Nordic diet may improve cholesterol, blood sugar, even without weight loss

 

• Researchers investigated the health effects of a healthy Nordic diet (HND) using metabolic analysis.
• They found that the diet positively affects glucose metabolism, cholesterol, and cardiometabolic risk.
• They conclude that metabolic analysis is an effective way to assess dietary outcomes.

The HND consists of berries, fish, root vegetables, and rapeseed oil. It is known to benefit various aspects of health, including weight lossTrusted Source, blood pressure, inflammationTrusted Source, and blood lipid profilesTrusted Source.

Studies also show that HND lowers the risk of cardiovascular diseaseTrusted Source, type 2 diabetes, and deathTrusted Source.

Nutritional research often faces challenges due to a lack of objective measures, as studies typically rely on subjective tools, such as food consumption questionnaires. Using biomarkers instead can allow researchers to measure dietary health effects more accurately.

In the present study, researchers from Scandinavia assessed the metabolic effects of HND on glucose metabolism, blood lipid profiles, and inflammatory markers using data from a randomized control trial from 2013Trusted Source.

When examining metabolites in the blood and urine of the participants, they found a link between closer adherence to the diet and more benefit on low grade inflammation and lipid profiles, as well as indicators of glucose metabolism.

“The original analysis compared participants in the intervention arm [with] those in the control arm,” said Christina C. Dahm, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University in Denmark, in an interview with Medical News Today. Dr. Dahm was not involved in the study.

“This reanalysis uses metabolites in blood plasma and urine to group people with high levels of metabolites sourced from either the intervention diet or the control diet,” she added.

The study appears in Clinical Nutrition.

Metabolic analysis

The 2013 study enrolled 200 participants with overweight and metabolic syndrome. The average age of the participants was 55 years.

After an initial 4-week period, during which the participants consumed their typical diets, the researchers randomly assigned them to follow either HND or a control diet, defined as the average nutrient intake across Nordic countries.

The researchers then instructed the participants in the HND group to increase their consumption of whole grain products, such as rye and barley, alongside berries, fruit, and vegetables.

Those in the control group received instructions to eat low fiber wheat products, including refined white bread and pasta, and not to moderate their consumption of vegetables and fruit.

Both diets contained similar amounts of calories to keep the participants’ weight stable throughout the study. The researchers followed the participants for either 18 or 24 weeks and had them provide blood and urine samples at the beginning and end of the intervention, as well as at week 12.

For the present metabolic profiling study, the researchers analyzed data from 98 participants in the HND group and 71 in the control group.

They found that those who adhered to HND most had different fat-soluble metabolites in their blood than others. The researchers link these metabolites to better glucose regulation, improved cholesterol profile, and reduced cardiometabolic risk.

These findings build upon the initial results from 2013, stating that although HND has a positive effect on lipid profiles and inflammation, it does not affect blood glucose metabolism.

Underlying mechanisms

To explain their findings, the researchers say that fish, flaxseed, sunflower, and rapeseed — all staples in HND — contain healthy fats.

“We can only speculate as to why a change in fat composition benefits our health so greatly,“ says Lars Ove Dragsted, one of the study authors. “However, we can confirm that the absence of highly processed food and less saturated fats from animals have a very positive effect on us.”

“The fat composition in the Nordic diet, which is higher in omega-3 and omega-6 unsaturated fats, [probably explains many of] the health effects we find from the Nordic diet, even when the weight of participants remains constant,” he adds.

Christopher Gardner, Ph.D., Rehnborg Farquhar Professor at Stanford University, not involved in the study, told MNT that the findings are not surprising. “The intervention was focused on healthy foods, and specifically listed berries, veggies, fish, whole grains, [low fat] dairy products, and rapeseed oil.”

“I can think of multiple mechanisms for cardiometabolic benefits, regardless of weight loss: less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, more fiber, and lower sodium. All of these would beneficially impact lipids, glucose, blood pressure, inflammation,” he added.

The authors of the present study conclude that assessing metabolites is an effective way to evaluate the health benefits of different diets.

They say, however, that their findings have some limitations. For example, their analysis may have overlooked some metabolites that other profiling techniques may have found. They also say that their sample size was relatively small.

Dr. Gardner added that these results may have been due to a generally healthier diet rather than due to anything particular to HND: “[The results could have arisen from the] Nordic, Mediterranean, vegetarian, DASH, [or] whole food plant-based diet, or half a dozen others. Many of the components of [HND] are similar to these [other diets].”

Source: Medical News Today

Pandemic-related barriers to women in medicine: Study offers solutions

 

• Disparities exist between men and women working in healthcare, causing equity gaps in salaries and promotions.
• A new expert opinion paper discusses how additional barriers related to the COVID-19 pandemic are pushing women out of academic medicine.
• The researchers suggest financial, cultural, and operational solutions that institutes and foundations can adopt to solve this problem.

Many studies have shown a disparity between men and women working in healthcare. Not only are there gaps in salary and leadership positionsTrusted Source, but female physicians in academic medical centers are also less likely to receive professorship or department chair promotions.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, research has shown that this situation has worsened.

Women have reportedly lost more than 5.4 million jobs in the United States, accounting for 55% of all jobs lost since the start of the pandemic. Of those jobs, more than 1.5 million were in healthcare.

Now, an expert opinion paper, which researchers from seven medical research and academic institutions have written, warns that female researchers in academic medicine have been falling behind with being published and receiving grant funding during the pandemic. The authors argue that this puts women at risk of completely dropping out from the research workforce unless institutes, foundations, and funders take certain actions.

The results from this commentary appear in the journal Nature MedicineTrusted Source.

The disproportionate burden of caregiving

According to lead author Dr. Pamela B. Davis, Ph.D., professor at the Center for Community Health Integration at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, the aim of this paper was to support the clinical researchTrusted Source workforce, which was stretched thin during the pandemic.

Dr. Davis and her team collected information from other studies about the effects of pandemic stresses on caregivers conducting research in academic medicine.

“We were concerned because the burdens of caregiving, especially for young children, but also for dependent elderly relatives, fell disproportionately on women, and women who are engaged in a research career are pulled away from their work to render care that formerly was done by the schools, day care, babysitters, or home health aides,” Dr. Davis told Medical News Today.

“This is damaging to the clinical research enterprise, just as there is increasing public understanding of the importance of clinical research in bringing treatments and vaccines to patients,” she said.

This issue rings true for Jennifer Bramen, Ph.D., senior research scientist at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, who spoke with MNT about the paper.

Dr. Bramen said that reviewing the commentary made her think about her own experience when in graduate school. She said that she and many other women in her program either made career decisions around their desire for children or made family plans around their passion for their academic career.

“I elected not to have children for fear of becoming a trailing spouse after investing 10 years into my secondary education,” Dr. Bramen recalled.

The changes that can help close the gap

Providing benefits that help women with children, such as tax-exempt accounts to support child care, is one of the recommendations Dr. Davis and her team list as ways in which institutions can help reduce the number of women leaving academia.

The study authors suggest that institutions consider providing short-term, flexible research support for junior facultyTrusted Source with caregiving responsibilities. They are asking foundations and funders to help by advocating for the value that both child care and the care of older adults offer to society.

The authors also recommend certain operational changes, including a flexible work schedule and the availability of high quality mentorship and sponsorship programs for all junior faculty. One actionable suggestion, in particular, proposes that institutions pause the promotion timeline when necessary.

“I believe that the ability to request a pause (to) the promotion timeline for maternity leave and creating a culture open to accepting maternity leave as a reasonable explanation during reduced productivity periods would be helpful to women with children long after the pandemic,” Dr. Bramen said.

The authors also recommend cultural changes, such as sharing the responsibility of establishing gender equity and engaging Boards of Trustees.

For such transformative changes, Dr. Davis said that leadership is key and that institutional leaders — including board members, deans, and chairs — should incorporate this message into their communications and their decisions regarding invited speakers. Funders should advocate, celebrate, and publicize programs that address gender equity.

Source: Medical News Today

How meditation can help you make fewer mistakes

 If you are forgetful or make mistakes when in a hurry, a new study from Michigan State University -- the largest of its kind to-date -- found that meditation could help you to become less error prone.

The research, published in Brain Sciences, tested how open monitoring meditation -- or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts or sensations as they unfold in one's mind and body -- altered brain activity in a way that suggests increased error recognition.

"People's interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits," said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author. "But it's amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of a guided meditation can produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators."

The findings suggest that different forms of meditation can have different neurocognitive effects and Lin explained that there is little research about how open monitoring meditation impacts error recognition.

"Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring meditation is a bit different," Lin said. "It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery."

Lin and his MSU co-authors -- William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser -- recruited more than 200 participants to test how open monitoring meditation affected how people detect and respond to errors.

The participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through electroencephalography, or EEG. Then, they completed a computerized distraction test.

"The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses," Lin said. "A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls."

While the meditators didn't have immediate improvements to actual task performance, the researchers' findings offer a promising window into the potential of sustained meditation.

"These findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can do to enhance the brain's ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes," Moser said. "It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily functioning right there in the moment."

While meditation and mindfulness have gained mainstream interest in recent years, Lin is among a relatively small group of researchers that take a neuroscientific approach to assessing their psychological and performance effects.

Looking ahead, Lin said that the next phase of research will be to include a broader group of participants, test different forms of meditation and determine whether changes in brain activity can translate to behavioral changes with more long-term practice.

"It's great to see the public's enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there's still plenty of work from a scientific perspective to be done to understand the benefits it can have, and equally importantly, how it actually works," Lin said. "It's time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens."

Source: ScienceDaily

Air pollution linked to depressive symptoms in adolescents

 Exposure to ozone from air pollution has been linked to an increase in depressive symptoms for adolescents over time, even in neighborhoods that meet air quality standards, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

Ozone is a gas that is produced when various pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust, power plants and other sources react to sunlight. Higher ozone levels have been linked to various physical ailments, including asthma, respiratory viruses and premature death from respiratory causes. This study is the first to link ozone levels to the development of depression symptoms in adolescents over time. Those symptoms may include persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, difficulty with concentration, sleep disturbances and thoughts about suicide.

"I think our findings really speak to the importance of considering air pollution's impact on mental health in addition to physical health," said lead researcher Erika Manczak, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Denver.

The researchers analyzed data from a previous study about early life stress with 213 adolescent participants (aged 9 to 13 years old) in the San Francisco Bay area. The researchers compared data about the adolescents' mental health over a four-year period with Census tracts for their home addresses and air quality data for those tracts from the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Adolescents who lived in areas with relatively higher ozone levels showed significant increases in depressive symptoms over time, even though the ozone levels in their neighborhoods didn't exceed state or national air quality standards. The findings weren't affected by the participants' sex, age, race, household income, parental education or socioeconomic characteristics of their neighborhoods. The research was published online in Developmental Psychology.

"It was surprising that the average level of ozone was fairly low even in the communities with relatively higher ozone exposure," Manczak said. "This really underscores the fact that even low levels of ozone exposure have potentially harmful effects."

Ozone and other components of air pollution can contribute to high levels of inflammation in the body, which has been linked to the onset and development of depression. Adolescents may be especially sensitive to these effects because they spend more time outdoors.

The study included a relatively small sample size from one area of the United States. The findings are correlational so it can't be proven that ozone levels caused an increase in depressive symptoms, only that there is a link between them. It's also possible that other components of air pollution besides ozone could be a factor.

Because air pollution disproportionately affects marginalized communities, ozone levels could be contributing to health disparities, Manczak said. Communities also should consider ways to reduce ozone exposure, such as holding youth sporting events indoors when necessary and limiting driving during peak hours of air pollution alerts. Investment in clean and renewable energy sources that reduce air pollution also could be helpful.

"I believe state and federal air quality standards should be stricter, and we should have tighter regulations on industries that contribute to pollution," Manczak said. "Our findings and other studies suggest that even low levels of ozone exposure can pose potentially serious risks to both physical and mental health."

Source:Sciencedaily

Largest ever human family tree: 27 million ancestors

 Researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute have taken a major step towards mapping the entirety of genetic relationships among humans: a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of us. The study has been published today in Science.

The past two decades have seen extraordinary advancements in human genetic research, generating genomic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals, including from thousands of prehistoric people. This raises the exciting possibility of tracing the origins of human genetic diversity to produce a complete map of how individuals across the world are related to each other.

Until now, the main challenges to this vision were working out a way to combine genome sequences from many different databases and developing algorithms to handle data of this size. However, a new method published today by researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute can easily combine data from multiple sources and scale to accommodate millions of genome sequences.

Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the principal authors, explained: "We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today. This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome."

Since individual genomic regions are only inherited from one parent, either the mother or the father, the ancestry of each point on the genome can be thought of as a tree. The set of trees, known as a "tree sequence" or "ancestral recombination graph," links genetic regions back through time to ancestors where the genetic variation first appeared.

Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns, who undertook the research as part of his PhD at the Big Data Institute and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said: "Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships. We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived. The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples."

The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1,000s to over 100,000 years. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained almost 27 million ancestors.

After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.

Although the genealogical map is already an extremely rich resource, the research team plans to make it even more comprehensive by continuing to incorporate genetic data as it becomes available. Because tree sequences store data in a highly efficient way, the dataset could easily accommodate millions of additional genomes.

Dr Wong said: "This study is laying the groundwork for the next generation of DNA sequencing. As the quality of genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves, the trees will become even more accurate and we will eventually be able to generate a single, unified map that explains the descent of all the human genetic variation we see today."

Dr Wohns added: "While humans are the focus of this study, the method is valid for most living things; from orangutans to bacteria. It could be particularly beneficial in medical genetics, in separating out true associations between genetic regions and diseases from spurious connections arising from our shared ancestral history."

Source:Sciencedaily

Cellular rejuvenation therapy safely reverses signs of aging in mice

 Age may be just a number, but it's a number that often carries unwanted side effects, from brittle bones and weaker muscles to increased risks of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute, in collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche group, have shown that they can safely and effectively reverse the aging process in middle-aged and elderly mice by partially resetting their cells to more youthful states.

"We are elated that we can use this approach across the life span to slow down aging in normal animals. The technique is both safe and effective in mice," says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, co-corresponding author and a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory. "In addition to tackling age-related diseases, this approach may provide the biomedical community with a new tool to restore tissue and organismal health by improving cell function and resilience in different disease situations, such as neurodegenerative diseases."

As organisms age, it is not just their outward appearances and health that change; every cell in their bodies carries a molecular clock that records the passage of time. Cells isolated from older people or animals have different patterns of chemicals along their DNA -- called epigenetic markers -- compared to younger people or animals. Scientists know that adding a mixture of four reprogramming molecules -- Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and cMyc, also known as "Yamanaka factors" -- to cells can reset these epigenetic marks to their original patterns. This approach is how researchers can dial back adult cells, developmentally speaking, into stem cells.

In 2016, Izpisua Belmonte's lab reported for the first time that they could use the Yamanaka factors to counter the signs of aging and increase life span in mice with a premature aging disease. More recently, the team found that, even in young mice, the Yamanaka factors can accelerate muscle regeneration. Following these initial observations, other scientists have used the same approach to improve the function of other tissues like the heart, brain and optic nerve, which is involved in vision.

In the new study, Izpisua Belmonte and his colleagues tested variations of the cellular rejuvenation approach in healthy animals as they aged. One group of mice received regular doses of the Yamanaka factors from the time they were 15 months old until 22 months, approximately equivalent to age 50 through 70 in humans. Another group was treated from 12 through 22 months, approximately age 35 to 70 in humans. And a third group was treated for just one month at age 25 months, similar to age 80 in humans.

"What we really wanted to establish was that using this approach for a longer time span is safe," says Pradeep Reddy, a Salk staff scientist and co-first author of the new paper. "Indeed, we did not see any negative effects on the health, behavior or body weight of these animals."

Compared to control animals, there were no blood cell alterations or neurological changes in the mice that had received the Yamanaka factors. Moreover, the team found no cancers in any of the groups of animals.

When the researchers looked at normal signs of aging in the animals that had undergone the treatment, they found that the mice, in many ways, resembled younger animals. In both the kidneys and skin, the epigenetics of treated animals more closely resembled epigenetic patterns seen in younger animals. When injured, the skin cells of treated animals had a greater ability to proliferate and were less likely to form permanent scars -- older animals usually show less skin cell proliferation and more scarring. Moreover, metabolic molecules in the blood of treated animals did not show normal age-related changes.

This youthfulness was observed in the animals treated for seven or 10 months with the Yamanaka factors, but not the animals treated for just one month. What's more, when the treated animals were analyzed midway through their treatment, the effects were not yet as evident. This suggests that the treatment is not simply pausing aging, but actively turning it backwards -- although more research is needed to differentiate between the two.

The team is now planning future research to analyze how specific molecules and genes are changed by long-term treatment with the Yamanaka factors. They are also developing new ways of delivering the factors.

"At the end of the day, we want to bring resilience and function back to older cells so that they are more resistant to stress, injury and disease," says Reddy. "This study shows that, at least in mice, there's a path forward to achieving that."

Belmonte is currently an Institute Director at Altos Labs, Inc., in addition to being a professor at the Salk Institute.

Source: ScienceDaily

Researchers uncover how the human brain separates, stores, and retrieves memories

 Researchers have identified two types of cells in our brains that are involved in organizing discrete memories based on when they occurred. This finding improves our understanding of how the human brain forms memories and could have implications in memory disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health's Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and published in Nature Neuroscience.

"This work is transformative in how the researchers studied the way the human brain thinks," said Jim Gnadt, Ph.D., program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the NIH BRAIN Initiative. "It brings to human neuroscience an approach used previously in non-human primates and rodents by recording directly from neurons that are generating thoughts."

This study, led by Ueli Rutishauser, Ph.D., professor of neurosurgery, neurology and biomedical sciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, started with a deceptively simple question: how does our brain form and organize memories? We live our awake lives as one continuous experience, but it is believed based on human behavior studies, that we store these life events as individual, distinct moments. What marks the beginning and end of a memory? This theory is referred to as "event segmentation," and we know relatively little about how the process works in the human brain.

To study this, Rutishauser and his colleagues worked with 20 patients who were undergoing intracranial recording of brain activity to guide surgery for treatment of their drug-resistant epilepsy. They looked at how the patients' brain activity was affected when shown film clips containing different types of "cognitive boundaries" -- transitions thought to trigger changes in how a memory is stored and that mark the beginning and end of memory "files" in the brain.

The first type, referred to as a "soft boundary," is a video containing a scene that then cuts to another scene that continues the same story. For example, a baseball game showing a pitch is thrown and, when the batter hits the ball, the camera cuts to a shot of the fielder making a play. In contrast, a "hard boundary" is a cut to a completely different story -- imagine if the batted ball were immediately followed by a cut to a commercial.

Jie Zheng, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital Boston and first author of the study, explained the key difference between the two boundaries.

"Is this a new scene within the same story, or are we watching a completely different story? How much the narrative changes from one clip to the next determines the type of cognitive boundary," said Zheng.

The researchers recorded the brain activity of participants as they watched the videos, and they noticed two distinct groups of cells that responded to different types of boundaries by increasing their activity. One group, called "boundary cells" became more active in response to either a soft or hard boundary. A second group, referred to as "event cells" responded only to hard boundaries. This led to the theory that the creation of a new memory occurs when there is a peak in the activity of both boundary and event cells, which is something that only occurs following a hard boundary.

One analogy to how memories might be stored and accessed in the brain is how photos are stored on your phone or computer. Often, photos are automatically grouped into events based on when and where they were taken and then later displayed to you as a key photo from that event. When you tap or click on that photo, you can drill down into that specific event.

"A boundary response can be thought of like creating a new photo event," said Dr. Rutishauser. "As you build the memory, it's like new photos are being added to that event. When a hard boundary occurs, that event is closed and a new one begins. Soft boundaries can be thought of to represent new images created within a single event."

The researchers next looked at memory retrieval and how this process relates to the firing of boundary and event cells. They theorized that the brain uses boundary peaks as markers for "skimming" over past memories, much in the way the key photos are used to identify events. When the brain finds a firing pattern that looks familiar, it "opens" that event.

Two different memory tests designed to study this theory were used. In the first, the participants were shown a series of still images and were asked whether they were from a scene in the film clips they just watched. Study participants were more likely to remember images that occurred soon after a hard or soft boundary, which is when a new "photo" or "event" would have been created.

The second test involved showing pairs of images taken from film clips that they had just watched. The participants were then asked which of the two images had appeared first. It turned out that they had a much harder time choosing the correct image if the two occurred on different sides of a hard boundary, possibly because they had been placed in different "events."

These findings provide a look into how the human brain creates, stores, and accesses memories. Because event segmentation is a process that can be affected in people living with memory disorders, these insights could be applied to the development of new therapies.

In the future, Dr. Rutishauser and his team plan to look at two possible avenues to develop therapies related to these findings. First, neurons that use the chemical dopamine, which are most-known for their role in reward mechanisms, may be activated by boundary and event cells, suggesting a possible target to help strengthen the formation of memories.

Second, one of the brain's normal internal rhythms, known as the theta rhythm, has been connected to learning and memory. If event cells fired in time with that rhythm, the participants had an easier time remembering the order of the images that they were shown. Because deep brain stimulation can affect theta rhythms, this could be another avenue for treating patients with certain memory disorders.

This project was made possible by a multi-institutional consortium through the NIH BRAIN Initiative's Research on Humans program. Institutions involved in this study were Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Children's Hospital Boston (site PI Gabriel Kreiman, Ph.D.), and Toronto Western Hospital (site PI Taufik Valiante, M.D., Ph.D.). The study was funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative (NS103792, NS117839), the National Science Foundation, and Brain Canada.

Source: ScienceDaily