Does support from administrative leadership help keep teachers in their jobs by making them feel safer and less stressed? And when teachers experience violence from students in their classrooms, does it weaken the impact of that protective relationship?

To find out, researchers analyzed 2020–21 national survey data on school violence from 5,550 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers. Conducted in collaboration with the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel, the study was published recently in Educational Researcher.

Andrew Perry, a senior lecturer in educational studies at The Ohio State University, led the project alongside a research team that included co-author Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses. They focused specifically on teachers’ intentions to transfer or quit, noting that about one-third of educators who express a desire to leave actually follow through within the year.

The researchers’ definition of support centers on transparency and communication — such as teachers feeling safe and comfortable talking to principals about matters of discipline — and a general belief that school administrators will back up teachers when a disciplinary incident occurs.

They found that while supportive leadership is widely recognized as protective against teacher burnout, student-directed violence is a critical tipping point. In a sample where 44% of educators reported experiencing student victimization and up to 80% faced verbal or threatening aggression, high levels of violence systematically weakened the protective benefits of principal support.

These results did not surprise Perry. “Our hypotheses were largely supported by the study. What we expected to find, we found,” he said. “Support is beneficial and necessary, but not sufficient. You have to have it, but in the face of victimization, support alone is not enough.”

Prior research shows that teachers who are on the front lines in our schools are most susceptible to non-physical violence from students — including verbal threats, obscene remarks and slurs. It’s “a demoralizing, sobering day-to-day reality,” Perry said. “If a teacher feels they are in an environment where this stuff is ignored, and they have nobody to turn to, it becomes toxic to their well-being, and they want to get away.”

Notably, elementary school teachers reported being victimized more often than their peers. Perry suspects this is due to elementary students having a lower capacity for self-regulation, making them more likely to lash out through hitting, biting, throwing objects or screaming.

“Teachers sign up for the job, but dealing with young children presenting these behaviors is challenging. School principals being present and showing support is a necessary component, but systematic strategies are required alongside it,” he said.

In a 2024 School Psychology paper co-authored by Perry, researchers evaluated strategies schools use to prevent violence and found that zero-tolerance policies and school hardening practices, like upgrading physical security and surveillance systems, do not work. “The most effective strategies are restorative, prevention-based approaches that build a climate of mutual respect, safety and integrity,” he said.

Beyond institutional policies, Perry emphasized that addressing teacher retention requires a fundamental shift in how schools and communities handle classroom safety.

“Violence against teachers is real, pervasive and impactful. When teachers are victimized, they want to leave. Teacher attrition leads to cascading consequences: schools lose experienced veteran teachers and replacing them is expensive and leads to inexperienced instruction,” Perry said.

Administrators can influence teachers’ perceptions of school safety, anxiety and stress, and retention intentions, the researchers noted, but administrator support needs to be combined with positive and clear discipline policies, and effective violence prevention initiatives that include all stakeholders and systemic improvements in school culture and climate.

“Teachers are human beings who need support not only from principals, but from parents and the public as well,” Perry said.

This work was supported by the American Psychological Association. Additional co-authors include Linda A. Reddy of Rutgers University; Andrew Martinez of Hunter College; Susan D. McMahon of DePaul University; Ron A. Astor of the University of California, Los Angeles; Frank C. Worrell of the University of California, Berkeley; and Dorothy L. Espelage of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The study in cell cultures and rabbits found that a hormone that naturally becomes elevated during pregnancy produces specific fatty compounds, creating conditions favoring the virus’s ability to make copies of itself.    

The study helps explain why pregnancy, especially the third trimester, is associated with severe HEV outcomes, including liver failure, fetal complications and maternal death.

“This work demonstrates that the same biological processes that support fetal growth may also be co-opted by the virus,” said first author Kush Yadav, assistant professor of animal sciences at Ohio State.

Yadav also said the findings extend beyond hepatitis E, highlighting how metabolic changes during pregnancy may influence the severity of other viral infections.

The study, a collaboration between Ohio State and the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, was published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hepatitis E (HEV) is a leading cause of viral hepatitis worldwide and is known to disproportionately affect pregnant women, particularly in late stages of pregnancy. The risk of death in infected pregnant people can be dramatically higher than in the general population, but the biological reasons behind this heightened risk have remained unclear.

HEV is also the leading cause of acute viral liver infection in humans worldwide, mostly in developing regions where sanitation is poor.

In this new study, the research team discovered that placental lactogen, a hormone that increases significantly during pregnancy, plays a central role in fueling viral replication. The hormone increase triggers the production of higher levels of fatty acids and lipids – compounds that store energy, form cell membranes and perform other important functions in the body.

In cases of pregnant people infected with HEV, the presence of those fatty compounds provides the virus with an environment conducive to replicating more efficiently.

Experiments showed that elevated levels of oleic acid, a common fatty acid, directly enhance HEV replication, and increased production of phosphatidylethanolamine, or PE, a membrane-forming lipid, is essential for viral replication.

“This collaborative research reveals an important role of host lipid reprogramming in the pathogenesis of hepatitis E virus. Our findings that certain lipids, such as phosphatidylethanolamine and oleic acid, are elevated in hepatitis E virus-infected pregnant animals and enhance virus replication provide mechanistic insights into how hepatitis E virus causes disease, particularly pregnancy-associated adverse clinical outcomes,” said senior author X.J. Meng, University Distinguished Professor of molecular virology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.

Disrupting these lipid production pathways significantly reduced viral replication, results showed.

“Cutting-edge lipidomic analyses allowed us to precisely narrow down the key lipid drivers of HEV replication, identifying specific fatty acids and PE as strong candidates,” said second author Menuka Bhandari, a research senior associate in the Research and Analytical Service Core of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

While additional research is needed, particularly in human populations, the study provides a foundation for developing targeted treatments to reduce pregnancy-related complications from HEV, the researchers say.

“By identifying lipid metabolism as a critical driver of HEV replication, the research opens new avenues for interventions,” Yadav said.

Potential future strategies may include therapies that target lipid production pathways, approaches that regulate hormone-driven metabolic changes, and development of broad antiviral strategies that disrupt virus–lipid interactions.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Ohio State startup funds and Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship.

Additional co-authors include Hassan Mahsoub and Hannah Brown of Virginia Tech; Young Bin Park, Huong Van Lee and Jay Mun Choi of Calico Co. Ltd.; and Gireesh Rajashekara of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The analysis also shows the risk of a nonfatal overdose is up to three-fold higher in illicit users compared to patients exposed to fentanyl in a medical setting or through a prescription.

Overall, the study found that illicit-source fentanyl exposure is linked to a significantly higher risk of opioid-related harmful outcomes than medical-source exposure.

Almost 300,000 people from a dataset of 300 million patients were divided into two groups based primarily on urine drug test results, with illicit-source users constituting 71.1% of the study cohort, compared to 28.9% medical-source users.

“Fentanyl is a big problem, but we don’t actually know how serious illicit drug use is compared to medical use,” said co-lead author Ping Zhang, professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical informatics at The Ohio State University. “Finding that illicit use has reached 70% among all fentanyl users is a surprise. And this is also a contribution of this paper. To make something that’s been a black hole visible to the healthcare system is significant.”

The analysis also showed that among all states, illicit fentanyl use is most common in Ohio.

The study was published Aug. 14, 2026, in eClinicalMedicine.

Data on patients screened for fentanyl exposure from 2015 to 2023 came from Epic Cosmos, a large U.S. electronic health record dataset. First author Seungyeon Lee, a PhD student in Zhang’s lab, conducted the analysis linking urine drug test results with medication records to group patients by medical or illicit use.

“Inferring or characterizing individual-level illicit fentanyl exposure poses significant challenges because illicit use often occurs outside the clinical setting and therefore is not directly observed in clinical data, so it’s difficult to measure the scale and impact,” Lee said. “This study focused on identifying illicit-source fentanyl use and its risk for opioid-related harmful outcomes.”

Among patients in the Epic dataset who met study criteria, people who tested positive for fentanyl and had received a prescription for the drug within 72 hours before the urine test were categorized as medical-source patients (85,535), and people who tested positive but had no recent fentanyl prescription composed the illicit-source use cohort (210,193).

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that’s up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Its main clinical use is to treat severe pain, especially after surgery and for advanced cancers. Fentanyl is among the synthetic opioids that contribute to nearly 70% of overdose deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition to categorizing fentanyl users, Lee conducted analyses to examine patterns of adverse outcomes in both illicit and medical-source users that emerged over time from 2015 to 2023 and to estimate short-term risks within 30 days of fentanyl initiation.

The negative outcomes linked to fentanyl use included nonfatal overdose, abuse or misuse, and dependence that leads to withdrawal symptoms when use stops. Fatal overdoses were not included in this work because causes of death were not part of the Epic dataset.

The temporal analysis showed illicit fentanyl users had a higher prevalence of all three negative outcomes compared to medical users, and by 2023, the prevalence of nonfatal overdose was four-fold higher for illicit users than for medical-source fentanyl patients, at 18.6% of illicit users compared to 4.3% of medical users.

In the short-term risk analysis, after adjusting for a variety of health conditions and demographics, results showed that illicit-source fentanyl initiation was associated with a two- to three-fold higher risk of nonfatal overdose, abuse and dependence within 30 days compared to medical-source initiation.

“These patterns indicate that illicit-source fentanyl remains a significant and growing threat to public health nationwide,” the authors wrote.

The analysis also showed that, compared to medical exposure to fentanyl, illicit fentanyl users were younger and less likely to be married, had a higher concentration of fentanyl detected in their urine drug test, and were more likely to have a mental health or substance use disorder.

Medical-source users were more likely than illicit-source users to have a chronic condition, and patients with chronic conditions were more likely to have more frequent healthcare utilization and greater exposure to opioid medications.

Geographically, Ohio had the highest proportion of illicit-source fentanyl users – 12.2% – followed by Massachusetts (10.5%) and California (8.8%). Medical-source exposure was most common in North Carolina (10.6%), Ohio (10.5%) and California (10.3%).

Opioid regulations have been focused on medical-source opioid drugs, including fentanyl, but the researchers say the availability of new data on the widespread illicit use of fentanyl and related health dangers highlights a need for additional policy action.

For example, the examination of patient data revealed a transition from medical-source fentanyl use to illicit-source use among some patients. The Zhang lab’s next step will be analyzing patterns related to this transition, with hopes that the findings could assist with policymaking strategies.

This work was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Zhang is also a core faculty member in the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State. Additional co-authors were Richard Urman of Ohio State and Wenyu Song and David Bates of Harvard Medical School.

People who have experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are susceptible to many types of infections, especially in the lungs. Yet previous studies have shown that bladder infections in this population are not uncommon: 15% of adult brain injury patients experience a urinary tract infection (UTI) within a year, and UTIs are responsible for up to 20% of hospital readmissions that occur within a year after a TBI. In addition, UTIs are known to cause delirium-like symptoms in medically vulnerable people.

This new study, led by researchers at The Ohio State University and published recently in the Journal of Neurotrauma, is the first publication to examine neuroimmune and cognitive effects of a post-brain injury bladder infection in an animal model.

“This very common infection is happening in TBI survivors and probably those who don’t even report it and go to the hospital, and it’s associated with observed and perceived cognitive changes. We thought UTI could be something that’s having a much bigger impact on recovery after brain injury than we currently appreciate,” said senior author Olga Kokiko-Cochran, an investigator in the Chronic Brain Injury Program and the Institute of Brain, Behavior, and Immunology (IBBI) at Ohio State and associate professor of neuroscience in the College of Medicine.

“Let’s not overlook UTI,” she said. “Sometimes these common experiences that are overlooked are important, and I think we can’t presume that an infection of any sort is no big deal.”

Injuries in this work are moderate in severity and resemble the type of TBI that could result from a fall – the most common cause of traumatic brain injury.

The experiments involved four groups of female mice: those with a TBI (performed surgically under anesthesia) and “sham” mice, which had surgery but no brain injury. Three days later (again, under anesthesia), either uropathogenic E. coli bacteria, the main cause of UTIs, or a control treatment was injected into their urethras.

Results from behavioral tests six days after injury showed that the TBI impaired the animals’ spatial memory, and UTI following the injury “greatly exaggerated those cognitive impairments,” said first author Zachary Zimomra, a neuroscience research associate and manager of Kokiko-Cochran’s lab.

That UTI-induced cognitive impairment was associated with delayed increases of two inflammation-related proteins in two different cell types in several regions of the injured brains compared to controls. This finding suggested that brain immune cells were responding to not just the TBI, but to the bladder infection as well. And bladder immune cells changed after brain injury alone – an intriguing clue that could help explain why infections follow a TBI.

“Maybe there’s some susceptibility we don’t even appreciate,” Kokiko-Cochran said. “Because we do see, post-TBI, a higher immune cell presence in the bladder.”

The team looked further into changes in inflammatory protein signaling linked to the injury and infection, finding one cytokine, IL-6, elevated in the blood after TBI and then muted by the UTI – suggesting that clearance of the infection prompted anti-inflammatory activity.

Cellular changes seen in the bladder and brain also offer hints at the biology behind post-injury infection that researchers plan to investigate further. A better understanding of how the brain and bladder communicate – beyond their known neural connection related to urination – could lead to infection prevention strategies that improve long-term TBI outcomes, the researchers say.

“Clinically, there is something about UTI that causes a behavioral change in cognition that you don’t necessarily see from influenza or a cold or some other infection. It may be something with the bladder itself,” Zimomra said. “We want to learn what happens within the brain, but also how bladder change following TBI exaggerates or enhances these behavioral effects.”

UTIs affect 400 million people worldwide each year, and females are 30 times more likely than males to experience a bladder infection – which is why this initial study was done in female mice. But UTI after a brain injury is not restricted to females, meaning future research will include animals of both sexes, Kokiko-Cochran said.

“This has been an opportunity for our lab to contribute something new that has, we think, important translational relevance and could raise awareness and help us think about how this type of infection was layered on top of a brain injury,” she said. “There’s a lot more we can do to understand the brain-bladder connection.”

This work was supported by pilot funding from the Chronic Brain Injury Program and IBBI at Ohio State. Co-authors included Christina Lepak, Rebecca Boland, Morgan Taylor, Amber McCraw, Irene Crescenze and Dana McTigue of Ohio State, and Henry Schreiber of Washington University School of Medicine.

Scientists at The Ohio State University showed that the engineered extracellular vesicles could evade immune cells and target cancer cells, two capabilities that could improve the delivery of future therapies.  

The technology offers exceptional flexibility: By assembling the vesicles from red blood cell lipids using microfluidics, researchers were able to package cargo ranging from genetic material and proteins to whole viruses used in gene therapy.

In mice, the engineered vesicles remained in circulation and were distributed to multiple organs in patterns similar to those of naturally occurring extracellular vesicles, with notable accumulation in the lungs.

Though researchers started with the idea of making delivery devices out of natural extracellular vesicles generated by red blood cells, they encountered limitations in efforts to scale up production and cargo loading flexibility – so they turned to engineering techniques to improve upon what nature had to offer.

“In terms of lipid composition, they basically match very closely with what the natural extracellular vesicles from red blood cells would have,” said senior author Eduardo Reátegui, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. “We are keeping some of the great biological advantages that these particles have by themselves because they are very biocompatible.”

The source cells for the lipids are expired red blood cells – or RBCs – obtained from the lab of co-author Andre Palmer, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and an Ohio Eminent Scholar at Ohio State.

“We’re always purifying hemoglobin from expired red blood cells,” said Palmer, whose lab uses the hemoglobin as a building block for making red blood cell substitutes. “The approach here is very sustainable because these expired red blood cells otherwise would be thrown out since they cannot be transfused into patients.”

Reátegui, Palmer and colleagues described the platform in a study published recently in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are tiny cargo-containing particles that emerge from cells to transport signals to other cells. EVs are known to contribute to both health and disease, and the Ohio State team has been investigating how engineered EVs can be used in a variety of medical applications.

Beyond the biocompatibility provided by red blood cell lipids, microfluidics enables therapeutic cargo to be incorporated as the vesicles form, eliminating the need for separate cargo-loading steps afterward.

“We’re not saying our process is better. We’re claiming that we have a lot more controllability in terms of what we want the composition of this engineered vesicle to look like,” said Reátegui, also a member of the Cancer Biology Program in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Experiments showed that attaching a CD47 peptide to the carriers’ outer surface protected them from being mistaken for pathogens and eaten by macrophages.

The team also showed that the vesicles could be engineered for tumor targeting by adding PD-L1-recognition molecules, including anti-PD-L1 nanobodies developed in the lab of co-author Blaise Kimmel, and by demonstrating preferential uptake of anti-PD-L1-tagged vesicles in PD-L1-positive breast cancer tumors that are often targeted by immunotherapy.

In fact, researchers said these engineered EVs could function similarly to cancer CAR T-cell therapies that are made from a patient’s own immune system T cells.

“It could be a unique way of using a person’s own red blood cell lipids to then encapsulate therapeutic materials that could be delivered back to that patient to potentially cure a disease,” Palmer said.

The microfluidics method also enables inclusion of comparatively large molecules, such as whole proteins or even an adeno-associated virus (AAV) – the established delivery system for many gene therapies. Encasing a therapeutic AAV inside an engineered red blood cell extracellular vesicle tagged with the CD47 peptide could reduce the chances of triggering an immune response, Reátegui said.

“Our thought was to take these AAV particles and encapsulate them inside engineered RBC extracellular vesicles. We tested if the gene therapy would still work and be delivered into cells, and we show that it would. And we also demonstrated that the AAVs would be protected from neutralizing antibodies,” he said.

With the platform in place, the researchers aim to narrow their focus to gene therapy and delivery of select therapeutics, particularly those that capitalize on the EVs’ affinity for the lungs.

This research was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and Ohio State’s William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Co-authors include Chiranth Nagaraj, Xilal Rima, Kim Nguyen, Courtney Culkins, Nana Boateng, Jacob Doon-Ralls, Alejandro Bresolin, Xin Huang, Vahedi Amid, Ajeet Pal Singh, Dharti Shantaram, Anastasiia Amari, Nicholas Merriam, Zachary Schultz, Willa Hsueh, Rachel Kopec of Ohio State; and Hong Li, Scott Harper, Nizar Saad and Setty Magaña of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

But the preliminary clinical results exceeded researchers’ expectations: In the pilot trial with 12 veterans, 75% of participants were in remission one month after the study’s end. Their symptoms no longer met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“For a population with severe treatment-resistant PTSD, these results are striking,” said Stacey Armstrong, first author of the new study, published today (July 30, 2026) in Communications Medicine.

“While treatments do work for some veterans with PTSD, they’re falling short for many, leaving veterans to continue to search for solutions, which can lead to treatment dropout, long-term disability and elevated suicide risk,” said Armstrong, senior researcher and associate director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in The Ohio State University College of Social Work.

“It’s this unmet need that inspires us.”

The 11-week trial period combined eight hours of psychotherapy followed by two doses, 15 milligrams and 25 milligrams, of synthetic psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Six to eight more hours of integrative therapy followed the drug treatment.

From baseline to one month after treatment was finished, there was an overall average drop of 27.5 points in clinician-rated PTSD symptoms among the group. Nine participants had a clinical response to treatment and were in remission. No severe adverse events occurred, with the most common side effect being a mild headache after taking psilocybin. Suicidal ideation scores did not significantly change from baseline to one month post-treatment.

Future papers from this study will assess the treatment’s effectiveness up to six months after the trial, as well as biological changes and effects on other PTSD-related problems like sleep disorders and substance use, said Alan Davis, senior author of the study, director of the CPDRE and associate professor of social work at Ohio State.

Anecdotal observations, and previous research showing that depression remission endured for five years after an earlier psilocybin trial that Davis co-led, suggest the combined therapies could have staying power for many people whose symptoms are not eased by traditional therapies.

“It’s been an incredible honor to work with veterans in this study, many of whom have been suffering with PTSD for decades or longer,” said Davis, who also holds faculty appointments in psychology and internal medicine at Ohio State.

“Some experiences we’ve seen in actual treatment sessions are extremely profound and meaningful. The ability for them to go back and to revisit really difficult events that happened to them and to find a new way of understanding them and a new way of moving forward in their life has really been exciting.”

One participant’s experience

To be eligible for the trial, veterans had to have severe PTSD that was considered treatment-resistant. The need for help in this population became quite evident as participant recruitment began: Over 3,600 applicants reached out to partake in online prescreening and 668 were assessed for eligibility. Though the initial goal was 15 participants, the final number was 12 – nine men and three women.

Zachariah Collett, a U.S. Army veteran from Washington Court House, Ohio, considers himself one of the lucky ones who was selected to participate.

Collett joined the Army in 2002 as an enlisted soldier and later became a military police corps paratrooper, serving a 28-month combat tour in Iraq. By age 25 he was medically retired. Among the diagnoses and service-connected disabilities that led to retirement was post-traumatic stress disorder.  

His symptoms included nightmares, a short temper, feeling constantly on guard and being angry virtually all the time – leading to behavior that had a negative effect on his family.

“I was just absolutely tortured by the internal struggle, the internal dialogue, the noise inside my head and the inability even to just be still,” Collett said. Years of trying counseling and medications didn’t help.

It was an intensive 41-day self-discovery experience combining a healthful diet with a series of integrative therapies that first put Collett on the path to healing. When he later learned about the psilocybin trial, he saw it as the perfect opportunity – and medicine – to take a “deeper dive.”

Now three years out from the treatment, he said the psilocybin-assisted therapy had a profound effect on him, his family and his marriage.

“For the first six months to a year, I felt like I had this fantastic set of training wheels while I’m relearning the way to act in situations,” he said. “That’s the great thing about this medicine. It’s gentle and it allowed me the space to rediscover, or discover, things I didn’t know I was capable of doing.

“It allowed me the opportunity to create peace, and stillness, and acceptance, and forgiveness and grace – all those things opposite of resentment and anger and hatred. It’s rather beautiful.”

Where the magic happens

A rigorous psychotherapy schedule is a key part of the process, with evidence from the trial suggesting that PTSD symptoms were lowered even before the drug was administered.

“There is this big question in the psychedelic therapy field right now about how much of this is a drug effect, how much of this is a therapy effect, and how much is a combination of the two,” Davis said.

This study, the first to try to answer the question, found a drop in PTSD symptoms from baseline to the end of preparation therapy, with a much larger reduction after the psilocybin doses.

“This treatment is more than just a drug,” Davis said. “The drug itself is a catalyst for the deep work that opens a window for people to perhaps access things they wouldn’t be able to access emotionally otherwise, and what that does is catalyze the therapeutic process after.

“That’s where the magic actually happens. It happens in the therapy, and in the changes that people start to make in their lives after the treatment’s concluded.”

The research team acknowledges that pilot studies with no control group tend to produce larger effect sizes than standard clinical trials. They hope to secure funding to follow up with a larger randomized, controlled clinical trial.

“Recognizing the tools that we have don’t work so well and recognizing the significant burden of PTSD in the United States carried by our servicemen and women and veterans, this seemed like the right direction to go,” Armstrong said. “Too many veterans right now are suffering despite the treatments that we have, and that’s why we feel that this research is important.”

Davis, who has been studying psychedelics as a component of mental health treatment for the past 16 years, said, “This is a very exciting time for psychedelic-assisted therapy research. These treatments are generally safe, well tolerated and showing a strong signal of efficacy.”

This research was supported by Ohio State’s College of Social Work, The Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, the Clinical Research Center/Center for Clinical Research Management of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

Additional co-authors were Adam Levin, Nathan Sepeda, Hillary Shaub, Taweh Hunter, Angela Douglas and Rafaelle Lancelotta, all of Ohio State.

Those natural enzymes are called ATPases, and their activity’s reliance on ATP makes these catalysts a desirable model for drug discovery. For example, a naturally derived ATPase that’s smaller and more malleable than a protein could be delivered to cancer cells to direct ATP’s energy toward killing those cells, or targeted to block the release of energy that stimulates harmful cellular processes.

Researchers at The Ohio State University have gotten one step closer to that possibility by identifying the first noncoding RNA derived from human cells that can bind to ATP. The team is looking now at that RNA’s function, with hopes that its affinity to ATP resembles an ATPase function that could form the basis of a therapeutic nanoparticle.

“The concept of having a noncoding RNA function as an ATPase is still really new. No one has been able to find ATPase activity in an RNA yet,” said senior study author Peixuan Guo, professor in the Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmacology at Ohio State.

“Many scientists think human proteins handle all ATP activity in the body, but I think there’s no way it’s limited to only a protein function,” he said.

The study was published recently in the journal Non-coding RNA Research.

Guo is a pioneer in the discovery of functional noncoding RNAs – tiny RNA molecules lacking instructions for building proteins – that constitute over 98% of the human genome. His lab has spent years refining nanoparticle technology with versatile RNA molecules that cooperate with the body, most recently designing molecular clusters called RNA micelles that deplete metastatic colorectal cancer tumors in mice.

He is optimistic that there is a noncoding RNA to be found in the genome that functions as an ATPase, and foresees making use of such a molecule for a new class of therapeutic nanomaterials. 

This new work builds on previous work in Guo’s lab that led to the identification of a viral RNA that could bind to ATP. 

“I was essentially doing a continuation of that study, looking to see if there’s anything in human RNAs that can bind to ATP,” said first author Margaret Bohmer, a PhD student in Guo’s lab. 

Bohmer ran multiple rounds of screening total RNA extracted from human cells, looking for segments that could connect with ATP. She removed non-binders between rounds and amplified the presence of ATP until she had an enriched pool of RNAs that bound only to ATP. She then sequenced what was left, confirming identification of a single noncoding RNA that made a strong attachment to ATP. 

The structure of this RNA is called a G-quadruplex, which has an advantage of being very compact and highly stable, Bohmer said. 

The team is following up by investigating the mechanism of exactly how this noncoding RNA binds to ATP. 

There’s a decent chance, she said, that this noncoding RNA could be part of an ATPase motor that assists in decomposing ATP – a prediction based on the lab’s previous finding that the viral RNA they found years ago that bound to ATP had a functional role in the motor. 

In another recent Non-coding RNA Research paper, Guo’s team also found evidence that viral molecules called packaging RNAs that bind ATP structurally remained very similar or the same while changing their coding sequences over the course of evolution to perform motor-related biological functions – a sign that they, like enzyme proteins, could trigger similar catalytic reactions in cells. 

“We are curious to see if this G-quadruplex RNA is an RNA that functions in a similar way,” Bohmer said. 

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, an Ohio State President’s Research Excellence Catalyst Award and an Ohio State Center for RNA Biology Fellowship.

Kai Jin, a PhD student in Guo’s lab, was also a co-author of the paper.

A new study tells a different story. These two proteins, myosin and actin, always work together to activate a muscle, but tiny variations in how they interact change the speed, frequency and energy consumption associated with myosin’s movement – and, as a result, define the nature of a given animal’s related muscle function. An analysis of historic genomic data across species revealed about 50 previously unidentified gene subfamilies that drive those subtle but meaningful differences.

The findings suggest that the evolution of animals as disparate as salmon, snakes, eagles and elephants isn’t explained only by their external appearance. Instead, diversity and adaptation may be prompted at least in part by factors nestled deep under the surface as a response to species-specific muscular needs. 

“A lot of the story of vertebrate evolution has to do with these incredibly different body forms and different physiologies, while the core machinery has been treated as a constant,” said James Pease, senior author of the study and associate professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“What we found is that the core machinery is actually quite variable. Musculoskeletal innovations may be a rather large and underappreciated component of the story of vertebrate evolution.” 

The work was led by first author Christina Harvey, a 2026 biology PhD graduate of Wake Forest University, where Pease was a faculty member until 2024. Harvey is now an assistant professor at High Point University.

The research was published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

Pease and colleagues pursued the myosin mystery after studying a different musculoskeletal protein in birds that perform dramatic overhead wing snaps. First comparing the mammalian myosin gene profile to the chicken genome, they saw a huge difference in the number of genes in the respective region of each genome relevant to muscle movement. Further investigation showed this was not an isolated phenomenon. 

“Everything we’ve assumed for how a mammal’s muscles work, we’ve applied outside of mammals to these other groups. But when we pulled in more and more genes over time, we found that the story was more complex than that,” Harvey said. 

Accessing hundreds of samples from publicly available genomic data, the team modeled 500 million years of evolutionary history of the genes for 1,201 myosins, showing that each vertebrate group is equipped with its own set of core skeletal muscle myosin proteins. 

“With the advent of molecular biology and being able to explore things at the protein and gene level, we’ve untangled that while the traits that we see on the surface seem very similar, the routes that they’ve taken to get there through molecular processes have been very distinct and very different,” Harvey said. “Every major group of vertebrates exhibits its own distinct gene turnover.” 

Even within a species, these proteins can be highly specialized: In the rattlesnake, different myosin molecules govern muscle activity in the head and middle segments, and muscles surrounding the rattle on the tail have a high concentration of one type of myosin that had never been documented before, Pease said. 

Overall, the researchers proposed new names for at least 50 previously unknown subfamilies of myosin genes, adding to the 15 existing sub-types. 

“There are many, many more genes that have yet to be identified individually. I like to think that these 50 new subfamilies represent diversity across vertebrates that was previously unrecognized,” Harvey said. 

Myosin expression patterns have traditionally been studied in mammals in the context of whether muscles belong in the slow-twitch or fast-twitch category, with slow-twitch enabling, for example, humans to hold up their necks all day. 

“The new subtypes are a window into a new paradigm: The molecular basis of what makes a fast-twitch or slow-twitch muscle in mammals doesn’t translate to birds or to lizards or to fish. It’s a different molecular basis,” Pease said. 

The findings can’t explain what drove these molecular changes, and diversification is usually explained by an organism’s need to respond to changes in the external environment – like an emerging pathogen. The bar for proving adaptation has occurred is high, so the team can only make inferences based on the evidence at hand. 

“What we would say in a conservative way is that if this diversity of all of these molecular subtypes weren’t important, there would probably be only one type of myosin,” Pease said. “These different molecules that are new had specific roles, and this process is overturning and changing, but these molecules are not identical copies. They’re diversifying. And that’s really unlikely to happen over and over and over again if these aren’t being driven by some kind of selective or adaptive process.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

Additional co-authors were Eric Schuppe and Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, and Matthew Fuxjager of Brown University.

There are no cellphones or tablets in the world of Llama Llama, but if there were, who would blame Mama Llama if instead she handed her overwhelmed toddler a video to watch so she could carry on shopping in peace?

In real life, plenty of parents do reach for a screen to soothe a distressed child — a pattern of technology use researchers call “media emotion regulation.” A new study from The Ohio State University looked at how using technology to regulate young children’s emotions affects their cognitive development, and found it isn’t a one-size-fits-all story.

“It’s not just that the effects are larger or smaller for some kids — the underlying pattern is different for different kids,” said Jane Shawcroft, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State who led the study, published recently in the Journal of Communication.

The study focused on the relationship between media emotion regulation and executive functions — a set of interrelated cognitive skills necessary for goal-directed behavior and social functioning. Two of these skills — cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control — are thought to be especially sensitive to a child’s environment during their formative years.

Cognitive flexibility enables children to respond to changing demands, understand different perspectives and problem-solve. Inhibitory control allows them to suppress impulsive responses, which is important for making conscious choices and pausing before acting. Ultimately, these skills build the foundation for behavioral health, school success and healthy social relationships across a person’s lifespan.

To investigate, Shawcroft analyzed data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-term Brigham Young University study tracking how media shapes children’s development, with six waves following children from age 2½ to 7½. She tested three possibilities: that using screens to calm children affects the development of these cognitive skills; that a child’s own cognitive development drives parents to offer screens more or less often; or that the two feed into each other in a loop over time.

Most children showed that reinforcing loop: the harder or easier a child was to settle, the more or less a parent hit play to calm them down — and that screen use, in turn, shaped the child's developing executive functions, which again shaped how often screens were used for calming. That was expected, Shawcroft said, because “children influence parenting, and parenting influences children’s development.”

For that majority, she noted, this means there’s more than one way to intervene and support both healthy development and healthy relationships with technology: Parents can change how, when and why they use technology to support cognitive development, but they can also support a child’s cognitive development through other means, which can in turn lead to a healthier relationship with technology for young children.

But two smaller groups of children broke from the overall pattern. In one group — about 6% of children — the two cognitive skills were related to media emotion regulation in different ways, which researchers couldn’t fully explain. Shawcroft said a later wave of the ongoing study is collecting more information about these children.

For the other outlier group (roughly 7% of children), screen use appeared to shape how cognitive skills developed, but the reverse wasn’t true: A child’s cognitive skills didn’t predict how often parents reached for a screen to manage their child’s difficult emotions. What stood out about these families, the study found, was that the parents of children in this group were more likely to report higher levels of depression.

“We found that parent mental health is a strong predictor of the way parents use technology with their young kids, because technology is a lever parents can pull when parents don’t have the resources to cope with their own poor mental health,” Shawcroft said.

Parenting a small child is hard, she added, and a screen is sometimes one of the few tools a struggling parent has within reach, especially when their child is struggling with their own feelings. Cultural conversations around technology and child development often focus on whether parents are doing the right thing for their kids. But a takeaway of this study, she said, isn’t that these struggling parents are necessarily doing something wrong, rather: “Supporting parents’ mental health is a way to help them parent with technology better.”

What this study tells us, Shawcroft said, is that parents need more resources at their disposal — including access to other ways to help their children regulate, like places for children to spend time outdoors, or tools to help practice mindfulness, etc. — especially when parents are struggling with their own mental health concerns. This means helping children experience healthy development in the context of technology isn’t just on parents’ shoulders. The children at most risk of problematic media use, she said, would benefit from broader community support and increased resources, including check-ins from family members, neighbors and friends who can help make parenting less isolating and difficult for struggling parents.

“I really wish the narrative around children and tech would be less about ‘it’s just a parents’ job,’ and more about this shared responsibility we have as a society to support children in this context we’ve built for them,” Shawcroft said. “If we want kids to be OK, part of that is helping their parents to be OK.”

Co-authors include McCall A. Booth from Georgetown University; Chris L. Porter, Megan Van Alfen, Lara A. Maximiano, Elena K. Holmes, Sarah M. Coyne, Hailey G. Holmgren and Blake L. Jones from Brigham Young University; Megan Gale from Utah State University; and Andrew Martinez from Hunter College. The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

In a study published this week in Psychology of Violence, researchers surveyed school personnel prior to the onset of COVID-19, during the height of COVID restrictions and after most restrictions had been lifted, and their findings surprised them: Administrators were more likely than teachers or school mental health professionals to experience verbal and threatening aggression from parents. After restrictions lifted, 77% of administrators reported such experiences, nearly 3.5 times the rate reported by teachers.

The research was led by Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses at The Ohio State University. He and colleagues have conducted a number of related studies as members of the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel.

“We didn't fully expect such a pattern to emerge,” Anderman said. “A lot of us went in with an assumption, including me, that it would be mostly the teachers — they’re the ones who have the most direct contact with students every day.”

The data show that parental aggression against school personnel never went away, even during the height of COVID restrictions. When most schools switched to remote learning, 42% of administrators still reported experiencing verbal or threatening aggression from parents, and rates climbed even higher after schools reopened.

For Anderman, the issue is personal. As a high school teacher early in his career, he experienced a verbal threat from a student and didn’t feel supported by his school’s administration. “That always stuck with me,” he said. “Whenever I write about it, it resurfaces.”

Anderman’s research focuses primarily on academic motivation, which is how he became involved with the APA Task Force nearly two decades ago. Past research from the group found that 49% of teachers nationwide considered quitting or transferring jobs as the result of violence and threats made against them, and that violence against teachers is higher in schools that focus on grades and test scores than in schools that emphasize student learning. 

Although school personnel experience physical assaults, the new study focused on verbal aggression and threats, which a 2022 meta-analysis found to be more commonplace in schools. The researchers measured eight specific types, including obscene remarks or gestures, intimidation, identity-based slurs, verbal threats, bullying, public humiliation, cyberbullying and sexual harassment.

After pandemic restrictions were lifted, more than 1 in 4 teachers said a parent had publicly humiliated them, and more than 1 in 4 reported being cyberbullied. For administrators, more than 4 in 10 were verbally threatened, and around 1 in 5 reported being publicly humiliated or cyberbullied.

The scope of the problem becomes clearer when educators are given the opportunity to describe their experiences anonymously. In earlier research, the task force collected around 3,000 written accounts from teachers describing the worst incidents they had experienced.

“The stuff they told us — you can’t make this stuff up,” Anderman said. “People said things like, ‘Thank you for asking. Nobody ever asked.’ It was therapeutic for some of them.”

Despite how common these experiences are, Anderman describes them as a “silent epidemic” because there is currently no national system for tracking or reporting aggression against school personnel, and it receives little media attention. In addition, many educators don’t report incidents for fear of looking weak or incapable of managing their classrooms. This silence has consequences for the quality of education students receive and for the ongoing national teacher shortage.

There’s good news, though. The study found that maintaining positive relationships between parents and school personnel and providing support for teachers, administrators and mental health professionals at the school and community levels all help reduce parental aggression. School level factors, such as strong administrative support and effective disciplinary policies, were associated with less aggression at all three time points, and community-level factors, such as perceived district investment in education, also made a difference.

The researchers recommend implementing tiered systems of support for all school personnel — including classroom, school and community training — to foster a healthier, safer climate for everyone. The study also noted the importance of proactive and positive communication from school employees to parents. This resonated with Anderman, who still remembers the time his ninth-grade Spanish teacher called his mother — not to report a problem, but to say he was doing well in class. “It made my day,” he said. “But it’s the only time I ever remember it happening.”

Co-authors include Andrew Perry, Hyun Ji Lee and Adriana Martinez-Calvit from Ohio State; Susan D. McMahon from DePaul University; Frank C. Worrell from the University of California, Berkeley; Linda A. Reddy from Rutgers University; Andrew Martinez from Hunter College; Dorothy L. Espelage from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Ron A. Astor from the University of California, Los Angeles. The research was supported by the American Psychological Association.

The study, published online recently in the Sociology of Sport Journal, found that while most survey respondents — including those who played youth sports — never engaged in violence, 17% did report they had committed acts of violence. Ever playing heavy-contact sports regularly and dropping out after initially playing organized youth sports were particularly associated with committing acts of violence over the life course.

“Our findings challenge the common notion that sports are inherently good — that you just put kids in sports after school and it’s going to be okay,” said lead author Emily Nothnagle, a PhD student in The Ohio State University College of Social Work and a former captain of Ohio State’s national championship varsity pistol team. “There is more to the story.”

Nothnagle and Chris Knoester, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State, found that the type of sport, level of engagement, length of engagement, and positive peer influences all matter when it comes to associations between organized youth sports and violence.

In society, sports are largely beloved. “Not only is sport thought to lead to a host of positive things, but the Great Sport Myth suggests that it’s automatic,” said Knoester. “You just roll the ball out, throw a few kids on the field, and good things happen. They learn self-control, perseverance, discipline, how to get along with one another, and how to become healthier — without any intervention or direction.”

Nothnagle wanted to test those assumptions — specifically any links between sport participation and acts of physical violence.

The study used survey data on 3,849 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative (SSI). Those surveyed volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research (CHRR). Participants, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019.

Data for this study focused on participants’ sport participation patterns, both growing up and in adulthood, and their experiences with violent behaviors over their lives.

About two-thirds of survey participants played organized sports growing up, with most playing and eventually dropping out. Nearly 30% of participants reported playing heavy-contact sports regularly. While most survey participants reported never engaging in violent behavior, about 17% said they had, with 3% engaging in violence in the past year. Among violent acts cited, the most common were physical fights and hurting someone badly enough to require medical care.

The study found that people who participated in organized youth sports were 7 percentage points more likely to have ever committed a violent act than those who never played. This was carried by people who played and dropped out of organized sports, who were 5 percentage points more likely to commit acts of violence than those who never played organized sports. Additionally, respondents who played a heavy-contact sport regularly while growing up were 8 percentage points more likely to commit an act of violence than those who did not.

The researchers found no significant difference between those who played organized sports continually and those who never played.

A take-home message of this research, Knoester explained, is that there’s “evidence that sport participation is not associated with reductions in the risk of committing violence. In fact, we find consistent evidence that sport is more likely to increase the risk of ever committing violence, and this is especially the case when people are playing more violent sports. This suggests that it’s important to rethink how we are conducting sports in society and the types of programs and messaging that we’re introducing children into, if we want more positive outcomes.”

One example of organized sports focused on positive youth development, he noted, is Ohio State’s LiFEsports program, which teaches young athletes social and leadership skills and provides coach education, all backed by research that shows the program is getting results.

Nothnagle, who has been an active leader and scholar associated with LiFEsports and its Coach Beyond program, said she hopes that as we learn more about what conditions are leading to more positive or negative outcomes for people who participate in sports, it can lead to more systemic change.

“Life skills are taught, not caught. So, it’s about trying to create those environments that shape the behaviors and outcomes you want to see,” she said.

The National Sports and Society Survey was funded and supported by the College of Arts & Sciences, SSI and CHRR at Ohio State. Nothnagle received a graduate student research grant from SSI to help fund the project.

Experts from NOAA and their government and academic partners discussed the 2026 Seasonal Forecast of Harmful Algal Blooms for Lake Erie during a free public webinar today hosted by Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory. 

“Toxic algae affect not only the health of people and Great Lakes ecosystems, but they can negatively impact local and regional economies by preventing people from fishing, swimming, boating and visiting the shoreline,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service. “NOAA’s Lake Erie harmful algal bloom forecast is designed to provide timely, science-based information to water managers and public health officials as they make decisions to protect their communities and visitors.” 

The HAB severity index is based on the bloom’s biomass (the amount of algae) during the peak 30 days of the bloom. Moderate blooms have an index of 3 to 5, while an index above 5 indicates more severe HABs. Blooms over 7 are particularly severe, with extensive scum formation and persistent bloom coverage affecting the lake. 

NOAA expects to see a visible bloom by mid-July. The bloom’s timeline will depend on the frequency of high winds in September, which cannot be predicted this far in advance. Most of the bloom will remain in areas of the lake’s western basin. The central basin of the lake is usually unaffected until later in the season, although localized blooms may occur around some of the rivers after summer rainstorms. 

Lake Erie HABs consisting of cyanobacteria (i.e. blue-green algae) are capable of producing microcystin, a known liver toxin that poses a risk to human and wildlife health. Such blooms can sometimes require cities and local governments to add more treatment to drinking water and close beaches. 

The size of a HAB is not necessarily an indication of how toxic it is. Each algal bloom is unique in terms of size, toxicity and ultimately its impact on local communities. NOAA continues to develop new tools to detect and predict how toxic blooms will be. 

NOAA will issue a seasonal forecast update in late July based on observed nutrient loads from the Maumee River watershed into the western basin.

NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science’s (NCCOS) Lake Erie HAB Forecast website provides predictions and visualizations of the bloom’s location and movement on the lake’s surface, as well as where the bloom is located within the water column. This information is especially helpful to water treatment plant operators because intake structures are usually located below the surface, so the risk of toxins in their source water may be greater when these cells sink.

In addition to the early season projections, NOAA issues HAB forecasts during the bloom season. These forecasts provide the current extent and 5-day outlooks, which include predictions of where the bloom will travel and the concentrations of blue-green algae which are likely to be seen, allowing local authorities to make informed management decisions.

Additionally, NOAA forecasts hypoxia in Lake Erie’s central basin.

Nutrient load estimates for the forecasts came from Heidelberg University in Ohio, and the various forecast models are run by NCCOS, the University of Michigan, and North Carolina State University. The field observations used for monitoring and forecasting are collected in partnership with a number of NOAA offices, including its Ohio River Forecast Center, NCCOS, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, as well as Ohio Sea Grant, The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory, The University of Toledo, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The research also hints at why the outbreaks have confounded scientists, farmers and livestock handlers hoping to contain and prevent the disease – an effort likely complicated by the fact that the virus has an affinity for cow mammary glands rather than airways.

Tests for transmission among cows through milk machinery or through feeding of calves, and between birds and cattle through shared indoor air, didn’t show results of disease spread.

Researchers are continuing to pursue more answers, but for now the transmission mystery endures, meaning scientists can’t yet provide evidence-based recommendations for practices that would stop the spread.

“How it spreads from cow to cow becomes a very important question. We need to understand if there’s a way to change milking practices or farming practices, whatever it is, to limit cow-to-cow transmission because we think spillover is going to happen again. It’s just a matter of time,” said senior author Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at The Ohio State University.

“And right now we don’t have a great way to prevent either that spillover or cow-to-cow transmission once it happens.”

The study was published recently in Nature Communications.

Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza A viruses are associated with wild birds and poultry, but since 2021 a group of these viruses of clade 2.3.4.4b have circulated globally in mammals and were first reported in U.S. dairy cattle in March 2024.

To date, 1,053 outbreaks of the originally detected virus genotype (B3.13) have been confirmed in dairy herds in 17 states, which have been brought under control through a national milk testing strategy that halted movement of herds producing milk in which the virus was detected. Current federal data suggests small numbers of infections in cows are confirmed in Idaho, Utah and Texas.

“This work has all been done in response to the unprecedented spillover of avian influenza into dairy cattle,” Bowman said. “Initially, we had no idea that cows could even be infected with influenza, let alone that the mammary gland was involved. That in and of itself was a major paradigm shift: It’s not respiratory.”

Bowman and colleagues have been following the disease since its emergence on dairy farms, reporting early this year on detection of the virus in retail milk supplies – at that time, 36.3% of samples tested were positive for H5N1 particles.

“Pasteurization is inactivating it. But once a cow’s infected, they produce high-viral-titer milk for a week-plus,” Bowman said.

Those high virus titers, or concentrations, in milk were among the results of the current work, which involved testing the effects of varied levels of viral particle inoculations into individual cow teats, where mammary glands are located.

Results showed that the smallest dose of 10 particles resulted in productive infection but fewer clinical signs compared to higher doses, as well as shedding of milk containing high concentrations of viral particles.

“They are four separate mammary glands that have a common blood supply, but in these small numbers of animals, we’re not seeing a lot of viral movement between those glands,” Bowman said. “I think that may become important to how sick a cow does or doesn’t get because if one of four glands is infected, that’s different from a severe infection in all four.”

Several experiments aimed to identify potential disease transmission routes.

Researchers transferred contaminated milking equipment directly from an infected cow to a healthy cow twice daily for 14 days. Even though infected cows had clinical signs and their milk was high in viral particles, the healthy cows exposed to contaminated equipment remained unaffected and their milk was virus-free.

Bottle-feeding calves high-viral-titer milk collected from infected cows led to minimal virus detection and inflammatory signs in the calves, suggesting transmission through feeding doesn’t spread enough material to establish an infection.

Lactating cows given an intranasal dose of the H5N1 virus did not get sick and the presence of viral RNA was minimal in nasal swabs and absent in milk, but some of their respiratory tissues showed signs of an immune response compared to uninfected cows. These cows were also co-housed with chickens that remained healthy after 17 days. The combined findings suggest airborne transmission may be minimal if it’s happening at all.

Experiments were conducted in one of only six Biosafety Level 3 facilities in the country that can accommodate large animals. There is a chance, Bowman said, that the biocontainment conditions were too sterile and airflow-controlled to resemble daily farm life, especially when it comes to airborne transmission.

And performing a limited number of tests on actual cows, rather than surrogate models, could be a “numbers game,” he said. “We see about 20% of cows on farms become clinically ill. Two transmission experiments just may not be enough.

“I think the milking equipment is something we still have to consider. The virus replicates in the mammary gland to a really high titer. It comes out in milk at a really high titer. We have common contact equipment that goes from cow to cow with high-risk material to the high-risk tissue. I think the straight line between two points would say the milking equipment still seems to be the likely route of transmission between cows,” Bowman said.

“There is still the bigger question of spillover from wild birds into cows. In waterfowl, it’s a pathogen replicating in their gut. How in the world does it go from a duck’s intestine into a cow’s mammary gland? That’s a head scratcher.”

This work was supported by the Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Cody Warren and Scott Kenney of Ohio State were co-lead authors. Additional co-authors were Carolyn Lee, Natalie Tarbuck, Hannah Cochran, Bryant Foreman, Patricia Boley, Saroj Khatiwada, Alok Dhakal, Khadijat Adefaye, Jennifer Schrock, Mohammad Jawad Jahid, Thamonpan Laocharoensuk, Raksha Suresh, Olaitan Shekoni, Erika Stevens, Sara Dolatyabi, Christina Sanders, Elizabeth Ohl, Devra Huey, Juliette Hanson, Kara Corps and Renukaradhya Gourapura, all of Ohio State, and Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The Plant and Animal Agrosecurity Research Facility is located at Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences Wooster Campus.  

The researcher who led development of the vaccine is the senior author of a New England Journal of Medicine review article published last week describing the difficulties of treating most forms of the disease and reporting that the live vaccine, found to be safe in animals, is expected to be tested in humans later this year. 

Up to 1 million new cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL), caused by many species of Leishmania and transmitted through the bite of infected sand flies, are diagnosed worldwide each year. At any given time, approximately 6 million people are infected – yet up to 1 billion people in 99 territories and countries where leishmaniasis is endemic, including the U.S., are at risk of contracting the disease, the authors wrote. 

Lead researcher Abhay Satoskar, professor of pathology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, has been working on development of a leishmaniasis vaccine for over 20 years. In 2020, he and colleagues reported strong results in mice with a vaccine developed using CRISPR gene-editing technology to mutate the parasite that causes the skin disease. Late last year, the vaccine cleared a key U.S. Food and Drug Administration hurdle: approval of an investigational new drug (IND). 

“This means the FDA has seen the product and our preclinical data and has deemed that this product can be tested in people now,” Satoskar said. “It’s a big milestone in terms of product development, especially when the product was conceived in academia.

“This helps everywhere in the world because once the U.S. FDA gives its approval, it means other regulators know that it has gone through a very thorough review.”

To develop the vaccine, the researchers used CRISPR technology to edit the genome of Leishmania major by deleting centrin, the gene for a protein that supports the parasite’s physical structure.

The team applied the new technology to the century-old Middle Eastern practice of leishmanization – deliberately introducing the live parasite to the skin to create a small infection that, once healed, leads to life-long immunity against further disease.

These parasites cause infection by hijacking immune cells and using those host cells to replicate indefinitely. Studies of the vaccine in mice showed that the mutant parasite lacking centrin could still find its way into cells and make copies of itself, but for only a limited amount of time and not at a pace that leads to clinical disease. Immunization with the mutated parasites induced immunity against vector-transmitted infections.

“Live vaccines like that are the best vaccines, but there’s a potential risk of causing serious disease in some people,” said Satoskar, also a professor of microbiology at Ohio State. “We refined the concept using modern technology, making a parasite that does not cause clinical disease but allows for induction of immunity.”

Satoskar and his collaborators will be responsible for conducting the initial trials in Kenya and Brazil, two countries in which leishmaniasis is endemic and among the countries targeted for eventual vaccine deployment. A site in Cincinnati, Ohio, may also be added to the trial. Between about 75 and 100 people will participate.

This initial trial is focused on testing the safety of the vaccine in healthy people, but the team will also collect blood samples to investigate whether the vaccine provokes an immune response. Testing in endemic regions is an important step in gauging whether people who may have already been exposed to the parasite, and therefore have antibodies in their blood, experience an allergic reaction or other adverse effect.

In a parallel project, the team is developing a leishmaniasis skin test similar to a tuberculosis skin test.

“Testing positive with the skin test means that a person has been exposed to the disease and is now immune to the disease,” Satoskar said. “It is a test for immunosurveillance but also for immunogenicity of our vaccine. Without this kind of test, you cannot do surveillance. You cannot know the level of immunity in the community.”

After interim analysis of the Phase 1 results, the team is aiming to conduct a Phase 2 trial in at least 3,000 people with the purpose of understanding the effectiveness of the vaccine and any side effects.

“An effective prophylactic vaccine is indispensable for elimination or eradication of leishmaniasis,” Satoskar said. “This is true for almost all infectious diseases.”  

A vaccine would also provide an affordable way to prevent a disease that can lead to disfigurement, disability, social stigma and poverty, he said. Researchers estimate that a vaccine would likely cost less than $5, compared to the $100 to $200 cost for treatment in the hardest-hit countries – treatment that requires weeks of daily drug injections with unpleasant side effects, leading to poor patient compliance that allows parasites to develop resistance to the drugs. 

A much more severe form of the disease, visceral leishmaniasis, affects organs and is fatal if left untreated. While the L. major vaccine may also protect against the visceral form, Satoskar and colleagues have used the CRISPR technique to work on a vaccine with the Leishmania donovani parasite that causes visceral leishmaniasis.

The Phase 1 trial and leishmaniasis skin test production is supported by $10 million in grants from the Japan-based Global Health Innovative Technology Fund, which also supported the vaccine’s development along with the Wellcome Trust UK.

Additional partners on the trial include Nagasaki University in Japan; Gennova Biopharmaceuticals Ltd., which manufactures the vaccine; Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil; HJF Medical Research International in Kenya; the FDA; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Johns Hopkins University.

Co-authors of the review article were Naomi Aronson of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland and Ahmed Musa of the University of Khartoum in Sudan.

Among the surprising findings: The messenger RNA (mRNA) that is targeted for interference – suppression of the protein whose instructions are carried by this same mRNA – also helps with completion of the final step of assembling the complex that inhibits gene expression. 

Overall, the study shows that the managing protein undergoes a four-step process to convert a precursor complex into a mature RNA-induced silencing complex, or RISC.  

“This mechanism has been a black box for a quarter century, since the discovery of RNA interference,” said senior author Kotaro Nakanishi, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. 

“Visualizing the mechanism is very important – pharmaceutical companies may appreciate our 3D structures because they can optimize or design a new drug based on them.” 

The study is published today (May 26, 2026) in the journal Molecular Cell. 

Nakanishi outlined in a 2022 paper how the “superfamily” of four Argonaute proteins is involved in RNA interference, explaining that microRNAs and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), both small segments of RNA that inhibit genes’ protein-building functions, must be loaded into Argonaute proteins to carry out that job – they cannot perform the task on their own. 

In this new work, Nakanishi and colleagues conducted biochemical assays and cryogenic-electron microscopy using Argonaute2 as a model, “but based on the biochemical data, we believe that all of the Argonaute proteins behave the same way,” he said. 

The starting point of the study involved incubating a human Argonaute2 protein with a specific siRNA duplex. 

The results identified a series of steps that followed: Argonaute2 loads the double-stranded RNA and selects one strand over another to serve as a guide. The protein then unwinds the duplex and ejects the “passenger” strand that’s no longer of use. 

The ejection revealed the surprising role for the target mRNA – helping cast off the passenger strand – which led the team to call the final step TAPE, for target-assisted passenger ejection.

Though mRNAs have been viewed primarily as targets of microRNA and siRNA in most instances of RNA interference, “our results instead suggest that mRNAs can also bind precursor RISCs and facilitate passenger removal during RISC maturation,” the authors wrote.

“It’s complicated, but it also makes sense to me that if the cell is targeting predominant mRNAs, these targeted mRNAs also facilitate formation of the RISC,” Nakanishi said. 

He said the findings should help advance development of therapeutic siRNAs and cityRNAs (cleavage-inducing tiny RNAs) that could be designed to override natural cellular processes and prompt a specific RNA interference process to silence problematic genes linked to diseases. 

“Researchers and pharmaceutical companies have been using siRNAs as a potential therapy to shut down gene expression and study the role of the protein of interest. However, nobody knows how RISCs are formed,” Nakanishi said. “So now we can provide a robust structural basis or foundation to design or optimize siRNAs.” 

His lab is now using the same techniques to confirm how the other three Argonaute proteins assemble RISCs. 

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and fellowships from Ohio State’s Center for RNA Biology. 

Co-authors included Huaqun Zhang, Vishal Annasaheb Adhav, Audrey Kehling, Andrew Savidge and Zhangfei Shen, all of Ohio State, and Tianmin Fu of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. Giovanna Grandinetti and Yohie Narui of Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis helped with collection of high-quality cryo-EM micrographs. 

Nakanishi is a co-founder and scientific advisor of and reports a financial interest in City Therapeutics, Inc.

The findings hint at the juice’s promise as a functional food that may help curb the unchecked inflammation that characterizes a range of chronic conditions, researchers say. 

The tomato-soy juice contained high levels of the plant-based compounds lycopene and soy isoflavones, both believed to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties based on previous research. Compared to a control tomato juice lacking these compounds, the tomato-soy juice significantly lowered blood levels of three proteins that are markers of systemic inflammation. 

“The idea is, can we use food-based interventions to modulate inflammation?” said lead author Jessica Cooperstone, associate professor of horticulture and crop science at The Ohio State University. “And can we test this in a rigorous way so that we can really see this is affecting inflammation, versus just saying something is anti-inflammatory?” 

Based on these results and additional data, Cooperstone and colleagues have received National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases funding for a pilot clinical trial testing whether consuming the same tomato-soy juice reduces inflammation in patients with pancreatitis. 

The study was published recently in the journal Molecular Nutrition & Food Research. 

Lycopene is a carotenoid that gives tomatoes and other vegetables their colors, and soy isoflavones are flavonoids that mimic the action of the hormone estrogen. Both are phytochemicals that help plants thrive. 

Years ago, based on studies showing an association between diets high in either tomato products or soy and a lowered risk for prostate cancer, Ohio State researchers developed the tomato-soy juice made with tomatoes containing a high concentration of lycopene – also developed and grown at Ohio State – and enriched with soy isoflavone extract. 

Later research at the university linked higher intake of the tomato-soy juice to reduced prostate-specific antigen levels in some men with prostate cancer, and studies elsewhere have suggested that tomatoes and soy, consumed separately or combined, can affect inflammatory and metabolic pathways related to obesity and other chronic illnesses. 

“There’s been enough compelling evidence that compounds from tomatoes and soy might be modulating inflammation that we decided to test this in people,” Cooperstone said. 

In the new study, 12 healthy adults with obesity consumed two 6-ounce cans of tomato-soy juice every day for four weeks. After a washout period, they consumed the low-carotenoid control tomato juice for four weeks. 

“The hypothesis is that it’s the lycopene from the tomatoes and the isoflavones from the soy that’s inducing the effect, so we didn’t want to have a control that’s just water,” Cooperstone said. 

Researchers took blood samples testing for cytokines – pro-inflammatory proteins produced by the immune system – before and after each four-week trial period. Only the tomato-soy juice resulted in significant reductions in three cytokines: Interleukin (IL)-5, IL-12p70 and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), as well as showing a downward trend in tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a) that was not statistically significant. 

The team also analyzed participants’ urine before and after each trial period for changes in metabolites, the molecular products of biochemical reactions that break down nutrients to produce energy and perform other essential functions. 

The findings showed that both the tomato-soy and control tomato juice led to some shared changes in the metabolite profiles, meaning some tomato-driven effects occurred in the absence of lycopene. Soy isoflavone metabolite shifts stood out among the changes induced by the tomato-soy juice. While further investigation is warranted, the changes provide additional evidence that this food-based intervention is affecting human biology. 

“This is probably a function of the fact that there’s more to our intervention agents than just these two compounds,” Cooperstone said. “Ultimately, we want to have a better understanding of how the foods that we eat are relating to our health. And when we really want to be sure, we need to test them in clinical trials. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

She and colleagues have also found evidence in an animal model that the soy-tomato juice can reduce inflammation and the severity of chronic pancreatitis – data supporting the prediction in the current clinical trial that the intervention could improve outcomes for patients with pancreatitis. 

“Care for patients with pancreatitis is palliative, focused on controlling pain and GI symptoms. Our hypothesis is that the tomato-soy juice may serve as an intervention to decrease inflammation and hopefully increase patients’ quality of life,” Cooperstone said. 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, the Lisa and Dan Wampler Endowed Fellowship for Foods and Health Research, and the Foods for Health Initiative at Ohio State. 

Co-authors include first author Maria Sholola, Jenna Miller, Emma Bilbrey, David Francis and Thomas Mace of Ohio State, and Janet Navotny of the USDA. Mace is the lead principal investigator on the pancreatitis trial. Cooperstone, Philip Hart and Kristen Roberts of Ohio State are also PIs on the trial.

In current practice, patients answer a series of questionnaires – subjective self-reported data – that’s combined with objective lung function and exercise test results to help clinicians gauge patients’ mental outlook on living with a difficult illness. 

For the study, researchers added a visual element, providing patients a simple outline of the human lungs and asking them to color in the proportion of their own lungs that they perceived to be diseased. 

Statistical analysis showed that patients’ visual perceptions of illness were equally effective as standard questionnaires and test results in conveying the symptom-related quality of patients’ lives – and provided additional predictive value when combined with both verbal assessments and test results. 

“What has always been fascinating to me about working with medical patients is that the objective numbers absolutely do not tell the whole story,” said lead study author Charles Emery, professor emeritus of psychology at The Ohio State University. 

“The broad construct here is illness perception, which becomes especially important for people who have terminal illnesses or chronic illness. If you have less control over quantity of life because of the terminal nature of your illness, then quality of life becomes that much more important. And one important factor linked to quality of life is illness perceptions – essentially, the broad cognitive mental model of your illness,” he said. 

“Illness perception is an avenue through which patients can talk about how they view their illness and consider alternate perspectives that enhance quality of life, even in the face of a terminal illness.” 

The study is published in the May issue of the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention. 

The 40 patients between ages 32 and 85 who participated in the study had been diagnosed with interstitial lung disease, which encompasses over 200 pulmonary diseases characterized by shortness of breath, low blood oxygen, chronic coughing, and varying degrees of inflammation and lung tissue stiffening. The average survival among patients with a new diagnosis ranges from about four to seven years. 

Emery witnessed the effect of lung disease on quality of life early in his faculty career when a physician colleague described two patients with the same pulmonary function very differently: “One was waltzing into the office seeming fine, and the other was dragging themselves in,” he recalled. 

“That is linked to quality of life, and it’s linked to perception,” said Emery, also professor emeritus of internal medicine in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “Perception has so many consequences in terms of how you approach an illness and whether you see it as a problem to be solved that you take on as a challenge or you think, ‘life is out to get me, so why bother?’” 

While earlier studies of visualized illness perception have asked patients to draw free-form pictures of the affected part of their body, Emery and colleagues used a standardized image of the lung to allow them to quantify each patient’s perception of the lung disease. 

On average, participants perceived about a fifth of their overall lung volume to be affected by disease, with depictions of disease involvement ranging from zero to 73%. 

Questionnaires that these patients routinely answer assess symptoms, especially cough and shortness of breath; symptom impact on the ability to carry out daily activities; and perceptions of how long the illness will last and treatment effectiveness. They are combined with results of spirometric testing of pulmonary function and a six-minute walk test of exercise capacity. 

Statistical analysis and modeling of the data showed that lung function test results and self-reported illness perception – whether described verbally or visually – were equally predictive of illness-related quality of life.

“If you’re seeing a patient and want to assess this person’s quality of life, you can get an idea by looking at pulmonary function, but the data show you’re getting important additional information by asking them questions about illness perception,” Emery said. “Self-report is probably the most reliable way of understanding a patient’s quality of life because, ultimately, they’re the ones who are determining it.”

Emery noted that the questionnaires are reliable and effective, but that they may not capture the full picture from people who have limited language abilities or don’t want to tell anyone, even a doctor or family member, how they feel about being sick. 

Incorporating a visual measure of illness perception into medical exams could serve patients with a range of language limitations and help identify those who may benefit from psychological counseling, he said. 

He also said this technique could apply to a wide range of diseases that affect specific organs, and that using computer graphics and machine-learning for data analysis could speed up computation of a visual illness perception measure during exams. 

“One of our responsibilities in working with patients is to get as clear a read of that patient’s experience as we can,” Emery said. “And so you want a measure that you can give to a patient, and they can completely do it on their own, with no input from anyone else.” 

Co-authors of the study, all from Ohio State, included Ihsan Rodriguez, Nitin Bhatt, Vincent Esguerra and Alice Staaby.

Reporting today (April 29, 2026) in Nature, the researchers describe building upon a technique called prime editing by inserting DNA that attaches to the genome through a series of overlapping flaps. This method, which they call a prime assembly approach, avoids a bottleneck in the gene therapy field – a double-strand break to the donor DNA that can cause toxicity and kill cells.

“Using this method, we are doing genome assembly rather than making a small edit in a gene,” said Bin Liu, a co-lead author of the study and assistant professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “If we think of the genome as a book, we can remove one paragraph and replace it with a new one – or even rewrite a chapter.” 

This distinction is important: Because some diseases involve hundreds of mutations, pursuit of a gene therapy treatment would require hundreds of gene edits that would be subject to individual federal approval, Liu said. 

“The biggest impact of this technology is we can correct 1,000 heterogeneous mutations at once,” he said. 

In the study using mammalian cells, Liu and co-lead authors from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School show the technique can allow for efficient insertion of a DNA segment containing up to 11,000 base pairs – compared to a maximum of about 800 base pairs successfully inserted with other methods. 

“We tried to hit the upper limit of the technology to see how large we can go,” he said. “Using our method, we envision setting up a universal platform and incorporating a healthy copy of a gene directly into a patient, no matter what mutation they have.” 

Achieving the insertion of a large DNA segment involved a combination of techniques. 

Any healthy “donor” DNA used for this type of therapy can be manufactured in a lab. The researchers used a twin prime editing method to generate programmable flaps on the target DNA that introduces the DNA insertion to the genome. The flaps complement the ends of the donor DNA, avoiding a double-strand break. This insertion does induce a single-strand DNA break, which is considered less likely than a double-strand break to be toxic to a cell, Liu said. 

Assays evaluating and visualizing the efficiency of the insertion in mammalian cell cultures demonstrated the method’s promise, he said. 

The editing steps removed the need for reliance on a repair mechanism, called homology directed repair, that has been a key part of gene-editing techniques that involved cuts to DNA. By ruling out that repair step, which occurs in actively dividing cells, the prime assembly technique can incorporate both single- and double-stranded DNA donors and be used as therapy in non-dividing cells such as neurons and heart cells. 

“Previous applications that relied on homology-directed repair have worked well in cells, but in animal models, its efficiency is often very low,” Liu said. “That’s why our method provides a big advantage by harnessing prime editing.” 

The team calls the technology “prime assembly” in a nod to the common lab technique “Gibson assembly cloning,” which joins DNA in a test tube. 

There is more work to do, including determining the best delivery vehicle for the donor DNA segment and delivering editor – likely a lipid nanoparticle or adeno-associated virus. Additionally, testing the effectiveness of in vivo editing is planned in Liu’s lab and with collaborators in Ohio State’s Gene Therapy Institute, including ophthalmologist Tom Mendel. 

The work was co-led by Erik Sontheimer, professor, and Wen Xue, associate professor, in the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School. Additional co-authors include Yanjun Zhang of Ohio State; Andrew Petti, Xuntao Zhou, Haoyang Cheng, Jenny Gao, Matthew Yee, Youwei Qiao, Lin Zhou and Scot Wolfe of UMass Chan Medical School; and Tingting Jiang of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Leducq Foundation Translatlantic Network of Excellence Program and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Previous research has shown that a protein in humans called RAD52 performs DNA repair in cancer cells lacking the tumor-suppression function of normal BRCA genes, enabling the cells to survive and replicate – an indication that blocking RAD52 would kill these cells. 

But blocking RAD52 requires fully understanding its repair activities, which have been difficult to capture with even the most sophisticated techniques. So the research team turned to its ancestral protein Mgm101 in yeast mitochondria and observed several key steps in its DNA repair process, called single-strand DNA annealing. 

A clearer understanding of how this family of proteins binds to DNA strands and coaxes them back together after a break provides insights for drug targets that could halt the process in cancer cells empowered by mutated BRCA genes. 

“It’s still a proposed mechanism: Just because we see these snapshots of the process doesn’t mean we know all the details, but we do have the best snapshots for any protein that does this single-strand annealing,” said senior author Charles Bell, professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “This focuses our strategies for drug development.” 

The study is published today (April 27, 2026) in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, which designated the paper as a Breakthrough Article. 

DNA strands break every day in every cell, which is why proteins exist to fix the breaks and otherwise keep cellular processes running smoothly. But because repairs must happen quickly and human proteins are often more complex than their ancestral counterparts, even the most advanced imaging equipment can’t capture every step in the process. 

Bell’s lab partnered on this research with the lab led by co-author Vicki Wysocki, professor emerita at Ohio State and chair of the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Wysocki’s lab specializes in native mass spectrometry and mass photometry, using light to measure masses of protein-DNA complexes. 

These techniques showed that Mgm101 assembled from a monomer, or single copy of itself, into a large multi-unit molecular complex called a 19-mer – essentially, a ring composed of 19 copies of the protein. 

“This ring is sitting there as a template so that the first strand of the DNA can come down, and then the second strand comes on and starts being annealed to the first strand,” Wysocki said. 

These findings were supported by what Bell’s lab determined using cryogenic electron microscopy, observing structures floating in solution and frozen in a thin layer of ice. 

The high-resolution structures showed multiple phases of the process: the 19-mer ring with a single strand of DNA attached (substrate), with the second strand in place for annealing (duplex intermediate), and after release of the repaired DNA, visible as the classic double helix DNA formation (B-form product). 

“RAD52 high-resolution structures have been determined with single-stranded DNA, but not with the two DNAs that it’s trying to anneal,” Bell said. “Its job is to bind single stranded DNA and anneal it to its complement sequence. It’s been captured structurally, but only in a few states relevant to the reaction. 

“Here, we have more of the states along the full pathway from substrate, to intermediate and product. And the duplex intermediate is a conformation that’s never been seen before – when the protein binds the first DNA around the ring, it’s bound only by its sugar-phosphate backbone, with the nucleotide bases pointing up and fully exposed and separated, so that they can be searched. It’s extended, it’s completely unwound, and it’s circular.” 

Bell said the field has been uncertain about whether this mechanism is carried out with one or two participating protein rings, but that these findings show the process is managed by a single molecular complex – and, therefore, single-strand annealing is likely to be a conserved cis mechanism. 

The team plans to try to capture the same phases of the DNA repair process with RAD52 from humans, placing particular emphasis on the duplex intermediate, and to expand the role of mass spectrometry in determining how the DNA is bound to the protein. 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The cryo-EM data were collected at Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis and processed using the Ohio Supercomputer Center. 

Carter Wheat of Ohio State and Zihao Qi, formerly of Ohio State and now at Georgia Tech, are co-first authors of the study. Additional co-authors include Metro High School student Miqdad Hussain and Katerina Zakharova, formerly of Ohio State and now at CAS.

The findings suggest influenza D has strong potential to spill over to humans, the scientists say. Some people who work with cattle, considered the primary host for this virus, have been found to have influenza D antibodies in their blood, but no active human infection has been discovered to date. 

Results showed that several genetically different strains of influenza D that were isolated from cattle and pigs, another animal host, were as effective at replicating in cells from the human respiratory tract as influenza A viruses – the types of flu linked to both modern seasonal illness and historic pandemics. 

“All of the viruses, despite their genetic distance from each other, had similar replicative capacity in these human cells and human tissues,” said lead author Cody Warren, assistant professor of veterinary biosciences at The Ohio State University. 

“It seems like there are many animal species that are susceptible to influenza D viruses, suggesting that maybe they can evolve differently in different hosts. What’s obvious is that zoonotic infections are happening. 

“This is an opportunity, if we are indeed in front of it, to invest in surveillance and basic understanding of its biology such that we could be prepared if it were to emerge in the future.” 

The study was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The influenza D viruses from pigs used in the study were collected as part of long-term surveillance for swine flu – a type A influenza virus – at county and state fairs led by Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State. 

“Flu D popped up in our samples and that led us to question what the risk is at the human-animal interface,” said Bowman, a co-author of the study. 

“The currently held belief is that bovines are the natural host for flu D. So pigs may be a secondary host, or not. The fact that it was in pigs is something we were trying to understand: Is that a potential pathway for the virus to adapt into a more transmissible virus in humans? So the pig component is trying to understand what the role of the pig is with influenza D.” 

Warren’s lab began by testing influenza D’s replication in cells that mimic the human airway by differentiating patient-derived lung epithelial cells at the air-liquid interface – cellular conditions the virus would encounter naturally. 

“When the virus started growing in those just as well as influenza A, we decided to leverage another physiologically relevant system to evaluate the breadth of cell types targeted by this virus: tissues,” Warren said. 

The team compared influenza types D and A growth in both human and swine lung tissues, finding that both virus types replicated efficiently in lung tissues from both species. 

The experiments in cells and tissue also showed a key difference between the two flu types: Influenza D, despite growing well, did not stimulate a robust antiviral immune response in infected cells, while the influenza A virus did. 

Separate tests in cell cultures showed influenza D growth was restricted if the cells were first primed by the protein interferon – suggesting that human cells have potent mechanisms to restrict viral infection. 

In infected animals, influenza D generates respiratory symptoms that cattle and pigs recover from, suggesting their immune systems are at work fending off the infection. In humans, most viral infections trigger the release of interferon, which produces inflammation and raises body temperature – leading to the symptoms that make us feel sick. 

These initial findings prompt important questions: Could humans have been infected but not felt sick, meaning influenza D is not a serious health risk? Or is it so stealthy that it can hide from the immune system, leaving us unable to put up a fight? 

“Those are gaps that we don’t quite understand,” Warren said. “The virus replicates to really high levels but doesn’t elicit a robust interferon response. Would it behave differently in the body of a person versus in these cell or tissue-based systems? That’s up for debate. 

“It seems the only smoking gun we’re missing is a virus isolated from a person. There’s been evidence of a history of exposure, but not necessarily any demonstration of active infection.” 

Bowman has collected many more influenza D viruses from pigs through ongoing swine flu surveillance, and plans to analyze the samples to assess whether the viruses are changing, and how. 

“What’s giving influenza D attention now is that it’s recognized as a cause of respiratory disease in cattle, and we’ve certainly seen it cause disease outbreaks in pigs,” he said. “Causing disease in some host species makes us somewhat concerned about what it might do in humans. It may not cause disease in this particular form, but in an evolved form, there may be that potential.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health and the Ohio State Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge. 

Additional co-authors include Christina Sanders, Min Liu, Jovanna Fusco, Elizabeth Ohl, Natalie Tarbuck, Emily King, Devra Huey and Amanda Panfil of Ohio State; Thomas Fabrizio and Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; and Phylip Chen and Mark Peeples of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

The journey to outer space is incredibly dangerous, but crews must also face day-to-day hazards, such as exposure to cancer-causing radiation, microgravity and extreme isolation. Understanding and mitigating these risks may allow astronauts to stay in these environments for extended periods, especially as agencies race to build permanent habitats on the Moon.

This quest was the highlight of this year’s National Academy of Engineering regional meeting, as students, scientists and industry experts gathered to discuss and shape solutions to the logistical challenges of living and working in outer space. The three-day event was held at the Blackwell Inn and Pfahl Conference Center at The Ohio State University. 

One of the conference’s keynote speakers was Scott Parazynski, a physician and former NASA astronaut who once flew with John Glenn, who spoke about anticipating and preparing for health issues in space. Such concerns range from how astronauts will treat medical emergencies and mental health conditions to ensuring long-term pharmaceutical availability. 

“Space is actually harder on the body than you might think,” said Parazynski.

Despite the extensive health checks astronauts must undergo before liftoff, instances of illness and injury in space are still common occurrences. Prolonged stays in space can cause long-term issues like cardiovascular strain, sleeplessness, hypoxia (low oxygen) and reduced musculoskeletal fitness. Earlier this year, one astronaut even experienced a health scare that led to the first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station. 

But in situations where it isn’t possible to return to Earth quickly, crews will need to be able to handle emergency situations on their own, including having to perform space surgeries or provide care for other spaceflight-induced traumas. 

This means that advanced tools and systems will be vital to overcoming the challenges astronauts will face once off-world. “In exploration, when we challenge ourselves to go to extreme environments, we inevitably have to invent technologies not only to make it safe to go do that,” said Parazynski, “but also to extract science and do meaningful work.”

Polishing up novel technologies for future space missions could also lead to big improvements in medical systems here on Earth. “Investments in space health help us in remote parts of our world, in disaster recovery, and so many other facets of health care,” said Parazynski. 

Other topics addressed during the meeting revealed insights regarding Earth observation – or how scientists are monitoring our planet from above, what drives materials and manufacturing in space, and how researchers are finding new pathways to lunar exploration.

In another panel, Karen Dannemiller, an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at Ohio State, detailed some of the engineering challenges behind preserving astronaut health, and spoke about the importance of identifying issues like microbial threats in the environment as quickly as possible. 

“None of us thinks too much about indoor environmental quality until it’s an emergency,” said Dannemiller. “But traveling to the moon or to Mars, we don’t have the luxury to wait until then.” Instead, early detection and addressing issues before they become unmanageable are staples of sustainable innovations that can collectively support human health, she said. 

She and other panelists also shared advice on how next-generation scientists and academic leaders ought to seek out new research solutions to modern-era spaceflight obstacles.

“Follow your passions wherever that may lead,” said Dannemiller. “Don’t be afraid of failure.”

In a small study in rural northwestern Ohio, researchers found that men who had a “country” identity – for example, a love of hunting and guns, pickup trucks and country music – showed different vowel patterns in their pronunciations than did their neighbors who showed more interest in pursuits like theater, golf and rock music.

“We are used to language patterns like accents being regionally based – you talk like the people who live around you,” said Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, co-author of the study and associate professor of linguistics at The Ohio State University.

“But here we found that aspects of language may be tied to identity rather than just where you happen to live.”

The setting of the study – Defiance County – is key.

Defiance County is in a “transition zone” between the Inland North accent, which is spoken around the lower Great Lakes including Chicago, Detroit and Toledo, and the Midland accent, which includes parts of western and southern Ohio through the Midwest. The western part of Ohio has a gradual transition while the east, with European settlement shaped by the Western Reserve, has a much sharper border.

The result is that the area is a linguistic melting pot where speakers use a mix of features from both the North and the Midland, Campbell-Kibler said. So, in this study, the researchers investigated whether two factors other than the county’s location might influence accents of the residents: travel patterns and country identity.

The study, published recently in the journal American Speech, involved recorded interviews with 22 men in the county. The researchers looked specifically at five vowel patterns and how they differed based on travel patterns and country identity.

One hypothesis was that people who traveled a lot for work or other reasons might pick up accents tied to where they visit.  The researchers compared those who traveled to Toledo or Michigan – firmly in the Inland North – with those who traveled to Fort Wayne, an Indiana city also in the transition zone, and those who didn’t travel much.

But travel affected only one of the vowels studied, the LOT vowel, with those traveling to Toledo more likely to use the Inland North pronunciation (where “hot” may sound more like “hat”).  And this finding was not very robust, Campbell-Kibler said.

Much more robust were the findings about the country identity.  Through the course of the interviews, the researchers asked participants about their hobbies, music choices and vehicle choices.  Each participant was given a score for whether they mentioned connections to things like hunting, fishing, gardening, 4H and livestock (country identity) or hiking, biking, golf or video games (not country.)  They were also asked about their high-school identity.  Those who said “rednecks” or “ag kids” were given points for a country identity while those who said “band geeks” or “nerds” were not.

The researchers also asked each participant if they felt they had more in common with someone living in Fort Wayne, the nearest city, or with someone living in a similarly rural community in Idaho.  Those who scored high on country identity were much more likely to say they had more in common with a person in rural Idaho.

Findings showed that those who identified more strongly with country practices were more likely to use two vowel patterns often associated with the South or Appalachia, even though Defiance County is hundreds of miles from those regions.  For example, they may pronounce “my” like “ma.”

Although there was some Appalachian migration to Defiance County in the 20th century, participants didn’t maintain connections to family in Appalachia or connect their country identity to roots there. Instead, they defined being country as being about what someone does — especially having gardens and livestock.

Campbell-Kibler said she suspects that the results found in this study probably would be found in other parts of the United States.

“People today are influenced not just by the people they live near, but by all they read and see on the internet and television,” she said.  “The way people talk can be affected by who they want to be, not just where they live.”

Co-authors on the study were Martha Austen and Shontael Elward, who did the work as graduate students at Ohio State, and both now have PhDs in linguistics from the university.

Many of the academic experts who have advanced the science behind concussions in student-athletes – and, in collaboration with the Department of Defense, in soldiers as well – are now focused on addressing these head injuries in a population that’s similar, but different: first responders. 

The considerations are many, spanning from a first responder’s potential sports or military injuries in a previous life to the factors that signal when it’s safe to return to duty after a strike to the head. Getting a clinical diagnosis is key to putting an injured first responder on the proper trajectory of recovery – not just working safely, but also maintaining a satisfying quality of life, experts agree. 

Researchers will soon publish the first evidence-based guidelines for traumatic brain injury (TBI) recognition and management and return to duty in first responders – a group encompassing law enforcement officers, corrections personnel, firefighters and emergency medical technicians (EMTs). 

The authors will be the nearly 60 experts who convened at The Ohio State University in late March to pursue consensus on protocols surrounding six frameworks: workplace policies, injury prevention measures, challenges of recognizing injuries, diagnosis and treatment of the injury, mental health monitoring, and steps needed to get a concussed first responder back to work. 

“This is a critical step in improving the care and support for our first responders who risk so much for us every day,” said Jaclyn Caccese, associate professor in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (HRS) at The Ohio State University. 

Caccese co-hosted the 1st International Conference on TBI in First Responders with James Oñate, interim director of HRS, interim vice dean for health and rehabilitation sciences in the College of Medicine, and a professor in the HRS Division of Athletic Training. 

One universally accepted fact drove the work: Brain health in first responders is a matter of public safety – for the injured personnel, their colleagues, their families and the public they are sworn to protect. 

After working together for several months in six workgroups, the scholars, clinicians and first responders met March 26-27 to share what they’ve learned and vote on a series of recommended guidelines. The final recommendations and consensus statement will be published early next year in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation. 

While head injury data on first responders is minimal, a meta-analysis of studies to date suggests that about 60% of law enforcement and corrections officers have suffered at least one traumatic brain injury in their lifetime, and 17% have experienced a TBI on the job. Among firefighters, lifetime TBI prevalence ranges from 62% to 77%. There have been no studies of head injuries in EMTs. 

Though what has been learned by studying sports and military concussions has given these teams a head start, most workgroups indicated that the need for more research specific to the first responder workforce is apparent. 

“We’ve lumped first responders together. We’re going to stop doing that,” Oñate said. “This is the beginning, and we’re starting with many things we’ve advanced already. We’re not starting from scratch.” 

In a first-of-its-kind survey of Ohio law enforcement officers in 2024, Caccese, Oñate and colleagues reported that 74% of officers had a lifetime history of one or more head injuries, and 30% had a head injury that happened on the job. Further analysis showed post-traumatic stress disorder and depressive symptoms were higher in those who had experienced one or more head injuries.  

At the conference, each of the six workgroups brought forward four to five recommendations for a vote. Consensus was reached on all but two, though many will undergo refinements before publication. 

Overarching themes included standardizing methods of recognizing and treating TBIs and assessing return-to-duty readiness; ensuring no punitive actions are taken against an injured and recovering first responder; protecting the head as much as possible during training intended to expose new personnel to risks linked to blasts and being hit at work; and educating agencies, first responders, families and health care providers about TBI risks, prevalence and potential lasting effects when they’re not managed well. 

“Almost every workgroup talked about the importance of education,” Caccese said. 

The educational component is critical because this effort is still very new. Many agencies are unaware that an international effort is afoot to address TBI in first responders. In addition to publishing the conference outcomes in a scientific journal, the group plans to present at academic and first responder-specific conferences and approach publications targeted to first responder agencies. 

Conference attendees acknowledged TBI in this workforce is a delicate subject for so many reasons, not the least of which is the stigma linked to injuries that affect performance in a profession characterized by a mission-first mindset that leads to underreporting. First responders served on every workgroup alongside the academic researchers to help keep suggestions realistic for the workplace cultures and practices that are being asked to change. 

The conference featured a panel discussion with three law enforcement officers who had received a head injury on the job. They described symptoms including double vision, dizziness, chronic migraines, short-term memory loss, speech problems and temporary paralysis, as well as complications navigating recovery – with one eventually losing her job as a result of her occupational injury. 

Hearing from these officers “helps give us context about the stakes to come up with recommendations for first responders to return to full capacity,” said Nathan Edwards, a research scientist in Ohio State’s Human Performance Collaborative. 

Improving care for first responders isn’t stopping with the brain: Researchers are investigating musculoskeletal issues, physical performance and heart health in the first responder population as well, Oñate said. 

“It’s on us to get the level of evidence much higher,” he said. “It’s also on us to communicate with the first responder community to look at what impacts they’re looking for and what they need to have happen.” 

This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs endorsed by the Department of Defense, through the Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychological Health Research Program. The conference was also supported by HRS and Ohio State’s Center for Brain Injury Recovery & Discovery.

A group at The Ohio State University has created “STUART,” a Small Transportable Uncrewed Aerial Rescue Technology flight vehicle. The team — called The Sloopy Works — designed STUART as an entry for the GoAERO Prize, a three-year international competition aimed at helping first responders save lives by designing new medical aircraft. In the process, they set a new Ohio State record. 

Weighing 120 pounds and spanning nearly 8 feet across, it is the heaviest drone ever built in the university’s history to successfully take off vertically and fly on its own. As a prototype, the drone is only about one-third the footprint it would be if it were full-scale, yet its total lifted weight is 70% greater than the world-speed-record holding autonomous drone flown by Ohio State that took to the skies in 2017. 

“What normally takes an aerospace company five plus years to develop a new vehicle from scratch, we did within one year,” said Kevin Disotell, a research scientist in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State and the director of the team. “This shows that our team was really resilient to be able to deliver an actual flying machine so quickly.” 

The GoAERO Prize competition comprises three stages, for which the total prize purse is $2 million. Stage 1 teams submitted an aircraft design and Stage 2 teams had to validate that concept by having their drone complete a 100-foot flight while carrying a small payload. Stage 3, which won’t begin until 2027, will involve a final fly-off at NASA’s Ames Research Center that will make the vehicles carry a 125-pound manikin in an obstacle-style course meant to test specific skills and capabilities relevant to future drone missions. 

While the drone with the best performance will earn a $1 million top prize, Ohio State was one of 14 university entries to GoAERO from the United States to have been awarded concept-building funds from NASA’s University Innovation project, which promotes university-led research into transformative technologies. 

Self-flying vehicles, for instance, can be extremely useful for overcoming obstacles, assessing situations or reaching remote areas that would be impossible for humans to reach alone. 

In the United States, more than 4.5 million people currently live in “ambulance deserts,” areas where it could take emergency services 25 minutes or longer to reach them. High-tech drones can be used to quickly render aid and deliver life-saving supplies, such as bandages, medicines and blood bags, to these vulnerable communities.  

Still, because autonomous technologies can struggle to complete certain tasks in their entirety, such as the rescue portion of a search-and-rescue mission, scientists hope to create aircraft that are more versatile than the small surveillance drones and large rescue helicopters typically used in emergency response situations, as well as help curb the shortage of pilots in rural areas. 

“This project is so important, not just here in Ohio, but around the world, because we’re tackling technical challenges that can have a real-world impact on families,” said Disotell. “Few things are worse than an emergency victim that needs air evacuation, and you can’t get a helicopter.”

With this goal in mind, STUART, named in honor of Stuart Roberts, an Ohio State College of Medicine professor in the 1960s who developed the world’s first hospital-based medical helicopter rescue program, was designed to be a smaller, portable vehicle that could both take off and land vertically. Guided by Matthew McCrink, co-adviser for The Sloopy Works group and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State who has built and flown more than 50 complex aircraft, STUART is unlike a traditional helicopter. 

Instead, its powerful propellers are enclosed inside ducts to protect their components and people from damage, and onboard computers control the drone’s movements in real time without the need for a human pilot.  

During its flight attempt on a particularly cloudy day at The Ohio State University Airport last year, STUART reached the 100-foot marker while flying at 23 feet above ground at an average speed of about 3.4 feet per second. The successful flight demonstration yielded valuable engineering data, said Disotell. 

“There were so many real-world lessons along the way in building and flying this prototype,” he said. “It was a signature experience that I hope all our students on the team carry with them into their careers.”

To document their achievement, the team will present their flight test results at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aviation Forum in June, during which teams can showcase their prototypes to the larger scientific community. 

Despite the hurdles the team faced in bringing such a new design to life, many members found the challenges behind the experience inspiring, said Aditya Chittari, president of The Sloopy Works and a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. 

“Taking on the challenge of creating an aircraft for real people and patients is something that we took charge of and did really well,” he said. “This experience really pushed me to understand how different aspects of the design can all come together.”

While the team did not receive one of the eight prizes for Stage 2, entrants aren’t required to win a previous stage prize to continue into the next round of the competition – so the Ohio State team, powered by its enthusiasm for helping bring a new class of technologies to market, is working to forge ahead. 

“We’re very passionate about where we want to end up in the future,” said Chittari. “We’re going to keep pushing forward with ways to make an impact.”

The project was supported by Farva Technology LLC. 

A new study suggests another dietary pitfall could have a similar damaging effect in a similarly short amount of time in older adults: a lack of fiber. 

The study in rats also points to the amygdala – the small structure governing emotional memories, especially related to bad experiences – as a brain region that is particularly sensitive to a highly processed diet. Every type of refined diet fed to old animals was associated with cellular and behavioral signs of cognitive problems traced to this emotional memory center of the brain. 

“The amygdala is important for learning the association between something fearful and a bad outcome. And we found that all of the refined diets, whether they were high fat, high sugar, low fat, low sugar, it didn’t matter. They all impaired memory that’s governed by the amygdala,” said co-lead author Ruth Barrientos, an investigator in the Institute of Brain, Behavior and Immunology at The Ohio State University. 

“And when we looked to see the common thread among all of those diets, the one thing that became very obvious was that they all lack fiber.” 

Not learning the association between an action and its outcome, especially when it’s dangerous or risky, may increase the risk for physical or financial harm, said Barrientos, also an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health and neuroscience in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

“The amygdala plays a role in that kind of awareness and learning,” she said. “Its vulnerability to a refined diet is therefore concerning for older adults who are at greater risk of financial exploitation and scams.” 

The research was published recently in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. 

Barrientos has studied the effects of high-fat and highly processed diets on the aged brain for several years, seeing behavioral results and related indications of inflammation in both the amygdala and the hippocampus, which is important for spatial, autobiographical and episodic memory. 

In this work, she and colleagues focused on disentangling the diet contents to see whether fat or sugar, or something else, had the strongest link to cognitive impairment in rats.

Young and aged male rats were fed either normal chow or one of five experimental diets for three days: low fat, low sugar; low fat, high sugar; medium fat, low sugar; medium fat, high sugar; or high fat, low sugar. 

Behavioral tests showed that old animals that were fed all of the refined diets – no matter the level of fat or sugar – had impaired long-term emotional memory based in the amygdala compared to young rats on the same diets. In contrast, memory-related behavior traced to the hippocampus was negatively affected only by the high-fat, low-sugar diet. 

And then there was the no-fiber factor. All of the experimental diets lacked fiber, and examination of the rats’ guts and blood showed a significant reduction in a key molecule, called butyrate, that is produced in the gut and circulated in the blood when dietary fiber is broken down by gut microbes. 

Previous research by other labs has shown that butyrate has anti-inflammatory effects and can cross the blood-brain barrier, which may mean a deficiency in butyrate caused by a lack of dietary fiber could be linked to unregulated inflammation in the brain, Barrientos said. 

“What our study really brings to light is the complexity of diet and how it affects so many different things, even the brain,” said co-lead author Kedryn Baskin, assistant professor of physiology and cell biology at Ohio State. “There’s not a magic bullet, but in this case, low butyrate, as a result of a lack of fiber, is a culprit.” 

At the cellular level, the researchers found the most compelling evidence of refined diet-related damage in the mitochondria of microglia, cells that have multiple functions important to memory function. When exposed to experimental energy demands in cell cultures, mitochondria from young brains could adapt to the changes, but these power centers in aged brain cells were not able to rise to the challenge. 

“The mitochondria are still functioning, but they’re showing depressed respiration and are functioning at a much, much lower rate in the aged compared to the young,” Baskin said. 

Though the refined diets caused some weight gain, Barrientos said the findings put to rest the notion that obesity brought on by a highly processed diet is the primary driver of impaired cognition.  

“These effects on the brain after you eat something are pretty rapid,” she said. “You can experience this unhealthy cognitive dysfunction well before you reach obesity.” 

And while she and Baskin said the data imply increasing fiber in the diet could be beneficial to the brain, the team plans to study whether fiber or butyrate supplementation in animals could reverse the age-related cognitive problems that follow poor eating. 

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the Foods for Health Research Initiative at Ohio State, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. 

Additional co-authors were Michael Butler, Jade Blackwell, Andrew Sanchez, Hannah Sanders, Dominic Kolonay, Jeferson Jantsch, Stephanie Muscat, Sabrina Mackey-Alfonso and Bryan Alvarez, all of Ohio State; and Maria Elisa Caetano-Silva, Akriti Shrestha, Casey Kin Yun Lim, Robert McCusker and Jacob Allen of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

These particles, called extracellular vesicles, are known to safely carry signaling cargo as a communication method between cells in bodily fluids and within tissue, and to influence health and disease. Understanding how the properties of these vesicles differ in normal versus diseased tissue could make them outstanding biomarkers for early disease detection, researchers say. 

Scientists at The Ohio State University have made inroads into understanding one side of that equation, finding that extracellular vesicles’ range of travel in a cancer tumor environment is limited almost entirely to nearby recipient cells – which is related to how densely packed cells are in a tumor. 

“This is the first assessment of how far a vesicle can move in physiological conditions. We didn’t perturb the system. We just measured on a single-cell basis how far a vesicle can go,” said senior study author Emanuele Cocucci, associate professor of pharmaceutics and pharmacology at Ohio State, who is studying these particles – and how physiological conditions affect them – to weigh their potential as biomarkers for pancreatic cancer. 

“There are no clear biomarkers for pancreatic cancer at the moment. Our goal is to define a novel biomarker,” said Cocucci, also a member of the Leukemia and Hematologic Malignancies Program at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. “But until we know how extracellular vesicle exchange occurs in tissue before and during cancer onset, it’s impossible to understand whether extracellular vesicles could be the next answer for early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles. 

This work involved a series of cell culture experiments in two cancer cell types, first showing that increasing the density of cells in a petri dish led to a decrease in the number of vesicles released per cell – suggesting either the cell-to-cell interface inhibits release of vesicles, or that neighboring cells are gobbling the particles up. 

Researchers then used a technique that tagged donor cells – those releasing extracellular vesicles – with one color of dye and all other surrounding cells with a different color, and observed the vesicle activity at a single-cell level using flow cytometry. Results showed that the surrounding cells engulfed many of the vesicles and, in some cases, degraded them. Though any signal exchange was not measured, the results clearly showed that the vesicles didn’t stray very far from their donor cells. 

“I was expecting we would see a huge exchange over a distance, and that no matter what, the vesicles would diffuse away, so the chance for being taken up nearby or far away should have been the same,” Cocucci said. “Instead, that seems not to be the case. When cells are close together, they share more vesicles with each other.” 

To analyze what would happen in living tissue, tumors were developed in mice and then injected with one vesicle donor cell for every 3,000 acceptor cells, all dyed so they could be identified through confocal microscopy imaging. After introducing a chemical to prevent any degradation of the particles, the researchers measured how far extracellular vesicles dispersed from the donor cells. 

The findings showed that 80% of the vesicles stayed within 40 microns – or 40 thousandths of a meter – of the donor cell, and 95% of these carriers traveled no farther than 70 microns away, a distance roughly equal to the thickness of a human hair. 

Computational modeling predicted the same result.

“If we interpret this in a tissue situation, then donor cells will release vesicles, and the cells most affected by vesicle release are the surrounding cells,” Cocucci said. “When you go two to three cells away, these cells will affect the neighboring cells – suggesting that the majority of the effect of vesicles is constrained within 70 microns from the cell of origin.” 

Cocucci’s lab is now developing tools for use in animal models that would allow the team to investigate and define the contribution of each tissue to the circulating pool of extracellular vesicles. 

“If the release of the vesicle changes according to the physiological state of the tissue, this means the contribution of each tissue to the circulating extracellular vesicle pool changes according to the status of the tissue itself,” he said. “If you are able to define the contribution of each tissue in normal or disease conditions to the circulating pool of vesicles, then when we analyze vesicles from a patient, we may be able to suggest, without bias, a diagnosis without further analysis.” 

This research was supported by the National Cancer Institute, the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ohio Cancer Research via the McCurdy/Kimball Midwest Research Fund, the American-Italian Cancer Foundation and a Pelotonia Postdoctoral Fellowship. 

Additional co-authors were Federico Colombo, Kartik Nimkar, Erienne Grace Norton and Francesca Lovat, all of Ohio State.

Researchers constructed tiny molecular clusters called RNA micelles, loaded them with potent chemo drugs and an RNA molecule that blocks cancer survival, and placed a tumor targeting molecule on their outer wall that attaches to receptors on cancer cell surfaces to enhance delivery. 

Treatment with these RNA micelles almost completely depleted metastatic colorectal cancer tumors in mouse lungs within 26 days. The tumors in mice mimicked colorectal cancer that metastasizes to the lung in humans, which comes with a poor prognosis: Only 16.2% of patients survive five years after diagnosis. 

“Developing RNA therapeutic technology is key to treating colorectal cancer lung metastasis because there is no cure,” said senior study author Peixuan Guo, Sylvan G. Frank Endowed Chair professor in the Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmacology at The Ohio State University. “We’ve developed a nanoparticle that can treat it efficiently without toxicity – the particle spontaneously targets the cancer and no toxicity is detected.” 

The study was published Jan. 20 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. 

The research coincides with a Nature Protocols publication from Guo’s lab published Feb. 3, in which he and colleagues provide detailed instructions on how to construct RNA nanoparticles for targeted delivery of therapeutics combined in one package to produce synergistic treatment effects. 

The scientists describe Lego-like architectural structures composed mainly of versatile RNA molecules that have rubber-like properties, all factors that foster cooperation with the body and, as a result, enabling spontaneous tumor targeting and rapid excretion by the kidneys. 

“The main idea of the micelle studies is that we can literally prove part of the idea we talk about in the Nature Protocols paper,” said Kai Jin, first author of the colorectal cancer study and a PhD student in Guo’s lab. “The micelle paper is an example of how a different kind of RNA nanoparticle can be achieved.” 

In the study, the researchers doubled the cancer-killing power of the RNA micelles by combining multiple copies of the chemo drug gemcitabine with a molecule called a small interfering RNA to silence the gene encoding for survivin, resulting in treatment of the colon cancer lung metastasis and termination of cancer cell growth, respectively. 

“It’s a two-pronged approach. The chemotherapy is killing the cells and the small interfering RNA is blocking survival gene expression,” said co-author Daniel Binzel, a research assistant professor of pharmaceutics and pharmacology at Ohio State. “The two together help kill the cells in multiple different pathways.” 

The team also attached a molecule called a ligand to the micelles to enhance their attraction to receptors on cancer cell surfaces.

The team initially found in cell culture experiments that delivering gemcitabine and survivin siRNA packaged together in micelles induced DNA damage and programmed cell death in a human colorectal cancer cell line. 

In the animal experiments, a six-dose micelle therapy over three weeks started five days after mice were injected with metastatic colorectal cancer cells. Compared to the tumor status in groups of control mice receiving micelles containing either chemo or siRNA alone, the mice receiving micelles loaded with the combined therapeutics were nearly cancer-free. Attaching the ligand to the micelles significantly improved the tumor reduction. 

Results showed the micelles attacked the cancer in two ways, accumulating in tumor blood vessels and entering the cells with the ligand’s help. 

“We showed that one nanoparticle can carry a drug and therapeutic RNA at the same time, and also used an RNA ligand – these three things are put together so the particle recognizes the cancer cells, binds to them and delivers the particles into the cancer cells,” said Guo, also an investigator in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Publishing the RNA nanoparticle methodology in Nature Protocols, which publishes only protocols proven to work, comes almost four decades after Guo, as a student in the 1980s, published a paper in Science determining that short segments of noncoding RNA not only existed, but had important functions in cells. 

“The recent boom of RNA therapeutics companies and the FDA approval of RNA therapeutics have indicated that my prediction that RNA was the third milestone of pharmaceutical drug development has been realized,” he said. 

The work in both publications was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and an Ohio State President’s Research Excellence Catalyst Award. 

Binzel is the first author of the Nature Protocols paper, co-authored by Guo, Jin and Tesla Yudhistira, all of Ohio State. Additional co-authors of the Advanced Functional Materials paper include Piotr Rychahou and Mark Evers of the University of Kentucky. 

RNA Nanobiotics, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, holds exclusive global licenses to multiple patents covering RNA nanoparticle platforms for targeted cancer therapy and RNA exosome technologies developed by Guo at Ohio State and the University of Kentucky. 

Researchers followed up on a 2014 study finding that Ohio’s first established population of blacklegged ticks, carriers of the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, had been detected in 2010 in Coshocton County.

At that time, the infectious bacteria were detected in 2.4% of collected blacklegged ticks and antibodies indicating prior exposure to the pathogen were detected in 20% of white-footed mice, one of the most common of several small mammal sources of wildlife infections to ticks in their nymph and larval stages. 

In the new study, the research team from The Ohio State University found that the prevalence of infection in captured ticks had increased to as much as 47.6% and in infected small mammals, up to 60.4%. 

“Our suspicion was that 10 years later, when we have robust populations of the right hosts in this ecological community in Ohio, that this pathogen vector system could really establish and take off. And that’s what this study essentially shows – that that is what happened,” said senior author Risa Pesapane, associate professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State.  

“And now Ohio has the same risk as those endemic regions in the Northeast. I think that is surprising to a lot of people because we think, sure, we have the tick and we have some of the hosts, but we’re not Connecticut. But for some parts of Ohio, we are Connecticut at this point.”

Pesapane noted that the risk for infection varies across Ohio and is highest in forested areas in the eastern and southern regions of the state. That said, the presence of blacklegged ticks has been reported in all 88 counties. 

“I think it’s really important to convey, when it comes to both personal protection and to the medical community’s awareness, that you have the same chance of getting Lyme disease in Coshocton, Ohio, and other Ohio areas with the right habitat, that you do in Lyme, Connecticut.” 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks, are widely distributed in the eastern United States and are a known carrier of the Borrelia burgdorferi strains of bacteria that cause most North American Lyme disease cases in people and dogs. The ticks also carry Anaplasma phagocytophilum, the pathogen that causes anaplasmosis. 

Ningzhu Bai, a PhD student in the Environment and Natural Resources Graduate Program at Ohio State, led this study for her master’s thesis. The team collected 654 ticks demonstrating questing behavior and trapped 106 small mammals. Ticks pick up the infectious bacteria from small mammals that are reservoir hosts, which infect the ticks that bite them for a blood meal. 

Deer, by the way, are not involved in the cycle of infection that occurs in ticks’ earliest life stages, but are strongly linked to blacklegged ticks because white-tailed deer are the main hosts of adult ticks that are looking for blood meals and mates. 

The researchers extracted genomic DNA from 368 ticks and from mammal tissue and blood samples to test for Borrelia burgdorferi and Anaplasma phagocytophilum. 

“It was shocking to find that infection prevalence increased from 2.4% for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato to almost 50% in 10 years,” Bai said. “And it was also really high for Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto – over 40% carried that pathogen.” 

The infection prevalence in ticks for the anaplasmosis pathogen was 15.5%. Six of the eight mammal species tested positive for infectious bacteria with prevalence of 60.4%, 19.8% and 11.9% for the same pathogens, respectively. White-footed mice and eastern chipmunks were the most frequently infected hosts. 

“When I talk to people, I like to stress this means one out of every two ticks that you might encounter in Ohio could possibly be infected,” said Pesapane, who also has a faculty appointment in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. 

The study provides the ecological data needed to guide where interventions could have the most impact – evaluating the effectiveness of tick-killing acaricides on small mammal reservoirs is an upcoming research plan for the Coshocton properties visited in this study. 

“Ecological interventions are challenging. That’s why we keep promoting personal protective actions, which work extremely well,” Pesapane said. Steps include wearing tick repellent and long sleeves and pants, and tucking pants into socks while outdoors; performing a thorough tick check once inside, and showering; and using preventives for companion animals. 

In Ohio, these protective tasks are worth it, she said: “If we look from 2010 all the way to 2025, there’s been a 48-fold increase in the number of Lyme disease cases in Ohio, and we are going to be considered a high-incidence state moving forward.” 

In addition to frequently collecting and studying ticks of medical concern across Ohio, Pesapane invites the public to mail ticks to her lab. She is also the faculty director of the Buckeye Tick Test, an Ohio State service that tests submitted ticks for pathogens that cause disease, including Lyme disease, for a fee. 

These submissions, and her own research, have made it clear that tick bites are not only a warm-weather threat. 

“Even on days that have snow, as long as the ambient temperature is above freezing, blacklegged ticks will be seeking hosts and biting rather indiscriminately whomever they encounter,” she said. “So year-round, there’s a tick exposure risk.” 

Andreas Eleftheriou of Ohio State was also a co-author of the study. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The new system, called PURE (Policy-guided Unbiased REpresentations for Structure-Constrained Molecular Generation), promises to significantly cut down the early-stage timelines of drug development — currently a billion-dollar, decade-long process — and could play a crucial role in addressing drug resistance in cancer and infectious diseases. It stands apart from existing molecule-generation AI tools that rely on rigid scoring mechanisms or statistical optimization.

PURE draws inspiration from how drugs are actually synthesized in labs, simulating step-by-step molecular changes using templates derived from real chemical reactions. By blending self-supervised learning — which lets the model learn patterns from data without labels — with a policy-based reinforcement learning setup, it explores the chemical landscape more naturally.

One of the biggest problems in AI-driven drug discovery is that most AI-generated molecules look promising on a computer but are nearly impossible to synthesize in reality. PURE solves this.

“This new framework offers game-changing benefits for early-stage pharmaceutical research, with the capability to identify alternative, more effective drug candidates in the face of resistance and hepatotoxicity,” explained Ohio State Computer Science and Engineering Professor Srinivasan Parthasarathy. “It blends cutting-edge self-supervised learning with policy-based reinforcement learning, using template-driven molecular simulations to navigate the discrete molecular search space while mitigating metric leakage.

“In addition to drug discovery, PURE provides a promising foundation for accelerating the discovery of new materials, an important future research direction.”

PURE was evaluated on widely accepted molecule-generation benchmarks, including QED (drug-likeness), DRD2 (dopamine receptor activity) and solubility tests. It delivered more diverse and original molecules and generated possible synthetic routes without ever being trained on those scoring metrics. This makes PURE a general-purpose AI engine for molecular discovery, capable of working across multiple disease and property objectives using a single trained model.

The findings were published in the Journal of Cheminformatics.

Parthasarathy’s collaborators include B. Ravindran, Karthik Raman, Abhor Gupta, Barathi Lenin and Rohit Batra from IIT Madras and recent Ohio State PhD graduate Sean Current.

“What’s unique about PURE is the way it uses reinforcement learning, not just to optimize specific metrics, but to learn how molecules transform,” said Ravindran. “By treating chemical design as a sequence of actions guided by real reaction rules, PURE moves us closer to AI systems that can reason through synthesis steps much like a chemist would.”

In addition to drug discovery, Parthasarathy said the PURE framework also provides a promising foundation for accelerating the discovery of new materials.

These cells are inhibitory interneurons that connect to a specific location on target excitatory neurons, regulating information processing and maintaining proper balance in brain circuits by controlling how active the excitatory neurons become. Loss of coordination between these two types of cells, which leads to circuit malfunction, is associated with such disorders as epilepsy, depression, autism and schizophrenia. 

The research team determined that the presence of two different types of proteins in precise locations on each of the cells enables a “handshake” between the neurons – a step called innervation, which generates synapses on the excitatory neurons that set up a lifelong communication channel between the two cell types.

“These inhibitory interneurons shape and balance local circuit activity – they are the modulators, coordinators, the conductors of the orchestra,” said first author Yasufumi Hayano, a postdoctoral scholar in pathology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “From our results, we’ve concluded that interaction between two specific proteins regulates the specificity of their synapse formation.

“This is basic neuroscience, but there might be an impact for neuronal disorders. If this process is disrupted, what happens? If we lose those genes, which neuronal disorder might occur? We still don’t know, but those possibilities should be explored.” 

The study is published online in the Journal of Neuroscience. The team’s research image was selected for the cover of the upcoming print issue. 

Hayano works in the lab directed by senior study author Hiroki Taniguchi, associate professor of pathology at Ohio State and an investigator in the Chronic Brain Injury Program. Taniguchi’s neurobiology research program focuses on the mechanisms underlying the development of circuitry in the cortex, the brain’s outermost layer, with a goal of identifying potential targets for therapeutic intervention in neuronal disorders. 

This study involved chandelier cells, inhibitory interneurons in the cortex of the brain that are named for their spray of synapses (called synaptic cartridges) that resemble candles of a traditional chandelier, a pattern that gives them inhibitory control over hundreds of cells at a time. 

Chandelier cells coordinate the activity of cells called excitatory pyramidal neurons in the cortex, and their synaptic reduction has been implicated in brain disorders such as schizophrenia and epilepsy. The two cell types’ association, though known to exist, is one of many in this critical area of the brain that are not well understood. 

Based on their previous research with chandelier cells, the team knew these cells connected to their partner cells through synapse specificity – hooking up at a precise junction point for optimum communication – and that cell adhesion molecules were the likely protein type to facilitate the handshake. 

The connection to excitatory pyramidal cells takes place in an area called the axon initial segment, which is located close to where an axon, a long, slender extension of the nerve cell that transmits messages, sprouts from the cell body. Because the axon initial segment is the site that generates action potentials, neuronal signals that encode information and are used for communication between neurons, chandelier cells are thought to be the most powerfully influencing activity patterns in excitatory neuron networks among inhibitory interneuron types.   

“The axon initial segment is like a faucet that releases information instead of water,” Hayano said. “Chandelier cells have hundreds of hands that grab the faucet handles of surrounding pyramidal neurons. If the chandelier cells turn off the faucet, the pyramidal neurons are unable to send information to other neurons.” 

Using RNA sequencing analysis systematically comparing gene expression levels among distinct inhibitory interneuron types, the team identified gliomedin as a cell surface molecule that is enriched in chandelier cells and known as a receptor for neurofascin-186, which is localized in the axon initial segment.

Visualizations using dyes to label and detect cells in the brains of very young mice – roughly corresponding to the timing of brain development that occurs in human teenagers – confirmed this connection, which led to the placement by chandelier cells of cartridges, or synapses, on the axon initial segments of pyramidal neurons. 

A series of experiments in the mice involving deleting or overexpressing the genes that carry the instructions for building both proteins showed a reduction in synapse formation when the genes were missing and increased synapse formation when the genes were highly expressed.

“This enabled us to watch brain development as it happens and manipulate conditions to test what the mechanisms are, and showed that gliomedin in chandelier cells and neurofascin-186 at the axon initial segment are both essential for development of the chandelier synapse formation,” Hayano said.

“This is the mechanism of how our brain can specify the synapses at these tiny, tiny segments within the crowded brain. There are so many neurons, and they cannot see axon initial segments, but they can still make a specific connection. It speaks to the beauty of the brain circuit.” 

While pyramidal neurons are the main excitatory cells in the brain, there are other subtypes of inhibitory interneurons that regulate excitatory and inhibitory balance in the brain with similarly mysterious mechanisms underlying their circuitry organization. 

“In the future, we can use a similar strategy to explore other interneurons, especially those that we predict would have different types of molecular mechanisms,” Hayano said. 

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Max Planck Society, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s Chronic Brain Injury Program. 

Additional co-authors include Yugo Ishino of the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, Manzoor Bhat of UT Health San Antonio and Elior Peles of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Researchers found that people are less engaged and don’t have the same positive emotional responses when they use technology, like video calls or texting, to connect with others, compared to when they meet in person.

The results were clear, said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“If there is no other choice than computer-mediated communication, then it is certainly better than nothing,” Bushman said. “But if there is a possibility of meeting in person, then using technology instead is a poor substitute.”

The study was published online yesterday (Jan. 6, 2026) in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Lead author Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, said: “Electronic communication is here to stay, so we need to learn how to integrate it into our lives. But if it replaces live interactions, you’re going to be missing some important benefits and probably be less fulfilled.”

Research has shown the importance of social interactions for psychological and physical health. But the issue for computer-mediated communication is that it is “socializing alone,” the researchers said.  You are communicating with others, but you’re by yourself when you do it. The question becomes, is that important?

To find out, the researchers did a narrative review of 1,158 studies uncovered in a database search of studies that compared “face-to-face” and “computer-mediated” communication.

The main finding from the studies reviewed was that impact and engagement are reduced when socializing alone, as compared to interacting in the physical presence of others.

Positive emotional responses were also reduced when communicating via smartphones, computers and tablets.

A good example of the superiority of in-person communication is laughter, Bushman said. “We found a lot of research that shows real health benefits to laughing out loud, but we couldn’t find any health benefits to typing LOL in a text or social media post,” he said.

Another key finding was that numerous studies showed that educational outcomes were superior in in-person classes compared to those done online.  Some of these studies were conducted during the COVID pandemic, when teachers were forced to teach their students online.

As might be expected, video calls were better than texting for boosting positive emotions, the research showed.  Being removed in both time and space makes texting and non-live communication less beneficial for those participating.

Results were mixed regarding negative emotions. Computer-mediated communication may reduce some forms of anxiety.

“Shy people in particular seem to feel better about interacting online, where they can type their thoughts into a chat box, and don’t have to call as much attention to themselves,” Baumeister said.

But there was also a dark side.  Some people are more likely to express negative comments online than they would in person. Inhibitions against saying something harmful are reduced online, results showed.

In general, the research found that group dynamics, including learning, were not as effective online as they were in person.

Many studies reviewed found that solitary socializers do not process information as thoroughly as they do in face-to-face situations, which is consistent with them being less engaged. That may contribute to poorer learning and decision making in online groups.

Computer-mediated communication does best when people are highly motivated to be engaged and participate fully with each other, according to Bushman and Baumeister.

Engagement was often found to be high among those in online psychotherapy, among highly committed workers and among romantic partners.

“I was struck that studies showed patients thought video therapy worked as well or almost as well as in person when their engagement levels were high,” Baumeister said. “There may even be a bit of benefit in that people seem less inhibited talking about their problems in video therapy.”

The benefits of modern technology for communication in some situations are indisputable, according to Bushman. But this review shows that it does come with some costs.

“Humans were shaped by evolution to be highly social,” Bushman said. “But many of the benefits of social interactions are lost or reduced when you interact with people who are not present with you.”

The researchers noted that concerns about the impact of technology on human communication go way back.  Almost a century ago, sociologists were concerned that the telephone would reduce people visiting in person with neighbors.

“There is a long history of unconfirmed predictions that various innovations will bring disaster, so one must be skeptical of alarmist projections,” the authors wrote in the paper.

“Then again, the early returns are not encouraging.”

Other co-authors on the paper were Michaela Bibby of Harvard University and Dianne Tice of Brigham Young University.

But when life hands you doubts, the answer may be to question your doubts, a new study suggests.

A psychology professor found that when people who were worried about achieving an identity goal were induced to experience what is called meta-cognitive doubt, they actually became more committed to achieving their goal.

“What this study found is that inducing doubts in one’s doubts can provide a formula for confidence,” said Patrick Carroll, author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Lima.

The study was published online recently in the journal Self and Identity.

Carroll was interested in what happens when people have what is called an “action crisis” while pursuing an identity goal – a long-term objective centered on who you want to become in life. Wanting to become a doctor, for instance, is an identity goal.

An action crisis is a decision conflict where you are not sure if you want to continue pursuit of the goal.

“When you’re pursuing identity goals, bumps in the roads inevitably arise. There may come a point where the obstacle is big enough to evoke doubts about whether to continue,” Carroll said.

Most research on the topic has focused specifically on these doubts and how they can impact whether people go forward with their goals.

But based on previous work done by other Ohio State researchers, Carroll decided to examine meta-cognitive doubt, which is the sense of certainty a person has in the validity of one’s thoughts.

In the case of this research, a person can have doubts about whether they can achieve their goal. But what happens if you make the person wonder if their doubts are valid?

Carroll conducted two studies.  One involved 267 people who participated online.  First, they completed an action crisis scale about their most important personal goal. The scale included items such as “I doubt whether I should continue striving for my goal or disengage from it” and participants responded on a scale from “strongly disagree” to strongly agree.”

Participants were then told they would take part in a second, unrelated study on the effect of memory writing exercises. Half of the participants were asked to write about a time that they felt confidence in their thinking.  The other half were asked to write about a time when they had experienced doubt in their thinking.

After completing the writing exercise, all participants were asked to rate how committed they were to achieving their most important personal goal, on a scale from “not at all committed” to “very committed.”

Findings showed that the writing exercise succeeded in making people feel more confident or more doubtful in their own thoughts about their identity goal – even though the writing exercise was not directly connected to their goals.

Here’s how it worked: Those participants who felt doubtful about their identity goal – and then wrote about an experience feeling confident – were less committed to achieving their goal. In other words, the writing exercise made them more confident in their doubts about achieving their goal.

On the other hand, those who felt doubtful about their goal and then wrote about an experience of feeling doubtful in their own thoughts actually had higher levels of commitment to their goals. For them, writing about doubt made them question their own doubts about achieving their goal.

“On some level, it may seem that doubt would be additive. Doubt plus doubt would equal more doubt,” Carroll said. “But this study found the opposite: Doubt plus doubt equaled less doubt.”

Carroll replicated the findings in another study, involving 130 college students, that used a different way of inducing doubt.  In this study, Carroll used a technique developed by Ohio State researchers that had the participants complete the action crisis scale with their non-dominant hand.

“Previous research showed that using the non-dominant hand leads participants to have doubts in their own thoughts because they use their shaky handwriting as a cue that their thoughts must be invalid,” Carroll said.

“And that is exactly what I found in this study. So in two different studies we found that inducing meta-cognitive doubt can lead to people doubting their own doubts.”

On a practical level, it may be difficult for individuals to induce doubts about their doubts on their own, Carroll said.  One reason it worked in this study is that participants were not aware that the doubt induction was related to their goal doubts.

This could be more effective if someone else – a therapist, a teacher, a friend or a parent – can help a person question their own thoughts and doubts.

“You don’t want the person to be aware that you’re getting them to question their doubts about their goals,” he said.

Carroll also noted that this technique should be used carefully, because it could potentially undermine wise judgment if overused or misapplied.

“You don’t want to undermine humility and replace it with overconfidence or premature certainty,” he said.  “This needs to be used wisely.”

Researchers found that states that had the largest declines in churchgoing from 1985 to 2000 also had larger increases in death by drug overdoses, suicide and alcoholic liver disease – what have been called deaths of despair.

While the increase in deaths of despair has often been linked to the introduction of OxyContin and other new opioids in the late 1990s, this study shows the trend began years earlier when religious participation started to fall, said Tamar Oostrom, co-author of the study and assistant professor of economics at The Ohio State University.

“What we see in this study is the beginning of the story, before opioids became a major issue, and it shows rises in deaths of despair were already beginning to happen when the opioid crisis hit,” Oostrom said.

Oostrom conducted the study with Tyler Giles of Wellsley College and Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame.  It was published online recently in the Journal of the European Economic Association.

The researchers used data on religiosity from the General Social Surveys and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Their analysis showed that the decline in religious participation was driven by white, middle-aged Americans without a college degree – the same group that experienced increases in mortality, Oostrom said.

The link between declining churchgoing and increased mortality was found among both men and women, in both rural and urban areas of the United States.

In order to further confirm that link, the researchers analyzed the repeal of “blue laws” that had prohibited many stores and businesses from doing business on Sunday, eliminating competition from going to church.

The largest repeal of blue laws occurred in 1985, when Minnesota, South Carolina and Texas all repealed their laws.  The researchers compared those three states to others.

Findings showed that the repeal of blue laws led to a 5- to 10-percentage-point decrease in weekly attendance of religious services, and later an increase in the rate of deaths of despair in those states.

Oostrom said that deaths of despair were on a steady decline among middle-aged white Americans from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when the decline leveled off, Oostrom said. This leveling off is consistent with the effects of the repeal of blue laws and declines in religious participation.

The mortality rates then began to skyrocket after the introduction of OxyContin in 1996.

“OxyContin and the opioid crisis made a bad situation worse, but the deaths of despair were already on the rise,” Oostrom said.

How is the decline in churchgoing related to increases in deaths of despair?

Oostrom said when people stop going to church, they lose those social connections, which studies have shown are very important to health.  But it appears to be more than that.

This study didn’t find any decline in other forms of social activity at the same time as the decline in churchgoing.

“Religion may provide some way of making sense of the world, some sense of identity in relation to others, that can’t easily be replaced by other forms of socialization,” Oostrom said.

She noted that belief in God didn’t decline during the time of this study.

“What changed is whether people identified as religious and whether they go to church. Those are the things that matter when it comes to deaths of despair,” she said.

The results raise the question of whether a return to participation in organized religion, or maybe other secular community organizations, could reverse these mortality trends.

“To our knowledge, findings on this point have so far been pessimistic,” the authors write in the paper.

Oostrom noted that there is no evidence that general declines in community participation are reversing. And the benefits of religious participation for life satisfaction are difficult to replicate with other forms of social engagement.

If anything, the 21^st century rise of social media may make a reversal even less likely, she said.

“People are less religious now, and there hasn’t been a substitute that provides what religion provided to many people. And our paper suggests this could have long-term impacts on health and mortality,” Oostrom said.

Though research to date shows that these bubbles, called extracellular vesicles and particles, influence human health and disease, they come in so many different sizes and contain such a huge range of contents that it’s difficult to pinpoint their specific functions. Found circulating in biological fluids and embedded in tissues, they are being explored for applications ranging from early disease detection to drug delivery.     

In a study published recently in Nature Methods, scientists at The Ohio State University report on a new approach to immobilize extracellular vesicles in a way that mimics their interactions with tissues, a tricky environment compared to bodily fluids because these particles have a specific characteristic: They’re sticking to a surface.

“The extracellular vesicles present in tissues are very poorly understood in terms of how the particles actually interact with cells in our body,” said senior author Eduardo Reátegui, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. 

The new technique enables label-free immobilization of extracellular vesicles and particles without damaging them, allowing researchers to study them individually or in clumps and observe how they interact with cells. 

“What we want to do is not only understand what these vesicles contain, but also identify their tissue of origin, and how they interact with cells. One way to do that is to analyze them without destroying them,” said Reátegui, also a member of the Cancer Biology Program in The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Researchers began by coating a glass surface with a chemical layer, and then used UV light to “etch” a micropattern on that layer, creating tiny spaces with an attractive electrostatic charge to which the proteins on the extracellular vesicles’ outer layers would stick. Computer simulations confirmed that electrostatic attractions dominate the interactions between the tiny spaces and the particles. 

The researchers found that every extracellular vesicle type used in experiments adhered to the surface only where the light-induced micropattern was produced, without seeping outside those micropatterns. 

The team calls the technology Light-Induced Extracellular Vesicle and Particle Adsorption, or LEVA. 

This analytical advance opens the door to studying these particles and their complex interactions with cells at a whole new level, such as exploring their contents for disease biomarker discovery or loading them with therapeutic molecules and watching cells respond, to name just a few possibilities. 

Previously, Reátegui and colleagues developed a method of using antibodies to immobilize these extracellular vesicles and particles for analysis, which allowed the team to identify molecules inside specific types of particles that were biomarkers for brain cancer or indicators of immunotherapy response. But the method had a limitation: Only EVs with a specific molecule on their surface that would be recognized by the antibody could be isolated for analysis. 

With this new technique focused on surface-based extracellular vesicles and particles (EVPs), the UV light degrades regions of a coating to coax particle adsorption to the surface that is dictated by electrostatic interactions rather than any biological signature.  

“We started to think about how we can remove that bias in terms of pre-selecting this extracellular vesicle population with antibodies,” he said. “And now we can basically immobilize all of them, and have the ability to interrogate them with molecular probes or even cells.”

In one application of the study, researchers showed that the new technique can be used to study early stages of inflammation by mimicking the response of immune cells to pathogens such as bacteria or fungi – but instead of using bacteria such as E. coli, they used the extracellular vesicles produced by the bacteria. They found that the EVs emitted by E. coli induced what is known as a neutrophil swarming – the coordinated recruitment and migration of neutrophils toward sites of infection, along the micropatterns where the bacterial EVs were bound.   

“This showed that, first, we can generate matrix-bound EVPs in different contexts for easy analysis, and second, this approach allows exploration of EVP interactions in tissue,” Reátegui said. 

This work was supported by the Ohio State Center for Cancer Engineering-Curing Cancer Through Research in Engineering Sciences; the National Institutes of Health; the Burroughs Wellcome Fund; and Ohio State postdoctoral scholars programs. 

Co-authors include Colin Hisey, Xilal Rima, Jacob Doon-Ralls, Chiranth Nagaraj, Sophia Mayone, Kim Truc Nguyen, Sydney Wiggins, Kalpana Deepa Priya Dorayappan, Xin Huang, Karuppaiyah Selvendiran, David Wood, Chunyu Hu, Divya Patel, Andre Palmer and Derek Hansford of Ohio State; Mangesh Hade and Setty Magaña of Nationwide Children’s Hospital; and James Higginbotham, Oleg Tutanov, Jeffrey Franklin and Robert Coffey of Vanderbilt University.

Specifically, the research shows that fragmented sleep worsens symptoms that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) alone produces – and that mice without a head injury can make up for some REM sleep loss brought on by interruptions to sleep, but injured mice do not.

REM sleep has a major role in helping the brain consolidate and process new information and is associated with better concentration and mood regulation. Loss of REM sleep can lower brain and cellular function.

“I think sleep has gone underappreciated as a key determinant of traumatic brain injury outcomes for a long time,” said senior author Olga Kokiko-Cochran, an investigator in the Chronic Brain Injury Program and the Institute of Brain, Behavior, and Immunology (formerly the IBMR) at The Ohio State University and associate professor of neuroscience in the College of Medicine. 

“A brain injury doesn’t occur in isolation. We have to think about the recovery environment and acknowledge that there are effects of external stimuli,” she said. “We set up the paper to think about recovery in a hospital, rehabilitation or even a home setting where there are lots of things in the environment that might influence someone’s sleep – and oftentimes those may go unrecognized or unnoticed or even downplayed as to how important they could be in influencing recovery.”

The research was published recently in the journal Experimental Neurology.

Injuries in this work were moderate in severity and resembled the type of TBI that could result from a fall – the most common cause of traumatic brain injury.

The experiments involved four groups of mice: those with a TBI (performed surgically under anesthesia) exposed to either sleep fragmentation or no sleep disturbance, and “sham” mice, which had surgery but no brain injury, that got either normal or fragmented sleep.

Select mice from each group were implanted with telemetry sensors to detect brain (EEG) and muscle (EMG) activity, body temperature and cage activity for 30 days after the surgery or injury – the equivalent of several months in a human.

Sleep was interrupted in the sleep fragmentation groups by a bar that swept across the floor of the mouse cage every two minutes during the first four hours of the animals’ sleep phase – intended to mimic a period when sleep need is high, such as when a patient might have trouble falling asleep in a clinical setting.

Results showed that after about a week, mice with TBI were less active than uninjured mice, and their activity continued to decrease over weeks three and four. Sleep fragmentation alone also brought on fatigue – but interrupted sleep on top of the TBI significantly intensified the fatigue.

Analysis of data on the animals’ biological rhythms showed there was more to the story of TBI coupled with interrupted sleep: changes to their rest-activity patterns over time.

“Just looking at the activity alone you can’t differentiate that the fatigue is worse until you look at some more nuanced statistical tests,” said Christopher Cotter, co-first author of the paper and a student in Ohio State’s Neuroscience Graduate Program. “That’s really important when we think about clinical populations – they might get sleep recordings that suggest nothing is wrong. One of the points of this analysis was to show that there are a lot of biological things happening that you may not be able to see with sleep analysis alone.”

Sleep fragmentation affected both non-REM and REM sleep in all of the mice, which was not a surprise. The analysis of interrupted sleep on the REM phase focused on what recovery looked like in the mice after the fragmentation exposure stopped.

Findings show that mice with TBI and TBI with fragmented sleep displayed decreased REM sleep, while uninjured mice with sleep fragmentation made up for the sleep loss.

“So the sham mice are compensating for the loss, but all of the animals with TBI are not compensating for that loss and they continue not compensating for the loss over the four weeks. They just lose that REM sleep and they don’t get it back,” Cotter said. “We looked to see if they were sleeping more when they were not supposed to be, and the answer was no. So they just lost that sleep, and that was a really striking finding.”

The EEG provided data on electricity released by different structures of the brain that are associated with specific biological functions. Results showed that injured mice with interrupted sleep had deficits not seen in uninjured mice: These animals had an increased need for non-REM sleep but didn’t get more non-REM sleep, and their loss of REM sleep – especially in the acute recovery phase – could be linked to loss of cognitive function.

“Change in sleep quality really happens between one and 14 days, so that is a more vulnerable time for disruption after traumatic brain injury,” Cotter said. “There is this sensitized injury response period.”

Kokiko-Cochran said the collection of 30 days of continuous EEG and EMG data provided insights that will enhance future sleep-related TBI research in her lab.

“This model of brain injury and sleep fragmentation gives us an opportunity to study things like fatigue – something understudied in the space of traumatic brain injury that can be difficult to model,” she said. “It’s important because many survivors have an opportunity for extended lifespans. They’re surviving sometimes decades after their brain injury, but there are still persistent symptoms.

“We are trying to be conscious of the fact that people are having lots of other experiences that could influence their recovery.”

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, included co-first author Zoe Tapp, Cindy Ren, Sam Houle, Jessica Mitsch, John Sheridan, Jonathan Godbout, Juan Peng and Ashley Ingiosi.

Researchers found that when an algorithm controlled what information was shown to study participants on a subject they knew nothing about, they tended to narrow their focus and only explore a limited subset of the information that was available to them.

As a result, these participants were often wrong when tested on the information they were supposed to learn – but were still overconfident in their incorrect answers.

The results are concerning, said Giwon Bahg, who led the study as part of his doctoral dissertation in psychology at The Ohio State University.

Many studies on personalized algorithms tend to focus on how they may guide people’s beliefs on political or social issues about which they are somewhat familiar.

“But our study shows that even when you know nothing about a topic, these algorithms can start building biases immediately and can lead to a distorted view of reality,” said Bahg, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at Pennsylvania State University.

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The results suggest that many people may have little problem taking the limited knowledge they get from following personalized algorithms and building sweeping generalizations, said study co-author Brandon Turner, professor of psychology at Ohio State.

“People miss information when they follow an algorithm, but they think what they do know generalizes to other features and other parts of the environment that they’ve never experienced,” Turner said.

In the paper, the researchers gave an example of how algorithmic personalization could lead to inaccurate generalizations during learning: Imagine a person who has never watched movies from a certain country but wants to try them.  An on-demand streaming service recommends movies to try.

The person chooses an action-thriller film randomly because it is first on the suggestion list. As a result, the algorithm suggests more movies of the same genre, which the person also watches.

“If this person’s goal, whether explicit or implicit, was in fact to understand the overall landscape of movies in this country, the algorithmic recommendation ends up seriously biasing one’s understanding,” the authors wrote.

This person is likely to miss other great movies in different genres. This person may also draw unfounded and overstretching conclusions about popular culture and society based on only seeing action-thriller and related movies, the authors said.

Bahg and his colleagues tested how this could happen in an online experiment with 346 participants.

In order to test learning, the researchers used a totally fictional setup that participants knew nothing about.

Participants studied categories of crystal-like aliens that had six features. The features varied between different types of aliens. For example, one part of the aliens was a square box could be dark black for some types of aliens and pale gray for others.

The goal was to learn how to correctly identify the aliens in the study, without knowing the total number of alien types.

In the experiment, the features of the aliens were hidden behind gray boxes.  In one condition, participants had to sample all the features so they could get a complete picture of which features belong to which aliens.

Others were given choices of which features to click – and then a personalization algorithm chose study items from which they are likely to sample as many features as possible. The algorithm even encouraged them to continue to sample the same feature as the experiment went on. They were also allowed to pass on reviewing other features. But crucially, these participants still had the opportunity to reveal any of the features they wanted.

But the findings showed that when participants were fed features by the personalized algorithm, they sampled fewer features in a consistently selective way. When participants were tested on new information they had not seen before, they often incorrectly categorized the new information based on their limited knowledge. Still, they were sure they were right.

“They were even more confident when they were actually incorrect about their choices than when they were correct, which is concerning because they had less knowledge,” Bahg said.

Turner said this has real-world implications.

“If you have a young kid genuinely trying to learn about the world, and they’re interacting with algorithms online that prioritize getting users to consume more content, what is going to happen?” Turner said.

“Consuming similar content is often not aligned with learning. This can cause problems for users and ultimately for society.”

Vladimir Sloutsky, professor of psychology at Ohio State, was also a co-author.

Following up on previous work showing a connection between negative changes to gut bacteria after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and poor decision making, researchers at The Ohio State University are now exploring whether the gut problems may actually cause some long-term symptoms. 

They found that adding the prebiotic galacto-oligosaccharide (GOS) to rat diets before and after a TBI lowered their impulsivity in a decision-making gambling test in which they are rewarded with sweets. 

“We found in this study that their impulse control has improved,” said senior author Cole Vonder Haar, assistant professor of neuroscience in the Ohio State College of Medicine. 

“In our task, we basically ask them to make a decision, but they have to wait for the cue light to come on. And that’s hard to do if you’re a hungry rat, right? So it sets up a measure of impulsivity, and that’s where we saw one of the most robust effects.” 

The poster was presented Nov. 17 at Neuroscience 2025, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. 

Almost 3 million TBI-related emergency department visits are reported in the United States each year, and over 11 million Americans over 40 who lost consciousness with a TBI are living with a disability, according to the Brain Injury Association of America. 

“There’s no FDA-approved treatment for TBI. People are stuck with their symptoms and do whatever they can to manage those symptoms, whether it’s rehabilitation or pharmacological help for specific symptoms like depression,” Vonder Haar said. 

His lab is studying several interventions to see if a gut-based treatment could provide some relief. “We’re trying to improve the quality of life for people who are suffering and struggling with brain injury-related problems,” he said. 

The work focuses on symptoms that follow a moderate TBI – an injury in rats (occurring under anesthesia) intended to mimic what might happen to a person in a car accident or a fall from a ladder. 

Within the past decade, researchers in the field have determined that gut dysbiosis – a negative change to the collection of bacteria in the digestive tract – occurs in patients after they suffer a moderate brain injury. 

“The core question we’re trying to understand now is whether this is a causal force,” Vonder Haar said. “We’ve previously published data showing that there’s a very strong predictive correlation: If you measure the gut microbiome acutely after the brain injury, it can predict very long-term deficits in decision making. So it seems something is going on, but this earlier work was all correlative.” 

In the new study, rats were fed a control diet or a diet supplemented with 2% GOS beginning six weeks before the injury and continuing for another 60 days after injury. The animals were then tested for anxiety-like and depressive-like behavior, learning and memory, and impulsivity and decision making. 

During the rodent gambling task, which assesses decision making and impulsivity, rats are offered four choices resulting in rewards of varying amounts of sugar pellets, and they learn over time what each option provides. 

“And one of the key things we see is that brain injuries really suppress the ability to do this well,” Vonder Haar said. “Our rat models really show this long-term chronic impairment, which patients also struggle with.” 

Rats on the GOS diet had better outcomes in impulsivity after TBI than injured rats that ate a non-supplemented diet. 

“It’s a modest effect. They’re still more impulsive than control animals without injury, but it’s reduced compared to their counterparts,” Vonder Haar said. “Most of the studies we’ve done to try to treat impulsivity haven’t worked out. This is one of the few times where it looks like a treatment has some beneficial effects.” 

Vonder Haar also chaired a Nov. 16 Neuroscience 2025 minisymposium on the gut microbiome in traumatic brain injury and is the lead author of a new Journal of Neuroscience article reviewing the evidence establishing the gut as a modulator of TBI and potential underlying mechanisms. 

“We know what the behavioral outcome from TBI looks like, but the mechanism, why and how this is happening, is the other big question,” he said. 

The prebiotic study was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Co-authors of the study include Alexandra Dorinsky, Katie Koontz, Berkin Bilgin, Lizza O’Connell, Jenna McCloskey, Michael Bailey and Kris Martens, all of Ohio State, and Miranda Hilt of Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

Researchers at The Ohio State University used data from wearable sleep trackers to measure sleep for 359 varsity athletes over five years.

They found that when male athletes had team practices that began before 8 a.m., they averaged about 30 minutes less sleep the night before when compared to later morning workouts. Female athletes averaged about 20 minutes less sleep.

Findings also showed evidence that the sleep was less efficient and that athletes took longer to fall asleep on nights before early practices.

“The strength of our study is that we have objective data on a large sample of athletes showing the impact of early practices on sleep,” said Emaly Vatne, lead author of the study and a PhD student in kinesiology at The Ohio State University.

Most other related studies included fewer athletes and relied on self-reported sleep times, said Vatne, who is an assistant sports scientist at Ohio State’s Human Performance Collaborative.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

The findings can offer guidance to coaches as they schedule practices for their teams, said co-author Joshua Hagen, faculty director of the Human Performance Collaborative and a research associate professor in integrated systems engineering.

“Coaches and others may have this intuition that early practices are not optimal for sleep, but now we have the data to quantify that,” Hagen said.

“There may be times when it is necessary to schedule early practices, but coaches should understand the trade-offs.”

The study, done in cooperation with Ohio State’s Department of Athletics, involved 359 athletes from 15 varsity teams, including football and men’s and women’s basketball, ice hockey and swimming.

Athletes were provided with an Oura Ring wearable device that provided objective sleep and nighttime cardiovascular physiology data.

Researchers compared sleep data for athletes on nights before team practices in the early morning (at or before 8 a.m.), morning (8 a.m. to noon) or afternoon (noon to 4 p.m.)

Overall, the study included 27,576 nighttime sleep records collected between 2019 and 2024.

Findings showed female athletes averaged about seven hours of sleep before early morning practices, compared to about seven hours and 17 minutes when practices were later in the morning.

Male athletes averaged six hours and 20 minutes of sleep before early morning practices and six hours and 50 minutes before later morning practices.

But it wasn’t just time asleep that was affected by early practices, Vatne said.

Findings showed sleep efficiency scores were worse when athletes practiced early in the morning – meaning sleep was more fragmented, with brief awakenings through the night. In addition, athletes took longer to fall asleep.

“That’s something I didn’t necessarily expect, but it makes sense,” said Vatne, who also is an applied sport scientist at Racing Louisville FC.

“If you have an early morning wake-up coming, it’s a bit harder to fall asleep thinking about having to get up early, and you may not sleep as well expecting that alarm.”

Maybe not surprisingly, athletes stayed up later – slightly more than an hour – when they had practices in the afternoon rather than the early morning.

Overall, the results send a clear message to both coaches and athletes, Hagen said.

“We have so much evidence of the importance of sleep, not just for athletes but everyone,” Hagen said.

“For athletes, sleep is really one of the best performance-enhancing activities you can do. If you want to get every advantage you can, one of the things you can do is go to bed early.”

Vatne, who played varsity soccer for Ohio State, said she realizes that coaches may have to schedule early morning practices sometimes.

“But sometimes the extra sleep and focus on recovery may be what your athletes need most.”

Other co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Matthew Vatne, Daniel Cencer, Catherine Saenz, William Kraemer, Bradley Robinson, Paul Jones, Jason Stone, Justin Merrigan and Tyler Carpenter

From July 2021 through June 2022, the clinics, which provide about half of the state’s abortions, reported 24,071 abortions. In the year after Dobbs, that number rose to 32,579. A 191% increase in out-of-state patients came without a decrease in services for Illinois residents, researchers found.

Illinois became one of the closest options for many people in the Midwest and South, where many states restricted or banned abortion after Dobbs. To accommodate the increase, providers in Illinois expanded gestational limits, established mobile sites and made other adjustments, said lead author Mikaela Smith of The Ohio State University College of Public Health.

“The clinics were creative and quick to respond,” said Smith, a research scientist who works with the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network, a multi-institution group that researches abortion and contraception, focused on policies and inequities in Ohio and neighboring states.

“There was a concern that with additional patients coming in from other states, access to care for Illinois residents might be more limited. We didn’t see that in this case,” she said.

The study, published online in the American Journal of Public Health, used data from a monthly survey of Illinois abortion providers.

Beyond the surge in out-of-state patients, the analysis showed a 22% increase in medication abortions, a 53% increase in procedural abortions and a 75% increase in abortions performed at 12 weeks of pregnancy or later.

The Illinois findings are part of a series of papers from OPEN’s ongoing monitoring of abortion access in the Midwest.

Last year, an OPEN study evaluating abortion care in Ohio following the Dobbs decision reported a 56% decrease in abortions in the three-month period when abortions could not be performed if embryonic cardiac activity was detected (about six weeks of pregnancy duration). After that ban was lifted, the number of patients seeking an abortion increased, as did the percentage from out of state.

Alison Norris of Ohio State’s College of Public Health was a co-author on both studies.

Are they simply curious or is something missing in their ability to control attention?

In a new study, scientists at The Ohio State University have found out why – by forcing adults to behave just like children when trying to complete a task.

The answer to why children are easily distracted is that their working memory isn’t developed enough to hold the task goals in mind and control attention. And without such control, attention has no single target and is diffused, said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State.

Such behavior comes across as over exploring.

Sloutsky and lead author Qianqian Wan, a former Ohio State doctoral student in psychology and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Davis, got adults to behave like children by overloading their working memories while they were trying to complete a task.

“We made it difficult for adults to focus by filling their working memory with things that weren’t relevant to what they were trying to accomplish,” Sloutsky said. “And when we did that, adults began to over explore and scatter their attention much like children do.”

“Importantly, like in children, this scattered attention was observed, despite high levels of task accuracy,” Wan added.

The study was published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

One experiment involved 40 5-year-old children and 71 adults.

The children and adults participated in a game on a computer or touch screen in which they collected virtual candy from four alien creatures.

Each creature consistently delivered a fixed number of candies – 1, 2, 3 or 10 – but participants did not know this in advance, so they weren’t sure as they were playing if the amounts would stay the same.

The goal was simple: Earn as much candy as possible. The creatures moved during the game, so participants couldn’t rely on location to determine where they could get the most candy.

But some of the adults in the study had an additional task, one that was designed to tax their working memory.  This secondary assignment required participants to monitor a continuous stream of numbers on the screen. Whenever two odd numbers appeared in a row, they had to verbally identify the second odd number.

After the study, the researchers asked all participants, adults and children, if they could identify which creature gave the highest reward. And all participants had above-chance accuracy in choosing the correct creature. That shows that both children and adults learned what creature would help them reach their goal of collecting the most candy.

Still, some participants continued to select other creatures, even though they learned which one gave the most.

“As we expected from previous research, the children were generally slower to start selecting the most rewarding creature and switched creatures much more often than the adults who weren’t asked to do an additional task,” Wan said.

“But the adults who were under the working memory load behaved much like the children, not settling on the most rewarding creature. It is compelling evidence that an undeveloped working memory is behind children’s tendency to distribute their attention.”

Similarly, when adults were given learning tasks under working memory load, just like young children, they showed successful learning coupled with distributed attention.

How is working memory a part of how children and adults allocate their attention while completing tasks?

Sloutsky said research suggests working memory is involved in the active maintenance and updating of “attentional maps,” or mental models that guide information sampling.

“These maps may guide attention to what is deemed important, allow selective information sampling and more efficient task performance,” Wan said.

“But if you don’t have sufficient working memory resources, these maps become harder to form and maintain.  The result is that you have to broaden your attention to compensate for uncertainty.”

Overloading the adults’ working memory results in the same problems with attention that come with children’s underdeveloped working memory.

The results suggest that children’s “distractible” behavior isn’t a flaw, but reflects the natural consequences of their developing memory system, Sloutsky said.

This tendency to be easily distracted from the task at hand and over explore the environment may actually help children notice what adults miss and learn in more flexible ways than typical adults do.

“These findings could inform teaching strategies that work with, rather than against, young children’s natural learning tendencies,” Wan said.

Findings showed that children’s trust only declined when the villains in a video they watched were explicitly labeled as scientists or talked about them “doing science” in the show.

“Our findings revealed some harmful effects of superhero television, yet those effects appeared weak and limited in scope,” said Blue Lerner, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in communication at The Ohio State University.

“Even then, it is easy to mitigate that harm by removing associations between villainy and science. That’s good news.”

The findings also suggest that the “mad scientist” stereotype may not be as commonly believed by children as previous studies have suggested, said study co-author James Alex Bonus, associate professor of communication at Ohio State.

The study, published this week in the Journal of Media Psychology, involved 256 children aged 8 to 12 and their parents.

At the beginning, participating children completed measures that examined whether they thought scientists were best described as “smart” or “dumb.” They also answered questions that measured three dimensions of trust in scientists: expertise, integrity and benevolence.

“Almost every child rated scientists as smart and gave them high marks for expertise, integrity and benevolence, although their ratings for expertise were higher than integrity and benevolence,” Bonus said.

Participating children watched one of two five-minute segments of the animated Disney program “Marvel’s Spiderman.” One of the videos featured a villainous female scientist character and one featured a heroic female scientist character.

The researchers decided to use female scientist characters for several reasons, one being that previous work has shown that most kids think of scientists as males. It is possible that exposure to female scientists may lead kids to have stronger reactions to villainous or heroic actions because they don’t have ingrained attitudes about female scientists.

One key finding was that children have very positive views of scientists overall. This is inconsistent with a lot of other research that suggests kids have a conception of “mad scientists” doing experiments for evil reasons.

Many of these earlier studies asked kids to draw their view of what a scientist looks like, and the researchers inferred what the children thought about scientists based on their drawings.

These studies found that many children depict scientists in their drawings as evil, crazy and supernatural, Bonus said.

But asking for drawings may get children to think about memorable characters from popular media rather than an average scientist.
 

“When you ask children directly, as we did in this study, it may allow them to evaluate scientists as a broader group,” Bonus said.

“In other words, children may rely on stereotypical imagery when drawing scientists, but also recognize that such portrayals do not reflect all scientists.”

Findings also showed that for impacts on trust, how the villainous scientist was referenced in the video clip was an important factor.

In one version of the video, the researchers edited out all references to the woman being a scientist or doing science as she committed her evil deeds. Children who saw this version of the villainous scientist didn’t show any decreases in trust after viewing the clip.

“Kids may not be identifying the villainous actions of the character as science unless it is explicitly labeled that way,” Lerner said.

Even when the videos of villainous characters included the science label, the decline in children’s trust was relatively modest.

“It is not that kids who saw the villains thought scientists are wicked and evil. They were just not as often saying they were good,” she said.

The children who watched the heroic scientist character did not, on average, show an increase in trust of scientists. However, the researchers noted that kids already showed a high level of trust, so there wasn’t much room for it to increase.

As part of the study, parents were asked how much television featuring superheroes their children watched. Those who watched the most of these TV shows did show less belief that scientists were benevolent, the researchers said, but the effect was relatively small.

Overall, the findings suggest that children have more trust in the expertise, integrity and benevolence of scientists than was documented in studies that analyzed children’s drawings of scientists, Bonus said.

And that trust was not easily shaken by watching villainous scientists in superhero TV shows.

To the extent that it did lower trust, there was an easy fix available to content creators: Just don’t label the villainous characters as scientists.

“This minor change might reduce any negative influence on children’s perceptions of real-life scientists,” Bonus said.

“Access to veterinary care appears to be generally pretty good and the wait times aren’t too long, particularly if you compare it to how long people often have to wait to establish primary care, but there’s clearly room for improvement in less populated areas,” said Simon Haeder, the study’s lead author and an associate professor in Ohio State’s College of Public Health. The research appears in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Using a “secret shopper” survey approach, members of the research team posed as dog owners, calling more than 5,000 randomly selected veterinary practices in six states (California, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington) in early 2025.

The team was able to secure an appointment 67% of the time. When they didn’t, it was typically because they couldn’t connect with staff or were on hold for excessively long periods – more than five minutes was the cutoff in the study. In almost 4% of cases, veterinarians didn’t have the capacity to accept new patients.

The “dog owners” who were able to make an appointment were told they’d have to wait an average of 6.4 days. Average travel distance for an appointment was 6.4 miles.  

But when it came to rural areas, the barriers to care grew more substantial. The research team was able to make an appointment less than 62% of the time when calling rural practices. The average wait time jumped to 8.6 days, and the average travel distance increased to 13 miles.

Current efforts to increase the number of veterinary students nationwide, and at Ohio State, could help remedy this disparity, Haeder said.

Through a new Ohio initiative called Protect One Health in Ohio, Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine aims to strengthen Ohio’s veterinary workforce, protect public health and advance the agricultural economy.

In another recent paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, that college’s leadership detailed plans to educate more Ohio veterinarians with a specific aim of increasing veterinary care in rural areas.

After costs associated with care, access has been consistently identified as the most pressing concern among pet owners, Haeder said.

“When pets don’t receive prompt preventive care, diagnoses and treatment, both the pets and their owners suffer, and we know that living with a beloved pet can be good for health, both mental and physical,” he said.

“And gaps in access can pose broader public health threats, especially if animals aren’t protected against vaccine-preventable illnesses like rabies.”

More than 15% of undergraduates and more than 11% of graduate students told a research team from The Ohio State University that they had ever tried a nicotine pouch. And about 3% of the students said they use the pouches at least monthly.

Certain groups, including fraternity members, reported much higher rates – more than 41% of students in a fraternity said they’d tried a pouch such as Zyn.

The study included more than 1,400 undergraduate and graduate students at Ohio State, who were surveyed in spring 2025.

“Many students reported using the pouches while socializing at parties and while drinking — ‘I like the buzz’ was the most commonly cited reason for using them,” said lead author Megan Roberts, an associate professor in Ohio State’s College of Public Health.

The study appears in the Journal of American College Health.

Pouch use is much less obvious than other forms of nicotine use, including vapes, cigarettes and chewing tobacco. The pouches are small, often mint or fruit flavored, and contain no tobacco leaf. Users typically place them between their lip and gums.

Nicotine pouches can increase heart rate and blood pressure and cause gum irritation, dry mouth and potential oral health issues. But because pouches are a relatively new product, little is known about other potential health harms, Roberts said.

One concern she and her fellow researchers have: Pouches have the potential to ease the path to nicotine addiction by providing an alternative that can be used covertly in places where smoking isn’t permitted, such as classrooms and airplanes, Roberts said.

“It seems to have been rapidly incorporated into fraternity life. Part of this is college culture, and part of this may be that some social media influencers have promoted pouch use as a stimulant to boost energy for workouts, including weightlifting,” Roberts said.

“I don’t think any legitimate health coach is going to recommend using Zyn before going to the gym,” she said.

While the pouches don’t pose a direct threat to other people in the vicinity (there’s no secondhand smoke or vape byproduct to consider), pouches do create litter and threaten water safety when discarded improperly, Roberts said.

Other researchers who worked on the study, all from Ohio State, are Amy Ferketich, Brittney Keller-Hamilton and Tong Lin.

The research was supported by the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The findings suggest that interventions designed to boost positive family experiences and shield children from negative experiences may not be hitting the mark on a national scale, the study’s authors say. 

In all, the study examined the prevalence of 11 adverse and seven positive childhood experiences reported by parents of adolescents between 2016 and 2023 in a large national survey. Adverse experiences included parental divorce, death or incarceration, witnessing violence and facing discrimination. Positive experiences included being mentored by an adult, family resilience in the face of difficulties, participating in organized or service activities, and neighborhood safety and support. 

Senior author Susie Breitenstein, a professor of nursing at The Ohio State University, develops research-based parent training programs designed to improve the social and emotional well-being of parents and children. 

“I do early intervention parenting work, and the goal really is to decrease the incidence of adverse childhood experiences and increase the incidence of positive childhood experiences. So this really connects with the work of our lab in terms of early intervention and prevention through strength-based approaches in parenting,” Breitenstein said. 

“I think at a local level we have had some success, but at a national level it doesn’t seem like we’ve really moved the needle a lot on some of these experiences,” she said. “This was kind of surprising to us.” 

The study is published today (Oct. 20, 2025) in JAMA Pediatrics. 

Previous research has shown that adverse childhood experiences can raise the risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood, and positive childhood experiences may help prevent kids from having psychological and relationship problems as adults. 

Most additional research has focused on identifying segments of the population at highest risk for adverse childhood experience or estimating how many adverse or positive life events the average child will experience. 

The Ohio State team took a different approach, aiming to describe the percentage of teens who experienced specific adverse and positive childhood experiences, and whether the prevalence changed over eight years spanning the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Data on 125,564 adolescents aged 12 to 17 came from the National Survey of Children’s Health. 

“We predicted that we might see pretty dramatic changes in direction around 2020 or 2021. And one of the surprising things we found was that, with a couple of exceptions that make a lot of sense, things were actually pretty stable,” said co-author and lead statistician Nathan Helsabeck, a research assistant professor of nursing at Ohio State. 

“We saw a decrease in economic hardship in the first couple of years as the country was coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, and then directly following COVID in 2021, we saw a decrease in participation in activities, which is thought to be a positive childhood experience.” 

Economic hardship showed the sharpest drop among adverse childhood experiences, decreasing in prevalence by about 25% from 2016 to 2023. The most common adverse experience, affecting at least 30% of teens but declining by about 1% during the study period, was having divorced parents. The adverse experience with the steepest increase, of about 6% overall, was racial discrimination. 

There was a bright spot: Among this national sample, positive childhood experiences were far more common than adverse experiences, with positives reported by between roughly 40% and 90% of parents compared to all negative experiences affecting fewer than 35% of adolescents. 

Adverse childhood experiences have had a prominent role in influencing policy, Breitenstein said – but positive experiences are gaining traction among researchers exploring whether positive childhood experiences may buffer the effects of negative events. 

“There are complex dynamics across experiences that intersect across family, community and the broader society,” she said. “And in our work, we constantly talk about strength-based approaches and the importance of propping those up, and how to do that. Because sometimes you can’t avoid these adverse experiences, especially when we talk about something like divorce.” 

Using national data to detail the overall prevalence of childhood experiences at a population level has accomplished a central goal for the team: providing a baseline to inform future studies. 

“This is a really clear, straightforward baseline that other researchers or policymakers could use to build a case for an intervention or other work,” Helsabeck said. 

Breitenstein and her colleagues, who study how social and community support influence outcomes for youth experiencing homelessness and psychiatric treatment, plan to put the data to use. 

“There are a lot of things that help strengthen children’s experiences, but they don’t always cross paths or build on each other,” Breitenstein said. “We know these things matter, so we’ll use the data to shore up the resources we can to help support others.” 

This work was supported by the Ohio State College of Nursing Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children and Youth; the National Institute of Nursing Research; and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. 

First author Jack Krupa, who led the research project, worked in Breitenstein’s lab through the former Discovery Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program, an Ohio State College of Medicine initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is now a PhD student at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Jodi Ford, Kayla Herbell, Margaret Fitzpatrick, Lia Pinkus, Stephanie Hosley and Barbara Warren.

The change in perception of chapulines (from the Nahuatl term chapolin) shows how food and its meaning change through time, said Jeffrey H. Cohen, author of the new book “Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them.”

In the book, Cohen, a professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University, explores chapulines and their role in culture, tradition and the survival of the Mexican people.

Cohen has spent years doing research in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where chapulines are a seasonal treat that appears with the start of the rainy season in May.

“For tourists, grasshoppers are seen as a delicacy, or a novelty.  But for the local residents, it is just food,” Cohen said.

“It has been a part of meals for thousands of years.”

They are easy to prepare. The grasshoppers are dipped in boiling water, which turn them a deep red color. They are then placed on a cooking surface with garlic, lemon, chili and other seasonings and are ready to eat in a few minutes.

Grasshoppers have been a major source of protein for the local populations for centuries, but their status changed after the Spanish conquest, when new foods were introduced to the region.

“The Spanish thought of eating grasshoppers (saltamontes in Spanish) as absurd – not as something you would actually eat,” Cohen said.

Still, Oaxacans continued to enjoy their chapulines.

And then in the 1920s and ’30s, the Mexican government pushed a new food agenda, in which officials encouraged locals to eat what they considered “more modern nutritional foods,” by replacing local favorites like tortillas with bread and chapulines with other kinds of protein, such as beef and pork.

While many Mexicans did incorporate other foods in their meals, eating grasshoppers never disappeared from the menu. They were readily available in the fields around their homes and less expensive than other food choices.

And collecting, preparing and selling chapulines was an important and often vital job for many women.

“The women who sell grasshoppers in local markets have become important breadwinners for their families, earning incomes that can exceed professionals in the cities,” Cohen said.

During COVID-19, when markets closed down, chapulineras – the women who sell chapulines – found innovative ways to sell their grasshoppers. They created a touchless economy using WhatsApp and other messaging services to connect to customers, leaving purchased products outside their houses for pickup.  Some also provided no-interest loans to people who could not afford their orders.

The meaning and value of chapulines has changed again recently, as Oaxaca has become a popular tourist destination.

“For many foodies and other tourists, tasting chapulines becomes a way to experience the past, to feel they are connected to a long exotic history,” Cohen said.

Chapulineras have learned to cater to these tourists.

“These women know how to play to the foodies. They talk about the 3,000-year tradition and how it goes back to their ancestors who lived there,” Cohen explained.

“And they also use more modern pitches. They emphasize nutrition and their high protein content. It really connects to the tourists.”

As much as the women try to appeal to tourists, they also know that it is not how they make their living. The market is based on feeding the local residents, and not foodies who stop by for a taste of the past.

“The way the women described it to me was that if a tourist comes by and buys a bag of grasshoppers, that’s great, but they are leaving, never to be seen again,” he said.

“What I need to do is sell grasshoppers by the kilo to the people who live here, and if I don’t do that, I’m not going to make enough money.”

Cohen said as much as the culture and meaning around chapulines have changed over the centuries, their appeal has endured – and that is unlikely to change.

“It still amazes me how much chapulines remain a part of everyday life in Oaxaca and how incredibly important they are to the economy and to the culture of the area,” he said.

A team led by researchers at The Ohio State University compared the annual out-of-pocket and total costs of 33 neurologic medications either covered by insurance and sold by commercial pharmacies or bought online through the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Out-of-pocket costs include copay, coinsurance and deductible charges, and total costs reflect all consumer out-of-pocket and insurance premium payments as well as what insurers pay. 

Overall, direct-to-consumer out-of-pocket neurologic drug costs were 75% higher than for insured medicines at retail pharmacies, but the total annual costs of the drugs from Cuban’s online pharmacy were 431% lower than those sold by commercial pharmacies to insured patients. 

Because health plan out-of-pocket costs are in addition to insurance premiums paid by beneficiaries, the findings suggest the direct-to-consumer pharmacy may offer uninsured patients similar pricing for medications without having to pay the premium. 

The higher out-of-pocket costs at Cuban’s pharmacy reflected an average across the board, but many of the medications are inexpensive – so the higher price did not reflect a significant amount of money, said first author Amanda Gusovsky Chevalier, assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

For 76% of the online pharmacy drugs, the difference in out-of-pocket payments was less than $200 per year. 

“The difference was close to zero for a lot of these different medications,” Gusovsky Chevalier said. “The reason that’s notable is because this price that patients can get directly from a website is the same as the cost to patients who, on top of buying medications, are paying a premium for an insurance plan that’s probably coming out of their paycheck. 

“So the cost you’re paying that is subsidized by your insurance provider is the same as what you could pay at the Mark Cuban pharmacy. This could be a great option for uninsured patients who are paying completely out of pocket.” 

The study was published recently in JAMA Network Open. 

Gusovsky Chevalier and colleagues had previously published an analysis of neurologic drug costs from commercial pharmaceutical and Medicare supplemental insurance claims databases from 2012-2021, enabling the team to calculate 2024 estimates for out-of-pocket and total costs of the medications. For this new study, those estimates were compared to prices posted on the Cost Plus Drug Company website on Dec. 10, 2024. 

“I had heard about the Mark Cuban pharmacy through colleagues and thought it would be interesting to compare the costs because his pharmacy is very direct-to-consumer – they cut out the middleman and whatever is advertised on the website is what you’re paying for, and that’s your only cost,” she said. 

The analysis included drugs used to manage 11 neurologic conditions, among them Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), peripheral neuropathy and Parkinson’s disease. 

The highest-priced medications (annual costs) in the direct-to-consumer pharmacy – and therefore all paid out of pocket – were the MS drugs glatiramer acetate ($24,186) and fingolimod ($2,185), and cyclosporine ($2,185), a treatment for myasthenia gravis. All other medications examined in the study from the Mark Cuban pharmacy cost less than $635 per year. 

The medications with the highest 2024 insurance plan annual out-of-pocket and total costs, respectively, were teriflunomide for MS ($286 and $11,739), droxidopa for orthostatic hypotension ($238 and $11,618) and fingolimod ($240 and $8,394). 

Out-of-pocket costs for only two medications, teriflunomide and droxidopa, were lower (40% and 18%, respectively) in the direct-to-consumer pharmacy compared to commercial insurance plans. Eighteen of the 33 medications had lower total annual costs at Cuban’s pharmacy compared to private plans. 

Those two drugs and one other MS medication, dimethyl fumarate, stood out for their markedly reduced total costs: Results estimated aggregate annual savings of at least $11 million each by using the direct-to-consumer pharmacy instead of commercial insurance plans at a retail pharmacy. 

“Total costs represent system-level spending, and we look at them because we want to know how much money is moving around to be able to cover these medication costs,” Gusovsky Chevalier said.

The authors noted that there can be drawbacks to relying on a direct-to-consumer pharmacy – the Cost Plus online pharmacy listed only 33 of 79 commercially available neurologic medications at the time of the analysis. And patients who work both sides of the system to pay the lowest prices would risk having fragmented prescription records that could lead to unintended drug interactions.

Even so, the findings suggest direct-to-consumer online pharmacies may be an attractive alternative source of prescription medications, especially for patients who lack insurance coverage, the authors concluded. 

“Our research has shown that the costs of medications just continue to rise through insurance plans, and it’s really important to find ways for patients to access medicines,” Gusovsky Chevalier said. “I think this adds to a larger body of evidence showing that these direct-to-consumer pharmacies have the potential to disrupt the market in some significant way in the future. 

“It’s important for people to know that online pharmacies like this are available.” 

Co-authors of the study include Chun Chieh Lin, Kevin Kerber and senior author James Burke of Ohio State; Evan Reynolds of Michigan State University; and Brian Callaghan of the University of Michigan.

In an effort to enhance suicide risk prediction nationwide, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine are launching a study funded by a $19.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The study will begin recruiting about 13,500 participants nationwide in January, including about 4,000 people from Ohio, Michigan and Indiana who have recently visited a health care provider. Individuals between the ages 18 and 55 will be recruited, representing varying levels of risk for suicide. 

Approximately 4,200 higher-risk participants will be recruited based on recent health care visits, including those from clinics for depression, PTSD, psychosis or risk for psychosis, sleep disorders, pain and underinsured individuals, to represent a range of moderate to high suicide risk groups. 

Researchers will follow participants for about six weeks to try to better understand which individuals will or will not go on to have suicide risk after seeing a doctor. 

“We aim to understand how people experience suicide risk and manage challenges. By applying dynamical systems modeling and AI, we hope to analyze this data and predict when individuals may be most at risk for a suicide attempt,” said study principal investigator Jessica Turner, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist in the department of psychiatry and behavioral health at Ohio State. “This study will help us gain a better understanding of who goes on to make a suicide attempt, and when.” 

The study, called ARTEMIS (Analyses to Reveal Trajectories and Early Markers of Imminent Shifts in Suicidal States), will also measure other important factors that might impact how people experience suicide risk. This includes using cognitive tasks to understand how people think and approach problems, measuring people’s activity through their smartphone sensors, and asking key questions about sleep patterns and mental health symptoms. 

The ARTEMIS team incorporates broad expertise in the multi-principal investigator team that includes these Ohio State experts: 

• Melanie Bozzay, PhD, suicide and digital phenotyping
• Jay Fournier, PhD, depression and predictive modeling
• Scott Langenecker, PhD, virtual cognitive assessment and bipolar disorder
• Ivy Tso, PhD, psychosis and neurocognitive assessment

This team also comprises a network of participating institutions, including the University of Utah for computational modeling; the University of Michigan for bipolar disorder; and Indiana University for psychosis.

“ARTEMIS will revolutionize the strategies we have available for clinicians to detect urgent suicidal crises,” said Bozzay. “These efforts are vital to help providers in our health care systems prevent suicides by targeting lifesaving interventions to the right person, at the right time.”

The ARTEMIS study benefits from the Ohio State team’s experience in large-scale recruitment, longitudinal assessment, behavioral phenotyping, identifying and treating clinical markers of suicide risk, and advanced modeling techniques for risk prediction, said K. Luan Phan, MD, chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at Ohio State. 

“It also reflects our ongoing research efforts in suicide, trauma, psychosis, substance use and mood disorders, making use of connections and participants from the State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience (SOAR) study,” he said. 

The (SOAR Study) statewide research initiative led by Ohio State Wexner Medical Center seeks to identify the root causes of the ongoing epidemic of persistent emotional distress, suicide and drug overdose. It received an initial $20 million grant from The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Moving forward, the continuation of the SOAR Study will be funded through a combination of sources including philanthropy, external grants similar to ARTEMIS and Wexner Medical Center funding. 

“ARTEMIS builds on the strong foundation of the SOAR Study – both studies advance our understanding and treatment of mental health issues through the measurement of longitudinal patient risks and outcomes,” said Andrew Thomas, MD, chief clinical officer at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “We appreciate that the NIH values the research we do at Ohio State and anticipate we will have a number of additional grants in the future that leverage our SOAR infrastructure and expertise as we advance solutions to help save lives.”  

Researchers found that kids who were born in the 1990s were about three times as likely to participate in private club and travel sports as those who were born in the 1950s. Findings were based on adults’ retrospective reports of their experiences while growing up.

About 4% of surveyed adults who were born in the ’50s said they participated in club or travel teams, compared to 13% of those born in the ’90s.

The findings also showed that particularly kids with highly educated parents but also those from high social class backgrounds were more likely to participate in club and travel teams in recent generations than they were earlier.

“The experience of playing sports is a lot different for kids growing up today compared to those growing up in previous generations, with the shift from school-based and community-based sports to private club sports,” said Chris Knoester, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

“The result is that it is much more expensive to play youth sports today, and it requires extraordinary commitments from both kids and their parents.”

Knoester conducted the study with Chris Bjork, professor of education at Vassar College.  Their research was published recently in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues.

The growth in club and travel sports represents a change in how many parents view the purpose of youth sports, Bjork said.

“For a lot of parents, there’s been a shift from sports as a way to have fun and get exercise to using sports as a way to position their kids for future success in college and beyond,” Bjork said.

The study used survey data on 3,938 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative. Those surveyed volunteered to participate through the American Population Panel, run by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. Participants, who came from all 50 states, answered the survey online between the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019.

Respondents answered questions about playing a sport or sports regularly, playing an organized sport and playing sports at various levels between the ages of 6 and 18. They were asked specifically if they played on any private club or travel teams.  They were also asked if they played in a competitive league for elite teen athletes in their main sport.

On average, 11% of the adults said they had ever played on private club or travel teams.  About 8% played in leagues for elite teen athletes. As in the private club and travel teams, the proportion of people who played in elite leagues generally increased over the decades covered by the study.

Family and community sports cultures appeared to have had a major impact on participation. Adults in the study who said their parents were big sports fans and athletes themselves were markedly more likely to take part in club and travel sports, as were those who lived in sports-oriented communities.

But the findings showed that parents’ socioeconomic status became increasingly important over the generations in predicting who would play travel and club sports.

“We essentially find evidence of private club or travel sports participation rates for children with a college-educated parent that are double those without a parent with some college, in the youngest generation of respondents,” the researchers wrote.

For example, for kids born in the 1990s, those who had a college-educated parent had a 16% probability of participating in a club or travel team, compared to just a 6% probability for those with no college-educated parents.

Similar results were found for teens’ participation in teams for elite players.

The researchers noted that for those born in the 1950s, there was essentially no difference in participation rates that were tied to parents’ education levels.

“It appears that opportunities are steadily declining for less educated families that don’t have the knowledge or the money to invest in their kids’ sports careers,” said Bjork, who is co-author of the book “More Than Just a Game: How the Youth Sports Industry Is Changing the Way We Parent and What to Do About It.”

Recent statistics back this up, Knoester added.  Project Play found that the average cost for a child to play their primary sport has increased by nearly 50% over the five years between 2019 and 2024. Parents now spend over $40 billion on youth sports a year.

“Our results reflect the fact that youth sports is a growing industry and it is continually creating more services that they are selling to parents,” Knoester said.

One implication of these findings is that it often takes more than just talent for young people to succeed in sports today, Bjork said.

“It is a more complicated picture with family income and education, family and community culture, all of this affecting the opportunities provided to young athletes, regardless of their talent,” Bjork said.

The current landscape in youth sports makes it difficult for many families who want to support their children’s sports dreams, Knoester added.

“Embracing private club and travel sports oftentimes brings overwhelming costs and a lot of stress when it comes to travel, organizational and family commitments,” Knoester said.

“And there is no indication that this trend is slowing down.”

Scientists at The Ohio State University and the University of Houston have received two grants from the National Institutes of Health totaling $25 million to test daily drops of atropine as a nearsightedness preventive therapy in children age 6-11 years old.

“The more nearsightedness you have, the more at risk you are as an older adult of sight-threatening complications – retinal detachments, atrophy at the back of the eye, glaucoma and macular degeneration,” said Jeffrey Walline, co-principal investigator on the grants and professor of optometry at The Ohio State University. “So anything we can do to reduce the amount of myopia reduces your risk of those complications. And that’s our goal, ultimately.” 

Walline is co-leading the study with David Berntsen, Golden-Golden Professor and chair of clinical sciences at the University of Houston College of Optometry, and Lisa Jordan, director of the Data Coordination and Analysis Center at Ohio State. 

Previous studies in the United States and Asia have suggested atropine can slow the progression of nearsightedness after its onset. This new study aims to administer the drug before diagnosis in children deemed at highest risk for myopia, or nearsightedness, based on their school vision screening outcomes. 

People are born farsighted, and previous research has suggested that kids whose farsightedness has decreased to a specific measure by third grade are at the highest risk – with almost 90% accuracy – for developing nearsightedness by eighth grade. Those children will be recruited to join the study. 

The clinical trial will be conducted at Ohio State, the University of Houston, and 12 additional centers across the United States. Researchers plan to enroll over 600 children who will be randomized to receive nightly drops of either 0.05% low-concentration atropine or a placebo for two years. 

The timing of the onset of nearsightedness in children receiving the drug will be compared to those who receive the placebo. Any children in the placebo arm of the trial who are diagnosed with myopia during the study will begin receiving the atropine drops. All children who become nearsighted will also receive an annual voucher for corrective lenses, Walline said. 

The eye grows fastest just before the onset of myopia, which tends to begin between the ages of 8 and 10 and progresses up to about age 16. After that, the eye might continue to grow but does not become more myopic in most people.  

The researchers predict the atropine drops will reduce the proportion of children who become nearsighted from 20% in the placebo group to 10% in the treatment group, and that atropine will slow pre-myopic eye growth by 30% over the course of the study. 

Myopia affects at least one-third of adults in the United States, and is becoming more prevalent – because, the scientific community believes, children are spending less time outdoors now than in the past. 

In decades past, myopia hasn’t been thought of so much as a disease than as a nuisance condition. But in the past 10 years, optometry research has advanced beyond alleviating symptoms to better understand and address the mechanisms of nearsightedness with an eye toward lowering the risk for vision loss in adulthood, Walline said. 

Walline, Berntsen and Jordan previously co-led studies showing that contact lenses can effectively slow the progression of nearsightedness. The research team reported in 2020 that multifocal contact lenses with the strongest reading power dramatically slowed further progression of myopia in nearsighted kids as young as 7 years old, and in 2025, they reported that those benefits lasted after the treatment ended. 

“We’ve shown that kids can handle treatments from a very young age, and so we’re just applying a different treatment now,” Walline said. “If they become nearsighted during our study, we will also give them the option of wearing contact lenses.” 

In addition to the health ramifications of myopia, correcting the condition is expensive, costing an estimated $4 billion to $7 billion annually in the United States. And high myopia not only threatens vision, but limits the options for refractive surgery, contact lenses and glasses – all factors that point to the importance of getting ahead of the diagnosis, Walline said. 

“Myopia affects such a large number of people, and even if the effects for given individuals aren’t particularly bad, if we can save the sight of just a few people, I think it’s ultimately very important,” he said. “This affects one out of every three people in the United States. We can make a big difference.”

The research calls attention to a need for focused, coordinated efforts to prevent overdose deaths in the places where deaths from the opioid are rampant, said lead author Thomas Wickizer, a professor emeritus in The Ohio State University College of Public Health.

The study appears in the journal Health Affairs Scholar.

“We can look at this map and see there are certain areas which are experiencing this at an extremely dire rate, and energy and resources, including financial investments, should be shifted toward the areas with the greatest potential impact,” Wickizer said.

“There’s no fentanyl epidemic in South Dakota or Wyoming or Nebraska. But in Kentucky, West Virginia, New England, Ohio … there’s this intense concentration and it’s taking a huge toll.”

The research team studied data from 2022, when more than 70,800 people died of unintentional overdoses, a 31-fold increase over the 2,139 U.S. fentanyl deaths a decade before. The numbers have skyrocketed as fentanyl — which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine — has become more widely available.

Because it is relatively cheap to illegally manufacture, smuggle and distribute, and because it can be made to mimic the looks of prescription medications, fentanyl has become a powerful and deadly actor in the international drug trade.

“This is the worst manmade epidemic in U.S. history,” Wickizer said.

In 2022, West Virginia’s toll, at 75 per 100,000 deaths, was 15 times greater than that of South Dakota. Other areas with high fentanyl mortality rates included Washington, D.C., (58), Kentucky (45) and Ohio (42).

The study also attaches an economic loss to those deaths — adding another layer of understanding to the harm fentanyl deaths cause not just to individuals and families, but to society.

The research team estimated the nationwide toll in 2022 was at least 2 million years of life lost, corresponding to an economic loss on the order of $57 billion to $67 billion. They estimated that Ohio incurred the largest economic loss, with $3 billion in losses based on more than 3,900 deaths in 2022.

“These economic loss measures are another way to illustrate the brutality of the drug on people’s lives, on their communities. There is such a tremendous amount of pain and loss,” Wickizer said.

Local, state or regional efforts to combat the fentanyl epidemic may be more valuable than national approaches, the study authors said.

“It’s also important to recognize this cuts across different sectors. If you’re going to be successful, you need to engage public health, health care, law enforcement, social services, schools and others,” Wickizer said.

A model in Cuyahoga County, Ohio — home to Cleveland — may serve as inspiration for others looking to save lives due to fentanyl overdoses, said Rachel Mason, study co-author and an Ohio State PhD student in health services management and policy.

The Cuyahoga County program, funded by the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board, was among 72 Mason and Wickizer surveyed in 2023.

There, fentanyl test strips were once considered drug paraphernalia. Now, they’re made available through a county-level program with multiple partners, she said. Along with harm reduction efforts including strips that allow drug users to test for fentanyl, the county’s successful program included social marketing to make people aware that drugs — anything from Adderall to heroin — could contain the opioid.

Other researchers who worked on the study are Evan Goldstein and Nasser Sharareh of the University of Utah’s School of Medicine.