In clinical practice, the bodily distribution of chronic pain is often used in conjunction with other signs and symptoms to diagnose and treat patients. Recent work on fibromyalgia has revealed that clinical pain syndromes thought to be distinct entities may share clinically-relevant features, especially regarding the impact of pain distribution on outcomes. However patterns of pain distribution have not been previously examined in a systematic way as predictors of pain characteristics or outcomes.

In the new study, researchers analyzed data on 21,658 patients seen at the seven pain management clinics of the University of Pittsburgh between 2016 and 2019. All patients completed a pain body map, in which areas of pain are selected on two side-by-side drawings of the front and back of the body, with 74 possible regions of pain. Other information on patients’ pain, health, and outcomes was available in the electronic medical record. Patients were 83% white, 60% female, 22% insured by Medicaid and 10% had at least one comorbidity.

Data from all patients revealed 9 distinct groupings of pain distribution. Demographic and medical characteristics, pain intensity, pain impact, and neuropathic pain quality all varied significantly across cluster subgroups. For instance, the pain intensity of the “Neck and Shoulder” group was less than that of “Lower Back Pain below knee” and “Neck, Shoulder and Lower Back Pain,” while the group with the highest pain intensity consisted of patients with widespread heavy pain, also associated with low physical function, high anxiety and depression and high sleep disturbance. In a subset of 7,138 patients who completed 3-month follow-up questionnaires, subgroups predicted the likelihood of improvement in pain and physical function; those in the “Abdominal Pain” group were the most improved, with 49% self-reporting clinically significant improvements, while those in the “Neck, Shoulder and Lower Back Pain” group were the least improved, with only 37% reporting improvements. The authors conclude that algorithmic clustering by pain distribution may, in the future, be an important facet of the personalization of pain management.

The authors add: “Using an algorithmic approach, we found that how a patient reports the bodily distribution of their chronic pain affects nearly all aspects of the pain experience, including what happens three months later. This emphasizes that chronic pain is a disease process and suggests that this facet of the chronic pain phenotype will be important for future developments in diagnosis and personalized pain management.”

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“The science is rapidly advancing in the area of epigenetics — modifications to our DNA that are often environmentally driven and have the potential to serve as early warning sign for disease,” says Ana Navas-Acien, MD, PhD, the study’s first author and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “In this study, we harness the country’s best clinical data on heart disease from diverse populations to begin to unlock the specific epigenetic changes involved the complex biology that leads to disease. Ultimately, we hope the research will allow us to identify and prevent disease before the worst damage takes place, although developing appropriate DNA methylation tests is still years away.”

The researchers began their analysis with data from the Strong Heart Study, the largest study of cardiovascular disease in American Indians, conducted in partnership with communities across the Great Plains and the Southwest since 1988. They analyzed blood samples to identify specific locations on DNA where methylation activity was associated with incidents of coronary heart disease, including heart attack and coronary deaths (methylation can change the activity of a DNA segment without changing the genetic sequence).

“The use of high-dimensional statistical methods allowed us to study methylation in hundreds of thousands specific locations in the DNA at the same time” says Arce Domingo-Relloso, MSc, data scientist and study co-author leading the statistical analyses for this project.

The researchers then took the same approach with four other major heart disease cohorts: Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (divided into Black and white cohorts due to differences in timing and laboratory methods), Framingham Heart Study, and Women’s Health Initiative. In all, they examined more than 400,000 DNA locations and 1,894 coronary heart disease events.

In the initial analysis of Strong Heart data, they identified 506 epigenetic marks linked to cardiovascular risk. Of these, 33 were also linked to cardiovascular risk in three or more of the other cohorts, although some of these sites were associated with higher risk of disease in one cohort but with lower risk of disease in other cohorts. Among the 33 methylation sites are those previously linked to cardiovascular risk and smoking, as well as novel sites that the researchers say are worthy of future investigation. Further analysis of the commonalities between the 33 marks found that many of them are connected with EGFR gene, which is involved in cell growth and cell survival.

“The overlap of these methylation sites across diverse cohorts supports the idea of interconnected biological pathways for cardiovascular risk,” says Yuling Hong, MD, PhD, chief of the epidemiology branch within the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “The more we understand about early risk for cardiovascular disease the better we may be able to prevent illness, particularly in populations such as American Indians with relatively high risk for heart disease.”

The study’s senior author is Shelley A. Cole, PhD, of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. A full list of authors is available on the journal’s article page.

The Strong Heart Study was supported by grants for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) (contract numbers: 75N92019D00027, 75N92019D00028, 75N92019D00029, 75N92019D00030) and previous grants (HL090863, HL109315, HL109301, HL109284, HL109282, HL109319) and cooperative agreements (HL41642, HL41652, HL41654, HL65520, HL65521) and by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (ES021367, ES025216, ES010349, ES009089). The Framingham Heart Study acknowledges the support of contracts NO1-HC-25195, HHSN268201500001I and 75N92019D00031 from the NHLBI and grant supplement HL092577-06S1 for this research. The Women’s Health Initiative is funded by the NHLBI, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through contracts N268201600018C, N268201600001C, N268201600002C, N268201600003C, and N268201600004C. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study has been funded in whole or in part with funds from the NHLBI, NIH, HHS (contract numbers HHSN268201700001I, HHSN268201700002I, N268201700003I, N268201700004I, N268201700005I). Funding was also supported by 5RC2HL102419 and NS087541. Investigator-specific funding is available on the journal’s article page. Navas-Acien and several other authors receive funding from the NHLBI and NIEHS.

Recently, a pair of NASA studies identified the most likely locations to find pieces of mantle on the surface, providing a map for future lunar sample return missions such as those under NASA’s Artemis program. If collected and analyzed, these fragments from deep within the Moon can provide a better understanding of how the Moon, the Earth, and many other solar system worlds evolved.

“This is the most up-to-date evaluation of the evolution of the lunar interior, synthesizing numerous recent developments to paint a new picture of the history of the mantle and how and where it may have been exposed on the lunar surface,” said Daniel Moriarty of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland and the University of Maryland, College Park.

Magma oceans evolve as they cool down and dense materials sink while light materials rise. The formation of magma oceans and their evolution are thought to be common processes among rocky planets and moons throughout our solar system and beyond. Earth’s Moon is the most accessible and well-preserved body to study these fundamental processes.

“Understanding these processes in more detail will have implications for important follow-up questions: How does this early heating affect the distribution of water and atmospheric gases of a planet? Does water stick around, or is it all boiled away? What are the implications for early habitability and the genesis of life?” adds Moriarty, lead author of the papers, published August 3 in Nature Communications and January 2021 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Large rocky objects such as planets, moons, and large asteroids can form magma oceans with the heat generated as they grow. Our solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust that collapsed under its own gravity. As this happened, dust grains smacked into each other and stuck together, and over time this process snowballed into larger and larger conglomerations, eventually forming asteroid and planet-sized bodies. These collisions generated a tremendous amount of heat. Also, the building blocks of our solar system contained a variety of radioactive elements, which released heat as they decayed. In larger objects, both processes can release enough heat to form magma oceans.

However, the details of how magma oceans evolve as they cool and how the various minerals in them crystalize are uncertain, which affects what scientists think mantle rocks may look like and where they could be found on the surface.

“The bottom line is that the evolution of the lunar mantle is more complicated than originally thought,” said Moriarty. “Some minerals that crystallize and sink early are less dense than minerals that crystallize and sink later. This leads to an unstable situation with light material near the bottom of the mantle trying to rise while heavier material closer to the top descends. This process, called ‘gravitational overturn’, does not proceed in a neat and orderly fashion, but becomes messy, with lots of mixing and unexpected stragglers left behind.”

The team reviewed the most recent laboratory experiments, lunar sample analysis, and geophysical and geochemical models to develop their new understanding of how the lunar mantle evolved as it cooled and solidified. They used this new understanding as a lens to interpret recent observations of the lunar surface from NASA’s Lunar Prospector and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, and NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument on board India’s Chandrayaan-I spacecraft. The team generated a map of likely mantle locations using Moon Mineralogy Mapper data to assess mineral composition and abundance, integrated with Lunar Prospector observations of elemental abundances, including markers of the last remaining liquid at the end of lunar magma ocean crystallization, and imagery and topography data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At around 1,600 miles (about 2,600 kilometers) across, the South Pole — Aitken basin is the largest confirmed impact structure on the Moon, and therefore is associated with the deepest depth of excavation of all lunar basins, so it’s the most likely place to find pieces of mantle, according to the team.

For years, scientists have been puzzled by a radioactive anomaly in the northwest quadrant of the South Pole — Aitken Basin on the lunar farside. The team’s analysis demonstrates that the composition of this anomaly is consistent with the “sludge” that forms in the uppermost mantle at the very end of magma ocean crystallization. Because this sludge is very dense, scientists have previously assumed that it should completely sink into the lower mantle early in lunar history.

“However, our more nuanced understanding from recent models and experiments indicates that some of this sludge gets trapped in the upper mantle, and later excavated by this vast impact basin,” said Moriarty. “Therefore, this northwest region of the South Pole — Aitken Basin is the best location to access excavated mantle materials currently on the lunar surface. Interestingly, some of these materials may also be present around the proposed Artemis and VIPER landing sites around the lunar South Pole.”

Scientists have long known that urban songbirds face a host of increased challenges, from habitat loss to altered food sources and a larger population of predators, such as skunks, rats, squirrels and, especially, house cats, compared to their rural cousins. In particular, urban nestlings weigh significantly less than those born in the country and have a decreased chance of surviving to adulthood, as a result. New research, published in the journal Ecosphere, helps to tease out exactly why.

Part of the difficulty in figuring out why urban nestlings struggle is due to what biologists call the “predation paradox:” though there are increased numbers of predators in urban areas, there is actually a lower per-capita rate of predation. “The key,” says Aaron Grade, the paper’s lead author who completed this research as a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s program in organismic and evolutionary biology, “has been hiding in plain sight. We haven’t been paying enough attention to fear itself.”

To arrive at this conclusion, Grade, along with his co-authors Susannah B. Lerman, research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station; and Paige S. Warren, professor in the department of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst; built 38 nest boxes for house wrens and placed them in participants’ backyards. The participants lived in a variety of landscapes, all in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, from the urban (Springfield, with a population density of 4,775 people per square mile), to low-density suburban (Amherst, 1,445 people per square mile) to the rural (Whately, 72 people per square mile).

Grade and his colleagues then played the cries of screech owls and Cooper’s hawks, both of which feed upon house wrens in Massachusetts, from speakers installed in each participant’s yard. “The participants were wonderful,” says Grade. “They put up with this noise in their backyards and were very invested in the experiment.” The nestlings in each box were then weighed every three days until they left the nest.

The authors discovered that, due to a variety of ‘urban effects,’ including availability of food, habitat loss and predation, urban nestlings all weighed about 10% less than the rural nestlings — an expected finding that is consistent with previous studies showing the effects of urban development on wildlife. But the authors also discovered that all the nestlings, both rural and urban, subjected to the owl and hawk cries saw a 10% decrease in weight as well.

“This is a largely unexplored component of human/wildlife interaction,” says Grade. “Birds are very in-tune with what’s going on, and if they see, or in this case hear, a predator, they’ll change their behavior.” For instance, the parent birds might spend less time finding food for their nestlings to avoid predation. “These landscapes of fear,” says Grade, “can have a greater effect on behavior and survival than the actual predator itself.”

In general, hobbyist birders should avoid using recordings of predators because they can cause unintended responses and undue stress in birds, as Grade’s research shows. These experiments were carried out with approval by the UMass Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and followed best practices for playback experiments to reduce any potential harm.

This research was funded by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate School; the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences; the Blodget Fund for Ornithological Studies; the Animal Behavior Society; the American Ornithological Society; and the National Science Foundation.

When this happens, don’t sigh at being distracted. A new study finds that these interruptions are beneficial to a sense of belonging and can counterbalance negatives such as lost productivity.

According to the study, which predominantly took place at the University of Cincinnati and soon will appear in the print edition of the Journal of Applied Psychology, while there were downsides to interruptions at work, like raising levels of stress and lowering people’s energy, there was also an upside: Employees felt more like they “belonged” and that eventually led to higher job satisfaction.

“If the past year of social distancing and isolation has shown us anything, it is that humans are social beings who have an inherent need for interacting with others,” says the study’s lead author Harshad Puranik, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Managerial Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the study, the team surveyed 111 full-time employees twice a day for three weeks. They asked participants about their experience at work (since the beginning of the day for lunchtime surveys and since lunch for the end of workday surveys), including work interruptions, how mentally drained they felt, their sense of belonging and overall job satisfaction. The researchers found that while work interruptions can take a toll on interrupted employees’ mental resources, thereby reducing job satisfaction, social interaction with an interrupter can also help boost employees’ level of belonging, which was associated with increased job satisfaction.

What previous research has not considered, Puranik says, is that apart from their task-based aspect, work interruptions by others also involve a social component — the social interaction with the interrupter. “Our study revealed that by providing this avenue for social interaction with one’s colleagues, work interruptions led to a greater sense of belonging. This sense of belonging, in turn, led to higher job satisfaction.”

The bulk of the study was conducted as part of Puranik’s UC doctoral thesis, with two former UC faculty members at UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business: Joel Koopman, now at Texas A&M University, and Heather C. Vough, now with George Mason University.

“We find that interruptions can actually benefit individuals from an interpersonal perspective — people feel like they belong when others come and talk to them or ask them questions, even while being distracted from their tasks,” says Vough.

What was surprising, Vough says, is that “the sense of belongingness mitigated the negative effect of interruptions on job satisfaction. Thus, interruptions at work may have gotten a bad rap due to a failure to consider their human element.”

Since management historically has focused on ways to eliminate work interruptions, the study suggests alternatives to address interruptions, such as allowing employees more leeway in choosing when and where they work from and how they schedule their work.

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