The onset of DLB is associated with abnormal deposits of alpha-synuclein, a protein in the brain that plays a role in the transmission of signals between neurons. The presence of these deposits, known as ‘Lewy bodies’, affects chemicals in the brain, leading to declines in thinking, reasoning and memory. Symptoms include confusion, memory loss, impaired movement, and visual hallucinations.

Parkinson’s disease also starts with movement problems, but some patients develop cognitive decline within one year. These patients are diagnosed with DLB when this cognitive decline occurs. Physicians find it difficult to predict which people with Parkinson’s disease will develop cognitive decline within a year and become patients with DLB.

A research group led by Associate Professor Masaaki Hirayama (Omics Medicine), Professor Kinji Ohno (Neurogenetics), and Assistant Professor Hiroshi Nishiwaki (Neurogenetics) of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, in collaboration with Okayama Neurology Clinic, Iwate Medical University, and Fukuoka University, analyzed microorganisms in the gut and fecal bile acids of patients with DLB, Parkinson’s disease, and rapid eye movement behavior disorder. They discovered that three intestinal bacteria, Collinsella, Ruminococcus, and Bifidobacterium, were associated with patients with DLB. This may suggest possible ways of diagnosing and treating this neurodegenerative disease.

The researchers also found similarities between the gut bacteria involved in Parkinson’s disease and DLB. In both diseases, the bacteria Akkermansia, which degrades the intestinal mucosa, increased. On the other hand, the bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) in the gut decreased. “Decreases in SCFA-producing bacteria have been repeatedly reported in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and ALS,” explains Ohno. “This suggests that it is a common feature of neurodegenerative diseases.” SCFA are important because they produce regulatory T cells. These types of cells play a critical role in regulating the immune system by suppressing neuroinflammation.

On the other hand, in patients with DLB, the researchers found an increase in Ruminococcus torques, an increase in Collinsella, and a decrease in Bifidobacterium. This was different from Parkinson’s disease patients, whose levels did not change. In the future using these insights, doctors may be able to analyze the bacteria in a person’s digestive tract to distinguish DLB from Parkinson’s disease.

Importantly, the reduced levels of Bifidobacterium mayalsosuggest possible ways to treat DLB. Bifidobacterium increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a key protein that supports the growth, development and maintenance of neurons in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Therefore, its decrease in DLB is likely to be associated with cognitive decline.

Similarly, both Ruminococcus torques and Collinsella are intestinal bacteria that carry an enzyme, the product of which regulates inflammation in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra.The substantia nigra produces dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is involved in the regulation of movement and is deficient in Parkinson’s disease. Compared to Parkinson’s disease, the levels of these bacteria were higher in people with DLB. This may explain why the effect on movement is delayed, a key feature that distinguishes DLB from Parkinson’s disease.

“Our findings can be used both for both diagnosis and treatment,” explains Ohno. “If a patient with Parkinson’s disease develops dementia in one year after the onset of motor symptoms, they are diagnosed with DLB. However, we cannot currently predict whether a patient with Parkinson’s disease will become a DLB patient. The gut microbiome will help to identify such patients.”

“In terms of treatment, the administration of Ruminococcus torques and Collinsella in patients with Parkinson’s is expected to delay neuroinflammation in the substantia nigra,” Ohno added. “Therapeutic intervention to increase Bifidobacterium may delay the onset and progression of DLB and reduce cognitive dysfunction.”

“The presence of intestinal bacteria unique to DLB may explain why some patients develop Parkinson’s disease and others develop DLB first,” Ohno said. “Normalizing the abnormal bacteria shared between DLB and Parkinson’s disease may delay the development of both diseases. Improving the gut microbiota is a stepping stone in the treatment of dementia. Our findings may pave the way for the discovery of new and completely different therapeutics.”

Driven by a combination of rising sea levels and climate change, destructive hurricanes and tropical storms could become far more likely to hit coastal areas in quick succession, researchers found. In an article, published Feb. 27 in the journal Nature Climate Change, the researchers said that in some areas, like the Gulf Coast, such double hits could occur as frequently as once every 3 years.

“Rising sea levels and climate change make sequential damaging hurricanes more likely as the century progresses,” said Dazhi Xi, a postdoctoral researcher and a former graduate student in civil and environmental engineering and the paper’s lead author. “Today’s extremely rare events will become far more frequent.”

Researchers led by Ning Lin, an associate professor civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, first raised questions about increasing frequency of sequential hurricanes after a particularly destructive hurricane season in 2017. That summer, Hurricane Harvey struck Houston followed by Irma in South Florida and Maria in Puerto Rico. The emergency planning challenges raised by 3 major hurricanes led researchers to question whether multiple destructive storms could occur more readily due to climate change, and what steps could be taken to prepare for this. In the late summer of 2021, Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana, followed shortly by Tropical Storm Nicholas, which had made landfall as a hurricane in Texas.

The researchers said their study showed that sequential storms have become more common on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast, although they remain relatively rare.

“Sequential hurricane hazards are happening already, so we felt they should be studied,” Lin said. “There has been an increasing trend in recent decades.”

The researchers ran computer simulations to determine the change in likelihood of multiple destructive storms hitting the same area within a short period of time such as 15 days over this century. They looked at two scenarios: a future with moderate carbon emissions and one with higher emissions. In both cases, the chance of sequential, damaging storms increased dramatically.

There is a general scientific consensus that climate change will increase the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes in the coming century. But there is some uncertainty in whether the number of storms will increase, decrease, or stay the same over the period, the researchers noted. The model used by Lin’s team showed an increasing number of storms, but other models have shown no increase. However, Lin’s team found that even without an increase in the overall frequency of storms, the increase in intensity will make it much more likely that areas along with East Coast and Gulf Coast will experience sequential storms.

“The proportion of storms that can have an impact on communities is increasing,” Lin said. “The frequency of storms is not as important as the increasing number of storms that can become hazardous.”

The increasing hazard is mainly driven by two developments: rising sea levels and increasing precipitation driven by climate change. Sea level rise is occurring worldwide with the changing climate, and it is compounded on the Atlantic coast by geography. As sea levels rise, storm surge becomes more of a threat to coastal communities because the baseline water level is higher. A 3-meter storm surge on top of a historically normal water level is less damaging to roads than the same surge on top of a water level that is elevated by .5 meters. At the same time, storms are intensifying and higher average air temperatures mean that storms carry more water. This means rainfall and flooding from storms are likely to increase.

The combination of both factors means that storms that might have passed with little notice in the past will become threats, particularly when they hit one after another. In 2021, for example, Tropical Storm Nicholas was relatively weak when it hit Louisiana, but the storm caused more problems than expected because the state was still recovering from the destruction related to Hurricane Ida.

“Nicholas was quite a weak storm and one reason it produced a significant hazard was that the soil was already saturated,” Lin said. “So there was a lot of flooding.”

The researchers said it is important for community planners and regional emergency officials to recognize this emerging threat. Improvements in both resilience and response are required to meet the increasing hazard. For resilience, communities will need to deal with increased flooding threats and harden systems that remove floodwater and protect critical infrastructure such as transportation, water systems and power grids. Emergency response teams will have to be prepared to handle multiple storms in relatively quick succession. On the state and federal level, this could mean being ready to dispatch resources to many stricken communities at the same time.

“If a power system requires 15 days to recover from a major hurricane, we cannot wait that long in the future because the next storm can hit before you can restore power, as in the case of Nicholas following Ida” Lin said. “We need to think about plans, rescue workers, resources. How will we plan for this?”

In an article recently published online in Nature Communications, Dr. Tallie Z. Baram, senior author and UCI Donald Bren Professor and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Pediatrics, Neurology and Physiology & Biophysics, and Matt Birnie, lead author and a postdoctoral researcher, describe the cellular changes in the brain’s circuitry caused by exposure to adversity during childhood.

“We know that early-life stress impacts the brain, but until now, we didn’t know how,” Baram said. “Our team focused on identifying potentially stress-sensitive brain pathways. We discovered a new pathway within the reward circuit that expresses a molecule called corticotropin-releasing hormone that controls our responses to stress. We found that adverse experiences cause this brain pathway to be overactive.”

“These changes to the pathway disrupt reward behaviors, reducing pleasure and motivation for fun, food and sex cues in mice,” she said. “In humans, such behavioral changes, called ‘anhedonia,’ are associated with emotional disorders. Importantly, we discovered that when we silence this pathway using modern technology, we restore the brain’s normal reward behaviors.”

Researchers mapped all the CRH-expressing connections to the nucleus accumbens, a pleasure and motivation hub in the brain, and found a previously unknown projection arising from the basolateral amygdala. In addition to CRH, projection fibers co-expressed gama-aminobutyric acid. They found that this new pathway, when stimulated, suppresses several types of reward behaviors in male mice.

The study involved two groups of male and female mice. One was exposed to adversity early in life by living for a week in cages with limited bedding and nesting material, and the other was reared in typical cages. As adults, the early adversity-experiencing male mice had little interest in sweet foods or sex cues compared to typically reared mice. In contrast, adversity-experiencing females craved rich, sweet food. Inhibiting the pathway restored normal reward behaviors in males, yet it had no effect in females.

“We believe that our findings provide breakthrough insights into the impact of early-life adversity on brain development and specifically on control of reward behaviors that underlie many emotional disorders. Our discovery of the previously unknown circuit function of the basolateral amygdala-nucleus accumbens brain pathway deepens our understanding of this complex mechanism and identifies a significant new therapeutic target.” Baram said. “Future studies are needed to increase our understanding of the different and sex-specific effects of early-life adversity on behavior.”

Team members include Annabel K. Short, postdoctoral researcher, Lara Taniguchi, graduate student, Aidan Pham, lab assistant, and co-corresponding author Yuncai Chen, project scientist, from Department of Pediatrics; Gregory B. de Carvalho, graduate student, Benjamin G. Gunn, assistant project scientist; Christy A. Itoga, researcher; Xiangmin Xu, professor; Lulu Y. Chen, assistant professor; from the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology; and Stephen V. Mahler, associate professor from the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior.

This work was supported by National Institute of Health grants P50 MH096889, MH73136, U01DA053826 NS108296 P50 DA044118, P50 MH096889 Seed Award FG23670, The Bren Foundation, a George E. Hewitt Foundation for Biomedical Research Fellowship and a British Society for Neuroendocrinology Project Support Grant BSN-5646342.

“We found this galaxy to be super-chemically abundant, something none of us expected,” said Bo Peng, a doctoral student in astronomy, who led the data analysis. “JWST changes the way we view this system and opens up new venues to study how stars and galaxies formed in the early universe.”

Peng is the lead author of “Discovery of a Dusty, Chemically Mature Companion to z~4 Starburst Galaxy in JWST Early Release Science Data,” published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Earlier images captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile contained hints of the companion resolved clearly by JSWT, but couldn’t be interpreted as anything more than random noise, said Amit Vishwas, a research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences (CCAPS) and the paper’s second author.

The team estimated the companion galaxy, which they labeled SPT0418-SE, was within 5 kiloparsecs of SPT0418-47, one of the brightest dusty, star-forming galaxies in the early universe, its distant light bent and magnified by a foreground galaxy’s gravity into a circle, called an Einstein ring. The Magellanic Clouds, satellites of the Milky Way are about 50 kiloparsecs away. The proximity suggests these galaxies are bound to interact with each other and potentially even merge, an observation that adds to the understanding of how early galaxies may have evolved into larger ones.

The two galaxies are modest in mass as galaxies in the early universe go, with “SE” relatively smaller and less dusty, making it appear bluer than the extremely dust-obscured ring. Based on images of nearby galaxies with similar colors, the researchers suggest that they may reside “in a massive dark-matter halo with yet-to-be-discovered neighbors.”

Most surprising about the companion galaxy, considering its age and mass, was its mature metallicity — amounts of elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, such as carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. The team estimated that as comparable to our sun, which is more than 4 billion years old and inherited most of its metals from previous generations of stars that had 8 billion years to build them up.

“We are seeing the leftovers of at least a couple of generations of stars having lived and died within the first billion years of the universe’s existence, which is not what we typically see,” Vishwas said. “We speculate that the process of forming stars in these galaxies must have been very efficient and started very early in the universe, particularly to explain the measured abundance of nitrogen relative to oxygen, as this ratio is a reliable measure of how many generations of stars have lived and died.”