Study results could lead to new therapeutic solutions

A new Mass General Brigham-led study using AI to analyze electronic health records found that long COVID may be twice as common as current estimates, affecting more than 18 million Americans. The findings reveal major gaps in diagnostic coding-based surveillance, with more than 10 million cases likely uncounted and prevalence continuing to grow over time.

The risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19 infection was lower among adults with better heart health scores. Adults without cardiovascular disease and with the best levels of heart health, as indexed by the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 heart health metric, were nearly half as likely to develop severe COVID-19 when compared to adults with the worst levels of heart health. Specifically, the Life’s Essential 8 components of better physical activity, body mass index, blood pressure and sleep were associated with most-reduced risk.

 U.S. prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a multisystem neurologic disease and debilitating chronic condition, averaged 1 million to 2.5 million before the COVID-19 pandemic. Incidence rates are now reported to be 15 times greater, related at least in part to long COVID. This retrospective chart review analyzed records of medications and supplements tried before specialty consultation from 571 adults with ME/CFS seen at a Mayo Clinic specialty clinic from 2018 to 2022.

In a new study published in Nature Immunology, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital demonstrated that pairing the original COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with an immune system enhancer, known as an adjuvant, improved the duration of the vaccine’s protection in mice. The combo also showed a more pronounced response against omicron viral components than the vaccine alone. The researchers say that introducing adjuvants like this one to mRNA vaccines may alleviate the need for frequent boosters due to waning antibodies or new viral variants.

A large-scale study of human mobility and wildlife movement across the United States suggests that the day-to-day presence of humans – not just how they alter the landscape – is a major ecological force that shapes how animals move through and use their environments, researchers report. Human activity is accelerating global biodiversity loss by transforming climates and rapidly reshaping natural landscapes. Yet beyond these physical alterations of the environment, there is a growing recognition that the direct presence of humans themselves may greatly influence how animals behave, including how they perceive risk, move through their habitats, compete for resources, and interact with other species. Despite this, large-scale comparative research has rarely examined human presence as a distinct and dynamic pressure on wildlife, largely due to the fact that detailed data on where and when people move are difficult to obtain. Most existing studies have focused on local settings or broad proxies of human presence, such as pandemic-related lockdowns, and have concentrated largely on mammals. As a result, relatively little is known about how interacting forms of human activity and presence combine to affect wildlife.

To address this gap, Ruth Oliver and colleagues combined data on numbers of mobile devices and vehicles in each U.S. census block as a measure of human presence, along with detailed measures of human landscape modification, with animal tracking data from more than 4,500 birds and mammals representing 37 species. By centering their study on the years 2019 and 2020 and leveraging the unique, temporary decline of human movement in modified landscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Oliver et al. were able to disentangle the direct effects of human activity from the broader impacts of landscape change and evaluate how each factor influenced the amount of space animals used. According to the findings, direct human presence influenced the movement patterns or use of the environment of 65% of species examined. Many mammals reduced the amount of territory they used in response to greater human activity, particularly in less-developed habitats where animals may perceive humans as a threat. On the other hand, some species, like gray wolves, expanded their ranges, likely to better avoid people. Adaptable species such as white-tailed deer appeared more comfortable incorporating human-modified environments into their usable habitats. Birds likewise showed highly variable responses, with some species becoming more spatially constrained and others altering their habitat use depending on the surrounding degree of development. In a related Perspective, Lydia Beaudrot discusses the study and its findings in greater detail.

Anti-Asian discrimination and violence increased during COVID, and new research from Murdoch University has revealed one key psychological driver.