Author: Matthew Keeler

Matthew Keeler News Source Article #4

Matthew Keeler

Professor Vejdemo-Johansson

HON 223

November 21, 2021

 

         One article that I found interesting when searching through various sources was “Americans Drank and Smoked More During the Pandemic, Study Shows” by Julia Musto posted in the New York Post. The article introduces the idea that while the stay-at-home orders and quarantines were in effect, society was not only affected with diseases from Covid-19, but impacted the way that people functioned in their daily lives. Within this article they identified the Health, Ethnicity, and Pandemic (HEAP) study that was conducted in October of 2020, which was carried out by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The roughly 3,000 people chosen were to report their lifestyle behaviors before and during the pandemic, and their results were analyzed to identify any decrease in essential activities and any increase in factors that will negatively impact their health and behavior. Along with the percent increase or decrease this article also discusses the idea that there were subgroups that were more susceptible to these pandemic influences and notes that there needs to be steps taken to maintain and get back to the lifestyle they had before the pandemic. Overall, within this news article I realized that this went into the actual statistical findings of the study and identifies the future processes needed as also discussed within the study itself. This article includes a lot more data than previous articles I have read because in the title it explicitly refers to a study, so they aren’t skewing information to vaguely discuss the research, in fact it is the main highlight.

         When reading through the abstract of the research paper I noticed that it is very similar to the way that the news article was structured. The abstract of the research paper essentially was structured with the same information from the New York Post article in which it introduces the study and relays background information as to why the study was conducted. However, the abstract does give a little bit more information regarding the actual numbers of the overall impact of the pandemic and highlights the fact that all the negative lifestyle behaviors increased, while those essential to our overall well-being decreased as society was forced inside unless essentially needed for work. The news article takes influence from the abstract as at the end it discusses the idea of separating the people into subgroups to see the effects on people depending on their race, ethnicity, and their age. Essentially, the research paper itself follows this same format once again, but when it comes to the results and data referring to the changes of behavior, they go more in depth into the percent change and utilize various graphs and tables to visualize the effect with the different variables. A portion of their results also details each identification of behaviors such as drinking, smoking, fast-food consumption, and lack of exercise, but is broken down by race, age, and even income to show the rates varied based on the subgroup the people tested were divided into. Although this does not provide long-term information it shows the immediate impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and does not discuss how these numbers may fluctuate after the pandemic and what this means for the future of our country.

         Overall, the New York Post article, abstract, and the research paper ended up correlating with each other and relayed the same information consistently throughout. Typically, the news article would write in a way to just gage the reader’s interest and let them explore more on their own if they would like, but I believe it offered a very accurate summary of the study itself. It captured the main highlights from the paper and the study and clearly portrayed the results that can be seen statistically throughout the paper itself. Since the news article seemed to be based mostly on the abstract and pulling quotes from the article to summarize the in-depth data collection they went through, the three all matched up with no discrepancies and they all flowed well with another to create the same overarching idea that was concluded from the study.

 

Works Cited

 

Chen, Liwei, et al. “Changes of Exercise, Screen Time, Fast Food Consumption, Alcohol, and Cigarette Smoking during the COVID-19 Pandemic among Adults in the United States.” Nutrients 13.10 (2021): 3359.

News, F. (2021, October 15). Americans drank and smoked more during the pandemic, study shows. New York Post. Retrieved November 20, 2021, from https://nypost.com/2021/10/15/americans-drank-smoked-more-in-the-pandemic-study-shows/. 

Matthew Keeler News Source Article #3

Matthew Keeler

Professor Vejdemo-Johansson

HON 223

November 8, 2021

 

One article that I found interesting when searching various sources for this week was “New Study Reveals How Alzheimer’s Disease Progresses in the Brain” by Julia Musto posted in the New York Post. The article starts off by explaining the idea of how Alzheimer’s develops in the brain with the protein tau and protein beta-amyloid. Within this article they discuss the findings from a research paper in which scientists from the University of Cambridge studied the growth of these proteins to identify how these “seeds” within the brain replicate and were able to quantify this information with a mathematical model. The news article includes a tweet that demonstrates the brain models that were utilized for the study and contains a quote from the article that encapsulated their conclusions from the study. While stating the findings directly from the research paper, the news article discusses how this is a progression from recent studies of the tau protein’s spread in regions of the brain and the promising importance for the development of new treatments and therapies. Overall, I found that the article is structured in a way to offer background information of the proteins in the brain, discussing the results, then explaining the effect that these findings can have on future research.

         When reading through the abstract of the research paper I noticed a lot of similarities to the news article from the New York Post. Once again, they start off by discussing the two proteins that are implicated in the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease in regions of the brain. They discuss their method of bringing together kinetics and measurements to come up with a quantification for the rates of different datasets which revealed the replication in which the number of seeds doubles in 5 years. It was revealed that the rate of progression is being dominated by local replication that occurs within the regions of the brain and when plugged into a spatially dependent reaction equation scientists were able to conclude that their growth rate to be doubling in that five-year period. Additionally, there is finding that there is initiation of aggregation reaction, but this is ultimately taken over by the local replication of the proteins that spreads faster than the time scale of the Alzheimer’s disease itself. By creating these quantitative models can be used in the future to not only determine the rate-limiting process of the body, but also can quantify the tauopathies and other aggregation related diseases with this information there can be therapies developed to help slow the rates of these aggregation diseases.

         Overall, when it comes to the comparison between the abstract and the news article from the New York Post they are identical with a lot of the same information coming straight from the abstract. In addition to this, they include a heavy block quote and tweet of a diagram present in the research paper to capture the ideas from the study. As I have realized the news articles present the paper in a way to get clicks on their article but was able to keep the idea and conclusions from the study the same and doesn’t skew the results or data presented in the research paper itself.

 

 

Works Cited

Meisl, Georg, et al. “In vivo rate-determining steps of tau seed accumulation in Alzheimer’s disease.” Science Advances 7.44 (2021): eabh1448.

News, F. (2021, November 3). New study reveals how alzheimer’s disease progresses in the brain. New York Post. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://nypost.com/2021/11/03/new-study-reveals-how-alzheimers-disease-progresses-in-the-brain/. 

 

Matthew Keeler News Article Sourcing #2

Matthew Keeler

Professor Vejdemo-Johansson

HON 223

October 18, 2021

The article that I found very interesting when I was exploring various sources this week was titled “New Research Suggests Signs of Dementia Can be Detected in Blood” by Julia Musto in the New York Post. Within the news article I realized they utilized a lot of the quotes from the study with very little commentary to go along with this information. One of the main points they highlighted was a graph that came directly from the abstract of the paper but didn’t provide any further information in explanation of the deeper meaning behind it other than the basic gist of its meaning. The news article explains what the study generally conducted and explains that by viewing the cellular disease models of both humans and animals, healthy and unhealthy, they were able to identify a 3-microRNA signature pathological condition that could enhance phenotypes in the animal models that were studied. The majority of the news article is the reporting of the studies finding and how this information can be used for the developing cases of Alzheimers and Dementia that are continuously increasing and expected to affect 14 million by the year 2060.

When looking in depth at the research article that was published on EMBOpress, I was able to notice similarities between the abstract and the paper itself. One of the main components from the abstract highlighted why these studies and tests transpired in the first place due to the reason that scientists wanted to be able to identify any signs of disease at an early stage and be able to treat with causative therapy before it’s too late. By identifying any possible molecular biomarkers there can be further testing and screenings done in order to identify at these earlier stages anyone who has the risk of developing Alzheimer’s Diseases. When researching the healthy and unhealthy samples scientists were able to conclude that the molecular biomarker they were looking for was a 3-microRNA signature that can be detected in the blood samples of patients to give more information regarding the relevant patho-mechanisms functioning in the brain. With this information scientists make headway to RNA therapeutics to potentially ameliorate any disease phenotypes currently present in the animal models. In the future it is believed that this can be used as a point-of-care screening approach to find at-risk individuals in time to give them the proper care and therapies necessary to intervene and treat Alzheimer’s disease.

Furthermore, there were various similarities that I identified between the news article, abstract, and the scientific research paper. The news article identified a string of quotes that they gathered from the research paper in order to add depth and some science behind their attention-grabbing headline. However, I do believe that Musto does a great job encapsulating the research paper’s research and conclusions and drawing attention to the findings with suggestive, but accurate headings and information. One very striking similarity is the fact that the news article even utilizes the abstract’s graph in its article from a tweet by EMBO backed with findings that Fischer was able to conclude from gathering the research. The main difference that I saw is obviously the paper discussing their findings with the figures and data tables they collected, while the news article solely goes for attention grabbing lines and information to provide an accurate representation, while still making the article have standout information that will catch the eyes of an abundance of readers. Overall, I felt that the article, abstract, and the research paper all had the same collective agreements and information with the overall research and conclusions drawn are the same throughout all the works.

 

Works Cited

Islam, Md Rezaul, et al. “A microRNA signature that correlates with cognition and is a target against cognitive decline.” EMBO Molecular Medicine (2021): e13659

News, Fox. “New Research Suggests Signs of Dementia Can Be Detected in Blood.” New York Post, New York Post, 14 Oct. 2021,  https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/new-research-suggests-signs-of-dementia-can-be-detected-in-blood/.