Health + Behavior - UCLA

A mother mouse needs a diverse gut microbiome to form a healthy placenta

Holly Ober — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 22:30:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Pregnant mice with no gut microbiome or diminished microbiomes aren’t able to form the healthy placentas necessary for proper fetal development.
UCLA scientists found that supplementing these mice with short-chain fatty acids — byproducts of microbe metabolism — promoted healthy placental development.
The researchers hope the findings could one day inform new treatment strategies for pregnant women and their developing fetuses.

The bacteria found naturally in the digestive tract do a lot more than help digest food.

Scientists have established that these microbial communities are also involved with the immune system and play a role in mental health. Now, they can add helping grow a healthy placenta during pregnancy to the list of unexpected ways the gut microbiome influences health and well-being.

New research led by UCLA scientists and published today in the journal Science Advances shows that mice with depleted gut microbiomes had smaller placentas than normal mice and that the network of blood vessels between the placenta and the fetus was also less developed.

Either of these conditions could deprive a fetus of nutrients, oxygen and other things it needs to grow. But when malnourished pregnant mice that had been fed low-protein diets and had diminished microbiomes were supplemented with short-chain fatty acids, which are produced by gut microbes, their placentas grew to normal size, the researchers said.

The new findings add to mounting evidence that in addition to its many other activities, the gut microbiome plays a role in the formation of new blood vessels, a process known as angiogenesis. They also show that byproducts of microbe metabolism known as metabolites play key roles in feto-placental development.

“The gut microbiome affects many aspects of host physiology, and more and more evidence is suggesting that it begins to exert its influence even during prenatal life,” said senior author Elaine Hsiao, a UCLA associate professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics.

The new research builds on previous laboratory work by Hsiao demonstrating the influence of the gut microbiome on the development of the fetal nervous system. Emerging research is revealing that the gut microbiome also influences human fetal development, but just how this happens is not well understood.

To learn how the vast colonies of bacteria that populate the gut affect something as seemingly distant and separate as the maternal-fetal environment, Geoffrey Pronovost, a UCLA doctoral student in Hsiao’s lab, led a team that looked at two groups of female mice: one that had been raised to have no microbiome and an adult group to which they gave broad-spectrum antibiotics to diminish their microbial population. They then then mated each of these groups with male mice to study placental development.

Pronovost and Hsiao suspected that microbial metabolites circulating in the bloodstream might be the missing link.

Compared with a control group of mice with normal microbiomes, these mice had smaller placentas with less-developed networks of placental blood vessels, the vasculature that facilitates the exchange of blood between mother and fetus. But the maternal microbiome’s importance did not stop at vasculature. Fetuses of microbiome-depleted mothers also had lower levels of 27 different metabolites and higher levels of 14 circulating in their blood.

“This added weight to our initial hypothesis that byproducts made by specific gut bacteria might be acting systemically to regulate feto-placental development and motivated the deeper dive in our study to identify the molecules involved,” Pronovost said.

However, injections of some of the metabolites found in low levels in the mice did not improve placental or fetal growth.

Since those metabolites didn’t seem to be directly responsible for the underdeveloped placentas, the researchers turned their attention to another class of metabolites called short-chain fatty acids, which are produced by bacterial fermentation of carbohydrates and play several roles in metabolism and growth.

When they gave microbiome-deficient mothers drinking water supplemented with these fatty acids, their placentas grew, becoming equivalent in size to the control group’s placentas. The fatty acids also promoted placental growth in undernourished pregnant mice that had been fed a low-protein diet but still had diminished gut microbes

Although there are important differenes between mouse and human gestation, the researchers said it’s possible that similar results might one day be found in humans.

“I’m hopeful that these fundamental discoveries in mice could inspire more research that could one day inform new treatment strategies for expectant mothers and their developing babies,” said Hsiao.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

UCLA survey shows alarming increase in challenges to health of Californians

Vanessa Villafuerte — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 17:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Rising food insecurity and hate incidents are two of the many factors affecting the health of Californians, with major variations across socioeconomic and racial or ethnic groups.
Difficulty accessing health care means that many in the state do not receive the help they need.
Californians have continuing increases in mental health needs, with the need highest in the LGBTQ+ community.

High rates of food insecurity, hate incidents and difficulties accessing health care were at the forefront of issues affecting the health of Californians in 2022, according to the annual California Health Interview Survey, or CHIS, released today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

According to 2022 data from CHIS, the nation’s largest annual health survey on a single state, a growing number of low-income adults (those living below 200% of the federal poverty level) struggled to access nutritious and affordable food. In 2022, 44% of these low-income Californians were not able to afford enough food, up from 35.8% in 2020. The most significant increase in food insecurity between 2020 and 2022 occurred among low-income, working-age adults, with the figure jumping 11 percentage points among those ages 18–24, to 47.7%; 8.6 percentage points among those 25–39, to 51.4%; and 12.4 percentage points among those 40–64, to 48%.

Among racial or ethnic groups, Latino adults experienced the highest increase in food insecurity, with a 9.6 percentage point increase, to 47%. The highest overall rates of food insecurity in 2022 were seen among adults of two or more races and Black or African American adults, at 49.9% and 48.6%, respectively.

The 2022 CHIS also included new and expanded questions on experiences with hate crimes or incidents. While more than 1 in 9 adults in California, or 11.7%, said they had at some point been a victim of a hate crime or incident, the rate among Black or African American adults was 26.2% — four times as high as the figure for white adults, at 6.3%. The figure was 17.4% for adults who identify as two or more races, 15.6% for Asian adults and 13.5% for Latino adults.

“Our 2022 data reveal a complex health landscape — deepening food insecurity, hate incidents, challenges in accessing health care and an ongoing mental health crisis — that paints a stark picture of the challenges faced by California’s large and diverse population,” said Ninez Ponce, center director and the survey’s principal investigator. “We call on community organizations and advocates, legislators and policymakers to explore the new data and address these pressing issues.”

A bright spot in the data was that 94.8% of respondents had health insurance — the highest rate ever recorded by CHIS. Latino adults had the lowest rate of health coverage but the most significant increase in coverage between 2021 and 2022, from 86.0% to 89.4%.

However, difficulty accessing care was a concern among many survey respondents, with more than 1 in 5 California adults (22.4%) unable to get a doctor’s appointment within two days in 2022, up from 12.3% in 2020. Similarly, one-third of adults (33.3%) who needed mental health care in 2022 said difficulty getting an appointment was the reason they hadn’t received the help they needed, up from 24.4% in 2021.

CHIS has highlighted gaps and inequities in health and health care access for more than two decades. The latest survey, which included responses from 21,463 adults, 985 teens and 3,395 children, covered a wide range of health topics and topics that influence health — among them, access to and use of health care, health insurance, health conditions, health behaviors, mental health, housing, intimate partner violence, child care, caregiving, discrimination, climate change, firearm safety and gun violence, and community engagement.

Other findings from the 2022 CHIS:

A pattern of higher mental health needs

In 2022, about 1 in 6 adults (16.4%) reported serious psychological distress in the past year, similar to the rate in 2021 (17%), with both figures being higher than in 2019 (13%) and 2020 (12.2%).
The LGBTQ+ community had significantly higher rates of serious psychological distress, with 61.6% of transgender or gender-nonconforming adults, 46.9% of bisexual adults and 29.7% of gay, lesbian or homosexual adults experiencing distress, compared to 13.6% of straight or heterosexual adults and 15.8% of cisgender adults.
In both 2021 and 2022, nearly 1 in 5 adults said they had experienced suicide ideation within the past 12 months (19.1% and 18.9%, respectively), up from 1 in 8 (12.2%) in 2020.
Among adults who said they needed help for emotional/mental or alcohol/drug problems, 50.2% of those who identified as two or more races, 48.9% of Asian adults and 46.4% of Latinx adults reported seeking help but not receiving treatment.

Differences in COVID-19 vaccination status and views

Californians with the lowest incomes (0–99% of the federal poverty level) were less likely to be vaccinated than those with the highest incomes (300% of the FPL and above), at 21.1% and 8.6%, respectively.
Among teens who were partially vaccinated or not vaccinated for COVID-19, 21% said the reason was that their parents didn’t want them to get the vaccine, and 27.6% said it was because they didn’t think the vaccine was necessary.
41.8% of white respondents who were not fully vaccinated said they thought the vaccine was unnecessary. This percentage was about double the rates among other races and ethnicities, with 20.8% of Latino, 20.5% of Black or African American and 24.1% of Asian Californians giving this as the reason for not being fully vaccinated.
Nearly 1 in 3 California adults (30.7%) who had had COVID-19 said they had experienced symptoms for two months or longer (long COVID). Latino adults (38.4%) had significantly higher rates of long COVID, compared with white adults (24.1%).

“While the state of California is often seen as a leader in striving toward health equity, the 2022 data highlight some of the ongoing disparities impacting Californians’ overall well-being,” said Todd Hughes, director of the survey. “This isn’t just a collection of numbers. This is a story of Californians — their challenges, their fears and their needs. This is the key to shaping a brighter, healthier future for all.”

Use of telehealth services rose during the pandemic and remains high

Vanessa Villafuerte — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 17:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

The use of telehealth in California quadrupled between 2018 and 2022.
People who are white, older, have health insurance or speak only English at home are the largest groups using telehealth.
Improving access to telehealth services across all sociodemographic groups can lessen health care inequities in the state, researchers say.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced restrictions and shutdowns, health care providers turned to telehealth. The result was a surge in the use of telehealth by Californians to access care, according to a new study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

The study found that in 2022, 46.7% of adults had used telehealth in the past year — slightly less than the 49% in 2021 but still nearly quadruple the approximately 12% who used such services in 2018, before the pandemic.

Telehealth services range from talking to health care providers over the phone or by video and using remote health-monitoring devices tracked by providers to

sending and receiving health-related messages over secure digital networks.

“Health care delivery services have evolved dramatically as a result of the pandemic,” said Sean Tan, a senior public administration analyst at the center. “Telehealth is transforming the health care delivery landscape and creating opportunities for hybrid models of health care.”

Despite the continued popularity of telehealth, researchers discovered wide disparities in its use across subpopulations in California. For instance, Latino and Asian adults were less likely than white adults to use telehealth (41.5% and 45.2%, respectively, vs. 51.3%).

Among the study’s other findings:

The proportion of adults who had health insurance and used telehealth was twice that of adults without health insurance (48.4% vs. 21.0%).
Older adults were more likely than young adults to use telehealth: More than half of those 65 and older (54.5%) used telehealth, compared with 35.8% of those between the ages of 18 and 26.
The main reasons adults used telehealth were for follow-ups or to access test or procedure results (42.7%); flu, cold, allergies or infections (20.4%); chronic conditions such as arthritis, joint or muscle pain (18.0%); mental or emotional health problems (17.5%); and general disease management (15.9%).
Adults in rural areas were less likely to use telehealth than those living in urban areas (41.2% vs. 47.3%).
More than half of adults (51.2%) who spoke only English at home used telehealth, compared with adults who spoke Spanish (38.3%), Chinese (38.5%), Vietnamese (33.0%), English and Spanish (39.9%), or English and Chinese (42.9%) in the home.

“Access to telehealth could be an effective way to lessen the inequities we have frequently seen in health care systems, especially prior to the pandemic,” said Ninez A. Ponce, director of the center and principal investigator for the California Health Interview Survey. “However, gaps in access to care still exist among certain sociodemographic populations, and California policymakers should focus on providing equitable access to these services.”

Learning critical Black history can change white perspectives on racism in health care

Elizabeth Kivowitz — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:30:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Two-thirds of white Americans believe that Black Americans do not experience racism or racial inequities in health care.
UCLA psychologists exposed white study participants to the well-documented history of medical-related mistreatment of Black Americans.
Subsequently, white participants were more likely to adopt a new perspective and support policies aimed at reducing racial disparities in health care.

Being exposed to some of the many historical incidences of anti-Black racism in American health care can contribute to white peoples’ recognition of health disparities currently faced by Black Americans and lead to their support for policies that aim to create more equitable health outcomes, according to UCLA psychologists.

Their findings are published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Poorer health outcomes for Black Americans, compared with white Americans, are well-documented in many areas, including infant mortality, life expectancy, hypertension, heart disease and breast cancer mortality. However, 67% of white Americans say they do not believe that racism exists for Black Americans in the health care system.

The researchers sought to determine whether white Americans would attempt to understand racial inequities from the perspective of Black Americans after being exposed to history lessons about Black experiences in health care and whether such “perspective-taking” would lead to greater recognition of racism in health care.

Kimberly Martin, who conducted the research as a UCLA doctoral student in social and health psychology, and Kerri Johnson, a UCLA professor of social psychology and communication, recruited 1,853 white participants online for two studies.

In the first, the researchers exposed roughly 400 participants to a “critical Black history” lesson that consisted of photographs and captions illustrating health care injustices experienced by Black Americans from the 1800s to the present. The researchers instructed half of them to try to imagine the “feelings, thoughts and experiences” of the Black person who had been mistreated in history, while the other half were simply told to read the information. Afterward, participants were asked questions about how much they tried to “perspective-take” with Black people and about their thoughts and acknowledgements of the existence of racism in American society.

The researchers found that people who reported higher perspective-taking were also more likely to recognize racism in the present day. The finding was similar whether the participant was instructed to try to take on the perspective of the Black person who had been mistreated in history, or whether they did so spontaneously, without being instructed to do so.

For the second study, about 1,400 participants were divided into three groups, with each group exposed to one of three Black history lessons. Participants in the “critical Black history” group were shown photographs and captions, as in the first study. One example told the story of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who in 1961 underwent what was to be a routine tumor-removal procedure during which her uterus was taken out by a white doctor without her consent. The caption also included the broader, systemic context of Hamer’s story, as doctors at that time were disproportionately performing hysterectomies on Black women without consent.

Other photographs in this lesson documented stories of harmful, unconsented-to and even fatal medical experimentation on Black people aimed at advancing medical research — experimentation that was supported by medical and broader national and government agencies.

A second group was exposed to a “celebratory Black history” lesson in which photographs and captions focused on the accomplishments of Black Americans in health care rather than episodes of systemic or individual racism and mistreatment. One photograph, for example, depicted Dr. Patricia Bath, the ophthalmologist who invented laser cataract surgery.

The third group — a control group — saw photographs of Black Americans from the 1800s to the present that included no critical or celebratory information.

After being exposed to the history lesson, participants were asked a series of questions about their level of perspective-taking, their recognition of racism and discrimination, and their support for policies that would reduce racism and health disparities in the U.S. health care system.

The researchers found that the spontaneous perspective-taking that occurred in the first study occurred in the second study after participants were exposed to the critical Black history lesson and was much more prevalent than when exposed to the celebratory Black history or the control lesson.

They also discovered that this led to a recognition among participants that there is individual and systemic racism in the present U.S. health care system, as well as to support for policies that promote equal access to health care for Black Americans and educate the public about the public health impacts of racism.

“The findings have far-reaching impacts toward creating an anti-racist society and a health care system that treats patients more equitably,” said Johnson, the study’s senior author.

Surprisingly, their research also showed that certain false biological stereotypes — such as the belief that Black people are more resistant to pain — persisted, regardless of which lesson participants were exposed to.

“There is overwhelming evidence of the existence of racism in health care and the persistence of stereotypes, but with our work, we aim to demonstrate that there could be ways to intervene, reduce discrimination and create more equitable health care outcomes,” said Martin, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at Yale University.

Martin’s research focuses on developing culturally relevant methods and interventions to reduce discrimination and to increase acknowledgment of and support for addressing racial inequities. One of the next steps in her work is to explore how to change the medical school curriculum and requirements for doctors in ways that will lead to better patient interactions, more referrals for needed screenings and treatments, better trustworthiness and, ultimately, a healthier, more equitable society.

Another key takeaway from the research for the field of social psychology and even more broadly is the value of teaching and learning of history, said Johnson, who noted that learning history promotes perspective-taking that is beneficial to society.

“Efforts to silence stories of oppression,” Martin said, “rob people of the opportunity to gain insights and perspective, particularly about oppressed people. Our evidence suggests that with the study of an accurate history of injustice comes increased perspective-taking and broader support for a more equitable, just society.”

Does this number make me look fat?

Holly Ober — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Football players sometimes choose jerseys with lower numbers thinking that they’ll look slimmer and faster. There’s a scientific basis for that belief, according to a new UCLA study.
In two experiments, volunteers consistently said that images of players in jerseys numbered 10 to 19 looked thinner than players in jerseys numbered 80 to 89, even when the bodies were the same size.
The finding suggests that people’s previously learned associations between numbers and sizes influence their perceptions of body size.

In 2019, an ESPN report explored the reasons so many football wide receivers prefer to wear jersey numbers between 10 and 19. The story found that many of the athletes simply believed the lower numbers made them look faster and slimmer than the higher numbers traditionally assigned to their position.

Ladan Shams, a UCLA professor of psychology and neuroscience, was quoted in the story and offered a psychological explanation for the phenomenon. But she emphasized that there was no scientific research on the topic.

Now there is.

A new UCLA study published in the journal PLOS One reveals that those wide receivers were onto something.

In two experiments, subjects consistently said that images of players in jerseys numbered from 10 to 19 looked thinner than those in jerseys numbered from 80 to 89, even when the body sizes were the same. The finding suggests that previously learned statistical associations between numbers and sizes influence the perception of body size.

“How we perceive the world is highly influenced by our prior knowledge,” said Shams, the paper’s senior author. “In our daily lives, numbers written on objects — on a bag of sugar in the supermarket or weights in the gym — usually represent the magnitude of the objects. The higher the number, the bigger or more massive the object generally is.

“Previous research has established that our brains are very good at detecting and storing statistical associations and regularities, unbeknownst to us, and those associations can shape future perception.”

Courtesy of Ladan Shams

Ladan Shams

A longtime NFL rule required wide receivers to wear uniform numbers between 80 and 89, but the league changed the restriction in 2004, opening the door for pass-catchers who preferred lower numbers on their uniforms. By 2019, when ESPN published its story, nearly 80% of wide receivers wore a jersey number between 10 and 19.

Shams is a specialist in the science of perception, and when her other work ground to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, she returned to the question about jersey numbers. With her research group, she devised an online study to test her suppositions about the popularity of lower numbers.

Respondents were shown computer-generated images of players in identical poses — but with different body sizes and skin and jersey colors — and were asked to judge their slenderness. Subjects saw each player twice — once each in jerseys with high and low numbers. In general, the players in jerseys numbered from 10 to 19 were perceived as thinner than players in jerseys numbered 80 to 89, regardless of their body size and their skin or jersey colors.

After pandemic restrictions eased, the researchers repeated the experiment in person.

This time, they addressed concerns that because the numeral 8 is wider than 1, simply the amount of jersey space occupied by numbers from 80 to 89 could make players look larger. So they chose number combinations that used the same numerals but varied only in which digit came first: 17 and 71, 18 and 81, 19 and 91.

In this second experiment, subjects still perceived the players with higher numbers to be huskier than players with lower numbers, although the effect was somewhat smaller than in the first iteration.

Shams said the results strongly support the hypothesis that when processing perception of body size, the brain leans on learned associations between numbers and objects’ size attributes. That finding is consistent with previous research showing that statistical learning is a fundamental and universal learning mechanism.

Multisensory Processing Lab/UCLA, PLOS One

Research subjects consistently said that images of players in jerseys numbered from 10 to 19 looked thinner than those in jerseys numbered from 80 to 89.

Those learned associations, Shams said, generally help the brain interpret sensory input — the pattern of light receptor responses in the eye, for example — because sensory input can be noisy, unreliable and ambiguous. The ability to perceive the world faster and more correctly is critical for survival, she said.

How viewers perceive football players’ body size likely has little effect on the athletes’ performance. But in other areas of life, such perceptual and cognitive biases can be more harmful — for example, when they influence judgment, decisions and behavior toward people or social groups, a phenomenon often referred to as implicit bias. If a group is frequently associated with negative qualities, others are much more likely to treat people in that group accordingly, whether they realize it or not.

“Our work highlights the importance of representation,” Shams said. “We need to see all kinds of people doing the full diversity of things people can do. We can use the statistical learning power of our brains to reduce implicit bias.”

Study could help explain why certain brain tumors don’t respond well to immunotherapy

Denise Heady — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 16:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Immunotherapy has been effective in treating certain types of cancer, including those that spread into the brain. But it has little effect in fighting glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer that originates in the brain.
UCLA-led research revealed that immune checkpoint blockade, a type of immunotherapy, triggers a process that fights tumors more effectively in cancers that spread to the brain than it does in glioblastoma.
The finding could help scientists develop strategies for more effective immunotherapy for treating brain cancers that originate in the brain, like glioblastoma.

A study led by researchers at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center sheds new light on why tumors that have spread to the brain from other parts of the body respond to immunotherapy while glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer that originates in the brain, does not.

In people with tumors that originated in other parts of the body but spread to the brain, treatment with a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade appears to elicit a significant increase in both active and exhausted T cells — signs that the T cells have been triggered to fight the cancer. The reason the same thing doesn't occur in people with glioblastoma is that anti-tumor immune responses are best initiated in draining lymph nodes outside of the brain, and that process does not occur very effectively in glioblastoma cases.

To date, immunotherapy has not been effective in treating glioblastoma, but it has been shown to slow or even eradicate other types of cancer, such as melanoma, which frequently metastasizes to the brain.

The new research, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could help improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy for people with brain tumors and it could suggest new paths in the effort to help develop more effective therapies.

“If we’re going to try to develop new therapies for solid tumors, like glioblastoma, which are not typically responsive, we need to understand the tumor types that are responsive, and learn the mechanisms by which that happens,” said the study’s senior author, Robert Prins, a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology and of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

The researchers studied the immune cells obtained from nine people with metastatic brain tumors who had been treated with immune checkpoint blockade — which works by harnessing the body’s immune system to destroy cancer cells — and compared their observations with immune cells taken from 19 patients with brain metastases that not been treated with immunotherapy.

They used a technique called single-cell RNA sequencing to examine the genetic material in both sets of samples, and then compared the data to previously published analyses of 25 recurrent glioblastoma tumors to better understand the effect the immunotherapy had on T cells.

“We really were trying to figure out which immune cells are changing in the more responsive tumors in order to better explain the higher response rate to the treatment,” said the study’s co-first author, Lu Sun, a project scientist in the Geffen School of Medicine’s neurosurgery department. “No study has comprehensively examined the differential effect of immune checkpoint blockade treatment on these two types of brain tumors before.”

In the tumors that had spread to the brain, the researchers saw that the T cells had specific characteristics associated with fighting tumors entering the brain, most likely due to a more effective priming step that occurs outside of the brain.

Before traveling to the brain, T cells are first activated in the lymph nodes. During this process, a type of immune cells called dendritic cells share information about the tumor to T cells so they can better attack the tumor. This priming process, however, doesn't work very effectively when doctors attempt to use immune checkpoint blockade for treating glioblastoma.

The researchers also found that a specific subgroup of those exhausted T cells was associated with longer overall survival in people whose cancer had metastasized to the brain.

“We found quite a significant difference between the two types of brain tumors and how they respond to immunotherapies,” said study author Dr. Won Kim, surgical director of UCLA Health’s brain metastasis program and a member of the Jonsson Cancer Center. “There was a tremendous number of T cell lymphocytes that were found within brain metastases following immunotherapy, and while the number of T cell lymphocytes also increased in glioblastoma patients, it wasn’t anywhere near the same extent.”

Prins, who is also a researcher at the Jonsson Cancer Center, said that finding “suggests that enhancing the activation and presentation of T cells by dendritic cells could be a potential treatment strategy.”

In future studies, the researchers plan to analyze data from a larger, more uniform group of people who were diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to the brain.

The study’s other co-first author is Jenny Kienzler, who was a UCLA fellow in neurosurgery when the research was conducted. Other UCLA authors are Jeremy Reynoso, Alexander Lee, Eileen Shiuan, Shanpeng Li, Jiyoon Kim, Lizhong Ding, Amber Monteleone, Geoffrey Owens, Dr. Richard Everson, David Nathanson, Dr. Timothy Cloughesy, Gang Li, Dr. Linda Liau and Willy Hugo.

The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health Specialized Programs of Research Excellence in Brain Cancer, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health National Center for Advancing Translational Science, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Brain Tumor Funder’s Collaborative and Cancer Research Institute.

Immunotherapy drug combo helps extend lives of people with metastatic melanoma

Denise Heady — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 18:52:00 GMT

A research team co-led by UCLA investigators has shown that an immunotherapy drug combination can be an effective second-line therapy for patients with an aggressive and deadly type of melanoma that is resistant to widely used immunotherapy drugs called PD-1 inhibitors.

In clinical trials, the investigators found that the combination therapy could extend the amount of time patients live without their cancer worsening, known as progression-free survival, and that it helps overcome their resistance to prior immunotherapies — which would allow more people to benefit from the treatment.

The study evaluated the use of the immunotherapy drugs ipilimumab and nivolumab against the current standard therapy of ipilimumab alone. The multicenter clinical trial was conducted by the SWOG Cancer Research Network, a group funded by the National Cancer Institute; the findings were reported in the journal Nature Medicine.

“The results are practice-changing,” said Dr. Antoni Ribas, the study’s senior author, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Tumor Immunology Program. “The combination approach should be the preferred drug regimen for people with cancer that has not responded to prior immunotherapy treatment.”

Read the full news release.

New study identifies genes linked to high production of key antibody

Wayne Lewis — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 15:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Researchers studying white blood cells identified an atlas of genes linked to high production and release of the most common type of antibody found in the human body, known as immunoglobulin G.
The finding could be a step toward new antibody-based treatments and improvements in the effectiveness of cell therapies.
The researchers used microscopic containers called nanovials, which were developed at UCLA, to capture the individual cells they studied.

A collaboration led by UCLA and the Seattle Children’s Research Institute has yielded new knowledge about the genes responsible for the production and release of immunoglobulin G, the most common type of antibody in the human body.

The finding has the potential to advance manufacturing of antibody-based therapies for diseases such as cancer and arthritis, as well as the development of medical treatments that rely on the production of antibodies.

Antibodies are a group of proteins that are crucial to the immune system. Immunoglobulin G, or IgG, stores memories of past infections and tags dangerous microbes to be eliminated by immune cells. Mothers’ IgG is also vital for their newborns’ immune defense.

Scientists have known for decades that a population of white blood cells, called plasma B cells, make IgG. Plasma B cells are highly efficient, producing more than 10,000 IgG molecules every second. But the molecular mechanisms that enable plasma cells to secrete antibodies into the bloodstream are still not fully understood.

In order to learn more about those mechanisms, the researchers performed an analysis that had never been done before: They captured thousands of single plasma B cells as well as their individual secretions, and then connected the amount of proteins each individual cell released to an atlas mapping tens of thousands of genes expressed by that same cell.

To collect the cells and their secretions, the researchers used microscopic, bowl-shaped hydrogel containers called nanovials, which were developed in prior UCLA research.

Their analysis found that genes involved with producing energy and eliminating abnormal proteins were even more important for high IgG secretion than the genes containing instructions for making the antibody itself. They also discovered that the presence of CD59, a gene that had not previously been linked to IgG secretion, is a better predictor of high-producing plasma cells than other genetic markers already associated with this cell type.

“These processes in cells are like an assembly line for making proteins, and there are lots of places where you could see bottlenecks,” said Dino Di Carlo, the Armond and Elena Hairapetian Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a co-corresponding author of the study. “Things have to be moving smoothly in sync across the cell. If a cell is making a lot of proteins, it’s using a lot of energy and needs a way to correct the proteins that get messed up.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications. Di Carlo, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, said the findings could not only advance fundamental understandings of biology but also could have applications in biomedicine.

For instance, knowing which genes are associated with higher secretion of an antibody could be used by pharmaceutical makers to engineer cells that secrete large volumes of the antibody. That knowledge could also be applied to an emerging strategy that introduces engineered cells directly to patients’ bodies, such as the potential cell therapies under development by University of Washington immunologist Richard James, a co-corresponding author of the paper.

The new way in which nanovials and a standard laboratory setup were used in the study also opens up new possibilities for understanding how the instructions contained in DNA are translated into the behaviors of cells.

Each nanovial contains molecules tailored to bind with proteins on the surface of the cells that the researchers are investigating, which enables the nanovial to capture a single cell at a time. Once that cell is immobilized and protected within the nanovial “bowl,” its secretions also accumulate and are attached to specific antibodies engineered to capture them.

In the study, the investigators trapped tens of thousands of plasma cells, along with the IgG they released, in nanovials with a diameter about one-third the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanovials were then run through an instrument to analyze each cell’s messenger RNA, or mRNA.

Every cell in an individual’s body carries the same blueprint written in DNA. So scientists detect which genes are active by looking at the mRNA, which translates those instructions so that each cell can build proteins that are specific to its functions.

“There are multiple layers of information in each cell,” Di Carlo said. “We’re able to link the final layer — the amount of proteins actually secreted that have a clear function throughout the body — back to the more fundamental layer of genetic code. There’s currently no other technique that is available to do that. Now that we have this approach, the most interesting thing, to me, is which question to ask next.”

In future studies, the researchers hope to identify all of the genes that affect plasma cells’ production and secretion of IgG.

Nanovials are available commercially from Partillion Bioscience, a company co-founded by Di Carlo that is based in CNSI’s on-campus startup incubator, Magnify.

The first authors of the study are Rene Cheng of the University of Washington and Joseph de Rutte, who earned a doctorate from UCLA in 2020 and is a co-founder and CEO of Partillion. Other authors are affiliated with UW, Partillion and the Seattle-based company Luminex. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

Machine learning models could improve suicide-risk predictions for children

UCLA Health — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 21:59:00 GMT

Amid a nationwide youth mental health crisis, mental health providers are trying to improve their understanding of which children are at risk for suicide or self-harm so providers can intervene earlier.

Many risk-prediction models that are designed to identify children who have a future risk are based on incomplete data, which limits their accuracy. Now, a study by UCLA Health researchers reveals that the typical ways health systems store and track data on children receiving emergency care miss a sizable portion of those who are having self-injurious thoughts or behaviors.

The researchers tested several machine learning models that they had designed and found that they were significantly better at identifying children at risk for self-harm.

“Our ability to anticipate which children may have suicidal thoughts or behaviors in the future is not great,” said Dr. Juliet Edgcomb, the study’s lead author and the associate director of the UCLA Mental Health Informatics and Data Science Hub, or MINDS. “A key reason is our field jumped to prediction rather than pausing to figure out if we are actually systematically detecting everyone who is coming in for suicide-related care. We sought to understand if we can first get better at detection.”

Read the full news release.

Cost of translating documents could be a barrier to underrepresented groups in clinical trials

UCLA Health — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A UCLA study has found that cancer research centers conducting clinical trials could enroll more patients from underrepresented groups by relieving investigators of the costs of translating consent documents into languages other than English.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

“We identified a readily addressable weakness in the clinical trial process, and we believe that overcoming this barrier, as we have begun to do, will ensure better representation of trial participants from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, enabling researchers to provide more comprehensive, ‘generalizable’ study results,” said Dr. Edward Garon, the study’s senior author and a medical oncologist at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Consent documents are required to be in a language understandable to the patient, and studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies — which represent about 70% of all randomized cancer clinical trials — typically have budgets that cover the costs of translating documents into languages appropriate for participants.

But in studies that are not sponsored by drug companies or device makers, investigators often operate on a fixed, per-patient budget provided by a grant, often from philanthropic organizations or governmental groups. As a result, unexpected costs like fees for translating consent documents, reduce the funds available for other potentially important aspects of the research.

The UCLA researchers theorized that such additional costs could discourage investigators from recruiting patients for whom consent document translation would be required, which could in turn contribute to the disproportionately low rates of participants from traditionally underrepresented groups in clinical trials.

Read the full news release.

92% de los asistentes se sienten seguros en el programa de parques del condado de L.A.

Vanessa Villafuerte — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:00:00 GMT

Conclusiones claves

Parks After Dark comenzó en tres parques del condado de Los Ángeles en 2010, en parte para ayudar a reducir la violencia y fomentar la actividad física. Se ha expandido a 34 parques.
Una encuesta de asistentes del 2022 encontró que el 92% se sintieron seguros en los eventos y el 94% estuvieron de acuerdo en que el programa les dio la oportunidad de pasar tiempo de calidad con sus familias.
Los investigadores de UCLA concluyeron que, en el transcurso del programa, se han cometido 189 delitos menos en los vecindarios que llevaron a cabo los eventos de los que se hubieran esperado que ocurrieran, por lo contrario.

Read this news in English.

El noventa y dos por ciento de las personas que asistieron a un programa de eventos nocturnos en los parques del condado de Los Ángeles en el verano de 2022 se sintieron seguras, según una nueva evaluación del Salud del Centro de Investigación de Políticas de Salud de UCLA (UCLA Center for Health Policy Research).

El programa, Parks After Dark, inició en tres parques en 2010 y desde entonces se ha expandido a 34 ubicaciones, principalmente en vecindarios con índices de violencia, dificultades económicas y obesidad superiores al promedio. (Después de una pausa de dos años durante la pandemia de COVID-19, los eventos regresaron en 2022 y continúan este verano).

"Parks After Dark ofrece una programación recreativa crucial en los parques del condado de Los Ángeles en un ambiente seguro,” dijo Nadereh Pourat, directora del Programa de Investigación en Economía y Evaluación de la Salud del Centro de Investigación de Políticas de Salud de UCLA y autora principal del informe. “Es una oportunidad para disfrutar actividades y ejercicio afuera y gratis, pasar tiempo con la familia y experimentar la belleza de la naturaleza sin miedo a la violencia. Esto es fundamental para que las comunidades prosperen.”

El informe también atribuye al programa con la reducción de la delincuencia y con mejorar la salud de las personas. Los investigadores de UCLA compararon las estadísticas de delincuencia de los vecindarios que han organizado eventos de Parks After Dark con datos de vecindarios similares de Los Ángeles que no organizaron eventos en esas fechas. Durante la vida del programa, concluyeron, que se cometieron 189 delitos menos — 115 delitos graves o violentos y 74 delitos no violentos — en los vecindarios de Parks After Dark de los que podrían haber ocurrido de otra manera.

Los investigadores de UCLA también estimaron los beneficios de salud del programa. Llegaron a la conclusión que si los participantes mantuvieran el mismo nivel de actividad física que realizaron durante Parks After Dark durante todo el año, habría una reducción significativa en los costos asociados con las enfermedades crónicas.

Como resultado, el informe concluyó que para 2022, Parks After Dark, cuya organización costó 3,3 millones de dólares, ahorró a la ciudad y a los residentes aproximadamente 11,4 millones de dólares en costos de justicia penal y costos asociados con discapacidades y años de vida perdidos debido a enfermedades crónicas.

Parks After Dark ofrece actividades gratuitas para la familia que incluyen noches de cine, clínicas deportivas y juegos, conciertos y natación todos los jueves, viernes y sábados por la noche durante junio, julio y agosto. Está dirigido por el Departamento de Parques y Recreación del Condado de Los Ángeles en colaboración con el Departamento de Salud Pública y la Oficina de Prevención de la Violencia del condado.

El informe de UCLA, que está disponible en inglés y español, informó que los asistentes citaron varias razones por las cuales se sintieron seguros en los eventos, incluyendo el personal del parque, un ambiente positivo y la presencia de alguaciles adjuntos del Departamento del Sheriff del Condado de Los Ángeles y trabajadores de intervención de la comunidad.

Según el informe, el programa también fue altamente calificado por los asistentes por proporcionar la oportunidad de pasar tiempo de calidad con la familia (94% de los encuestados estuvieron de acuerdo) y proporcionar un sentido de pertenencia dentro de su comunidad (93% estuvieron de acuerdo). El noventa y seis por ciento de los asistentes dijeron que asistirían de nuevo.

“Parks After Dark es una parte integral de la iniciativa de la Oficina de Prevención de la Violencia para construir comunidades más seguras en todo el condado de Los Ángeles,” dijo Andrea Welsing, directora de la Oficina de Prevención de la Violencia. “Parks After Dark promueve la equidad al proporcionar espacios verdes seguros y vibrantes para familias que viven en condiciones difíciles y crea un sentido de orgullo comunitario en los parques. La adopción de los programas de pasajes seguros de Parks After Dark respalda un enfoque más centrado en la comunidad para la seguridad pública.”

Entre otros resultados del estudio de UCLA:

84% de las personas asistieron con niños
62% de los asistentes eran Hispanos/Latinx y el 19 % eran personas de raza Negra o Afroamericanos
89% de los asistentes estuvieron de acuerdo en que los alguaciles adjuntos participaron "positivamente" con los miembros de la comunidad
81% de los asistentes participaron en actividad física en los eventos

“He estado viniendo al Parks After Dark con mi hijo desde que tenía dos años y medio, y ahora tiene 7 años,” dijo un asistente en una encuesta. “Me encanta que tengan cosas para que él participe y que sean gratis. Vivo de cheque en cheque y este tipo de cosas son geniales para familias que tienen un presupuesto limitado.”

Parks After Dark comenzó como una estrategia de prevención de la Iniciativa de Reducción de la Violencia de Pandillas del condado. Otras agencias públicas involucradas en el programa son el Departamento del Sheriff del Condado de Los Ángeles y el Departamento de Libertad Condicional del Condado de Los Ángeles.

“Parks After Dark juega un papel vital en los esfuerzos de prevención de la violencia del condado al invertir en los jóvenes, las familias y las comunidades”, dijo Norma Edith García-González, directora del Departamento de Parques y Recreación. “Durante los últimos 13 años, el programa ha convertido a parques del condado de Los Ángeles en un destino para la conexión social y vecinal, y la evidencia demuestra que Parks After Dark promueve el bienestar de los residentes de manera mensurable”.

92% of attendees feel safe at long-running L.A. County parks program

Vanessa Villafuerte — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Parks After Dark began at three Los Angeles County Parks in 2010, in part to help reduce violence and encourage physical activity. It has expanded to 34 parks.
A survey of attendees from 2022 found that 92% felt safe at the events, and 94% agreed that the program gave them the chance to spend quality time with their families.
UCLA researchers concluded that, over the course of the program, 189 fewer crimes have been committed in the neighborhoods hosting the events than could have been expected to occur otherwise.

Leer en español.

Ninety-two percent of people who attended a nighttime events program in Los Angeles County parks in the summer of 2022 felt safe, according to a new evaluation by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

The program, Parks After Dark, was launched in three parks in 2010 and has since expanded to 34 locations, primarily in neighborhoods with higher-than-average rates of violence, economic hardship and obesity. (After a two-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, the events returned in 2022 and are continuing this summer.)

“Parks After Dark provides crucial recreational programming in Los Angeles County parks in a safe environment,” said Nadereh Pourat, director of the Center for Health Policy Research’s Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program, and the report’s lead author. “It’s an opportunity to enjoy free outdoor activities and exercise, spend time with family and experience the beauty of nature without fear of violence. This is critical for communities to thrive.”

The report also credits the program with reducing crime and improving people’s health. UCLA researchers compared crime statistics from the neighborhoods that have hosted Parks After Dark events to data for similar Los Angeles neighborhoods that did not host events on those dates. Over the life of the program, they concluded, 189 fewer crimes — 115 serious or violent crimes and 74 nonviolent offenses — took place in the Parks After Dark neighborhoods than might have occurred otherwise.

The UCLA researchers also estimated the health benefits of the program. They concluded that if participants maintained the same level of physical activity that they expended during Parks After Dark, year-round, there would be a significant reduction in costs associated with chronic disease.

As a result, the report concluded that for 2022, Parks After Dark, which cost $3.3 million to host, saved the city and residents an estimated $11.4 million in criminal justice costs and costs associated with disabilities and years of life lost due to chronic diseases.

Parks After Dark offers free family-friendly activities including movie nights, sports clinics and games, concerts and swimming every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening during June, July and August. It is led by the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation in collaboration with the county’s Department of Public Health and Office of Violence Prevention.

The UCLA brief, which is available in English and Spanish, reported that attendees cited several reasons for their feeling safe at the events, including park staff, a positive atmosphere and the presence of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies and community intervention workers.

According to the report, the program also was highly rated by attendees for providing the chance to spend quality time with family (94% of respondents agreed) and providing a sense of belonging within community (93% agreed). Ninety-six percent of attendees said they would attend again.

“Parks After Dark is an integral part of the Office of Violence Prevention’s initiative to build safer communities across Los Angeles County,” said Andrea Welsing, director of the Office of Violence Prevention. “Parks After Dark advances equity by providing secure and vibrant green spaces for families that are living under challenging conditions and builds a sense of community pride at the parks. Parks After Dark’s embrace of safe passages programs supports a more community-centered approach to public safety.”

Among the UCLA study’s other findings:

84% of people attended with children
62% of attendees were Hispanic/Latinx and 19% were Black or African American
89% of attendees agreed that deputy sheriffs engaged “positively” with community members
81% of attendees participated in physical activity at the events

“I’ve been coming to Parks After Dark with my son since he was 2 1/2; he is now 7 years old,” one attendee said in a survey. “I love that they have things for him to participate in that are free. I live paycheck to paycheck, and this is great for families that are on a budget.”

Parks After Dark began as a prevention strategy of the county’s Gang Violence Reduction Initiative. Other public agencies involved in the program are the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

“Parks After Dark plays a vital role in the county’s violence prevention efforts by investing in youth, families and communities,” said Norma Edith García-González, director of the Department of Parks and Recreation. “For the past 13 years, the program has made Los Angeles County Parks a destination for social and neighborhood connection, and the evidence demonstrates that Parks After Dark promotes residents’ well-being in measurable ways.”

Often, consumers inadvertently give too much credit to products’ ‘scientifically studied’ claims

Holly Ober — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 18:44:00 GMT

Key takeaways

A new study finds that consumers often misremember if a product is labeled “scientifically studied” or “scientifically proven” — despite the significant difference in meaning between the two phrases.
UCLA psychologists conducted an experiment with one group of college students and another group of older adults to determine whether they would accurately recall which claim was made in an advertisement for a dietary supplement.
Only 26% of subjects correctly remembered which phrase was used, and the percentage who recalled the information accurately was roughly the same among both groups.

Being scientifically studied and being scientifically proven are two completely different things.

But a study led by UCLA psychologists has found that consumers often incorrectly remember marketing claims about just how lab-tested — or -proven — products actually are. The research discovered that even when products are labeled “clinically studied,” people frequently recall them as being “clinically proven.”

“‘Clinically studied’ can mean lots of things,” said Alan Castel, the paper’s senior author and a UCLA psychology professor. “Maybe the product was studied only in animals, or in people but found to be ineffective or not effective enough. ‘Clinically studied’ only shows that someone was interested enough in the product to study it, not that the study was well designed or showed conclusively that the supplement works.”

The findings, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, suggest that the popularity of products like dietary supplements — a $21 billion industry in the U.S. alone — is due in part to consumers’ unwarranted confidence in product claims. And the study highlights anew the importance of carefully reading product labels or consulting medical professionals.

Castel studies aging, memory and brain health, and he often reads about “science-backed” brain-training products or Alzheimer’s drugs. The new study was spurred when he came across a magazine ad for a cognitive enhancement supplement with a “clinically studied” claim; Castel wondered how consumers would interpret that phrase.

With his colleagues, Castel recruited two groups of subjects to find out: one cohort of 150 college students, a demographic in which people tend to have stronger memories, and another of 166 adults at least 65 years old, representing the typical target consumer for memory supplements.

Participants were shown three versions of the ad: The original, with the “clinically studied” phrasing, one in which the scientific claim was replaced with “clinically proven,” and another that omitted the reference altogether. After being given an unrelated task meant to distract them temporarily, the subjects were asked whether they believed the claim in the ad was “scientifically studied,” “scientifically proven,” “clinically studied,” “clinically proven” or none of these.

Remarkably, only 26% of the subjects in the overall study correctly remembered which phrase was used — even though subjects were generally able to accurately remember other aspects of the advertisement, including the layout and a photo of a doctor. No matter which ad they viewed, participants tended to recall the word “proven” being present much more often than “studied.”

The younger participants remembered a few more details about the ads than the older adults, but both groups misremembered the crucial phrase about equally.

“The findings fit models of memory suggesting that we remember the gist of things better than details,” Castel said. “When people see or hear scientific claims made in vague terms, they later misremember them in more definitive terms.”

The problem, Castel said, is that even if marketers are truthful in their claims that a product has been scientifically studied, they may be taking advantage of the fact that human memory is malleable, which can easily lead consumers to trust the product without solid reasons. In particular, he said, older adults who are worried about memory loss could be susceptible to wasting money on supplements that ultimately are useless.

“How do you evaluate these claims if your memory is already slipping, or you are distracted?” Castel said.

His advice? “Don’t rely on memory before spending money or choosing a course of action. Consult others and look into it before you buy. Take time, pay attention and don’t make decisions too quickly.”

Other researchers who contributed to the study are current and former UCLA graduate students Dillon Murphy, Shawn Schwartz, Kylie Alberts and Alexander Siegel; UCLA undergraduate student Brandon Carone; and Aimee Drolet, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Hardship affects the gut microbiome across generations

Holly Ober — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 19:52:00 GMT

Key takeaways

A UCLA-led study has shown that hardship experienced by mothers during their own childhood or during pregnancy is reflected in the composition of their 2-year-old children’s gut microbiome.
It was previously understood that in rodents, prenatal stress affects microbiomes into adulthood, but how long after birth the effects lasted in humans was unknown.
The changes to this community of microorganisms are likely among the ways that hardship affects a child’s socioemotional development.

Hardship experienced by mothers during their own childhood or during pregnancy is reflected in the composition of their 2-year-old children’s gut microbiomes, reports an international team of scientists led by UCLA psychologists.

The researchers found small to medium changes in the children’s microbiomes. The research is the first to document the transgenerational effects of adversity on the human gut microbiome.

A growing body of evidence links the gut microbiome to brain and immune functioning, and according to the researchers, changes to that community of microorganisms is likely among the ways that hardship affects children’s socioemotional development.

The study, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, builds on previous research in rodents, which has shown that that prenatal stress disrupts maternal vaginal and gut microbiomes. Because babies acquire their first gut microbes passing through their mother’s birth canal, mothers’ microbiomes form the basis of their offspring’s.

Previous research in humans has shown that shortly after birth, stress experienced by the infant while in the womb and the mother’s own psychological distress influence the infant microbiome. And while it was known that the effects of prenatal stress on rodent microbiomes persist into adulthood, scientists did not yet know how long after birth the disturbances remain in humans, or whether they affected the next generation.

The study investigated the consequences of maltreatment to mothers during their childhoods, anxiety while pregnant and their children’s exposure to stressful life events in 450 mother–child pairs in Singapore when the children were 2 years old. The researchers asked mothers to recall abuse, neglect or other maltreatment they experienced during childhood, and mothers were screened for anxiety during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Researchers also interviewed the children’s primary caregivers to learn about stressful events that the children had experienced, and their general behavior and health, during their first two years of life, and researchers collected stool samples from the children. The researchers controlled for family income, which often serves as a proxy for childhood adversity.

Children whose mothers reported more anxiety in pregnancy had microbiomes in which the species of microorganisms had populations of similar sizes, a metric biologists call “evenness,” which had not been found before. Typically, the populations of the various species that make up the gut’s microflora are “lumpier,” with some species being abundant and others less common. In the study sample, however, those differences were less prominent, and populations were of similar sizes.

The gut microbes of children who experienced stressful life events after birth also had less genetic diversity, meaning that the microbes living in each child’s gut were more closely related to each other than such microbes usually are.

However, while more experiences of adversity were correlated with less microbial genetic diversity in each child, the amount of adversity did not seem to affect how similar children’s gut microbiomes were to each other. There was still variation among the children.

“There are lot of questions around whether more diversity or evenness is better or worse when the gut microbiome is developing during childhood, so we don’t know if more is better at 2 years old,” said Francesca Querdasi, a UCLA doctoral student and the paper’s lead author.

“But many of the species we found to be related to adversity are known to interact with the immune system in some way, suggesting that maybe the way the gut microbiome interacts with the immune system is different after adversity. There’s a lot that we need to explore in the future.”

The researchers also found some kinds of behavior and mental health problems associated with an abundance of certain species in the gut microbiome. Although none of those species were the same ones related to adversity in this study, the authors noted that some have been associated with adversity in past studies and may perform similar functions as the species that are related to adversity.

The brain–gut microbiome connection develops rapidly during the first two to three years of life, and it is likely that the changes due to adversity demonstrated in the new study have some influence on children’s socioemotional development.

A nascent area of study called nutritional psychiatry, which researches how changes to diet could affect mental health, is developing as scientists learn more about the brain–gut microbiome connection.

“The microbiome gets a lot of attention and is very exciting, but it really is just one piece of the large and complicated puzzle of human health,” said Bridget Callaghan, a UCLA assistant professor of psychology and the paper’s senior author.

“Our study is part of a growing body of research showing the effects of early exposure and transgenerational experience on the microbiome. When we understand how experiences of hardship can influence the gut microbiome, we can then try to manipulate diet, supplements and lifestyle to make positive impacts on an individual’s gut microbiome and broader developmental trajectory.”

Program for Medi-Cal beneficiaries with complex health needs reduced emergency visits, hospitalizations

Vanessa Villafuerte — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

California’s Health Homes Program aimed to improve care and reduce costs for Medi-Cal beneficiaries with complex medical needs.
From mid-2018 through the end of 2021, the program enrolled 90,000 people in 12 California counties.
Program enrollees generally had fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations than Medi-Cal beneficiaries who weren’t enrolled, saving the state an average of $1,113 per person per year.

A California program for Medi-Cal beneficiaries with complex medical needs and chronic conditions reduced the number of emergency department visits and hospital stays among its enrollees, according to an evaluation published today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. For those enrollees, the change lowered the annual cost of medical bills — which the state pays — by an average of $1,113 per person, the report found.

About 90,000 people in 12 California counties initially enrolled in the Health Homes Program, which ran from July 2018 to December 2021. The California Department of Health Care Services’ program was open to Medi-Cal beneficiaries who had chronic physical conditions, substance use disorders and/or serious mental illness. It was run by managed care plans that contracted with about 260 community-based care groups to provide comprehensive care management to coordinate physical health, behavioral health and community-based social services.

The largest portion of participants (48%) were between the ages of 50 and 64 years old, 59% were women and 47% were Latino. About 8% of those in the program were experiencing homelessness or were at risk of homelessness during the study period. And participants’ most common chronic conditions, prior to the start of the program, were depression (73%), hypertension (65%) and diabetes (49%).

UCLA researchers measured changes two years before and two years after enrollment and compared the results with data from Medi-Cal beneficiaries who were not enrolled in the program but had similar demographics and health conditions and comparable use of health services.

They found that over that period, visits to emergency departments declined for enrollees in the Health Homes Program, especially those with serious mental illnesses, and that program participants had fewer visits than the control group overall. The overall rate of hospitalizations was also lower for those in the program, with a significant decline among those with chronic health conditions or substance use disorders.

Those enrolled in the program were also more likely to have their high blood pressure under control than those who weren’t enrolled.

“The goal of the Health Homes Program was to address the critical needs of Medi-Cal beneficiaries with a very complex profile who were in need of extensive care management,” said Nadereh Pourat, the report’s lead author and the head of the Center for Health Policy Research’s Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program. “Our intensive assessment showed that the program effectively helped enrollees receive appropriate care in the right settings, keeping them healthier and saving the state thousands of dollars.”

The study also found that during the first six months of enrollment, those in the program tended to use primary and specialty care services more than they had previously and that their use of these services declined after that, indicating they were generally directed to appropriate professionals who could provide needed care.

Additionally, by the end of the study period, participants with mental health care needs used mental health and substance-use services less than those in the control group, suggesting that improvements in their mental health may have reduced the need for more frequent visits.

Overall, the researchers said, people in the Health Homes Program tended to use health care services less — with the exception of a slight increase in long-term care stays — than Medi-Cal beneficiaries who weren’t enrolled.

Multiracial Black adults more likely to need mental health services than monoracial Blacks

Vanessa Villafuerte — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 19:00:00 GMT

California adults who identify as Black and at least one other race are more likely to need mental health services than those who identify only as Black, according to a study published today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

In five years of surveys, approximately 18% to 21% of multiracial Black adults reported having experienced serious psychological distress over the previous 12 months — nearly double the 11% for monoracial Black adults, researchers found.

The study also found that among all California Black adults — both multiracial and monoracial — those who were born in the United States were twice as likely to have experienced serious psychological distress (14%) as those born elsewhere (7%). Those born outside the U.S., however, were more likely to have mental health needs that were unmet, the researchers said.

The study, which used data from the 2017 to 2021 California Health Interview Surveys, is the center’s first to assess the mental health needs and unmet need for mental health services among Black adult groups in California, broken down by racial identity and place of birth. California’s Black adult population numbers roughly 2 million overall, of whom 76% are monoracial and 24% are multiracial.

“Analyzing the Black adult population as a single group simply does not reflect the nuances of different structural or social determinants that may lead to poor mental health or create barriers in accessing timely and appropriate care,” said the study’s lead author, Imelda Padilla-Frausto, a research scientist at the center.

“Disaggregating the data makes it possible to see differences in the needs or unmet needs for mental health services among different groups, and this information, in turn, can be used to help inform tailored programs and services for prevention and intervention.”

The authors looked at adults experiencing both serious psychological distress, which can interfere with a person’s daily life and requires intensive mental health services, and moderate psychological distress, which, if untreated, could become severe and disabling. Individuals with unmet mental health needs were defined as those who need mental health care but were not receiving it.

Among the findings:

Among all Black adults with serious or moderate psychological distress, 43% had unmet needs.
Among adults with serious or moderate psychological distress, the percentage who had unmet mental health needs ranged from a low of nearly 31% for those identifying as Black and another race to a high of 49% for those identifying as both Black and Latino.
41% of U.S.-born Black adults had unmet mental health needs, compared with 59% of those who were not born in the U.S.

Along with disaggregating data to advance mental health equity, the study’s authors suggest changes to state policies, such as requiring anti-racism training by state and local governments, increasing multiracial and foreign-born diversity among mental health providers, and partnering with community and faith-based organizations and others who can reach specific subpopulations of Black adults.

Said Padilla-Frausto, “As the Black population continues to grow in this country, so does the need to understand the diverse experiences impacting mental well-being and access to care among these various groups.”

UCLA psychiatrist adapts memoir about overcoming mental illness into opera

Manon Snyder — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 18:50:00 GMT

Dr. Kenneth Wells, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and professor of health policy and management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public health, has composed an opera based on the memoir of his friend, University of Southern California professor Elyn Saks, and her lifelong struggle with schizophrenia.

This is Wells’ second opera adapting Saks’ memoir, “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.” At the end of the first, Saks’ character has taken the audience through episodes of psychosis during her studies at Yale Law School, hospitalization and finally, graduating with support from family and friends. The new opera, “The Center Cannot Hold, Part 2: Recovery,” will follow Saks on the next stages of her journey, where she joins the faculty at USC Law School and falls in love.

“I think it’s important for people to know that even with a serious mental illness there are paths to having meaningful and rich lives,” said Wells, who is also the David Weil Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and director of the Center for Health Services and Society at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“The Center Cannot Hold, Part 2” will be performed on June 17, June 23 and June 25 at the UCLA Semel Auditorium, and will also be livestreamed. Please register for the live performance or for the livestream.

Read the full story about Wells’ opera on the UCLA Health website.

UCLA study shows less parent-child interaction during COVID-19

Vanessa Villafuerte — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 15:00:00 GMT

Child care challenges and financial stresses during the pandemic may have greatly diminished opportunities for California parents to interact with their youngest children, according to a study (PDF) published today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Parental involvement behaviors that contribute to a child’s learning and development include reading and singing to the child and taking them to the park or playground. The UCLA study revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, parents struggled to provide these kinds of experiences for children in the first five years of life. Young children thus had fewer opportunities to engage in activities that promote language, literacy and interpersonal skills.

“Our findings suggest that the pandemic stole precious time from parents to interact with their young children,” said Sean Tan, senior public administration analyst at the center and co-author of the study.

According to data from the center’s California Health Interview Survey, the proportion of parents or caregivers overall who read to young children every day decreased from 64.1% in 2019 to 53.9% in 2021. These changes in parental involvement behaviors may have long-term effects on a young child’s development and health, said the study’s authors.

Declines in reading to a child daily among some parent groups:

Families in the lowest and highest income categories had the greatest percentage point decreases in daily reading — around 27 and 13 percentage points, respectively.
Among Black parents, daily reading dropped more than 26 percentage points from 2019 (70.8%) to 2021 (44.3%).
Among Latino parents, daily reading to children (40.1%) was 8 percentage points lower in 2021 than in 2020 and more than 15 percentage points lower than in 2019 (55.6%).

Although the percentage of parents who took their young children out to play dropped from 80% in 2019 to 67.1% in 2020, that figure climbed to 75.1% in 2021. The proportion of parents who sang daily to their children — 67.3% in 2021 — remained statistically the same during the pandemic.

Financial stressors and child care difficulties impacted parent-child activities

Nearly 12% of parents reported difficulties making their rent and mortgage payments due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and nearly 13% reported difficulties paying for necessities such as bills or groceries.

The pandemic worsened child care challenges, with 11.1% of parents reporting difficulties securing child care or paying increased costs. Data also suggested that twice the number of parents who were essential workers reported difficulties with child care compared with those who were not essential workers (18.2% vs. 9.2%).

“The first few years of a child’s life are some of the most critical to future growth,” said Nicole Lordi, program director at the nonprofit Public Health Institute and co-author of the center’s study. “Parents should have access to child care programs that offer developmental opportunities for young children.”

The study was funded by the state program First 5 California, which aims to improve the lives of young children and their families through a comprehensive system of services.

“It is important to develop early childhood policy solutions that are trauma-informed, healing-centered and culturally responsive,” said Jackie Thu-Huong Wong, the program’s executive director. “That’s why First 5 California is proud of our longstanding partnership with the California Health Interview Survey. Obtaining credible data from Californians is critical to improving our ability to meet children’s needs, ensuring every family can thrive.”

New drug delays progression of glioma, a deadly brain cancer

Denise Heady — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 12:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

A targeted therapy drug called vorasidenib had positive results in delaying progression of a specific form glioma, a slow-growing but deadly brain cancer.
In a study of 331 people with the disease, the drug was effective in lengthening the period of time before the patients’ cancer worsened, and with no observed adverse effects.
New treatment approaches for glioma are needed because current treatments, including chemotherapy and radiation, can cause neurological deficits.

In an international study co-led by UCLA, scientists have shown that a new targeted therapy drug can extend the amount of time people with a subtype of glioma are on treatment without their cancer worsening. The finding suggests a possible new treatment option for people with the slow-growing but deadly brain tumor.

The team found the drug vorasidenib more than doubled progression-free survival in people with recurrent grade 2 glioma with IDH1 and IDH2 mutations. Compared with people who received a placebo, those who took vorasidenib went for nearly 17 more months without their cancer worsening, delaying the time before they needed to begin chemotherapy and radiation.

The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

The type of glioma studied in the paper, recurrent grade 2 glioma with IDH1 and IDH2 mutations, tends to affect younger people, often those in their 30s. The current standard treatment, a combination of radiation and chemotherapy, can cause neurological deficits that make it hard for patients to learn, remember new things, concentrate or make everyday decisions — all of which can be especially challenging for people who have young families or are in the early years of their professional lives.

Dr. Timothy Cloughesy, a professor of neuro-oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and co-senior author of the study, said the availability of a treatment that enables patients to go for longer periods of time between chemotherapy and radiation treatments could have a major impact.

UCLA

Dr. Timothy Cloughesy

“We’re always concerned about the delayed effects of radiation,” said Cloughesy, who is also a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Having the ability to hold off on getting radiation therapy to the brain with an effective therapy is really critical and very meaningful to this population of patients.”

Vorasidenib is classified as a dual inhibitor of mutant IDH1/2, meaning that it prevents the formation and accumulation of the onco-metabolite 2-Hydroxyglutarate, or 2-HG, that occurs when genetically altered versions of two enzymes, IDH1 and IDH2, are present in a tumor. 2-HG is thought to be responsible for the formation and maintenance of IDH-mutant gliomas.

The study is also the first clinical trial to analyze a targeted therapy drug specifically developed to treat brain cancer.

Targeted therapies are designed to target specific molecules that are involved in the growth and spread of cancer cells. Unlike chemotherapy and other therapies that can affect both cancerous and healthy cells, targeted therapies only attack cancer cells with the mutated target while minimizing damage to normal cells.

While there has been great progress in using targeted therapies to treat many types of cancer, development of targeted therapies for brain tumors has been especially challenging because of the difficulty of getting through the blood-brain barrier. Vorasidenib is a brain-penetrant inhibitor, which means that it has the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier.

The study involved 331 people aged 12 and older who had been diagnosed with recurrent grade 2 glioma with the IDH1 and IDH2 mutations and who had undergone brain tumor surgery. From that group, 168 were randomly assigned to receive vorasidenib and 163 received placebos.

Among those who received vorasidenib, the disease did not progress for an average of 27.7 months, significantly longer than the 11.1 months for those who received the placebo. And among those who received vorasidenib, 85.6% went for 18 months before their next treatment, while 83.4% went for 24 months between treatments.

The disease progressed in just 28% of people receiving vorasidenib, compared to 54% of those receiving placebos. And as of September 2022, which was 30 months after the study began, 72% of patients who were in the vorasidenib group were still taking the drug and their disease had not progressed.

For patients who were originally in the placebo group whose cancer began to progress during the study, doctors permitted a switch to vorasidenib. The researchers observed limited adverse side effects from vorasidenib. “This is the first targeted treatment that shows unequivocal efficacy in this population and is precedent-setting for this disease,” Cloughesy said.

Benjamin Ellingson, director of the UCLA Brain Tumor Imaging Laboratory and a member of the Jonsson Cancer Center, was a key participant in the research that led to the clinical trial. He was involved in the radiographic evaluation of tumors in the study, which confirmed that there was a benefit of the targeted therapy. The study’s first author is Dr. Ingo Mellinghoff of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The co-senior author is Dr. Patrick Wen of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The study was sponsored by Servier Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures vorasidenib. The drug has not yet been approved by the FDA for clinical use.

Couples’ social networks took long-lasting hit during COVID

Holly Ober — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 19:22:00 GMT

Key takeaways

A UCLA study shows that a the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social interactions, both virtual and in person, declined significantly for married couples.
The decline was found to be greater and more long-lasting for Black and Latino couples and lower-income couples than for white couples and wealthier couples.
The researchers suggest exploring new ways of protecting public health during crises that also help more vulnerable populations sustain meaningful relationships.

Following the lockdowns and restrictions on public gatherings in the early days of COVID-19, the social networks of white, Black and Latino couples all shrank, UCLA psychologists report. But these networks shrank most significantly among lower-income and Latino and Black couples and didn’t fully recover even after vaccines became available and the most severe restrictions were lifted.

The UCLA study, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is the first to examine the pandemic-related loss of connections with family, friends and colleagues among diverse couples recruited from lower-income neighborhoods — a population at particular risk from COVID-19. The findings, they say, highlight the vulnerability of marginalized groups to the consequences of certain public health measures.

“Limiting social interactions may well have reduced the spread of infection,” said lead author Benjamin Haggerty, a doctoral student in the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab, “but this policy also had unexamined and potentially lasting social costs.”

Psychologists with the lab followed hundreds of mixed-gender couples before and after COVID-19 struck and found that when the pandemic began, face-to-face interactions declined overall by 50%, with little recovery over the next 18 months. Black and Latino couples and those with lower incomes, they discovered, maintained even fewer of their relationships than white couples and those with higher incomes.

And while many people attempted to compensate for a lack of in-person gatherings through increased use of technologies like Zoom and FaceTime, the researchers found that among the couples they studied, even virtual interactions declined during the first months of the pandemic. Significantly, these declines weren’t restricted to particular types of relationships — they affected connections with family, friends and co-workers alike.

“What happened to those lost relationships?” asked study co-author Benjamin Karney, co-director of the lab and a professor of psychology at UCLA. “One answer is that some simply could not be sustained for so long without frequent interactions to nourish them.”

In general, for white couples and for wealthier couples, the picture was a bit rosier. Partly due to fewer initial decreases in social interactions in the earliest months of COVID-19 and partly because of greater recovery in interactions over the subsequent year, the networks of these couples contracted less than those of lower-income and Latino and Black couples.

The UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab was in a unique position to measure the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on social networks. Since 2009, the researchers had been conducting a long-term study of social interactions among couples. Their cohort, drawn from primarily lower-income neighborhoods, included a spectrum of income levels and races and ethnicities. Most participants were Latino.

As social isolation became a common concern during the lockdown, Haggerty and his colleagues realized they had the tools in place to track COVID-19–related changes in the social lives of these couples. Their study analyzed five sets of detailed interviews conducted before the outbreak and during the pandemic’s first 18 months with 243 husbands and 250 wives. In each interview, spouses discussed the nature of their relationship with 24 of their social network members.

The psychologists discovered that not all participants were equally affected by the lockdowns and restrictions. When lockdown orders were put in place in March 2020 and many Americans began to work from home, 73% of the husbands and 48% of the wives interviewed continued to work in person. In-person workers experienced smaller declines in face-to-face contact, but when it came to virtual interactions, husbands who worked in person experienced greater declines than all those who didn’t work outside the home.

Declines in virtual interactions may have been due to work schedules may have left many couples less time to catch up with family and friends virtually, the researchers said.

The study findings suggest that to prepare for future disease outbreaks, there is a need to develop ways to limit pathogen transmission without harming the in-person interactions necessary to sustain meaningful relationships.

“In the future,” Haggerty said, “techniques of limiting infection that also allow for social interactions, such as masking, might be a way of threading this needle.”

As an example, Karney pointed to high-quality masks and air filtration systems that were shown to be successful at slowing transmission.

“Perhaps we can use lessons learned during COVID-19 to plan public health measures for future pandemics that don’t cause such long-lasting damage to social ties,” he said.

Elderly patients see no difference in health outcomes when treated by M.D.s or osteopaths

Enrique Rivero — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 01:37:00 GMT

New UCLA-led research suggests that patient mortality rates, likelihood of readmission, length of stay and cost of care were virtually identical for elderly hospitalized patients who were treated by physicians with doctor of medicine degrees versus those who were treated by physicians with doctor of osteopathic medicine degrees.

While both traditional, or allopathic, medical schools and osteopathic medical schools provide the same rigorous health education, osteopathic training adds a more holistic, hands-on component involving manipulation of the musculoskeletal system — for instance, the use of stretching and massage to reduce pain or improve mobility.

“These findings offer reassurance to patients by demonstrating that they can expect high-quality care regardless of whether their physicians received their training from allopathic or osteopathic medical schools,” said Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, the paper’s senior author and an associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

The study examined Medicare data for 329,510 patients, of whom 77% were treated by M.D.s and 23% were treated by osteopathic physicians.

The study is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Read the full news release on the UCLA Health website.

Class of COVID: Leah Likin dives deep into pandemic anxieties with her honors project

Madeline Adamo — Fri, 26 May 2023 16:06:00 GMT

With the COVID-19 national public health emergency officially coming to an end just two weeks ago, members of UCLA’s class of 2023 will be the first to graduate having spent most, if not all, of their academic years living through a pandemic — and all the uncertainties, anxieties, and physical and mental health challenges that has entailed.

Among those graduates will be fourth-year psychology major Leah Likin, who has mined these experiences for her highly original and deeply personal honors capstone project, which has won a Dean’s Prize for Excellence in Research and Creativity as part of UCLA’s current 10th annual Undergraduate Research Week.

Likin’s experiences and, in particular, her struggles with mental health during the pandemic — which at their worst necessitated inpatient psychiatric treatment — served as a springboard for the ambitious project, which in addition to more traditional research and data collection also incorporated poetry, personal writing and art.

The goal, she said, was not only to explore the factors that led to her mental health crisis in August 2022 but, importantly, to focus on and quantify how these same factors had affected others during the pandemic. So she began compiling data that would tell that story.

“I just researched things that affected me deeply and affected my family dynamic,” she said.

As part of her project, Likin interviewed 15 people, ranging in age from 20 to 86, about a number of topics, including COVID-19, mental health, climate change, perception of time and the use of smartphones — the last of which she refers to as “handheld digital spaces … that have complicated what it could mean to be present, to be connected, and to communicate meaningfully.”

Through these interviews, Likin was also able to begin to unpack her own mental health burdens, like her addiction to her smartphone, her long-held insecurities and body-image issues from growing up with social media, and the anxiety she felt about waste and the environment — all of which she said were amplified tenfold during the pandemic. She recalled being so concerned about waste while living in student housing that, for her meals, she began eating the remaining food from others’ trays and the waste conveyor belt in the dining halls to offset students’ waste.

“My worries about material waste are related to a deeper fear of wasted time, of not doing or being enough in the time that I have,” said Likin, who through the project sought to address how experiences in, and of, time are inextricably linked to mental well-being.

She opens her project’s written component with poetry and a personal essay about how those anxieties ultimately evolved into suicidal ideation and her “5150” — California code for the involuntarily detainment and psychiatric hospitalization of those in a mental health crisis who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. Ultimately, she entered intensive outpatient program and, as she relates in her project, “thanks to time, medication, therapy, love and support” was able to improve.

“It was interesting to explore my sense of loss and my sense of belonging during that time, and also my growth and sense of identity,” she said.

Jack Stenzel

Likin with her advisor, Ron Avi Astor.

“It's not a distant academic subject, it's something that many of us go through,” said Likin’s advisor, Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education.

Likin, who is also minoring in public affairs and environmental systems and society, said she was inspired by how Astor would often read his poetry about his mental health struggles and those of his family in his multidisciplinary course “Creating Safe and Welcoming Schools.” After Likin opened up to him about her own mental health journey, Astor encouraged her to consider autoethnography — a form of autobiographical academic writing she enjoyed — as a way to intersect the humanities with her ambitious research goals.

“I love the fact that she rooted this in her own life and her own network and experience but then brought everything together and reversed the research process,” Astor said of Likin’s project, which in its final weeks also sprouted a new component — an art show — to complement the writing.

Likin utilized UCLA’s MakerSpace, a high-tech campus workshop free to students, to construct a giant laser-cut clockface from cardboard, wood and pages from her planner — “moments in, and units of, time,” she called them. Another piece, a tower of recycled Styrofoam, includes dozens of little cabinets containing items like antidepressants spilling from a pill bottle, cellphone parts, USB cords, face coverings, written words and diagrams meant to encourage viewers to consider their ability to repurpose trash and challenge ideas about waste and wasted time.

The symbolic art, said Astor, could have been a capstone project on its own.

“In my 30 years of being a professor — at the University of Michigan, the University of Southern California and all the other places, and here at UCLA — I've never had a student do that, let alone an undergraduate,” he said. “I hope other people look at it and read it and learn from it, particularly around issues of mental health.

“But it goes beyond that. What I like about it is that it ripples into the fabric of our society in parts that we may need to reconsider and rethink in our own lives.”

Learn more about Likin’s capstone project, which will be on view weekdays through June 16 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Hillel at UCLA building at 574 Hilgard Ave.

Likin, who participated in the UCLA Prison Education Program, which makes post-secondary education accessible to currently incarcerated women and young people, has dedicated the exhibit to the women incarcerated in the federal prison in Victorville, California, who, she said, “can’t speak or move freely through time and digital or physical space like we can.”

Q&A: Hal Hershfield on finding harmony with your future self

Paul Feinberg — Thu, 25 May 2023 20:58:00 GMT

The seeds of Hal Hershfield’s new book were planted during the financial crisis that gripped the nation in 2008. Watching the Great Recession unfold, he began to wonder why it was so easy for people to take risks that they really shouldn’t.

Hershfield, a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, decided to investigate the retirement crisis — a “slow-moving catastrophe,” he calls it — in which people are living longer and saving less, leaving them without resources for retirement.

Hershfield, who earned his doctorate in psychology from Stanford University, approached the research not as an economist but as a psychologist. He examined how people relate to their future selves, and how those relationships influence the decisions we people make, or don’t make, in the present.

The result is “Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today,” which will be published June 6. One of its key findings is that when people think about their future selves, their brain activity mirrors the type of activity that occurs when they think about complete strangers. In an interview, Hershfield spoke about how to make “future you” a part of your present, the need to forgive your past missteps and why you might want to consider writing letters to yourself.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

How did your research for the book evolve?

For years now, I’ve been doing research looking at how emotionally connected people are to their future selves, and I’ve investigated these relationships in a variety of contexts — from financial health to physical health, from ethical decision making to overall life satisfaction.

One study I describe in the book is a neuro-imaging project that I conducted years ago, and the punchline was that on a neuro level, our future selves look more like the way other people look to us. This was really surprising because it suggested that on some deep level, we may think of our futures selves as if they’re other people. And I began to wonder if what really matters is the type of relationship we have with our future selves.

What have you learned about how people can better connect to their future selves?

The book is full of concrete things one can do, but one of the more abstract ones is to start creating a conversation with your future self. Make that more a part of your life, so that when you’re making big decisions that are going to have impacts and consequences later on, you are thinking about that push and pull between your present and future selves.

In the book, I go through a couple of different strategies, one of which is to try to increase that connection with one’s future self by trying to imagine the future more vividly through an exercise where you write a letter to — and then from — your future self.

I also talk about trying to figure out what parts of your life are going off course, then creating pre-commitments to a certain course of action.

Your book not only looks at the future self, but also offers some guidance for thinking about the past.

One of the other things I feel is important is forgiving our past selves in a genuine way. We can recognize where we’ve gone wrong in the past, but then also have some compassion for ourselves. You can’t go back and change what you did in the past, but you can change what you’re going to do moving forward.

The book tries to give a sense of agency to people moving from the present to the future. And if you’re stuck on what you’ve done wrong, it’s going to cause people to sort of bury their heads in the sand. And that’s not what we want.

Why, for so many people, does just thinking about the future cause anxiety?

There‘s a variety of factors at play here. One is that we live in the present; we don’t live in the future. So we’d be forgiven for focusing on now rather than later because that’s what’s happening now. The problem is when we pay too much attention to “right now” and fail to consider “later.”

Another problem that arises is when we are motivated in some way to think that future me will suddenly take care of all the things that present me has not taken care of.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I want readers to come away with more harmony between who they are now and who they will be. And I don’t necessarily want everyone to stop having fun today in order to save more, or to start eating only healthy foods. That’s only part of the equation.

What I’m trying to do is create more harmony and balance between who people are now and who they are going to become, so that they are satisfied now with their choices and that they are still satisfied with them later. I want them to be glad about the things they did — and glad they didn’t do what they didn’t do.

A metabolic process in cancer cells could unlock a possible treatment for glioblastoma

Denise Heady — Thu, 25 May 2023 15:00:00 GMT

Key takeaways

Glioblastomas are lethal brain tumors with few treatment options and a poor prognosis for most patients.
A UCLA-led team identified a genetic alteration that occurs in 60% of people who are diagnosed with glioblastoma; that mutation disrupts the cancer cells’ metabolism.
The discovery suggests that one possible approach to treat glioblastoma would be a therapy that targets the metabolic process in patients who have that genetic alteration.

A study led by researchers at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found that targeting a metabolic process in people with a specific genetic mutation could help treat glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.

The genetic alteration — a deletion in a gene called CDKN2A — is present in about 60% of people who have glioblastoma. The mutation causes changes in the way lipids are distributed in cancer cells, which in turn makes the cancer cells vulnerable to being destroyed. The discovery, published in Cancer Cell, could suggest a path toward the development of targeted therapies that specifically target that vulnerability.

“Each patient’s tumor can have a unique combination of genetic alterations,” said David Nathanson, co-senior author of the study and an associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Because all of these tumors are different, we need to understand how certain genetic changes can affect tumor metabolism in order to identify potential targets for future treatments.”

Scientists believe that disrupting cancer cells’ metabolism — the way that they process energy and nutrients in order to survive, grow and invade healthy cells — could be one key to new and effective treatments.

Developing new ways to treat glioblastoma is imperative, said Nathanson, who also is a member of the Jonsson Cancer Center. Glioblastomas are lethal brain tumors that grow quickly, and currently there are few treatment options. The average lifespan of someone diagnosed with the brain tumor is just 12 to 15 months, and only about 5% of people diagnosed with glioblastoma are alive five years after their diagnosis. President Joe Biden’s son Beau and Senator John McCain both died from the disease.

Looking for possible patterns in the way the cancer cells process fats — which might indicate that they could be vulnerable to medicine — the researchers analyzed data from 84 glioblastoma tumors, 42 human cell lines and 30 mouse models of glioblastoma. They noticed some irregularities with CDKN2A, the gene that is mutated in a majority of people with glioblastoma.

UCLA

David Nathanson

They found that the gene rewires lipid metabolism to work in a different way than cells without that genetic alteration. And when the CDKN2A gene is missing, the way cancer cells process fats makes them more vulnerable to cell death, or ferroptosis.

The team then used a drug that targets this process and found glioblastoma cells with the genetic alteration in CDKN2A were highly susceptible to cell death, while the glioblastoma cells that did not have the genetic alteration were insensitive to the drug.

“We discovered that CDKN2A may be a key regulator of cancer cell metabolism, which has never before been shown in the context of cancer, even though it is deleted in other types of cancer,” Nathanson said. “Importantly, we found that CDKN2A deletion rewires lipid metabolism not just in our models but also in tumors from glioblastoma patients. This indicates that this metabolic vulnerability could one day be a target of therapy in glioblastoma patients.”

While there is no existing drug that could penetrate the brain to target the process studied by the UCLA scientists, the study provides strong rationale to develop one, Nathanson said.

Steven Bensinger, the Sherie and Donald Morrison Professor of Immunology and co-senior author of the study, said another important aspect of the work is that it could shed new light on how diet and other lifestyle factors could influence cancer progression and patients’ responses to therapy.

“Our data indicates that CDKN2A-deleted cancer cells shift the type of lipids used to build their cellular membranes, and that this difference can be exploited to kill tumors,” Bensinger said. “This opens up the exciting possibility that prescribing special diets containing the ‘wrong’ lipids could make them more susceptible to therapy or reduce tumor growth.”

The database of the 156 glioblastoma samples that the investigators analyzed is now available to researchers worldwide; the team has also expanded the number of samples in the database to more than 500, which the scientists hope will help them identify additional relationships between cancer-fighting genes and specific types of lipids used by brain cancer.

The study’s other co-senior author is Scott Dixon of Stanford University. The co-first authors are UCLA doctoral candidates Jenna Minami and Nicholas Bayley, and Danielle Morrow, who earned her doctorate from UCLA in 2021. Other co-authors are Elizabeth Fernandez, Jennifer Salinas, Christopher Tse, Henan Zhu, Baolong Su, Rhea Plawat, Anthony Jones, Alessandro Sammarco, Dr. Linda Liau, Thomas Graeber, Kevin Williams and Dr. Timothy Cloughesy, all of UCLA.

The study was funded in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

UCLA study highlights need to focus on individuals, versus populations, in genomic medicine

UCLA Health — Fri, 19 May 2023 19:39:00 GMT

One way scientists can estimate a person’s risk for a wide range of diseases is a measure called a polygenic score. The score is based on the variants in that person’s genes and how closely those variants are associated with the risk for disease among large groups of people who have similar genetic traits.

The measure holds promise not only for identifying risk for disease but also for guiding personalized treatments. But a new UCLA study, published in the journal Nature, found that polygenic scores fail to account for the wide range of genetic diversity across all ancestries.

“Polygenic scores can estimate the likelihood of an individual having a certain trait by pulling together and analyzing the small effects of thousands to millions of common genetic variants into a single score, but their performance among individuals from diverse genetic backgrounds is limited,” said Bogdan Pasaniuc, a UCLA Health expert in statistical and computational methods for understanding genetic risk factors for common diseases.

The UCLA researchers developed a method to evaluate polygenic scores’ accuracy at the individual level. To test it, they applied polygenic scores for 84 complex traits to data from more than 35,000 people in the UCLA ATLAS Precision Health Biobank, one of the world’s most diverse biobanks.

Read the full news release on the UCLA Health website.