UIC Science

You may have noticed that we haven't posted here in a while. That's because we've moved the UIC science blog and renamed it Science Sparks. We're now going to officially retire this Tumblr account.

The Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC) has announced its 2023 class of the CBC Entrepreneurial Fellows, which includes a graduate from the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Pharmacy.

The Entrepreneurial Fellows program provides mentorship to bio-entrepreneurial minded junior researchers who will gain real-world experience by helping Chicago’s university researchers, including those at UIC, develop academic science into biomedical applications.

The fellows were recruited through a nationwide search of graduating PhD scientists. Incoming fellow Ahmed Disouky earned his PhD from UIC, where he studied the extent of hippocampal neurogenesis in Alzheimer’s disease patients and its impact on their learning and memory. He will join three other fellows as part of this second cohort in the program.

The CBC’s mission is to stimulate collaboration among scientists at UIC, Northwestern University, The University of Chicago, and other area institutions to accelerate discovery and expand the life sciences ecosystem here.

The Entrepreneurial Fellows receive a full-time, paid, two-year position that offers them professional and career development, as well as a curriculum in early-stage drug development and the business of biotech. They will work with a network of industry mentors including venture capitalists, biotech executives, Chicago-area entrepreneurs, member institution tech transfer offices, and senior advisors.

This network, combined with guidance from CBC staff, helps the fellows evaluate technologies sourced from commercially promising research projects from the three CBC member universities. The best of these projects will receive up to $250,000 in funding through the CBC Accelerator Award to advance the science.

“UIC is committed to helping our scientists translate their ideas into medicines through our Proof of Concept Awards. The CBC has been a wonderful collaborator by partnering their Environmental Fellows with our faculty to provide guidance, strategic feedback and follow-on funding after the POC awards,” said Joanna Groden, vice chancellor for research at UIC.

Roughly 5% of people who menstruate are affected by premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a cyclical, hormone-trigged mood disorder which can cause symptoms like irritability, anxiety and depression. And about a quarter of those with PMDD do not respond to standard treatments.

Yet, an effective treatment for treatment-resistant PMDD is often not offered to patients because providers do not have all the information they need, according to a new paper from UIC researchers. The researchers therefore wrote a primer for practitioners on treatment-resistant PMDD with a guide to the treatment, called gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs with stable hormone addback. The paper was recently published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

It is critical that practitioners, including psychiatrists, be familiar with PMDD and how to treat it because, the authors write, those with PMDD are at increased risk for suicide. The article walks through how to diagnose PMDD, the first line of treatment, and then how to assess the use of gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs with stable hormone addback if the standard treatments are not effective.

“Despite the fact that PMDD represents a psychiatric condition characterized by a neurobiological sensitivity to hormone changes, most psychiatrists—even reproductive psychiatrists—do not currently offer [this] treatment for severe, treatment-resistant PMDD,” the authors write.

As COVID-19 spread around the world in 2020 and 2021, it was accompanied by waves of online misinformation about the virus, its dangers and the public health efforts to prevent infection. Many medical and scientific professionals attempted to fight back online by providing evidence-backed information on social media. 

But a new survey detailed in JAMA Network Open describes the blowback of those efforts. UIC oncologist Shikha Jain and researchers from Northwestern, University of Chicago and University of California, San Francisco found that 66% of physicians, biomedical scientists and trainees experienced social media harassment, a dramatic increase from the 23% of physicians who reported harassment in a study conducted before the pandemic by the same team. 

COVID-19 was confirmed as the main flashpoint – 64% of total survey respondents said they received harassment over their comments on the pandemic, and 88% of those who reported harassment said it was in response to advocacy. But the physicians and scientists also experienced harassment based on gender, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability. 18% of respondents said their private information had been shared – a practice known as “doxxing.”

As a result of these experiences, 64% of the 359 survey respondents said they had changed the way they use social media. 

One of the many technological adaptations during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was a shift to telehealth – virtual doctor appointments conducted over a computer or phone. According to one report, telehealth visits increased over 8,000% in the first few months of the national shutdown, and they remained elevated even after doctor’s offices and hospitals returned to normal activity.

But do patients get what they need from these virtual experiences? To answer this question, a team of researchers from UIC Business, led by Ranganathan Chandrasekaran, scraped more than 5,000 reviews from the medical booking site Zocdoc. They then used data science techniques to analyze the text of those reviews for sentiment and common themes of praise or complaints.

Overall, the feedback on video visits was favorable: almost 90% of the reviews reflected positive sentiment. And the objections to the online format appeared to decrease over the time period that the researchers examined, which ran from April 2020 to March 2022. 

Patient reviews most often mentioned communication and medical expertise as important factors for how they judged their virtual visit. “Patients favored those physicians who listened to their concerns, answered questions and provided clear and easily understandable information,” the authors wrote. They propose a new concept of “webside manner,” behaviors that medical providers should follow to “make patients comfortable in virtual settings.”

On the negative side, patients pointed out issues with long wait times, technical issues, and difficulty with follow-up information and appointments. The authors also could not use the current dataset to test whether patients preferred video visits to the in-person variety, they said. 

As anyone grocery shopping with a child has probably noticed, the checkout aisles of grocery stores are often filled with candy, chips, soda and other sweet or salty temptations. A new study by researchers at UIC, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Davis quantifies this impulse sales trick, finding that 7 out of 10 items in checkout lanes are unhealthy.

The research, published in Current Developments in Nutrition, observed over 100 stores in four California cities. The most commonly-found categories in the checkout lanes were candy (38%), gum (18%), sugary beverages such as soda (11%) and salty snacks (9%). Healthy options such as water, fruits and vegetables or nuts appeared only rarely as last-minute purchase options.

Researchers also found that more healthy foods and drinks were found in the checkout lanes of specialty food stores and large chains, while unhealthy treats predominated in dollar stores and independent grocery stores – the types often found in disadvantaged “food desert” neighborhoods.

“There’s an opportunity here for checkouts to offer more choice by expanding access to healthier options,” said lead author Jennifer Falbe in a UC Davis news release. “Currently, consumers lack choices at the checkout.”

The study’s co-authors included Samantha Marinello, Andrea Pipito, Rebecca Schermbeck and Lisa Powell from UIC. Powell, distinguished professor and director of the Division of Health Policy and Administration in the School of Public Health, researches the effects of public policy on behavioral outcomes. 

UIC sociologist Junia Howell was on WGN discussing her research into the large difference in home appraisals in white vs. non-white neighborhoods.

Howell and her fellow researchers found that the median home value in 2022 in Chicago for a home in a majority-minority neighborhood was about $219,000, while it was about $608,160 in a majority-white neighborhood.

But those numbers are “even more drastic” than they seem, Howell explained, because the researchers have been able to eliminate factors like home quality, crime and schools, and isolate just the difference due to the racial composition of the community.

“This problem is at the cornerstone of racial wealth gaps,” Howell, a visiting professor,  told WGN.

Howell said she and others are working on creating new appraisal formulas that will chip away at this disparity. She’s hoping to have something to make public in the next few months, she said.

Wildfires in Canada have blanketed much of the country in smoke that can be harmful to people’s health. So it’s not a huge surprise that people are trying to quantify the health risks by comparing wildfire smoke to smoking cigarettes.

But a number of experts, including Susan Buchanan, a clinical associate professor in the School of Public Health at UIC, said this is a faulty comparison, which may actually downplay the dangers of breathing in wildfire smoke. Buchanan and others were quoted in an article in the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper out of Rochester, N.Y.

Buchanan stressed that there have been no lab experiments comparing cigarettes and wildfire smoke, so there’s no basis for saying that standing outside in the smoke equates to smoking a certain number of cigarettes.

But the lack of scientific comparisons does not mean that the wildfire smoke should be taken lightly, she told the newspaper.

"That means that some people with heart disease and lung problems are going to have increased symptoms," she told the Democrat & Chronicle. "They should stay inside in air-conditioning" preferably with a Minimum Efficiency Reporting Values, or MERV, 13 filtration or higher.

You can learn more, including how a more accurate comparison may be between wildfire smoke and living with a chain smoker, by reading the full article.

In her forthcoming book, Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture, UIC’s Alexandra Filindra traces gun culture’s roots back to the American Revolution. However, the origin was not in libertarian ideals but instead was tied to the belief in white male supremacy.

The book, which comes out in September, recently received a starred review from Kirkus.

“This is a deeply informed, persuasive book, offering a compelling overview of how Americans became militarized and how that militarization is increasing,” the review says.

Filindra, an associate professor of political science and psychology, has conducted research into American gun politics, race and ethnic politics, and political psychology.

You can read the full Kirkus review here and learn more about the book here.

It’s been 10 years since then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel made the highly controversial decision to close 50 Chicago Public Schools because of dwindling enrollment.

WBEZ and the Sun-Times teamed up on a deep dive into the legacy of those closures, with faculty from the University of Illinois Chicago weighing in. The upshot of the reporting is that, a decade later, there is little evidence that the closings helped students or the “welcoming” schools they were sent to.

For example, many of these welcoming schools find themselves in the same position as closed schools did 10 years ago, with low enrollment contributing to significant budget constraints. David Stovall, a professor of black studies at UIC, told the reporting team that this is partly because these schools are near the closed schools, so are impacted by many of the same factors.

“In those places where schools have been closed, there's a lack of access to affordable housing, lack of access to long-term living wage employment,” he is quoted as saying. “Those are the spaces that have the highest levels of recorded violence. So we don't have those things and people decide to move elsewhere — [that’s] the result.”

This ongoing population loss is contributing to the further reduction in students, the reporting explains. And while school closings may not be the main reason people moved, they send a message to these neighborhoods, explained Amanda Lewis, director of UIC’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.

"Schools, in many ways, are representative of a general public commitment to a community and to the longevity and health of a community, to its vitality, to its future," she is quoted as saying. "They are clearly anchor institutions in a lot of ways."

You can read more of the WBEZ and Sun-Times reporting here.

Cardiovascular disease is the perennial leading cause of death in the United States, as well as a significant source of racial and ethnic health disparities. The low-hanging fruit for improving these statistics may be new approaches to promoting physical activity in under-resourced groups, according to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association.

Despite the well-known protective effects of exercise against cardiovascular disease and risk factors such as obesity and diabetes, less than 1 in 4 adults achieve the recommended 150 minutes of moderate activity per week. Lower physical activity has also been observed in many of the same groups – people above 65, women, Black and Hispanic adults, people with lower income and education – that show elevated rates of cardiovascular issues.

The AHA report, published in Circulation and written by a team including Eduardo Bustamante, assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, reviews the literature on physical activity across these groups and in different environments, such as urban vs. rural or different weather and air quality conditions. It also looks at the results of various strategies used to promote physical activity in these populations and settings.

The programs that were most effective engaged the community in designing interventions, created culturally appropriate materials and exercise options and used more audiovisual and interactive media, the authors wrote. They also called for more research on the long-term effectiveness of these programs and on the intersectionality with other barriers to exercise such as the built environment, cultural norms and lack of resources such as childcare.

We’re used to X-rays in hospitals, dental offices and airports, where the 19th-century technology is still used to capture images of bones, teeth and other dense objects. But scientists also use X-rays to study the composition of samples and materials and examine very small targets in medicine, biology, physics and engineering. 

In a paper published May 31 in the journal Nature, a multi-institutional team of scientists set a new standard for X-rays on the microscopic level, characterizing a single atom for the first time. The co-authors included Tomas Rojas and Anh Ngo of University of Illinois Chicago.

Previously, the smallest sample captured by an X-ray was 10,000 atoms. The research team designed a new synchrotron instrument located at the Advanced Photon Source of Argonne National Laboratory, using a sharp metal tip detector placed in “extreme proximity” to an iron or terbium atom. 

The experiments produced X-ray absorption spectra – “fingerprints” that could be used to successfully identify the target atoms and their chemical properties. In the future, scientists could use the method to identify trace amounts of different elements in materials important for applications in quantum technology or in samples for medical or environmental research.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of mental health issues have skyrocketed. The increase in anxiety, depression and other conditions has taxed the already limited resources of the U.S. healthcare system, creating long waitlists for psychiatric care. To try and meet this demand, several mental health apps driven by data science and artificial intelligence have emerged.

But few of these apps have scientific evidence that they work. Lumen, an AI-driven voice coach designed by researchers from UIC and collaborators at Washington University and Penn State, is among the first to show effects both on user’s symptoms and brain activity associated with mental disorders.

A new article from WebMD highlighted these findings and spoke with Olusola Ajilore, professor of psychiatry at UIC and a co-author of the Lumen study. Ajilore emphasized that Lumen, which guides patients through problem-solving therapy using the Alexa smart assistant interface, is not meant to replace human therapists but to offer patients immediate help while they wait for in-person care.

Ryan Wade, a psychiatrist unaffiliated with the study, agreed: “It won’t replace the therapist…but part of their job can be done in an automated fashion. This can help people get started. If we work with it, I think we can find it can be really effective.”

Long COVID is a “syndrome of syndromes” and more likely to occur in unvaccinated patients and people infected before the 2021 Omicron variant, according to a new study of nearly 10,000 patients published in JAMA.

The RECOVER initiative is a nationwide collective of researchers studying patients with long COVID, where symptoms last for months or years beyond the original infection with the virus. The Illinois arm of the study, a network of health systems and community-based organizations known as ILLInet, is led by UIC physicians Jonathan Klein and Jerry Krishnan. 

ILLInet was one of several sites that contributed data to the new study, which assessed the symptoms of 8,646 patients who experienced a COVID-19 infection. They found 12 symptoms more prevalent in long COVID: post-exertional malaise, fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, gastrointestinal symptoms, heart palpitations, issues with sexual desire or capacity, loss of smell or taste, thirst, chronic cough, chest pain, and abnormal movements.

Based on the findings, the study created a scoring system that physicians can use to identify long COVID in their patients.

“One of the big take-aways from this study is the heterogeneity of long COVID,” said Andrea Foulkes, ScD, the senior study author, a principal investigator of the RECOVER Data Resource Core, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the director of Biostatistics at Massachusetts General Hospital in an NIH news release. “Long COVID is not just one syndrome; it’s a syndrome of syndromes."

The data provides an important baseline for the RECOVER study as it searches for the biological causes of long COVID and tests treatments in upcoming clinical trials. 

Intermittent fasting — eating only during a limited number of hours during the day — has become increasingly popular in recent years. Along with that popularity have come concerns that this pattern of eating can be detrimental to women’s fertility.

But Krista Varady, UIC professor of kinesiology and nutrition, tells Outside magazine that research has proved those worries are unsubstantiated.

“We’ve done about 30 clinical trials in intermittent fasting, and about 85 percent of our samples are women,” she told Outside. “This diet either has no effect on reproductive hormones, or it actually benefits people with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).”

In one of Varady’s recent studies, published last year in the journal Obesity, she and co-authors followed a group of pre- and post-menopausal obese women for eight weeks while they followed a strict intermittent fasting plan known as the “warrior diet.”

The researchers found that levels of sex-binding globulin hormone, a protein that carries reproductive hormones throughout the body, was unchanged after the women followed the diet for eight weeks. Testosterone and androstenedione, which the body uses to produce both testosterone and estrogen, were also unchanged.

You can read the full Outside article for more information on intermittent fasting and fertility. And you can read about Varady’s Obesity study in this UIC today article.

Workers who get little warning about their work schedules are at higher risk of having symptoms of depression than those who get their schedules farther in advance, according to a new study co-authored by Vanessa Oddo, UIC assistant professor of kinesiology and nutrition.

The research team used data collected in 2019 from nearly 5,000 37- to 42-year-olds in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The researchers found that women were 39% more likely to report depressive symptoms — such as feeling sad, having trouble eating and sleeping, and feeling like everything “was an effort” — if they received their work schedules with two weeks or less notice as compared to women who got at least two weeks’ notice. Men did not show the same pattern.

Additionally, those who reported getting little scheduling notice were more likely to be Black or Hispanic, to live in the south and in rural areas.

“Policies to reduce precarious work scheduling practices should be further evaluated for their impacts on mental health,” the researchers write in their paper, which was published in the journal SSM – Population Health.

You can read the full study here.

The University of Illinois Cancer Center has released a series of short videos to help explain cancer research to the community. The goal is to increase scientific literacy by sharing information between young researchers, cancer patients, survivors, research advocates and allies.

The eight videos are all about six minutes long and cover different aspects of cancer science, from molecular biology to cancer metastasis. They are geared for an audience with little to no scientific background. For example, in the first video “Cellular Composition,” cell components are described by comparing them to the parts of a candy factory.

The goal of the series, according to the video intro, is to “bring everyone to the table for scientific discussions related to cancer science and therapies.”