Decline in smoking saves nearly 800,000 lives over 25 years
Rafael Meza, assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, is a co-author on a collaborative study that found tobacco control policies in the United States prevented 795,000 lung cancer deaths from 1975 to 2000.
The paper came out of the Lung Cancer Group of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network, and Meza has been a member since 2006. The CISNET groups used statistical models to estimate the impact on lung cancer deaths of changes in smoking patterns due to tobacco control efforts.
The paper, “Impact of reduced tobacco smoking on lung cancer mortality in the United States during 1975–2000,” appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Meza, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, joined U-M last fall.
At the Hutchinson Center, Meza helped develop one of the models used in this analysis. He also developed a lung cancer risk prediction model that is the smoking dose-response module in many of the other CISNET lung models.
Currently, the CISNET lung group is working on extending their analyses to predict lung cancer mortality rates in the United States to at least 2050. Meza said the groups also are studying the efficacy of lung cancer screening for current and former smokers in different age and exposure level groups, based on the results of benefit for spiral CT screening found in the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial. Meza is one of the principal Investigators of the project.
— Laura Bailey, News Service
Vitamins doing gymnastics: Scientists capture first full image of vitamin B12 in action
You see it listed on the side of your cereal box and your multivitamin bottle. It’s vitamin B12, part of a nutritious diet like all those other vitamins and minerals.
But when it gets inside your body, new research suggests, B12 turns into a gymnast.
In a paper published recently in the journal Nature, scientists from the U-M Health System and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report they have created the first full 3-D images of B12 and its partner molecules twisting and contorting as part of a crucial reaction called methyltransfer.
That reaction is vital both in the cells of the human body and, in a slightly different way, in the cells of bacteria that consume carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. That includes bacteria that live in the guts of humans, cows and other animals, and help with digestion. The new research was done using B12 complexes from another type of carbon dioxide-munching bacteria found in the murky bottoms of ponds.
The 3-D images produced by the team show for the first time the intricate molecular juggling needed for B12 to serve its biologically essential function. They reveal a multi-stage process involving what the researchers call an elaborate protein framework — a surprisingly complicated mechanism for such a critical reaction.
U-M Medical School professor and co-author Stephen Ragsdale notes that this transfer reaction is important to understand because of its importance to human health. It also has potential implications for the development of new fuels that might become alternative renewable energy sources.
Gunes Bender of U-M also is an author on the study.
— Kara Gavin, UMHS Public Relations
Listen to solar storm activity in new sonification video
What does a solar storm sound like? Take a listen in this video at youtu.be/S-saaAyaW0c. It’s a “sonification” of measurements from two spacecraft during the most recent storm.
The researcher who created it is Robert Alexander, a design science doctoral student. Alexander is a composer with a NASA fellowship to study how representing information as sound could aid in data mining.
For this project he used data from U-M’s Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer instrument on NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury, as well as from NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which is about 1 million miles from the Earth.
To sonify the data, he began by writing 90 hours’ worth of raw information to an audio waveform. But in its original sampling rate of 44,100 hertz, it played back in less than a quarter of a second. That’s one of the benefits of sonifying data. You can zip through days’ worth of information in an instant. To make sense of it, in this case, he had to run it through additional algorithms and find the right playback speed.
“This approach is changing the timescale for us,” says Jim Raines, a lead mission operations engineer in the Space Physics Research Lab. “It’s really interesting to hear it.”
Sonification is the process of translating information into sound. It is used in Geiger counter radiation detectors, which emit clicks in the presence of high-energy particles. It’s not typically used to pick out patterns in information, but scientists in the Solar and Heliospheric Research Group are exploring its potential in that realm. They’re looking to Alexander to make it possible.
“Robert is giving us another research tool,” Raines said. “We’re used to looking at wiggly-line plots and graphs, but humans are very good at hearing things. We wonder if there’s a way to find things in the data that are difficult to see.”
Results of the research appear in the Astrophysical Journal.
— Nicole Casal Moore, News Service
U.S. economic woes ripple all the way to Latin America, U-M study shows
As employment opportunities have dried up for Latino immigrants in the United States, so has their ability to send financial assistance to chronically ill family members in their home countries, according to a U-M study published online last week ahead of print in the International Journal of Health Services.
“Remittance payments from relatives living in the United States are a major source of income for chronically ill people in Latin America,” says lead study author John D. Piette, professor of internal medicine at the Medical School, associate director for Global Health Technologies of the U-M Center for Global Health, and senior research scientist with the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare System.
“It may be hard to imagine causal linkages between a factory closing in Michigan or a pay cut for restaurant workers in Iowa and the health care of someone in rural Honduras. But the results of this study suggest that economic stresses in the United States ripple outward.”
In a 2009 survey of 624 chronically ill adults in poverty-stricken Honduras, investigators found that more than half reported relatives living outside of the country, and of that group, two thirds received remittances. Seventy-four percent of those receiving the support reported a decrease over the prior year, mostly due to job losses among relatives abroad.
Decreases in remittance payments averaged roughly $700 per year — a significant loss in a country where many families live on less than $200 per month.
Patients receiving reduced support from families overseas were less likely to visit a hospital for a health emergency and were more likely to take less of their medications than prescribed because of financial strain.
The study’s findings reflect U.S. employment data. Latino immigrants have been especially hard-hit during the nation’s financial crisis, partly due to major job losses in housing construction, which is a leading source of employment for them.
Additional authors are Dr. Milton O. Mendoza-Avelares, Laura Chess, Evan C. Milton, Dr. Armando Matiz Reyes and Dr. Joel Rodriguez-Saldana.
— Beata Mostafavi, UMHS Public Relations
Decade-long study raises new questions about antibiotic use for cystic fibrosis
When it comes to treating cystic fibrosis, the current standard of aggressive antibiotic treatments may not always be the best answer, a decade-long study led by U-M researchers found.
Traditionally, bacteria-blasting antibiotics are used to suppress infection in CF patients’ lungs to the lowest level possible, but maintaining a diversity of bacterial communities may help some patients stay healthy longer, says the study’s senior author, Dr. John J. LiPuma.
The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The conventional wisdom has been that as patients with CF age and become sicker, as their lung disease progresses, more and more bacteria move in,” says LiPuma, the James L. Wilson, M.D., Research Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases at the Medical School. “But our study — which was the first to examine the bacterial communities in CF patients’ lungs over a long period of time — indicates that’s not what happens.”
Instead, aggressive use of antibiotics — rather than a patient’s age or disease progression — is responsible for lowering the diversity of lung bacteria, leading to infections that become increasingly hard to treat. A diverse community of bacteria may encourage competition that keeps the most virulent strains in check, the researchers found.
“What we normally do is essentially carpet bombing with antibiotics,” says LiPuma, who also is an associate chair of the Department of Pediatrics. “However, what we found is that over time this ultimately helps treatment-resistant bacteria by getting rid of their competition.”
LiPuma says the results may mark a first step toward developing new therapeutic approaches, such as more narrowly tailored use of antibiotics or even a probiotic approach.
Additional U-M authors are Jiangchao Zhao, Patrick D. Schloss, Linda M. Kalikin, Lisa A. Carmody, Bridget K. Foster, James D. Cavalcoli, Susan Murray, Jun Z. Li and Vincent B. Young.
— Ian Demsky, UMHS Public Relations
