News Archive - Colorado Longitudinal Study

Searching the Prodrome for MS Answers

Researchers are looking at the years and sometimes decades before patients are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis to find a biomarker that predicts the disease development. One area being researched is a marker in the blood called neurofilament light. How Early Does MS Begin, a blog post on Momentum, the blog for The National MS Society, describes this work. The vision for COLS is to create a “warehouse” of information that researchers could probe for these answers without having to create their own database.

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New canine coronavirus discovered in past human pneumonia patients

A researcher with Duke University developed a new test to scan for all coronaviruses — even the unknown ones — and found evidence of a new coronavirus in samples taken from pneumonia patients in Malaysia in 2017 and 2018, according to a study published May 19, 2021, in Clinical Infectious Diseases journal. This new coronavirus appears to have been transmitted by dogs but does not appear to being transmitted from human to human at this point. To stop a future coronavirus pandemic, the researcher says more of these types of tests need to be done on more people earlier. At COLS, we’re working to create a biobank that would give researchers access to large numbers of biological samples they could test for new and emerging pathogens and also the data that will help tell them who is most likely to become infected.

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Scientists look to space to study aging

It’s estimated that the heart, blood vessels, bones, and muscles deteriorate more than 10 times faster in space than by natural aging. This means to study the aging process, scientists don’t have to wait for their biological subjects to naturally mature on Earth—they can harness the accelerated health effects by running experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). Using over 300 biological samples, scientists catalogued a series of bodily differences in twin astronauts, including changes to the astronauts’ gene expressions, microbiomes, cognitive functions, and vascular systems. Susan Bailey, a radiologist at Colorado State University involved in the studies, made the striking discovery that the telomeres of the twin who went into space lengthened. Telomeres typically shorten as we age, and how quickly telomeres shorten is an important marker of health.

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Where You Live Could Affect Alzheimer’s Risk

Where you live matters in terms of Alzheimer’s disease risk. An emerging body of research is identifying counties and neighborhoods with higher prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease, which affects 5.8 million people and is the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S. Researchers in the field of aging are seeking to find out if those locations have common risk factors associated with Alzheimer’s and if any of those risk factors can be reduced. A new report by UsAgainstAlzheimer’s and the Urban Institute looked at the 25 counties across the U.S. with the highest incidence of Alzheimer’s and found that lower education, lower access to exercise, and higher poverty rates corresponded with the higher rates.

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Trained Immunity and COVID-19 Risk

Can the flu, polio, chicken pox, or other vaccines lower a person’s risk of contracting COVID-19? It might seem far-fetched that a vaccine designed to protect against one infection could protect against others, too. But a growing body of research suggests that this does, in fact, occur through a process called “trained innate immunity.” Vaccines are known to work by stimulating the adaptive immune system, causing the body to make antibodies that can recognize and attack a specific pathogen if it is encountered again. But recent studies suggest that some vaccines also train the body’s faster-acting and less specific innate immune system, improving its ability to fight off many kinds of infections. Vaccines appear to achieve this feat by reprogramming stem cells that give rise to cells involved in this early innate immune response. Long-term studies across various populations are needed to understand if trained immunity is valid and whether it can be replicated for other coronaviruses.

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Researching the Link Between Blood Type and COVID-19 Risk

Several studies recently published seem to show a correlation — not causation — between blood type and risk of contracting COVID-19 or experiencing more severe symptoms. The studies are interesting, but researchers warn that much further research is needed. Mypinder Sekhon, an intensive care physician at Vancouver General Hospital and an author of one of the studies, said, “As a clinician … [blood type] is at the back of my mind when I look at patients and stratify them. But in terms of a definitive marker we need repeated findings across many jurisdictions that show the same thing.” Sekhon added that he doesn’t believe blood type “supersedes other risk factors of severity” for Covid-19, such as a person’s age or comorbidities. “If one is blood group A, you don’t need to start panicking, and if you’re blood group O, you’re not free to go to the pubs and bars.”

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The Health Impact of Wildfire Smoke

It is widely understood that wildfires cause an immediate spike in respiratory emergencies and heart attacks in nearby communities. But researchers are beginning to see that smoke inhalation from massive wildfires might have severe long-term health impact as well — and that people far away from the fires may be at even higher risk. Wildfire smoke is an especially dangerous form of pollution because it is filled with reactive chemical compounds that can be carcinogenic. These particles undergo oxidation as they are carried in the wind, converting them into highly reactive compounds the longer they are airborne. Just a few of the long-term impacts of wildfire smoke are thought to be increased incidence of respiratory illness, cancer, and the risk of premature births. Newborn babies could be at particular danger because their developing lungs are highly vulnerable to smoke toxicity. By collecting biological specimens over decades in time, biobanks such as COLS will help researchers identify track the changes that occur in people who are exposed to wildfire smoke, perhaps leading to early interventions that stop disease from progressing.

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Genetic Changes Preceding Alzheimer’s Could Lead to Preventive Therapies

Scientists have identified a series of changes in gene expression that appear to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania studied changes in RNA, proteomic profiles, and epigenomics in postmortem brains to identify molecular pathways involved in the neurogenerative disease. Their results, published in the journal Nature Genetics, found that the development of Alzheimer’s involves a reconfiguration of the epigenome. The scientists suspect the discovery could lead to the development of epigenetic strategies for early-stage treatment or prevention of the neurogenerative disease.

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Racial Disparities in COVID Deaths Linked to Prenatal Factors

As of late July, Black people in the US were dying of the coronavirus at more than twice the rate of white people. One reason for this alarming ratio is that African-Americans have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension and asthma—ailments linked to worse outcomes after infection with the coronavirus. Decades of research show that these health conditions, usually diagnosed in adulthood, can reflect hardships experienced while in the womb. Risk factors linked to maternal poverty—such as malnutrition, smoking, exposure to pollution, stress, or lack of health care during pregnancy—can predispose babies to future disease in middle age and beyond. This research article focuses on current studies in this field relying on commonly collected statistics, such as low birth weight, with the author pointing out that it is difficult to conduct traditional direct research because it would be unethical and immoral to knowingly expose fetuses to negative conditions to track the long-term health effects. When fully developed, the Colorado Longitudinal Study will track biological specimens and naturally occurring social determinants of health factors on participants throughout the lifespan, enabling researchers to objectively study the linkages and level of impact between these types of prenatal factors and long-term health outcomes.

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Biorepository Provides Access to Big Data

Adrian Vella, MD, with Mayo Clinic, wanted to understand why some adults have high blood sugar (glucose) but never develop diabetes while others do. To understand this phenomenon, Dr. Vella had been trying for years, without success, to find patients with uncommon variants of a diabetes-associated gene called TCF7L2. Humans can carry different variants of TCF7L2 in theirDNA — one that helps protect against diabetes and one that predisposes people to the disease. To understand how these variants work, Dr. Vella needed to find a lot of people with both types of variants. Using samples from just one biobank would not yield the numbers he needed. But Mayo’s biorepository that stores samples from more than 100 biobanks allowed him to search a much larger number of DNA samples and he quickly found what he needed.

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