This program of research comprised an analysis of diaries and lab experiments. The researchers analyzed daily diary entries from 202 college students, who tracked their sleep, daily stressors, and anger over one month. Preliminary results show that individuals reported experiencing more anger on days following less sleep than usual for them.

The research team also conducted a lab experiment involving 147 community residents. Participants were randomly assigned either to maintain their regular sleep schedule or to restrict their sleep at home by about five hours across two nights. Following this manipulation, anger was assessed during exposure to irritating noise.

The experiment found that well-slept individuals adapted to noise and reported less anger after two days. In contrast, sleep-restricted individuals exhibited higher and increased anger in response to aversive noise, suggesting that losing sleep undermined emotional adaptation to frustrating circumstance. Subjective sleepiness accounted for most of the experimental effect of sleep loss on anger. A related experiment in which individuals reported anger following an online competitive game found similar results.

“The results are important because they provide strong causal evidence that sleep restriction increases anger and increases frustration over time,” said Zlatan Krizan, who has a doctorate in personality and social psychology and is a professor of psychology at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. “Moreover, the results from the daily diary study suggest such effects translate to everyday life, as young adults reported more anger in the afternoon on days they slept less.”

The authors noted that the findings highlight the importance of considering specific emotional reactions such as anger and their regulation in the context of sleep disruption.

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The study reveals that among patients who participated in an in-hospital addiction medicine intervention at OHSU, three-quarters came into the hospital using more than one substance. Overall, participants used fewer substances in the months after working with the hospital-based addictions team than before.

The study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment.

“We found that polysubstance use is the norm,” said lead author Caroline King, M.P.H., a health systems researcher and current M.D./Ph.D. student in the OHSU School of Medicine’s biomedical engineering program. “This is important because we may need to offer additional support to patients using multiple drugs. If someone with opioid use disorder also uses alcohol or methamphetamines, we miss caring for the whole person by focusing only on their opioid use.”

About 40% of participants reported they had abstained from using at least one substance at least a month after discharge — a measure of success that isn’t typically tracked in health system record-keeping.

Researchers enrolled 486 people seen by an addiction medicine consult service while hospitalized at OHSU Hospital between 2015 and 2018, surveying them early during their stay in the hospital and then again 30 to 90 days after discharge.

Treatment of opioid use disorder can involve medication such as buprenorphine, or Suboxone, which normalizes brain function by acting on the same target in the brain as prescription opioids or heroin.

However, focusing only on the opioid addiction may not adequately address the complexity of each patient.

“Methamphetamine use in many parts of the U.S., including Oregon, is prominent right now,” said senior author Honora Englander, M.D., associate professor of medicine (hospital medicine) in the OHSU School of Medicine. “If people are using stimulants and opioids — and we only talk about their opioid use — there are independent harms from stimulant use combined with opioids. People may be using methamphetamines for different reasons than they use opioids.”

Englander leads the in-hospital addiction service, known as Project IMPACT, or Improving Addiction Care Team.

The initiative brings together physicians, social workers, peer-recovery mentors and community addiction providers to address addiction when patients are admitted to the hospital. Since its inception in 2015, the program has served more than 1,950 people hospitalized at OHSU.

The national opioid epidemic spiraled out of control following widespread prescribing of powerful pain medications beginning in the 1990s. Since then, it has often been viewed as a public health crisis afflicting rural, suburban and affluent communities that are largely white.

Englander said the new study suggests that a singular focus on opioids may cause clinicians to overlook complexity of issues facing many populations, including people of color, who may also use other substances.

“Centering on opioids centers on whiteness,” Englander said. “Understanding the complexity of people’s substance use patterns is really important to honoring their experience and developing systems that support their needs.”

Researchers say the finding further reinforces earlier research showing that hospitalization is an important time to offer treatment to people with substance use disorder, even if they are not seeking treatment for addiction when they come to the hospital.

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Materials provided by Oregon Health & Science University. Original written by Erik Robinson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Rather, policy change in response to extreme weather events appears to depend on a combination of factors, including fatalities, sustained media coverage, the unusualness of the event and the political makeup of the community.

Climate scientists predict that the frequency and severity of extreme weather events will only continue to increase in coming decades. OSU researchers wanted to understand how local communities are reacting.

“There’s obviously national and state-level climate change policy, but we’re really interested in what goes on at the local level to adapt to these changes,” said lead author Leanne Giordono, a post-doctoral researcher in OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences. “Local communities are typically the first to respond to extreme events and disasters. How are they making themselves more resilient — for example, how are they adapting to more frequent flooding or intense heat?”

For the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, Giordono and co-authors Hilary Boudet of OSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Alexander Gard-Murray at Harvard University examined 15 extreme weather events that occurred around the U.S. between March 2012 and June 2017, and any subsequent local climate policy change.

These events included flooding, winter weather, extreme heat, tornadoes, wildfires and a landslide.

The study, published recently in the journal Policy Sciences, found there were two “recipes” for local policy change after an extreme weather event.

“For both recipes, experiencing a high-impact event — one with many deaths or a presidential disaster declaration — is a necessary condition for future-oriented policy adoption,” Giordono said.

In addition to a high death toll, the first recipe consisted of Democrat-leaning communities where there was focused media coverage of the weather event. These communities moved forward with adopting policies aimed at adapting in response to future climate change, such as building emergency preparedness and risk management capacity.

The second recipe consisted of Republican-leaning communities with past experiences of other uncommon weather events. In these locales, residents often didn’t engage directly in conversation about climate change but still worked on policies meant to prepare their communities for future disasters.

In both recipes, policy changes were fairly modest and reactive, such as building fire breaks, levees or community tornado shelters. Giordono referred to these as “instrumental” policy changes.

“As opposed to being driven by ideology or a shift in thought process, it’s more a means to an end,” she said. “‘We don’t want anyone else to die from tornadoes, so we build a shelter.’ It’s not typically a systemic response to global climate change.”

In their sample, the researchers didn’t find any evidence of mitigation-focused policy response, such as communities passing laws to limit carbon emissions or require a shift to solar power. And some communities did not make any policy changes at all in the wake of extreme weather.

The researchers suggest that in communities that are ideologically resistant to talking about climate change, it may be more effective to frame these policy conversations in other ways, such as people’s commitment to their community or the community’s long-term viability.

Without specifically examining communities that have not experienced extreme weather events, the researchers cannot speak to the status of their policy change, but Giordono said it is a question for future study.

“In some ways, it’s not surprising that you see communities that have these really devastating events responding to them,” Giordono said. “What about the vast majority of communities that don’t experience a high-impact event — is there a way to also spark interest in those communities?”

“We don’t want people to have to experience these types of disasters to make changes.”

Addressing this unmet need, researchers at Texas A&M University have now invented a new technology that can drastically downsize the apparatus used for Raman spectroscopy, a well-known technique that uses light to identify the molecular makeup of compounds.

“Raman benchtop setups can be up to a meter long depending on the level of spectroscopic resolution needed,” said Dr. Pao-Tai Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “We have designed a system that can potentially replace these bulky benchtops with a tiny photonic chip that can snugly fit within the tip of a finger.”

In addition, Lin said that their innovative photonic device is also capable of high-throughput, real-time chemical characterization and despite its size, is at least 10 times more sensitive than conventional benchtop Raman spectroscopy systems.

A description of their study is in the May issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry.

The basis of Raman spectroscopy is the scattering of light by molecules. When hit by light of a certain frequency, molecules perform a dance, rotating and vibrating upon absorbing the energy from the incident beam. When they lose their excess energy, molecules emit a lower-energy light, which is characteristic of their shape and size. This scattered light, known as the Raman spectra, contains the fingerprints of the molecules within a sample.

Typical benchtops for Raman spectroscopy contain an assortment of optical instruments, including lenses and gratings, for manipulating light. These “free-space” optical components take a lot of space and are a barrier for many applications where chemical sensing is required within tiny spaces or locations that are hard to reach. Also, benchtops can be prohibitive for real-time chemical characterization.

As an alternative to traditional lab-based benchtop systems, Lin and his team turned to tube-like conduits, called waveguides, that can transport light with very little loss of energy. While many materials can be used to make ultrathin waveguides, the researchers chose a material called aluminum nitride since it produces a low Raman background signal and is less likely to interfere with the Raman signal coming from a test sample of interest.

To create the optical waveguide, the researchers employed a technique used by industry for drawing circuit patterns on silicon wafers. First, using ultraviolet light, they spun a light-sensitive material, called NR9, onto a surface made of silica. Next, by using ionized gas molecules, they bombarded and coated aluminum nitride along the pattern formed by the NR9. Finally, they washed the assembly with acetone, leaving behind an aluminum waveguide that was just tens of microns in diameter.

For testing the optical waveguide as a Raman sensor, the research team transported a laser beam through the aluminum nitride waveguide and illuminated a test sample containing a mixture of organic molecules. Upon examining the scattered light, the researchers found that they could discern each type of molecule within the sample based on the Raman spectra and with a sensitivity of at least 10 times more than traditional Raman benchtops.

Lin noted since their optical waveguides have very fine width, many of them can be loaded onto a single photonic chip. This architecture, he said, is very conducive to high-throughput, real-time chemical sensing needed for drug development.

“Our optical waveguide design provides a novel platform for monitoring the chemical composition of compounds quickly, reliably and continuously. Also, these waveguides can be easily manufactured at an industrial scale by leveraging the already existing techniques to make semiconductor devices,” said Lin. “This technology, we believe, has a direct benefit for not just pharmaceutical industries but even for other industries, like petroleum, where our sensors can be put along underground pipes to monitor the composition of hydrocarbons.”

Other contributors to this research are Megan Makela from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and Paul Gordon, Dandan Tu, Cyril Soliman, Dr. Gerard Coté and Dr. Kristen Maitland from the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

In Australia, more than 1.4 million people are employed in shift work, with more than 200,000 regularly working night or evening shifts.

Lead researcher, Dr Stephanie Centofanti from UniSA Online and the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at UniSA says the finding could help counteract the kind of sleep inertia that is experienced by many shiftworkers.

“Shift workers are often chronically sleep-deprived because they have disrupted and irregular sleep patterns,” Dr Centofanti says.

“As a result, they commonly use a range of strategies to try to boost their alertness while on the nightshift, and these can include taking power naps and drinking coffee — yet it’s important to understand that there are disadvantages for both.

“Many workers nap during a night shift because they get so tired. But the downside is that they can experience ‘sleep inertia’ — that grogginess you have just after you wake up — and this can impair their performance and mood for up to an hour after their nap.

“Caffeine is also used by many people to stay awake and alert. But again, if you have too much coffee it can harm your overall sleep and health. And, if you use it to perk you up after a nap, it can take a good 20-30 minutes to kick in, so there’s a significant time delay before you feel the desired effect.

“A ‘caffeine-nap’ (or ‘caff-nap’) could be a viable alternative — by drinking a coffee before taking a nap, shiftworkers can gain the benefits of a 20-30-minute nap then the perk of the caffeine when they wake. It’s a win-win.”

The small pilot study tested the impact of 200 mg of caffeine (equivalent to 1-2 regular cups of coffee) consumed by participants just before a 3.30am 30-minute nap, comparing results with a group that took a placebo.

Participants taking a ‘caffeine-nap’ showed marked improvements in both performance and alertness, indicating the potential of a ‘caffeine-nap’ to counteract sleep grogginess.

Dr Centofanti says this shows a promising fatigue countermeasure for shift workers. She says the next move is to test the new finding on more people.

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