Medical Bulletin 17/August/2022

Here are the top medical news for the day:

Do wind instruments disperse COVID aerosol droplets?

In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania worked with musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra to deepen our understanding of how much aerosol is produced and dispersed by wind instruments.

The researchers used visualization to characterize the flow and then tracked fog particles in the air with a laser. They also measured aerosol concentration from wind instruments with a particle counter.

Ref: "Flow and aerosol dispersion from wind musical instruments" authored by Quentin Brosseau, Ranjiangshang Ran, Ian Graham, Douglas J. Jerolmack, and Paulo E. Arratia. Physics of Fluids Aug. 16, 2022 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0098273).

How the brain gathers threat cues and turns them into fear

Salk scientists have uncovered a molecular pathway that distills threatening sights, sounds and smells into a single message: Be afraid. A molecule called CGRP enables neurons in two separate areas of the brain to bundle threatening sensory cues into a unified signal, tag it as negative and convey it to the amygdala, which translates the signal into fear.

The research, published recently in Cell Reports, may lead to new therapies for fear-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder or hypersensitivity disorders such as autism, migraines and fibromyalgia.

Ref: Sung Han et. al, A central alarm system that gates multi-sensory innate threat cues to the amygdala,Cell Reports,16-Aug-2022,10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111222

Combining antiviral drugs and antibody therapy could treat seasonal flu

Researchers at McMaster University have found a class of well-known antiviral drugs could be part of a one-two punch to treat seasonal influenza and prevent a flu pandemic when used in combination with antibody therapies.

Antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu have been prescribed for decades to treat flu symptoms in people at risk for serious complications.

Ref: Ali Zhang,Matthew Miller et. al,Broadly-neutralizing antibodies that bind to influenza hemagglutinin stalk domain enhance effectiveness of neuraminidase inhibitors via Fc-mediated effector functions, Cell Reports Medicine,10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100718,16-Aug-2022

Pre fertilization DNA transfer to avoid mitochondrial disease inheritance appears safe

Transferring the nuclear genome from one egg into the cytoplasm of a donor egg is a strategy to enable women carrying mutations in their mitochondrial DNA to have healthy babies. A new study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, uses multiple "omics" techniques to show that this strategy, called spindle transfer, is likely to be safe, with little evidence of genetic or functional difference between the resulting embryos and healthy control in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos. The results are likely to spur further adoption of spindle transfer for IVF when there is a risk of mitochondrial disease.

The "spindle" refers to the division apparatus that holds the nuclear chromosomes in suspension until fertilization. During spindle transfer, the maternal spindle is removed from an unfertilized egg and placed into a donor egg that has had its own spindle removed. Spindle transfer has been used clinically, but there remain questions about its safety.

Ref: Qi S, Wang W, Xue X, Lu Z, Yan J, Li Y, et al. (2022) Single-cell multiomics analyses of spindle- transferred human embryos suggest a mostly normal embryonic development. PLoS Biol 20(8): e3001741. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001741