How do you pay attention? What do you pay attention to? Can you direct your attention? Do you sometimes feel like a slave to your attention orientation? Monotropism is a theory around attention that many autistic people, including myself, resonate with. It describes both our strengths and our weaknesses. Before I read the original paper proposing this theory, I felt it made sense of practically everything in terms of how my attention plays out. However, after reading the full paper and further researching, I realised it didn’t even touch the sides. This is a video about that.
In this video, I discuss my scepticism of stem cell treatments for multiple sclerosis. I explain why it would be very difficult for stem cells to get to the site of injury and remyelinate. At the end of the video, I offer hope for future improvements.
Penn State researchers may have uncovered another layer of complexity in the mystery of how diet impacts ageing. A new study led by researchers in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development examined how caloric restriction affected a person’s telomeres—sections of genetic bases that function like protective caps at the ends of chromosomes.
The team published their results in Aging Cell. Analyzing data from a two-year study of caloric restriction in humans, the researchers found that people who restricted their calories lost telomeres at different rates than the control group—even though both groups ended the study with telomeres of roughly the same length. Previous research has shown that restricting calories by 20% to 60% has been shown to promote longer life in many animals.
Over the course of human life, every time a person’s cells replicate, some telomeres are lost when chromosomes are copied to the new cell. When this happens, the overall length of the cell’s telomeres becomes shorter. After cells replicate enough times, the protective cap of telomeres completely dissipates. Then, the genetic information in the chromosome can become damaged, preventing the cell’s future reproduction or proper function. A cell with longer telomeres is functionally younger than a cell with short telomeres, meaning that two people with the same chronological age could have different biological ages depending on the length of their telomeres.
Typical aging, stress, illness, genetics, diet and more can all influence how often cells replicate and how much length the telomeres retain, according to Idan Shalev, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. Shalev led the researchers who analyzed genetic samples from the national CALERIE study — the first randomized clinical trial of human calorie restriction. Shalev and his team sought to understand the effect of caloric restriction on telomere length in people. Because telomere length reflects how quickly or slowly a person’s cells are aging, examining telomere length could allow scientists to identify one way in which caloric restriction may slow aging in humans.
“There are many reasons why caloric restriction may extend human lifespans, and the topic is still being studied,” said Waylon Hastings, who earned his doctorate in biobehavioral health at Penn State in 2020 and was lead author of this study. “One primary mechanism through which life is extended relates to metabolism in a cell. When energy is consumed within a cell, waste products from that process cause oxidative stress that can damage DNA and otherwise break down the cell. When a person’s cells consume less energy due to caloric restriction, however, there are fewer waste products, and the cell does not break down as quickly.”
The researchers tested the telomere length of 175 research participants using data from the start of the CALERIE study, one year into the study and the end of the study after 24 months of caloric restriction. Approximately two-thirds of study participants participated in caloric restriction, while one-third served as a control group.
During the study, results showed that telomere loss changed trajectories. Over the first year, participants who were restricting caloric intake lost weight, and they lost telomeres more rapidly than the control group. After a year, the weight of participants on caloric restriction was stabilized, and caloric restriction continued for another year. During the second year of the study, participants on caloric restriction lost telomeres more slowly than the control group. At the end of two years, the two groups had converged, and the telomere lengths of the two groups was not statistically different.
“This research shows the complexity of how caloric restriction affects telomere loss,” Shalev said. “We hypothesized that telomere loss would be slower among people on caloric restriction. Instead, we found that people on caloric restriction lost telomeres more rapidly at first and then more slowly after their weight stabilized.”
Shalev said the results raised a lot of important questions. For example, what would have happened to telomere length if data had been collected for another year? Study participants are scheduled for data collection at a 10-year follow-up, and Shalev said that he was eager to analyze those data when they become available.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an insidious disease. Patients suffer because their immune system is attacking their nerve fibres, inhibiting the transmission of nerve signals. People with MS experience mild to severe impairment of their motor function and sensory perception in a variety of ways. These impairments disrupt their daily activities and reduce their overall quality of life. As individual as the symptoms and progression of the disease are, so too is how it is managed. To monitor the disease progression and be able to recommend effective treatments, physicians ask their patients regularly to describe their symptoms, such as fatigue.
Going off memory
Patients are thus faced with the tricky task of providing information about their state of health and what they have been capable of over the past few weeks and even months from memory. The data gathered this way can be inaccurate and incomplete because patients might misremember details or tailor their responses to social expectations. And since these responses significantly impact how the progression of the disease is recorded, it could be mismanaged.
“Physicians would benefit from having access to reliable, frequent and long-term measurements of patients’ health parameters that give an accurate and comprehensive view of their state of health,” explains Shkurta Gashi. She is the lead author of a new study and postdoc in the groups led by ETH Professors Christian Holz and Gunnar Rätsch at the Department of Computer Science, as well as a fellow of the ETH AI Center.
Together with colleagues from ETH Zurich, the University Hospital Zurich, and the University of Zurich, Gashi has shown that fitness trackers (like your Fitbit) and smartphones can provide this kind of reliable long-term data with a high temporal resolution. Their study was published in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine.
Digital markers for MS
The researchers recruited a group of volunteers – 55 with MS and a further 24 serving as control subjects – and provided each person with a fitness tracking armband. Over the course of two weeks, the researchers collected data from these wearable devices as well as from participants’ smartphones. They then performed statistical tests and a machine learning analysis of this data to identify reliable and clinically useful information.
What proved particularly meaningful was the data on physical activity and heart rate, which was collected from participants’ wearable devices. The higher the participants’ disease severity and fatigue levels, the lower their physical activity and heart rate variability. Compared to the controls, MS patients took fewer steps per day, engaged in an overall lower level of physical activity and registered more consistent intervals between heartbeats.
How often people used their smartphone also delivered important information about their disease severity and fatigue levels: the less often a study participant used their phone, the greater their level of disability and the more severe their level of fatigue. The researchers gained insights into motor function through a game-like smartphone test. Developed at ETH a few years ago, this test requires the user to tap the screen as quickly as possible to make a virtual person move as fast as possible. Monitoring how fast a person taps and how their tapping frequency changes over time allows the researchers to conclude their motor skills and physical fatigue.
“Altogether, the combination of data from the fitness tracker and smartphone lets us distinguish between healthy participants and those with MS with a high degree of accuracy,” Gashi says. “Combining information related to several aspects of the disease, including physiological, behavioural, motor performance and sleep information, is crucial for more effective and accurate monitoring of the disease.”
Reliable approach
This new approach gives MS sufferers a straightforward way of collecting reliable and clinically useful long-term data as they go about their day-to-day lives. The researchers expect that this type of data can lead to better treatments and more effective disease management techniques: more comprehensive, precise and reliable data helps experts make better decisions and possibly even propose effective treatments sooner than before. What’s more, evaluating this patient data lets the experts verify the effectiveness of different treatments.
The researchers have now made their data set available to other scientists. They also point out the need for a larger study and more data to develop reliable and generalizable models for automatic evaluation. In the future, such models could enable MS patients to experience a significant improvement in their lives thanks to data from fitness trackers and smartphones.
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