- Parkinson’s Disease Can Now Be Detected Through the Skin The Wall Street Journal
- Researchers report on the effectiveness of skin biopsy to detect Parkinson’s and related neurodegenerative diseases Medical Xpress
- Breakthrough Results of NIH-Sponsored Study of Syn-One Test® as a Skin-Based Diagnostic Tool for Parkinson’s Disease and Related Disorders Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Business Wire
- Skin Biopsy Effective in Detecting Parkinson’s: Study Mirage News
- Simple skin biopsy ‘could help diagnose Parkinson’s disease at earliest stages’ Burnham and Highbridge Weekly News
Tag Archives: detected
‘Zombie deer’ disease, first detected in Idaho 2 years ago, spreads to McCall area – Idaho Statesman
- ‘Zombie deer’ disease, first detected in Idaho 2 years ago, spreads to McCall area Idaho Statesman
- Fish and Game is running check stations in November to monitor for chronic wasting disease in the Panhandle Idaho Fish and Game
- Deer farm in Oneida County confirmed to have chronic wasting disease Fox11online.com
- The first positive case of chronic wasting disease of the fall hunting season found near New Meadows KTVB.com
- Mule deer taken in Hunting Unit 32A tests positive for chronic wasting disease Idaho Fish and Game
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Arlington closes public splash pads, pools after possible brain-eating amoeba detected – CBS News
- Arlington closes public splash pads, pools after possible brain-eating amoeba detected CBS News
- Arlington father of child killed by amoeba speaks after city announces possible presence of amoeba WFAA
- Arlington closes public splash pads after possible brain-eating amoeba detected CBS TEXAS
- Public pools and splash pads in Arlington remain closed NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth
- His 3-year-old son died of a rare brain eating amoeba two years ago. Now, he fears the possibility it could be back at another Arlington splash pad. WFAA.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected – SciTechDaily
- Surprising Phenomena Observed by NASA’s NuSTAR in Brightest Cosmic Explosion Ever Detected SciTechDaily
- Largest explosion since the Big Bang was powered by a bizarre energy jet unlike any other Livescience.com
- Brightest cosmic explosion on record is even weirder than first thought Business Insider
- Recording the entire process of a tera-electron volt gamma-ray burst during the death of a massive star Phys.org
- Brightest Cosmic Burst Since The Big Bang Observed And There’s Something Strange Going On Giant Freakin Robot
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Potential Hidden Cause of Dementia Detected by Cedars-Sinai Research – Can Be Cured!
A recent Cedars-Sinai study indicates that some patients diagnosed with behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia, an incurable condition causing loss of behavior control and daily living abilities, may actually have a treatable cerebrospinal fluid leak instead.
A Cedars-Sinai study suggests physicians treating dementia should look for cerebrospinal fluid leak—a treatable cause of an otherwise incurable condition.
Wouter Schievink, MD, director of the Cerebrospinal Fluid Leak and Microvascular Neurosurgery Program, said many patients with brain sagging—which can be detected through MRI—go undiagnosed, and he advises clinicians to take a second look at patients with telltale symptoms.
A new Cedars-Sinai study suggests that some patients diagnosed with behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD)—an incurable condition that robs patients of the ability to control their behavior and cope with daily living—may instead have a cerebrospinal fluid leak, which is often treatable.
Researchers say these findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal
On the Left: An image of brain sagging. On the right: Post-op resolution of brain sagging. Credit: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) circulates in and around the brain and spinal cord to help cushion them from injury. When this fluid leaks into the body, the brain can sag, causing dementia symptoms. Schievink said many patients with brain sagging—which can be detected through MRI—go undiagnosed, and he advises clinicians to take a second look at patients with telltale symptoms.
“A knowledgeable radiologist, neurosurgeon or neurologist should check the patient’s MRI again to make sure there is no evidence for brain sagging,” Schievink said.
Wouter Schievink, MD. Credit: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Clinicians can also ask about a history of severe headaches that improve when the patient lies down, significant sleepiness even after adequate nighttime sleep, and whether the patient has ever been diagnosed with a Chiari brain malformation, a condition in which brain tissue extends into the spinal canal. Brain sagging, Schievink said, is often mistaken for a Chiari malformation.
Even when brain sagging is detected, the source of a CSF leak can be difficult to locate. When the fluid leaks through a tear or cyst in the surrounding membrane, it is visible on CT myelogram imaging with the aid of contrast medium.
Schievink and his team recently discovered an additional cause of CSF leak: the CSF-venous fistula. In these cases, the fluid leaks into a vein, making it difficult to see on a routine CT myelogram. To detect these leaks, technicians must use a specialized CT scan and observe the contrast medium in motion as it flows through the cerebrospinal fluid.
In this study, investigators used this imaging technique on 21 patients with brain sagging and symptoms of bvFTD, and they discovered CSF-venous fistulas in nine of those patients. All nine patients had their fistulas surgically closed, and their brain sagging and accompanying symptoms were completely reversed.
“This is a rapidly evolving field of study, and advances in imaging technology have greatly improved our ability to detect sources of CSF leak, especially CSF-venous fistula,” said Keith L. Black, MD, chair of the department of Neurosurgery and the Ruth and Lawrence Harvey Chair in Neuroscience at Cedars-Sinai. “This specialized imaging is not widely available, and this study suggests the need for further research to improve detection and cure rates for patients.”
The remaining 12 study participants, whose leaks could not be identified, were treated with nontargeted therapies designed to relieve brain sagging, such as implantable systems for infusing the patient with CSF. However, only three of these patients experienced relief from their symptoms.
“Great efforts need to be made to improve the detection rate of CSF leak in these patients,” Schievink said. “We have developed nontargeted treatments for patients where no leak can be detected, but as our study shows, these treatments are much less effective than targeted, surgical correction of the leak.”
Reference: “The reversible impairment of behavioral variant frontotemporal brain sagging syndrome: Challenges and opportunities” by Wouter I. Schievink, Marcel Maya, Zachary Barnard, Rachelle B. Taché, Ravi S. Prasad, Vikram S. Wadhwa, Franklin G. Moser and Miriam Nuño, 18 December 2022, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions.
DOI: 10.1002/trc2.12367
New research indicates signs of depression can be detected in speech patterns
New research published in BMC Psychiatry finds that changes in speech like speed, pitch, number of pauses, and intensity can predict who may report more depressive symptoms. The research team found they could predict with 93% accuracy who would have scores on a measure of depression high enough to be clinically significant. This research may lead to new early screening methods for depression.
Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental illnesses of our time; it is found everywhere in the world and, according to the WHO, affects more than 264 million people. An illness that affects so many can benefit from early detection methods. Research has found that if early signs of depression are caught, therapeutic interventions may reduce the intensity of the depressive episode. Alexandra König and colleagues recognize that objective and easy-to-use tools for early identification are needed.
It has been known for some time that those who are depressed speak differently; speed, fluency, and pitch are known to change during depressive episodes. Clinicians report that they look for these speech characteristics during the diagnosis process. If this is so, König and the research team were curious if a speech analysis test could be developed to look for speech differences in those at risk for depression.
In order to determine if this was possible, subjects with no clinical diagnosis were used in the hopes that some would have more depressive symptoms and would be identified through speech analysis. One hundred and eighteen university students were recruited for the study. First, participants took an assessment called “Trail Making.” This assessment was intended to measure their cognitive speed at problem-solving. Next, they took an assessment of depressive symptoms; then, they were recorded speaking.
The speech task asked them to speak for one minute about something positive in their life and one minute about something negative. The speech task was analyzed, looking for specific acoustic features, how many words were said, and how many words were said in a speech segment (before a pause).
Their results found that 25 of their subjects scored high enough on the measure of depression to be considered for a clinical diagnosis of depression. These 25 subjects spoke more words than those who did not score high for depression, and this was true in both the positive and negative stories. In addition, speed of speech, pitch, and prosodic features of speech were excellent predictors of who would have depression scores. Finally, those with high depression scores took more time to complete the Trail Making Test.
The research team acknowledges some limitations to their work. Their speech recording was short, just two minutes per subject, which may have needed longer to make reliable predictions. Second, the subjects of their study were all university students, making the sample, not representative. Finally, the subjects were not clinically observed, so it is impossible to know if they would have been diagnosed with clinical depression.
These limitations notwithstanding, the research team finds their work valuable in the pursuit of early detection of depressive symptoms. They conclude, “Taken together, our study adds to the current literature that speech features are sensitive for the detection of depressive symptoms even in a non-clinical sample.”
The study, “Detecting subtle signs of depression with automated speech analysis in a non-clinical sample”, was authored by Alexandra König, Johannes Tröger, Elisa Mallick, Mario Mina, Nicklas Linz, Carole Wagnon, Julia Karbach, Caroline Kuhn, and Jessica Peter.
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Record-Breaking Signal From Distant Galaxy Is Furthest of Its Kind Ever Detected : ScienceAlert
Hydrogen is a key building block of the cosmos. Whether stripped down to its charged core, or piled into a molecule, the nature of its presence can tell you a lot about the Universe’s features on the largest of scales.
For that reason astronomers are very interested in detecting signals from this element, wherever it can be found.
Now the light signature of uncharged, atomic hydrogen has been measured further from Earth than ever before, by some margin. The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India has picked up a signal with a lookback time – the time between the light being emitted and being detected – of a huge 8.8 billion years.
That gives us an exciting glimpse of some of the earliest moments in the Universe, which is currently estimated to be in the region of 13.8 billion years old.
“A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals,” says cosmologist Arnab Chakraborty, from McGill University in Canada. “Until now, it’s only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth.”
In this case, the radio signal emitted by atomic hydrogen is a light wave with a length of 21 centimeters. Long waves aren’t very energetic, nor is the light intense, making it difficult to detect at a distance; the previous record lookback time stood at a mere 4.4 billion years.
Due to the vast distance it traveled before being intercepted by the GMRT, the 21 centimeter emission line had been stretched by expanding space to 48 centimeters, a phenomenon described as the redshifting of light.
The team used gravitational lensing to detect the signal, which originates from a distant star-forming galaxy called SDSSJ0826+5630. Gravitational lensing is where light is magnified as it follows the curving space surrounding a massive object that sits between our telescopes and the original source, effectively acting as a huge lens.
“In this specific case, the signal is bent by the presence of another massive body, another galaxy, between the target and the observer,” says astrophysicist Nirupam Roy, from the Indian Institute of Science.
“This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up.”
The results of this study will give astronomers hope for being able to make other similar observations in the near future: the distances and lookback times that were previously off limits are very much now within reason. If the stars align, that is.
Atomic hydrogen is formed as hot, ionized gas from the surroundings of a galaxy starts to fall onto the galaxy, cooling down along the way. Eventually, it turns into molecular hydrogen, and then into stars.
Being able to look back so far in time can teach us more about how our own galaxy formed in the beginning, as well as leading astronomers towards a better understanding of how the Universe behaved when it was just getting started.
These latest findings will “open up exciting new possibilities for probing the cosmic evolution of neutral gas with existing and upcoming low-frequency radio telescopes in the near future,” write the researchers in their published paper.
The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Massive Volcanic Outburst Detected on Jupiter’s Hellish Moon Io : ScienceAlert
The most powerful volcanic eruptions in the Solar System occur not on Earth, but on Io, a sulfurous moon orbiting the planet Jupiter.
And now, researchers from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in the US have noticed a recent outburst that’s been surprisingly productive, even for a hellish world like Io.
In the space around Jupiter, a torus of plasma created and fed by Io’s volcanic emissions grew significantly richer between July and September of last year and persisted until December, showing the moon underwent a spate of volcanic activity that released a huge amount of material.
For something that’s just a little bit bigger than Earth’s Moon, Io is an absolute beast of volcanism. It’s bristling with volcanoes, with around 150 of the 400 known volcanoes erupting at any given time, creating vast lakes of molten lava.
This is all down to its relationship with Jupiter: Io orbits on an elliptical path, resulting in variations in the gravitational pull that change the shape of the moon as it swings around the planet.
The other Galilean moons tug on Io too. This creates frictional heating inside Io, which then spews out molten material from its interior.
What happens to the volcanic emissions from Io then has an effect on Jupiter. Because Io has no magnetic field of its own, the sulfur dioxide escapes, forming a torus of plasma that orbits Jupiter.
This is what feeds the permanent ultraviolet auroras that shimmer at Jupiter’s poles – the most powerful auroras in the Solar System.
This complex interplay is fascinating in its own right, of course. But it can also help inform other interactions of a similar nature that may be occurring out there in the broader galaxy.
So PSI astronomer Jeff Morgenthaler has been keeping an eye on Io by using the PSI’s Io Input/Output observatory (IoIO) since 2017.
Jupiter is very big and very bright, so IoIO uses a coronagraphic technique: effectively minimizing the light shining off Jupiter so that Mogenthaler can see the light emitted by other things in the space around it, including the plasma torus.
This is how he sees that Io has a volcanic outburst every year; and how he was able to see that sulfur and sodium were being pumped into the torus in fall of last year.
However, while the quantities were huge, the torus was dimmer than other years. We don’t know what this means, yet, but unraveling it could tell us something new about the fiery dance between Jupiter and Io.
“This could be telling us something about the composition of the volcanic activity that produced the outburst or it could be telling us that the torus is more efficient at ridding itself of material when more material is thrown into it,” Morgenthaler says.
We’ll have to wait to learn more, but with IoIO on the ground and Juno currently orbiting Jupiter, additional information about the plasma torus will be coming in, especially since Juno can measure changes in Jupiter’s plasma environment.
In addition, Juno will be performing a flyby of Io in December 2023, so we’re looking forward to a wealth of information on the smelly yellow moon.
“Juno measurements,” Morgenthaler says, “may be able to tell us if this volcanic outburst had a different composition than previous ones.”
‘Super’ Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes Detected in Asia
Researchers in Japan say they’ve discovered “super” resistant mosquitoes in Asia. In a study published this week, they detail finding populations of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—a common disease vector—in Vietnam and Cambodia carrying several mutations believed to confer strong protection against the most widely used insecticides. The discovery should merit urgent action to prevent these mutations from spreading globally, they argue.
A. aegypti mosquitoes are one of the most prolific sources of human misery in the world, thanks in part to the wide assortment of germs they can transmit to us. These mosquito-borne diseases include yellow fever, dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, to name a few. The global presence of A. aegypti (along with a related species, A. albopictus) and the diseases they spread has expanded in recent years. Many experts expect their range to only grow wider over the coming decades as the climate continues to warm, including throughout the southern and eastern parts of the United States. So these new findings, published Wednesday in Science Advances, might add yet another concern to an already serious problem.
The research was led by scientists from Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases, the country’s equivalent to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the U.S. They studied samples of A. aegypti mosquitoes recently collected throughout Asia, looking specifically for mutations in their voltage-gated sodium channel gene. Some mutations in this gene, called knockdown mutations, can help mosquitos and other insects survive exposure to pyrethroids, a class of chemicals commonly used to control insect populations. To test whether any of the mutations found by the researchers truly protected the mosquitos, they also compared their survival rates against the insecticides to non-resistant mosquitoes in the lab.
The team ultimately identified 10 previously unknown substrains of A. aegypti mosquitoes that seemed to carry one or more of these knockdown mutations. One novel mutation in particular, called a L982W substitution, was found in over 78% of mosquitoes from both countries. And in a specific area of Cambodia, about 90% of mosquitoes carried one of two pairs of mutations that were identified as especially troubling.
Lab experiments also found that these combination mutation-carrying mosquitoes were much harder to kill, with “substantially higher levels of pyrethroid resistance than any other field population ever reported,” the team wrote. In the title of their paper, they describe their results as the “discovery of super-insecticide-resistant dengue mosquitoes in Asia.”
Other studies in recent years have found evidence of growing pyrethroid resistance among A. aegypti mosquitoes in Asia and the Americas, both in the lab and the real world. And the new study is the latest in the team’s ongoing research project to understand pyrethroid resistance in A. aegypti globally. They say it’s the first to try unraveling the molecular mechanisms that have led to these mutations emerging, particularly in the mosquitos from Cambodia.
There are developing non-insecticide technologies that might someday better keep mosquitoes in check, such as sterile insect techniques that sabotage the population from within, but none of these interventions are expected to see widespread use soon. There is also a newer class of insecticides, called neonicotinoids, that’s beginning to be deployed more often against mosquitoes. But these chemicals are controversial due to their damaging effects on important insect pollinators, and there are already signs that mosquitoes have begun to adapt to them as well. There are also no highly effective and/or low-cost vaccines and treatments for the most common diseases that these mosquitos spread, especially dengue.
All of this means that pyrethroids will remain a widely used tool against A. aegypti mosquitoes for the time being. Given that, much more has to be done to keep these worrying mutations from spreading around the world before it’s too late. The L982W mutation hasn’t been found in mosquitoes outside of Vietnam and Cambodia yet, for instance. But “it may be spreading to other areas of Asia, which can cause an unprecedentedly serious threat to the control of dengue fever as well as other Aedes-borne infectious diseases,” the researchers warn.
Mysterious Patterns in Temperatures Detected on Jupiter
This view compares a lucky imaging view of Jupiter from VISIR (left) at infrared wavelengths with a very sharp amateur image in visible light from about the same time (right). Credit: ESO/L.N. Fletcher/Damian Peach
Based partly on data from generations of
Jupiter’s troposphere has a lot in common with Earth’s: It’s where clouds form and storms churn. To understand this weather activity, scientists need to study certain properties, including wind, pressure, humidity, and temperature. They have known since NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 missions in the 1970s that, in general, colder temperatures are associated with Jupiter’s lighter and whiter bands (known as zones), while the darker brown-red bands (known as belts) are locations of warmer temperatures.
These infrared images of Jupiter with color added were obtained by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2016 and contributed to the new study. The colors represent temperatures and cloudiness: The bluer areas are cold and cloudy, and the orange areas are warmer and cloud-free. Credit: ESO / L.N. Fletcher
However, not enough data sets were available to understand how temperatures vary over the long term. The new research, published on December 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy, breaks ground by studying images of the bright infrared glow (invisible to the human eye) that rises from warmer regions of the atmosphere, directly measuring Jupiter’s temperatures above the colorful clouds. The scientists collected these images at regular intervals over three of Jupiter’s orbits around the Sun, each of which lasts 12 Earth years.
In the process, they discovered that Jupiter’s temperatures rise and fall following definite periods that aren’t tied to the seasons or any other cycles scientists know about. Because Jupiter has weak seasons – the planet is tilted on its axis only 3 degrees, compared to Earth’s jaunty 23.5 degrees – scientists didn’t expect to find temperatures on Jupiter varying in such regular cycles.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest planet in the solar system. It is a gas giant with a mass about two and a half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter has a thick atmosphere made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, and it has a number of distinctive features, including dark bands called “belts” and light bands called “zones.” The most famous feature of Jupiter is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that has been raging for hundreds of years. Jupiter has 80 known moons, the four largest of which are called the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer, Galileo Galilei. These moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jupiter also has a number of rings, though they are much less prominent than the rings of
“We’ve solved one part of the puzzle now, which is that the atmosphere shows these natural cycles,” said co-author Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in England. “To understand what’s driving these patterns and why they occur on these particular timescales, we need to explore both above and below the cloudy layers.”
One possible explanation became apparent at the equator: The study authors found that temperature variations higher up, in the stratosphere, seemed to rise and fall in a pattern that is the opposite of how temperatures behave in the troposphere, suggesting changes in the stratosphere influence changes in the troposphere and vice versa.
Decades of Observations
Orton and his colleagues began the study in 1978. For the duration of their research, they would write proposals several times a year to win observation time on three large telescopes around the world: the
Then came the hard part – combining multiple years’ worth of observations from several telescopes and science instruments to search for patterns. Joining these veteran scientists on their long-duration study were several undergraduate interns, none of whom had been born when the study began. They are students at Caltech in Pasadena, California; Cal Poly Pomona in Pomona, California; Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio; and Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Scientists hope the study will help them eventually be able to predict weather on Jupiter, now that they have a more detailed understanding of it. The research could contribute to climate modeling, with computer simulations of the temperature cycles and how they affect weather – not just for Jupiter, but for all giant planets across our solar system and beyond.
“Measuring these temperature changes and periods over time is a step toward ultimately having a full-on Jupiter weather forecast, if we can connect cause and effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said. “And the even bigger-picture question is if we can someday extend this to other giant planets to see if similar patterns show up.”
Reference: “Unexpected long-term variability in Jupiter’s tropospheric temperatures” by Glenn S. Orton, Arrate Antuñano, Leigh N. Fletcher, James A. Sinclair, Thomas W. Momary, Takuya Fujiyoshi, Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, Padraig T. Donnelly, Jennifer J. Greco, Anna V. Payne, Kimberly A. Boydstun and Laura E. Wakefield, 19 December 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01839-0