Category: 8. Health

In the early 2000s the U.S. Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), a large randomized clinical trial, showed that intensive lifestyle modification was better than a medication called metformin at preventing at-risk patients from developing Type 2 diabetes.

In a newly completed follow-up study, a team of researchers including Vallabh “Raj” Shah, professor emeritus in The University of New Mexico Departments of Internal Medicine and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the School of Medicine, found that the health benefits from the lifestyle intervention persisted more than 20 years later.

In a paper published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, they reported that the greatest results from both interventions were seen in the first few years of the study, and they were durable, Shah said. “The data suggests that those people who didn’t get diabetes also didn’t get diabetes after 22 years,” he said.

The DPP was launched in 1996 to compare the benefits of metformin – then newly approved by the FDA to treat Type 2 diabetes – and a lifestyle modification regimen that included exercise and a healthy diet. The study enrolled 3,234 patients with prediabetes at 30 institutions in 22 states.

The intensive lifestyle intervention reduced the development of diabetes by 24%, and metformin reduced diabetes development by 17%, according to the new study. The DPP had previously found that after the first three years of study, the lifestyle intervention of moderate weight loss and increased physical activity reduced the onset of Type 2 diabetes by 58% compared with a placebo medicine, while metformin reduced development of diabetes by 31%.

Compared with the original placebo group, the median time without diabetes was extended by three-and-a-half years in the lifestyle group and two-and-a-half years in the metformin group.

“Within three years, they had to stop the study because lifestyle was better than metformin,” Shah said. “That means lifestyle, which everybody is banking on, is more effective – that is the news.”

But because a wealth of health and biological data had already been collected for patients participating in the project, the DPP was repurposed into the DPP Outcomes Study (DPPOS), enabling researchers to follow their health outcomes in multiple domains over a period of decades, he said.

Shah has contributed to kidney disease research for more than three decades, conducting multiple studies at Zuni Pueblo and other American Indian communities in western New Mexico. He has also overseen the participation of the American Indian cohort enrolled in the DPPOS. Meanwhile, David Schade, MD, chief of the Division of Endocrinology in the UNM School of Medicine, recruited New Mexico participants in the study.

More recently, he said, DPPOS researchers have taken advantage of their large, well-documented cohort to repurpose the study to focus on diseases associated with aging, such as cancer and dementia, Shah said.

Banner Photo: Vallabh “Raj” Shah, PhD. Photo Credit: Jett Loe

Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, and other drugs in the same class have revolutionized the treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Now, a clinical trial suggests the medicines can treat type 1 diabetes, as well.

The trial results, published June 23 in the journal NEJM Evidence, suggest semaglutide can improve blood sugar levels and induce weight loss in people with type 1, potentially introducing a new drug that could be used along with insulin to manage the disease.

Yuchen Cao and Xiaorui Shen conducted a systematic review of AI models used in studies detecting depression in social media users and found major flaws.

Artificial intelligence models used to detect depression on social media are often biased and methodologically flawed, according to a study led by Northeastern University computer science graduates.

Yuchen Cao and Xiaorui Shen were graduate students at Northeastern’s Seattle campus when they began examining how machine learning and deep learning models were being used in mental health research, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Teaming up with peers from several universities, they conducted a systematic review of academic papers using AI to detect depression among social media users. Their findings were published in the Journal of Behavioral Data Science.

“We wanted to see how machine learning or AI or deep learning models were being used for research in this field,” says Cao, now a software engineer at Meta.

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit offer researchers a trove of user-generated content that reveals emotions, thoughts and mental health patterns. These insights are increasingly being used to train AI tools for detecting signs of depression. But the Northeastern-led review found that many of the underlying models were inadequately tuned and lacked the rigor needed for real-world application.

The team analyzed hundreds of papers and selected 47 relevant studies published after 2010 from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore and Google Scholar. Many of these studies, they found, were authored by experts in medicine or psychology — not computer science — raising concerns about the technical validity of their AI methods.

“Our goal was to explore whether current machine learning models are reliable,” says Shen, also now a software engineer at Meta. “We found that some of the models used were not properly tuned.”

Traditional models such as Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, Random Forests, eXtreme Gradient Boosting and Logistic Regression were commonly used. Some studies employed deep learning tools like Convolutional Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory networks and BERT, a popular language model.

When bacteria infect our bodies, they sometimes form sticky mats of sugars and proteins called biofilms to protect themselves. This viscous layer makes it difficult for antibiotics and immune cells to reach the invading microbes, rendering usual therapies less effective. Researchers, led by Li Zhang at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Ben Wang at Shenzhen University, demonstrated that magnet-driven, light-activated microrobots can cut through this goo and fight biofilms in the sinuses of animals (Sci. Robot. 2025, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adt0720).

“We saw microrobots as a promising way to physically navigate into these hard-to-reach spaces” and attack bacteria directly, says Zhang in an email.

Other scientists have previously proposed using microrobots, which are smaller than 1 mm, to target and disrupt biofilm formations, either mechanically or by delivering chemicals that kill bacteria. But biofilms in the sinuses present a unique challenge for microrobots because our natural immune response to a sinus infection produces a viscous pus that’s hard to get through.

The researchers got around this sinus buildup problem by designing their bots to stir up the goo. External magnets placed near the sinuses guide the robots to align into chains and form spinning swarms that create a mechanical force to break up both thick sinus fluids and biofilms.

The microrobots themselves have a magnetic core and a shell of copper-doped bismuth oxoiodide (BiOI), a light-sensitive material. When exposed to visible light delivered by an optical fiber guided magnetically into the sinuses, electrons in the BiOI jump to a higher energy level, leaving behind positively charged holes. In this electron-hole pair, the excited electrons can react with oxygen to form superoxide radicals, while the holes react with water to produce hydroxyl radicals—both species are toxic to bacteria.

When the BiOI absorbs light, it also heats up, which further breaks down mucus and biofilms.

In live rabbit sinuses, the robots cut through thick mucus and destroyed bacterial biofilms without damaging healthy tissue. In pig sinus tissue, which is more anatomically like human sinus tissue, the microrobots also destroyed biofilms, with only 3% of bacteria surviving the treatment.

“Any piece [of the system] is not particularly novel, but the combination is certainly an advancement,” says Edward Steager, an expert in microrobots for medical applications at the University of Pennsylvania.

After the treatment, cilia in the sinuses, which are tiny hair-like structures that move mucus, can clear out the microrobots.

The researchers think the treatment, with some modifications, could be expanded to treat biofilms in other parts of the body, like the gastrointestinal or urinary tract.

Zhang plans to conduct larger-scale animal studies with the robots and says the team is also exploring prototype development for human clinical trials.

The Trump administration appears to be expanding RSV vaccinations to some adults starting at age 50, down from 60, following the advice of a recently fired panel of government vaccine advisers.

The decision appears on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage but as of Wednesday wasn’t on the agency’s official adult immunization schedule.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, typically is a coldlike nuisance, but it can be severe, even life-threatening, for infants and older adults. The CDC recommends vaccination for certain pregnant women and a onetime shot for everyone 75 or older. But people as young as 60 with health problems that increase their risk can also get it.

In April, the CDC’s influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended expanding RSV vaccination to high-risk adults as young as 50, too. But the CDC lacks a director to decide whether to adopt that recommendation and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t immediately act.

Last month, Kennedy fired all 17 members of that panel and handpicked seven replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.

The new panel alarmed doctors’ groups last week by ignoring settled science on a rarely used flu vaccine preservative and by announcing a probe of the children’s vaccine schedule. It didn’t revisit RSV vaccination for older adults.

Kennedy already had taken the unusual step of changing COVID-19 vaccine recommendations without consulting the committee.

On Wednesday, a page on CDC’s website said that on June 25, Kennedy had adopted the ousted panel’s recommendation to expand RSV vaccination to high-risk 50-somethings and it is “now an official recommendation of the CDC.”

That move was first reported by Endpoints News.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Lauran Neergaard, The Associated Press