Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc.
Editor-in-Chief
Biological Sciences, B.Sc.

A study led by University of Queensland researchers has found women who have experienced maltreatment, domestic violence or household substance abuse as children have a higher risk of complications during pregnancy.

Associate Professor Abdullah Mamun from UQ’s Poche Centre for Indigenous Health led a project which analyzed 21 existing studies on the impact of childhood trauma, to understand a possible link to complications during pregnancy.

The research also found women with adverse childhood experiences had an increased risk of substance use, physical inactivity and poor diet.

“This highlights the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences and the importance of preventing these to reduce both immediate and intergenerational impacts,” Dr Mamun said.

While the profound impact of childhood trauma on adult mental health is well documented, the researchers said little has been known about its effect on pregnancy.

“There are numerous reasons explaining the relationship between child maltreatment, physical abuse and household substance abuse and adverse pregnancy outcomes,” Dr Mamun said.

“Those experiences can alter the way the brain functions including things like our stress-signaling pathways, and even our immune system function.”

Dr Mamun said screening for adverse childhood experiences and providing trauma-informed care may be a viable option to prevent pregnancy complications.

“Current trauma-informed care should also be examined to assess whether it improves clinical outcomes for mothers and their children,” Dr Mamun said.

“This is clearly an important area of research, with the negative effects of childhood trauma being felt well into adulthood, and across generations.”

The researchers highlighted further research was needed in the field, as there were limitations to the data with most of the studies included from high-income Western countries.

Some of the studies used different screening tools and cut-off values, and researchers also weren’t able to analyze results by specific types of childhood experience.

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc
Forensic Science, B.Sc.
Forensic Science, Analytical Chemistry

It’s basic exercise knowledge that to gain muscles, you strength train, and to lose fat, you do cardio – right?

Not necessarily, a new UNSW study published this week in Sports Medicine suggests.

In fact, the study – a systematic review and meta-analysis that reviewed and analysed existing evidence – shows we can lose around 1.4 per cent of our entire body fat through strength training alone, which is similar to how much we might lose through cardio or aerobics.

Up until now, the link between strength training and fat loss has been unclear. Studies have investigated this link in the past, but their sample sizes tend to be small – a side effect of not many people wanting to volunteer to exercise for months on end. Smaller sample sizes can make it difficult to find statistically significant results, especially as many bodies can respond differently to exercise programs.

“It can be really difficult to discern whether there’s an effect or not based on one study alone,” says Dr Hagstrom. “But when we add all of these studies together, we effectively create one large study, and can get a much clearer idea of what’s going on.”

Dr Hagstrom and her team pulled together the findings from 58 research papers that used highly accurate forms of body fat measurement (like body scans, which can differentiate fat mass from lean mass) to measure the outcomes from strength training programs. Altogether, the studies included 3000 participants, none of which had any previous weight training experience.

While the strength training programs differed between the studies, the participants worked out for roughly 45-60 minutes each session for an average of 2.7 times per week. The programs lasted for about five months.

The team found that, on average, the participants lost 1.4 per cent of their total body fat after their training programs, which equated to roughly half a kilo in fat mass for most participants.

While the findings are encouraging for fans of pumping iron, Dr Hagstrom says the best approach for people who are aiming to lose fat is still to stick to eating nutritiously and having an exercise routine that includes both aerobic/cardio and strength training.

But if aerobics and cardio just aren’t your thing, the good news is you don’t need to force it.

“If you want to exercise to change your body composition, you’ve got options,” says Dr Hagstrom.

A better way of measuring progress

As part of their study, the team conducted a sub-analysis comparing how different ways of measuring fat can influence a study’s findings.

Interestingly, it showed that when papers used more accurate measurements like body scans, they tended to show lower overall changes in body fat.

“Using accurate fat measurements is important because it gives us a more realistic idea of what body changes to expect,” says lead author of the study Mr Michael Wewege, PhD candidate at UNSW and NeuRA.

“Future exercise studies can improve their research by using these more accurate body measurements.”

Reframing the way we measure progress doesn’t just apply to sports researchers, but to everyday people, too.

“Resistance training does so many fantastic things to the body that other forms of exercise don’t, like improving bone mineral density, lean mass and muscle quality. Now, we know it also gives you a benefit we previously thought only came from aerobics,” says Dr Hagstrom.

“If you’re strength training and want to change how your body looks, then you don’t want to focus on the number on the scale too much, because it won’t show you all your results.

“Instead, think about your whole body composition, like how your clothes fit and how your body will start to feel, and move, differently.”

Emily Henderson
Senior Editor
Forensic Science, B.Sc.
Forensic Science, Analytical Chemistry

Whether COVID-19 becomes a life-threatening disease depends, in part, on the virus reaching one’s lungs. Scientists suspect the initial infected tissues in the upper airway can act as the source for virus-laden droplets or boluses, that are aspirated into the lungs. That could explain the brisk pace at which the infection spreads to the lungs in some patients, shortly after the COVID-19 symptoms appear.

Assistant professor Saikat Basu of South Dakota State University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering is part of a multi-institutional group that investigated whether the novel coronavirus might be invading the lungs through this mechanism.

Basu and researchers from the School of Medicine at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the School of Public Health at Boston University and Fractal Therapeutics, a drug development company, found the amount of virus that can potentially be aspirated into the lungs is thousands of times more than the dose needed to spread the infection to susceptible cells in the lower airway.

He has been modeling aerosol transport in the human respiratory tract to investigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission, improve delivery of nasal therapeutics, prophylactics and vaccines and develop a mask that captures and deactivates the virus. The research is supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation RAPID grant for COVID-19 research.

Basu has also been doing similar aerosol and drug delivery modeling to help patients with chronic sinus problems with the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine research group for nearly six years.

An article detailing the results was recently released in Rhinology Online, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by the European Rhinologic Society. “This is one of the top journals in the ENT community and perhaps the first time clinicians have directly reviewed our COVID-related work prior to publication,” Basu said.

Figuring out how the infection spreads from the upper airways to the lungs can help health care professionals identify patients at higher risk for severe disease.
Analyzing infectivity

The site where a sore throat occurs-;the cavity behind the nose and mouth and above the esophagus, known as the nasopharynx-;is the entry point of the novel coronavirus, explained Basu. His earlier modeling work on virus-laden droplets, along with studies at UNC Chapel Hill and Oxford University, amongst others, have confirmed this.

Other studies have assessed viral load in the saliva of COVID-19 patients. In previous work, Basu estimated the minimum number of virus particles needed to trigger the infection, known as the infectious dose, to be about 300 viral particles or virions.

Other research studies determined a person swallows 500 to 700 times including while eating and drinking during the day and 24 times at night. Approximately 12% of those swallows result in tiny droplets from the upper airway entering the lungs, Basu said. That means a person inhales tiny droplets 60 to 84 times while awake and three times while sleeping.

Using the droplet sizes and inhalation frequency, Basu did aerosol transport modeling using CT scans of human airways. Results showed a person infected with COVID-19 can potentially inhale at least 10,000 times the amount of virus needed to cause an infection in the lungs each day. Doctoral student Mohammad Mehedi Hasan Akash also worked on the research project.
Understanding of viral transmission

“We are not claiming that this is the end-all” because the computational fluid dynamics modeling was done using only three subjects, Basu said. However, this study increases the scientific understanding of virus transmission by addressing the likelihood of inhaled viral particles triggering a more serious disease trajectory.

“Having doctors as a part of the team helped us make sure that what we are modeling is reasonable from a clinical perspective,” Basu said. Dr. Natasha Hochberg, associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, specializes in infectious diseases, while Dr. Brent Senior, vice chair of development and strategic initiative at the UNC School of Medicine, is an otolaryngologist and head and neck surgeon.

COVID-19 vaccines generate an antibody response throughout the body, but the potential onslaught produced from viral inhalation may play a role in triggering breakthrough infections, Basu continued. Furthermore, patients who are elderly and who have sleep apnea and diseases-;such as Parkinson’s, which affect swallowing-;may be at greater risk for complications.

The next step will be to confirm these findings through clinical studies. This may then pave the way for developing therapeutics that can help prevent aggressive, and often fatal, disease stages when a person gets infected with coronaviruses.