#uk biobank

[cbirt]

OpenAI’s ChatGPT: A Promising AI Tool for Early Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease

Researchers at Drexel University’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Health Systems have found that ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot program, may be able to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. In a study, the program analyzed conversations between individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and healthy controls and was able to accurately identify those with the disease with an accuracy rate of 80%. ChatGPT uses AI algorithms to generate responses similar to how a human would respond to user input and be able to detect differences in language patterns, such as difficulty finding the right words and repetitive language, in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. While more research is needed, the study suggests that OpenAI’s GPT-3 could potentially be used as a non-invasive, cost-effective method for detecting Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. 

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[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Sharon Guynup | 21 January 2023

On the screen and on the street, strawberry blonds and those with auburn tresses attract attention, and always have.

That is, in part, because red hair is an exotic trait, occurring in just one or two out of every 100 people.

While the gene variants that endow flaming locks are rare, redheads are not destined to vanish from the population, despite recurring claims to that effect.

“Redheads are not going extinct,” says Katerina Zorina-Lichtenwalter, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at University of Colorado, Boulder.

To understand why this is so, it’s necessary first to understand why there are redheads in the first place.

As it turns out, it’s not only tabloids that are interested in flame-haired people. Scientists are too.

There’s more research on the variations in human hair color than you might expect, and the science makes it clear that crimson locks are not becoming increasingly rare, nor will they disappear any time soon. It’s a trait that dates to prehistory.

Analysis of 50,000-year-old DNA revealed that some Neanderthals were pale-complected redheads.

A famous 3,800-year-old Bronze Age mummy, known as the Beauty of Loulan, was unearthed from a desert cemetery in northwestern China with intact sepia-colored hair.

From the fifth century on, in what is now southeast Europe and Turkey, the mythological King Rhesus of the ancient Thracians was depicted on Greek pottery with carrot-colored hair and beard.

The gene variants involved are recessive, meaning two copies—one from the mother and one from the father—are required to produce a red-haired child.

"Only if both parents are redheads can they be almost certain their baby will have fiery hair," Zorina-Lichtenwalter says.

In her book Red: A History of the Redhead, author Jacky Colliss Harvey characterizes the odds of having a crimson-haired baby this way:

“In the great genetic card game, red hair is the two of clubs. It is trumped by every other card in the pack.”

The genetics of red

Ginger coloring in people—as well as horses, dogs, pigs, and other mammals—is conferred by just a handful of genetic mutations that both parents must carry.

The “redhead gene” was discovered in 1995 by a team including Ian Jackson, now a professor emeritus at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh.

This melanocortin 1 receptor gene, or MC1R, plays a key role in producing melanin, the tan pigment that protects skin from ultraviolet radiation (sunlight) and also colors eyes and skin.

One type, eumelanin, endows brown or black hair.

Pheomelanin creates red or blonde locks and confers light skin and freckles.

In people who have red hair, the skin cells (melanocytes) that produce pigment have a variant receptor on the cell surface.

When exposed to UV light, this variant fails to trigger a switch that changes melanin pigment from yellow/red to the protective brown/black.

“MC1R is one of several genes that work together to produce dark melanin, and without that switch, you’re going to have light skin,” says Zorina-Lichtenwalter—and easily burn when out in the sun.

In their 1995 research, Jackson and his colleagues compared 30 Irish and British redheads with the same number of brunettes.

More than 80 percent of rosy-haired and/or fair-skinned people carried variations in the MC1R gene; but just 20 percent of the brown-haired individuals did.

When they published the study, geneticist Richard Spritz told the media “this is the first time in humans that a specific gene for any common visible characteristic has been identified.”

Genetic advantage—and peril

Pale coloration bestowed a key advantage to cultures migrating from sunnier regions into northern Europe with its gray skies and short winter days.

“There was evolutionary pressure to lose skin pigmentation,” Zorina-Lichtenwalter explains, because lighter skin absorbs more UV, which produces more vitamin D from the limited amount of sunlight in northern regions.

Vitamin D helps the body absorb and retain calcium, build stronger bones, and protect against inflammation.

These health benefits increased the likelihood that women would survive pregnancy and birth, successfully passing on genes for light skin and red or blonde hair to their offspring.

The trait flourished in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where there are, by far, more fair-skinned redheads than anywhere else on Earth.

Some unofficial estimates peg the number at around 10 percent.

Much of the research into redhead genetics stems from their elevated skin cancer risk.

The MC1R gene mutations linked to crimson hair, light skin, and freckles also allows more UV to reach DNA and damage it.

One study found that people carrying a so-called R variant of the MC1R gene had a 42 percent higher incidence of melanoma, one of the most aggressive forms of cancer.

Melanoma is 20 times more prevalent in Caucasians than in African Americans.

However, the average age for melanoma diagnosis is 65. Therefore, Zorina-Lichtenwalter says, “it doesn’t threaten reproductive fitness.”

At that age, women have already passed their genes to the next generation. This is why, she says, redheads are unlikely to disappear from the gene pool.

More ginger genes

When he was working on that 1995 genetic analysis, Jackson knew there was more to understand about the factors conferring red hair.

“It seemed logical that there were other genes involved,” he says, but deeper exploration was not yet possible: Genetic research was extremely slow and costly.

While rapid advances in genetic technologies and computing had launched the Human Genome Project, the first draft of the genetic map would not be complete until 2001.

Now, a quarter-century later, quick, inexpensive genetic research is the norm.

Jackson and his colleagues recently revisited their inquiry with resources unthinkable in 1995.

They analyzed DNA from the UK Biobank, which contains genetic and health information on a half million residents of the United Kingdom.

They discovered eight previously unknown genetic variants that affect red hair and skin pigmentation.

“To go through and find those genes using the Biobank was very, very satisfying,” Jackson says.

This research, published in 2022, identified most of the genetic variation contributing to differences in hair color.

Most redheads have two MC1R variants, according to Jackson, one from each parent. But several other genes also affect whether your hair will be red.

“It's a particular combination that gives rise to red hair,” he says.

Researchers assigned each of the implicated genes a “genetic risk score”: with some variants exerting higher probability of red locks.

Others had much less clout but were still associated. You don’t need all of them to have red hair, Jackson says.

“MC1R is king when it comes to red headedness,” Zorina-Lichtenwalter says.

“It has a tremendous amount of say in whether we'll have dark pigmentation or light pigmentation.”

More than four-fifths of redheads carry MC1R; whereas the remaining reds are caused by other genes.

Geography and ancestry

A recent U.K. genetic study correlated the incidence of burnished tresses with place of birth, with more redheads in the country’s north and west.

“In the Biobank, you've got the latitude and longitude of birthplace of every individual,” Jackson says.

“The further north you were born, the higher the likelihood of having red hair.”

Red-haired, light-skinned genetics thrived in remote regions, closed communities, and islands––such as Scotland (estimates of redheads there range from Jackson’s 6 percent up to 12 or 14 percent); Ireland (10 percent); and Britain (6 percent).

While the populations of these countries are no longer cut off from the rest of the world, “when you have an insular population, isolated from others reproductively, then whatever alleles, they rise in frequency from generation to generation,” Zorina-Lichtenwalter says.

However, redheads are not only Celts or Caucasians. Their distribution is a testament to the global movement of DNA across societies and landscapes.

Although most common in Northern Europe, parts of Russia, and among European descendants in Australia, there are redheads from all ethnicities and races.

For example, both Morocco and Jamaica have higher-than-average numbers.

The reason, Zorina-Lichtenwalter says, is that several genes are responsible for triggering dark eumelanin production to protect skin.

But for hair color, she says “MC1R does appear to dominate, which is why variants in MC1R can still produce red hair in Jamaicans and other dark-skinned people.”

We are not amidst a redhead extinction event

"Claims that redheads are a dying breed are not new, and some of them were clearly linked to financial gain," Jackson says.

One headline that started an uproar blared, “Redheads May Soon Join Polar Bears As Casualties Of Climate Change,” which is a serious stretch.

"Climate change is creating more extreme temperature, drought, and flood; but the possibility that it will impact UV radiation enough to alter Northern Hemisphere genetics––within the predicted few hundred years––is slim," says Zorina-Lichtenwalter.

The source of this claim was Alistair Moffat, CEO of the now-defunct genetic testing company ScotlandsDNA.

Prior to that, the Oxford Hair Foundation (also dissolved) predicted that redheads would be extinct by 2100, with the gene variant that confers flaming hair slowly disappearing.

“[The institute] was a front, funded by a hair dye and cosmetics company to generate interest in hair color,” Jackson says.

While recessive genes can become rare, they don't utterly disappear unless every person who carries that gene either perishes—or does not bear children.

And clearly that’s not going to happen.

Wherever they live, redheads garner outsized attention, sometimes stigmatized, sometimes admired.

As testament to their continued presence in the world, they celebrate themselves in yearly “red pride” events in the U.K., France, and Italy, as well as the U.S.

The largest may be an event in August, when thousands of gingers from across the world convene in the Netherlands for “Redhead Days.”

[trendynewsnow]

Long-Term Health Benefits of Early Life Sugar Rationing: A Study

Impact of Early Sugar Rationing on Long-Term Health A recent study has revealed that individuals who were subjected to limited sugar intake in their early years are significantly less likely to develop diabetes and high blood pressure later in life. This groundbreaking research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, leveraged a unique historical context in the United Kingdom during World…

[nando161mando]

"Race science group say they accessed sensitive UK health data" https://theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/17/race-science-group-say-they-accessed-sensitive-uk-health-data

In 'Resisting AI' I specifically warned about UK Biobank, genome-wide association studies and the emergence of AI-driven eugenics.

[billloguidice]

Caffeine consumption associated with lower risk of developing CM - New Study

Caffeine consumption associated with lower risk of developing CM - New Study #caffeine #coffee #tea #plasmametabolites #cm #research #newstudy #newresearch

In a new study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) from Oxford Academic, “Habitual Coffee, Tea, and Caffeine Consumption, Circulating Metabolites, and the Risk of Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity,” consumers of moderate amounts of caffeine had the lowest risk for Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity (CM). CM is one of the most common and harmful multimorbidity profiles…

[thetanningguru]

Shedding New Light on UV Exposure: Sunbed Health Benefits Finally Revealed

For years, we’ve been warned about the dangers of ultraviolet (UV) light exposure, particularly from sunbeds. However, a groundbreaking new study from researchers at the University of Edinburgh suggests that UV exposure may have more health benefits than previously thought, especially in countries with low sunlight like the United Kingdom. The Study at a Glance Published in the journal Health &…

[centralbiohubsworld]

Procure high-quality PBMC samples for research

Human PBMCs consists of round nucleated peripheral blood cells such as lymphocytes, monocytes, and macrophages, which have a crucial role in regulating human immunity. Due to it’s high sensitivity and specificity concerning genetic diversity and chemical exposure, Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells are a powerful tool for conquering new horizons of immunological research and the development of personalized medicine. If you are searching high-quality, well annotated human PBMC samples for research, check out the latest inventory of Central BioHub online human biospecimen marketplace:https://centralbiohub.de/biospecimens/cell-products/pbmc

Benefiting researchers globally, Central BioHub unlocks your access to 800,000+ human biospecimens such as serum, plasma, CSF, tissues, and FFPE blocks gathered from healthy and disease-state donors exclusively for drug and diagnostic research.Hurry up Order biospecimens online:https://centralbiohub.de/

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

Not covid specific, but good to remember: Masking and other airborne disease prevention keeps you from getting other diseases like the flu too. Covid's not the only threat to your long-term health out there.

By Felicity Nelson

A study of around 500,000 medical records suggested that severe viral infections like encephalitis and pneumonia increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Researchers found 22 connections between viral infections and neurodegenerative conditions in the study of around 450,000 people.

People treated for a type of inflammation of the brain called viral encephalitis were 31 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. (For every 406 viral encephalitis cases, 24 went on to develop Alzheimer's disease – around 6 percent.)

Those who were hospitalized with pneumonia after catching the flu seemed to be more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease, dementia, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Intestinal infections and meningitis (both often caused by a virus), as well as the varicella-zoster virus, which causes shingles, were also implicated in the development of several neurodegenerative diseases.

The impact of viral infections on the brain persisted for up to 15 years in some cases. And there were no instances where exposure to viruses was protective.

Around 80 percent of the viruses implicated in brain diseases were considered 'neurotrophic', which means they could cross the blood-brain barrier.

"Strikingly, vaccines are currently available for some of these viruses, including influenza, shingles (varicella-zoster), and pneumonia," the researchers wrote in their paper published last year.

"Although vaccines do not prevent all cases of illness, they are known to dramatically reduce hospitalization rates. This evidence suggests that vaccination may mitigate some risk of developing neurodegenerative disease."

In 2022, a study of more than 10 million people linked the Epstein-Barr virus with a 32-fold increased risk of multiple sclerosis.

"After reading [this] study, we realized that for years scientists had been searching – one-by-one – for links between an individual neurodegenerative disorder and a specific virus," said senior author Michael Nalls, a neurogeneticist at the National Institute on Aging in the US.

"That's when we decided to try a different, more data science-based approach," he said. "By using medical records, we were able to systematically search for all possible links in one shot."

First, the researchers analyzed the medical records of around 35,000 Finns with six different types of neurodegenerative diseases and compared this against a group of 310,000 controls who did not have a brain disease.

This analysis yielded 45 links between viral exposure and neurodegenerative diseases, and this was narrowed down to 22 links in a subsequent analysis of 100,000 medical records from the UK Biobank.

While this retrospective observational study cannot demonstrate a causal link, it adds to the pile of research hinting at the role of viruses in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

"Neurodegenerative disorders are a collection of diseases for which there are very few effective treatments and many risk factors," said co-author Andrew Singleton, a neurogeneticist and Alzheimer's researcher and the director of the Center for Alzheimer's and Related Dementias.

"Our results support the idea that viral infections and related inflammation in the nervous system may be common – and possibly avoidable – risk factors for these types of disorders."

This study was published in Neuron.

Study link: www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)01147-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627322011473%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists have found genetic variations associated with human bisexual behaviour for the first time, and they are linked to risk-taking behaviour and producing more children.  The University of Michigan-led study, which was published on Wednesday (3 January) in Science Advances, analysed data from more than 450,000 people in the UK’s Biobank database of genetic and health information. 

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[cbirt]

The POPDx framework was created to effectively identify a wide variety of phenotypes among participants in the UK Biobank study. To provide a thorough analysis, it makes use of a wide variety of patient data, including demographic details, medical histories, lifestyle factors, and genetic information. The framework has been successfully tested on the UK Biobank dataset and outperforms other comparable methods in identifying a wide range of phenotypes, both common and rare. This ground-breaking platform has the potential to increase the precision of phenotype recognition significantly and can be used with other biobank records.

In order to advance precision medicine and enhance patient care outcomes, POPDx is positioned to emerge as a significant player in the field of patient phenotyping. The results offer useful direction for scientists, medical professionals, and patients.

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[maaarine]

How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain (Marta Zaraska, Quanta Magazine, Feb 28 2023)

"Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions.

Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly.

Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections. (…)

However, a study that the team published in 2022 revealed that although threatening social situations trigger more amygdala activity in people suffering from social anxiety, they do not have that effect on lonely people.

Similarly, people with social anxiety have diminished activity in the reward sections of their brain, and that does not appear to be true for lonely people.

“The core features of social anxiety were not evident in loneliness,” Lieberz said.

Those results suggest, she said, that treating loneliness simply by telling lonely people to go out and socialize more (the way you can treat a phobia of snakes with exposure) will often not work because it fails to address the root cause of the loneliness.

In fact, a recent meta-analysis confirmed that simply providing lonely people with easier access to potential friends has no effect on subjective loneliness.

The problem with loneliness seems to be that it biases our thinking.

In behavioral studies, lonely people picked up on negative social signals, such as images of rejection, within 120 milliseconds — twice as quickly as people with satisfying relationships and in less than half the time it takes to blink.

Lonely people also preferred to stand farther away from strangers, trusted others less and disliked physical touch.

This may be why the emotional well-being of lonely individuals often follows “a downward spiral,” said Danilo Bzdok, an interdisciplinary researcher at McGill University with a background in neuroscience and machine learning. (…)

Bzdok and his team showed that some regions of the default network are not only larger in chronically lonely people but also more strongly connected to other parts of the brain.

Moreover, the default network seems to be involved in many of the distinctive abilities that have evolved in humans — such as language, anticipating the future and causal reasoning.

More generally, the default network activates when we think about other people, including when we interpret their intentions.

The findings on default network connectivity provided neuroimaging evidence to support previous discoveries by psychologists that lonely people tend to daydream about social interactions, get easily nostalgic about past social events, and even anthropomorphize their pets, talking to their cats as if they were human, for example.

“It would require the default network to do that too,” Bzdok said.

While loneliness can lead to a rich imaginary social life, it can make real-life social encounters less rewarding.

A reason why may have been identified in a 2021 study by Bzdok and his colleagues that was also based on the voluminous UK Biobank data.

They looked separately at socially isolated people and at people with low social support, as measured by a lack of someone to confide in on a daily or almost daily basis.

The researchers found that in all such individuals, the orbitofrontal cortex — a part of the brain linked to processing rewards — was smaller.

Last year, a large brain-imaging study based on data from more than 1,300 Japanese volunteers revealed that greater loneliness is associated with stronger functional connections in the brain area that handles visual attention.

This finding supports previous reports from eye-tracking studies that lonely people tend to focus excessively on unpleasant social cues, such as being ignored by others. (…)

While interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, promoting trust and synchrony, or even ingesting magic mushrooms could help treat chronic loneliness, transient feelings of solitude will most likely always remain part of the human experience.

And there is nothing wrong with that, Tomova said.

She compares loneliness to stress: It’s unpleasant but not necessarily negative.

“It provides energy to the body, and then we can deal with challenges,” she said.

“It becomes problematic when it’s chronic because our bodies are not meant to be in this constant state. That’s when our adaptive mechanisms ultimately break down.”"

[sronti]

Valaki nem akarja ezt megírni egy oldalban? Nagyon érdekes, de azért na.

[blessphemy]

Tumblr post about long covid mentions MECFS.

Me: to DuckDuckGo with “MECFS” cuz idk what that is. Wikipedia article pops up.

Wikipedia: A genetic component is suspected, as ME/CFS (Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) can run in families.

Me: clicking on first source cited:

The first source’s abstract: “Here we critically review existing evidence that genetic factors alter ME/CFS risk before concluding that most ME/CFS candidate gene associations are not replicated by the larger CFS cohort within the UK Biobank. Multiple genome-wide association studies of this cohort also have not yielded consistently significant associations”

Me: clicking on backup source (same thing different host I think) cited:

The backup sources abstract: “Despite a prevalence of ∼0.2–0.4% and its high public health burden, and evidence that it has a heritable component, ME/CFS has not yet benefited from the advances in technology and analytical tools that have improved our understanding of many other complex diseases. Here we critically review existing evidence that genetic factors alter ME/CFS risk before concluding that most ME/CFS candidate gene associations are not replicated by the larger CFS cohort within the UK Biobank.”

This is about where I stopped, though the next step would be to track down the studies referenced by this source that led them to interrogating the “evidence that there is a heritable component.” Also if I were being more thorough I would read the whole study and not just the abstract to see what I think of the credibility of how they reached their conclusions.

Summary: yes, a genetic component is “suspected” by some researchers, but the potential genetic markers investigated so far in the cited study have not been shown to be statistically significant, i.e. they’re no good as markers. Other genetic markers might be found in the future. The study references “evidence of a heritable component” but I have not seen this evidence with my own eyes yet and therefore maintain ambivalence to the idea that MECFS has a heritable component.

My conclusion: bit of oversimplified and kinda misleading phrasing you used there, Wikipedia article.

[partisan-by-default]

A study has looked at the health of more than 413,000 people taking part in the UK Biobank project. All were between 40 and 69 years old and free of dementia, cancer or stroke at the start of the study. Their health was tracked, focusing on the association between air pollution and the transition from being healthy to having a stroke, dementia or both. Data was also collected on their lifestyles, including smoking, exercise, alcohol consumption and diet, as well as their socioeconomic status.

Over the course of 11 years, 6,484 people had a stroke, 3,813 developed dementia and 376 had a stroke and developed dementia. Having allowed for other risk factors, the researchers found relationships between long-term air pollution exposure and acquiring dementia, as well as developing dementia after a stroke.

Prof Frank Kelly of Imperial College London, who was part of the study team, said: “These new findings help to clarify how air pollution plays an important role in the dynamic transitions of stroke and dementia, even at concentrations below the UK’s current air quality standards.

“The target for particle pollution under the Environment Act is twice the World Health Organization guideline and is set to be achieved by 2040. Not meeting the WHO guideline as soon as possible means that thousands more people are on the path to developing serious illness such as stroke and dementia simply because they are unable to breathe clean air.”