Medical Bulletin 22/ February/ 2025 - Video

Workplace bullying affects not only the employee’s sleep but their partner’s too, according to new research published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Exposure to bullying by superiors and/or colleagues has been linked to a variety of negative health outcomes, such as sleep problems.

Now research by the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, and Complutense University of Madrid and Seville University in Spain, sheds light on the short-term consequences of workplace bullying on various indicators of sleep.

These include waking up too early (sleep severity), interference with daily life (sleep impact) and dissatisfaction with own sleep (sleep satisfaction).

the researchers aimed to examine how bullying at work impacts insomnia and to test the mediating role of “anger rumination” – which involves repetitive, persistent thinking about distressing events, such as bullying.

They found the relationship between bullying and sleep increases over time, particularly in relation to sleep onset difficulties, staying asleep and early morning awakening, and is explained by work-related anger felt by the employee and this constant rumination. They also found evidence of insomnia symptoms being “contagious” between employees and their partners, meaning that the sleep issues (both severity and impact) of one person can influence the other, highlighting how interconnected sleep health can be in relationships.

Lead UK author Professor Ana Sanz-Vergel, from UEA's Norwich Business School, said: “Our results show that the effects of workplace bullying are time-dependent and accumulative, and go beyond the individual and the work setting, impacting the partner’s sleep as well.

“Therefore, rumination can be seen as a maladaptive coping strategy to deal with workplace bullying, meaning that while this type of reflection may initially seem like a way to resolve issues or understand the situation, it can actually lead to more harm in the long run.”

Ref: Rodríguez-Muñoz, A., Antino, M., Ruiz-Zorrilla, P., Sanz-Vergel, A. I., & León-Pérez, J. M. (2025). Your Job Makes us Lose Sleep: The Effect of Workplace Bullying on Own and Partner’ Insomnia. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605251318291

They’re the modern way to find love according to the 323 million people who use them worldwide, but dating apps are fuelling an obsession with cosmetic surgery that may not have a happy ending.

A new study by researchers at the University of South Australia has shed light on how dating app female users are far more likely to undergo cosmetic procedures and digitally alter their looks on screen than non-users.

The emphasis on appearance, particularly with the swipe-based apps, plays a role in influencing 20% of women to change their looks via dermal fillers and anti-wrinkle injections in particular. UniSA Bachelor of Psychology (Honours) graduate, and provisional psychologist, Naomi Burkhardt, who led the study published in Computers in Human Behaviour, says that while the increasing popularity of dating apps has reduced the stigma of using them to find love, there is a downside.

“The visual nature of dating apps, which prioritise photo-based profiles, places significant pressure on users to present themselves in an idealised matter which is not genuine,” Burkhardt says.

The researchers surveyed 308 Australian women aged 18 to 72 and found that nearly half of them had used a dating app in the past two years and one in five reported undergoing at least one cosmetic procedure.

Women who used dating apps had significantly more positive attitudes towards cosmetic surgery compared to non-users and those who altered their appearances digitally were also more likely to consider cosmetic procedures.

Apart from the pressures to enhance physical appearance, dating apps could also be partly responsible for an increase in overall body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, anxiety and poor self-esteem among women.

Online dating has become increasingly popular in recent years and the trend is expected to continue, with dating website predicting that by 2040, more than 70% of relationships will begin online.

Ref: “Swipe, Style, Surgery: Exploring Dating App Use, Self-Presentation Style, and Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery” is authored by University of South Australia researchers Naomi Burkhardt, Dr John Mingoia and Lauren Conboy. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2025.108568

Four young children have gained life-changing improvements in sight following treatment with a pioneering new genetic medicine through UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital, with the support of MeiraGTx.

The outcomes of the new treatment, reported in The Lancet, show that gene therapy at an early age can dramatically improve sight for children with this condition – one that is rare and particularly severe.

The children were born with a severe impairment to their sight due to a rare genetic deficiency that affects the AIPL1 gene. The condition, a form of retinal dystrophy, means those affected are born with only sufficient sight to distinguish between light and darkness. The gene defect causes the retinal cells to malfunction and die, with children affected being legally certified as blind from birth. The new treatment is designed to enable the retinal cells to work better and to survive longer.

The procedure, developed by UCL scientists, consists of injecting healthy copies of the gene into the retina, at the back of the eye through keyhole surgery. These copies are contained inside a harmless virus, so can penetrate the retinal cells and replace the defective gene.

The condition is very rare, and the first children identified were from overseas. To mitigate any potential safety issues, the first four children received this novel therapy in one eye only. All four saw remarkable improvements in the treated eye over the following three to four years, but lost sight in their untreated eye.

The team is now exploring the means to make this new treatment more widely available.

Ref: Gene therapy in children with AIPL1-associated severe retinal dystrophy: an open-label, first-in-human interventional study, The Lancet, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), MeiraGTx and Moorfields Eye Charity.

The risk of developing ADHD was three times higher among children whose mothers used the pain-relief drug during pregnancy, according to a study published in Nature Mental Health.

Prior research shows that upward of 70% of pregnant women use acetaminophen during pregnancy to control pain or reduce fever. The drug, which is the active ingredient of many pain-relief medications, is one of the few considered safe to take during pregnancy by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The new findings suggest, however, that doctors should reconsider prescribing medications with acetaminophen to mothers during pregnancy, the researchers said.

Most of the prior studies asked women to self-report whether they had taken Tylenol or anything that contained acetaminophen,” said lead author Brennan Baker, a researcher at Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

“This medication was also approved decades ago, and may need reevaluation by the FDA,” said Sathyanarayana, the paper’s senior author. “Acetaminophen was never evaluated for fetal exposures in relations to long-term neurodevelopmental impacts.”

Despite acetaminophen’s classification as low risk by regulatory agencies such as the FDA, accumulating evidence suggests a potential link between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, including ADHD and ADHD autism spectrum disorder, the researchers noted.

The children born to these mothers were followed for 8 to 10 years. Among the women who did not use acetaminophen during pregnancy, the rate of ADHD was 9%, but for the women who used acetaminophen, the ADHD rate among their offspring was 18%.

Also, the association was stronger among daughters than sons, with the daughters of acetaminophen-exposed mothers showing a 6.16 times higher likelihood of ADHD while the association was weaker and nonsignificant in males. Researchers did not know why the association was stronger in females.

Hence, it was concluded that more work needs to be done to find out if some people can tolerate acetaminophen during pregnancy with no ill effects on the fetus while others cannot.

Ref: Baker, B.H., Bammler, T.K., Barrett, E.S. et al. Associations of maternal blood biomarkers of prenatal APAP exposure with placental gene expression and child attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Nat. Mental Health (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00387-6