Prof awarded funding for obesity research
Akilah Dulin Keitah, assistant professor of behavioral and social sciences, received two years’ worth of funding to study childhood obesity in Southeast Asians earlier this month, according to a University press release.
Keitah currently researches health disparities at the Brown Institute for Community Health Promotion, according to an article on News Medical Net. The institute’s work focuses on topics including dietary habits, weight maintenance and “using culturally sensitive materials to promote better health,” according to its website.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded Keitah the grant through its New Connections program, the press release reported.
New Connections grants aim to “increase the exposure of RWJF to researchers and experts that represent historically underrepresented research communities,” according to the program’s website.
“This award will connect me to a network of established experts in research and evaluation related to health and health care, while providing me with an opportunity to evaluate a program that has far-reaching implications for childhood obesity,” Keitah said in the press release.
Respiratory co-infections do not change hospital outcomes, study finds
A recent study led by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital and the Alpert Medical School found that hospitalized patients who were infected with both H1N1 and another respiratory virus did not fare any worse than those who were infected with a single respiratory virus. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE earlier this month.
“There is scant data in the literature regarding the incidence and impact of simultaneous infection by two respiratory viruses, particularly in adults,” said Leonard Mermel, professor of medicine and senior author of the study, in a Lifespan press release.
The researchers examined data from people who were hospitalized between October 2009 and December 2009. They identified 617 patients with a single respiratory virus and 49 patients who were co-infected with two different viruses.
Although patients with multiple infections were more likely to have complications including bacterial pneumonia, they were no more likely to be admitted to the Intensive Care Unit.
“While hospitalized patients with respiratory virus co-infection did not experience poorer outcomes, our findings do not address whether co-infection is a risk factor for hospitalization itself,” said Ignacio Echenique, lead author of the study and a former researcher at Rhode Island Hospital, in the press release.
Study sheds light on succulent evolution
Plants that grow in arid climates, like succulents, store water in “fat” leaves. Evolving such storage mechanisms required leaf veins to grow in three dimensions, according to new research led by Erika Edwards, assistant professor of biology, and Matt Ogburn PhD’12.
Their study was published in the journal Current Biology earlier this month, according to a University press release.
Leaves contain cells in which photosynthesis — the process through which plants convert light energy, carbon dioxide and water into sugar — takes place. Plants must have an infrastructure through which to then transport water from their roots to their leaves and nutrients produced in the leaves to the rest of the plant.
Fat leaves present an additional transportation challenge — even though they store a large amount of water, plump leaves require the veins transporting water and other nutrients to reach farther, reducing their efficiency.
“There must be some kind of a trade-off in a fat leaf that’s really different from most flat leaves,” Ogburn said in the press release. “There’s a benefit to that in storing water in the leaf, but it’s going to have a cost to it in terms of the other things the leaf has to do.”
To determine how the vein structure of fat leaves evolved, Edwards and Ogburn examined the water storage of more than 80 dry-climate plant species and the vein structure of over 40.
The researchers found that once plant leaves reached a certain thickness, their vein structure switched from two dimensions to a three-dimensional ring-shaped structure, the press release reported.
“If you had just a 2-D-veined pile of species and a 3-D-veined pile of species, and you didn’t know how they were related to each other, you might say, maybe 3-D venation just evolved once a long time ago and had absolutely nothing to do with succulence,” Edwards said in the release. “But when you can lay them out on a phylogeny and reconstruct how many times this transition happened — the more times you see this repeated correlation between these two traits, the more power you have to say that this is actually adaptive.”
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