Common osteoporosis drug associated with increased rates of depression and anxiety

Osteoporosis affects over 10 million Americans over 50. Bisphosphonate therapy, mainly alendronate, is amongst the most prescribed treatments for the disease. The use of alendronate and other bisphosphonates has been associated with depressive symptoms in recent case reports. In this study we quantified this association by analyzing over 100,000 adverse events reports from the Food and Drug Administration Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS) and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global database for adverse drug reactions, ADRs, VigiAccess. We found that alendronate therapy is significantly associated with depression and anxiety when compared to other first-line osteoporosis treatments. The reported risk of depressive ADRs was found to be over 14-fold greater in patients taking alendronate under the age of 65 and over fourfold greater for patients over 65 compared to the control. Several hypotheses concerning the molecular mechanism of the observed association of alendronate and depressive symptoms were discussed.

Renal Safety Profile of EGFR Targeted Therapies: A Study from VigiBase® the WHO Global Database of Individual Case Safety Reports

Kidney EGFR expression together with reported cases of glomerular diseases in the context of anti-EGFR drug administration raise concerns about the renal safety profile of these drugs. This issue is addressed in a case/non-case study carried out on VigiBase®, the WHO global database of individual case safety reports (ICRS). Disproportionality analysis of renal adverse effects related to the selected anti-EGFR drugs, erlotinib, gefitinib, afatinib, osimertinib, cetuximab and panitumumab, was assessed using the reporting odds ratio (ROR). Nine hundred and eighty-nine ICRSs were included. A signal of disproportionate reporting (SDR) was found for afatinib (ROR = 2.70; 95% CI [2.22–3.29]) and erlotinib (ROR = 1.73; 95% CI [1.46–2.04]) with acute kidney injury, and for afatinib (ROR = 2.41; 95% CI [1.78–3.27]), cetuximab (ROR = 1.42; 95% CI [1.14–1.78]) and erlotinib (ROR = 2.23; 95% CI [1.80–2.77]) with renal failure. The preferred term “diarrhoea” was frequently reported in the included cases. An SDR was found for erlotinib with haemolytic and uremic syndrome (ROR = 4.01; 95% CI [1.80–8.94]) and thrombotic microangiopathy (ROR = 4.94; 95% CI [2.80–8.72]). No SDR was seen for glomerular or tubule-interstitial diseases. This study showed that the anti-EGFR drug renal toxicity is mainly related to renal failure in the context of digestive toxicity.

Global Strategies to Minimize Environmental Impacts of Ruminant Production

Demand for ruminant products (dairy products, beef, and sheep meat) is increasing rapidly with population and income growth and the acceleration of urbanization. However, ruminant animals exert the highest environmental impacts and consume the most resources in the livestock system. Increasing studies have focused on various measures to reduce ammonia, greenhouse gas emissions, and resource depletion from ruminant production to consumption. This review offers supply- and demand-side management strategies to reduce the environmental impact of ruminant products and emphasizes the mitigation potential of coupling livestock production with cultivation and renewable energy. On a global scale, more attention should be paid to the green-source trade and to strengthening global technology sharing. The success of these strategies depends on the cost effectiveness of technology, public policy, and financial support. Future studies and practice should focus on global database development for sharing mitigation strategies, thus facilitating technology innovations and socioeconomic feasibility. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 10 is February 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Paratype: A genotyping framework and an open-source tool for Salmonella Paratyphi A

Background: Salmonella enterica serovar Paratyphi A (Salmonella Paratyphi A) is the primary causative agent of paratyphoid fever, which is responsible for an estimated 3.4 million infections annually. However, little genomic information is available on population structure, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and spatiotemporal distribution of the pathogen. With rising antimicrobial resistance and no licensed vaccines, genomic surveillance is important to track the evolution of this pathogen and monitor transmission. Results: We performed whole-genome sequencing of 817 Salmonella Paratyphi A isolates collected from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan and added publicly available 562 genomes to build a global database representing 37 countries, covering 1917-2019. To track the evolution of Salmonella Paratyphi A, we used the existing lineage scheme, developed earlier based on a small dataset, but certain sub-lineages were not homologous, and many isolates could not be assigned a lineage. Therefore, we developed a single nucleotide polymorphism based genotyping scheme, Paratype, a tool that segregates Salmonella Paratyphi A into three primary and nine secondary clades, and 18 genotypes. Each genotype has been assigned a unique allele definition located on a conserved gene. Using Paratype, we identified genomic variation between different sampling locations and specific AMR markers, and mutations in the O2-polysaccharide synthesis locus, a candidate for vaccine development. Conclusions: This large-scale global analysis proposes the first genotyping tool for Salmonella Paratyphi A. Paratype has already been released (https://github.com/CHRF-Genomics/Paratype) as an open-access, command-line tool and is being adopted for large scale genomic analysis. This tool will assist future genomic surveillance and help inform prevention and treatment strategies.

Potential Change of Soil Microbial Diversity in Anticipated Atmospheric-CO2 Elevation Triggers Rhizosphere Activation: A Meta-analysis.

One of the key challenges in present time to meet out growing global food demand without damaging environment under constant threats of climate-extremes. Enhancement of nutrient use efficiency and build up intrinsic system tolerance through soil microbial manipulation has gained significant international support to address this challenge. Impact of elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) on soil microbial diversities both at present and future climatic scenario in spatial and temporal scale is highly debated with respect to its effects on soil functioning, nutrients dynamics and crop productivity and its practical consequences on resource conservation and food security. We conducted a meta-analysis on global database using 572 observations from 202 studies to investigate the effects of elevated CO2 on soil microbial biomass carbon (MBC), yield and structural (soil microbial populations) and functional (soil enzymatic activities) diversities across 22 countries and 108 crop species. Overall, our results revealed that MBC and functional diversity increases with elevated atmospheric-CO2 irrespective of temperature zone and crop type. However, data trends showed structural diversity has been gradually adapted under elevated CO2 across the region over decadal scale. Anticipated elevation of atmospheric CO2 increase rhizospheric activities and could make soil more input demanding and more so in temperate region. Therefore, to fetch the benefits of CO2 fertilization and to meet out the higher demand both plant and soil (microbes), real time judicious nutrient supply is necessary; otherwise, soil priming, loss of fixed soil carbon reserve and land degradation might threat the future food security.

Development of information security model with application of production model

Objective. The purpose of the study is to find methods for solving the problem of ensuring a reliable level of security for cloud services. Production models can be considered the most common models that provide simplicity of knowledge representation and inference organization.Method. The research is based on the application of methods of fuzzy logic and mathematical modeling.Result. It is proposed to use fuzzy models that provide a flexible strategy for processing heterogeneous dynamic interacting processes that represent data and knowledge in an essentially fuzzy state space of objects of analysis.Conclusion. A production model of information security management is proposed, which is used to create data processing and storage centers. The production system includes a rule base, a global database, and a rule interpreter. The effective use of large information resources operating in an uncertain environment on the basis of a production model makes it possible to model and ensure information security of systems.

Diversity of COVID-19 News Media Coverage across 17 Countries: The Influence of Cultural Values, Government Stringency and Pandemic Severity

The current media studies of COVID-19 devote asymmetrical attention to social media; in contrast, newspapers have received comparatively less attention. Newspapers are an integral source of current information that are syndicated and amplified by social media to a wide global audience. This is one of the first known studies to operationalize news media diversity and examine its association with cultural values during the pandemic. We tracked the global diversity of COVID-19 coverage in a news media database of 12 billion words, collated from 28 million articles over 7000 news websites, across 8 months. Media diversity was measured weekly by the number of unique descriptors of 10 target terms of the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19, coronavirus) and normalized by the corpus size for the respective countries per week. Government Stringency was taken from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and cultural scores were taken from Hofstede’s Cultural Values global database. Results showed that Media Diversity Rate increased 6.7 times over 8 months, from the baseline period (October–December 2019) to during the pandemic (January–May 2020). Mixed effects modelling revealed that higher COVID-19 prevalence rates and governmental stringency predicted this increase. Interestingly, collectivist cultures are linked to more diverse media coverage during COVID-19. It is possible that news outlets in collectivist societies are motivated to present a diverse array of topics given the impact of COVID-19 on every segment of society. Of broader significance, we provided a framework to design targeted public health communications that are culturally nuanced.

DarkCideS 1.0, a global database for bats in karsts and caves

Understanding biodiversity patterns as well as drivers of population declines, and range losses provides crucial baselines for monitoring and conservation. However, the information needed to evaluate such trends remains unstandardised and sparsely available for many taxonomic groups and habitats, including the cave-dwelling bats and cave ecosystems. Here, we present the DarkCideS 1.0, a global database of bat caves and bat species based on curated data from the literature, personal collections, and existing datasets. The database contains information for geographical distribution, ecological status, species traits, and parasites and hyperparasites for 679 bat species known to occur in caves or use caves in their life-histories. The database contains 6746 georeferenced occurrences for 402 cave-dwelling bat species from 2002 cave sites in 46 countries and 12 terrestrial biomes. The database has been developed to be a collaborative, open-access, and user-friendly platform, allowing continuous data-sharing among the community of bat researchers and conservation biologists. The database has a range of potential applications in bat research and enables comparative monitoring and prioritisation for conservation.