After looking at social media posts, parents of young children were better able to recall safety messages such as how to put a baby safely to sleep when the images in the posts aligned with the messages in the text, the researchers found.

The study appears in the Journal of Health Communication.

“Many times, scientists and safety experts aren’t involved in decisions about social media for health agencies and other organizations, and we end up seeing images that have nothing to do with the safety message or, worse, images that contradict the guidance,” said lead author Liz Klein, an associate professor of public health at The Ohio State University.

Take the safe sleep example, for instance. The researchers found posts that advocated a bumper-free crib for baby but used an image of an infant in a crib with bumpers. They saw posts about preventing head injury with bike helmets illustrated by pictures of kids without bike helmets.

“In this study, we were trying to understand how much those mismatches matter — do people understand the message even if the picture isn’t right? Does the picture really matter?” Klein said.

Their answers came from research using eye-tracking technology to gauge the attention young parents paid to various posts, and subsequent tests to see what they recalled about the safety messages.

When the 150 parents in the study were shown a trio of posts with matched imagery and text and three other posts with mismatched visual and written messages, they spent far longer on the matched posts — 5.3 seconds, compared to the 3.3 seconds their eyes lingered on the mismatched posts.

Further, the matched messages appeared to make a difference in understanding and recall of safety messages. After accounting for differences in health literacy and social media use among participants, the researchers found that each second of viewing time on matched posts was associated with a 2.8% increase in a safety knowledge score.

“With nearly 70% of adults reporting use of social media, and many parents using social media and other internet sources to keep current on injury prevention strategies, social media is a great opportunity to broadcast safety and injury prevention messages,” said study co-author Lara McKenzie, a principal investigator in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

“As more health organizations and public health agencies use social media to share health information with the public, the findings of our study underscore the need to ensure that the imagery and text in social media posts are aligned.”

Klein said she understands that those managing social media accounts may be drawn to images that are the most attention-grabbing. But when it comes to health and safety, this study suggests that making sure the image and the text are sending the same message is more important.

“If you want people to put their medicine up and out of reach of children, kids to wear their bike helmets or new parents to remember that babies should always go to sleep on their backs, alone and in a crib — that’s where matching matters. Maybe save the eye-grabbing stuff and the humorous posts for different purposes.”

Klein said the findings in this study likely extend beyond child safety messaging to any number of health and safety campaigns, but that there’s more work to be done to understand how best to harness the power of social media for different types of public health communication.

“We need to pay more attention to how we communicate with the people we’re trying to influence with health and safety guidance. All of us can do a better job of thinking about how we use our social media accounts to contribute to better public health,” she said.

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Materials provided by Ohio State University. Original written by Misti Crane. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The article, “The neural mechanisms underlying processing speed deficits in individuals who have sustained a spinal cord injury: A pilot study”  was published online on September 25, 2020 by Brain Topography. The authors are scientists with expertise in research in cognitive rehabilitation and SCI rehabilitation: Glenn Wylie, DPhil, Nancy D. Chiaravalloti, PhD, Erica Weber, PhD, Helen Genova, PhD, and Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD, from Kessler Foundation, and Jill M. Wecht, EdD, from the James J. Peters VA Medical Center.

Individuals with chronic SCI have an increased risk for cognitive deficits that resemble the deficits associated with the aging process, giving rise to the theory of “accelerated cognitive aging.” As reported previously by this team, the deficits affect processing speed, new learning and memory, and verbal fluency, which are the domains affected during aging. This study is the first to examine the neural mechanisms of higher order cognitive tasks of individuals with SCI. The focus was on processing speed, which is known to be affected by SCI and aging, and is integral to cognitive function and everyday life activities.

The 30 participants were participants of a larger study who underwent optional neuroimaging studies at the Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center at Kessler Foundation — 10 individuals with cervical SCI, 10 age-matched controls, and 10 healthy older individuals. In addition to traditional neuropsychological testing methods, processing speed was tested in the scanner, using timed letter comparison tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This study was the first to use the modified letter comparison test.

Significant differences in brain activation were found between the SCI group and the age-matched control group, but the SCI and older groups had similar patterns, including activation of the hippocampal, frontal and parietal areas. “This suggests that individuals with SCI are compensating for deficits in processing speed by relying on the areas of the brain involved in executive control and memory,” noted Dr. Chiaravalloti, “which supports the theory of accelerated brain aging after SCI.”

Despite the limitations of sample size and level of injury, the study is an important contribution to our understanding of the impact of SCI on cognition, according to Dr. Wylie, director of the Ortenzio Center. “Our ability to observe brain activation while the individual performs specific cognitive tasks provides new information on the mechanisms that underlie the cognitive deficits that we now know affect a substantial proportion of the SCI population,” Dr. Wylie said. “Developing treatments targeted to these deficits depends on our pursuit of this line of research, which may benefit other populations affected by delayed processing speed.”

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The structure of the lungs exposes them to viruses and bacteria from both the air and the blood. Macrophages are immune cells that, among other things, protect the lungs from such attacks. But under certain conditions, lung macrophages can also contribute to severe lung diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and COVID-19.

To date, research on the development of human lung macrophages has been limited.

Macrophages can have different origins and develop, among other things, from white blood cells, monocytes, that are divided into different genetically determined main types. In humans, two of these are “classical” CD14+ monocytes and “non-classical” CD16+ monocytes.

In a new study at Karolinska Institutet, researchers have used a model to study the development of lung macrophages directly in a living lung. This has been combined with a method to study gene activity in individual cells, RNA sequencing, and thereby discovered how blood monocytes become human lung macrophages.

“In our study, we show that classical monocytes migrate into airways and lung tissue and are converted into macrophages that protect the health and function of the lungs. We have also identified a special kind of monocyte, HLA-DRhi, which is an intermediate immune cell between a blood monocyte and an airway macrophage. These HLA-DRhi monocytes can leave the blood circulation and migrate into the lung tissue,” says Tim Willinger, Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, Karolinska Institutet, who led the study.

The non-classical monocytes, however, develop into macrophages in the many blood vessels of the lungs and do not migrate into the lung tissue.

“Certain macrophages in the lungs probably have a connection to a number of severe lung diseases. In respiratory infections, for example, monocytes in the lungs develop into macrophages, which combat viruses and bacteria. But a certain type of macrophage may also contribute to severe inflammation and infections,” says the study’s first author Elza Evren, a doctoral student in Tim Willinger’s research team.

In an infection with the novel coronavirus, SARS-COV-2, which causes COVID-19, researchers believe that protective, anti-inflammatory macrophages are replaced by pro-inflammatory lung macrophages from blood monocytes.

“The existence of these blood monocyte-derived macrophages has been shown in other studies to correlate with how severely ill a person becomes in COVID-19 and how extensive the damage to the lungs is. Patients with severe COVID-19 also have fewer HLA-DRhi monocytes in their blood, probably because they move away from the blood into the lungs. Given their important role in rapid inflammatory responses, our results indicate that future treatments should focus on inflammatory macrophages and monocytes to reduce lung damage and mortality from severe COVID-19,” says Tim Willinger.

The research is financed by the Swedish Research Council, Karolinska Institutet, Centre for Innovative Medicine (CIMED)/Region Stockholm, the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation, and the Swedish Cancer Foundation. There are no reported conflicts of interest.

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Nicolas Bazan, MD, PhD, Boyd Professor, Professor of Neurology and Director of the Neuroscience Center of Excellence at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, and Ludmila Belayev, MD, LSU Health New Orleans Professor of Neuroscience, Neurology, and Neurosurgery, discovered this novel therapeutic strategy for ischemic stroke using an experimental model.

During an ischemic stroke, signals are produced from arriving blood white cells and primary brain immune cells called microglia that cause neuroinflammation leading to a buildup of chemicals that harm the brain. Platelet-activating factor (PAF) accumulates, and inhibition of this process plays a critical role in neuronal survival. Dr. Bazan’s earlier studies also showed that in addition to its anti-inflammatory properties, DHA, an essential omega-3 fatty acid, stimulates the production of Neuroprotectin D1 (NPD1), a molecule that protects brain cells and promotes their survival. One complicating factor in developing neuroprotective strategies for stroke are the multiple routes and events that occur in the brain during a stroke, which has been approached mainly by monotherapeutic agents that were mostly unsuccessful.

Because no single therapy has proven effective in treating the complexity of stroke, the team aimed at two different events — blocking pro-inflammatory platelet-activating factor receptors (PAF-R) and activating cell-survival pathways. They found that treatment with LAU-0901, a synthetic molecule discovered in the Bazan lab that blocks pro-inflammatory platelet-activating factor, plus aspirin-triggered NPD1 (AT-NPD1) reduced the size of the damaged area in the brain, initiated repair mechanisms, and remarkably improved behavioral recovery.

Total lesion volumes were reduced with LAU‑0901 plus NPD1 by 62% and LAU‑0901 plus AT‑NPD1 by 90%. Combinatory treatment with LAU‑0901 plus AT‑NPD1 improved the behavioral score up to 54% on day three. LAU‑0901 and LAU‑0901 plus DHA decreased the production of 12‑hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acid, a pro‑inflammatory mediator.

“The biological activity of LAU-0901 and AT-NPD1 is due to specific activation or modulation of signaling pathways associated with the immune system, inflammation, cell survival, and cell-cell interactions,” notes Dr. Bazan. “These findings provide a major conceptual advance of broad therapeutic relevance for cell survival, brain function and, particularly, stroke and neurodegenerative diseases.”

“We discovered that these novel molecules promote neuronal cell survival with important anti-inflammatory activity,” explains Dr. Belayev. “This combinatorial therapy may hold promise for future therapeutic development against ischemic stroke.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, someone in the United States has a stroke every 40 seconds. Every 4 minutes, someone dies of stroke. Every year, more than 795,000 people in the United States have a stroke. About 87% of all strokes are ischemic strokes, in which blood flow to the brain is blocked. Stroke-related costs in the United States came to nearly $46 billion between 2014 and 2015. This total includes the cost of health care services, medicines to treat stroke, and missed days of work. Stroke is a leading cause of serious long-term disability. Stroke reduces mobility in more than half of stroke survivors age 65 and over.

Other LSU Health authors include Drs. Pranab K. Mukherjee, Eric J. Knott and Reinaldo B. Oria, along with Larissa Khoutorova and graduate students Madigan M. Reid and Cassia R. Roque. Dr. Andre Obenaus, Lawrence Nguyen, and Jeong Bin Lee from the University of California Irvine School of Medicine, and Dr. Nicos A. Petasis of the University of Southern California, are also co-authors.

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health and Brazilian CAPES.