Summary: Three to four one-minute bouts of vigorous physical activity a day, such as running for a bus or walking fast to complete tasks reduces the risk of all-cause and cancer-related death by 40%, and a 49% reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

Source: University of Sydney.

In good news for those who don’t like playing sport or going to the gym, new research finds just three to four one-minute bursts of huffing and puffing during daily tasks is associated with large reductions in the risk of premature death, particularly from cardiovascular disease.

Researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine have found that a unique bacteria found in the gut may be responsible for causing rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in patients who are already predisposed to the autoimmune disease.

A group of researchers from the Division of Rheumatology worked on the study under the leadership of Kristine Kuhn, MD, Ph.D., an associate professor of rheumatology. The study was recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Meagan Chriswell, a medical student at CU, is the paper’s lead author.

“Work led by co-authors Drs. Kevin Deane, Kristen Demoruelle, and Mike Holers here at CU helped establish that we can identify people who are at risk for RA based on serologic markers, and that these markers can be present in the blood for many years before diagnosis,” Kuhn says. “When they looked at those antibodies, one is the normal class of antibody we normally see in circulation, but the other is an antibody that we usually associate with our mucosa, whether it be the oral mucosa, the gut mucosa, or the lung mucosa. We started to wonder, ‘Could there be something at a mucosal barrier site that could be driving RA?’”

The DNA is by far the oldest ever discovered, giving scientists an unprecedented glimpse of a lost ecosystem with “no modern analogue.”

The risk of complications in assisted reproduction is higher when two embryos are transferred, instead of one embryo. This has been shown in a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, which included all births in Sweden 2007–2017.

Fertility treatments using assisted reproduction in Sweden are among the safest in the world regarding risks for the mother and children. A national recommendation to only transfer one embryo in assisted reproduction was introduced in 2003, aiming to decrease the risk of multiple pregnancies and their related complications during pregnancy and delivery.

In certain cases, two embryos are still transferred in order to increase the chance of pregnancy while the risk of multiple pregnancy remains low. Thus, many of the treatments with double embryo transfer result in single pregnancies. Many patients wish to have two embryos transferred to increase their chances of pregnancy, but there is a lack of data on potential risks with transferring two embryos when the treatment results in the birth of a single child.