The research, led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, found more than 40 per cent who received care in the home following a complex appendectomy recovered faster and had fewer complications.

More than 300 patients present with appendicitis to The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) every year, with about one in three experiencing a burst appendix or severe infection.

The study involved 83 children, aged five to 18 years, admitted to the RCH for a complicated appendicectomy, with 35 suitable for the Hospital in the Home (HITH) program. All patients needed at least five days of intravenous antibiotics (IV) post-surgery. Under the program, a nurse visited the child’s home daily to administer the antibiotics and record clinical observations.

MCRI Associate Professor Penelope Bryant said under this model, patients at home recovered more quickly and didn’t require readmission to hospital.

“Acute post-operative care at home is rare, but we found it’s possible for children to spend 35 per cent less time in hospital after complicated surgery,” she said. This could be done safely and without prolonging IV courses or broadening antibiotic use.

“These findings will help clinicians to identify which children are suitable for HITH care following surgery for complicated appendicitis.”

MCRI Associate Professor Warwick Teague said the HITH program, used heavily during the COVID-19 pandemic, had the added benefits of reduced hospital and family costs, improved quality of life, less time taken from work and prevention of hospital-acquired infections.

“The pandemic presented us with the need and opportunity to deliver care to children in their home,” he said. This study showed even children who had severe appendicitis can be well cared for at home after surgery, freeing up hospital beds for other sick children and those needing surgery.

“Traditionally after surgery for severe appendicitis, surgeons have insisted on daily reviews in hospital by the surgical team. However, in this study we learnt that optimal postoperative care be delivered at home, by well-trained non-surgical clinicians working as a team with surgeons.”

“For complicated appendicitis, the HITH program also saved over $1,400 per day for the hospital and $300 daily for families, reducing cost-of-living pressures with longer-term benefits for healthcare sustainability.”

Researchers from The Royal Children’s Hospital and University of Melbourne contributed to the study.

Joint senior author Associate Professor Nic Rawlence, Director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory, says while elephant seals now only inhabit the subantarctic islands and South America, Aotearoa beaches used to be “heaving” with the colossal animals.

“At the time of human arrival in New Zealand, you would be hard pressed to find room on the beaches, with fur seals on the rocky headlands, prehistoric sealions and elephant seals on the sand, and lots of penguins,” he says.

“It’s a picture that is very hard to imagine today, especially as most New Zealanders wouldn’t think that these majestic giants were once part of our biological heritage.”

The study was undertaken by a group of international researchers, led by postgraduate students Andrew Berg, of the University of Sydney, and Otago’s Megan Askew, and recently published in the leading journal Global Change Biology.

They used palaeogenetic techniques on specimens dating back thousands of years from New Zealand, Tasmania and Antarctica to show that southern elephant seals used to be spread across the entire Southern Ocean.

Joint senior author Dr Mark de Bruyn, of Griffith University, says their whereabouts was heavily impacted by climate change and humans over a short evolutionary period.

“The Ice Ages would have rapidly increased the amount of sea ice surrounding Antarctica, forcing elephant seals to retreat to multiple refugia in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and South America, before they expanded back out as the climate warmed, including temporarily to the Antarctic mainland,” Dr de Bruyn says.

“However, indigenous subsistence hunting and European industrial sealing once again resulted in the contraction of their range, this time to the deep Southern Ocean with their extirpation from Australia and New Zealand.”

Associate Professor Rawlence says knowing how elephant seals responded to these changes will provide insights into how they — and the Southern Ocean ecosystem, which New Zealand and Australia are part of — may be impacted in the future.

“Their dynamic evolutionary history, plus climate change and human impact, strongly suggests that unless measures are taken to mitigate the effects of human-driven climate change and marine ecosystem deterioration, elephant seals and the Southern Ocean ecosystem are in for a rough ride into the future,” he says.

Puzzling discovery in Namibia

Geologist Cees Passchier has been working in Namibia for 25 years, among other places. His research focuses on the geological reconstruction of Precambrian terranes. “We look at the structure of the rocks to find out how continents came together to form the supercontinent Gondwana 500 to 600 million years ago,” explained Passchier. At that time, carbonate deposits formed in the ancient oceans and turned into marble due to pressure and heat. “We noticed strange structures in this marble that were not the result of geological events.” Instead of smooth erosion surfaces, tubes could be seen that were about half a millimeter wide and up to three centimeters long, lined up parallel to one another and forming bands up to ten meters long. Some calcrete crusts had formed on the edges.

The first observations of this kind in the Namibian desert were made 15 years ago. In the meantime, Professor Cees Passchier, together with colleagues from the Institute of Geosciences at Mainz University, and Dr. Trudy Wassenaar, head of the consulting company Molecular Microbiology and Genomics Consultants, have continued to investigate the phenomenon. “We think that it must have been a microorganism that formed these tubes.” The tubes were not empty but filled with a fine powder of clean calcium carbonate. It is assumed that microorganisms may have bored the tunnels to use nutrients present in the calcium carbonate, the main component of marble. The fine powder remained behind. Passchier also found very similar structures during field work in Oman and in Saudi Arabia — in Oman in limestone, while in the Saudi Arabian desert they were in marble.

“In any case, these are old structures, perhaps one or two million years old,” said Passchier. “We assume that they were formed in a slightly more humid climate, not in the dry desert climate that prevails today.” However, the organism that caused these structures remains a mystery.

Endolithic microorganisms use rock as a basis for life

Microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, or lichen are found even in inhospitable or remote corners of the Earth. So-called endolithic microorganisms are not uncommon in desert areas as they can obtain their energy and nutrients from the rocks they live in. “What is so exciting about our discovery is that we do not know which endolithic microorganism this is. Is it a known form of life or a completely unknown organism?” According to Cees Passchier, it must be an organism that can survive without light because the tubes have formed deep inside the rock. The researchers found biological material, but no DNA or proteins that could provide further insights.

Passchier hopes that specialists on endolithic organisms will look into this phenomenon in the future. “This form of life, of which we do not know whether it still exists, could be important for the global carbon cycle. It is therefore essential that the scientific community becomes aware of it.” The release of carbon through the biological activity of microorganisms could also play a major role in the Earth’s CO₂ balance.

Dietary fibres in fruit, vegetables, beans and whole grains are some of the most important food components for human health. They help digestion, weight management, blood sugar control, heart health, cancer prevention and more.

But RMIT University food scientist Professor Raj Eri said consumer advice on how best to use them for these various benefits is sorely lacking.

“Quite like how different medicines target different conditions, so too do different types of fibres,” he said.

“For example, apples and bananas are both rich in dietary fibre but the fibre in each works very differently.

“Our research is helping to understand which type of fibres we should eat to help address certain ailments.”

A new model for more tailored diets

In a new study published in Food Research International, the RMIT University team propose a more nuanced fibre classification based on five key features: backbone structure, water-holding-capacity, structural charge, fibre matrix and fermentation rate.

Study lead author and RMIT PhD candidate Christo Opperman said by starting with the key active features of fibre, this ‘bottom-up approach’more accurately described each fibre’s health impacts.

“For example, suppose you want to promote colonic health. In that case, you identify a fibre’s properties as defined by the bottom-up approach, which align with your desired outcome — in this case fermentation rate,” Opperman said.

“Applying this framework can assure consumers, dieticians, clinicians and food technologists that they are receiving their desired health effect, which previously was a vague guessing game.”

Opperman said the RMIT team have now taken 20 different types of fibres and studied how they interact specifically with microbiome in the gut.

“Until now, these types of specific interactions have been understudied, but with this framework as a beginning, we are on the verge of a much more helpful and detailed understanding,” he said.

A global fibre gap

Eri said there was already strong interest among dieticians, clinicians and food technologists — and of course consumers — on how to better integrate fibre into diets.

“In the countries surveyed, including Europe and the USA, every single population had a deficiency of fibre,” Eri said.

“Considering fibre is one of the most important nutrients, this is extremely worrying.”

While recommended dietary fibre intake is 28-42 grams per day, Americans on average get only 12-14 grams per day and Europeans 18-24 grams per day.

Beyond soluble and insoluble

The current classification of dietary fibres has them grouped into soluble and insoluble fibres, which is based on whether they dissolve in water.

Insoluble fibres are seldom fermented in the large intestine and help keep us regular.

Soluble fibres are more readily fermented and can reduce cholesterol, glucose absorption and food craving.

But it’s not always so straightforward. For example, often insoluble fibres can also rapidly ferment and reduce glucose absorption.

“Despite our evolving understanding of how central different types of fibre are to nurturing a healthy gut biome, our dietary fibre classifications remain simplistic between broad categories of soluble and insoluble types,” Eri said.

“This binary classification of soluble and insoluble insufficiently captures the diverse structures and complex mechanisms through which dietary fibres influence human physiology.”

“Our framework is an essential step in addressing this gap,” he said.

The researchers are now planning to investigate how a specific type of fibre (based on our new classification) modulates the microbiota and how we can utilise such knowledge for specific health applications.

Although Parkinson’s disease is a well-recognized illness, the term can refer to a variety of conditions, ranging from idiopathic Parkinson’s, the most common type, to other movement disorders like multiple system atrophy Parkinsonian variant and progressive supranuclear palsy. Each shares motor and nonmotor features, like changes in gait — but possess a distinct pathology and prognosis.

Roughly one in four patients, or even one in two patients, is misdiagnosed.

Now, researchers at the University of Florida and the UF Health Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases have developed a new kind of software that will help clinicians differentially diagnose Parkinson’s disease and related conditions, reducing diagnostic time and increasing precision beyond 96%. The study was published recently in JAMA Neurology and was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“In many cases, MRI manufacturers don’t communicate with each other due to marketplace competition,” said David Vaillancourt, Ph.D., chair and a professor in the UF Department of Applied Physiology and Kinesiology. “They all have their own software and their own sequences. Here, we’ve developed novel software that works across all of them.”

Although there is no substitute for the human element of diagnosis, even the most experienced physicians who specialize in movement disorder diagnoses can benefit from a tool to increase diagnostic efficacy between different disorders, Vaillancourt said.

The software, Automated Imaging Differentiation for Parkinsonism, or AIDP, is an automated MRI processing and machine learning software that features a noninvasive biomarker technique. Using diffusion-weighted MRI, which measures how water molecules diffuse in the brain, the team can identify where neurodegeneration is occurring. Then, the machine learning algorithm, rigorously tested against in-person clinic diagnoses, analyzes the brain scan and provides the clinician with the results, indicating one of the different types of Parkinson’s.

The study was conducted across 21 sites, 19 of them in the United States and two in Canada.

“This is an instance where the innovation between technology and artificial intelligence has been proven to enhance diagnostic precision, allowing us the opportunity to further improve treatment for patients with Parkinson’s disease,” said Michael Okun, M.D., medical adviser to the Parkinson’s Foundation and director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at UF Health. “We look forward to seeing how this innovation can further impact the Parkinson’s community and advance our shared goal of better outcomes for all.”

The team’s next step is obtaining approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“This effort truly highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration,” said Angelos Barmpoutis, Ph.D., a professor at the Digital Worlds Institute at UF. “Thanks to the combined medical expertise, scientific expertise and technological expertise, we were able to accomplish a goal that will change the lives of countless individuals.”

Vaillancourt and Barmpoutis are partial owners of a company called Neuropacs whose goal is to bring this software forward, improving both patient care and clinical trials where it might be used.