Common drug may ease stomach problems for people with autism

A new pilot study suggests that propranolol, a common blood pressure drug, may help ease stomach issues for some people with autism.

People with autism experience digestive challenges—such as bloating, constipation, and diarrhea—at significantly higher rates than others.

Since previous research has shown these gastrointestinal issues are linked with stress, anxiety, and depression, researchers are searching for new ways to address the underlying causes of discomfort to ultimately improve the quality of life for autistic individuals.

In 2023, Brad Ferguson, an assistant research professor with the University of Missouri School of Medicine, coauthored a study that found propranolol can be repurposed to reduce anxiety for people with autism.

Recently, he led a new study to explore if the blood pressure drug might ease gastrointestinal distress among people with autism as well.

Ferguson’s latest study included 46 participants, all of whom receive care at Mizzou’s Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment. His pilot study found that autistic teens and young adults with higher heart rate variability—a sign of a calmer nervous system—showed more improvement in gastrointestinal symptoms after 12 weeks of taking propranolol compared to those with a more stressed nervous system.

“Our ultimate goal is to support precision medicine by finding out who can benefit from certain treatment options the most,” Ferguson says.

“We found that propranolol seemed to work best for those whose nervous system was more relaxed.”

Going forward, Ferguson is partnering with Fang Wang from the College of Engineering to use a smartwatch app capable of monitoring stress levels and social activity in people with autism with and without gastrointestinal symptoms.

The research appears in Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.

Source: University of Missouri

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There’s a link between pollution and bleeding in the brain

Researchers have found an association between air pollution exposure and a rare type of bleeding within the brain.

An aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, or aSAH, can damage brain tissue enough to leave patients paralyzed or in a coma or cause death.

Neurosurgeon Robert Rennert led a retrospective study of 70 patients treated at the University of Utah Hospital for aSAH over a 5-year period. Utah’s Wasatch Front is often beset with high levels of fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) during wintertime inversions.

Rennert’s team, which included neurosurgeons from the University of California, San Diego, reviewed nearly 13,000 data points to determine PM2.5 levels on the Wasatch Front in the days, weeks and months leading up to the admissions of local patients. The goal was to determine whether PM2.5 levels affected each patient’s risk of hemorrhage.

“After controlling for other variables, we expected to find that patients were more likely to be admitted for aSAH within a week of exposure to high PM2.5 levels,” Rennert says.

“Instead, we found that these patients were experiencing higher rates of aneurysmal rupture three to six months after peaks in air pollution levels.”

This gap in time between when PM2.5 levels were highest and when a brain hemorrhage actually occurs makes studying the association between these events challenging.

Nonetheless, “aSAH has a high risk of death and disability, so understanding the risk factors for rupture in patients with brain aneurysms is critically important from a public health perspective.”

The air quality along Utah’s Wasatch Front has long been considered poor, especially during the winter when inversions trap polluted air in the valleys, but researchers are still learning exactly how our health is affected by poor air quality.

The American Lung Association’s 2024 list of most polluted cities in the U.S. ranked the Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem area 25th for short-term PM2.5 pollution. PM2.5 consists of tiny particles or droplets (30 times finer than human hair) that are easily inhaled and can be harmful, damaging lungs and increasing the risk of ischemic strokes and other maladies.

Rennert says this study is the beginning of the team’s efforts to understand the effects of PM2.5 on brain health, with additional studies planned to determine more definitively whether PM2.5 pollution can cause aSAH, including in regions beyond the Wasatch Front, as well as further assess the mechanisms and risks of air pollution on cerebrovascular disease more broadly.

“We’re hoping that our research helps alert people to the public health risks of air pollution and encourages changes,” Rennert says.

“Incentivizing public transportation use, applying stricter daily pollution quota regulations, and broadening research funding for environmental studies will all help to lessen our exposure and have long-term benefits for collective health.”

The research appears in the journal npj Clean Air.

Source: University of Utah

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Deep listening can make you feel more ‘Kama Muta’

Listening well can move you, literally, a new study finds.

Within every human culture rests the potential for a distinctly positive emotional experience that’s variously characterized, in English, as feeling moved, emotionally touched, or heartwarming.

Other languages rely on similar contact metaphors to describe this feeling, which has been labeled only recently by researchers as Kama Muta, a Sanskrit word for being “moved by love.”

Kama Muta is an emotional episode that produces physiological, cognitive, and behavioral changes—such as a buoyant sense of warmth, closeness, a lump in the throat, or goosebumps—that contribute to fostering bonds and enriching experiences.

Scholars of Kama Muta argue that it emerges whenever we participate in or witness a sudden increase in the closeness of a relationship. This can include situations as different as a burgeoning romance, a reunion after an extended period of separation, or witnessing someone sacrifice for another person.

Science is just beginning to grasp this profound and sudden surge in the connection strength between people.

Now, researchers have further expanded this understanding of Kama Muta by approaching the experience as listening researchers.

Kama Muta can be elicited through high-quality listening, according to Kenneth DeMarree, an associate professor of psychology in the University at Buffalo.

Through a series of studies, the researchers found that high-quality listening—which involves attention toward a speaker; seeking to understand them and their experience; and having positive intentions toward them—can enhance Kama Muta.

“High quality listening is listening that tries to understand people and accepts them for who they are, without judging anyone’s experiences or perceptions,” says DeMarree.

He and his colleagues argue that when people share a personal experience with someone who listens to them well, it leads them to go deeper, subsequently sharing more of themselves in the conversation.

“Listening offers an opportunity to create connections,” he says.

Across three studies, the authors provide evidence supporting the correlation between high-quality listening in conversations and greater Kama Muta—for both speakers and listeners.

“In terms of our daily lives, these results show how important good listening can be to shaping and developing all types of relationships, whether friendships, romantic partnerships, or working relationships,” says DeMarree.

“Listening can foster these positive, meaningful, and important feelings that have implications for not only how we feel in that moment, but for our motivation to strengthen those relationships.”

Five specific dimensions influence Kama Muta, although it may only be in more intense instances of the emotion that a person experiences all five.

The first is communal sharing, or the sense of closeness or togetherness. Secondly, Kama Muta is generally a positive feeling, like that associated with joy, affection, or delight. The third dimension constitutes a range of physiological sensations where people describe things like a warm feeling in the chest, goosebumps, a lump in the throat, or teary eyes. The fourth dimension is a commitment to engage in behaviors that further strengthen the relationship. And finally, Kama Muta involves labeling the experience as heartwarming or feeling moved or touched.

The three studies, involving groups of 293, 513 and 318 participants, all tested whether high-quality listening increases speakers’ and listeners’ Kama Muta using a scale for each of the five dimensions.

The first was a scenario study that asked people to recall an act they regretted and to imagine talking with someone about it with someone who listened to them well or not. The second study asked people to recall conversations from their actual lives and attempted to get at both sides of the conversation.

Specifically, participants recalled an actual conversation in which either they or someone they knew talked about a positive event where the listener either listened well or not. Study three used real conversations between people where one of them shared a meaningful experience while the other listened to them: Each person reported how well they thought the listener was tuned into the conversation.

The patterns across the studies were mostly the same—higher-quality listening predicted greater reports of Kama Muta across all five dimensions. The final study was an exception, as among speakers, perceiving higher quality listening predicted three of the dimensions of Kama Muta, excluding the devotion and physical sensations.

“High-quality listening allows us to go deeper in a conversation, which can lead to a greater degree of closeness,” says DeMarree. “Greater Kama Muta.”

The findings will appear in the journal Emotion.

Source: University at Buffalo

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How the brain adapts to switching destinations

Biomedical engineers show how two brain regions quickly adapt to shift focus from one planned destination to another.

Stephanie Prince explains her research with a scenario many Atlantans can relate to.

Imagine you’re driving to the Atlanta airport to pick up a friend. They call to say they’re in the terminal—but they’re not sure which one. North, maybe? You head that direction through the maze of roads around the airport.

Then they call back. They’re actually in the South Terminal. So you make a quick mental adjustment and switch your route to arrive at the correct side of the airport.

You had a plan. You received new information. You quickly changed your destination. The question Prince has studied is this: How does that process happen in the brain?

A new research paper in Nature Communications is offering insights into that decision-making. And it could help scientists as they work to better understand when brain disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s impair those processes.

The study by Prince, Annabelle Singer, and other collaborators showed the new information prompted one brain region to quickly shift to representing both the original and new destinations simultaneously. Meanwhile, another region considering those choices rapidly switches to the new destination.

Researchers didn’t know this dynamic change in brain activity takes place. Singer says it’s important to learn because navigation planning is a good model for a variety of planning processes in the brain.

“Some of what we’re looking at could apply to planning more broadly,” says Singer, an associate professor in the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“The other important aspect is that these systems go wrong in disease—including dementia and depression. Understanding the basic healthy process is fundamental to then understand how they go wrong in disease.”

“We thought that maybe we would see some background information, but the two goal locations really dominate. That large increase of the brain representing both possible goals instead of one or the other was interesting.”

Meanwhile, in the decision-making prefrontal cortex, the mouse’s focus jumps from the initial destination to the new treat location, Prince says.

“That seems to happen before they’ve even changed their movement. It was really surprising to us to see those things happen so quickly.”

To decipher how brains drive navigation in changing environments, Prince designed an experiment using a virtual reality maze that she could change on the fly. As mice navigated the simple maze in pursuit of a treat, Prince recorded data from thousands of neurons in two brain regions: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

Both showed significant activity changes.

“Most of the time, the animals have this GPS system in hippocampus saying, ‘this is where I am currently.’ When we presented new information, suddenly they’re not thinking about where they are. Instead, they’re thinking about the old goal and the new goal,” says Prince, a former PhD student in Singer’s lab who now works as a scientific data engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The study helps address long-standing conflicting evidence in previous studies about what’s actually being represented or encoded in the hippocampus and how activity there supports deliberation and planning.

More broadly, the findings offer new information about cognitive flexibility in the face of new information, Singer says.

She adds, studying rodent navigation offers value because they’re very good at it and that well-developed sense has parallels to what scientists have observed in humans.

The lab isn’t done with the detailed data Prince collected. Singer says the behavior they studied in these experiments is challenging. So her team is digging more into the large amount of neuron data to see what else they can discover.

Support for this research came from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Packard Award in Science and Engineering, and the McCamish Foundation.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

Source: Georgia Tech

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AI beats docs at identifying patients likely to die of cardiac arrest

A new AI model is much better than doctors at identifying patients likely to experience cardiac arrest.

The linchpin is the system’s ability to analyze long-underused heart imaging, alongside a full spectrum of medical records, to reveal previously hidden information about a patient’s heart health.

The  research could save many lives and also spare many people unnecessary medical interventions, including the implantation of unneeded defibrillators.

“Currently we have patients dying in the prime of their life because they aren’t protected and others who are putting up with defibrillators for the rest of their lives with no benefit,” says senior author Natalia Trayanova, a researcher focused on using artificial intelligence in cardiology.

“We have the ability to predict with very high accuracy whether a patient is at very high risk for sudden cardiac death or not.”

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is one of the most common inherited heart diseases, affecting one in every 200 to 500 individuals worldwide, and is a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young people and athletes.

Many patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy will live normal lives, but a percentage are at significant increased risk for sudden cardiac death. It’s been nearly impossible for doctors to determine who those patients are.

Current clinical guidelines used by doctors across the United States and Europe to identify the patients most at risk for fatal heart attacks have about a 50% chance of identifying the right patients, “not much better than throwing dice,” Trayanova says.

The team’s model significantly outperformed clinical guidelines across all demographics.

Multimodal AI for ventricular Arrhythmia Risk Stratification (MAARS), predicts individual patients’ risk for sudden cardiac death by analyzing a variety of medical data and records, and, for the first time, exploring all the information contained in the contrast-enhanced MRI images of the patient’s heart.

People with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy develop fibrosis, or scarring, across their heart and it’s the scarring that elevates their risk of sudden cardiac death. While doctors haven’t been able to make sense of the raw MRI images, the AI model zeroed right in on the critical scarring patterns.

“People have not used deep learning on those images,” Trayanova says. “We are able to extract this hidden information in the images that is not usually accounted for.”

The team tested the model against real patients treated with the traditional clinical guidelines at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute in North Carolina.

Compared to the clinical guidelines that were accurate about half the time, the AI model was 89% accurate across all patients and, critically, 93% accurate for people 40 to 60 years old, the population among hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patients most at-risk for sudden cardiac death.

The AI model also can describe why patients are high risk so that doctors can tailor a medical plan to fit their specific needs.

“Our study demonstrates that the AI model significantly enhances our ability to predict those at highest risk compared to our current algorithms and thus has the power to transform clinical care,” says co-author Jonathan Chrispin, a Johns Hopkins cardiologist.

In 2022, Trayanova’s team created a different multi-modal AI model that offered personalized survival assessment for patients with infarcts, predicting if and when someone would die of cardiac arrest.

The team plans to further test the new model on more patients and expand the new algorithm to use with other types of heart diseases, including cardiac sarcoidosis and arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy.

The findings appear in Nature Cardiovascular Research.

Additional authors are from Johns Hopkins; the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center of Excellence at University of California, San Francisco; and Atrium Health.

Support for the work came from the National Institutes of Health and a Leducq Foundation grant.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

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Wearable sensor can tell when you need water

Researchers have created a new noninvasive, wearable sensor designed to measure a user’s hydration levels continuously.

Such a device could help a football player stay hydrated on a hot September afternoon, keep a firefighter battling a blaze from getting too dried out, or just let an office worker know when it’s time to refill a water bottle.

“Dehydration is a silent threat that affects millions of people every day,” says Nanshu Lu, a professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering’s aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics department, who led the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our wearable sensor provides a simple, effective way to monitor hydration levels in real time, empowering individuals to take proactive steps to stay healthy and perform at their best.”

It uses bioimpedance, a technique that measures how electrical signals pass through the body, to track hydration levels. Using strategically placed electrodes, the sensor sends a small, safe electrical current through the arm.

How the electrical current flows through the body depends on the amount of water in the tissues. Water is a good conductor of electricity, so hydrated tissues allow the current to pass more easily, while dehydrated tissues resist the flow.

Data collected by the sensor is wirelessly transmitted to a smartphone, allowing users to monitor their hydration levels.

The researchers conducted several experiments to test the device, including a diuretic-induced dehydration study and a 24-hour free-living trial. In the dehydration study, participants took a diuretic medication to promote fluid loss, and their hydration levels were monitored using the wearable sensor and then tested against a urine sample.

The results showed a strong correlation between changes in arm bioimpedance and body weight loss due to water loss.

“Our experiments demonstrated that arm bioimpedance is not only sensitive to hydration changes but also aligns closely with whole-body hydration measurements,” says Matija Jankovic, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in Lu’s lab.

“This means the sensor can be a reliable surrogate for tracking hydration levels, even during everyday activities like walking, working or exercising.”

Traditional methods for assessing hydration, such as urine tests and blood analysis, are often invasive, time-consuming and impractical for continuous monitoring. Commercial hydration assessment devices typically require bulky equipment and stationary setups, limiting their use in everyday life.

Lu and her team have used similar technology to create sensors to measure other aspects of human health, including:

• A sensor to measure stress levels, which could help people working difficult jobs perform at their best.
• A conductive ink that can be printed on someone’s head to measure their brainwaves.

Hydration is essential for human health. It plays a critical role in maintaining organ function, regulating body temperature, and supporting vital physiological processes.

Yet dehydration—a condition caused by insufficient water in the body—remains a common and often overlooked issue. Even mild dehydration can impair cognitive function, physical performance and thermoregulation, while severe dehydration can lead to life-threatening conditions such as kidney stones, cardiovascular issues and heatstroke.

In addition to protecting workers in extreme environments, the device has potential applications in health care. Continuous hydration monitoring could aid in diagnosing and managing conditions such as kidney disease, cardiovascular issues and chronic dehydration.

While the current version of the sensor tracks relative changes in hydration, future research aims to establish reference data for absolute hydration levels. This would involve collecting bioimpedance measurements from a large population to create a baseline for comparison.

The researchers also plan to explore new designs, such as breathable e-tattoos and sweat-wicking wearables, to improve comfort and performance during extended use. They hope to expand testing to larger groups and explore applications for other body segments, such as the forearm or thigh.

“This is just the beginning,” Lu says. “Our goal is to make simple hydration monitoring accessible to everyone.”

Source: UT Austin

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Tuberculosis bacteria ‘play dead’ to beat vaccines

New research finds that tuberculosis bacteria play possum to evade vaccines.

A vaccine protects more than 100 million infants each year from severe tuberculosis (TB), including the fatal brain swelling it can cause in babies and toddlers. But the vaccine doesn’t prevent adults from developing the more common form of TB that attacks the lungs.

This allows TB to persist as the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing 1.25 million people a year.

“This bug is incredibly good at surviving the immune system.”

The existing vaccine for TB elicits a strong immune system reaction, according to most studies. Since standard measures of immunity don’t predict protection in adulthood, researchers took a new approach—studying how the TB bacterium evades an immune system primed to destroy it.

Their genetic study in mice, recently published in npj Vaccines, reveals that TB bacteria can essentially play dead to outlast the immune response.

TB is also known by its historic name—consumption—a term that reflects the disease’s slow, wasting, and often fatal course.

“There’s a dire need for better prevention, because treatment alone is not going to contain the spread of TB,” says Amanda Martinot, an associate professor at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and co-senior author of the study.

“When drugs to treat TB became available more than 60 years ago, cases dramatically dropped worldwide. But TB reemerged alongside the HIV epidemic, and it is increasingly resistant to traditional antibiotics. With just a handful of newer drugs available to treat resistant tuberculosis, it’s now much harder to cure.”

While other respiratory diseases like the flu and COVID-19 are caused by viruses that mutate frequently and constantly need new vaccines, TB is caused by a very genetically stable bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. So, in theory, TB should be easily preventable by vaccine.

For their study, the research team used a tool called transposon insertion sequencing, or TnSeq, to identify which genes were essential for bacterial survival in four groups of mice.

The first group of mice was vaccinated with the current vaccine, which was developed more than 100 years ago from the type of TB seen in cows. The second group was given an experimental vaccine based on the TB seen in humans, which generated a stronger immune response than the only currently approved vaccine in a preclinical study. The third group of mice had been exposed to TB and then cured by antibiotics. And the final, control group had never been vaccinated for or infected by TB.

The researchers expected to find key genes that TB needs to survive in vaccinated hosts, and they did uncover some potentially worth exploring for future vaccines. But the bigger surprise was which genes the bug didn’t need after vaccination or past infection.

“We were most surprised to find that certain genes that are normally important for driving rapid bacterial growth and causing serious tuberculosis infection aren’t as necessary when the bacteria infect someone who already has an immune response, either because they’ve been vaccinated or previously infected,” says Martinot.

Instead, the researchers discovered that the TB bacteria seem to switch strategies, relying on different genes that help them deal with stress and stop growing in a hostile environment.

“We suspect that the bacteria hunkers down, going quiet until the immune response weakens, whether from waning vaccine protection, HIV, or other conditions,” says Allison Carey, an assistant professor at the University of Utah and co-senior author of the study.

This knowledge could help scientists create treatments that could be given alongside vaccines to help the immune system root out TB when it tries to hide.

The team also found that different vaccines, or how they’re given, can shift which genes TB needs to stay alive. This shows that different vaccines may put different kinds of pressure on the bacteria, which could lead to new, more effective combinations of a vaccine plus booster.

“This bug is incredibly good at surviving the immune system,” says Martinot.

“It’s been infecting humans since ancient Egypt. Additional studies are needed so we can finally outsmart TB and rein in the current global emergency.”

Additional researchers fromTufts, The University of Utah, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Texas A&M University contributed to the work.

Source: Tufts University

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