Children who were infected with COVID-19 show a substantially higher risk of developing type 1 diabetes (T1D), according to a new study that analyzed electronic health records of more than 1 million patients ages 18 and younger.

A Providence study released online today in the Journal of the American Medical Association sheds new light on the added benefit of a booster dose of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine among previously vaccinated individuals.

About The Study: In a large U.S. population, COVID-19 mRNA boosters were associated with decreased odds of hospitalization compared with the mRNA vaccine primary series alone, with the magnitude of the association reduced with more time since the booster dose.

About The Study: New type 1 diabetes diagnoses were more likely to occur among pediatric patients with prior COVID-19 than among those with other respiratory infections in this study, but researchers acknowledge study limitations that include the observational and retrospective design of the electronic health record analysis and the possibility that additional unidentified factors accounted for the association.

About The Study: In 348 California hospitals, hospital financial performance was highly variable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Losses were reduced by COVID-19 relief funding and strong equities market performance starting in the second quarter of 2020. Non–safety net hospitals maintained positive operating margins throughout the pandemic, while safety-net hospitals experienced large losses. Between the first quarter of 2020 and the second quarter of 2021, California safety-net hospitals’ net operating losses were more than $3.2 billion.

A research team led by Matthias Preusser from MedUni Vienna's Division of Oncology had already demonstrated that cancer patients benefit from a third vaccination to protect them against COVID. A recent study now also supports fourth vaccination for this vulnerable group. However, passive immunisation by administering an antibody combination to cancer patients does not seem to provide adequate protection. The study has now been published in the top journal "JAMA Oncology".

A new study has investigated the potential of proteins in common foods to elicit protection against SARS-CoV-2. The researchers found that antibodies that bind SARS-CoV-2 can also bind to proteins in certain foods, viruses, vaccines, and common bacteria. The results suggest that exposure to such agents may confer some protective immunity to Covid-19, but further research is needed to confirm this.

Mobile sensing has shown its power in the pervasive and effective monitoring of COVID-19 in varying population scales and time duration, according to a study published in Health Data Science, a Science Partner Journal.

New research, being presented at this year’s European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) Annual Meeting in Stockholm, Sweden (19-23 Sept), found that testing positive for SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—is associated with an increased incidence of new-onset type 1 diabetes in people aged younger than 35 years, but this is restricted to the first month after infection, and is more likely explained by increased testing around the time of diabetes diagnosis and COVID-19 precipitating diabetes in those already developing it.

Developing life-saving medicines can take billions of dollars and decades of time, but University of Central Florida researchers are aiming to speed up this process with a new artificial intelligence-based drug screening process they’ve developed. Using a method that models drug and target protein interactions using natural language processing techniques, the researchers achieved up to 97% accuracy in identifying promising drug candidates. The results were published recently in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics.

Vaccine boosters and breakthrough infections following vaccination both provide a substantial and potentially pandemic-breaking immunity against COVID-19, according to new laboratory research from Oregon Health & Science University.

A study by Stanford Medicine investigators shows that SARS-CoV-2 can infect human fat tissue. This phenomenon was seen in laboratory experiments conducted on fat tissue excised from patients undergoing bariatric and cardiac surgeries, and later infected in a laboratory dish with SARS-CoV-2. It was further confirmed in autopsy samples from deceased COVID-19 patients.