The HEAL-COVID trial (Helping to Alleviate the Longer-term consequences of COVID-19) is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.  To date, more than a thousand NHS patients hospitalised with COVID have taken part in HEAL-COVID, a platform trial that is aiming to find treatments to reduce the number who die or are readmitted following their time in hospital.

In these first results from HEAL-COVID, it’s been shown that prescribing the oral anticoagulant Apixaban does not stop COVID patients from later dying or being readmitted to hospital over the following year (Apixaban 29.1%, versus standard care 30.8%).

As well as not being beneficial, anticoagulant therapy has known serious side effects, and these were experienced by participants in the trial with a small number of the 402 participants receiving Apixaban having major bleeding that required them to discontinue the treatment.

There was also no benefit from Apixaban in terms of the number of days alive and out of hospital at day 60 after randomisation (Apixaban 59 days, versus standard care 59 days).

Following these results, the trial will continue to test another drug called Atorvastatin, a widely used lipid lowering drug (‘a statin’) that acts on other mechanisms of disease that are thought to be important in COVID.

Chief Investigator for the trial Professor Charlotte Summers is an intensive care specialist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the University of Cambridge.  She said: “Having survived the ordeal of being hospitalised with COVID-19, far too many patients find themselves back in hospital, often developing longer-term complications as a result of the virus. There is an urgent need for us to find treatments that prevent this significant burden of illness and improve the lives of so many still being affected by COVID.

“These first findings from HEAL-COVID show us that a blood thinning drug, commonly thought to be a useful intervention in the post-hospital phase is actually ineffective at stopping people dying or being readmitted to hospital. This finding is important because it will prevent unnecessary harm occurring to people for no benefit. It also means we must continue our search for therapies that improve longer term recovery for this devastating disease.”

Dr Mark Toshner, joint Chief Investigator for HEAL-COVID said: “Up until now it’s been assumed that Apixaban helps patients recover after severe COVID-19 and that thinning their blood to prevent clots is beneficial. This trial is the first robust evidence that longer anticoagulation after acute COVID-19 puts patients at risk for no clear benefit.

“Our hope is that these results will stop this drug being needlessly prescribed to patients with COVID-19 and we can change medical practise. Finding out that a treatment doesn’t work is really important. It’s not the solution many hoped it would be, with our results highlighting once again why testing treatments in randomised trials is important.

“At present, the world’s research efforts have focussed on acute COVID-19. We now urgently need evidence about how to best treat patients beyond their initial infection.”

Professor Nick Lemoine, NIHR Clinical Research Network Medical Director, said: “Research into COVID-19 recovery remains vital as we move out of the pandemic. Results such as these from the HEAL-COVID study, help to strengthen our knowledge of how patients can be treated following their stay in hospital and how recovery rates can be improved upon.

“Findings from clinical trials, whether they identify new treatments or rule out methods of care, are vital and rigorous evidence when it comes to changing best medical practice.”

The trial is being led by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) and University of Cambridge, in collaboration with Liverpool Clinical Trials Centre (University of Liverpool) and Aparito Limited.

HEAL-COVID enrols patients when they are discharged from hospital, following their first admission for COVID-19. They are randomised to a treatment and their progress tracked.

Adapted from a press release from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Most young people in the UK experience a sharp decline in their subjective well-being during their first years at secondary school, regardless of their circumstances or background, new research shows.

Academics from the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester analysed the well-being and self-esteem of more than 11,000 young people from across the UK, using data collected when they were 11, and again when they were 14.

The adolescents’ overall ‘subjective well-being’ – their satisfaction with different aspects of life (such as friends, school and family) – dropped significantly during the intervening years.

It is widely accepted that young people’s well-being and mental health are influenced by factors such as economic circumstances and family life. The research shows that notwithstanding this, well-being tends to fall steeply and across the board during early adolescence.

That decline is probably linked to the transition to secondary school at age 11. The study identified that the particular aspects of well-being which changed in early adolescence were typically related to school and peer relationships, suggesting a close connection with shifts in these young people’s academic and social lives.

In addition, students with higher self-esteem at age 11 experienced a less significant drop in well-being at age 14. This indicates that structured efforts to strengthen adolescents’ self-esteem, particularly during the first years of secondary school, could mitigate the likely downturn in well-being and life satisfaction.

The research is published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. It was led by Ioannis Katsantonis, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, building on research he undertook while studying for an MPhil in Psychology and Education.

“Even though this was a large, diverse group of adolescents, we saw a consistent fall in well-being,” Katsantonis said. “One of the most striking aspects was the clear association with changes at school. It suggests we urgently need to do more to support students’ well-being at secondary schools across the UK.”

Ros McLellan, an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, specialist in student well-being, and co-author, said: “The link between self-esteem and well-being seems especially important. Supporting students’ capacity to feel positive about themselves during early adolescence is not a fix-all solution, but it could be highly beneficial, given that we know their well-being is vulnerable.”

Globally, adolescents’ well-being is in decline. In the UK, the Children’s Society has shown that 12% of young people aged 10 to 17 have poor well-being. Dr Jose Marquez, a Research Associate at the Institute of Education, University of Manchester, and co-author, said: “Until now, we haven’t fully understood how universally poor well-being is experienced. The relationship between well-being and self-esteem has also been unclear.”

The researchers used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, which involves a nationally representative sample of people born between 2000 and 2002 and incorporates standard questionnaires about well-being and self-esteem. They then calculated a well-being ‘score’ for each student, balanced to control for other factors that influence well-being – such as economic advantage, bullying, and general feelings of safety.

While most adolescents were satisfied with life at age 11, the majority were extremely dissatisfied by age 14. By that age, the well-being scores of 79% of participants fell below what had been the average score for the entire group three years earlier. “This is a statistically significant drop,” Katsantonis said. “It goes far beyond anything we would classify as moderate.”

The study also captured information about the adolescents’ satisfaction with specific aspects of their lives, such as schoolwork, personal appearance, family and friends. This suggested that the most dramatic downturns between 11 and 14 were probably related to school and relationships with peers.

Despite the overall fall, students with better well-being at age 14 tended to be those who had higher self-esteem at age 11. The pattern did not apply in reverse, however: better well-being at age 11 did not predict better self-esteem later. This implies a causal link in which self-esteem seems to protect adolescents from what would otherwise be sharper declines in well-being.

“Supporting self-esteem is not the only thing we need to do to improve young people’s well-being,” Katsantonis said. “It should never, for example, become an excuse not to tackle poverty or address bullying – but it can be used to improve young people’s life satisfaction at this critical stage.”

The researchers identify various ways in which schools could support this. At a basic level, Katsantonis suggested that celebrating students’ achievements, underlining the value of things they had done well, and avoiding negative comparisons with other students, could all help.

More strategically, the study suggests incorporating more features that promote self-esteem into England’s well-being curriculum, and stresses the need to ensure that similar efforts are made across the UK. Recent studies have, for example,  highlighted the potential benefits of mindfulness training in schools, and of ‘positive psychology’ initiatives which teach adolescents to set achievable personal goals, and to acknowledge and reflect on their own character strengths.

McLellan added: “It’s really important that this is sustained – it can’t just be a case of doing something once when students start secondary school, or implementing the odd practice here and there. A concerted effort to improve students’ sense of self-worth could have really positive results. Many good teachers are doing this already, but it is perhaps even more important than we thought.”

Along with all areas of the global economy, flight must become climate neutral. However, huge uncertainty remains around what technology, policy, finance, and behaviour will be needed to get it there.

Inspired by a call in early 2020 from His Majesty, King Charles III, for industry, academia, and Government to move much faster to get aviation to net zero, the University of Cambridge set up the Aviation Impact Accelerator (AIA). The AIA aims to accelerate the journey to sustainable aviation by developing evidence-based tools that allow people to map, understand, and embark on the pathways towards sustainable flight.

The team are now working on the Journey Impact Simulator, a tool that can be used to explore how a flight from A to B might look now and in the future, showing the best possible technology options to minimise climate impact while showing the user the trade-offs in terms of cost, land and electricity required. This tool draws results from the whole system model built by the AIA’s international and multi-disciplinary team.

“What we are trying to do is work with experts from industry, government, academia and civil society from around the world to identify ‘unlocks’ which will open the door to much wider transformation in the sector,” explains Professor Rob Miller, AIA lead and Director of the Whittle Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

Dr Samuel Gabra, an Egyptian research associate with the AIA, is passionate about scaling up energy access while reaching net-zero. Explaining how one might use the Simulator to explore a flight from London Standard to Sharm El Sheikh in 2035, he says that the model suggests a synthetic jet fuel and hydrogen combustion aircraft as the best options for limiting the climate impact.

“Although we reduce emissions by depending on hydrogen and synthetic jet fuel, this comes with a significant cost,” Gabra says.

It is startling to see the cost, land and electricity required for these future options. For example, for just one flight from London to Egypt in 2035 using synthetic jet fuel, the electricity requirement is approximately 166% of Egypt’s average electricity use per capita per year.

Gabra adds: “As we saw, the future of sustainable aviation is likely to require a huge amount of energy, which means it is impossible for a single country or region to single-handedly provide this amount of energy. This presents an opportunity for all countries, especially developing ones, to participate in the future of sustainable aviation. By capitalising on their abundant renewable resources, countries can act as hubs for producing green electricity and synthetic jet fuel.”

It is vital that as the world faces climate change adaptation and mitigation, all countries are included in the discussion around the opportunities and challenges. Aviation plays a key role in connecting our world, but access to the economic and social opportunities it brings are not equally available. As the aviation industry works to transform the sector, it is not just the climate impact that must be considered but the impact on people.

Adapted from an article from the Aviation Impact Accelerator

Negativity on Twitter about decarbonising the built environment has increased by around a third since 2014, according to a new analysis of more than 250,000 tweets featuring #emissions and #building between 2009 and 2021.

The pessimistic trend has followed the launch of major climate action reports. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, reveals that expressions of ‘fear’ in Twitter dialogue increased by around 60% following the launch of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2015.

The researchers, from Cambridge, Boston, Sussex and Aarhus Universities and Caltech, also found that ‘sadness’ increased by around 30% following the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming 1.5˚C in November 2019; while debate in November 2020 over lobbying of builders and utility companies over non-compliance with new building codes in the US triggered a spike in ‘anger’.

Mapping tweets that caused spikes in emotional engagement revealed that public concerns triangulated around inaction towards emission reduction, the fairness of carbon tax, the politicisation of building codes (distinctively seen for the US) and concerns over environmental degradation. This demonstrates, the researchers argue, “a strong environmental justice discourse.”

The findings appear on the heels of COP27’s building sector events (10th – 14th November), which sought to promote a just transition and enhancing building resilience with the tagline ‘Build4Tomorrow’.

Lead author Ramit Debnath, Cambridge Zero Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a visiting faculty associate in Computational Social Science at Caltech, said:

“Major climate policy events including COP have emphasised how difficult it is to decarbonise the built environment and this has been reflected in the rise of negative feelings on social media.

“But our research also offers hope – we found that climate policy events can and do foster public engagement, mostly positive, and that this has the power to increase the building sector’s focus on environmental justice.

“To build for tomorrow fairly, global climate action has to incorporate and empower diverse public voices. Policy actions are no longer isolated events in this digital age and demand two-way communication. Policy events and social media have a crucial role to play in this.”

The study highlights that the building sector is one of the most important and challenging to decarbonise. The IPCC suggests that restricting climate change to 1.5˚C requires rapid and extensive changes around energy use, building design, and broader planning of cities and infrastructure. The buildings and construction sector currently accounts for around 39% of global energy and process-related carbon emissions. The International Energy Agency estimates that to achieve a net-zero carbon building stock by 2050, direct building carbon emissions must decrease by 50%, and indirect building sector emissions must also decrease 60% by 2030.

But decarbonising the building sector is challenging because it involves a complex overlap of people, places and practices that creates a barrier to designing just emission reduction policies. The study argues that democratising the decarbonisation process “remains a critical challenge across the local, national and regional scales”.

“Our findings shed light on potential pathways for a people-centric transition to a greener building sector in a net-zero future,” Debnath said.

Using advanced natural language processing and network theory, the researchers found a strong relationship between Twitter activity concerning the building sector and major policy events on climate change. They identify heightened Twitter engagement around developments including: the Paris Agreement’s call for the building sector to reduce its emissions through energy efficiency and address its whole life cycle; COP-23’s ’Human Settlement Day’ which focused on cities, affordable housing and climate action; COP25’s discourse on green/climate finance for residential homes; and COP26’s ’Cities, Region and Built environment Day’.

The researchers found that despite negative sentiments gaining an increasing share since 2014, positive sentiments have continued to multiply as Twitter engagement has exploded. Across the entire study period (2009–21), positive sentiments have fairly consistently maintained a larger share of the conversation than negative sentiments.

The study highlights the fact that core topics covered by tweets have changed significantly over time, as new innovations, technologies and issues have emerged. Hashtags associated with COP26, for instance, included #woodforgood and #masstimber, as well as #housingcrisis, #healthybuildings #scaleupnow, and #climatejusticenow, all largely or entirely absent in Twitter conversations between 2009 and 2016.

The researchers found that discourse on innovative emissions reduction strategies which remain uncommon in the building sector— including use of alternate building materials like cross-laminated timber; implementing climate-sensitive building codes; and the circular economy – inspired Tweets expressing ‘anticipation’.

“COP26 was an extraordinary moment,” Debnath said. “The Twitter engagement surrounding the event connected public health, the circular economy, affordable housing, and decarbonisation of the built environment like never before.”

“We are seeing a paradigm shift in the building emission discourse towards broader social and environmental justice contexts. Reference to low-carbon alternatives to concrete, housing crisis, scaling-up and climate justice are all part of the growing social justice movement associated with healthy and affordable social housing narratives globally.”

The study notes that considering the size of Twitter’s current user base (around 211 million users globally), the number of tweets about emissions in the building sector, remains relatively small.

“It’s crucial that policymakers raise the salience of these issues and develop communications strategies to emphasise the importance of climate action in hard-to-decarbonise sectors like the building sector,” Debnath said.

The authors of the study intend to continue to analyse social media interaction with further climate policy events, beginning with COP27.

Co-author Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University said: “Some people dismiss Twitter as a poor focus of academic research, given its ability to spread misinformation and fake news. But we instead see it as a lens into the inner workings of how millions of people think, and rethink, about energy and climate change. It offers an incredible opportunity to reveal people’s true intentions, their revealed preferences, in unbiased form on a public forum.”

Co-author Prof R. Michael Alvarez, Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech, said: “This is an innovative and important study, showing how an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars can use big data and machine learning to provide policy guidance on how to decarbonize the build sector. Research like this is critical at this time, to inform the debates at forums like COP27 and to energise additional scholarly work that can help further our goal of democratising climate action.”

Reference

R. Debnath, R. Bardhan, D.U. Shah, K. Mohaddes, M.H. Ramage, M.R. Alvarez, and B. Sovacool, ‘Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector’. Nature Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41589-022-23624-9

The Cambridge Dictionary has revealed its word of the year for 2022 as “homer”. Editors have credited disgruntled Wordle players whose winning streak was ended by the unfamiliar American English term.

Homer, an informal American English word for a home run in baseball, was searched for nearly 75,000 times on the Cambridge Dictionary website during the first week of May when it was an answer in the online five-letter word puzzle.

It became the dictionary’s highest-spiking word of the year, and editors said five-letter Wordle answers dominated searches this year as the game became a global phenomenon.

Tellingly, 95% of searches for homer were from outside North America as baffled Wordle players turned to the Cambridge Dictionary to find out what it meant.

Some speakers of British English expressed frustration on social media about the choice of “homer” as the Wordle answer for 5th May. But many players would have been rewarded for demonstrating Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2021: perseverance.

In 2022, the American spelling of humor caused the second highest spike. In third place was caulk, a word more familiar in American English than in British English, meaning to fill the spaces around the edge of something, for example a bath or window frame, with a special substance.

Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary’s publishing manager, said: “Wordle’s words, and the public’s reactions to them, illustrate how English speakers continue to be divided over differences between English language varieties, even when they’re playing a globally popular new word game that has brought people together online for friendly competition about language.

“The differences between British and American English are always of interest not just to learners of English but to English speakers globally, and word games are also perennially entertaining.

“We’ve seen those two phenomena converge in the public conversations about Wordle, and the way five-letter words have simply taken over the lookups on the Cambridge Dictionary website.”

Searches for Wordle’s five-letter words on the Cambridge Dictionary website squeezed out other high-interest words that reflected current affairs.

These included oligarch, likely triggered by new international sanctions and geopolitical shifts amid Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Ableist spiked during the controversy over the use of an ableist slur in lyrics to the pop song Grrrls by Lizzo.

Additions to the Cambridge Dictionary this year have included shrinkflation, defined as the situation when the price of a product stays the same but its size gets smaller.

Cambridge University Press has been publishing dictionaries for learners of English since 1995. Cambridge Dictionary began offering these dictionaries completely free of charge online in 1999 and is now the top learner dictionary website in the world, serving 2.6 billion page views a year.

Cambridge, Jesus and Trinity were leading participants in efforts of the Responsible Investment Network – Universities (RINU) to focus engagement on persuading banks to stop financing companies that continue to build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

“Banks have a key role to play in the energy transition,” University of Cambridge Chief Financial Officer Anthony Odgers said. “Our historic relationship with major banks, combined with our academic expertise, puts the University of Cambridge in a strong position to influence finance towards net zero goals. This award will help us share this approach with other institutions.”

The University and the two colleges helped a global bank include methane emissions in its methodology, and to report on absolute emissions for the first time.

They also persuaded a second global bank to commit to phasing down their financing of the fossil fuel industry on a timeline consistent with the UN goal to limit global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to update oil, gas and coal policies by the end of 2022.

“Our engagement with HSBC and other banks, including through the activities of the Trinity Responsible Investment Society, has shown how influential networks can be in accelerating the energy transition, especially when communicating expectations both as shareholders and clients,” Trinity College Investment and Sustainability Officer Romane Thomas said.

Jesus College Bursar Dr Richard Anthony said the award was a significant achievement, which shows how working in partnership to effect change can deliver on a scale that is much bigger than the College.

“We must all work together as we face the real and immediate challenge of climate change,” Anthony said.

Green Gown judges were incredibly impressed with the quality of the Collegiate Cambridge initiative, calling it “innovative” and “sector-changing”.

“This initiative is leading the way and we cannot wait to see the change they create using money for good,” the judges said.

Green Gown Awards are awarded by the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC), an alliance for sustainability leadership in education with more than 300 member institutions in the Further and Higher Education sector of the UK and Ireland.

Physical activity – particularly when it is moderate to vigorous – has many health benefits, decreasing the risk of a wide range of diseases from cancer to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as helping maintain a healthy weight and better mental health.

Evidence suggests physical activity can help parents cope with the daily challenges of being a parent and strengthen relationships with children if they are active together. However, parents tend to be less active than non-parents.

To examine how family composition affected the amount of physical activity mothers engaged in, researchers at the University of Cambridge and University of Southampton analysed data from 848 women who participated in the UK Southampton Women’s Survey.  The women, aged 20-34 years, were recruited between 1998 and 2002 and followed up over subsequent years. They were given accelerometers to assess their levels of activity. The results are published today in PLOS ONE.

Women with school-aged children did on average around 26 mins* of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, whereas mothers with only younger children (aged four years or under) managed around 18 mins* per day.

Having more than one child meant mothers managed only around 21 mins* of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, but interestingly, mums with multiple children all under five years old did more light intensity activity than those with children of school-age.

Less than 50% of mothers met the recommended levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (150 minutes per week), regardless of the ages of their children.

Dr Kathryn Hesketh from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge said: “When you have small children, your parental responsibilities can be all-consuming, and it’s often hard to find the time to be active outside of time spent caring for your children. Exercise is often therefore one of the first things to fall by the wayside, and so most of the physical activity mums manage to do seems to be of a lower intensity.

“However, when children go to school, mums manage to do more physical activity. There are a number of possible reasons why this might be the case, including more opportunities to take part in higher intensity activities with their children; you may return to active commuting; or feel more comfortable using time to be active alone.”

Rachel Simpson, a PhD student in the MRC Epidemiology Unit, added: “There are clear benefits, both short term and long term, from doing more physical activity, particularly if it increases your heart rate. But the demands of being a mother can make it hard to find the time. We need to consider ways not only to encourage mums, but to make it as easy as possible for busy mums, especially those with younger children, to increase the amount of higher intensity physical activity they do.”

Professor Keith Godfrey from the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Centre and the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre said: “It is perhaps not unexpected that mothers who have young children or several children engage in less intense physical activity, but this is the first study that has quantified the significance of this reduction. More needs to be done by local government planners and leisure facility providers to support mothers in engaging in physical activity.”

*Note: these are mean averages

Reference
Simpson, RF et al. The association between number and ages of children and the physical activity of mothers: cross-sectional analyses from the Southampton Women’s Survey. PLOS ONE; 16 Nov 2022; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276964

Enzymes are naturally occurring biological catalysts, which enable the chemical transformations required for our bodies to function – from translating the genetic code into proteins, right through to digesting food. Although most enzymes are proteins, some of these crucial reactions are catalysed by RNA, a chemical cousin of DNA, which can fold into enzymes known as ribozymes. Some classes of ribozyme are able to target specific sequences in other RNA molecules and cut them precisely.

In 2014, Dr Alex Taylor and colleagues discovered that artificial genetic material known as XNA – in other words, synthetic chemical alternatives to RNA and DNA not found in nature – could be used to create the world’s first fully-artificial enzymes, which Taylor named XNAzymes.

At the beginning, XNAzymes were inefficient, requiring unrealistic laboratory conditions to function. Earlier this year, however, his lab reported a new generation of XNAzymes, engineered to be much more stable and efficient under conditions inside cells. These artificial enzymes can cut long, complex RNA molecules and are so precise that if the target sequence differs by just a single nucleotide (the basic structural unit of RNA), they will recognise not to cut it. This means they can be programmed to attack mutated RNAs involved in cancer or other diseases, leaving normal RNA molecules well alone.

Now, in research published today in Nature Communications, Taylor and his team at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease (CITIID), University of Cambridge, report how they have used this technology to successfully ‘kill’ live SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Taylor, a Sir Henry Dale Fellow and Affiliated Researcher at St John’s College, Cambridge, said: “Put simply, XNAzymes are molecular scissors which recognise a particular sequence in the RNA, then chop it up. As soon as scientists published the RNA sequence of SARS-CoV-2, we started scanning through looking for sequences for our XNAzymes to attack.”

While these artificial enzymes can be programmed to recognise specific RNA sequences, the catalytic core of the XNAzyme – the machinery that operates the ‘scissors’ – does not change. This means that creating new XNAzymes can be done in far less time than it normally takes to develop antiviral drugs.

As Taylor explained: “It’s like having a pair of scissors where the overall design remains the same, but you can change the blades or handles depending on the material you want to cut. The power of this approach is that, even working by myself in the lab at the start of the pandemic, I was able to generate and screen a handful of these XNAzymes in a matter of days.”

Taylor then teamed up with Dr Nicholas Matheson to show that his XNAzymes were active against live SARS-CoV-2 virus, taking advantage of CITIID’s state-of-the-art Containment Level 3 Laboratory – the largest academic facility for studying high risk biological agents like SARS-CoV-2 in the country.

“It’s really encouraging that for the first time – and this has been a big goal of the field – we actually have them working as enzymes inside cells, and inhibiting replication of live virus,” said Dr Pehuén Pereyra Gerber, who performed the experiments on SARS-CoV-2 in Matheson’s lab.

“What we’ve shown is proof of principle, and it’s still early days,” added Matheson, “It’s worth remembering, however, that the amazingly successful Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are themselves based on synthetic RNA molecules – so it’s a really exciting and rapidly developing field, with enormous potential.”

Taylor checked the target viral sequences against databases of human RNAs to ensure they were not present in our own RNA. Because the XNAzymes are highly specific, this should in theory prevent some of the ‘off-target’ side-effects that similar, less accurate molecular therapeutics may cause, such as liver toxicity.

SARS-CoV-2 has the ability to evolve and change its genetic code, leading to new variants against which vaccines are less effective. To get around this problem, Taylor not only targeted regions of the viral RNA that mutate less frequently, but he also designed three of the XNAzymes to self-assemble into a ‘nanostructure’ that cuts different parts of the virus genome.

“We’re targeting multiple sequences, so for the virus to evade the therapy it would have to mutate at several sites at once,” he said. “In principle, you could combine lots of these XNAzymes together into a cocktail. But even if a new variant does appear that is capable of getting round this, because we already have the catalytic core, we can rapidly make new enzymes to keep ahead of it.”

XNAzymes could potentially be administered as drugs to protect people exposed to COVID-19, to prevent the virus taking hold, or to treat patients with infection, helping rid the body of the virus. This sort of approach might be particularly important for patients who, because of a weakened immune system, struggle to clear the virus on their own.

The next step for Taylor and his team is to make XNAzymes that are even more specific and robust – “bulletproof,” he says – allowing them to remain in the body for longer, and work as even more effective catalysts, in smaller doses.

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society, the Medical Research Council, NHS Blood and Transplant, and Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust.

Reference
Pereyra Gerber, P., Donde, M.J., Matheson, N.J. and Taylor, A.I. XNAzymes targeting the SARS-CoV-2 genome inhibit viral infection. Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34339-w

Young people who believe they come from poorer backgrounds than their friends are more likely to have lower self-esteem and be victims of bullying than those who feel financially equal to the rest of their peer group, according to a new study from psychologists at the University of Cambridge.

The team also found that those who think themselves poorer and those who believe they are richer were both more likely to perpetrate bullying. Overall, feeling a sense of economic equality among your friends had the best outcomes for mental health and social behaviour.

While economic disadvantage on a society-wide spectrum has long been linked to mental health and social problems in young people, the new study is one of the first to show that just feeling poorer compared to those in your immediate social sphere may be related to negative psychological outcomes.

According to researchers, judgments we make about ourselves via “social comparison” in early adolescence – how popular or attractive we think we are, compared to others – are central to our burgeoning sense of self, and perceived economic status may contribute to this development.

“Adolescence is an age of transitions, when we use social comparisons to make self-judgments and develop our sense of self,” said study lead author Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer, a Cambridge Gates Scholar and PhD candidate in the University’s Department of Psychology.

“A sense of our economic position not just in wider society, but in our immediate environment, might be problematic for our sense of belonging,” said Piera Pi-Sunyer. “Belonging is particularly important for well-being and psychosocial functioning during adolescence.”

“Our research suggests that wealth comparisons with those around us might contribute to a sense of social and personal self-worth when we are young.”

The latest study, published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, was co-led by Piera Pi-Sunyer and Dr Jack Andrews of the University of New South Wales, as part of a research project conducted by Cambridge psychologist Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.

The researchers analysed perceived economic inequality within friendship groups among 12,995 children in the UK at age 11.

Eleven-year-olds who believed themselves poorer than their friends scored 6-8% lower for self-esteem, and 11% lower in terms of wellbeing, than those who saw themselves as economically equal to friends.

Those who considered themselves less wealthy were also more likely to have ‘internalising difficulties’ such as anxiety, as well as behavioural problems eg anger issues or hyperactivity.

Adolescents who see themselves as poorer than their friends were 17% more likely to report being bullied or picked on compared to those who feel financially the same as friends at age 11.

While reported levels of victimisation fell across the board by the time young people reached 14 years old, those who considered themselves poorer were still 8% more likely to be victimised than those who felt economically similar to friends.

Feeling both richer or poorer than peers was related to 3-5% higher rates of actually perpetrating bullying. “It may be that feeling different in any way at a time when belonging is important increases the risk of interpersonal difficulties such as bullying,” said Piera Pi-Sunyer.

Part of Piera Pi-Sunyer’s PhD research looks at the cognitive processes behind how we view ourselves. This includes how memorising and internalising self-judgements in our earlier years can guide how we come to think of ourselves – sometimes known as ‘self-schema’.

“Negative judgments about ourselves can bias us to pay attention to information that reinforces a lack of self-worth, which has implications for mental health. We see this may well include economic perceptions among some of our peer and friendship groups during adolescence,” said Piera Pi-Sunyer.

The researchers used data collected as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), conducted with thousands of young people born between the years 2000 and 2002. The surveys gauged an array of mental states and social behaviours, and included questions on perceived economic status.

The majority of children felt they were as wealthy as their friends, but 4% and 8% perceived themselves as poorer or richer, respectively, than their friends (16% said they didn’t know).

The MCS also gathered data on ‘objective family income’, including a measure of weekly family disposable income, allowing researchers to discount the effects of actual parental wealth.

“Many studies suggest that, objectively, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have more mental health difficulties. Our findings show that the subjective experience of disadvantage is also relevant,” added Piera Pi-Sunyer.

“You do not have to be rich or poor to feel richer or poorer than your friends, and we can see this affects the mental health of young adolescents.”

The team found that the end of 2020 was the time when young people faced the most difficulties and that the mental health of those young people without access to a computer tended to deteriorate to a greater extent than that of their peers who did have access.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant effect on young people’s mental health, with evidence of rising levels of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Adolescence is a period when people are particularly vulnerable to developing mental health disorders, which can have long-lasting consequences into adulthood. In the UK, the mental health of children and adolescents was already deteriorating before the pandemic, but the proportion of people in this age group likely to be experiencing a mental health disorder increased from 11% in 2017 to 16% in July 2020.

The pandemic led to the closure of schools and an increase in online schooling, the impacts of which were not felt equally. Those adolescents without access to a computer faced the greatest disruption: in one study 30% of school students from middle-class homes reported taking part in live or recorded school lessons daily, while only 16% of students from working-class homes reported doing so.

In addition to school closures, lockdown often meant that young people could not meet their friends in person. During these periods, online and digital forms of interaction with peers, such as through video games and social media, are likely to have helped reduce the impact of these social disruptions.

Tom Metherell, who at the time of the study was an undergraduate student at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge, said: “Access to computers meant that many young people were still able to ‘attend’ school virtually, carry on with their education to an extent and keep up with friends. But anyone who didn’t have access to a computer would have been at a significant disadvantage, which would only risk increasing their sense of isolation.”

To examine in detail the impact of digital exclusion on the mental health of young people, Metherell and colleagues examined data from 1,387 10–15-year-olds collected as part of Understanding Society, a large UK-wide longitudinal survey. They focused on access to computers rather than smartphones, as schoolwork is largely possible only on a computer while at this age most social interactions occur in person at school.

The results of their study are published in Scientific Reports.

Participants completed a questionnaire that assesses common childhood psychological difficulties, which allowed the Understanding Society team to score them on five areas: hyperactivity/inattention, prosocial behaviour, emotional, conduct and peer relationship problems. From this, they derived a ‘Total Difficulties’ score for each individual.

Over the course of the pandemic, the researchers noted small changes in overall mental health of the group, with average Total Difficulties scores increasing form pre-pandemic levels of 10.7 (out of a maximum 40), peaking at 11.4 at the end of 2020 before declining to 11.1 by March 2021.

Those young people who had no access to a computer saw the largest increase in their Total Difficulties scores. While both groups of young people had similar scores at the start of the pandemic, when modelled with adjustment for sociodemographic factors, those without computer access saw their average scores increase to 17.8, compared to their peers, whose scores increased to 11.2. Almost one in four (24%) young people in the group without computer access had Total Difficulties scores classed as ‘high’ or ‘very high’ compared to one in seven (14%) in the group with computer access.

Metherell, now a PhD student at UCL, added: “Young people’s mental health tended to suffer most during the strictest periods of lockdown, when they were less likely to be able go to school or see friends. But those without access to a computer were the worst hit – their mental health suffered much more than their peers and the change was more dramatic.”

Dr Amy Orben from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences at the University of Cambridge, the study’s senior author, added: “Rather than always focusing on the downsides of digital technology on young people’s mental health, we need to recognise that it can have important benefits and may act as a buffer for their mental health during times of acute social isolation, such as the lockdown.

“We don’t know if and when a future lockdown will occur, but our research shows that we need to start thinking urgently how we can tackle digital inequalities and help protect the mental health of our young people in times when their regular in-person social networks are disrupted.”

The researchers argue that policymakers and public health officials need to recognise the risks of ‘digital exclusion’ to young people’s mental health and prioritise ensuring equitable digital access.

Dr Amy Orben is a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Tom Metherell was supported by was supported by the British Psychological Society Undergraduate Research Assistantship Scheme. The research was largely funded by the Medical Research Council.

Reference
Metherell, T et al. Digital access constraints predict worse mental health among adolescents during COVID-19. Scientific Reports; 9 Nov 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-23899-y

Nine Sigma 12 battery electric buses will run on an extended route commencing at Girton College and then linking Eddington with West Cambridge, the city centre, the train station and onwards to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, after the University – which subsidises the Universal buses – agreed to electrify the service from July 2023 as part of its commitment to sustainability.

Route U, ‘the University bus for everyone’, carries around 16,000 people per week, including staff, students and members of the public.

Bus company Whippet, part of the Ascendal Group, will operate the new electric service. This week they hosted a public event at the West Hub, JJ Thomson Avenue, where one of the fully electric Sigma vehicles was on display – albeit the shorter Sigma 10 model. After hearing about some of the features of the buses – the first of their kind to be used in the UK – attendees were given the opportunity to travel on one of the vehicles.

Professor Ian Leslie, Senior Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor with special responsibility for Environmental Sustainability, said: “Cambridge is an institution which prides itself on innovation, and has an appreciation of innovation that can help address the biggest issues facing society.

“We are committed to reducing our carbon emissions across all scopes, and the introduction of these new zero-emission vehicles is part of a wide programme of work the University is undertaking to achieve outstanding environmental sustainability. It will be a big day when the newly electrified Universal fleet rolls out into service next July.”

Jonathan Ziebart, Group Business Development Director at Ascendal, said: “We remain incredibly excited to be the University of Cambridge’s partner in introducing its first zero-emission bus network, operating along the world’s longest guided busway.”

The new Universal contract will provide a ‘split service’, with half of the buses serving Girton College at the northern end of the route, and half routed along Grange Road and into Barton Road and Newnham Road to better serve Wolfson College, with some buses returning to Hills Road to connect with Homerton College and the Faculty of Education.

More than three in five UK adults are overweight or obese, increasing their risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cancer. A major factor that contributes to this is excess energy intake – in other words, eating too many calories. Measures that can help reduce energy intake could help tackle the obesity problem.

In the UK, adults eat as many as a third of their meals out of home, including in workplace cafeterias, and these meals are often much higher in calories than meals eaten at home. Since April 2022 calorie labelling is now required on food and drink served out of the home in businesses employing 250 or more people. While many people welcome this information, evidence for its effectiveness in reducing calories purchased or consumed is limited in quantity and quality. For example, two previous studies conducted by the authors in nine worksite cafeterias found no evidence for  an effect of simple calorie labelling (kcal) on calories purchased.

Another option is to show the amount of exercise required to burn off these calories – so-called PACE (physical activity calorie-equivalent) labels – for example, a 1014kcal ‘large battered haddock’ portion would take upwards of five hours walking (278 minutes) to burn off. A recent systematic review – a type of study that brings together existing evidence – concluded that PACE labels may reduce energy selected from menus and decrease the energy consumed when compared with simple calorie labels or no labels, but only one of the 15 studies reviewed was in a ‘real world’ setting.

To explore whether PACE levels can make a difference in real world settings, researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Behaviour and Health Research Unit carried out an experiment across 10 workplace cafeterias in England over a 12 week period in 2021. Their results are published today in PLOS Medicine.

The team collected baseline sales data for a period of business-as-usual for the cafeterias ahead of the experiment. During this period, most labels and menus featured only the product name and price, though some products included standardised front-of-pack nutrition labels on branded and in-house products.  During the intervention period the ten cafeterias included calorie information and PACE labels alongside food and drinks items and on items including hot meals, sandwiches, cold drinks and desserts. These labels displayed the minutes of walking that would be needed to burn off the calories in the product.

The team found no evidence that including PACE labels resulted in an overall change in energy purchased from labelled items. However, there was a great deal of variability, with one cafeteria reporting a fall per transaction of 161kcal and another an increase of 69kcal, while five of the cafeterias reported no significant change.

First author Dr James Reynolds from the School of Psychology, Aston University, who carried out the research while at Cambridge, said: “Although we found that showing the amount of exercise required to burn off calories made little difference to the number of calories purchased – and, we can assume, eaten and drunk – there was considerable variability between cafeterias. This suggests that other factors may have influenced the effectiveness of these labels, such as the type of food sold in the cafeteria or the characteristics of those using them.”

The number of calories purchased from items that did not feature the PACE labels did not change and the labels made little difference to the revenue for the cafeterias – just a small increase of 3p per transaction.

Senior author Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit and Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “This is the largest study in a real world setting to look at the impact of PACE labels on food and drink purchases, examining 250,000 transactions across 10 worksite cafeterias. The findings suggest that PACE labels, contrary to expectations, may have little or no impact on the food people buy in worksite cafeterias.”

Reference
Reynolds, JP et al. Evaluation of physical activity calorie equivalent (PACE) labels’ impact on energy purchased in cafeterias: a stepped-wedge randomised controlled trial. PLOS Med; 8 Nov 2022; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004116

The manufactured blood cells were grown from stem cells from donors. The red cells were then transfused into volunteers in the RESTORE randomised controlled clinical trial.

This is the first time in the world that red blood cells that have been grown in a laboratory have been given to another person as part of a trial into blood transfusion.

If proved safe and effective, manufactured blood cells could in time revolutionise treatments for people with blood disorders such as sickle cell and rare blood types. It can be difficult to find enough well-matched donated blood for some people with these disorders.

Chief Investigator Professor Cedric Ghevaert, Professor in Transfusion Medicine and Consultant Haematologist at the University of Cambridge and NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “We hope our lab grown red blood cells will last longer than those that come from blood donors. If our trial, the first such in the world, is successful, it will mean that patients who currently require regular long-term blood transfusions will need fewer transfusions in future, helping transform their care.”

The RESTORE trial is a joint research initiative by NHS Blood and Transplant and the University of Bristol, working with the University of Cambridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, NIHR Cambridge Clinical Research Facility, and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It is part-funded by a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) grant.

Professor Ashley Toye, Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Bristol and Director of the NIHR Blood and Transplant Unit in red cell products, said: “This challenging and exciting trial is a huge stepping stone for manufacturing blood from stem cells. This is the first-time lab grown blood from an allogeneic donor has been transfused and we are excited to see how well the cells perform at the end of the clinical trial.”

The trial is studying the lifespan of the lab grown cells compared with infusions of standard red blood cells from the same donor. The lab-grown blood cells are all fresh, so the trial team expect them to perform better than a similar transfusion of standard donated red cells, which contains cells of varying ages.

Additionally, if manufactured cells last longer in the body, patients who regularly need blood may not need transfusions as often. That would reduce iron overload from frequent blood transfusions, which can lead to serious complications.

The trial is the first step towards making lab grown red blood cells available as a future clinical product. For the foreseeable future, manufactured cells could only be used for a very small number of patients with very complex transfusions needs. NHSBT continues to rely on the generosity of donors.

Co-Chief Investigator Dr Rebecca Cardigan, Head of Component Development NHS Blood and Transplant and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s really fantastic that we are now able to grow enough red cells to medical grade to allow this trial to commence. We are really looking forward to seeing the results and whether they perform better than standard red cells.”

Two people have so far been transfused with the lab grown red cells. They were closely monitored and no untoward side effects were reported. They are well and healthy. The identities of participants infused so far are not currently being released, to help keep the trial ‘blinded’.

The amount of lab grown cells being infused varies but is around 5-10mls – about one to two teaspoons.

Donors were recruited from NHSBT’s blood donor base. They donated blood to the trial and stem cells were separated out from their blood. These stem cells were then grown to produce red blood cells in a laboratory at NHS Blood and Transplant’s Advanced Therapies Unit in Bristol. The recipients of the blood were recruited from healthy members of the NIHR BioResource.

A minimum of 10 participants will receive two mini transfusions at least four months apart, one of standard donated red cells and one of lab grown red cells, to find out if the young red blood cells made in the laboratory last longer than cells made in the body.

Further trials are needed before clinical use, but this research marks a significant step in using lab grown red blood cells to improve treatment for patients with rare blood types or people with complex transfusion needs.

John James OBE, Chief Executive of the Sickle Cell Society, said: “This research offers real hope for those difficult to transfuse sickle cell patients who have developed antibodies against most donor blood types. However, we should remember that the NHS still needs 250 blood donations every day to treat people with sickle cell and the figure is rising. The need for normal blood donations to provide the vast majority of blood transfusions will remain. We strongly encourage people with African and Caribbean heritage to keep registering as blood donors and start giving blood regularly.”

Dr Farrukh Shah, Medical Director of Transfusion for NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “Patients who need regular or intermittent blood transfusions may result develop antibodies against minor blood groups which makes it harder to find donor blood which can be transfused without the risk of a potentially life-threatening reaction. This world leading research lays the groundwork for the manufacture of red blood cells that can safely be used to transfuse people with disorders like sickle cell.  The need for normal blood donations to provide the vast majority of blood will remain. But the potential for this work to benefit hard to transfuse patients is very significant.”

Adapted from a press release from NHS Blood and Transplant

ACE has awarded renewed National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status to the consortium of seven museums (£617,534) and to Kettle’s Yard, the University’s contemporary art gallery (£296,107).

The University cares for the country’s highest concentration of internationally important collections outside London, with more than five million works of art, artefacts and specimens.

Together, they form an international tourist attraction and the largest cultural provider in the East of England, one of the country’s most rapidly growing regions.

The University museums work closely together with the University’s Botanic Garden, Library and other collections, and Cambridge’s independent museums and cultural organisations, providing vital sector support across Cambridgeshire and the region.

“University collections have a unique power to bring people together from across the world to explore today’s big questions, looking at the past and present to help determine our future,” said Kamal Munir, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for University Community & Engagement.

“This is a difficult funding landscape and we know that ACE were faced with hard decisions during an investment round that received more applications than ever before. In that context, we’re especially pleased to have received further investment in the University collections.

“While this grant represents a reduction of 40% from current funding levels, it is heartening to see this continued recognition of the important role the collections play within our local communities,” Munir said.

Driven by research and shaped by communities, the work of the museums is grounded in the University’s commitment to contribute to society through education, learning and research at the highest levels of excellence, and encompasses collaboration with world-renowned contemporary artists, game-changing research-led exhibitions and wide-ranging inclusion and learning programmes, promoting wellbeing, creativity and connectivity.

“While there is no doubt that this significant reduction to our current level of Arts Council England funding represents a major challenge, we’re grateful for the support announced today, especially given the difficult times that many people are facing,” said Luke Syson, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, lead partner of the museums NPO.

“As we look ahead to our future, we remain committed to continuing to engage the widest possible audience, both in the enormously unequal region of Cambridgeshire and beyond, and look forward to working with ACE and other partners and funders to deliver our ambitious programmes.”

The museums are undertaking a long-term investigation into the legacies of empire and enslavement, and are currently sharing findings and inviting challenge and conversation with audiences and communities through a major public programme, Power and Memory. An upcoming collaborative programme will also inspire action to mitigate the climate crisis through engaging audiences with innovative environmental research.

Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard said: “We are proud to continue to be an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation. This core funding supports our work making outstanding exhibitions, conserving and animating the house and collection, engaging with diverse community groups and providing a learning programme – so contributing powerfully to the Let’s Create strategy.”

Jo McPhee, Head of Partnerships, added: “Cambridge is frequently ranked as the most unequal city in the country. Our communities and the sector are facing increasingly challenging times. Despite a reduction in our funding, we will continue to work with delivery partners, including the City and County Councils, and cultural sector colleagues to support our communities and create a flourishing cultural offer that’s open and accessible to everyone.”

The University of Cambridge Museums are

• Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
• Museum of Classical Archaeology
• Fitzwilliam Museum
• Kettle’s Yard
• Polar Museum
• Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
• Whipple Museum of the History of Science
• Museum of Zoology

The astrophysicists, from the University of Cambridge, the University of Trento, and Harvard University, say that there is a clear, unambiguous signal in the cosmos which could eliminate inflation as a possibility. Their paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, argues that this signal – known as the cosmic graviton background (CGB) – can feasibly be detected, although it will be a massive technical and scientific challenge.

“Inflation was theorised to explain various fine-tuning challenges of the so-called hot Big Bang model,” said the paper’s first author Dr Sunny Vagnozzi, from Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and who is now based at the University of Trento. “It also explains the origin of structure in our Universe as a result of quantum fluctuations.

“However, the large flexibility displayed by possible models for cosmic inflation which span an unlimited landscape of cosmological outcomes raises concerns that cosmic inflation is not falsifiable, even if individual inflationary models can be ruled out. Is it possible in principle to test cosmic inflation in a model-independent way?”

Some scientists raised concerns about cosmic inflation in 2013, when the Planck satellite released its first measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the universe’s oldest light.

“When the results from the Planck satellite were announced, they were held up as a confirmation of cosmic inflation,” said Professor Avi Loeb from Harvard University, Vagnozzi’s co-author on the current paper. “However, some of us argued that the results might be showing just the opposite.”

Along with Anna Ijjas and Paul Steinhardt, Loeb was one of those who argued that results from Planck showed that inflation posed more puzzles than it solved, and that it was time to consider new ideas about the beginnings of the universe, which, for instance, may have begun not with a bang but with a bounce from a previously contracting cosmos.

The maps of the CMB released by Planck represent the earliest time in the universe we can ‘see’, 100 million years before the first stars formed. We cannot see farther.

“The actual edge of the observable universe is at the distance that any signal could have travelled at the speed-of-light limit over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the birth of the Universe,” said Loeb. “As a result of the expansion of the universe, this edge is currently located 46.5 billion light years away. The spherical volume within this boundary is like an archaeological dig centred on us: the deeper we probe into it, the earlier is the layer of cosmic history that we uncover, all the way back to the Big Bang which represents our ultimate horizon. What lies beyond the horizon is unknown.”

In could be possible to dig even further into the universe’s beginnings by studying near-weightless particles known as neutrinos, which are the most abundant particles that have mass in the universe. The Universe allows neutrinos to travel freely without scattering from approximately a second after the Big Bang, when the temperature was ten billion degrees. “The present-day universe must be filled with relic neutrinos from that time,” said Vagnozzi.

Vagnozzi and Loeb say we can go even further back, however, by tracing gravitons, particles that mediate the force of gravity.

“The Universe was transparent to gravitons all the way back to the earliest instant traced by known physics, the Planck time: 10 to the power of -43 seconds, when the temperature was the highest conceivable: 10 to the power of 32 degrees,” said Loeb. “A proper understanding of what came before that requires a predictive theory of quantum gravity, which we do not possess.”

Vagnozzi and Loeb say that once the Universe allowed gravitons to travel freely without scattering, a relic background of thermal gravitational radiation with a temperature of slightly less than one degree above absolute zero should have been generated: the cosmic graviton background (CGB).

However, the Big Bang theory does not allow for the existence of the CGB, as it suggests that the exponential inflation of the newborn universe diluted relics such as the CGB to a point that they are undetectable. This can be turned into a test: if the CGB were detected, clearly this would rule out cosmic inflation, which does not allow for its existence.

Vagnozzi and Loeb argue that such a test is possible, and the CGB could in principle be detected in future. The CGB adds to the cosmic radiation budget, which otherwise includes microwave and neutrino backgrounds. It therefore affects the cosmic expansion rate of the early Universe at a level that is detectable by next-generation cosmological probes, which could provide the first indirect detection of the CGB.

However, to claim a definitive detection of the CGB, the ‘smoking gun’ would be the detection of a background of high-frequency gravitational waves peaking at frequencies around 100 GHz. This would be very hard to detect, and would require tremendous technological advances in gyrotron and superconducting magnets technology. Nevertheless, say the researchers, this signal may be within our reach in future.

Reference:
Sunny Vagnozzi and Abraham Loeb. ‘The Challenge of Ruling Out Inflation via the Primordial Graviton Background.’ The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2022). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac9b0e

Adapted in part from a piece on Medium by Avi Loeb.

The stereotype of a family firm is one where nepotism is rife and talent goes unrewarded. Yet according to a new study co-authored by a Cambridge researcher, having a family CEO in charge can actually boost positive emotions in employees and lower voluntary turnover.

“Research suggests that firms with family CEOs differ from other types of businesses, yet surprisingly little is known about how employees in these firms feel and behave compared to those working in other firms,” says the study by Jochen Menges who teaches at both the University of Zurich and Cambridge Judge Business School and colleagues from the Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of St. Gallen.

Family businesses: the advantages when it comes to CEOs

The research fills in this knowledge gap, busting some old myths about family firms by finding that family CEOs are better at creating an emotional connection to the business than hired professional CEOs.

“There has long been a conundrum in family business research: why do many such firms thrive despite anachronistic management structures and low investment in employees?” says Menges. “This study helps unlock that paradox by focusing on the positive role of emotions tied to family CEOs.”

Based on data from 41,200 employees and 2,246 direct reports of CEOs in 497 firms in Germany with and without family CEOs, the research finds that family-managed firms seem better able to “leverage the power of emotions for the benefit of organisational survival and success.”

“Family CEOs, because of their emotion-evoking double role as family members and business leaders, are, on average, more likely to infuse employees with positive emotions, such as enthusiasm and excitement, than hired professional CEOs.”

“These firms, especially when they are relatively small and less formalised, provide a workplace characterised by high-energy positive emotions – not despite but rather because of their seemingly outdated hereditary leadership structures that reserve the CEO role for family members. We conclude that family-managed firms are not relics of the past. Instead, they are here to stay, thriving on the positive feelings that their employees share.”

How the CEO plays a key role

The study finds the role of the CEO is crucial in explaining employees’ feelings and behaviours. By integrating family science with management research, it centres on emotions rather than strategic or cognitive factors.

The researchers compare the impact of a CEO who is a family member of the ownership family with a hired professional CEO (whether a firm is family-owned or not), and finds these family CEOs pass on their high-energy, positive emotions to non-family members. This may partly be because where firms have been held in family hands for generations, family CEOs often perceive such firms as their “babies” – allowing for an emotional bond to develop over an extended period. An indirect effect of a family CEO is that if employees collectively feel better at work, they should also be less likely to leave their jobs.

Emotional contagion: spreading positive feelings

Family CEOs are shown not only to be more likely to experience positive emotions, but also to express them at work, while suppressing potential negative emotions.

“We suggest that these emotions spread through firms by way of emotional contagion during interactions with employees, thereby setting the organisational affective tone,” the research says.

In family-managed firms, this spread of emotions is likely to be facilitated by the frequent interactions that these CEOs have with their employees, often forging stable, long-term relationships with those who report directly to them. This process then trickles down through the firm, by staff mimicking each other’s emotional expression, and determining how to feel by watching others express their feelings.

“Because of their hereditary claim to power, family CEOs are considered to be more powerful than their professionally appointed counterparts who can be more easily removed from the CEO position,” the study says. “Thus, family CEOs should hold greater sway over the emotions their employees feel.”

This sway is limited, however, by certain aspects of organisational structure:

Size: The larger the organisation, the weaker the relationship between the family CEO and the positive affective tone of the firm because the emotional contagion process, which relies on social interaction, is easily interrupted.

Centralisation: The more that authority and decision-making is diluted from the CEO, the weaker their effect because it fosters horizontal communication patterns rather than vertical, limiting opportunities for family CEOs to transmit their emotions.

Formalisation: Rules, procedures, instructions, and communications being formalised or written down are likely to stifle the emotional contagion effect of the family CEO because things become more regulated, less spontaneous, and are less affected by emotion.

The authors suggest this study could be used by human resources managers to demonstrate the potential benefits of working for these businesses. It could also provide insight for firms needing to appoint a new family or hired CEO.

“The research has implications for managers even outside of family firms,” says Menges. “Managers can benefit from the research by seeking creative ways to bring aspects of their own family into the workplace as a way to tap into and pass on positive emotions to others in the firm.”

Reference
Nadine Kammerlander, Jochen Menges, Dennis Herhausen, Petra Kipfelsberger, Heike Bruch: ‘How family CEOs affect employees’ feelings and behaviors: A study on positive emotions’, Long Range Planning (2022)

Adapted from an article published by Cambridge Judge Business School

In the study, led by researchers at the Autism Research Centre, 524 non-autistic people and 417 autistic people completed an online survey about their experience of pregnancy. Anyone who was pregnant at the time of responding or had previously given birth was eligible to take part.

The study revealed that autistic parents were around three times more likely than non-autistic parents to report having experienced prenatal depression (9% of non-autistic parents and 24% of autistic parents) and anxiety (14% of non-autistic parents and 48% of autistic parents).

Autistic respondents also experienced lower satisfaction with pregnancy healthcare. Autistic respondents were less likely to trust professionals, feel that professionals took their questions and concerns seriously, feel that professionals treated them respectfully, and be satisfied with how information was presented to them in appointments. Furthermore, autistic respondents were more likely to experience sensory issues during pregnancy and more likely to feel overwhelmed by the sensory environment of prenatal appointments.

Dr Sarah Hampton, lead researcher on the study, said: “This study suggests that autistic people are more vulnerable to mental health difficulties during pregnancy. It is imperative that effective mental health screening and support is available for autistic people during pregnancy.”

Dr Rosie Holt, a member of the research team, added: “The results also suggest that autistic people may benefit from accommodations to prenatal healthcare. These may include adjustments to the sensory environment of healthcare settings, as well as adjustments to how information is communicated during prenatal appointments.”

Dr Carrie Allison, Deputy Director of the Autism Research Centre and a member of the team, said: “We are grateful to members of the autistic community for providing feedback when we designed this research. It is vital that autistic people with lived experience help shape the research we do, and we keep their priorities as a clear focus.”

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre and a member of the research team, said: “It is important that more research is conducted looking at the experiences of autistic new parents, who have been neglected in research. It is also important that this research is translated into health and social care policy and practice to ensure these parents receive the support and adaptations they need in a timely manner.”

Reference
Hampton, S., Allison, C., Baron-Cohen, S., & Holt, R. (2022). Autistic People’s Perinatal Experiences I: A Survey of Pregnancy Experiences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

A team from the University of Cambridge, working with colleagues from Austria, found a new way to make a possible replacement for rare-earth magnets: tetrataenite, a ‘cosmic magnet’ that takes millions of years to develop naturally in meteorites.

Previous attempts to make tetrataenite in the laboratory have relied on impractical, extreme methods. But the addition of a common element – phosphorus – could mean that it’s possible to make tetrataenite artificially and at scale, without any specialised treatment or expensive techniques.

The results are reported in the journal Advanced Science. A patent application on the technology has been filed by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

High-performance magnets are a vital technology for building a zero-carbon economy, and the best permanent magnets currently available contain rare earth elements. Despite their name, rare earths are plentiful in Earth’s crust. However, China has a near monopoly on global production: in 2017, 81% of rare earths worldwide were sourced from China. Other countries, such as Australia, also mine these elements, but as geopolitical tensions with China increase, there are concerns that rare earth supply could be at risk.

“Rare earth deposits exist elsewhere, but the mining operations are highly disruptive: you have to extract a huge amount of material to get a small volume of rare earths,” said Professor Lindsay Greer from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, who led the research. “Between the environmental impacts, and the heavy reliance on China, there’s been an urgent search for alternative materials that do not require rare earths.”

Tetrataenite, an iron-nickel alloy with a particular ordered atomic structure, is one of the most promising of those alternatives. Tetrataenite forms over millions of years as a meteorite slowly cools, giving the iron and nickel atoms enough time to order themselves into a particular stacking sequence within the crystalline structure, ultimately resulting in a material with magnetic properties approaching those of rare-earth magnets.

In the 1960s, scientists were able to artificially form tetrataenite by bombarding iron-nickel alloys with neutrons, enabling the atoms to form the desired ordered stacking, but this technique is not suitable for mass production.

“Since then, scientists have been fascinated with getting that ordered structure, but it’s always felt like something that was very far away,” said Greer. Despite many attempts over the years, it has not yet been possible to make tetrataenite on anything approaching an industrial scale.

Now, Greer and his colleagues from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Montanuniversität in Leoben, have found a possible alternative that doesn’t require millions of years of cooling or neutron irradiation.

The team was studying the mechanical properties of iron-nickel alloys containing small amounts of phosphorus, an element that is also present in meteorites. The pattern of phases inside these materials showed the expected tree-like growth structure called dendrites.

“For most people, it would have ended there: nothing interesting to see in the dendrites, but when I looked closer, I saw an interesting diffraction pattern indicating an ordered atomic structure,” said first author Dr Yurii Ivanov, who completed the work while at Cambridge and is now based at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa.

At first glance, the diffraction pattern of tetrataenite looks like that of the structure expected for iron-nickel alloys, namely a disordered crystal not of interest as a high-performance magnet. It took Ivanov’s closer look to identify the tetrataenite, but even so, Greer says it’s strange that no one noticed it before.

The researchers say that phosphorus, which is present in meteorites, allows the iron and nickel atoms to move faster, enabling them to form the necessary ordered stacking without waiting for millions of years. By mixing iron, nickel and phosphorus in the right quantities, they were able to speed up tetrataenite formation by between 11 and 15 orders of magnitude, such that it forms over a few seconds in simple casting.

“What was so astonishing was that no special treatment was needed: we just melted the alloy, poured it into a mould, and we had tetrataenite,” said Greer. “The previous view in the field was that you couldn’t get tetrataenite unless you did something extreme, because otherwise, you’d have to wait millions of years for it to form. This result represents a total change in how we think about this material.”

While the researchers have found a promising method to produce tetrataenite, more work is needed to determine whether it will be suitable for high-performance magnets. The team are hoping to work on this with major magnet manufacturers.

The work may also force a revision of views on whether the formation of tetrataenite in meteorites really does take millions of years.

The research was supported in part by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Seventh Framework Programme, and the Austrian Science Fund.

Reference:
Yurii P. Ivanov et al. ‘Direct formation of hard-magnetic tetrataenite in bulk alloy castings.’ Advanced Science (2022). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202204315

The latest findings, from researchers from the University of Cambridge in collaboration with researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Newcastle University, are published today in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.

After analysing all new autism cases across England using NHS health service boundaries for possible hotspots, some areas stand out. For example, 45.5% of the NHS Rotherham catchment area had higher-than-average new autism diagnoses clusters. For NHS Heywood, this amounted to 38.8% of its catchment area and 36.9% for NHS Liverpool, pointing at a possible health service effect towards who receives an autism diagnosis.

The research team used four years’ worth of data from the Summer School Census, which collected data from individuals aged 1-18 years old in state-funded schools in England. Of the 32 million pupils studied, more than 102,000 new autism diagnoses were identified between 2014 and 2017.

After adjusting for age and sex, the researchers found that one in 234 children were given a new autism diagnosis during that four-year period. New diagnoses tended to happen when children were transitioning to a new school, whether that was into nursery (1-3 years), primary school (4-6), and secondary school (10-12 years).

Particular communities appeared to have different rates, varying by ethnicity and deprivation.

Lead researcher Dr Andres Roman-Urrestarazu from the Department of Psychiatry and Cambridge Public Health at the University of Cambridge said: “Autism diagnoses are more common among Black students and other minority ethnic groups. Why this is the case is not clear and so we need to explore the role played by social factors such as ethnicity and area deprivation as well as the nature of local services.”

The likelihood of receiving an autism diagnosis more than tripled among girls depending on their ethnicity and social and financial situation compared to white girls without financial disadvantages who speak English as their first language.

In contrast, boys’ likelihood of receiving an autism diagnosis increased more than five-fold depending on their ethnicity and social and financial situation compared to white boys without financial disadvantages who speak English as their first language.

Boys and young men are already known to be more likely to receive autism diagnoses, but the social determinants that could affect a diagnosis remained an open question.

Dr Robin van Kessel, co-lead researcher from the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science said: “These new findings show how social determinants interact and can combine to significantly increase the likelihood of an autism diagnosis. As a result, individuals from a minority ethnic background experiencing economic hardship may be significantly more likely to receive an autism diagnosis than their peers.”

Professor Carol Brayne from Cambridge Public Health said: “There are clear inequalities in an individual’s likelihood of receiving an autism diagnosis, whether they are socioeconomic factors, ethnicity or even which NHS region or local authority someone lives in.”

This work was supported by the Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship, Institute for Data Valorization, Fonds de recherche du Québec—Santé, Calcul Quebec, Digital Research Alliance of Canada, Wellcome Trust, Innovative Medicines Initiative, Autism Centre of Excellence at Cambridge, Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, Templeton World Charitable Fund, Medical Research Council, NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, and the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration East of England—Population Evidence and Data Science.

Reference
Roman-Urrestarazu, A et al. Autism incidence and spatial analysis in more than 7 million pupils in English schools: a retrospective, longitudinal, school registry study. Lancet Child & Adolescent Health; 25 Oct 2022; DOI: 10.1016/S2352-4642(22)00247-4

The consortium has received £2 million from the Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council and the Medical Research Council, both part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). It is led by the Pirbright Institute and the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research.

Researchers will work closely with experts at government agencies – the Animal and Plant Health Agency, UK Health Security Agency, and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory – to study the current outbreak and inform the public health response in the UK and internationally.

Cambridge scientists Professor Geoffrey Smith from the Department of Pathology and Professor Mike Weekes from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and Department of Medicine are among the key scientists involved in the consortium.

Professor Weekes said: “Monkeypox has become a really important global pathogen, reaching more than 50 countries worldwide in a matter of months. Although we have an effective vaccine and treatment, global roll-out has so far proved challenging, emphasising the importance of a comprehensive understanding of this virus. The UK consortium includes researchers from multiple different disciplines, and I anticipate the data we generate will rapidly help understand how the virus can be targeted in new ways to prevent disease.”

Professor Smith said: “Few would have predicted that monkeypox virus would be causing a global epidemic in 2022. The ability to respond quickly to this new challenge has been helped greatly not just by the swift and welcome response of UKRI, but also by decades of support for the study of orthopoxviruses from UKRI and the Wellcome Trust. The information gained from those studies is valuable in the fight against monkeypox virus.”

The monkeypox virus outbreak originated in West Africa. The current worldwide outbreak of cases spreading outside this area was first identified in May 2022. This is the first time that many monkeypox cases and clusters have been reported in non-endemic areas.

In the UK there have been more than 3,400 confirmed cases since May, although case numbers are currently falling. Internationally, WHO reports it has spread to 106 countries and territories with 25 confirmed deaths.

Professor Melanie Welham, Executive Chair of BBSRC, said: “One of the real strengths of the UK’s scientific response to disease outbreaks is the way that we can draw on leading researchers from all over the country, who can pool their expertise to deliver results, fast. Long-term support for animal and human virus research has ensured we have the capability to respond with agility.

“This new national consortium will study the unprecedented monkeypox outbreak to better understand how to tackle it. This will feed rapidly into global public health strategies, developing new diagnostic tests and identifying potential therapies.”

The consortium will focus on building our understanding in a number of key areas, including:

Developing new tests and identifying potential control measures:

• Developing sensitive point-of-care tests to speed up diagnosis, such as lateral flow tests or LAMP* tests. The lateral flow test development will be conducted with Global Access Diagnostics (GADx) to develop a product which could later be manufactured at scale and used clinically worldwide, including in low/middle income countries.
• Screening potential drugs to treat monkeypox in human cells in the lab to determine which ones could be developed for further testing.
• Studying the virus, how it infects humans and its susceptibility to the immune response to identify targets for future therapies.

Studying the virus:

• Characterising the genome of the virus and studying how it is evolving, and how this is linked to changes in the transmission and pathology of the virus.
• Understanding the human immune response to the virus and the vaccine, including studying samples from infected individuals.
• Identifying animal reservoirs and potential spill-over routes of transmission between animals and humans.

Learning from the vaccine roll-out:

• Studying the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine by tracking the immune responses after primary and secondary vaccination of up to 200 individuals.

Professor Bryan Charleston, co-lead from The Pirbright Institute, said: “The implications of the current monkeypox outbreak are huge. As well as tackling the current outbreak, we also need to be fully prepared for next outbreak, because worldwide there’s a huge reservoir of infection. One of the key ways we can do this is to develop rapid tests, which are very important to help clinicians on the front line to manage the disease.”

Professor Massimo Palmarini, co-lead from the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, said: “Monkeypox is public health challenge, so taking decisive, collective action to better understand this virus is paramount. By bringing together research expertise in different areas, we will harness the UK’s world-leading knowledge to learn more about how the virus works and spreads and provide the foundations for the development of potential new treatments.”

Adapted from a press release from UKRI

The team, led by the University of Cambridge, tracked the movement of lithium ions inside a promising new battery material in real time.

It had been assumed that the mechanism by which lithium ions are stored in battery materials is uniform across the individual active particles. However, the Cambridge-led team found that during the charge-discharge cycle, lithium storage is anything but uniform.

When the battery is near the end of its discharge cycle, the surfaces of the active particles become saturated by lithium while their cores are lithium deficient. This results in the loss of reusable lithium and a reduced capacity.

The research, funded by the Faraday Institution, could help improve existing battery materials and could accelerate the development of next-generation batteries. The results are published in Joule.

Electrical vehicles (EVs) are vital in the transition to a zero-carbon economy. Most electric vehicles on the road today are powered by lithium-ion batteries, due in part to their high energy density.

However, as EV use becomes more widespread, the push for longer ranges and faster charging times means that current battery materials need to be improved, and new materials need to be identified.

Some of the most promising of these materials are state-of-the-art positive electrode materials known as layered lithium nickel-rich oxides, which are widely used in premium EVs. However, their working mechanisms, particularly lithium-ion transport under practical operating conditions, and how this is linked to their electrochemical performance, are not fully understood, so we cannot yet obtain maximum performance from these materials.

By tracking how light interacts with active particles during battery operation under a microscope, the researchers observed distinct differences in lithium storage during the charge-discharge cycle in nickel-rich manganese cobalt oxide (NMC).

“This is the first time that this non-uniformity in lithium storage has been directly observed in individual particles,” said co-first author Alice Merryweather, from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “Real time techniques like ours are essential to capture this while the battery is cycling.”

Combining the experimental observations with computer modelling, the researchers found that the non-uniformity originates from drastic changes to the rate of lithium-ion diffusion in NMC during the charge-discharge cycle. Specifically, lithium ions diffuse slowly in fully lithiated NMC particles, but the diffusion is significantly enhanced once some lithium ions are extracted from these particles.

“Our model provides insights into the range over which lithium-ion diffusion in NMC varies during the early stages of charging,” said co-first author Dr Shrinidhi Pandurangi from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Our model predicted lithium distributions accurately and captured the degree of heterogeneity observed in experiments. These predictions are key to understanding other battery degradation mechanisms such as particle fracture.”

Importantly, the lithium heterogeneity seen at the end of discharge establishes one reason why nickel-rich cathode materials typically lose around ten percent of their capacity after the first charge-discharge cycle.

“This is significant, considering one industrial standard that is used to determine whether a battery should be retired or not is when it has lost 20 percent of its capacity,” said co-first author Dr Chao Xu, from ShanghaiTech University, who completed the research while based at Cambridge.

The researchers are now seeking new approaches to increase the practical energy density and lifetime of these promising battery materials.

The research was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Alice Merryweather is jointly supervised by Professor Dame Clare Grey and Dr Akshay Rao, who are both co-authors on the current paper.

Reference:
Chao Xu et al. ‘Operando visualization of kinetically induced lithium heterogeneities in single-particle layered Ni-rich cathodes.’ Joule (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2022.09.008

In research published today in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, the team analysed data from the UK Biobank and found impairment in several areas, such as problem solving and number recall, across a range of conditions.

The findings raise the possibility that in the future, at-risk patients could be screened to help select those who would benefit from interventions to reduce their risk of developing one of the conditions, or to help identify patients suitable for recruitment to clinical trials for new treatments.

There are currently very few effective treatments for dementia or other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. In part, this is because these conditions are often only diagnosed once symptoms appear, whereas the underlying neurodegeneration may have begun years – even decades – earlier. This means that by the time patients take part in clinical trials, it may already be too late in the disease process to alter its course.

Until now, it has been unclear whether it might be possible to detect changes in brain function before the onset of symptoms. To help answer this question, researchers at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust turned to UK Biobank, a biomedical database and research resource containing anonymised genetic, lifestyle and health information from half a million UK participants aged 40-69.

As well as collecting information on participants’ health and disease diagnoses, UK Biobank collected data from a battery of tests including problem solving, memory, reaction times and grip strength, as well as data on weight loss and gain and on the number of falls. This allowed them to look back to see whether any signs were present at baseline – that is, when measurements were first collected from participants (between five and nine years prior to diagnosis).

People who went on to develop Alzheimer’s disease scored more poorly compared to healthy individuals when it came to problem solving tasks, reaction times, remembering lists of numbers, prospective memory (our ability to remember to do something later on) and pair matching. This was also the case for people who developed a rarer form of dementia known as frontotemporal dementia.

People who went on to develop Alzheimer’s were more likely than healthy adults to have had a fall in the previous 12 months. Those patients who went on to develop a rare neurological condition known as progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), which affects balance, were more than twice as likely as healthy individuals to have had a fall.

For every condition studied – including Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies – patients reported poorer overall health at baseline.

First author Nol Swaddiwudhipong, a junior doctor at the University of Cambridge, said: “When we looked back at patients’ histories, it became clear that they were showing some cognitive impairment several years before their symptoms became obvious enough to prompt a diagnosis. The impairments were often subtle, but across a number of aspects of cognition.

“This is a step towards us being able to screen people who are at greatest risk – for example, people over 50 or those who have high blood pressure or do not do enough exercise – and intervene at an earlier stage to help them reduce their risk.”

Senior author Dr Tim Rittman from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge added: “People should not be unduly worried if, for example, they are not good at recalling numbers. Even some healthy individuals will naturally score better or worse than their peers. But we would encourage anyone who has any concerns or notices that their memory or recall is getting worse to speak to their GP.”

Dr Rittman said the findings could also help identify people who can participate in clinical trials for potential new treatments. “The problem with clinical trials is that by necessity they often recruit patients with a diagnosis, but we know that by this point they are already some way down the road and their condition cannot be stopped. If we can find these individuals early enough, we’ll have a better chance of seeing if the drugs are effective.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council with support from the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Swaddiwudhipong, N, et al. Pre-Diagnostic Cognitive and Functional Impairment in Multiple Sporadic Neurodegenerative Diseases. Alzheimer’s & Dementia; 13 Oct 2022; DOI: 10.1002/alz.12802

In a newly-published study of almost 500 children from high-poverty, urban communities in the United States, researchers found that a widely-used assessment, which measures the development of thinking skills called ‘executive functions’, did not fully and accurately evaluate students’ progress. The study links this to probable cultural bias in the assessment design and suggests that this may be replicated in other, similar tools.

Any such design flaw may have influenced a growing body of research which suggests that children from poorer backgrounds tend to start school with less well-developed executive functions.  ‘Executive functions’ is a collective term for a set of essential thinking skills needed to carry out everyday tasks, and learning. They include working memory, self-control, the ability to ignore distractions and easily switch between tasks. Children with good executive functions tend to have better test scores, better mental health and greater employment potential.

One common method for measuring the healthy development of these skills involves asking teachers to complete questionnaires about children’s observed behaviours. The results can potentially help pinpoint children – or entire groups – who need extra support. They also provide a rich source of data for research on how executive functions develop.

In the new study, researchers found that one of these teacher rating scales, which has been widely used in the United States, was of limited value when assessing poorer, urban students. Specifically, they found that the executive function screener of a version of the Behaviour Assessment System for Children (BASC), called the BASC-2, “is not a good representation of everyday executive function behaviours by children from schools in high-poverty communities”.

The team, from the University of Cambridge (UK) and Virginia Commonweath University (US) suggest that the likely cause is that both this scale, and others like it, have been developed using an unrepresentative sample of children.

Researchers have previously pointed out that these assessments tend to be modelled on children who are mostly from comfortable socio-economic settings. By mapping their observed behaviours on to executive functions, they may falsely assume that these behaviours are ‘normal’ markers for any child of the same age. In reality, children’s different backgrounds and lived experiences may mean that executive functions express themselves differently across different groups.

Annie Zonneveld, from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and the study’s first author, said: “There is a big question around how we measure executive functions: are we actually using the right tools? If they are based on white, middle-class students, we cannot be sure that they would actually work for the whole population. We may be seeing evidence of that here.”

Michelle Ellefson, Professor of Cognitive Science at the Faculty of Education, said: “Teachers can provide us with really valuable data about children’s executive functions because they can monitor development in ways we could not possibly replicate in a lab, but they need effective measures to do this. This means the assessments must draw on information about children from different backgrounds.”

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, about 14% of children in the United States live in poverty. While nearly 50% of all children are from ethnic minority families, 71% of those in poverty are from these backgrounds. Most psychometric research on executive functions, however, focuses on white, middle-income, or affluent families. It has never been clear how far its findings can be generalised.

The new study examined the executive function components of two versions of the BASC: the BASC-2 and BASC-3. These ask teachers to observe children’s everyday behaviours and rate, on a scale of ‘never’ to ‘always’, how far they agree with statements such as “acts without thinking”, “is easily distracted”, “cannot wait to take turn”, “is a self-starter” and “argues when denied own way”. They then extrapolate information about the children’s executive functions based on the responses.

The researchers analysed two sample groups of children, aged around nine or 10, all from state schools in high-poverty, urban areas in the United States. In total, 472 children took part. The first sample was assessed using the BASC-2; the other using the BASC-3.

Both groups also completed six computer-based tasks which psychologists and neuroscientists use in lab-based tasks to measure specific executive functions. The researchers looked at how far the scores from these computerised tasks – which are accurate but difficult to run with large groups – corresponded to the measures from the teacher-administered surveys.

The findings indicated that while the BASC-2 provides a reasonable overview of students’ general executive functioning, it does not capture accurate details about specific functions like working memory and self-control. The BASC-3 was far more effective, probably because it uses a different and more focused set of questions.

“The BASC-2 has been used extensively in archived datasets and contributes to academic research about how executive functions develop,” Ellefson said. “It is really important to recognise that without modification, it is not an appropriate basis for making judgements about certain groups of children.”

The assessment is just one of many surveys that measure children’s cognitive development in different countries. “It is important that we know how these tools are establishing their baseline understanding of ‘typical’ development,” Zonneveld said. “If they are based on mostly white populations from affluent suburbs, they won’t necessarily be as representative as we might hope.”

The study is published in Developmental Science.