In a study published in January in Stem Cell Reports, researchers from Osaka University report that heart cells from a patient with an inherited heart disease called arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy do not contract correctly when grown in the laboratory, and that replacing the mutated gene responsible for this effect fixes this defect.

Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy occurs due to mutations in genes involved in desmosomes, which form ‘welds’ between cells that help them communicate and move in a coordinated way. One of these genes, PKP2, encodes a protein known as plakophilin-2 that is crucial to maintaining heart cell structure.

“Previous studies carried out in cardiomyocytes have shown that mutations in PKP2 play a pathological role in arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy,” says lead author of the study Hiroyuki Inoue. “However, the cells used in those experiments were derived from healthy individuals and were not assessed for contractile function.”

To investigate how cells derived from patients behave in the laboratory, the researchers first took a blood sample from a young patient with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, induced some of the blood cells to become stem cells, and then differentiated these stem cells into heart cells. They then modified this original batch of heart cells into three different cell lines with precisely adjusted PKP2 expression based on how many mutated or intact copies of the gene were present.

“The cells with two mutated copies of PKP2 clearly exhibited reduced contractility and impaired desmosome assembly due to plakophilin-2 deficiency,” explains Shuichiro Higo, senior author. “These effects were also observed in cells with only one mutated copy of PKP2, although they were less severe.”

Replacing the mutated PKP2 with an intact copy of the gene repaired the defects in both cell contraction and desmosome assembly, which the researchers were able to observe using a time-lapse approach and fluorescently labeled desmosomes.

“These findings suggest that our cardiomyocyte cell lines recapitulate the pathology of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy and provide a rapid and convenient platform for developing gene-based therapies for this disease,” says Higo.

Given that PKP2 is the most common gene associated with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, and that PKP2 mutations can lead to severe disease, new therapeutic approaches could help halt disease progression. The findings from this study suggest that gene replacement therapy could be a valuable way of treating patients with this condition and the cell lines created in this study are a viable model to test new therapies for arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy on.

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Materials provided by Osaka University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Research participants who used social media excessively were found to have higher levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a biological marker of chronic inflammation that predicts serious illnesses, such as diabetes, certain cancers and cardiovascular disease. In addition to elevated CRP levels, results suggest higher social media use was also related to somatic symptoms, like headaches, chest and back pains, and more frequent visits to doctors and health centers for the treatment of illness.

“Social media use has become an integral part of many young adults’ daily lives,” said David Lee, PhD, the paper’s first author and assistant professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “It’s critical that we understand how engagement across these platforms contributes to physical health.”

The findings appear in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

For decades, researchers have devoted attention to how social media engagement relates to users’ mental health, but its effects on physical health have not been thoroughly investigated. Recent surveys indicate social media usage is particularly high for people in their late teens and early 20s, a population that spends about six hours a day texting, online or using social media. And though a few studies have found links between social media usage and physical health, that research relied largely on self-reporting or the effects of usage with exclusively one platform.

“Our goal was to extend prior work by examining how social media use across several platforms is associated with physical health outcomes measured with biological, behavioral and self-report measures,” said Lee, an expert on health outcomes related to social interactions.

Researchers recruited a diverse sample of 251 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 24 for the study. Blood samples were collected through finger sticks, and participants also completed questionnaires on physical health and social media usage on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, the most popular platforms at the time the data were collected in 2017. Those responses were crosschecked with another survey that measured validity by determining the degree to which participants took their role in the study seriously.

“We were able to establish a correlation between the amount of social media use and these physical health indicators,” said Lee. “The more participants used social media, the more somatic symptoms they experienced and visits to the doctor they reported. They also showed higher levels of chronic inflammation.”

Lee says this study is just the beginning of understanding the relationship between social media and physical health.

“By looking at a biological marker in the blood, we were able to find a relatively more objective association between social media usage and physical health, but this correlational finding can’t rule out the possibility that poor health impacts social media usage,” said Lee.

Lee says the aphorism could hold true with social media use and physical health: The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. “In our previous research, we found those high in self-esteem benefited from using social media, but people low in self-esteem did not. So, the effect may be more nuanced.”

“There’s still work to be done,” said Lee. “But right now, I wanted to get the word out there that social media use may have a link to important physical health outcomes.”

Lee’s research team for the current study included colleagues from The Ohio State University: Tao Jiang, a graduate student; Jennifer Crocker, PhD, professor of social psychology; and Baldwin Way, PhD, associate professor of psychology.

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Materials provided by University at Buffalo. Original written by Bert Gambini. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A new study conducted at the University of Turku, Finland, examined the association between the neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage and the development of children’s body mass index and the risk of overweight from birth to school age. The children’s growth data was acquired from a national register of well-baby clinics.

Information on the socioeconomic status of the neighbourhood was linked to the participants with address coordinates using the national grid database of Statistics Finland. The database contains information that is based on all Finnish residents on social and economic characteristics at the level of 250 m x 250 m grids.

– The socioeconomic status of the neighbourhood was measured with education level, household income, and unemployment rate. The results were independent of the education level, economic situation, marital status and health of the children’s parents, says lead author, Docent Hanna Lagström from the Department of Public Health of the University of Turku.

Living in a less prosperous neighbourhood posed a major risk for children to develop overweight by school age in the population-based data, even when the researchers considered factors that can increase the risk of overweight in childhood. These included e.g. mother’s type 2 diabetes, mother’s smoking, and child’s high birth weight. In neighbourhoods with a higher socioeconomic status, children weighted more at birth, but their weight development stabilised already by the age of four.

– This could implicate that neighbourhoods can offer very different types of development environments for children, and that the risk of overweight grows before school age in neighbourhoods with lower socio-economic status. The results of our research are an important factor to take into consideration in e.g. city planning to ensure that inequality is stopped right from the childhood, says Lagström.

The study is based on 2008-2010 data from the Southwest Finland Birth Cohort (SFBC). The Birth Cohort consists of all children born in the Hospital District of Southwest Finland during those three years. In this study, the participants consisted of the first children born to the mothers during this this time.

The research was funded by the Academy of Finland and Juho Vainio Foundation as well as the Hospital District of Southwest Finland.

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Young stellar jets are a common by-product of star formation and are thought to be caused by the interplay between the magnetic fields of rotating young stars and the disks of gas surrounding them. These interactions eject twin torrents of ionized gas in opposite directions, such as those pictured in two images captured by astronomers using the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón on the edge of the Chilean Andes. Gemini South is one half of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, that comprises twin 8.1-meter optical/infrared telescopes on two of the best observing sites on the planet. Its counterpart, Gemini North, is located near the summit of Maunakea in Hawai’i.

The jet in the first image, named MHO 2147, is roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth, and lies in the galactic plane of the Milky Way, close to the boundary between the constellations Sagittarius and Ophiuchus. MHO 2147 snakes across a starry backdrop in the image — an appropriately serpentine appearance for an object close to Ophiuchus. Like many of the 88 modern astronomical constellations, Ophiuchus has mythological roots — in ancient Greece it represented a variety of gods and heroes grappling with a serpent. MHO 1502, the jet pictured in the second image, is located in the constellation of Vela, approximately 2000 light-years away.

Most stellar jets are straight but some can be wandering or knotted. The shape of the uneven jets is thought to be related to a characteristic of the object or objects that created them. In the case of the two bipolar jets MHO 2147 and MHO 1502, the stars which created them are obscured from view.

In the case of MHO 2147, this young central star, which has the catchy identifier IRAS 17527-2439, is embedded in an infrared dark cloud — a cold, dense region of gas that is opaque at the infrared wavelengths represented in this image [1]. The sinuous shape of MHO 2147 is caused because the direction of the jet has changed over time, tracing out a gentle curve on either side of the central star. These almost unbroken curves suggest that MHO 2147 has been sculpted by continuous emission from its central source. Astronomers found that the changing direction (precession) of the jet may be due to the gravitational influence of nearby stars acting on the central star. Their observations suggest that IRAS 17527-2439 could belong to a triple star system separated by more than 300 billion kilometers (almost 200 billion miles).

MHO 1502, on the other hand, is embedded in a totally different environment — an area of star formation known as an HII region. The bipolar jet is composed of a chain of knots, suggesting that its source, thought to be two stars, has been intermittently emitting material.

These detailed images were captured by the Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager (GSAOI), an instrument on the 8.1-meter-diameter Gemini South telescope. Gemini South is perched on the summit of Cerro Pachón, where dry air and negligible cloud cover provide one of the best observing sites on the planet. Even atop Cerro Pachón, however, atmospheric turbulence causes the stars to blur and twinkle.

GSAOI works with GeMs, the Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System, to cancel out this blurring effect using a technique called adaptive optics. By monitoring the twinkling of natural and artificial guide stars up to 800 times a second, GeMs can determine how atmospheric turbulence is distorting Gemini South’s observations [2]. A computer uses this information to minutely adjust the shape of deformable mirrors, canceling out the distortions caused by turbulence. In this case, the sharp adaptive optics images have made it possible to recognize more details in each knot of the young stellar jets than in previous studies.

Notes

[1] Astronomical objects can appear very different at different wavelengths. For example, the dust surrounding newborn stars blocks visible light but is transparent at infrared wavelengths. Something similar also happens here on Earth — doctors can see right through you with an X-ray machine even though human bodies are not transparent at visible wavelengths. Astronomers therefore study the Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum to learn as much as possible about the Universe.

[2] Adaptive optics systems on telescopes often make use of “natural guide stars” which are bright stars that lie close to the target of an astronomical observation. Their brightness makes it easy to measure how atmospheric turbulence is distorting their appearance. Gemini South also uses artificial guide stars produced by shining powerful lasers into the upper atmosphere.