Tag Archives: health

Sports science: An athlete-researcher’s experience

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Koji Murofushi’s career has been a mix of tradition and innovation in sports science. He shares his thoughts on a new training approach.

By Tim Hornyak

Sports science is the study of the body as a performance machine. Its specialties span biomechanics and psychology, and demand for its experts is growing. Whether it’s helping everyday people with their physical wellbeing or training elite athletes to react faster endure longer or jump farther, sports scientists and performance consultants are playing an increasingly important role in exercise and competition.

Evidence of growing demand for sports science mavens can be seen everywhere from new university programmes such as the University of Michigan’s Exercise & Sport Science Initiative, launched in 2016, to mass media events. In one example of the latter, before Irish mixed martial artist Conor McGregor went up against boxing champion Floyd Mayweather in a much-hyped showdown in August, he trained at the UFC Performance Institute, a $12 million facility that opened earlier this year in Las Vegas. McGregor used altitude chambers to improve aerobic capacity and ran on an underwater treadmill to build endurance. That may have helped him go more than nine rounds with Mayweather, the overwhelming favorite and eventual winner of the bought. Continue reading →

Quick profiles: Emma Hilton

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Emma Hilton worked as a doctor for nine years, including four in clinical research.  After that, she shifted to pharma. Here she shares her story.

Emma is now Global Medical Affairs Leader for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in GSK’s Respiratory Division.

As a child, I was fascinated by how things work, especially the human body, and I decided I wanted some kind of career in science. Medicine seemed like the ideal avenue and offered a reassuringly clear path including training and employment prospects.

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Being proactive about mental health during your PhD: a very short guide

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Psychologist Karra Harrington shares some tips for Mental Health Awareness week.

When I started out in my PhD I was excited about the challenges I would face. Two and a half years later I’m still excited about my research, but, like most PhD projects, it‘s not all been smooth sailing. Rather than let how I was feeling derail my progress, I decided to use my training as a psychologist to develop ways to be proactive about managing mental health during the course of a PhD.

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Creating a world without Parkinson’s 200 years after ‘An Essay on the Shaking Palsy’

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A guest blog by James Beck, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, Parkinson’s Foundation

Dr James Beck

This year, we mark 200 years since James Parkinson published his famous monograph, An Essay on the Shaking Palsy. In that time, we have reached many key milestones in science that have dramatically improved the lives of the ten million people worldwide who live with Parkinson’s.  Yet we still have nothing to slow the disease and nothing to stop it.

At the Parkinson’s Foundation, we consider the bicentennial anniversary of James Parkinson’s work a perfect time to look back at lessons learned and ahead at what’s to come. For example, looking back at the time that has passed since 1817, few milestones have been as monumental as the identification of levodopa by George Cotzias in 1967 and its subsequent confirmation as a life-changing Parkinson’s treatment by Dr. Melvin Yahr in 1968.

Today, our community still relies on levodopa as the gold-standard drug to treat Parkinson’s motor symptoms. Despite the lack of newer drugs, scientific progress has not stopped. In fact, we predict that advances in the next 20 years will likely outpace the progress of the past 200.

As we scan the horizon, we are seeing advances in healthcare and science that will lead to new ways of living better with the disease. The increasing intersections between information technology, healthcare, biomarkers, and genetics may help us to predict who will develop Parkinson’s. Meanwhile, advances in technology are portending a day when we can accurately measure the progression of Parkinson’s. Most importantly, we may be on the cusp of testing new hypotheses that will allow us to reach our ultimate end goal of stopping Parkinson’s.

This is exciting. However, if we want these advances to come to fruition, we must heed the lessons learned from Cotzias’s story — the need for human capital.

Many people may be surprised to learn that Cotzias’ key discovery of levodopa and Dr. Yahr’s follow-up study were milestones that were nearly missed. In the 1960s, funding was plentiful, and many researchers were testing levodopa. Where so many failed, only Cotzias succeeded, and he did so by taking a unique approach that no one could have predicted would work.

His story illustrates what many scientists know: that we cannot predict where answers will come from, and that we need a diverse cadre of people looking at diseases from different angles to solve them. Thus, he tells us what we need to create a world without Parkinson’s – people.

We need people who dedicate their careers to Parkinson’s research. Yet, over the past 20 years, human capital in the research community has been in jeopardy. The average age at which a scientist receives his or her first R01 (the original and historically oldest grant mechanism used by the NIH) has crept up from their 30s to their early 40s, leading droves of talented researchers to leave the lab for more stable careers.

If we don’t change our way of thinking about the next generation of scientists, we could easily lose a cadre of researchers who are at the prime of their careers.  At the Parkinson’s Foundation, we are doing our part by dedicating millions of dollars to support early-career scientists and clinicians.

But this isn’t enough. As a society, we need to value the up-and-coming generation for their creativity and support their ingenuity. A few weeks from now, on June 1st, we’re bringing together some of the best and brightest of the next generation for a scientific event entitled, “World Without Parkinson’s.” We’re asking one question of each these up-and-coming leaders, “How do you predict your area of expertise will help to end Parkinson’s?”

Will any of them have the right answer? Is the next George Cotzias among our speakers?

We don’t know. But we know that we have to continue to ask the question and make opportunities available for researchers to thrive until we find him or her.

In fact, it’s the only way we can find the world we envision — the one in which Parkinson’s no longer exists.

The Parkinson’s Foundation is working toward a world without Parkinson’s disease. Formed by the merger of National Parkinson Foundation and the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation in August 2016, the mission of the Parkinson’s Foundation is to invest in promising scientific research that will end Parkinson’s disease and improve the lives of people with Parkinson’s, and their families, through improved treatments, support and the best care. For more information, visit www.parkinsonsfoundation.org or call (800) 4PD-INFO (473-4636) or (800) 457-6676.

Finding job satisfaction as a humanitarian researcher

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Panagiotis Vagenas left Yale University to advise a non-profit on research design and quality.

What did you do before Yale?

I’m from Greece originally. In 1996 — when I was 17 — I moved to London, UK. I studied biochemistry for my degree and did a PhD in immunology. When I graduated I moved to the Population Council labs at the Rockefeller University in New York to start my postdoc.

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Panagiotis Vagenas

What did you study?

I worked on basic research in HIV. What’s always motivated me is trying to help people — to have a meaningful career in that sense. So in summer 2010 I moved to Yale School of Public Health and did a master’s in public health (MPH), and went on to join the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine in 2013. Continue reading →

Preparing researchers to manage traumatic research

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Studying traumatic events comes with its own risks – the scientific establishment needs to be doing more to protect researchers, says Dale Dominey-Howes and Danielle Drozdzewski.

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One of the authors interviews survivors a few days after the September 2009 South Pacific tsunami in the rubble of their communities in Samoa, as part of the UNESCO post-tsunami survey team reporting into the Prime Minister and King of Samoa. “It was a hard day for all of us,” says Dale Dominey-Howes.

What’s the issue and why is it important?

Earth is destabilizing rapidly. Terrorism, conflict, genocide, human displacement, socio-economic disruption, rapid global environmental change, slow emergencies and natural disasters are more common than at any point in history. Consequently, opportunities exist for researchers to investigate the causes, consequences and potential management solutions arising from this instability. For this to happen, we need a well-trained workforce equipped with the skills and capabilities to work with ‘traumatic’ research content, people and places. Continue reading →

Panic and a PhD

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The authors are recent PhD graduates who’ve all experienced anxiety during and after their doctoral program.

Here they share their story to support current doctoral students working to navigate and maintain a healthy work/life balance.

The lifestyle of graduate school has been associated with the presence of mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, in students during their academic programs. A 2013 analysis of the 2009 National College Health Assessment found that 61.3% of current graduate students reported ever feeling anxiety, with 43.8% feeling anxiety within the past 12 months. As recent graduates from a doctoral program, we’ve experienced this anxiety firsthand, and hope that our stories and recommendations can help to tackle this problem head-on.

Stress is an essential reaction to danger, a mechanism ingrained in us long ago to force a “fight” or “fly” response. However, it’s how we react to stress that impacts our long-term health, including the potential development of anxiety through cognitive distortions and unhealthy coping mechanisms. While we three may have already been naturally anxious people, this became increasingly heightened when under the stress of working on our PhDs.

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Nature Partner Journal Editor honoured in Queen’s Birthday Honours List

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Honoured for his services to medicine.

Honoured for his services to medicine.

Professor Aziz Sheikh, the Joint Editor-in-Chief of the new Nature Partner Journal, npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine, has been awarded an OBE for services to medicine in the Birthday Honours list.

The award is recognition of the contributions Aziz has made throughout a career during which he has advised the English and Scottish Governments on patient safety, was an adviser to NHS Connecting for Health’s Evaluation Programme, served as a member of the Information Technology for Patient Safety Expert Working Group of the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety (2009-2010), and is now chairman of the Patient Safety in Primary Care Working Group for the World Health Organization.

Professor Sheikh is Professor of Primary Care Research & Development at The University of Edinburgh, UK where he is also co-director of its Centre for Population Health Sciences and the head of its Allergy & Respiratory Research Group.

He read Physiology and Medicine at University College London and then read Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  Clinically, he trained in General Practice at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow and received specialist training in allergy at the Royal Brompton Hospital.  He has Fellowships from the Royal College of Physicians in both London and Edinburgh and the Royal College of General Practitioners.

Professor Sheikh has editorial experience with a number of journals, including the BMJ (editorial advisor, Primary Care editorial advisor) and PLOS Medicine (section advisor, Guidelines and Guidance). He holds visiting chairs at the University of Birmingham (UK), Queen Mary’s University of London (UK), Maastricht University (Netherlands), and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School (USA). He regularly publishes in leading international journals and details of his publications can be found on Research Gate.

He was appointed Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Primary Care Respiratory Journal in 2011 and in 2014 oversaw the re-launch of the journal under its new title, npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine, as part of the Nature Partner Journal series.

Egypt’s scientists want to redirect sunlight to narrow streets

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A group of Egyptian scientists at Ain Shams University have come up with the idea for translucent panels that are specifically fitted to be able to divert natural sunlight into densely-crowded alleyways, and can get easily positioned over roof tops, on a lower budget.

The scientists argue that a variety of health problems in overcrowded spaces—as seen all across the Arab world, including Egypt—are a result of the lack of sun exposure.

The proposed panel improves illumination by 200% and 400% in autumn and winter as per research simulations – the corrugated “sine-wave-shaped” structure is to be ideally installed on building roofs, only one meter beyond the roof edge, facing the sun and directing its light downwards into the alleys by diverging it.

“We expect the device to provide illumination to perform everyday tasks, and improve the quality of light and health conditions in dark areas,” Amr Safwat, a professor of electronics and communications engineering at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, told Science Daily.

Safwat is one of the authors of the study proposing the panel, published in Optics Express this month.

Previous structures used redirecting panels or guiding tubes that are optimized for certain solar altitude ranges, and which were suited for Middle Europe specifically; they also only direct the light upwards into the depth of a room and not into the depth of narrow streets, the researchers wrote. But the suggested panel, an improved model, can be tilted and operates over a wider range of solar altitude. “The fan-out angle exceeds 80% for certain solar altitudes and the transmitted power percentage varies from 40% to 90% as the solar altitude varies from 10°C degrees to 80°C,” the study reads.

The idea was to still use a sustainable source of energy to replace a conventional one—saving energy and reducing carbon emissions—while maintaining cost-effectiveness. The researchers say they have done this; the panels are made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), a type of thermoplastic material similar to synthetic glass available at low costs, and common press forming equipments are used in the panel’s manufacture.

Safwat and his team told the press they would eventually build a full-scale model 10 times bigger for validation and testing purposes, and they plan to market and commercialize their panels.

The Ain Shams university researchers were funded by the Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF).

2013: Nature Middle East’s Special Editions

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For Nature Middle East, 2013 has been an exciting year — with wider coverage of the latest in science and research from across the region, and the beta-launch of our monthly special editions earlier in the year, and regularly starting October.

Our specials section decided to go nuclear, in its experimental edition in April 2013, highlighting the four major players in the region on the this front. We explored the potential and ambitions of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE in nuclear energy development. The overarching question was: What kind of progress these countries can generate as they muddle through complex politics and logistics?

Our debut in October produced multiple features and news pieces on one of the most feared diseases of the century: cancer, whose incidence is expected to increase in the Middle East more than any other part of the world. From cancer screening in Algeria, which sadly occurs too late for many patients, to a prevalence of advanced breast cancer in Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Sudan, and the presence of a uniquely vicious type of the malignant disease in the Arab world, our cancer special balanced statistics from the ground with eye-opening lab findings in this area.

In November, the spotlight has shone on stem cell research in the region — one that experienced a head-start when Muslim scholars green-lighted basic research using embryonic stem cells. Promising research, such as that carried out by a team of scientists in Egypt using stem cells to find a cure for diabetes, is juxtaposed against opinions by experts from the field on regional policies, and how to move forward, logistical problems and financing shortages notwithstanding.

Finally, in December, Nature Middle East decided to get closure by talking about the elephant in the room: the rising prevalence rate of the HIV and AIDS in the region, which remains to be one of the most pressing issues thus far considering how little information we have regarding its spread.

You can’t talk about HIV without tackling stigma, which, as it turns out, is a solid force in the region; thwarting proper assessment of the incidence of the virus in 10 countries, affecting the reach of treatment (and in turn its effectiveness), and putting up proverbial walls between risk groups and health workers trying to help.

It’s a mixed bag. Worrying trends persist in some countries; for example around 80% of people living with HIV/AIDS in the region are not aware they’re carriers of the virus. While in others, there’s a measure of progress, with countries like Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Tunisia, adopting a hard reduction approach to curb the virus.