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      What to Know About CKM, the Link Between Heart Health, Diabetes and Kidney Disease

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      And they’re increasingly common. Here’s what to know about the shared risk factors for these diseases.Heart disease, diabetes and kidney disease are among the most common chronic illnesses in the United States — and they’re all closely connected.Adults with diabetes are twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke compared with those who don’t have diabetes. People with diabetes — Type 1 and Type 2 — are also at risk of developing kidney disease. And when the kidneys don’t work well, a person’s heart has to work even harder to pump blood to them, which can then lead to heart disease.The three illnesses overlap so much that last year the American Heart Association coined the term cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome to describe patients who have two or more of these diseases, or are at risk of developing them. A new study suggests that nearly 90 percent of American adults already show some early signs of these connected conditions.While only 15 percent of Americans meet the criteria for advanced stages of C.K.M. syndrome, meaning they have been diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease or kidney disease or are at high risk of developing them, the numbers are still “astronomically higher than expected” said Dr. Rahul Aggarwal, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and co-author of the study.The research suggests that people should pay attention to shared risk factors for these diseases early on — including excess body fat, uncontrolled blood sugar, high blood pressure and high cholesterol or triglyceride levels.A Dangerous CycleYour kidneys, heart and metabolic system (which helps process the food you eat into energy and maintains your blood sugar levels) work closely together. If something goes awry with one, it can lead to problems with the others.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Summer 2023 Was the Northern Hemisphere’s Hottest in 2,000 Years, Study Finds

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      Scientists used tree rings to compare last year’s extreme heat with temperatures over the past two millenniums.The summer of 2023 was exceptionally hot. Scientists have already established that it was the warmest Northern Hemisphere summer since around 1850, when people started systematically measuring and recording temperatures.Now, researchers say it was the hottest in 2,000 years, according to a new study published in the journal Nature that compares 2023 with a longer temperature record across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The study goes back before the advent of thermometers and weather stations, to the year A.D. 1, using evidence from tree rings.“That gives us the full picture of natural climate variability,” said Jan Esper, a climatologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and lead author of the paper.Extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are responsible for most of the recent increases in Earth’s temperature, but other factors — including El Niño, an undersea volcanic eruption and a reduction in sulfur dioxide aerosol pollution from container ships — may have contributed to the extremity of the heat last year.The average temperature from June through August 2023 was 2.20 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between the years 1 and 1890, according to the researchers’ tree ring data.And last summer was 2.07 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperature between 1850 and 1900, the years typically considered the base line for the period before human-caused climate change.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Google Unveils A.I. for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules

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      The system, AlphaFold3, could accelerate efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation.It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence lab, and Isomorphic Labs, a sister company, unveiled a more powerful version of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence technology that helps scientists understand the behavior of the microscopic mechanisms that drive the cells in the human body.An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.”Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.Biologists spent years or even decades trying to pinpoint the shape of individual proteins. Then AlphaFold came along. When a scientist fed this technology a string of amino acids that make up a protein, it could predict the three-dimensional shape within minutes.When DeepMind publicly released AlphaFold a year later, biologists began using it to accelerate drug discovery. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, used the technology as they worked to understand the coronavirus and prepare for similar pandemics. Others used it as they struggled to find remedies for malaria and Parkinson’s disease.The hope is that this kind of technology will significantly streamline the creation of new drugs and vaccines.A segment of a video from Google DeepMind demonstrating the new AlphaFold3 technology.Video by Google Deepmind“It tells us a lot more about how the machines of the cell interact,” said John Jumper, a Google DeepMind researcher. “It tells us how this should work and what happens when we get sick.”The new version of AlphaFold — AlphaFold3 — extends the technology beyond protein folding. In addition to predicting the shapes of proteins, it can predict the behavior of other microscopic biological mechanisms, including DNA, where the body stores genetic information, and RNA, which transfers information from DNA to proteins.“Biology is a dynamic system. You need to understand the interactions between different molecules and structures,” said Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs, which Google also owns. “This is a step in that direction.”Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs.Taylor Hill/Getty ImagesThe company is offering a website where scientists can use AlphaFold3. Other labs, most notably one at the University of Washington, offer similar technology. In a paper released on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature, Dr. Jumper and his fellow researchers show that it achieves a level of accuracy well beyond the state of the art.The technology could “save months of experimental work and enable research that was previously impossible,” said Deniz Kavi, a co-founder and the chief executive of Tamarind Bio, a start-up that builds technology for accelerating drug discovery. “This represents tremendous promise.” More

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      Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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      New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.The NewsThanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”Flowers for Karon Blake, 13, who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in January 2023. Gun-related deaths were two to four times higher among Black and Native American youth than among white youth.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressSome Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Makes a Society More Resilient? Frequent Hardship.

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      Comparing 30,000 years of human history, researchers found that surviving famine, war or climate change helps groups recover more quickly from future shocks.From the Roman Empire to the Maya civilization, history is filled with social collapses. Traditionally, historians have studied these downturns qualitatively, by diving into the twists and turns of individual societies.But scientists like Philip Riris have taken a broader approach, looking for enduring patterns of human behavior on a vaster scale of time and space. In a study published Wednesday, these methods allowed Dr. Riris and his colleagues to answer a profound question: Why are some societies more resilient than others?The study, published in the journal Nature, compared 16 societies scattered across the world, in places like the Yukon and the Australian outback. With powerful statistical models, the researchers analyzed 30,000 years of archaeological records, tracing the impact of wars, famines and climate change. They found that going through downturns enabled societies to get through future shocks faster. The more often a society went through them, the more resilient it eventually became.“Over time, you will suffer less, essentially,” said Dr. Riris, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in England. “There tends not to be wholesale collapse.”The researchers tracked the history of societies by taking advantage of the way archaeologists tell time. Most organic material, whether it’s charcoal or mussel shells, contains trace amounts of radioactive carbon-14, which gradually breaks down over thousands of years. By measuring the carbon-14 left at an archaeological site, researchers can estimate its age.This approach can also track population changes. As human groups get bigger, they burn more wood, eat more food and leave behind more garbage, all of which can be dated. When those groups shrink, their sites become rarer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Treadmill Desk Might Really Be Worth It

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      Research shows they can indeed deliver fitness benefits while you work — but only if you use them wisely.Experts have long known that extended inactivity can be bad for your body, increasing your risk for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and other illnesses. As the saying goes, “sitting is the new smoking.” At the same time, decades of studies have shown that walking — even just 4,000 steps a day — is good for the mind and body.Treadmill desks — a setup involving a standing desk with a treadmill beneath it — seem like an ingenious antidote to sedentary office life, and a way to get in a few more healthy steps. But are they worth the investment?As treadmill desks have become more mainstream, researchers have begun to ask how effective they are. A growing body of studies, though often limited, suggests they do help keep people moving, adding perhaps an average of two extra miles of walking per day.What’s more, one small 2023 study suggested regular use of treadmill desks increased peoples’ energy, improved their moods and, in some cases, even made them more productive at their jobs.“Having the ability to add in little bits of activity over the course of a day can add up,” said Akinkunle Oye-Somefun, a doctoral candidate at York University in Toronto and the lead author of a recent meta-analysis of treadmill-desk research. However, he noted, “walking on a treadmill desk is an add on, not something meant to replace your regular exercise routine.”The key to getting the most health benefits out of a treadmill desk, and avoiding boredom or frustration, is to go in with the right expectations and strategy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Complications from Alcohol Use Are Rising Among Women

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      New research shows that alcohol-related liver disease and other health problems increased even more than expected among women ages 40 to 64 during the pandemic.The LatestA new study adds to a mounting body of evidence showing that rising alcohol consumption among women is leading to higher rates of death and disease. The report, published Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum, examined insurance claims data from 2017 to 2021 on more than 14 million Americans ages 15 and older. Researchers found that during the first year and a half of the coronavirus pandemic, women ages 40 to 64 were significantly more likely than expected to experience serious complications like alcohol-related cardiovascular and liver disease, as well as severe withdrawal.The BackgroundAlcohol consumption in the United States has generally increased over the last 20 years, said Dr. Timothy Naimi, the director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria. Dr. Naimi was a co-author on a recent paper that showed deaths from excessive alcohol use in the United States rose by nearly 30 percent between 2016 and 2021.While men still die more often from drinking-related causes than women, deaths among women are climbing at a faster rate. “The gap is narrowing,” said Dr. Bryant Shuey, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and the lead author of the new study.The ResearchThe study looked at serious health issues related to drinking, including alcohol-related liver and heart disease, inflammation of the stomach lining that led to bleeding, pancreatitis, alcohol-related mood disorders and withdrawal. Researchers compared insurance claims data for these complications with the rates they expected to see based on past prevalence of these conditions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Makes Tiny ‘Water Bears’ So Tough? They Quickly Fix Broken DNA.

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      New research finds that microscopic tardigrades are remarkably good at repairing their DNA after a huge blast of radiation.To introduce her children to the hidden marvels of the animal kingdom a few years ago, Anne De Cian stepped into her garden in Paris. Dr. De Cian, a molecular biologist, gathered bits of moss, then came back inside to soak them in water and place them under a microscope. Her children gazed into the eyepiece at strange, eight-legged creatures clambering over the moss.“They were impressed,” Dr. De Cian said.But she was not finished with the tiny beasts, known as tardigrades. She brought them to her laboratory at the French National Museum of Natural History, where she and her colleagues hit them with gamma rays. The blasts were hundreds of times greater than the radiation required to kill a human being. Yet the tardigrades survived, going on with their lives as if nothing had happened.Scientists have long known that tardigrades are freakishly resistant to radiation, but only now are Dr. De Cian and other researchers uncovering the secrets of their survival. Tardigrades turn out to be masters of molecular repair, able to quickly reassemble piles of shattered DNA, according to a study published on Friday and another from earlier this year.Scientists have been trying to breach the defenses of tardigrades for centuries. In 1776, Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian naturalist, described how the animals could dry out completely and then be resurrected with a splash of water. In the subsequent decades, scientists found that tardigrades could withstand crushing pressure, deep freezes and even a trip to outer space.In 1963, a team of French researchers found that tardigrades could withstand massive blasts of X-rays. In more recent studies, researchers have found that some species of tardigrades can withstand a dose of radiation 1,400 times higher than what’s required to kill a person.A preflight photo of a marine tardigrade as seen magnified by 40 times under a light microscope.Boothby Lab/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More