A new supplemental issue of The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences presents new measures, methods, and data collected during Round 4 (2021 to 2023) of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) — with a focus on cognition and how researchers adapted to working with participants as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

About The Study: The results of this study suggest that mRNA COVID-19 vaccination may be a protective factor against post–COVID-19 condition in children following SARS-CoV-2 infection. These findings suggest benefits of COVID-19 vaccination beyond those associated with protection against acute COVID-19 and may encourage increased pediatric uptake.

About The Study: This cohort study found no increase in sudden cardiac arrest/sudden cardiac death in young competitive athletes in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that reports asserting otherwise were overestimating the cardiovascular risk of COVID-19 infection, vaccination, and myocarditis. Many athlete cases shown in social media video montages occurred before the pandemic yet claimed COVID-19 infection or vaccination raised the risk of sudden cardiac arrest/sudden cardiac death.

Researchers at the University of Kansas conducted a study in which they gauged respondents' attitudes about COVID-19 vaccines. They then showed them media content designed to lead to feelings of anger or embarrassment. They found people preferred discussing vaccines with an AI chatbot when they felt embarrassed, but preferred talking to a human when they were angry. The study, which used eye-tracking technology, helps illustrate that health communicators and marketers should take care to use tech like AI in a way that people like to most effectively reach people, researchers argue.

Advances in technology, the evolution of patient- and-family centered care, and infection control challenges—evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic—highlight the possibilities and challenges of intensive care unit (ICU) design. For example, prior ICU design guidelines in 1995 and 2012 did not envision remote manipulation of ventilator settings or infusion pumps, or the unique problems presented by pandemic care. As a result, the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) sought to update the 2012 ICU design guidelines. Published in Critical Care Medicine, the journal of SCCM, these new guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations for clinicians, administrators, and healthcare architects to optimize design strategies in new or renovation projects.

U.S. outpatient prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin increased 2- to 10-fold above pre-pandemic rates, respectively, to treat COVID-19, despite strong evidence disproving their effectiveness.

A novel machine learning framework – Mal-ID – can decipher an individual’s immune system’s record of past infections and diseases, according to a new study, providing a powerful tool with the potential for diagnosing autoimmune disorders, viral infections, and vaccine responses with precision. Traditional clinical diagnostic methods for autoimmune diseases or other immunological pathologies tend to rely on a combination of physical examination, patient history, and various laboratory testing for cellular or molecular abnormalities – a lengthy process often complicated by initial misdiagnoses and ambiguous systems. These approaches make limited use of data from the patient’s individual adaptive immune system’s B cell receptors (BCRs) and T cell receptors (TCRs). In response to pathogens, vaccines, and other antigenic stimuli, BCR and TCR repertoires undergo changes through clonal expansion, somatic mutation, and selective reshaping of immune cell populations. Sequencing BCRs and TCRs could provide a comprehensive diagnostic tool, potentially enabling simultaneous detection of infectious, autoimmune, and immune-mediated diseases in a single test. However, the extent to which immune receptor repertoire sequencing alone can reliably and broadly classify diseases remains uncertain.

 

To address this, Maxim Zaslavsky and colleagues developed Mal-ID (MAchine Learning for Immunological Diagnosis) – a 3-model machine learning framework that analyzes immune receptor datasets to identify signatures of infectious and immunological diseases and vaccine responses in patients. Zaslavsky et al. trained Mal-ID on BCR and TCR data systematically collected from 593 individuals, including patients with COVID-19, HIV, and type-1 diabetes, as well as influenza vaccine recipients and healthy controls. According to the findings, Mal-ID effectively distinguished six distinct disease states in 550 paired BCR and TCR samples with a multiclass AUROC score of 0.986, indicating exceptionally high classification accuracy. This metric reflects the model’s ability to rank positive cases above negative ones across all disease comparisons. Although the model was successful in differentiating COVID-19, HIV, lupus, T1D, and healthy individuals – illustrating its potential as a powerful diagnostic tool – Zaslavsky et al. note that the approach still needs to be refined, using clinical information, before it could be used with confidence in clinical applications.

Paxlovid does not significantly reduce COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality among vaccinated older adults. The study questions the assumption that Paxlovid’s effectiveness in reducing COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in unvaccinated adults also applies to vaccinated adults.

International researchers warn that the ongoing mpox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the potential to spread across borders more rapidly. The mpox virus has mutated, and the new variant, clade 1b, has become more infectious.

The new post-pandemic national hospital occupancy average is 75% -- a full 11 percentage points higher than the pre-pandemic average, largely due to a reduction in staffed hospital beds. This puts the U.S. on track for a severe shortage of hospital beds by 2032 unless action is taken. 

The rise in human life expectancy has slowed down across Europe since 2011, according to research from the University of East Anglia (UEA).

A new study, published in The Lancet Public Health, reveals that the food we eat, physical inactivity and obesity are largely to blame, as well as the Covid pandemic.

Of all the countries studied, England experienced the biggest slowdown in life expectancy.

It means that rather than looking forward to living longer than our parents or grandparents, we may find that we are dying sooner.

The team says that in order to extend our old age, we need to prioritise healthier lifestyles in our younger years – with governments urged to invest in bold public health initiatives.