MRI Scans Could Be Used To Improve ADHD Diagnoses

New research suggests that using MRI scans could help medical professionals improve diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by making it easier to distinguish between different subtypes.

The study, published in the journal Radiology, uses brain scans to identify the three primary subtypes of ADHD. These are predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive/impulsive, and a combination of the two. Diagnoses are currently done based on symptoms, so the team hope that by using MRI scans, they can speed up the time it takes patients to access treatment.

"The main aim of the current study was to establish classification models that can assist the psychiatrist or clinical psychologist in diagnosing and subtyping of ADHD based on relevant radiomics signatures," co-author Dr Qiyong Gong of Sichuan University said in a statement.

The team at the West China Hospital where Dr Gong works looked at MRI scans of 83 children between the age of seven and 14 that were newly diagnosed (and so never treated) for ADHD. They also looked at the brain scans of 87 children of similar age and with no ADHD. The team found no difference in brain volume between the two groups or in the volume of gray and white matter.

The main differences were in the alteration of three brain regions, specifically the area around the left central sulcus, the left temporal lobe, and the bilateral cuneus. The scientists also looked at differences within the ADHD group and discovered features that allowed them to tell the difference between the three subtypes.

The research is a first step in a new field, but it appears promising. The team could tell if a child was suffering from ADHD with 74 percent accuracy, as well as determine if it was either inattentive ADHD or the combined subtype 80 percent of the time.

"This imaging-based classification model could be an objective adjunct to facilitate better clinical decision making," Dr Gong said. "Additionally, the present study adds to the developing field of psychoradiology, which seems primed to play a major clinical role in guiding diagnostic and treatment planning decisions in patients with psychiatric disorders."

The researchers plan to recruit more patients to improve their analysis. ADHD affects between 5 and 7 percent of children and adolescents worldwide.

We Could Be Reaching Our Limits For Athletic Achievement

There were just two running world records broken at the Rio Olympics in 2016: Wayde van Niekerk, from South Africa, in the men's 400m and Almaz Ayana, from Ethiopia, in the women’s 10,000m.

Then, at this year's athletics world championships in London, only one athlete succeeded in breaking a world-record. That honor went to Portugal's Ines Henriques for the women's 50km race walk. Although an extremely impressive personal achievement, the fact that it was a record-breaker is not exactly surprising seeing as it was the very first year the event was contested. (Organizers introduced the event to ensure gender equality. Men have been able to compete in the 50km race walk since 1932.)

This might not be a short-term dip in record-breaking moments, experts say. It could be the start of a new, long-term trend.

While improvements in training and nutrition in the 20th century saw athletic achievement improve in leaps and bounds, many scientists believe we're now extremely close to reaching the human body's full potential for endurance sports. This means that the era of record-breaking, at least as far as professional runners are concerned, could be coming to an end. To break the natural limits of human physiology and beat existing records, athletes may have to turn to artificial technology and doping.

This argument is backed up by research. In 2008 – before Usain Bolt smashed existing records for the men's 100m in 2009 – a study found that athletes have already accomplished 99 percent of what is physically possible according to human biology. 

Many factors are needed to make the "perfect" runner. Vincent Pialoux, deputy head of Lyon's Inter-University Laboratory of Human Movement Biology, identified "three major physiological and biomechanical criteria” in an article published by AFP. These are endurance, the ability to create energy using oxygen, and motor efficiency (an athlete’s ability to save energy).

"Of these three factors, if we take the best data measured in the laboratory on different athletes, we arrive at times well below the limits predicted" by models based on the evolution of performance, he said.

No professional athlete has ticked all the boxes so the "perfect" runner is, at least for the time being, strictly theoretical. Still, now that we are approaching our biological limitations, will we see more incidents of doping, stem-cell therapy, and genetically engineered athletes?

"The transformation of man into an animal capable of running a marathon in one hour and 40 minutes would take a long time, if it is possible, and there are an incalculable number of scientific limits," added performance expert Pierre Sallet from Athletes for Transparency.

And, as he pointed out, "there will always be one limit: keeping the person alive."

Global Powers Agree To Refrain From Fishing In Arctic Ocean For 16 Years To Conduct Research First

Here’s a nugget of good news for your weekend: Global powers have agreed to prohibit commercial fishing in the Arctic Ocean for at least 16 years. This moratorium will allow researchers to study the ecology of the high Arctic, which is thawing at an incredibly swift rate. 

The delegation includes nations with Arctic shorelines as well as non-Arctic countries. In all, nine nations and the European Union have agreed to the legally binding agreement. 

Once signed by the governments involved, the parties under its terms will be part of a joint scientific research program. This will include research into local fish populations and the effects of commercial activities in the region.

Those with Arctic shorelines include the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. Those with trawling fleets but no Arctic shoreline are China, Japan, South Korea, Iceland, and the European Union.

"This is a landmark agreement," said David Balton, the deputy assistant secretary for oceans and fisheries at the State Department, to The New York Times. "It’s a rare case of governments doing something in advance, to prevent a problem from arising."

This agreement comes despite tensions between many of these nations, most notably the United States and Russia. However, both these countries have much at stake too.

The deal means none of these nations can trawl the frigid waters for 16 years, or until there is a sustainable fishing plan in place. This protects a 2.8-million-square-kilometer (1.1-million-square-mile) zone above Alaska and Chukotka.

"In the future if fish stocks are plentiful enough to support a commercial fishery there, they will be part of the management system and presumably their vessels will have the opportunity to fish for those stocks," Balton told Reuters.

The involvement of the United States is perhaps a tad surprising, considering President Trump’s climate change doubts. However, the US had already agreed to a moratorium in 2015. That had little impact, however, if the other nations did not also participate in the deal.

This agreement is much-needed: The Arctic Ocean was once an impenetrable block of ice, but as breaks in the sea ice open up due to global warming, opportunities for shipping routes are also becoming a possibility. Compared to other regions in the world, parts of the Arctic are warming twice as fast. 

This rapid loss of sea ice is particularly noticeable during the summer when as much as 40 percent of the central Arctic Ocean has open water.

Scott Highleyman, an official at the Ocean Conservancy, told Reuters: “This precautionary action recognizes both the pace of change in the Arctic due to climate change as well as the tradition of Arctic cooperation across international boundaries.”

The deal will be automatically renewed every five years unless one of the parties objects or they all come to a resolution.

Almost All Global Cholera Epidemics During The Past 50 Years Can Be Traced Back To One Place

Cholera is still very much a modern disease, infecting millions and causing the deaths of close to 100,000 people around the globe each year. Caused by a bacteria, it now seems that nearly all of the explosive epidemics seen within the last 50 years have originated from one region: Asia.  

This astonishing and potentially groundbreaking discovery has been reported in two papers published this week in Science, one of which focused on the cholera epidemics that have struck the Americas, and another that looked at those which have burned through Africa. From sequencing and then comparing the genomes of over a thousand samples of the disease, it seems the road leads all the way back to the Far East.

This is a fascinating finding for a number of reasons. Since the 1800s there have been seven cholera pandemics, with the current pandemic having started in the 1960s. It is caused by a single lineage of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae known as 7PET. This pandemic has led to various epidemics, with particularly large ones occurring in South America and Africa.

The first epidemic from this most recent spread in Africa sprung up in the 1970s, while in South America there were two; one started in Peru in 1991, while another was identified in Haiti in 2010. There has been a long-running, and often vitriolic debate over where these epidemics originated, with some arguing that in certain regions of Africa, the V. cholerae is endemic, surviving in reservoirs in the environment for years before rearing its head and starting a new epidemic.

But this research shows that this theory is unlikely to be completely accurate. While it is true that some strains of cholera are indeed endemic, the studies found that those which cause the massive epidemics that spread quickly and kill thousands are all members of the 7PET lineage, and so all originated in Asia.

“Our results show that multiple new versions of 7PET bacteria have entered Africa since the 1970s,” explained François-Xavier Weill, who led the African research. “Once introduced, cholera outbreaks follow similar paths when spreading across that continent. The results give us a sense of where we can target specific regions of Africa for improved surveillance and control.”

But not only that, it means that when a cholera outbreak occurs, researchers can first test to see if it is 7PET, and if it is, measures can be stepped up to contain the potential new epidemic. It also means that the complete eradication of cholera in places like Africa is absolutely achievable, which is no doubt going to be welcome news to the World Health Organization, which plans on cutting cholera deaths by 90 percent by 2030.

Sugar Industry Buried Evidence Of Links To Cancer And Heart Disease For Half A Century

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we craved energy-dense foods packed with salts, fats, and sugars because they ensured our survival. Nowadays, those in wealthy nations have easy access to a cornucopia of treats, and it’s one of the driving causes of obesity, itself linked to a plethora of health afflictions.

The US government has only recently updated its health guidelines to advise people to cut out a lot of sugar from their diets, but as highlighted in two recent studies, the sugar industry has been aware of its dangers for at least half a century.

“The sugar industry did not disclose evidence of harm from animal studies that would have (1) strengthened the case that the coronary heart disease risk of sucrose is greater than starch and (2) caused sucrose to be scrutinized as a potential carcinogen,” the team wrote in their paper.

Today, the trade association for the sugar industry in the US is known as the Sugar Association, but back in the 1960s, it was the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF). Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco have been digging through old records and, over the last few years, have uncovered evidence of a cover-up by the SRF of their own research that put them in a bad light.

As reported last year in JAMA Internal Medicine, the first study, funded by the SRF in secret, was published back in 1967. Using statistical techniques that reviewers would now say heavily biased the data, the paper discounted evidence linking sugar consumption to the levels of lipids (fats) within the blood – which in turn was linked to heart disease.

This study happened to appear at a time when that exact link was being debated by scientists across the world, and it sought to muddy the waters. The link today is absolutely clear and uncontroversial.

As has just been revealed in PLOS Biology, a second peculiar research project has been found. Carried out between 1967 and 1971 under the name Project 259, the SRF was assessing how sugar intake affected the digestive systems of rats.

After finding that there was a link to bladder cancer, the SRF terminated the project’s funding shortly before it was due to be completed. The results were never published.

It’s worth remembering that plenty of industry research is often kept behind closed doors. Major studies by tobacco companies and fossil fuel companies are often published behind a prohibitively expensive paywall or without fanfare, so not everyone can easily see them.

Even when the research lines up with what independent scientists have found, the PR messages the companies espouse are often in direct conflict with the studies. We’re not saying that all industries are involved in such behaviors, but it does seem like those selling sugar aren’t exactly being very open.

For their part, the researchers make a direct comparison between what is essentially Big Tobacco and Big Sugar.

“The tobacco industry also has a long history of conducting research on the health effects of its products that is often decades ahead of the general scientific community and not publishing results that do not support its agenda,” they noted.

“This paper provides empirical data suggesting that the sugar industry has a similar history of conducting, but not publishing studies with results that are counter to its commercial interests.”

For its part, the Sugar Association has released a statement deriding the new PLOS Biology study – one which claims that the sugar industry has always had a “commitment to transparency”.

Edited Blood Stem Cells Reverse Type-1 Diabetes In Mice

As an autoimmune disease, type-1 diabetes is caused by the body’s own immune system attacking the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. This has led to attempts to “reboot” the immune system in patients, but has only been met with partial success.

Now researchers say they have found out why these earlier attempts may have failed and, more impressively, how it can be fixed – even reversing type-1 diabetes in mouse models.

They found that the faulty immune system in people with type-1 diabetes failed to make a specific protein called PD-L1, and that this molecule has a strong anti-inflammatory effect when it comes to the condition. By taking the blood stem cells and engineering them to produce PD-L1, they showed that it can cure the autoimmune reaction in human and mouse cells in the lab, and in some cases reverse it in living mice.

“Blood stem cells have immune-regulatory abilities, but it appears that in mice and humans with diabetes, these abilities are impaired,” explains lead author Paolo Fiorina, from Boston Children's Division of Nephrology, in a statement. “We found that in diabetes, blood stem cells are defective, promoting inflammation and possibly leading to the onset of disease.”

It was previously thought that if doctors could reset the immune system of patients with type-1 diabetes, it could cure them. This process involved taking blood stem cells from a patient and culturing them, before wiping out the immune system. The stem cells that were harvested are then reinfused into the bones of the patient and the immune system rebuilt.

But this latest work, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that the condition might be caused – at least in part – by these blood stem cells that lack the ability to produce this certain molecule. This may explain why resetting the immune system doesn’t always work, because the stem cells that are harvested and then reinfused still have this fault.

It also provides a possible way to treat the condition. The researchers took some stem cells and, using a modified virus, inserted the missing bit of DNA that codes for PD-L1 into the cells. These were then injected back into mice with type-1 diabetes. In most cases, the treatment held off the condition in the short term, and in about a third of the murine models, the condition was reversed for their entire lifespan.

The next move is to look at how long this reversal lasts for and why it was only maintained over the lifespan of one-third of the mice. They also need to uncover how often the treatment would need to be given if extended to humans.

A Lost River Made Possible One Of The First Great Civilizations

The Indus Valley Civilization was among the pioneers of Bronze Age technology, its advances in metallurgy and measurement influencing cultures across Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Yet archaeologists have been puzzled by one feature: many of the civilization’s greatest cities lacked a nearby permanent water flow to meet their needs. The dating of an old riverbed demonstrates much of the area really did flourish without a great river.

Even today, the vast majority of the world's cities lie on sources of fresh water. Urban areas that outgrow the rivers that once fed them rely on great feats of engineering to bring water from neighboring valleys. How, then, could some of the largest settlements in the world 4,600-3,900 years ago have sat between the Ganges and Indus river systems, not close enough to either to survive?

In the 19th century, geographers discovered that the glacial-fed permanent Sutlej River once ran past several of these great metropolises. Case solved? Not quite. A paper in Nature Communications reports that dating of the sediments in Sutlej's former and current routes show the major tributary of the Indus had taken its current course by 8,000 years ago, long before these sites became substantial settlements.

When populations eventually congregated along the old riverbed (paleochannel), any water that flowed was seasonal – a product of the monsoon. Exactly how people managed to collect enough water to support a civilization through the dry season remains a mystery, particularly since there is no evidence of major dams. Groundwater left over from the era when the Sutlej flowed through the valley may have been a factor.

However, senior author Professor Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London argues the Sutlej's absence would have had its advantages. The intact rivers of the region are subject to devastating floods, frequent enough to have threatened cities. Even in a rainy year, however, the temporary flow through the paleochannel was probably insufficient to threaten those on its banks.

Where once it was thought the diversion of the Sutlej caused the abandonment of the population centers along its former banks, it now seems it was this redirection that made its former course so suitable for cities.

In the soft soils of deltas, rivers can constantly change their course, but usually fairly subtly. On the other hand, landslides or the dramatic collapse of an upstream riverbank can occasionally trigger major changes in a river's route. In 2008, the breaking of a beach of a levee of the Kosi River, northern India, caused the entire waterway to re-route 60 kilometers (40 miles) eastwards. Often, as in the Kosi River's case, such changes cause rivers to return to a route they had followed once