Latest news with #UniversityofCaliforniaLosAngeles
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Groundbreaking AI pen detects Parkinson's by analysing handwriting
Scientists have developed a special pen that analyses hand movements using artificial intelligence to detect early signs of Parkinson's, an advance that could lead to low-cost diagnosis for the disease. The device can identify differences in the writing styles of people with and without the neurological disease, which affects 10 million people worldwide. Symptoms include tremors and deteriorating limb and body movements. It is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's, and the fastest growing of such conditions. However, diagnoses typically done by observing patient motor skills remain underestimates in low- and middle-income countries due to a shortage of specialists. Handwriting is a complex process requiring brain-hand coordination and previous research has shown it's substantially affected by Parkinson's. The AI pen containing magnetic ink detects signs of Parkinson's by analysing handwriting samples. 'Here we developed a diagnostic pen, featuring a soft magnetoelastic tip and ferrofluid ink, capable of sensitively and quantitatively converting both on-surface and in-air writing motions into high-fidelity, analysable electrical signals for self-powered PD (Parkinson's Disease) diagnostics,' researchers, including from the University of California Los Angeles, said. The researchers demonstrated that, with the assistance of an AI system, the pen could successfully distinguish handwriting samples of three patients with Parkinson's from those of 13 healthy participants. They found the device could identify Parkinson's disease in patients with more than 95 per cent accuracy in the small set of 16 individuals. The researchers said they hoped the pen could be developed into a low-cost, accurate, and widely distributable technology to improve Parkinson's diagnostics across large populations and in resource-limited areas. 'Our development of the diagnostic pen represents a low-cost, widely disseminable and reliable technology with the potential to improve PD diagnostics across large populations and resource-limited areas,' the researchers said. 'It is particularly beneficial for untreated individuals who may not yet recognise themselves as potential patients with PD.' Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Disputed North Carolina race offers playbook for beaten candidates, experts warn
A disputed North Carolina state supreme court race that took nearly six months to resolve revealed a playbook for future candidates who lose elections to retroactively challenge votes, observers warn, but its ultimate resolution sent a signal that federal courts are unlikely to support an effort to overturn the results of an election. Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes last November out of around 5.5m cast. But for months afterwards, Griffin waged an aggressive legal fight to get 65,000 votes thrown out after the election, even though those voters followed all of the rules election officials had set in advance. The effort was largely seen as a long shot until the North Carolina court of appeals accepted the challenge and said more than 60,000 voters had to prove their eligibility, months after the election, or have their votes thrown out. The Republican-controlled North Carolina supreme court significantly narrowed the number of people who had to prove their eligibility, but still left the door open to more than 1,000 votes being tossed. However, Judge Richard Myers II, a conservative federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, halted that effort on 5 May and ordered the North Carolina state board of elections to certify the race. 'You establish the rules before the game. You don't change them after the game is done,' he wrote in his ruling. Griffin shortly after said he would not appeal against the election and conceded the race. The North Carolina episode marked the most aggressive push by a Republican to overturn an election since Donald Trump's blunt push to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race. While both efforts were unsuccessful, the North Carolina state court's embrace of such a brazen effort to disenfranchise voters after an election could set the stage for another candidate to try the same thing. 'The damage to future North Carolina elections has already been done,' Bryan Anderson, a North Carolina reporter who authors the Substack newsletter Anderson Alerts, warned. The North Carolina judges who had ruled in favor of Griffin, Anderson wrote, 'have issued decisions paving the way for retroactive voter challenges. It's a view that can't be put back in a box and stands to create little incentive for candidates to concede defeat in close elections going forward.' 'There's now also precedent for wrongly challenging voters who followed all rules in place at the time of an election and leaving them without any means to address concerns with their ballots,' he added. Although the North Carolina state board of elections was not willing to entertain Griffin's challenges in the future this time around, North Carolina Republicans wrestled control of the state elections board from Democrats, and might be more willing to entertain efforts to disenfranchise voters. Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles said the episode sent 'two conflicting signals, and it's hard to know which one is going to dominate'. On the one hand, he said Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in which Republicans are 'increasingly willing to believe' elections are being stolen and embrace efforts to overturn them. 'On the other hand, the fact that you have pushback, at least from the federal courts, should give some people pause,' he said. Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said he believed the saga 'closed the door' to similar challenges in the future. 'Certainly it is a shame that it took six months to get here, but the end result here is a reaffirmation of the fact that the federal courts aren't going to stand for changing the rules for an election after it's been run,' he said. 'Will other people try this? Maybe. But I think the lesson that should be learned from this is actually this won't work.' But Griffin's efforts may have 'only failed because the federal courts that oversee North Carolina happen to be free of partisan corruption', Mark Stern, a legal reporter, wrote in Slate. 'But what if a Republican candidate loses by a hair in, say, Texas, where state and federal courts are badly tainted by GOP bias,' he wrote. 'Griffin has laid out the blueprint for an election heist in such a scenario, with Scotus standing as the lone bulwark against an assault on democracy.' Although Republicans have been responsible for bringing election denialism into the mainstream in recent years, Benjamin Ginsberg, a well-respected Republican election lawyer who worked on George W Bush's team during the Florida recount in 2000, said the legal strategy Griffin deployed was essentially what Al Gore tried to do. 'That strategy has not worked, which is not to say somebody won't try it again. Because history would teach you that candidates who lose narrow races, try everything. Throw it on the wall and see what sticks,' he said.
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Health
- Forbes
The Future Of Researchers In The U.S. Is In Jeopardy
UCLA students, researchers and demonstrators rally during a "Kill the Cuts" protest against the ... More Trump administration's funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles on April 8, 2025. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 'DOGE,' have made drastic cuts to research funding throughout the Health and Human Services agencies. The radical reductions struck the National Institutes of Health particularly hard, throwing universities and research centers into a panic and scramble to see what might be salvaged. The severe budget cuts will leave lasting harm to research projects and toe the careers and personal lives of many researchers. Here's what several researchers said about the toll on them and their research study participants. Two Yale researchers who focus on mental illness and homelessness have abruptly lost their grant funding. They and others reportedly received the same form letter: 'This award no longer effectuates agency priorities. Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness. Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion ('DEI') studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans. Therefore, it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize such research programs.' One researcher said that what was particularly painful was what felt like a betrayal of trust to the community. Part of the grant was employing and training unhoused people. 'We were able to pay people and restore some justice. That was one of the more heartbreaking things' about losing the grant. The participants had a 'platform where they could impact the system they depend on. We set out to empower their voices, and it feels bad not to deliver on what we said.' She added that 'pulling the rug out harms that trust and our ability to approach' them in the future. Many university researchers are expected to fund their positions and staff through research grants. On a personal note, she said the loss of funding is 'terrifying as someone who is junior in my career' because these research grants are the 'trajectory to promotion.' Researchers have had to fire staff and, without their grants, are likely to lose their position with the university…and that could lead to losing their home and disrupting their children's schooling by having to move. The other researcher noted that their community partners 'are the experts in this project, and they've been dropped.' Trying to look on the bright side of this trauma, she added, 'it's forced us to be able to talk to a wider spectrum of people about why our work is important' and to think about how to convince someone that this research is worth doing. Paige Jarreau has a series, Silenced Science Stories, that is an illustrated series of portraits of other scientists whose work has been affected or who have been forced out of their research by budget cuts or firings. Harvard's Brittany Charlton, an epidemiologist and founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence, anticipated these kinds of cuts coming well before many others did, and has long been used to being targeted, as are abortion researchers. She observed that they are in a different grief space than those who are just beginning to realize what is happening to them. Because of those experiences, she is much more outspoken and wrote an excellent article about why she is suing RFK. She notes there 'that science should not be subject to political whims,' and having certain topics fall into disfavor is a 'violation of both congressional mandates and the NIH's own strategic plan.' In our interview, she stressed that she (and others) had a five-year grant and that Congress has the authority to allocate funds under the Constitution. So having the President say, 'We're canceling your existing grants because they don't align with our executive orders' is just so illegal.' Her suit notes these were existing contracts, and breaching these violates the Constitution as well as contractual law. She had 'about $15.9 million dollars [in NIH grants], and at least another $5.9 of that still needed to be spent in order to complete' her research projects. 'All of that money was then terminated,' wasting the entirety of the funding and the years of effort. The US has already invested so much, and ' then to cut it off as maybe the least efficient thing you could think of.' While Charlton notes these grant terminations mark 'the end of my center, the end of my career,' she focused more on the losses to the community, all the study volunteers, and public health advances. The suit also targets NIH and its director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, HHS and its head, RFK, Jr. Other plaintiffs in the suit include the American Public Health Association, United Auto Workers, which represents a number of postdocs and students), Ibis Reproductive Health, professor Katie Edwards, postdoc Nicole Maphis, and Peter Lurie (president of Center for Science in the Public Interest), who all had grants canceled. The effect of these abrupt cuts in funding from HHS across each of these agencies is an exodus of researchers from the US to other countries, many of whom have been long-term rivals. The US is losing its cutting edge and ability for long-term innovative research. What each of the researchers I spoke with asked is simple—bring science-based decisions back.
The Hill
22-04-2025
- Health
- The Hill
Transition to telemedicine has come with considerable reductions in carbon emissions: Study
The use of telemedicine reduced carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-fueled cars per month in 2023, a new study has determined. These findings suggest that telemedicine could have a modest but tangible contribution to curbing the effects of climate change, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care on Tuesday. 'As Congress debates whether to extend or modify pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities, our results provide important evidence for policymakers to consider,' John Mafi, an associate professor-in-residence at the University of California Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement. Specifically, those considerations could focus on the idea 'that telemedicine has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of US health care delivery,' Mafi added. Today, the U.S. health system is responsible for about 9 percent of domestic greenhouse gas emission — worsening the impacts of climate change and thereby posing a possible threat to human health, according to the authors. Meanwhile, because the transportation sector accounts for more than 28 percent of the country's total emissions, the authors argued telemedicine would have the potential to decrease the environmental footprint of healthcare services. To draw their conclusions, the researchers used the existing Milliman MedInsight Emerging Experience database to quantify almost 1.5 million telemedicine visits, including 66,000 in rural regions, from April 1 to June 30, 2023. Ultimately, they estimated that between 741,000 and 1.35 million of those visits occurred instead of in-person appointments. As a result of that shift to telemedicine, the researchers estimated carbon emissions reductions of between 21.4 million and 47.6 million kilograms per month. That quantity is approximately equivalent to cutting the carbon dioxide generated by 61,000 to 130,000 gas-powered vehicles each month or by recycling 1.8 million to 4 million trash bags, according to the study. The researchers acknowledged that there were some limitations to their findings, including the fact that the results were based on a single, easy-to-access resource rather than a random selection. They also noted that telemedicine use has dropped since the end of the pandemic — potentially leading to overestimations regarding the emissions averted. Nonetheless, they maintained that telemedicine does provide a significant chance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to therefore bring benefits to human health. 'The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,' co-senior author A. Mark Fendrick, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. 'The environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions,' Fendrick added.
Express Tribune
19-04-2025
- Health
- Express Tribune
UCLA scientists create drug that restores movement after stroke
Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles have developed a groundbreaking new drug that could change stroke recovery forever. Called DDL 920, the medication is the first to fully restore motor function without the need for long term physical therapy. Dr Thomas Carmichael, Chair of UCLA's Department of Neurology and lead researcher, said the drug marks a new era in stroke rehabilitation, one led by molecular medicine rather than conventional therapy. In trials on mice, DDL 920 successfully repaired brain damage and restored lost neural connections. The team is now preparing to begin human testing. Every year, strokes affect more than 15 million people worldwide, and many survivors are left with long term physical impairments. Current treatments mainly focus on preventing further strokes and improving quality of life—but none directly reverse the damage already done. Though the drug is still in its early stages, its potential has already sparked excitement across the medical community. Experts believe it could transform the way we approach not just stroke recovery, but also other brain injuries and degenerative conditions in the future.
