Latest news with #UCSanDiego
Los Angeles Times
20 hours ago
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
Severe obesity in U.S. children has more than tripled since 2008
The proportion of severely overweight children in the U.S. has skyrocketed in recent years, with the highest rates seen in adolescents and Black children, a new study found. Roughly 23% of all children were obese in 2023, up from 19% in 2008, according to the survey published this month in JAMA Network Open. Additionally, more than 1% of children between the ages of 2 and 18 had 'extremely severe obesity' — a 250% increase from the start of the study, the researchers from UC San Diego found. Phillipp Hartmann, the study's corresponding author, said he hopes the results lead to more trials that test the benefits of powerful weight loss drugs called GLP-1s for children and adolescents with severe obesity. 'It might be reasonable in those patients to have the weight loss medications very early,' he said in an interview. Medical professionals may be open to broadening the use of the popular weight loss drugs to treat obesity and diabetes in ever-younger patients. The Food and Drug Administration has approved only semaglutide, the main ingredient in Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy, for children 12 and older. But weight-loss medicines have been tested on kids as young as 6. Severe obesity also came with a higher risk of other health complications, such prediabetes and diabetes, severe insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that can increase the chance of heart disease and stroke. The results were based on information from more than 25,000 children gathered as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics. Amponsah writes for Bloomberg.
New York Post
2 days ago
- Health
- New York Post
Weed can help your migraines, says new study — if you use it the right way
High hopes for headache relief. A landmark new study suggests that inhaling a precise blend of CBD and THC can provide fast, meaningful relief from migraines. The research — presented at the American Headache Society (AHS) Annual Meeting 2025 — is the first of its kind. 4 The research — presented at the American Headache Society (AHS) Annual Meeting 2025 — is the first of its kind. Kateryna – 'This is the first placebo-controlled study in this space,' Dr. Nathaniel M. Schuster, a pain and headache neurologist and associate professor of anesthesiology at the UC San Diego (UCSD) Health Center for Pain Medicine, told Medscape Medical News. 'It's the first real — to me — compelling evidence for the antimigraine effects of cannabis in humans.' Scientists provided 92 patients — mostly women, with an average age of 41 — a treatment of 6% THC, 11% CBD, a combination of 6% THC and 11% CBD or a placebo. Roughly 67.2% in the THC/CBD group reported pain relief at 2 hours, compared to 46.6% in the placebo group. And approximately 34.5% of patients in the THC/CBD group achieved 'pain freedom' within that timeframe, compared to 15.5% in the placebo group. Patients also reported sustained pain relief up to 24 hours and most bothersome symptom freedom lasted through 48 hours. 4 'It's the first real — to me — compelling evidence for the antimigraine effects of cannabis in humans,' Schuster said. ststoev – Best of all: there were no serious side effects, although people in the THC-only group definitely got a little more high. 'It's known that CBD is a noncompetitive, negative allosteric modulator of the CB-1 [cannabinoid receptor 1] receptor that decreases the psychoactive side effects of the THC,' Schuster said. It's a big win for weed but, before you get rolling, Schuster noted that the patients received very controlled doses. 'A lot of neurologists, myself included, suspect that there could be medication overuse headache with [using] cannabinoids frequently,' he said. 'When I counsel patients now, I say, 'Look, we were only studying infrequent — four times over the course of a year — administration.'' 4 'A lot of neurologists, myself included, suspect that there could be medication overuse headache with [using] cannabinoids frequently,' he said. Africa Studio – He encouraged patients to limit the treatment to under 10 times per month and to 'optimally be using it really for those migraines that would not respond to standard-of-care therapy.' Weed has skyrocketed in popularity since 38 states and DC have legalized it for medical use. Of those, 24 states and DC have also cleared the way for adults 21 and over to use it recreationally. Research suggests that marijuana has the potential to ease chronic pain and reduce muscle spasms and stiffness linked to MS. Cannabis products have also been shown to boost appetite in HIV/AIDS and cancer patients, and combat chemo-related nausea. 4 Weed has skyrocketed in popularity since 38 states and DC have legalized it for medical use. Of those, 24 states and DC have also cleared the way for adults 21 and over to use it recreationally. amenic181 – Other potential benefits include easing stress, alleviating PTSD symptoms and aiding sleep in some people. However, mounting evidence does suggest it can pose risks to your heart, with one recent study showing marijuana has as much of a negative impact on cardiovascular health as tobacco — even if you don't smoke. Another recent study suggests that cannabis use raises the risk of heart attack and stroke more than cocaine, while other research claims it's sending older people to the hospital. Shockingly, scientists have also found that people with cannabis use disorder — that is, using weed enough that it causes problems and impairs your life — have altered dopamine activity in the brain that closely resembles patterns observed in psychosis. 'The biggest problem is that ever since it was made a Schedule 1 narcotic [in 1970], it has made it very difficult to do really well-devised, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies,' Dr. Ken Weinberg, chief medical officer of Cannabis Doctors of New York, previously told The Post. 'I don't think there's enough data.'
WIRED
4 days ago
- Health
- WIRED
At Least 750 US Hospitals Faced Disruptions During Last Year's CrowdStrike Outage, Study Finds
Jul 19, 2025 11:54 AM Of those, more than 200 appear to have had outages of services related to patient care following CrowdStrike's disastrous crash, researchers have revealed. Photograph:When, one year ago today, a buggy update to software sold by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike took down millions of computers around the world and sent them into a death spiral of repeated reboots, the global cost of all those crashed machines was equivalent to one of the worst cyberattacks in history. Some of the various estimates of the total damage worldwide have stretched well into the billions of dollars. Now a new study by a team of medical cybersecurity researchers has taken the first steps toward quantifying the cost of CrowdStrike's disaster not in dollars, but in potential harm to hospitals and their patients across the US. It reveals evidence that hundreds of those hospitals' services were disrupted during the outage, and raises concerns about potentially grave effects to patients' health and well-being. Researchers from the University of California San Diego today marked the one-year anniversary of CrowdStrike's catastrophe by releasing a paper in JAMA Network Open, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association Network, that attempts for the first time to create a rough estimate of the number of hospitals whose networks were affected by that IT meltdown on July 19, 2024, as well as which services on those networks appeared to have been disrupted. A chart showing a massive spike in detected medical service outages on the day of CrowdStrike's crashes. Courtesy of UCSD and JAMA Network Open By scanning internet-exposed parts of hospital networks before, during, and after the crisis, they detected that at minimum 759 hospitals in the US appear to have experienced network disruption of some kind on that day. They found that more than 200 of those hospitals seemed to have been hit specifically with outages that directly affected patients, from inaccessible health records and test scans to fetal monitoring systems that went offline. Of the 2,232 hospital networks they were able to scan, the researchers detected that fully 34 percent of them appear to have suffered from some type of disruption. All of that indicates the CrowdStrike outage could have been a 'significant public health issue,' argues Christian Dameff, a UCSD emergency medicine doctor and cybersecurity researcher, and one of the paper's authors. 'If we had had this paper's data a year ago when this happened," he adds, 'I think we would have been much more concerned about how much impact it really had on US health care.' CrowdStrike, in a statement to WIRED, strongly criticized the UCSD study and JAMA's decision to publish it, calling the paper 'junk science.' They note that the researchers didn't verify that the disrupted networks ran Windows or CrowdStrike software, and point out that Microsoft's cloud service Azure experienced a major outage on the same day, which may have been responsible for some of the hospital network disruptions. 'Drawing conclusions about downtime and patient impact without verifying the findings with any of the hospitals mentioned is completely irresponsible and scientifically indefensible,' the statement reads. 'While we reject the methodology and conclusions of this report, we recognize the impact the incident had a year ago,' the statement adds. 'As we've said from the start, we sincerely apologize to our customers and those affected and continue to focus on strengthening the resilience of our platform and the industry.' In response to CrowdStrike's criticisms, the UCSD researchers say they stand by their findings. The Azure outage that CrowdStrike noted, they point out, began the previous night and affected mostly the central US, while the outages they measured began at roughly midnight US east coast time on July 19—about the time when CrowdStrike's faulty update began crashing computers—and affected the entire country. (Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 'We are unaware of any other hypothesis that would explain such simultaneous geographically-distributed service outages inside hospital networks such as we see here' other than CrowdStrike's crash, writes UCSD computer science professor Stefan Savage, one of the paper's co-authors, in an email to WIRED. (JAMA declined to comment in response to CrowdStrike's criticisms.) In fact, the researchers describe their count of detected hospital disruptions as only a minimum estimate, not a measure of the real blast radius of CrowdStrike's crashes. That's in part because the researchers were only able to scan roughly a third of America's 6,000-plus hospitals, which would suggest that the true number of medical facilities affected may have been several times higher. The UCSD researchers' findings stemmed from a larger internet-scanning project they call Ransomwhere?, funded by the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health and launched in early 2024 with the intention of detecting hospitals' ransomware outages. As a result of that project, they were already probing US hospitals using the scanning tools ZMap and Censys when CrowdStrike's July 2024 calamity struck. For the 759 hospitals in which the researchers detected that a service was knocked offline on July 19, their scans also allowed them to analyze which specific services appeared to be down, using publicly available tools like Censys and the Lantern Project to identify different medical services, as well as manually checking some web-based services they could visit. They found that 202 hospitals experienced outages of services directly related to patients. Those services included staff portals used to view patient health records, fetal monitoring systems, tools for remote monitoring of patient care, secure document transfer systems that allow patients to be transferred to another hospital, 'pre-hospital' information systems like the tools that can share initial test results from an ambulance to an emergency room for patients requiring time-critical treatments, and the image storage and retrieval systems that are used to make scan results available to doctors and patients. 'If a patient was having a stroke and the radiologist needed to look at a scan image quickly, it would be much harder to get it from the CT scanner to the radiologist to read,' Dameff offers as one hypothetical example. The researchers also found that 212 hospitals had outages of 'operationally relevant' systems like staff scheduling platforms, bill payment systems, and tools for managing patient wait times. In another category of 'research relevant' services, the study found that 62 hospitals faced outages. The biggest fraction of outages in the researchers' findings was an 'other' category that included offline services that the researchers couldn't fully identify in their scans at 287 hospitals, suggesting that some of those, too, might have been uncounted patient-relevant services. 'Nothing in this paper says that someone's stroke got misdiagnosed or there was a delay in the care of someone getting life-saving antibiotics, for instance. But there might have been,' says Dameff. 'I think there's a lot of evidence of these types of disruptions. It would be hard to argue that people weren't impacted at a potentially pretty significant level.' The study's findings give a sprawling new sense of scope to anecdotal reports of how CrowdStrike's outage affected medical facilities that already surfaced over the last year. WIRED reported at the time that Baylor hospital network, a major nonprofit health care system, and Quest Diagnostics were both unable to process routine bloodwork. The Boston-area hospital system Mass General Brigham reportedly had to bring 45,000 of its PCs back online, each of which required a manual fix that took 15 to 20 minutes. In their study, researchers also tried to roughly measure the length of downtime of the hospital services affected by the CrowdStrike outage, and found that most recovered relatively quickly: About 58 percent of the hospital services were back online within six hours, and only 8 percent or so took more than 48 hours to recover. That's a far shorter disruption than the outages from actual cyberattacks that have hit hospitals, the researchers note: Mass-spreading malware attacks like NotPetya and WannaCry in 2017 as well as the Change Healthcare ransomware attack that struck the payment provider subsidiary of United Healthcare in early 2024 all shut down scores of hospitals across the US—or in the case of WannaCry, the United Kingdom—for days or weeks in some cases. But the effects of the CrowdStrike debacle nonetheless deserve to be compared to those intentionally inflicted digital disasters for hospitals, the researchers argue. 'The duration of the downtimes is different, but the breadth, the number of hospitals affected across the entire country, the scale, the potential intensity of the disruption is similar,' says Jeffrey Tully, a pediatrician, anesthesiologist, and cybersecurity researcher who coauthored the study. A map showing the duration of the apparent downtime of detected medical service outages in hospitals across the US. Courtesy of UCSD and JAMA Network Open A delay of hours, or even minutes, can increase mortality rates for heart attack and stroke patients, says Josh Corman, a cybersecurity researcher with a focus on medical cybersecurity at the Institute for Security and Technology and former CISA staffer who reviewed the UCSD study. That means that even a shorter-duration outage in patient related services across hundreds of hospitals could have concrete and seriously harmful—if hard to measure—consequences. Aside from drawing a first estimate of the possible toll on patients' health in this single incident, the UCSD team emphasizes that the real work of their study is to show that, with the right tools, it's possible to monitor and learn from these mass medical network outages. The result may be a better sense of how to prevent—or in the case of more intentional downtime from cyberattacks and ransomware—protect hospitals from experiencing them in the future.
Economic Times
4 days ago
- Business
- Economic Times
No computer science degree needed only to learn coding: Google's head of Android
Sameer Samat, Google's head of Android, believes the computer science degree needs a fresh 'rebrand,' according to a report by Business Insider. He explained that many people see it simply as learning to do Java coding, adding, "If that's what you want to do, you don't need a degree." Samat, who studied computer science at UC San Diego, disagrees with this narrow view. He said, "It's definitely not learning to code. It is the science, in my opinion, of solving problems." While coding is a part of the curriculum, the main focus lies in analysing problems, designing systems, and working collaboratively, he AI increasingly replacing the role of software engineers, many are beginning to question the value of a computer science degree. Automation is making it more difficult for graduates to land full-time roles and internships in the space. Recently, several tech leaders admitted to AI being used to generate 30% to 50% of work, especially coding, in companies such as Google and Salesforce, among others. However, reflecting on his own experience, Samat recalled learning to code during a time when Assembly language was being phased out. He said studying Assembly was valuable because it helped him understand how machines work at a deeper level. He believes that programming will always involve higher-level, more abstract languages. "Maybe someday it'll be natural language, where we're just talking about what we want, and something is building the underlying software for you," he said. But he added that this future is "not for a while."Samat also cautioned students against choosing computer science simply because it seems attractive to employers. He said, "I think it's really important that it be something that you're really excited about going deep in and really becoming a 5% top expert in the field."
Medscape
5 days ago
- Health
- Medscape
You Are When You Eat: Microbiome Rhythm and Metabolic Health
You are when you eat? Perhaps. Similar to circadian rhythms that help regulate when we naturally fall asleep and wake up, microbial rhythms in our gut are naturally active at certain times of the day to help regulate our digestion. Researchers from the UC San Diego sought out to track these microbial rhythms to determine whether aligning the times we eat to when our gut microbes are most active can bolster our metabolic health. This alignment is known as time-restricted feeding (TRF). 'Microbial rhythms are daily fluctuations in the composition and function of microbes living in our gut. Much like how our bodies follow an internal clock (circadian rhythm), gut microbes also have their own rhythms, adjusting their activities based on the time of day and when we eat,' said Amir Zarrinpar , MD, PhD, gastroenterologist and associate professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and senior author of the study. Zarrinpar and his team were particularly interested in observing whether adopting the TRF approach counteracted the harmful metabolic effects often associated with consuming a high-fat diet. The study is also notable for the team's use of technology able to observe real-time microbial changes in the gut — something not previously attainable with existing metagenomics. How the Study Evolved With New Tech Researchers separated three groups of mice to analyze their microbiome activity: one on a high-fat diet with unrestricted access, another on the same high-fat diet within a TRF window of 8 hours per day, and a control group on a normal chow diet with unrestricted access. 'In mice, [their] microbial rhythms are well-aligned with their nocturnal lifestyle. For example, during their active (nighttime) period, certain beneficial microbial activities increase, helping digest food, absorb nutrients, and regulate metabolism,' said Zarrinpar. As a result, the team made sure the mice's TRF window was at night or when they would normally be awake. 'We chose an 8-hour feeding window based on earlier research showing this time period allows mice to consume the same total calories as those with unlimited food access,' said Zarrinpar. 'By controlling [the] calories in this way, we ensure any metabolic or microbial benefits we observe are specifically due to the timing of eating, rather than differences in total food intake.' But before any observations could be made, the team first needed a way to see real-time changes in the animals' gut microbiomes. Zarrinpar and his team were able to uncover this, thanks to metatranscriptomics, a technique used to capture real-time microbial activity by profiling RNA transcripts. Compared with the more traditional technique of metagenomics, which could only be used to identify which genes were present, metatranscriptomics provided more in-depth temporal and activity-related context, allowing the team to observe dynamic microbial changes. '[Metatranscriptomics] helps us understand not just which microbes are present, but specifically what they are doing at any given moment,' said Zarrinpar. 'In contrast, metagenomics looks only at microbial DNA, which provides information about what microbes are potentially capable of doing, but doesn't tell us if those genes are actively expressed. By comparing microbial gene expression (using metatranscriptomics) and microbial gene abundance (using metagenomics) across different diet and feeding conditions in [light and dark] phases, we aimed to identify how feeding timing might influence microbial activity.' Because metagenomics focuses on stable genetic material, this technique cannot capture the real-time microbial responses to dietary timing presented in rapidly changing, short-lived RNA. At the same time, the instability of the RNA makes it difficult to test hypotheses experimentally and explains why researchers haven't more widely relied on metatranscriptomics. To overcome this difficulty, Zarrinpar and his team had to wait to take advantage of improved bioinformatics tools to simplify their analysis of complex datasets. 'It took several years for us to analyze this dataset because robust computational tools for metatranscriptomic analysis were not widely available when we initially collected our samples. Additionally, sequencing costs were very high. To clearly identify microbial activity, we needed deep sequencing coverage to distinguish species-level differences in gene expression, especially for genes that are common across multiple types of microbes,' said Zarrinpar. What They Found After monitoring these groups of mice for 8 weeks, the results were revealed. As predicted, the mice with unrestricted access to a high-fat diet exhibited signs of metabolic dysfunction due to disruptions in their circadian and microbial rhythms. 'When mice have free access to a high-fat diet, their normal eating behavior changes significantly. Instead of limiting their activity and feeding to their active nighttime period, these mice begin to stay awake and eat during the day, which is their typical rest phase,' Zarrinpar explained. 'This unusual daytime activity interferes with important physiological processes. Consequently, the animals experience circadian misalignment, a condition similar to what human shift workers experience when their sleep-wake and eating cycles don't match their internal biological clocks,' he continued. 'This misalignment can negatively affect metabolism, immunity, and overall health, potentially leading to metabolic diseases.' For the mice that consumed a high-fat diet within a TRF window, metabolic phenotyping demonstrated that their specific diet regimen had protected them from harmful high-fat induced effects including adiposity, inflammation, and insulin resistance. Even more promising, the mice not only were protected from metabolic disruption but also experienced physiological improvements including glucose homeostasis and the partial restoration of the daily microbial rhythms absent in the mice with unrestricted access to a high-fat diet. While the TRF approach did not fully restore the normal, healthy rhythmicity seen in the control mice, the researchers noted distinct shifts in microbial patterns that indicated time-dependent enrichment in genes attributed to lipid and carbohydrate metabolism. Better Metabolic Health — and Better Tools for Researching It Thankfully, the latest advancements in sequencing technology, including long-read sequencing methods, are making metatranscriptomics easier for research. 'These newer platforms offer greater resolution at a lower cost, making metatranscriptomics increasingly accessible,' said Zarrinpar. With these emerging technologies, he believes metatranscriptomics will become a more standard, widely used method for researchers to better understand the influence of microbial activity on our health. These tools, for example, enabled Zarrinpar and the team to delve deeper and focus on the transcription of a particular enzyme they identified as a pivotal influence in observable metabolic improvements: bile salt hydrolase (BSH), known to regulate lipid and glucose metabolism. The TRF approach notably enhanced the expression of the BSH gene during the daytime in the gut microbe Dubosiella newyorkensis , which has a functional human equivalent. To determine why this happened, the team leveraged genetic engineering to insert several active BSH gene variants into a benign strain of gut bacteria to administer to the mice. The only variant to produce metabolic improvements was the one derived from Dubosiella newyorkensis ; the mice who were given this BSH-expressing engineered native bacteria (ENB) had increased lean muscle mass, less body fat, lower insulin levels, enhanced insulin sensitivity, and better blood glucose regulation. 'It is still early to know the full clinical potential of this new BSH-expressing engineered native bacterium,' said Zarrinpar. 'However, our long-term goal is to develop a therapeutic that can be administered as a single dose, stably colonize the gut, and provide long-lasting metabolic benefits.' Testing the engineered bacteria in obese and diabetic mice on a high-fat diet would be a next step to determine whether its potential indeed holds up. If proven successful, it could then be used to develop future targeted therapies and interventions to treat common metabolic disorders. With this engineered bacteria, Zarrinpar and his team are hopeful that it alone can replicate the microbial benefits associated with following a TRF dietary schedule. 'In our study, the engineered bacterium continuously expressed the enzyme DnBSH1, independently of dietary or environmental factors. As a result, the bacterium provided metabolic benefits similar to those seen with TRF, even without requiring the mice to strictly adhere to a TRF schedule,' said Zarrinpar. 'This suggests the exciting possibility that this engineered microbe might serve either as a replacement for TRF or as a way to enhance its beneficial effects,' he continued. 'Further studies will help determine whether combining this ENB with TRF could provide additional or synergistic improvements in metabolic health.' Looking Ahead 'As the pioneer of the single anastomosis duodenal switch which separates bile from food until halfway down the GI tract, I agree that bile is very important in controlling metabolism and glucose,' said Mitchell Roslin , MD, FACS, professor of surgery at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine, Hempstead, New York, chief director of bariatric and metabolic surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, who was not involved in the study. 'Using enzymes or medications that work in the GI tract without absorption into the body is very interesting and has great potential. It is an early but exciting prospect.' However, Roslin expressed some reservations. 'I think we are still trying to understand whether the difference in microbiomes is the cause or effect/association. Is the microbiome the difference or is a different microbiome representative of a diet that has more fiber and less processed foods? Thus, while I find this academically fascinating, I think that there are very basic questions that need better answers, before we look at the transcription of bacteria.' Furthermore, translating the metabolic results observed in mice to humans might not be as straightforward. 'Small animal research is mandatory, but how the findings convert to humans is highly speculative,' said Roslin. 'Mice that are studied are usually bred for medical research, with reduced genetic variation. Many animal models are more sensitive to time-restricted eating and caloric restriction than humans.' While it requires further research and validation, this UC San Diego study nevertheless contributes to our overall understanding of host-microbe interactions. 'We demonstrate that host circadian rhythms significantly influence microbial function, and conversely, these microbial functions can directly impact host metabolism,' said Zarrinpar. 'Importantly, we now have a method to test how specific microbial activities affect host physiology by engineering native gut bacteria.' Roslin similarly emphasized the importance of continued investment in exploring the microbial ecosystem inside us all. 'There is wider evidence that bacteria and microbes are not just passengers using us for a ride but perhaps manipulating every action we take.'
