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Climate change threatens mental health via increasing exposure to the social and economic disruptions created by extreme weather and large-scale climatic events, as well as through the anxiety associated with recognising the existential threat posed by the climate crisis. Considering the growing levels of climate change awareness across the world, negative emotions like anxiety and worry about climate-related risks are a potentially pervasive conduit for the adverse impacts of climate change on mental health. In this study, we examined how negative climate-related emotions relate to sleep and mental health among a diverse non-representative sample of individuals recruited from 25 countries, as well as a Norwegian nationally-representative sample. Overall, we found that negative climate-related emotions are positively associated with insomnia symptoms and negatively related to self-rated mental health in most countries. Our findings suggest that climate-related psychological stressors are significantly linked with mental health in many countries and draw attention to the need for cross-disciplinary research aimed at achieving rigorous empirical assessments of the unique challenge posed to mental health by negative emotional responses to climate change.

Fas ligand (FasL, CD178) is known to bind to its receptor (Fas, CD95) and mediate cellular apoptosis to maintain immune homeostasis. Recently, it has been recognized that tumor cells and their microenvironments allow an adjacent vascular endothelium to express the FasL on its cell membrane, utilizing the endothelium as an immune barrier to kill antitumor cytotoxic T cells. Here, a microfluidic tumor vasculature model is presented, which enables the recapitulation of an endothelial immune barrier expressing FasL. The in vitro three-dimensional model replicates enhanced endothelial FasL expression under the hypoxic tumor microenvironment. Apoptosis rates of FasL-susceptible target cells are augmented under the microenvironment with upregulated FasL but are consequently abrogated by administrations of pharmacological inhibitions, FasL-Fas blockades. The microfluidic system suggests its promising applications in elucidating complex immunosuppressive mechanisms of the tumor microenvironment and screening of cell-mediated immunotherapies as a preclinical model.

Objectives: The Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) capture individual differences in aversive personality to complement work on other taxonomies, such as the Big Five traits. However, the literature on the Dark Triad traits relies mostly on samples from English-speaking (i.e., Westernized) countries. We broadened the scope of this literature by sampling from a wider array of countries. Method: We drew on data from 49 countries (N = 11,723; 65.8% female; Age Mean = 21.53) to examine how an extensive net of country-level variables in economic status (e.g., Human Development Index), social relations (e.g., gender equality), political orientations (e.g., democracy), and cultural values (e.g., embeddedness) relate to country-level rates of the Dark Triad traits, as well as variance in the magnitude of sex differences in them. Results: Narcissism was especially sensitive to country-level variables. Countries with more embedded and hierarchical cultural systems were more narcissistic. Also, sex differences in narcissism were larger in more developed societies: Women were less likely to be narcissistic in developed (vs. less developed) countries. Conclusions: We discuss the results based on evolutionary and social role models of personality and sex differences. That higher country-level narcissism was more common in less developed countries, whereas sex differences in narcissism were larger in more developed countries, is more consistent with evolutionary than social role models.

The present study sought to test the hypotheses that the relationship between age and life satisfaction is moderated by five societal factors: (1) eudaimonic well-being (i.e., psycho-social functioning), (2) economic quality, (3) healthcare system efficiency, (4) globalization, and (5) national age. This study was a cross-sectional analysis based on data from the Gallup World Poll. The sample consisted of 264,123 individuals across 133 countries. Multi-level modeling was used to analyze the data. The results showed that out of the five moderators, only national levels of eudaimonic well-being robustly moderated the relationship between age and life satisfaction. The relationship between age and life satisfaction was negative in countries with low and moderate levels of eudaimonic well-being, and non-significant in countries with high levels of eudaimonic well-being. It seems that a non-financial way to maintain higher levels of life satisfaction in aging populations is to enhance eudaimonic well-being. This can be achieved through interventions and policies targeted at individuals, groups, and organizations.

ObjectiveThe Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) is a brief scale measuring positive human functioning. The study aimed to examine the factor structure and to explore the cross-cultural utility of the MHC-SF using bifactor models and exploratory structural equation modelling.MethodUsing multigroup confirmatory analysis (MGCFA) we examined the measurement invariance of the MHC-SF in 38 countries (university students, N=8,066; 61.73% women, mean age 21.55 years).ResultsMGCFA supported the cross-cultural replicability of a bifactor structure and a metric level of invariance between student samples. The average proportion of variance explained by the general factor was high (ECV=.66), suggesting that the three aspects of mental health (emotional, social, and psychological well-being) can be treated as a single dimension of well-being.ConclusionThe metric level of invariance offers the possibility of comparing correlates and predictors of positive mental functioning across countries; however, the comparison of the levels of mental health across countries is not possible due to lack of scalar invariance. Our study has preliminary character and could serve as an initial assessment of the structure of the MHC-SF across different cultural settings. Further studies on general populations are required for extending our findings.

Highlights • Silent circulation (SC) of wild polio viruses (WPV) when oral polio vaccine (OPV) use is stopped, could threaten eradication. • We analyzed a model designed to develop theory about mechanisms and factors that lead to SC and how SC risks can be assessed using surveillance data. • Prolonged low-level SC emerges as a threshold phenomenon through a mechanism related to balancing contributions of different populations to the effective reproduction number. • Factors that promote this mechanism are many years of inadequate vaccination efforts, ongoing waning of immunity against transmission years after last OPV or WPV infection, low transmissibility of OPV, and high transmission conditions. • Analyzing acute flaccid paralysis surveillance or environmental surveillance data by themselves cannot assess the risk that an SC threshold has been passed, but new methods to analyze them jointly could do so., Waning immunity could allow transmission of polioviruses without causing poliomyelitis by promoting silent circulation (SC). Undetected SC when oral polio vaccine (OPV) use is stopped could cause difficult to control epidemics. Little is known about waning. To develop theory about what generates SC, we modeled a range of waning patterns. We varied both OPV and wild polio virus (WPV) transmissibility, the time from beginning vaccination to reaching low polio levels, and the infection to paralysis ratio (IPR). There was longer SC when waning continued over time rather than stopping after a few years, when WPV transmissibility was higher or OPV transmissibility was lower, and when the IPR was higher. These interacted in a way that makes recent emergence of prolonged SC a possibility. As the time to reach low infection levels increased, vaccine rates needed to eliminate polio increased and a threshold was passed where prolonged low-level SC emerged. These phenomena were caused by increased contributions to the force of infection from reinfections. The resulting SC occurs at low levels that would be difficult to detect using environmental surveillance. For all waning patterns, modest levels of vaccination of adults shortened SC. Previous modeling studies may have missed these phenomena because (1) they used models with no or very short duration waning and (2) they fit models to paralytic polio case counts. Our analyses show that polio case counts cannot predict SC because nearly identical polio case count patterns can be generated by a range of waning patterns that generate different patterns of SC. We conclude that the possibility of prolonged SC is real but unquantified, that vaccinating modest fractions of adults could reduce SC risk, and that joint analysis of acute flaccid paralysis and environmental surveillance data can help assess SC risks and ensure low risks before stopping OPV.

Inflammation is the initiation of defense of our body against harmful stimuli. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), originating from outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, causes inflammation in the animal&rsquo, s body and can develop several diseases. In order to study the inflammatory response to LPS of blood vessels in vitro, 2D models have been mainly used previously. In this study, a microfluidic device was used to investigate independent inflammatory response of endothelial cells by LPS and interaction of inflamed blood vessel with monocytic THP-1 cells. Firstly, the diffusion of LPS across the collagen gel into blood vessel was simulated using COMSOL. Then, inflammatory response to LPS in engineered blood vessel was confirmed by the expression of Intercellular Adhesion Molecule 1 (ICAM-1) and VE-cadherin of blood vessel, and THP-1 cell adhesion and migration assay. Upregulation of ICAM-1 and downregulation of VE-cadherin in an LPS-treated condition was observed compared to normal condition. In the THP-1 cell adhesion and migration assay, the number of adhered and trans-endothelial migrated THP-1 cells were not different between conditions. However, migration distance of THP-1 was longer in the LPS treatment condition. In conclusion, we recapitulated the inflammatory response of blood vessels and the interaction of THP-1 cells with blood vessels due to the diffusion of LPS.

Several workers have suggested that autoimmunity may either be an aetiological factor or it may contribute to the chronicity of symptoms in the prolapsed intervertebral disc syndrome. In order to test these hypotheses lymphocyte transformation to intervertebral disc fractions, obtained by defined extraction procedures, IgG, IgA, IgM quantitation, C-Reactive Protein (CRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), were compared in 20 patients with surgically proven prolapsed intervertebral discs (PID) and a similar number of age and sex matched controls. No significant differences were noted between the two groups.