially revolutionise how we study viral infections by merging the study of viruses with tissue engineering. This model is over 10,000-fold more susceptible to HBV infection and accurately mimics, what happens in an infected patient. This can now be utilised to develop novel and potentially curative therapies, which would benefit millions of people currently living with chronic HBV infection.  (more…)
Alcohol, Author Interviews / 14.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Alcohol” by zeevveez is licensed under CC BY 2.0Thomas Denson PhD University of New South Wales Australia  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: Decades of research have shown that alcohol is a powerful psychotropic contributor to aggressive behaviour. Researchers have long suspected that alcohol increases aggression because it dampens activation in the prefrontal cortex, which leads to reduced inhibition, narrows attentional processing, and exaggerates hostile thinking. However, direct evidence has been lacking. We compared brain activity in intoxicated versus sober participants when they were given the opportunity to behave aggressively in the scanner against other men who provoked them. We gave 50 healthy young men alcohol or a placebo. Participants who consumed alcohol breathalysed at .05. They did show decreased activation in the prefrontal cortex as expected. This was the first evidence to show that when intoxicated participants behave aggressively, they show reduced prefrontal activity. Interestingly, we found a positively correlation between prefrontal cortex activity and aggression, but only among intoxicated men. We think this reflects the fact that the participants in the alcohol condition were likely engaging in more hostile thinking about the provoking men.  (more…)