Critical insights into why airborne viruses lose their infectivity have been uncovered by scientists at the University of Bristol. The findings, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface today [20 June], reveal how cleaner air kills the virus significantly quicker and why opening a window may be more important than originally thought. The research could shape future mitigation strategies for new viruses.
Driven by recent studies, the evolving nature of the disease and the widespread vaccination of Americans against COVID-19, the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) and Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) today released a joint statement providing updated recommendations for the timing of elective surgeries and anesthesia for patients after a COVID-19 infection.
Undergraduates at UK universities experienced prolonged and high levels of psychological distress and anxiety during the pandemic, according to a new study, tracking wellbeing over the course of 2020 to 2021.
More pregnant women developed gestational diabetes during the COVID-19 pandemic than in the preceding two years, according to research being presented on Thursday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill.
The number of children diagnosed with type 2 diabetes continued to rise in the year following the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research being presented Thursday at ENDO 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill.
Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, working with collaborators in five countries, today revealed that the capacity to resist or recover from infections and other sources of inflammatory stress — called “immune resilience” — differs widely among individuals.
Researchers have used heart and lung stem cells infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 to better understand how the disease impacts different organs, paving the way for more targeted treatments.
Four state policies introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to spur expansion of telehealth were associated with expansion of such services by mental health facilities, but growth of telehealth was lower among facilities in counties with the greatest proportion of Black residents, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
“One of the main takeaways from our study is that rural health workers have core competencies in cross-sector collaboration, systems thinking and in engaging the community,” said Kett, who is a research scientist at the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
A U-M study examined the factors that went into decision-making around hospital transfers during the pandemic—and the moral distress that often resulted from it.
Researchers at Texas Biomedical Research Institute have succeeded in generating the lung’s most important immune cell, the alveolar macrophage, in the lab.
An overactive inflammatory response could be at the root of many long COVID cases, according to a new study from the Allen Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
Gentle cleansers are just as effective in killing viruses – including coronavirus – as harsh soaps, according to a new study from scientists at the University of Sheffield
Increased alcohol use among pregnant and postpartum women during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with autonomic nervous system dysregulation, known to negatively affect resilience to change and further exacerbate the risk of stress-related mental health disorders and substance use, a new study suggests. The findings, although preliminary, underline the potential for a new clinical biomarker and novel personalized mobile health apps in facilitating treatment interventions. Previous research linked the pandemic to increased stress levels and drinking, including in pregnant and postpartum women. Alcohol use, and stress-related conditions such as depression and anxiety, are associated with dysregulation in the feedback loop between the body and the brain. This process involves the peripheral autonomic nervous system, which regulates the heartbeat. Healthy, resilient people tend to have higher heart rate variability than people with stress and substance use disorders. Heart rate variab
Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome are debilitating conditions with similar symptoms. Neither condition has diagnostic tests or treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and each cost the United States billions of dollars each year in direct medical expenses and lost productivity.
In a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, University of Minnesota researchers found that metformin, a drug commonly used to treat diabetes, prevents the development of long COVID.
Human behavior changed dramatically during lockdowns in the first months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in behavioral changes of land mammals.
Biologists have identified a previously unknown way that our immune system detects viruses. The immune protein CARD8 acts as a trip wire to detect a range of viruses, including the virus that causes COVID. They also found that CARD8 functions differently among species and varies between humans.
Fatigue is the symptom that most significantly impacts the daily lives of long Covid patients, and can affect quality of life more than some cancers, finds a new study led by researchers at UCL and the University of Exeter.
Patients who had heart attacks during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK and Spain are predicted to live 1.5 and 2 years less, respectively, than their pre-COVID counterparts.
Researchers at The University of Queensland have discovered viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can cause brain cells to fuse, initiating malfunctions that lead to chronic neurological symptoms.
In Europe, the pandemic triggered in 2020 by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is now largely under control. But why this virus is able to spread so efficiently remains unclear. A team of researchers led by Dr. Simone Backes, Dr. Gerti Beliu and Prof. Dr. Markus Sauer of the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg (JMU) has now shown in a publication in "Angewandte Chemie" that some previous assumptions need to be reconsidered.
New research from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai shows that patients who went to a hospital with a heart attack and were simultaneously sick with COVID-19 were three times more likely to die than patients experiencing a heart attack without a COVID-19 infection.
A review of more than 245,000 doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines given to young children (most of them age 4 and younger) found no indications of serious side effects.
New Olin Business School research demonstrates the effectiveness of partisan cues in a COVID-19 vaccination video ad campaign.A large-scale study to see if politically partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines found that, yes, they can.
Patients infected with beta and delta COVID-19 variants, and those who required hospital stays for COVID-19 infection, were more likely to experience heart issues associated with long COVID, according to a recent study published in the European Heart Journal – Cardiovascular Imaging. Patients recovering from the omicron variant were least likely to have microvascular involvement. The study also found that microvascular dysfunction started to be seen less often after nine months to one year following infection suggesting that this type of abnormality may be reversible.
The world should be prepared to respond to a disease outbreak of “even deadlier potential” than COVID-19, the head of the WHO said after the UN agency launched a global network to monitor disease threats.
Individuals who are immunocompromised are considered at higher risk for severe or longer disease with COVID-19. Understanding the systemic immune response is vital for research efforts to reduce its effects on multiple organs.
Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital found key “on” switch, NLRP12, for innate immune cell death in diseases that cause red blood cells to rupture, which can lead to inflammation and multi-organ failure.
While most aspects of care quality in long-term care homes did not differ in the first year of the pandemic from pre-pandemic levels, a new study shows that the use of antipsychotic drugs increased in all provinces.
Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology show that T cells can recognize several different viral targets, called "antigens," shared between most coronaviruses, including common cold coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2. They also looked more in-depth at what fragments of these antigens, called “epitopes,” are recognized and how conserved they are across different coronaviruses.
Below are summaries of recent Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center research findings and other news. If you’re covering the American Society for Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, June 2-6 in Chicago, Illinois, see our list of Fred Hutch research highlights at ASCO and contact [email protected] to set up interviews with experts.
Cats can play a role in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and their contaminated environment (pens in this study) can be infectious, according to new research. The study was published in Microbiology Spectrum, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
Sixty per cent of roughly 1,600 Canadians who took part in a new McGill University study say their lifestyle habits either stayed the same or improved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mercy's Drs. Sabrina Barata and Sara Encisco are the featured guests on the hospital's monthly talk show, “Medoscopy,” airing Tuesday and Wednesday, June 20th and 21st, at 5:30 p.m. EST (www.facebook.com/MercyMedicalCenter).
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is one of the most prevalent herpesviruses worldwide. Depending on the geographical area, it can affect between 40% and 90% of the population and, although it does not produce symptoms in healthy people, the control of this chronic infection requires constant work by the immune system, which is constantly fighting to keep it at bay.
Working the night shift or binge drinking may double the risk of COVID-19 infection, according to a study of nurses published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research. Both alcohol misuse and night shift work have been shown to impact sleep and promote inflammation in the body, which has been linked to COVID disease severity. The findings from this study strongly suggest that alcohol and circadian misalignment contribute to the development of COVID disease in people exposed to the virus.
Delays in cancer screening during the COVID-19 pandemic will likely cause a significant increase in cancer cases that could have been caught earlier with screening, and may now be diagnosed at later stages, according to a new research article published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
Despite intensive research since the beginning of the pandemic, it is still unclear which components of the immune system are involved in the early control of virus replication in the respiratory tract and which therefore could help prevent COVID-19 taking a severe course.
In a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a team of researchers from UC San Francisco found that lower than expected exercise capacity was common among people with Long COVID and chronotropic incompetence (inadequate heart rate increase during exercise) was the most common reason. They also found reduced exercise capacity to be correlated with early post-Covid elevations of inflammatory biomarkers. In addition, they found that reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) may be related to reduced heart rate while exercising.