“Nurses are already at risk for higher rates of depression and insufficient sleep compared to other professions, thanks to the stress of patient care and the nature of shift work. The pandemic seems to have further exacerbated these issues to the detriment of nurses’ well-being,” said Amy Witkoski Stimpfel, PhD, RN, assistant professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and the lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Nurses have faced unparalleled challenges working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, including staffing shortages, an early lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and witnessing widespread suffering and death. Research is beginning to reveal the impact of these ongoing stressors on nurses’ mental health and well-being.

In this study, the researchers surveyed 629 nurses and interviewed 34 nurses from June through August 2020. The nurses, who worked across healthcare settings in 18 states, were asked about their experiences working during the first six months of the pandemic in the U.S.

The survey revealed high rates of depression (22 percent), anxiety (52 percent), and insomnia (55 percent) among nurses. Notably, difficulty sleeping was both a contributing factor to and an outcome of poor mental health.

Only sleeping for five hours or less before a shift increased the odds of depression, anxiety, and insomnia. However, nurses also described how anxiety and thinking about stressful working conditions — understaffing, being redeployed to a COVID unit, lack of PPE, and many patient deaths — led to difficulty falling asleep and waking up at night. In addition to stress-related sleep problems, changes in nurses’ work schedules from either working extra hours or abruptly switching between day and night shifts led to nurses getting fewer hours of sleep.

“We found that sleep problems were interwoven with anxiety and depressive symptoms,” said Witkoski Stimpfel. “Prior research supports this bidirectional relationship between sleep and mental health. We know that getting sufficient sleep fosters mental and emotional resilience, while not getting enough sleep predisposes the brain to negative thinking and emotional vulnerability.”

To better support nurses and their well-being, the researchers urge employers to take action to address work stress and factors that influence sleep. In addition to making sure that nurses have the resources like staffing, beds, and PPE to effectively do their jobs, employers can offer training on stress management and provide referrals to mental healthcare professionals for those in need. Employers should also pay attention to scheduling, ensuring nurses have time away from work, protecting them from excessive overtime hours and shifts that quickly switch between day and night, and offering flexible working arrangements.

“Our findings help us better understand the difficulty nurses are facing — and why some nurses are leaving their jobs or the field altogether — but also reveal opportunities for hospitals and other employers to support this critical workforce,” said Witkoski Stimpfel.

Additional study authors include Lloyd Goldsamt and Victoria Vaughan Dickson of NYU Meyers and Lauren Ghazal of the University of Michigan. The research was supported by an NYU COVID-19 Research Catalyst grant.

Story Source:

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

“Our artificial leaf system can be deployed outside the lab, where it has the potential to play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere thanks to its high rate of carbon capture, relatively low cost and moderate energy, even when compared to the best lab-based systems,” said Meenesh Singh, assistant professor of chemical engineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper.

Using a ?previously reported theoretical concept, the scientists modified a standard artificial leaf system with inexpensive materials to include a water gradient — a dry side and a wet side — across an electrically charged membrane.

On the dry side, an organic solvent attaches to available carbon dioxide to produce a concentration of bicarbonate, or baking soda, on the membrane. As bicarbonate builds, these negatively charged ions are pulled across the membrane toward a positively charged electrode in a water-based solution on the membrane’s wet side. The liquid solution dissolves the bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide, so it can be released and harnessed for fuel or other uses.

The electrical charge is used to speed up the transfer of bicarbonate across the membrane.

When they tested the system, which is small enough to fit in a backpack, the UIC scientists found that it had a very high flux — a rate of carbon capture compared with the surface area required for the reactions — of 3.3 millimoles per hour per 4 square centimeters. This is more than 100 times better than other systems, even though only a moderate amount of electricity (0.4 KJ/hour) was needed to power the reaction, less than the amount of energy needed for a 1 watt LED lightbulb. They calculated the cost at $145 per ton of carbon dioxide, which is in line with recommendations from the Department of Energy that cost should not exceed around $200 per ton.

“It’s particularly exciting that this real-world application of an electrodialysis-driven artificial leaf had a high flux with a small, modular surface area,” Singh said. “This means that it has the potential to be stackable, the modules can be added or subtracted to more perfectly fit the need and affordably used in homes and classrooms, not just among profitable industrial organizations. A small module of the size of a home humidifier can remove greater than 1 kilogram of CO₂ per day, and four industrial electrodialysis stacks can capture greater than 300 kilograms of CO₂ per hour from flue gas.”

The UIC scientists report on the design of their artificial leaf and the results of their experiments in “Migration-assisted, moisture gradient process for ultrafast, continuous CO₂ capture from dilute sources at ambient conditions,” which is published in Energy & Environmental Science.

The research is funded by a grant (DE-SC-0022321) from the U.S. Department of Energy. A patent application titled “Artificial photosynthetic systems for integrated carbon capture and conversion” has been filed by the Office of Technology Management at UIC.

Co-authors of the paper from UIC, Argonne National Laboratory, Oklahoma State University and Braskem are Aditya Prajapati, Rohan Sartape, Tomas Rojas, Naveen Dandu, Pratik Dhakal, Amey Thorat,?Jiahan Xie, Ivan Bessa, Miguel Galante,?Marcio Andrade, Robert Somich, Marcio Rebouças, Gus Hutras, Nathalia Diniz, Anh Ngo and Jindal Shah.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Illinois Chicago. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Their findings, to be published January 27 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, showed a dramatic shrinkage in tumors in mice compared to traditional cell therapy methods. With a novel microfluidic device that could be 3D printed, the team multiplied, sorted through and harvested hundreds of millions of cells, recovering 400% more of the tumor-eating cells than current approaches.

Most treatments for cancer involve toxic chemicals and foreign substances, which cause harmful side effects and weaken the body’s immune response. Using tissue from one’s own body can eliminate side effects and risk of rejection, and many disease therapies in regenerative medicine and cancer treatment have gained traction in the clinic. But sometimes the wheels skid.

“People have been cured in the clinic of advanced melanoma through treatment with their own immune cells that were harvested out of tumor tissue,” said Shana O. Kelley, a pioneer in translational biotechnology and corresponding author on the paper. “The problem is, because of the way the cells are harvested, it only works in a very small number of patients.”

Kelley is the Neena B. Shwartz Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at the Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and McCormick School of Engineering, and a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The cells of interest, called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), are natural immune cells that invade tumor tissue by engaging cells in a form of hand-to-hand combat that looks like someone using insecticide on a weed. But, in this scenario, previous researchers have been attacking the weeds with a half-expired cannister of chemicals.

This is the case in cell therapies used in clinics today, where a mixture of “exhausted” and “naïve” cells is used to treat tumors. After they are extracted from tissue, cells are grown in labs far away from the patients they were harvested from. By the time they’ve multiplied and are ready to be placed back in the body, many of the cells are exhausted and unable to fight, having been in the tumor for too long.

Assembling the best fighters

Using a new technology called microfluidic affinity targeting of infiltrating cells (MATIC), researchers can pinpoint which cells are most active through cell sorting techniques enabled with nanotechnology. In the paper, scientists used MATIC to find what the authors called the “Goldilocks population” of cells, producing dramatic results for the mice population they were looking at. Tumors in mice shrank dramatically — and in some mice disappeared completely — producing a large improvement in survival rates compared to more traditional methods of TIL recovery.

“Instead of giving mice this mixture of cells with different phenotypes, we’re giving them the one cell phenotype that can actually help them,” Kelley said. “You see much more potency and a much higher response rate when you really home in on the sweet spot of T cell reactivity.”

Reproducible, accessible technology

Because her team’s technology is small and easily reproducible, Kelley said it would be feasible to bring the 3D-printed device into hospital settings, rather than confining it to a lab. Getting cell therapy closer to patients would dramatically reduce research and development costs and ultimately deliver the treatment to more people.

Kelley joined Northwestern in August from the University of Toronto and has continued to study how her platform might advance cancer treatments. Now, she’s using the device to search for the same types of TILs in blood samples, which would eliminate the need for surgery to remove a small piece of tumor prior to this form of treatment.

Kelley has launched a small company to commercialize her devices and plans to work with industry partners and collaborators at Northwestern to continue expanding use cases for the tool.

The platform itself has been used across applications, mostly for the analysis and measurement of rare cells in the body.

“When we take on the development of a new technology, we typically end up with a hammer, and then need to go find a nail,” Kelley said. “We got introduced to problems in cell therapy, and it was immediately apparent that this was a perfect fit.”

The first author of the study, Ph.D. student Daniel Wang, is also joining Northwestern from the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow and plans to continue developing new solutions for cell therapy in the Kelley group’s labs on the Chicago campus.

Kelley also is a member of the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN), the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.