UC Science Today

Why do pregnant women tend to suffer from sleep disorders?

Financial status of the future mothers could be one of the reasons leading to insomnia. That’s according to Jennifer Felder, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“Women of color and women from more economically disadvantaged background are disproportionately affected by poor sleep during pregnancy so it is possible that this may explain part of the reason we have such big disparities in the preterm birth rate.”

Lack of resources brings along other inequality factors affecting pregnant women’s sleep.

"Stress and psychological problems, noisy neighborhoods, discrimination and racism, not feeling safe.”

Felder says researchers studying different disciplines – be it psychology, environmental science or public health - need to combine their efforts in helping low income pregnant women improve sleeping patterns.

Are yogurt, kefir and other probiotics really good for you? Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, believe the benefits of these products may be overstated. Michael Cabana, a professor of pediatrics, came to this conclusion while trying to figure out if a probiotic strain called LGG helps prevent the development of eczema or asthma in kids predisposed to these diseases.

“At two years of age we found that there is no difference in eczema levels between the kids. Despite the fact that previous studies have shown this probiotic strain helps prevent eczema in other countries, in the San Francisco area we didn’t find the same results.”

The UCSF findings further fuel the ongoing debate about the benefits of friendly bacteria in dietary supplements.

“We still learned a lot from this study and we still continue following these kids. It is probably more complicated than just giving a probiotic supplement.”

Genetic factors and other types of baby food, including breast milk, also affect a child’s microbiota. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

Environmental pollutants can damage our health, but how much do we know about their harmful effects? As part of a prenatal patients’ study, Tracey Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco has surveyed OBGYNs. The goal was to find out if doctors inform their patients about environmental health as part of their prenatal care.

“We actually surveyed doctors, obstetricians to ask them do you talk to your patients about environmental health, what do they say to you, do you think it is an important issue to ask them. And doctors by and large, at least obstetricians said we think this issue is really Important, but we don’t talk to our patients because we don’t have the kind of information we need to give to them.”

Woodruff and her team are now filling in the gap integrating environmental health into clinical care.

“One thing we have been doing is working with their professional societies to provide this foundational information so it is easier for a physician to give a patient information about environmental exposure they are concerned about.”

How technological advances are factored in climate change models by University of California

Private space tourism is no longer a faraway dream. In fact, Thomas Lang, an imaging scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, is trying to predict what tourists’ lives would be like in space. Researchers, for example, already have plans for designing commercial space habitats.

“What happens when you have private space stations? And those stations are geared for commercial activities. You would have people doing manufacturing or research or some other activity in space.”

The most pressing question for researchers is how to provide space tourists with an adequate training so they could stay in good health.

“Does it have to be NASA-like training program? Will they cut these health requirements down? What’s going to be the right trade off?”

Lang says, aging happens very quickly in space and can severely affect astronauts’ bones with lifetime bone structure being lost in just six months. But according to Lang, this could probably be prevented.

How important is it for pregnant women to get enough sleep? Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have recently conducted a study linking the lack of a good night’s rest to complications at delivery.

“Our study was the first to examine insomnia diagnosed during pregnancy and the risk of preterm birth. And our findings suggested that women with an insomnia diagnoses during pregnancy are at nearly two times higher risk for delivering before 34 weeks of gestation”.

That’s UCSF clinical psychologist Jennifer Felder. She urges mothers to pay extra attention to sleeping patterns in order to protect their babies.

“And this is really important because In the United States one in 10 women deliver their babies preterm. And it is now the leading cause of death before the age of 5 globally.”

Scientists hope that by treating sleep disorders they could reduce the rate of preterm births. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

Every year, more than 25 thousand pounds of chemicals are imported or manufactured in the United States, but scientists have very little data on many of those chemicals’ heath effects. Tracy Woodruff, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains.

"We do know a lot about some environmental chemicals, so air pollution, cigarette smoke, some carcinogens and chemicals that cause effects other than cancer. There is still a lot of scientific knowledge to be gained about any of the industrial chemicals that we are using currently in the market place and we are exposed to.”

Woodruff says the effect of chemicals on humans is often underestimated, because most studies involve lab animals.

“But that doesn’t really reflect somebody who lives in a neighborhood that has a lot of crime or they are low income and so they have a lot of other stressers in their lives.”

Woodruff says measuring the combined health effects of people’s social and environmental hardships could give researchers a more complete picture.

Every year, almost 2 million Americans suffer from traumatic brain injury, which often lead to severe memory loss and learning disabilities. Peter Walter, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, has recently discovered a drug that can completely reverse these impairments in mice.

“The mice learned better. They have a better ability of taking short term memory and storing it in long term memory. It is a drug that enhances synaptic plasticity that allow memory to form.”

Scientists need to conduct more studies to learn if the same improvements can be achieved in humans.

“Whether we can extrapolate it to humans is still an open question. Mice’ brains are very different from human brains.”

But since traumatic brain injury is a serious problem with no approved therapies available for patients, these studies may offer researchers new insight. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.

This week on Science Today, we learned something that many of you probably already know – and that’s how curiosity is often the main ingredient in scientific discovery. So many of the researchers we interview every week, often make breakthroughs by simply wondering about the world around them or asking different questions.

In the case of nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic at UC Davis, in her case it was a picture that prompted her to a discovery that the composition of sugars coating HDL particles in body may be a biomarker for disease.

"It was an electron micrograph of the inside of an arterial wall and it was hairy looking, right? And it’s because the endothelial cells that line the inside of your arteries are actually covered with these sugars. They’re kind of like these structures that help make sure certain things get through and certain things don’t get through from the bloodstream. And when I saw that picture I realized, well if your cells that these HDL particles have to kind of interact with are covered with sugars, then the HDL must be covered with sugars, too."

And at UCSF, environmental health scientist Tracey Woodruff wanted to understand how chemicals in the environment intersect with health disparities.

"For example, African American women have higher rates of adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth and low birthweight. Is it because one of the reasons of this health disparity is because there is some type of environmental factors that are also combining with the factors that are due to their circumstances, that put their pregnancy more at risk?"

And additional stressors like discrimination or domestic violence are exacerbated by environmental factors like air pollution or cigarette smoke. So by asking this question and digging further, Woodruff hopes their findings may lead to the implementation of better environmental policies, especially in impoverished areas that often get exposed to chemicals. And these are just two University of California researchers who are trying to make a difference in the world. Subscribe to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud to hear about others. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.

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Sometimes, breakthroughs in science really do come down to simple curiosity. That was definitely the case when a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis decided to look more closely at the composition of HDL particles in the body. One of HDL's jobs is to transport cholesterol out of cells. Nutrition researcher Angela Zivkovic says it was a picture that prompted her to question if HDL may be covered in glycans, or sugars, and how that may impact the body.

"It was an electron micrograph of the inside of an arterial wall and it was hairy looking, right? And it’s because the endothelial cells that line the inside of your arteries are actually covered with these sugars. They’re kind of like these structures that help make sure certain things get through and certain things don’t get through from the bloodstream. And when I saw that picture I realized, well if your cells that these HDL particles have to kind of interact with are covered with sugars, then the HJDL must be covered with sugars, too."

Their ultimate finding that these sugars do influence anti-inflammatory proteins in the body could lead to biomarkers for disease. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.