Eli Lilly and Co raised its full-year profit forecast on Thursday, banking on rising demand for its new diabetes drug Mounjaro to offset pressure from waning sales of some of its older treatments.
The company now expects 2023 adjusted full-year earnings of $8.35 to $8.55 per share, from its prior forecast of $8.10 to $8.30 per share. Analysts on average were expecting a profit of $8.28 per share in 2023, according to Refinitiv.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday removed the need for a positive test for COVID-19 treatments from Pfizer Inc(PFE.N)and Merck & Co Inc(MRK.N).
Pfizer's Paxlovid and Merck's Lagevrio pills were given emergency use authorizations in Dec. 2021 for patients with mild-to-moderate COVID who tested positive for the virus, and who were at risk of progressing to severe COVID.
Still, the FDA said the patients should have a current diagnosis of mild-to-moderate COVID infection.
The health regulator said individuals with recent known exposure with signs and symptoms may be diagnosed by their healthcare providers with COVID even if they have a negative test result.
Nicole Sirotek is a registered nurse in Nevada with over a decade of experience working in some of the harshest conditions. When a hurricane devastated Puerto Rico, Sirotek and the organization she founded, American Frontline Nurses (AFLN), were there and gave out over 500 pounds of medical equipment and supplies.
She hasn’t hesitated to be the first in when an emergency hits and medical professionals are needed. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s woken up on a cot in the middle of nowhere, boots still strapped to her feet, and ready to go.
But in tears during an interview with The Epoch Times, she detailed her ordeal with harassment and doxing over the past year and how she’s contemplated suicide due to crippling anxiety and depression.
“It took such a toll on my mental health. I wasn’t sleeping and wasn’t eating,” Sirotek said.
To regain her mental health, she decided to step back from the group she started. But even that decision brought pain.
“I said after I left New York, I’d do everything that I can to make sure it didn’t happen again,” Sirotek said, recalling the death she witnessed when she volunteered in New York as a nurse at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I mean, for me to step back and take a break just makes me feel like I failed!”
Sirotek is the victim of ongoing harassment. She’s received pictures of her children posed in slaughterhouses and hanging from a noose, drive-by photos of her house, and letters with white powder that exploded upon opening.
The Nevada State Board of Nursing was inundated with calls for Sirotek’s professional demise and flooded with anonymous complaints.
These complaints trace back to Team Halo, a social media influencer campaign formed as part of the United Nations Verified initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project.
In response, Sirotek filed a police report. Her lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter. The Epoch Times reviewed the documents.
The reply from the cease-and-desist letter? The client was acting within his First Amendment rights.
The Harassment Begins
In February 2022, Sirotek, as the face of AFLN, a patient advocacy network that boasts 22,000 nurses, appeared before Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and testified about the harm patients were experiencing when they sought treatment for COVID-19.
She said she didn’t witness patients dying from the novel virus when she volunteered to work the front lines in New York at the start of the pandemic.
Sirotek detailed the withholding by higher-ups of steroids and Ibuprofen and the prescribing of remdesivir. Additionally, there was zero willingness to consider possible early intervention treatments like ivermectin.
As the pandemic continued, such practices only escalated, Sirotek said.
Sirotek’s testimony resulted in cheers, widespread attention, and a target on her back.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) (C) speaks during a panel discussion titled COVID-19: A Second Opinion in Washington DC Jan. 24, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“[The harassment] all started the day we got back from DC,” Sirotek said.
At first, the attacks started with the typical “you’re transphobic, you’re anti-LGBTQ. I mean, they even called me racist,” Sirotek, who is Hispanic, recalled.
And as more patients sought AFLN’s help, the attacks increased in frequency and force.
At first, Sirotek said the attacks appeared to come from random people. But as the attacks continued, the terms “Project Halo,” “Team Halo,” and “#TeamHalo” continually cropped up. Especially on TikTok and from two accounts, “@jesss2019” and “@thatsassynp.”
“[@thatsassynp] just kept on saying how I was spreading misinformation, [that] ivermectin doesn’t work,” Sirotek said. “He kept targeting the Nevada State Board of Nursing because I was on the Practice Act Committee, and he did not feel like that was acceptable.”
Craig Perry, a lawyer representing nurses, including Sirotek, before the Nevada State Board of Nursing, confirmed Sirotek’s account. The executive director of the Nevada State Board of Nursing, Cathy Dinauer, declined to provide details on complaints or investigations, stating to The Epoch Times via email that they are “confidential.”
Sirotek said the complaints overwhelmed her ability to defend her nursing license.
“Untimely, they were filing so many complaints against me that [the Nevada State Board of Nursing] had to start filtering them as to what was applicable and not applicable. And [the complaints] just buried my nursing license to the point that we couldn’t even defend it,” Sirotek said.
Attacks Transition to Threats
Whenever Sirotek, or AFLN, tried to set up a community outreach webinar, hateful comments flooded their videos.
Julia McCabe, a registered nurse and the director of advocacy services for AFLN, told The Epoch Times that initially, they tried kicking the trolls out of the outreach videos. But they couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming numbers and had to shut the videos down, usually after only 10 minutes, she said.
To address the swarms, as McCabe labeled them, AFLN started charging an entrance fee for their webinars. But, McCabe said, they’d send out an email with a free access code to all of their subscribers before the webinar started. It helped, but not enough. The swarms kept coming. And the attacks escalated.
On June 5, 2022, @thatsassynp posted a video on TikTok calling for a “serious public uprising,” because the Nevada State Board of Nursing and other regulatory agencies weren’t disciplining nurses for spreading “disinformation.”
It became one of many such videos in the ensuing days. In the comments of one, he stated, “Also, stay tuned as [@jesss2019] will be addressing this as well. We are teaming up (as per usual) to raise awareness and demand action on this issue.” @jesss2019 responded, “Yes!!!! We will get this taken care of.”
Jess and Tyler Kuhk of @thatsassynp have “teamed up” on several occasions, targeting healthcare workers who question the COVID-19 narrative. Team Halo doesn’t officially list Kuhk on its site, but Kuhk posts with the #teamhalo.
In another video, he states, “If you’re new to this series, PLEASE watch the videos in my playlist ‘Nevada board of nursing.’ This started in Feb of this year.” His video has almost 35,000 “loves.”
On June 7, 2022, @jesss2019 posted a video on TikTok accusing Sirotek of spreading misinformation. It included a link to @thatsassynp, and his complaints about Sirotek to the Nevada State Board of Nursing and calls to remove her from the Practice Act Committee. She implored TikTok to boost the message. It, too, became one of many videos attacking Sirotek.
Specifically, @jesss2019 and @thatsassynp took issue with videos and posts from Sirotek, and AFLN, advocating for ivermectin and highlighting possible issues with remdesivir and the COVID-19 vaccines.
@jess2019 removed all of the above videos after The Epoch Times sought comment. The Epoch Times retains copies.
Sirotek says she received the first death threat against herself and her children around the same time, in June 2022.
“They cut off the pictures of my children’s faces from our family photos, where we take them every year on our front porch—we’ve got 11 years of those photos—and they cut them out and put them on the bodies of those little boys that have been sexually abused. And that’s what would get sent to my house. And I gave the police that,” Sirotek said.
In response to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, Sen. Johnson defended Sirotek.
“The COVID Cartel continues to frighten and silence those who tell the truth and challenge their failed response to COVID,” Johnson said. “It is simply wrong for Ms. Sirotek to be smeared and attacked like so many others who have had the courage and compassion to successfully treat COVID patients.”
As the threats continued and escalated, Sirotek also asked Perry to send a cease-and-desist letter to Tyler Kuhk on Aug. 1, 2022.
Kuhk, a nurse practitioner, is the person posting on TikTok under the pseudonym @thatsassynp.
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s U.S. head office in Culver City, California, on Sept. 15, 2020. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
The letter sent to Kuhk alleges that on at least 10 different occasions, @thatsassynp encouraged a “public uprising” against Sirotek. It also details that his videos attacking Sirotek garnered over 400,000 views.
In response, McLetchie Law, a “boutique law firm serving prominent and emerging … media entities” responded to Perry by stating in a letter dated Aug. 16, 2022, “Both Nevada law and the First Amendment provide robust protections for our client’s (and others’) rights to criticize Ms. Sirotek’s dangerous views and practices—and to advocate for her removal from the Nursing Practice Advisory Committee of the Nevada State Board of Nursing.”
It also warned that any attempt to deter Kuhk from his chosen path would “backfire” and could result in a “negative financial impact.” Neither Kuhk nor McLetchie Law responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Unable to confirm the real name behind the TikTok account @jesss2019, and thus, unable to send her a legal letter, Sirotek posted some of the threats she’d received on Facebook, pleading for @jesss2019 to cease targeting her, and recognize the possible real-world harm.
In desperation, Sirotek asked Perry to file a legal name change, which he did on Sep. 15, 2022, hoping that would thwart people’s ability to look up Sirotek’s information. Perry told The Epoch Times, “Usually, when you do a name change, it’s a public record. But under extenuating circumstances, you can have that sealed.”
In Sirotek’s case, the court recognized the threat to her and her family’s safety, waived the publication requirement, granted the change, and sealed her record on Oct. 4, 2022.
Sirotek, at the behest of Perry, filed a police report detailing the harassment on Oct. 17, 2022.
In December 2022, @jesss2019 posted a video to TikTok doxing Sirotek by revealing her name change. The Epoch Times sought comment from @jesss2019 but has not received a response. After the request for comment, the user removed the video.
Team Halo and Social Media
On Dec. 17, 2020, Theo Bertram, a director at TikTok; Iain Bundred, the head of public policy at YouTube; and Rebecca Stimson, the UK head of public policy for Facebook, appeared before the UK’s House of Commons to explain what their social media sites were doing to combat “anti-vaccination disinformation.”
All three stated their companies employed a “two-pronged approach.” Specifically, “tackle disinformation and promote trusted content.”
Bundred stated that from the beginning of the year to November 2020, YouTube had removed 750,000 videos that promoted “Covid disinformation.”
The logos of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat on mobile devices in a combination of 2017–2022 photos. (AP Photo)
Stimson stated that between March and October 2020, “12 million pieces of content were removed from [Facebook],” and it had labeled 167 million pieces with a warning.
Bertram stated that for the first six months of 2020, TikTok removed 1,500 accounts for “Covid violation” and had recently increased that activity. “In the last two months, we took action against 1,380 accounts, so you can see the level of action is increasing,” Bertram said.
“In October, we began work with Team Halo,” Bertram added. “I do not know if you are familiar with Team Halo. It is run by the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and is about getting reliable, trusted scientists and doctors on to social media to spread trusted information.”
Team Halo’s Origins
On Sep. 20, 2022, Melissa Fleming, the under-secretary-general for global communications at the United Nations, appeared at the World Economic Forum to discuss how the United Nations was “Tackling Disinformation” regarding “health guidance” as well as the “safety and efficacy of the vaccine” for COVID-19.
“A key strategy that we had was to deploy influencers,” Fleming stated. “Influencers who were really keen, who had huge followings, but really keen to help carry messages that were going to serve their communities.”
Fleming also explained that the United Nations knew its messaging wouldn’t resonate as well as influencers, so they developed Team Halo.
“We had another trusted messenger project, which was called Team Halo, where we trained scientists around the world, and some doctors, on TikTok. We had TikTok working with us,” Fleming said. “It was a layered deployment of ideas and tactics.”
Chinese enterprises increased patent filings for artificial intelligence products rapidly in the past couple of years.
As Statista's Katharina Buchholz notes, the companies holding the most active AI and machine learning patent families are now tech giant Tencent and search engine provider Baidu, ahead of U.S. firm IBM, South Korea’s Samsung, Chinese insurance provider Ping An and former AI patent leader Microsoft.
The latter company has been seeing one of its major AI investments come to fruition recently, as conversational AI bot ChatGPT by Microsoft partner OpenAI has been making waves. Microsoft swiftly announced another round of funding for OpenAI, rumored to be to the tune of $10 billion.
Many people are unaware that some antidepressants (medications used to treat people living with depression) are also being prescribed to treat certain chronic pain conditions.
One in five people experiences chronic pain in Australia and globally, and treatment of chronic pain is often suboptimal, with commonly used medicines having limited or unknown benefits. The use of antidepressants to help manage a person's painis on the rise, even when they do not have a mood disorder like depression.
An international team of researchers has found that some classes of antidepressants were effective in treating certain pain conditions in adults, but others were either not effective, or the effectiveness was unknown.
Published in The BMJ, the study reviewed the safety and effectiveness of antidepressants in the treatment of chronic pain.
The researchers say the results show that clinicians need to consider all the evidence before deciding to prescribe antidepressants for chronic pain management.
"This review, for the first time, brings together all the existing evidence about the effectiveness of antidepressants to treat chronic pain in one comprehensive document," said lead author Dr. Giovanni Ferreira from The Institute for Musculoskeletal Health and Sydney Musculoskeletal Health at the University of Sydney.
The review examined 26 systematic reviews from 2012 to 2022 involving over 25,000 participants. This included data from 8 antidepressant classes and 22 pain conditions including back pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, postoperative pain, and irritable bowel syndrome.
Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) antidepressants such as duloxetine were found to be effective for the largest number of pain conditions, such as back pain, knee osteoarthritis, postoperative pain, fibromyalgia, and neuropathic pain (nerve pain).
By contrast tricyclic antidepressants, such as amitriptyline, are the most commonly used antidepressant to treat pain in clinical practice, but the review showed that it is unclear how well they work, or whether they work at all for most pain conditions.
The use of antidepressants as a treatment for pain has recently gained attention globally. A 2021 guideline for chronic primary pain management published by The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends against using pain medicines with the exception of antidepressants. The guideline recommends different types of antidepressants, such as amitriptyline, citalopram, duloxetine, fluoxetine, paroxetine or sertraline for adults living with chronic primary pain.
Dr. Ferreira said a more nuanced approach to prescribing antidepressants for pain is needed.
"Recommending a list of antidepressants without careful consideration of the evidence for each of those antidepressants for different pain conditions may mislead clinicians and patients into thinking that all antidepressants have the same effectiveness for pain conditions. We showed that is not the case."
Co-author Dr. Christina Abdel Shaheed, from The School of Public Health and Sydney Musculoskeletal Health at the University of Sydney, said, "The findings from this review will support both clinicians and patients to weigh up the benefits and harms of antidepressants for various pain conditions so that they can make informed decisions about whether and when to use them."
Dr. Ferreira said that there are multiple treatment options for pain, and people should not rely solely on pain medicines for pain relief.
"Some pain medicines may have a role in pain management, but they need to be considered as only part of the solution. For some pain conditions, exercise, physiotherapy, and lifestyle changes may also help. Speak to your health professional to learn more about what alternatives might be appropriate for you," Dr. Ferreira said.
Professor Christopher Maher, Co-Director of Sydney Musculoskeletal Health at the University of Sydney, said, "This review distilled the evidence from over 150 clinical trials into an accessible summary that clinicians can use to help them make better decisions for their patients with chronic pain."
The current status of antidepressants
Most antidepressant prescriptions for pain are "off-label," which is when antidepressants have not been approved to be prescribed for pain.
Many antidepressants are thought to help with pain by acting on chemicals in the brain that can assist with pain relief, such as serotonin. However, it is unknown exactly why some antidepressants improve pain. In Australia, the only antidepressant approved for treating pain is duloxetine, which is approved for diabetic neuropathic pain (nerve pain caused by diabetes).
Amitriptyline is approved in the United Kingdom for some pain conditions, such as neuropathic pain (nerve pain), tension-type headaches and migraines, but it is not approved for treating any pain conditions in Australia.
The use of antidepressants has doubled in OECD countries from 2000 to 2015, and the use of "off-label" prescriptions of antidepressants for pain is considered a contributing factor to this increase. Data from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Taiwan, suggest that among older people, chronic pain was the most common condition leading to an antidepressant prescription, even more so than depression.
Currently, no data from Australia shows how many antidepressant prescriptions are for pain.
More information: Giovanni E Ferreira et al, Efficacy, safety, and tolerability of antidepressants for pain in adults: overview of systematic reviews, The BMJ (2023). DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2022-072415
Physician turnover is disruptive to patients and costly to health care facilities and physicians alike. In a new study, Yale researchers have used machine learning to reveal the factors—including the length of a physician's tenure, their age, and the complexity of their cases—that can increase the risks of such turnover.
Evaluating data from a large U.S. health care system over a nearly three-year period, they were able to predict, with 97% accuracy, the chances of physician departure. The findings, researchers say, provide insights that can help health care systems intervene before physicians decide to leave in order to reduce turnover.
The study was published Feb. 1 in PLOS ONE.
While health care facilities typically use surveys to track physician burnout and job satisfaction, the new study used data from electronic health records (EHRs), which are used by the majority of U.S. physicians to track and manage patient information.
The problem with surveys, said Ted Melnick, associate professor of emergency medicine and co-senior author of the new study, is that physicians often feel burdened to respond. Consequently, response rates are often low. "And surveys can tell you what's happening at that moment," he added, "but not what's happening the next day, the next month, or over the following year."
Electronic health records, however, which in addition to collecting clinical patient data also generate work-related data continuously, offer an opportunity to observe physician behavioral patterns moment to moment and over long periods of time.
For the new study, the researchers used three years of de-identified EHR and physician data from a large New England health care system to determine whether they could take a three-month stretch of data and predict the likelihood of a physician's departure within the following six months.
"We wanted something that would be useful on a personalized level," said Andrew Loza, a lecturer and clinical informatics fellow at Yale School of Medicine and co-senior author of the study. "So if someone were to use this approach, they could see the likelihood of departure for a position as well as the variables contributing most to the estimate in that moment, and intervene where possible."
Specifically, data were collected monthly from 319 physicians representing 26 medical specialties over a 34-month period. Data included how much time physicians spent using EHRs; clinical productivity measures, such as patient volume and physician demand; and physician characteristics, including age and length of employment. Different portions of the data were used to train, validate, and test the machine learning model.
When tested, the model was able to predict whether a physician would depart with 97% accuracy, the researchers found. The sensitivity and specificity of the model, which show the proportion of the departure and non-departure months that were correctly classified were 64% and 79%, respectively. The model was also able to identify how strongly different variables contributed to turnover risk, how variables interacted with each other, and what variables changed when a physician transitioned from low risk of departure to high risk.
The details about what's driving the prediction is what makes this approach particularly useful, researchers said.
"There have been efforts to make machine learning models not black boxes wherein you get a prediction but it's not clear how the model came to it," said Loza. "Understanding why the model produced the prediction it did is particularly useful in this case as those details are going to identify issues that may be leading to physician departure."
Through their approach, the researchers identified several variables that contributed to departure risk; the top four factors, they found, were how long the physician had been employed, their age, the complexity of their cases, and the demand for their services.
Whereas previous work enabled only analyses of linear relationships, the machine learning model allowed researchers to observe the challenges facing physicians with more nuance. For example, risk of departure was highest for physicians more recently hired and those with longer tenures but lower for those with middling tenure lengths. Similarly, risk of departure was higher for those up to 44 years old, lower for physicians aged 45 to 64, and higher again for those 65 years old or older.
There were also interactions between variables. For instance, more time spent on EHR activities decreased the risk of departure for physicians who had been on the job for less than 10 years. But for those physicians employed longer, it increased the risk of departure.
"The findings highlight there's not a one-size-fits-all solution," said Loza.
The risk of physician departure shifted throughout the study period, which covered a 34-month span from 2018 to 2021 (a period that included the pandemic and the pre-pandemic world), researchers said. They also identified specific variables that changed when a physician switched from low to high risk of departure; the proportion of EHR inbox messages responded to by a team member other than the physician, physician demand, and patient volume, were the variables that changed the most when a physician's risk flipped from low to high. COVID-19 waves were also linked to change in departure risk.
"I think this study is an important step in identifying factors that contribute to clinician turnover, with the ultimate goal of creating a sustainable and thriving work habitat for our clinicians," said Brian Williams, a medical informatics officer with Northeast Medical Group and an author of the study.
Towards that goal, the researchers created a dashboard that can display this information. Health care leaders see the value in the type of analysis this approach can provide.
"As physician burnout is an increasingly recognized problem, health care systems, hospitals, and large groups need to figure out what they need to do to ensure the emotional and physical health and well-being of the physicians and other clinicians who do the actual caring for patients," said Robert McLean, New Haven Regional Medical Director of Northeast Medical Group.
"Many health care systems already have wellness officers and wellness committees who could have the responsibility of collecting and analyzing this data and developing conclusions, which then would lead to implementation plans for changes and hopefully improvements."
Melnick added, "We're excited about the possibility of what this might look like in practice. And we're continuing to work on ethical implementation as this is really about how best to foster physician well-being and a thriving workforce."
More information: Kevin Lopez et al, Predicting physician departure with machine learning on EHR use patterns: A longitudinal cohort from a large multi-specialty ambulatory practice, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280251
Young blood has a rejuvenating effect when infused into older bodies, according to recent research: Aging hearts beat stronger, muscles become stronger, and thinking becomes sharper.
Many scientists are looking for the elements of young blood that can be captured or replicated and put into a pill.
But what if the best way to get the benefits of young blood is to simply rejuvenate the system that makes blood?
"An aging blood system, because it's a vector for a lot of proteins, cytokines, and cells, has a lot of bad consequences for the organism," says Emmanuelle Passegué, Ph.D., director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative, who's been studying how blood changes with age. "A 70-year-old with a 40-year-old blood system could have a longer healthspan, if not a longer lifespan."
Rejuvenating an older person's blood may now be within reach, based on recent findings from Passegué's lab published in Nature Cell Biology.
Passegué, with her graduate student Carl Mitchell, found that an anti-inflammatory drug, already approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, can turn back time in mice and reverse some of the effects of age on the hematopoietic system.
"These results indicate that such strategies hold promise for maintaining healthier blood production in the elderly," Mitchell says.
Rejuvenating the home of blood stem cells. The researchers found that an inflammatory signal released from old bone marrow, IL-1B, was critical in driving aging in blood stem cells. The drug anakinra returned the blood stem cells to a younger, healthier state. Credit: Emmanuelle Passegué
Returning blood stem cells to a younger state
The researchers only identified the drug after a comprehensive investigation of the stem cells that create all blood cells and the niches where they reside in the center of the bones.
All blood cells in the body are created by a small number of stem cells that reside in bone marrow. Over time, these hematopoietic stem cells start to change: They produce fewer red blood cells (leading to anemia) and fewer immune cells (which raises the risk of infection and impedes vaccination efforts), and they have trouble maintaining the integrity of their genomes (which can lead to blood cancers).
In a paper published in 2021 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Passegué and her team first tried to rejuvenate old hematopoietic stem cells, in mice, with exercise or calorie-restricting diet, both generally thought to slow the aging process. Neither worked. Transplanting old stem cells into young bone marrow also failed. Even young blood had no effect on rejuvenating old blood stem cells.
Mitchell and Passegué then took a closer look at the stem cells' environment, the bone marrow. "Blood stem cells live in a niche; we thought what happens in this specialized local environment could be a big part of the problem," Mitchell says.
With techniques developed in the Passegué lab that enable detailed investigation of the bone marrow milieu, the researchers found that the aging niche is deteriorating and overwhelmed with inflammation, leading to dysfunction in the blood stem cells.
One inflammatory signal released from the damaged bone marrow niche, IL-1B, was critical in driving these aging features, and blocking it with the drug anakinra remarkably returned the blood stem cells to a younger, healthier state.
Even more youthful effects on both the niche and the blood system occurred when IL-1B was prevented from exerting its inflammatory effects throughout the animal's life.
The researchers are now trying to learn if the same processes are active in humans and if rejuvenating the stem cell niche earlier in life, in middle age, would be a more effective strategy.
Meanwhile, "treating elderly patients with anti-inflammatory drugs blocking IL-1B function should help with maintaining healthier blood production," Passegué says, and she hopes the finding will lead to clinical testing.
"We know that bone tissue begins to degrade when people are in their 50s. What happens in middle age? Why does the niche fail first?" Passegué says. "Only by having a deep molecular understanding will it be possible to identify approaches that can truly delay aging."
Many societies have added more than 30 years to life expectancy in the past century. "Now it is imperative to conduct the science to determine how to create health and well-being across the full length of those lives," says Linda Fried, MD, MPH, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the Butler Columbia Aging Center. "This must include research to understand the mechanisms of normal aging and how to fully develop the huge opportunities to create healthy longevity for all."
More information: Carl A. Mitchell et al, Stromal niche inflammation mediated by IL-1 signalling is a targetable driver of haematopoietic ageing, Nature Cell Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41556-022-01053-0
