Xcel Energy Says Its Facilities Appeared to Have Role in Igniting Texas Wildfire

The utility provider Xcel Energy said Thursday that its facilities appeared to have played a role in igniting a massive wildfire in the Texas Panhandle that grew to the largest blaze in state history.

The Smokehouse Creek fire burned nearly 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers) and destroyed hundreds of structures. The Minnesota-based company said in a statement that it disputes claims that “it acted negligently” in maintaining and operating infrastructure.

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“Based on currently available information, Xcel Energy acknowledges that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire,” the company said in a statement.

Also Thursday, The Texas A&M Forest Service said that its investigators have concluded that the Smokehouse Creek fire was ignited by power lines, as was the nearby Windy Deuce fire.

Xcel Energy said it did not believe its facilities were responsible for the Windy Deuce fire.

Electric utilities have taken responsibility for wildfires around the U.S., including fallen power lines that started a blaze in Maui last year. Transmission lines also sparked a massive California wildfire in 2019.

The Smokehouse Creek fire was among a cluster of fires that ignited in the rural Panhandle last week and prompted evacuation orders in a handful of small communities. That wildfire, which also spilled into neighboring Oklahoma, was about 44% contained as of Wednesday.

Officials save said that as many as 500 structures may have been destroyed in the fires.

A lawsuit filed Friday in Hemphill County had alleged that a downed power line near the town of Stinnett on Feb. 26 sparked the blaze. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Stinnett homeowner Melanie McQuiddy against Xcel Energy Services Inc. and two other utilities, alleged the blaze started “when a wooden pole defendants failed to properly inspect, maintain and replace, splintered and snapped off at its base.”

Dale Smith, who operates a large cattle Ranch east of Stinnett said he lost an estimated 30 to 50 head of cattle out of the 3,000 that graze on his property.

“We’re still trying to tally up the cattle losses,” Smith said. “It burned probably 70-80% of the ranch.”

Smith said much of the grazing land will grow back quickly with the proper rain and moisture, but he said they also lost several 100-year-old Cottonwood trees that dotted the ranch. Firefighters were able to save three camps on the ranch that included barns and other structures.

Smith said he believes a faulty power line sparked the blaze which quickly spread because of high winds.

“These fires are becoming a regular occurrence. Lives are being lost. Livestock are being lost. Livelihoods are being lost. It’s a sad story that repeats itself again and again, because public utility companies and oil companies responsible for these power lines aren’t keeping them maintained.”

source https://time.com/6898471/xcel-energy-igniting-texas-wildfire-involvement/

Global Hot Streak Continues With February Breaking Several Temperature Records

WASHINGTON — For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records — with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus.

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The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fueled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023’s mark and still rising at the end of the month. And February, as well the previous two winter months, soared well past the internationally set threshold for long-term warming, Copernicus reported Wednesday.

The last month that didn’t set a record for hottest month was in May 2023 and that was a close third to 2020 and 2016. Copernicus records have fallen regularly from June on.

February 2024 averaged 13.54 degrees Celsius (56.37 degrees Fahrenheit), breaking the old record from 2016 by about an eighth of a degree. February was 1.77 degrees Celsius (3.19 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late 19th century, Copernicus calculated. Only last December was more above pre-industrial levels for the month than February was.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world set a goal of trying to keep warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Copernicus’ figures are monthly and not quite the same measurement system for the Paris threshold, which is averaged over two or three decades. But Copernicus data shows the last eight months, from July 2023 on, have exceeded 1.5 degrees of warming.

Read more: How El Niño May Test the Limits of Our Climate Knowledge

Climate scientists say most of the record heat is from human-caused climate change of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Additional heat comes from a natural El Nino, a warming of the central Pacific that changes global weather patterns.

“Given the strong El Nino since mid-2023, it’s not surprising to see above-normal global temperatures, as El Ninos pump heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, driving up air temperatures. But the amount by which records have been smashed is alarming,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis, who wasn’t part of the calculations.

“And we also see the ongoing ‘hot spot’ over the Arctic, where rates of warming are much faster than the globe as a whole, triggering a cascade of impacts on fisheries, ecosystems, ice melt, and altered ocean current pattern s that have long-lasting and far-reaching effects,” Francis added.

Record high ocean temperatures outside the Pacific, where El Nino is focused, show this is more than the natural effect, said Francesca Guglielmo, a Copernicus senior climate scientist.

The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record level — compared to the specific date — every day for a solid year since March 5, 2023, “often by seemingly-impossible margins,” according to University of Miami tropical scientist Brian McNoldy.

Read more: 2023 Was the Hottest Year Ever and 2024 May Be Even Worse

Those other ocean areas “are a symptom of greenhouse-gas trapped heat accumulating over decades,” Francis said in an email. “That heat is now emerging and pushing air temperatures into uncharted territory.”

“These anomalously high temperatures are very worrisome,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald. “To avoid even higher temperatures, we need to act quickly to reduce CO2 emissions.”

This was the warmest winter — December, January and February — by nearly a quarter of a degree, beating 2016, which was also an El Nino year. The three-month period was the most any season has been above pre-industrial levels in Copernicus record keeping, which goes back to 1940.

Francis said on a 1-to-10 scale of how bad the situation is, she gives what’s happening now “a 10, but soon we’ll need a new scale because what’s a 10 today will be a five in the future unless society can stop the buildup of heat-trapping gases.”

source https://time.com/6898421/global-hot-streak-continues-with-february-breaking-several-temperature-records/

TikTok Influencers Are Now Treating Ozempic Side Effects

Every day dozens of people come to Jennifer Witherspoon—a former dental office manager with zero medical training—for help managing nausea, headaches, and other side effects that can come with taking weight-loss shots. She even crafted a template response to help her quickly get through the messages.

“People have offered to pay me, begged me to start a podcast, asked me to call their sisters-in-law, wanted me to call their doctor,” she said. “One lady even invited me to her wedding.” Even Oprah’s production company reached out to feature one of her videos in a prime time special.

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What makes Witherspoon’s advice so appealing? It’s filling a void. As a Mounjaro user herself, Witherspoon figured out ways to minimize her own side effects, absent guidance from the doctor who prescribed her the drug. In August 2022, she started sharing that wisdom on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of others. 

“I’m known as, like, the side effect girl,” she said.

Influencers have found an audience desperate for information. As demand for GLP-1 drugs that cause weight loss, such as Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Mounjaro, explodes, more people are getting them from sources that offer little or no follow-up care. More than half of the several dozen U.S. telehealth companies that offer GLP-1s launched after Ozempic came to market in 2018, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Some have real expertise and bespoke services, but others offer little beyond the prescriptions they dole out.

And while the number of certified obesity doctors has more than doubled since 2018, the number of prescriptions for Ozempic alone has grown more than 5,000% in that same period—up to around 20 million last year. “Most physicians have very little or no training related to the treatment of obesity,” said Kimberly Gudzune, the medical director of the American Board of Obesity Medicine. While Ozempic and Mounjaro are technically diabetes drugs, they’re often used for weight loss. Shots with the same active ingredients are marketed under different names, Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound, specifically for obesity.

Read More: Here’s What Americans Think of Weight Loss Drugs

There’s a lot of “hand-holding” that goes into prescribing GLP-1 drugs, said Robert Kushner, an obesity specialist at Northwestern Medicine. He and multiple obesity experts told Bloomberg it took time to develop best practices. Many learned to increase the dosage over a series of weeks or months. What’s best for one patient might also not work well for others, which is why it’s important to coordinate with a physician while taking the drugs, they said.

Not everyone is getting that kind of treatment. Holly Lofton, the director of the medical weight management program at NYU Langone Health, has patients who first went to dermatologists or telehealth companies for weight-loss drugs and weren’t given proper oversight. Another doctor said some patients came to him after ending up in the hospital with dehydration because they weren’t advised to drink more water when taking a GLP-1 drug.

Witherspoon said most of the people that come to her say they were prescribed the medications by non-obesity specialists, like an OB-GYN or general practitioner, who never told them that certain foods or behaviors could worsen side effects. For them, TikTokers like her are a trusted source of information. 

“Jen is like my doctor,” said Ashley Hamilton, who started taking Ozempic to lose weight last May. 

When Hamilton’s primary care provider suggested she treat the nausea she experienced from the shot with a drug called Zofran, she knew from TikTok it could worsen the constipation she was also experiencing. Instead, the 37-year-old opted for magnesium supplements and tweaked her food and water intake—tips she learned from social media.

Read More: WeightWatchers Is Now Prescribing Weight Loss Drugs

Medical professionals don’t advise patients to get health advice from TikTok, where misinformation flourishes. Some of the guidance floating around—like switching injection sites to reduce nausea—has no scientific evidence to back it up, according to experts. But doctors say some of the information sharing among patients on TikTok, like advice to cut back on fatty foods and drink more water, is positive.

Witherspoon cautions she’s not a doctor, saying that she’s not a medical professional and is just sharing her personal experience. But there’s virtually no oversight of what she and other influencers like her do or say. TikTok prohibits harmful medical or public health misinformation, including discouraging people from getting appropriate medical care for a life-threatening disease, a spokesperson said. The company will remove videos, suspend certain posting privileges, or ban users altogether. It’s not clear if content like Witherspoon’s meets that criteria.

Even if patients are in contact with a specialist, some more easily trust their peers—particularly if they’ve had negative experience with the medical system before.

Branneisha Cooper started posting on TikTok about Mounjaro for that very reason. “When it comes to Black women going to medical providers, we’re just not taken as seriously as other races,” she said. “Having my face online, hopefully that aids in more trust.” One of her tips is to drink a protein shake before her injection to avoid side effects.

Fredi Pepper has also found a group eager for information. The 70-year-old retired school teacher said she learned how to manage Mounjaro’s side effects from TikTok. That’s not where her friends spend their time, though. She helps run a Facebook group called “Zepbound / Mounjaro Women Over 60 Support” for those not on the app. For the even less social media savvy, she shares her wisdom with them offline.

This social media effect may help explain why the newer drugs, Mounjaro and Wegovy, started out with lower rates of side-effect reports than their older peers, doctors say.

When Ozempic first came out in 2018, there was a deluge of patient complaints about vomiting, diarrhea and even more alarming reactions, like pancreatitis, according to a Bloomberg analysis of tens of thousands of cases sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Over time, however, reports of such events—including ones so serious they sent people to the hospital or were life-threatening—have dropped dramatically, the analysis found. Side effect reports associated with drugs tend to wane over time, in part because doctors hone their prescribing behaviors. But it’s notable that the newer drugs to market have far lower rates of reported side effects to begin with.

Read More: Your Brain Doesn’t Want You To Exercise

Spokespeople for both Lilly and Novo said patient safety is a top priority at the drugmakers and they recommend that those experiencing side effects to speak to their health-care provider. 

Doctors and regulators are on especially high alert for dangerous side effects from obesity shots. A handful of approved weight-loss treatments have been pulled from the market after links to serious health concerns, including suicide and heart damage. European regulators are investigating reports of suicidal thoughts from GLP-1 patients.

But even when compared to other drugs, reports of serious adverse events to the FDA among GLP-1s are low, according to Bloomberg’s analysis.

The FDA’s side effect data isn’t a comprehensive look at all patients taking the drugs, and has its limitations because it’s self reported. More robust clinical trials and scientific studies are needed to get a full picture of the risks.

But the stark difference in the rate of side effect reports between the newest GLP-1s and other drugs suggests that people are likely better tolerating the former. And social media seems to be having an impact. 

Doctors are now realizing that if they want to keep up with best-practices and reach patients, they need to be on TikTok too. Daniel Rosen, a bariatric surgeon and obesity specialist has more than 57,000 followers on the app. Between seeing patients he posts videos and responds to comments and messages. The information goes both ways with patients: He answers questions and asks them about what they’re learning from their experiences. “It’s the next frontier,” he said.

source https://time.com/6898410/ozempic-side-effects-tiktok/

Is COVID-19 a Seasonal Virus Yet?

The most common respiratory viruses that cause flu, colds, and RSV tend to cluster in the fall and winter months. Though that means months of elevated risk for sickness, “cold and flu season” is a convenient time for public-health officials to remind people to get vaccinated and wash their hands more frequently.

Experts had hoped that COVID-19 would follow that same pattern, but so far, that’s not the case.

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COVID-19 occurs in every season

Both flu and RSV tend to plummet to near negligible levels in spring and summer before surging again in the fall and winter. COVID-19 does not seem to fall into that same seasonal pattern.

While COVID-19 cases also peak during the winter season, they persist throughout the spring and summer at a lower but still significant level. “We do not see COVID-19 reach the same low levels as influenza and RSV during the late spring and summer,” says Andrew Pekosz, professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That’s why we can’t treat this like flu, because we are not seeing it go away like we see with flu. There is going to be a risk of getting COVID-19 year-round.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) nodded to the lack of seasonality of COVID-19 when it recently updated its vaccination guidance for older people. It advised those over 65—the age group that is currently developing more severe disease and requiring hospitalization most often—to get a second dose of the latest COVID-19 vaccine in the spring, at least four months after their first shot in the fall or winter. “We’re always driven by the data, and so far it looks like COVID-19 is not going to disappear in the spring and summer like flu and RSV,” says Dr. Wilbur Chen, professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a member of the CDC committee that recommended the additional vaccine dose.

But it could start acting more like a winter virus

We are at a transitional period with COVID-19 right now, Pekosz says. As people continue to rack up more infections, vaccine doses, or both, their immunity and defenses to the once-novel virus grow. That means that on a population level, the virus is finding fewer targets to infect. Even as it morphs into different variants, past infections and shots have offered protection (so far).

For most people, therefore, COVID-19 is slowly becoming more like a seasonal disease in which their risk of infection is highest during the winter months. That helps explain the CDC’s other recent decision to relax isolation guidelines for people who have COVID-19, moving away from a five-day isolation period after someone tests positive to allowing them to resume public activities 24 hours after they no longer have symptoms such as a fever. This approach is more in line with how people treat the common cold and flu.

Over time, it’s possible that COVID-19 infections could cluster in the winter, when people spend more time indoors and the virus has more opportunity to spread. The cold, dry air also encourages transmission. “If we look at other pandemics, it takes several years for a virus to settle into a seasonal pattern that resembles what we see with flu and RSV,” Pekosz says. “I think we’re moving in that direction, but we’re certainly not there yet.”

That’s why people at high risk of complications still “need tools to protect themselves better, like an additional dose of vaccine,” he says. However, “the majority of the general population can start to treat COVID-19 a little more like a seasonal infection,” he says.

source https://time.com/6852850/is-covid-19-seasonal-virus/

What Happened When a Man Got 217 COVID-19 Vaccines

COVID-19 vaccines have been key to controlling the pandemic, but researchers in Germany report on one man who took the vaccination message to the extreme.

The subject of the research published in Lancet Infectious Diseases is a 62-year-old man from Magdeburg, Germany who claims to have received 217 COVID-19 vaccinations within about 2.5 years. (German prosecutors confirmed he received 130 shots in nine months during an investigation into fraud; ultimately, they did not file criminal charges.)

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It’s not clear why the man wanted so many vaccinations or how he obtained them. But after reading news reports of the man’s story, scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) became intrigued and wanted to study how the vaccinations affected his immune system. The man—who told researchers he hadn’t experienced side effects from his shots—volunteered to provide blood and saliva samples to the scientists and allowed them to mine his health records so that they could better understand what effect aggressively stimulating the immune system with a COVID-19 vaccine might have. Even during this analysis, the man requested and received an additional two COVID-19 shots, against the advice of the study researchers.

The man’s extreme vaccination history provided a unique opportunity for scientists to see whether hyper-vaccination would positively or negatively affect the immune system’s ability to respond to pathogens like viruses. “It was unclear in which direction the 200 vaccinations would go,” says Dr. Kilian Schober, the study’s lead author and group leader at the Institute for Clinical Microbiology, Immunology, and Hygiene in Erlangen at FAU. Would these shots enhance his immune response—”like we want to see with multiple vaccinations and booster shots”—or perhaps damage it?

Read More: Why Older Adults Need Another COVID-19 Shot

Schober and the team compared the man’s immune responses—measured by his blood antibody levels, the first line of defense against a virus, and T cell levels, which are responsible for the body’s longer-term response—to those of a control group of 29 people who had received three COVID-19 shots.

Based on how the immune system works, Schober and his team thought that the man’s immune response might mirror that of people with chronic infections, such as HIV or hepatitis B. In those conditions, in which the immune system is constantly stimulated, immune cells can become overwhelmed and start to mount weaker responses.

But that’s not what they found. The man’s antibody levels and a type of T cell called effector T cells were six times higher than those in the control group on average. Those high levels proved that his immune response was strong.

However, his level of memory T cells—which are responsible for remembering viruses that a person has been infected with and replenishing the immune system’s overall T-cell population—were about the same as those in the control group. “It made sense,” says Schober, since memory T cells are reactivated when the body sees the same virus again. “But it was intriguing for us to actually see it in the data.”

According to repeated negative tests for COVID-19, which the researchers confirmed by the fact that that his immune system “showed no sign that it had dealt with the virus yet,” says Schober, the man was likely never infected with SARS-CoV-2. Schober cautions, however, against assuming that his hyper-vaccinated status was responsible for protecting him.

The researchers concluded that overall, while the man’s excessive vaccination history increased his antibody levels and apparently protected him from infection, hyper-activating his immune system did not seem to have a negative effect on his ability to mount an adequate response. At the same time, his extreme measures did not seem to afford him a level of super-immunity that distinguished his response dramatically from others who followed the recommended vaccination schedule. “His immune system was neither positively nor negatively affected,” says Schober.

source https://time.com/6852933/covid-19-217-vaccines/

What an American Approach to AI Regulation Should Look Like

As the world grapples with how to regulate artificial intelligence, Washington faces a unique dilemma: how to secure America’s position as the global AI leader, while guarding against AI’s possible risks? Although any country seeking to regulate AI must balance regulation and innovation, this task is especially hard for the United States because we have more to lose. The United Kingdom, European Union, and China all have formidable AI companies, but U.S. firms dominate the field, propelled by our uniquely open innovation ecosystem. This dominance was on display recently, which saw OpenAI release Sora, a powerful new text-to-video platform, and Google introduce Gemini 1.5, its next-generation AI model that can absorb requests more than 30 times the size of its predecessor.

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If these trends continue, and AI proves the game-changer that many expect—surrendering U.S. leadership is not an option. But as the recent Senate hearing with social media executives reminds us, neither is leaving another powerful technology completely unregulated.

So far, the EU and China have raced ahead on AI regulation, but they have different objectives in mind. The EU’s recent AI Act prioritized minimizing social harms—like AI-powered discrimination in hiring—through a comprehensive, “risk-based” approach. China’s AI regulations, unsurprisingly, focused on reasserting state control over information. Neither approach will favor AI innovation (as some EU member states have already groused). Washington’s challenge is to develop a uniquely American approach to AI regulation that secures our leadership and protects our people—and the world—from the technology’s potential dangers.

Although the Biden Administration’s AI executive order was a valuable first step, there are limits to what the executive branch can do on its own. Only Congress can provide America with an enduring legal framework to govern this transformative technology. As lawmakers weigh their options, they must balance an array of competing priorities: the need to ensure an open and competitive AI ecosystem, manage safety risks, control the proliferation of potentially harmful AI systems, and stay ahead of China. To accomplish these goals, the United States will need a flexible and adaptive regulatory framework to keep pace with a rapidly evolving technology.

Members of Congress have shown a bipartisan interest to act – from Senator Chuck Schumer’s AI Insight Forums to Speaker Mike Johnson’s new Task Force on AI. The enthusiasm is welcome and warranted. AI may pose the most complex and urgent regulatory challenge Washington has ever faced. As Washington grapples with AI regulation, here are four lessons to bear in mind:

First, AI will always move faster than Congress. After the advent of automobiles, it took decades for cars to become widespread in American families. For smartphones and social media, it took years. ChatGPT amassed over 100 million users in two months. In just a few years, generative AI has gone from creating human-like text responses to producing realistic images and videos on demand and credibly mimicking a human voice with just three seconds of original audio. The unforgiving pace of AI development will always run circles around legislative processes. Should Congress pass AI regulations, we should not expect it to revisit those rules soon. The last time Congress passed major technology regulations was 1996, when most Americans still had dial-up internet. Although technology has transformed many times over in the years since, the law has not. This is not to suggest Congress should abandon regulation. Rather, lawmakers should recognize that whatever laws they pass must have the foresight and flexibility to endure as AI evolves. This could argue for a principles-based approach to regulation, instead of fixed technical standards that could be outdated before the ink dries. It could also raise the appeal of an independent agency empowered to better target and adapt regulations over time, much like the expert agencies overseeing the pharmaceutical, aviation, automotive, food, agricultural, telecommunications, financial, and other sectors.

Second, safety sustains innovation. There will always be a tension between promoting innovation and safety, but they complement each other more than the current debate suggests. Cryptocurrency offers a cautionary tale. The virtually unregulated sector resulted, predictably, in the spectacular implosion of FTX. The fiasco left the public and policymakers alike with a dismal impression of the sector, for better or worse, likely stunting the technology’s adoption. It is not hard to imagine unregulated AI applications producing an equally high-profile failure that could hinder adoption or lead to a regulatory overcorrection from Washington. To run far, AI must run safely.

Third, AI regulation needs to incentivize broad and open competition. The growth of large, expensive foundation models has privileged big companies, which are training the most capable models at the frontier of AI development. In a surprising change from the anti-regulation stance of most tech companies over the last twenty years, some leading AI companies are openly calling for government regulation of the most advanced AI systems. These calls have been met with understandable skepticism, with some arguing Big Tech companies want regulations, not out of virtue, but to erect regulatory barriers against competition. But leaving powerful AI models unregulated is no solution. And the experience with social media has shown that unregulated Big Tech is hardly a recipe for healthy competition and social good. We should reject a choice between allowing the most powerful AI companies to self-regulate and a regulatory burden that stifles innovation and competition. This will require rules that are clear, consistent, and without massive compliance costs—admittedly, no easy feat. Congress should also seize opportunities to level the playing field, such as funding the National AI Research Resource to provide data and computing resources to academics and start-ups.

Fourth, America’s AI policy needs a global vision. As China, the E.U., the U.K., and others develop their own competing frameworks, global AI governance is up for grabs, and America cannot afford to sit on the sidelines. Even as the United States competes with China, it must look for opportunities for cooperation. No single nation can address the potential risks of AI-enabled bio and cyber threats on its own, any more than it can fight climate change and pandemics alone. As the world’s two leading AI powers, the United States and China must work together to enhance safety, limit proliferation, and draw red lines against dangerous AI uses. The agreement between President Joe Biden and General Secretary Xi Jinping to begin discussions on AI risk and safety is a promising sign. But a narrow fixation on China risks blowing America’s opportunity—and responsibility—to offer the world a compelling AI model that harnesses its benefits without trading away core democratic values like privacy and civil rights. China understands the appeal to the Global South of affirmative AI applications in areas such as energy and agriculture; it’s time for America to get in the game.

As Washington debates AI, its competitors have offered their own solutions for how to balance safety, innovation, and competition for this powerful technology. America needs its own answer, consistent with democratic values and interests—and needs it soon. At the Center for a New American Security, we recently launched an AI Governance Forum to convene experts from industry, academia, and civil society to tackle these challenges and propose actionable steps for policymakers. Our goal is to bring these communities together to develop solutions that balance competing interests and offer a framework for a uniquely American model for AI governance. U.S. leadership helped birth the age of AI; now it must help the world harness this technology safely while upholding its commitment to democracy, privacy, and human freedom.

source https://time.com/6848922/ai-regulation/

Researchers Are Using AI to Find New Alzheimer’s Risk Factors

Brain experts have a pretty good handle on some of the major risk factors that contribute to Alzheimer’s—from a person’s genes to their physical activity levels, how much formal education they’ve received, and how socially engaged they are.

But one promise of AI in medicine is that it can spot less obvious links that humans can’t always see. Could AI help uncover conditions linked to Alzheimer’s that have so far been overlooked?

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To find out, Marina Sirota and her team at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) ran a machine-learning program on a database of anonymous electronic health records from patients. The AI algorithm was trained to pull out any common features shared by people who were ultimately diagnosed with Alzheimer’s over a period of seven years. The database includes clinical data, such as lab and imaging test results and diagnoses of medical conditions.

“There were some things we saw that were expected, given the knowledge that we have about Alzheimer’s, but some of things we found were novel and interesting,” says Sirota. The results were published in Nature Aging.

Heart disease, high cholesterol, and inflammatory conditions all emerged as Alzheimer’s risk factors—not surprising, since they’re known to contribute to the buildup of protein plaques in the brain. But the less expected conditions included osteoporosis in women and depression in both men and women. The researchers also saw unexpected patterns emerge closer to when people are diagnosed, such as having lower levels of vitamin D.

Sirota and Alice Tang, a medical student in bioengineering who is the lead author of the paper, stress that these factors do not always mean that a person will develop Alzheimer’s. But they could be red flags that a patient can address to potentially lower their risk. “Picking up these factors gives us clues that a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s might be coming, and things like [high cholesterol] and osteoporosis are modifiable [with treatments],” says Tang.

Whether or not treating these issues can actually lower a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s isn’t clear yet; the study wasn’t designed to answer that question. Sirota and her team plan to continue mining the database of health records to determine if people receiving treatments for conditions like osteoporosis or high cholesterol, for example, eventually had a lower risk of Alzheimer’s than patients who had those conditions but didn’t treat them. “We can retrospectively look at treatment data in the electronic medical records, so that’s definitely a direction forward to determine if we can leverage any existing therapies to lower risk,” says Sirota.

Tang also hunted for genetic factors associated with things like high cholesterol or osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s that could further explain the connection between these risk factors. The link between cholesterol and Alzheimer’s turns out to be related to the ApoE gene; scientists have known that a specific form of the gene, ApoE4, is associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Tang also identified a gene associated with both osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s that could become a new research target for a possible treatment.

The study shows the power of machine learning in helping scientists to better understand the factors driving diseases as complex as Alzheimer’s, as well as its ability to suggest potential new ways of treating them.

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source https://time.com/6837037/alzheimers-risk-factors-ai/