Chronic pain is a common and serious medical condition affecting an estimated 100 million people in the United States, which correlates with annual costs of approximately $635 billion. The small-scale study was conducted in a semi-rural population in Oregon where issues of affordability, addiction and access to care are common. Participants received intensive instruction in mindfulness meditation and mindful hatha yoga during an eight-week period.

“Many people have lost hope because, in most cases, chronic pain will never fully resolve,” says Cynthia Marske, DO, an osteopathic physician and director of graduate medical education at the Community Health Clinics of Benton and Linn County. “However, mindful yoga and meditation can help improve the structure and function of the body, which supports the process of healing.”

Healing and curing are inherently different, explains Dr. Marske.

“Curing means eliminating disease, while healing refers to becoming more whole,” Dr. Marske says. “With chronic pain, healing involves learning to live with a level of pain this is manageable. For this, yoga and meditation can be very beneficial.”

The study found mindful meditation and yoga led to significant improvements in patients’ perceptions of pain, depression and disability. Following the course, Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) scores, a standard measure of depression, dropped by 3.7 points on a 27-point scale. According to Dr. Marske, some patients experience a similar drop from the use of an antidepressant.

“Chronic pain often goes hand-in-hand with depression,” says Dr. Marske. “Mindfulness-based meditation and yoga can help restore both a patient’s mental and physical health and can be effective alone or in combination with other treatments such as therapy and medication.”

Study participants received instruction in MBSR, a systematic educational program based on training people to have an awareness of the self in the present moment and a nonjudgmental manner. The findings bolster other evidence that MBSR can be a useful adjunctive treatment for chronic pain while improving perceived depression.

“The bottom line is that patients are seeking new ways to cope with chronic pain and effective non-pharmaceutical treatments are available,” says Dr. Marske. “Our findings show meditation and yoga can be a viable option for people seeking relief from chronic pain.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by American Osteopathic Association. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The new analysis conducted by researchers with University of Iowa Health Care based on patient data in the TriNetX COVID-19 research network suggests that Parkinson’s disease is an independent risk factor for dying from COVID-19.

The UI research team led by neurologists Qiang Zhang, MD, and Nandakumar Narayanan, MD, PhD, identified the COVID-19 patient cohort as of July 15 and analyzed the mortality data eight weeks later. They found that 5.5% (4,290 out of 78,355) of COVID-19 patients without PD died compared to 21.3% (148 of 694) COVID-19 patients who also had PD.

However, the patients with PD were generally older, more likely to be male, and less likely to be African American than the patients without PD. All of these factors also increase the risk of death from COVID-19.

So, the UI team used two approaches to account for these differences: logistic regression with age, sex, and race as covariates, and matching each PD patient with five non-PD patients with the exact age, sex, and race, and performing a conditional logistic regression. In both cases, the researchers found that the risk of dying from COVID-19 was 30% higher for patients with PD. The findings are published in the journal Movement Disorders.

“We recognize the limitations of this study; it is retrospective data from a single database, but we are confident that these data show that Parkinson’s disease is independent risk factor for death in COVID-19,” says Narayanan, UI associate professor of neurology and a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. “We believe this observation will be of interest to clinicians treating patients with Parkinson’s disease, and public health officials.”

The researchers say the findings should also inform patients with PD, and their physicians, of the increased importance of preventing COVID-19 infection in these patients.

“For our own patients, we can give advice that it’s important that you wear a mask. It’s important that you socially distance,” says Zhang, an associate in the UI Department of Neurology.

Zhang adds that physicians should also weigh the increased risk of death from COVID-19 when considering how to care for PD patients in person during the pandemic.

A potential reason why PD patients have an increased risk of death from COVID-19 may be related to the fact that COVID can cause pneumonia and pneumonia is a leading cause of death in patients with PD. This is partly because Parkinson’s patients can have trouble swallowing or choking that can cause aspiration.

“We are all focused on COVID right now, but this is a clear example of a respiratory illness that leads to increased mortality [in PD patients]. These findings may also have implications for understanding risks for PD patients from other diseases, including influenza,” Narayanan says. “I would recommend a flu vaccine and pneumonia vaccine to try to prevent these problems in patients with PD.”

In addition to Narayanan and Zhang, the UI research team included Jordan Schultz, PharmD, Georgina Aldridge, MD, PhD, and Jacob Simmering, PhD.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Iowa Health Care. Original written by Jennifer Brown. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers published their study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. The team includes scientists from Harvard University, The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pohang University of Science and Technology, and Raytheon BBN Technologies. The Army, in part, funded the work to fabricate this bolometer by exploiting the giant thermal response of graphene to microwave radiation.

“The microwave bolometer developed under this project is so sensitive that it is capable of detecting a single microwave photon, which is the smallest amount of energy in nature,” said Dr. Joe Qiu, program manager for solid-state electronics and electromagnetics, Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory. “This technology will potentially enable new capabilities for applications such as quantum sensing and radar, and ensure the U.S. Army maintains spectral dominance in the foreseeable future.”

The graphene bolometer sensor detects electromagnetic radiation by measuring the temperature rise as the photons are absorbed into the sensor. Graphene is a two dimensional, one-atom layer thick material. The researchers achieved a high bolometer sensitivity by incorporating graphene in the microwave antenna.

A key innovation in this advancement is to measure the temperature rise by superconducting Josephson junction while maintaining a high microwave radiation coupling into the graphene through an antenna, researchers said. The coupling efficiency is essential in a high sensitivity detection because “every precious photon counts.”

A Josephson junction is a quantum mechanical device which is made of two superconducting electrodes separated by a barrier (thin insulating tunnel barrier, normal metal, semiconductor, ferromagnet, etc.)

In addition to being thin, the electrons in graphene are also in a very special band structure in which the valence and conduction bands meet at only one point, known as Dirac point.

“The density of states vanishes there so that when the electrons receive the photon energy, the temperature rise is high while the heat leakage is small,” said Dr. Kin Chung Fong, Raytheon BBN Technologies.

With increased sensitivity of bolometer detectors, this research has found a new pathway to improve the performance of systems detecting electromagnetic signal such as radar, night vision, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and communication. It could also enable new applications such as quantum information science, thermal imaging as well as the search of dark matter.

The part of the research conducted at MIT included work from the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. The U.S. Army established the institute in 2002 as an interdisciplinary research center to dramatically improve protection, survivability and mission capabilities of the Soldier and of Soldier-supporting platforms and systems.

Story Source:

Materials provided by U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.