Canadians more likely than Americans to support climate change policies
Americans are less willing to open their wallets to pay for increased production of renewable energy resources than Canadians, a new U-M report indicates.
Americans who indicated they would not pay anything each year was at 41 percent compared with 21 percent for their counterpart. The willingness of Americans to contribute anything has declined between 2008 and 2010, the report states.
“Canadians are far more likely to see climate change as real and as a serious problem, and this appears to translate into greater willingness to take concrete steps in response,” says Barry Rabe, Arthur Thurnau Professor of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and one of the report’s authors.
The study provides insight into the evolution of American public opinion regarding climate matters, and compares American and Canadian views on global warming and its remediation.
Most believers point to both human activity and natural factors as reasons for increasing world temperatures. In addition, there is a general belief that this matter is a serious problem.
As climate change has emerged as a growing concern for governments worldwide, more attention has focused on the role of governments. Many Canadians and Americans indicate that national, state and local levels have a “great deal” of responsibility in combating global warming.
Regarding specific policies to confront climate change, both nations favor the national and state governments focusing on automobile fuel efficiency standards.
While most Americans do not support cap and trade and carbon taxes, many Canadians said they would support such policy options even if they had to pay up to $50 per month in energy expenses.
— Jared Wadley, News Service
Study: More than 1.5 million jobs, $62 billion in wages tied to Great Lakes
More than 1.5 million U.S. jobs are directly connected to the Great Lakes, generating $62 billion in wages annually, according to a new analysis by Michigan Sea Grant at U-M.
The analysis is based on 2009 employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and represents a conservative estimate of direct employment related to the Great Lakes in several industries, say the authors, Michigan Sea Grant’s assistant director, Jennifer Read, and research specialist Lynn Vaccaro.
“Many people don’t realize how large an impact the Great Lakes have across many large sectors of this region’s economy,” Read says. “The total number of jobs and the percentage of jobs by industry illustrate just how critical the Great Lakes are to the region. For example, there are more than 525,000 Great Lakes-related jobs in Michigan alone.”
A collaborative effort of U-M and Michigan State University, Michigan Sea Grant is part of the NOAA-National Sea Grant network of more than 30 university-based programs.
The two-page economic analysis updates a more extensive Michigan Sea Grant report issued in 2009. That report focused on Michigan’s economic ties to the lakes. The update provides figures for all eight states that border the Great Lakes.
The new report looks at the number of jobs connected to the Great Lakes by state and by industry. According to the report, Michigan has the highest number of jobs that depend on the lakes (525,886), followed by Illinois (380,786), Ohio (178,621), Wisconsin (173,969), New York (157,547), Indiana (54,397), Pennsylvania (25,479) and Minnesota (11,877).
Manufacturing was responsible for 66 percent of the Great Lakes-linked jobs, followed by tourism and recreation (14 percent), shipping (8 percent), agriculture (8 percent), science and engineering (2 percent), utilities (1 percent) and mining (1 percent).
— Jim Erickson, News Service
Brain imaging technique: New hope for understanding Parkinson’s disease
A noninvasive brain imaging technique gives new hope to patients with Parkinson’s disease in finding new and better treatment plans and tracking the disease progression, a new U-M study shows.
The technique uses an MRI to measure resting state brain activity oscillations, says Rachael Seidler, associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and the Department of Psychology, and study author.
Neural oscillations in a resting state are normal, Seidler says. However, in the part of the brain affected by Parkinson’s, called the basal ganglia, those neural oscillations go haywire and spill into other parts of the brain, causing cognition, movement, memory and other problems. Think of a ripple in a pond spreading and disturbing the entire surface of the pond. Previously these neural oscillations were only available for study during brain surgery or in animal models.
One drug that reduces these oscillations and subsequent disturbances in Parkinson’s is L-DOPA, Seidler says. Research subjects who hadn’t taken their morning L-DOPA came in twice for testing and either received a placebo pill or L-DOPA. When scanned in the MRI, the images showed that the increased oscillations were reduced by the L-DOPA.
Surprisingly, the MRI imaging found that in some cases the L-DOPA even slowed the oscillations too much —think of this as the pond freezing. “In this instance you could use it (the imaging) to titrate the dose,” Seidler says.
Study collaborators are Scott Peltier of the College of Engineering, Youngbin Kwak of the U-M Neuroscience Program, and Nicholaas Bohnen, Martin Muller and Praveen Dayalu, all of the Medical School.
Next steps may include analyzing the same data for the size of the oscillations — the ripple in the pond — and how the size relates to cognitive and motor performance in newly diagnosed Parkinson’s patients.
— Laura Bailey, News Service
Scientists target aggressive prostate cancer
Researchers at the Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a potential target to treat an aggressive type of prostate cancer. The target, a gene called SPINK1, could be to prostate cancer what HER2 has become for breast cancer.
Like HER2, SPINK1 occurs in only a small subset of prostate cancers — about 10 percent. But the gene is an ideal target for a monoclonal antibody, the same type of drug as Herceptin, which is aimed at HER2 and has dramatically improved treatment for this aggressive type of breast cancer.
“Since SPINK1 can be made on the surface of cells, it attracted our attention as a therapeutic target. Here we show that a ‘blocking’ antibody to SPINK1 could slow the growth of prostate tumors in mice that were positive for the SPINK protein,” says study author Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan, director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
The study appears in the March 2 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
The researchers additionally found that SPINK1 can bind to a receptor called EGFR. They tested a drug that blocks EGFR, cetuximab, which already is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and found that this also reduced the cancerous effects of SPINK1.
The study suggests that side effects were limited in mice. Future studies will need to determine whether targeting SPINK1 in humans would affect normal tissue. The researchers also will look to further understand why SPINK1 is elevated in a subset of prostate cancers. Clinical trials testing SPINK1 therapies are not available at this time.
Additional U-M authors are Bushra Ateeq, Scott Tomlins, Bharathi Laxman, Irfan Asangani, Qi Cao, Xuhong Cao, Yong Li, Felix Feng, Kenneth Pienta and Sooryanarayana Varambally.
— Nicole Fawcett, Comprehensive Cancer Center
Study: People want personal results from genetic research
The majority of people from a genetic study opted to be told whether they carried a cancer-causing gene mutation, and the knowledge did not cause emotional distress or change their health behaviors, a new study shows.
The School of Public Health’s re-contact study was one of the first of its kind specifically designed to give participants of epidemiological research follow-up information on their genetic makeup, says Kurt Christensen, lead study author and doctoral candidate in SPH.
U-M researchers designed the study this way to learn the practical challenges of sharing such information and the impact on subjects. Scott Roberts, assistant professor in the SPH Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, is the principal investigator.
The medical and science community is divided over whether epidemiological researchers have an obligation to disclose individual genetic results significant to the health of a research participant. Few, if any, currently do so.
“One argument against this is that participants won’t understand their results and they’ll get depressed or sent into a tailspin,” Christensen says. “We found people wanted the information, they understood the results and it didn’t affect their mood.”
In the study, researchers gave results to 19 U-M melanoma survivors who had donated DNA years earlier in a different study to help confirm whether a gene was associated with melanoma, Christensen says.
A genetic counselor provided the results to patients as well as educational materials specific to that gene and the study participants. Christensen says the feedback was costly and time consuming, but most likely worth it in the long run.
The paper, “Disclosing individual CDKN2A research results to melanoma survivors: Interest, impact and demands on researchers,” is available in the February online edition of Cancer, Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
— Laura Bailey, News Service
