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  • Rather than providing protection, an Omicron infection may leave patients more susceptible to future COVID infections, researchers find after studying seniors in care

    Rather than providing protection, an Omicron infection may leave patients more susceptible to future COVID infections, researchers find after studying seniors in care

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    Newswise — HAMILTON, ON, Aug. 21, 2023 – Researchers at McMaster University have found that rather than conferring immunity against future infections, infection during the first Omicron wave of COVID left the seniors they studied much more vulnerable to reinfection during the second Omicron wave.

    The surprising finding from a study of 750 vaccinated seniors in Ontario retirement homes and long-term care settings suggests the we don’t understand how some Omicron variants can evade the immune system, according to Dawn Bowdish, an immunologist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Aging & Immunity.

    There have been four major waves of Omicron infections in Ontario, Canada, and researchers found that being infected during the first wave, which was caused by the Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants, caused older adults to be more susceptible to infections in the third wave, which was caused by the Omicron BA.5 variant. Surprisingly, people who had had an infection with an early Omicron variant were much more susceptible to becoming reinfected than people who had never had an infection at all.

    “This research highlights the need for continued vigilance and underscores the importance of ongoing preventive measures against COVID-19, says Bowdish, who is corresponding author of a study published today in eClinicalMedicine, an open-access journal published by The Lancet. “We must remain cautious and proactive in our approach to protecting public health.”

    Senior co-author Andrew Costa, an epidemiologist and associate professor in McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact, says the findings should serve as a warning that we don’t know how previous infections will impact susceptibility to the variants which are now in circulation.  

    “These findings strongly suggest broader research is required to understand whether the wider population shares the same susceptibility as the seniors our group studied,” says Costa. “Until we know more, we think it’s smart for everyone to protect themselves.”

    Long-term care residents are easier to study because COVID-19 infections were, until recently, monitored more closely, Bowdish explains, and while the results may or may not be the same among the wider population, it’s important to learn more, and for everyone to consider a COVID vaccine booster this fall. 

    Though the researchers were not able to identify which Omicron variant a person had, all the initial infections occurred during the BA.1/BA.2 wave, and all the reinfections occurred during the summer of 2022 when the BA.5 variant was responsible for the vast majority of infections.

    “We found that some individuals had normal immune responses after the first infection, while others had very low levels of protective antibodies, which we believe was one contributing factor to why they got reinfected,” says Bowdish.

    The researchers urge people not to assume immunity from a prior Omicron infection and to remain vigilant to prevent further spread of the virus.

    She and Costa emphasize the urgency of considering COVID vaccine boosters this fall to safeguard against potential reinfections. 

    “Our current vaccine schedules are based on the assumption that having had an infection provides some level of protection to future infections, but our study shows that may not be true for all variants in all people,” says Bowdish.

    Despite the significance of the findings, Bowdish highlights some caveats. The study focused on an older adult population, many of whom were frailty and had chronic health conditions, and the results may not directly apply to younger individuals.

    High resolution photos related to this study can be found at:

    https://photos.app.goo.gl/859Ydekv5bVRW5oj6

     

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  • Not eating enough of these six healthy foods is associated with higher cardiovascular disease and deaths globally

    Not eating enough of these six healthy foods is associated with higher cardiovascular disease and deaths globally

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    Embargoed by the European Heart Journal until Thursday, July 6 at 7:05 (EDT)

    Newswise — HAMILTON, ON (July 6, 2023) – A study led by McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences researchers at the Population Research Health Institute (PHRI) has found that not eating enough of six key foods in combination is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in adults.

    Consuming fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, fish and whole-fat dairy products is key to lowering the risk of CVD, including heart attacks and strokes. The study also found that a healthy diet can be achieved in various ways, such as including moderate amounts of whole grains or unprocessed meats.

    Previous and similar research has focused on Western countries and diets that combined harmful, ultra-processed foods with nutrient-dense foods. This research was global in scope and focused on foods commonly considered to be healthy.

    The World Health Organization estimates nearly 18 million people died from CVD in 2019, representing 32 per cent of all global deaths. Of these deaths, 85 per cent were due to heart attacks and strokes. PHRI researchers and their global collaborators analyzed data from 245,000 people in 80 countries from multiple studies. The results were published in the European Heart Journal on July 6.

    Researchers derived a diet score from PHRI’s ongoing, large-scale global Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study, then replicated that in five independent studies to measure health outcomes in different world regions and in people with and without prior CVD.

    “Previous diet scores – including the EAT-Lancet Planetary Diet and the Mediterranean Diet tested the relationship of diet to CVD and death mainly in Western countries. The PURE Healthy Diet Score included a good representation of high, middle, and low-income countries,” said Salim Yusuf, senior author and principal investigator of PURE.

    As well as being truly global, the PURE Healthy Diet Score focused on exclusively protective, or natural, foods.

    “We were unique in that focus. The other diet scores combined foods considered to be harmful – such as processed and ultra-processed foods – with foods and nutrients believed to be protective of one’s health,” said first author Andrew Mente, PHRI scientist and assistant professor at McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact.

    “There is a recent increased focus on higher consumption of protective foods for disease prevention. Outside of larger amounts of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes, the researchers showed that moderation is key in the consumption of natural foods,” he said.

    “Moderate amounts of fish and whole-fat dairy are associated with a lower risk of CVD and mortality. The same health outcomes can be achieved with moderate consumption of grains and meats – as long as they are unrefined whole grains and unprocessed meats.”

    The PURE Healthy Diet Score recommends an average daily intake of: Fruits at two to three servings; vegetables at two to three servings; nuts at one serving; and dairy at two servings. The score also includes three to four weekly servings of legumes and two to three weekly servings of fish. Possible substitutes included whole grains at one serving daily, and unprocessed red meat or poultry at one serving daily.

    There was no specific funding for this analysis, although each study that contributed data was funded separately and conducted over a 25-year period.

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    A photo of Andrew Mente can be found at: https://macdrive.mcmaster.ca/d/d7cfaeb9c6ac4cfb80f0/

     

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  • Researchers create packaging tray that warns of contamination before food is unwrapped

    Researchers create packaging tray that warns of contamination before food is unwrapped

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    Newswise — Researchers at McMaster University have created a new packaging tray that can signal when Salmonella or other dangerous pathogens are present in packages of raw or cooked food such as chicken.

    The new technology will enable producers, retailers and consumers to tell in real time if the contents of a sealed food package are contaminated without having to open it, preventing exposure to contamination while simplifying cumbersome and expensive lab-based detection processes that today add significant time and cost to food production. 

    The prototype tray, shaped like a shallow boat, is lined with a food-safe reagent that allows a built-in sensor to detect and signal the presence of Salmonella. The technology can readily be adapted to test for other common food-borne contaminants, such as E. coli and Listeria. 

    “This is something that can benefit everyone,” says researcher Akansha Prasad, the co-lead author of a paper that describes the invention, published today in the journal Advanced Materials. “We’re hoping this technology will save lives, money and food waste.”

    “There is so much at stake with food safety,” says researcher Shadman Khan, co-lead author on the paper. “We wanted to develop a system that was reliable, quick, affordable and easy to use.”

    The sloped sides of the tray direct juices to a sensor embedded in a window at the bottom. Without the need for any additional lab work, users can scan the underside of the sealed package with a cell phone and know immediately whether the food is contaminated.

    Having easy, instant access to such information would allow public health authorities, producers and retailers to trace and isolate contamination quickly, reducing potentially serious infections while also cutting back significantly on food waste by identifying precisely which lots of food need to be recalled and destroyed, compared to today’s often broad recalls that end up wasting unspoiled foods.

    Further, the researchers say, protecting consumers from contaminated foods will create significant health-care savings. Globally, there are about 600 million cases of food-borne illness every year, largely attributed to the consumption of pathogen-contaminated food products.

    The McMaster researchers and their colleagues have been working for several years on related technologies, all aimed at creating simple, inexpensive tools to prevent and detect food contamination.

    Their work is part of McMaster’s broader Global Nexus School for Pandemic Prevention & Response.

    Co-author Tohid Didar, an associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering who holds the Canada Research Chair in Nano-biomaterials, says package-based sensors that measure other conditions such as humidity are already becoming common in Japan and elsewhere.

    He said the McMaster research team on the Lab-in-a-Package project – featuring 11 colleagues from the fields of biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineering, medicine and biochemistry – has worked to make the new contamination sensor as adaptable and economical as possible, knowing food producers are under pressure to keep costs low.

    “It’s really just a matter of time before technology like this becomes common all over the world,” Didar says. “Now that we’ve shown that one kind of food package can reveal contamination without even being opened, we can adapt it to other forms of packaging for other types of foods.”

    Didar and his colleagues Yingfu Li, a professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, and Carlos Filipe, McMaster’s Chair of Chemical Engineering, supervised the research.

    “Being able to combine packaging and Salmonella detection in one system is already very promising,” says Li. “It also shows that we can add sensing probes for other food-borne pathogens to the same system so the package will check for all of them at once. That’s the next step for us, and we’re already working on it.”

    The research has been supported by Toyota Tsusho Canada Inc., an indirect subsidiary of Toyota Tsusho Corporation in Japan.

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  • Where there’s smoke, there’s thiocyanate: McMaster researchers find tobacco users in Canada are exposed to higher levels of cyanide than other regions

    Where there’s smoke, there’s thiocyanate: McMaster researchers find tobacco users in Canada are exposed to higher levels of cyanide than other regions

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    Newswise — HAMILTON, ON – Mar 24, 2024 – Tobacco users in Canada are exposed to higher levels of cyanide than smokers in lower-income nations, according to a large-scale population health study from McMaster University.

    Scientists made the discovery while investigating the molecule thiocyanate – a detoxified metabolite excreted by the body after cyanide inhalation. It was measured as a urinary biomarker of tobacco use in a study of self-reported smokers and non-smokers from 14 countries of varying socioeconomic status. 

    “We expected the urinary thiocyanate levels would be similar across regions and reflect primarily smoking intensity. However, we noticed significant elevation of thiocyanate in smokers from high-income countries even after adjusting for differences in the number of cigarettes smoked per day,” says Philip Britz-McKibbin, co-author of the study and a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at McMaster.

    Tobacco-related illness remains the leading cause of preventable illness and premature death in Canada, contributing to approximately 48,000 deaths annually. According to researchers, the findings could be caused by the type of cigarettes smoked in high-income countries like Canada.

    “The cigarettes commonly consumed in Canada are highly engineered products with lower tar and nicotine content to imply they’re less harmful. Heavy smokers with nicotine dependence compensate by smoking more aggressively with more frequent and deeper inhalations that may elicit more harm, such as greater exposure to the respiratory and cardiotoxin, cyanide.”

    Smoking rates in Canada have declined from 26 per cent in 2001 to 13 per cent in 2020. But participation in smoking cessation programs has declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to concern about a potential uptick in smoking rates, including cannabis use and a plethora of vaping of products popular among young adults.

    Researchers say urinary thiocyanate can serve as a robust biomarker of the harms of tobacco smoke that will aid future research on the global tobacco picture, since most smokers now reside in developing countries. As smoking rates have decreased here in Canada, at-risk groups like youth and pregnant women have been prone to underreport their tobacco use when surveyed, making a reliable biomarker more valuable.

    “Historically assessing tobacco behaviors have relied on questionnaires that are prone to bias, especially when comparing different countries and local cultures. The idea is to find robust methods that can quantify recent tobacco smoke exposure more reliably and objectively, which may better predict disease risk and prioritize interventions for smoking cessation.” says Britz-Mckibbin.

    The study was published in the latest issue of Nicotine and Tobacco Research and received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Genome Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Hamilton Health Sciences New Investigator Fund, and an internal grant from the Population Health Research Institute.

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    Photos of Philip Britz-McKibbin can be found here

    Credit: McMaster University

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  • McMaster-led trial reduces COVID-19 hospitalization risk with single injection

    McMaster-led trial reduces COVID-19 hospitalization risk with single injection

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    Newswise — Hamilton, ON (Feb. 9, 2023) – A team led by McMaster University researchers Gilmar Reis and Edward Mills has discovered that a single injection of pegylated interferon lambda (lambda) can successfully treat COVID-19 in people early in the disease.

    They say that one dose of lambda injected under a patient’s skin was more effective than any currently available treatment for early COVID and avoids the potential problems of patient adherence to drug treatment regimens.

    The findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Feb. 9.

    “This discovery allows us to enter a new era where you can have pan-virus interventions against a range of diseases,” said Mills, a professor of the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact (HEI).

    Reis, an associate professor of the HEI, said, “Pegylated interferon lambda is a safe drug, and it is a single treatment approach.”

    “Lambda is not virus-specific as it works on all the different COVID-19 variants, and it probably also has a role to play in combatting other respiratory viruses such as influenza. We are beginning a study now of lambda for influenza.”

    Researchers tested lambda’s effectiveness using a randomized placebo-controlled trial involving adults with COVID-19 from both Canada and Brazil, who freely volunteered for the study. A total of 931 people received lambda and 1,018 received a placebo. Eighty-three per cent of the trial participants were vaccinated. Researchers ran the lambda trial from June 2021 to March 2022.

    Lambda works by activating the immune system’s antiviral defences against COVID-19 viruses invading the airways. Among the mostly vaccinated trial participants, lambda significantly reduced the need for hospitalization or emergency room visits compared to the placebo.

    “This could save tens of thousands of lives,” said Mills.

    Reis said, “The ultimate aim would be using it in combination with Paxlovid, but that needs to be evaluated in a clinical trial setting.”

    The lambda research falls under the ongoing TOGETHER trial, which Reis and Mills have led since June 2020. The ongoing platform study has evaluated multiple potential COVID-19 treatments during the pandemic. Potential treatments are always evaluated against a placebo.

    The TOGETHER platform has to date evaluated 14 different potential treatments, including lambda, since it was first launched in June 2020.

    External funding for the study was provided by FastGrants and the Rainwater Charitable Foundation. The lambda used in the trial was provided for free by Eiger BioPharmaceuticals.

    The McMaster researchers involved with the trial were Gilmar Reis, Edward Mills, Paula McKay, Sheila Sprague, Lehana Thabane and Gordon Guyatt.

    The study was done in partnership with Jordan Feld at University Health Network (UHN) and Professor Jeffrey Glenn at Stanford University. 

     

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    Editors:  

    A photo of Peginterferon Lambda can be found here: https://macdrive.mcmaster.ca/d/36d0184ee87a4513baf3/

    Credit: UHN

     

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