https://www.maximizemarketresearch.com/market-report/global-adult-vaccines-market/99560/


Vaccines are biological preparations that are administered in an individual’s body to establish immunity to a particular disease. Adult’s immunity deteriorates over time, putting them at risk of contracting new infectious diseases.

PSYCHOSIS-
Antibiotics and the Brain: It’s Complicated.
Antibiotics can both cause and cure psychosis.
Reviewed by Davia Sills

KEY POINTS-
Antibiotics can decimate a person's gut microbes.
An altered microbiota can affect one's mood and cognition.
It may soon be possible to mitigate the damaging effects of antibiotics on the gut.
“Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.” — Tom Frieden

Antibiotics are a bona-fide medical miracle. When it comes to bacterial infections, nothing compares. Antibiotics have saved millions of lives. Got a cut? Antibiotics. Got strep throat? Antibiotics. Got a cold? Antibiotics. I threw in the last one to see if you are paying attention. Colds are caused by viruses, not bacteria, and antibiotics won’t help even a tiny bit. But so what? Better safe than sorry, right?

The Bad
However, antibiotics have a dark side, and you should be aware of it. Scientists have long known about a direct connection between acute psychosis and certain antibiotics, including penicillin, fluoroquinolones, cephalosporins, and macrolides.

This turns out to be tricky to measure: The reason that antibiotics are administered is because of infection or inflammation, which can itself lead to psychosis. However, causality has been established in cases where the psychosis lifted when the antibiotics were stopped and returned when the antibiotics were resumed.

This isn’t a new finding; doctors have documented a wide variety of mental complications with penicillin since 1945. The list of symptoms is long, including seizures, aphasia, spasms, psychosis, confusion, lethargy, anxiety, and coma.

The How
It’s not just penicillin: The documented psychiatric side effects of antibiotics other than penicillin range from mild symptoms to severe delirium and psychosis. What is this mysterious connection between antibiotics and the brain? The prime suspect is the gut microbiota—the batch of microbes that live in our gut and help us with digestion and defense against pathogens.

Oral antibiotics can seriously damage the microbiota. That is, after all, the whole point of antibiotics: killing bacteria. Studies have shown that your microbiota can affect your brain via the gut-brain axis. Antibiotics can kill bacteria that produce neurotransmitters like GABA, dopamine, and serotonin, and that may affect your cognition and mood. The good news here is that when the antibiotics are discontinued, the mental issues typically resolve quickly.

Challenges to the microbiota can be especially impactful for children. The first 1,000 days of our childhood are special. That’s when our immune system must learn to tolerate our beneficial bacteria. Although the details are still murky, the job must get done, or we will forever be fighting our helpful microbes, setting us up for long-term inflammation.

Getting it right is important for more than just our gut: A proper microbiota helps the brain to develop normally as well. Giving antibiotics during this accommodation period risks killing the bacteria we need. In mice, a lack of bacteria can cause an abnormal stress reaction. Providing those mice with a healthy microbiota puts them back on track, but only if they are younger than three weeks. After that, their stress response can’t recover.

Humans are not mice, but infants who take antibiotics have a less diverse microbiota and are more likely to get IBD and depression as adults. If your child really needs them, don’t hold back, but keep in mind that there might be long-term consequences.

The Good
In 1882, Robert Koch discovered that tuberculosis was caused by bacteria, and soon sanatoriums were established to deal with contagious patients. People with TB are often depressed, and sanatoriums are typically quiet, somber places.

In 1951, researchers decided to trial a new antibiotic, called isoniazid, to treat TB bacteria. To their surprise, the patients reacted weirdly: They started laughing and dancing in the hallways. The staff found themselves shushing their normally reserved patients. The researchers realized that, by pure serendipity, they had discovered the first antidepressant.

They found that isoniazid prevented the breakdown of neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine. The race was on to find new drugs that could affect neurotransmitters. That focus ultimately led to all the modern antidepressants, including Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, and others.

Virtually forgotten in all the hoopla: isoniazid is an antibiotic. As well as lifting mood, the drug alters the microbiota. This was an early glimpse at the connection between microbes and brain function, but it was swiftly forgotten.

Another win for antibiotics and mood is hepatic encephalopathy, a liver problem that affects the brain. It can cause anxiety and profound personality changes. It is not new: Hippocrates made a note of patients with liver disease and bad tempers. He said, “Those who are mad on account of bile are vociferous, vicious, and do not keep quiet.”

The culprit is ammonia, which causes edema in the brain. If untreated, it can lead to coma and death. Ammonia is a product of certain gut bacteria. One treatment is lactulose, a sugar that is consumed by lactobacillus bacteria, which multiplies and produces lactic acid. That increased acidity kills off many of those ammonia producers.

Another treatment is rifaximin, an antibiotic that acts directly on gut bacteria. The ability to treat this particular psychosis with antibiotics is another reminder of the unexpected impact our gut bacteria have on our brains.

The Confusing
In third-world countries where infections are endemic, taking antibiotics while pregnant can increase the odds that the baby will have a healthy birth weight. But in high-income countries, antibiotic use during pregnancy is associated with low birth weight. Why is that?

Most mothers don’t know it, but they pass on more than their own genes to their children: They pass down microbial genes as well. So, when the mom gets sick or takes antibiotics, it can affect this microbial heritage. Maternal infections and antibiotic use during pregnancy are associated with increased rates of schizophrenia, autism, anxiety, and depression later in the child’s life.

Before you despair, remember that associations don’t imply causality, and antibiotics during pregnancy can save the life of both the mother and the baby. But it’s worth keeping in mind that broad-spectrum antibiotics may also damage the microbiota in a way that could have a lasting effect on the child.

The Upshot
Antibiotics will degrade some bacterial species, which will allow others to fill the ranks. In a balanced microbiota, these new recruits are good neighbors. But when they are allowed to bloom, they can produce dysbiosis. When you are taking antibiotics, you don’t want to encourage their overgrowth. You may not want prebiotic fiber to amplify the uncertain survivors of an antibiotic battle. Better to eat simple foods like rice and bananas until the antibiotic treatment is over.

When you stop taking antibiotics, you need to restore your friendly old neighborhood of microbes. Your best bet here is to eat a wide diversity of foods with lots of different colorful polyphenols and various types of fiber. A prebiotic blend could be a useful supplement if you can’t get enough diversity of vegetables. A Mediterranean-style diet is a great way to recoup from antibiotic treatment. It’s also delicious.

Alcohol can exacerbate a leaky gut, so use it sparingly. Sodas, candy, and other sweets will feed fungi. Bacteria and fungi have a complex relationship, but when antibiotics knock out bacteria, fungi enjoy a resurgence due to less competition. Fungal overgrowth can be tough to control, so don’t encourage it.

The future
A German study conducted by Lisa Maier, Camille Goemans, and colleagues from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory gives some hope for a better antibiotic outcome. The researchers looked at 144 different antibiotics and monitored how they affected specific gut bacteria. They discovered that several unexpected drugs could protect the gut microbiota against antibiotic damage. These include dicumarol (an anticoagulant), benzbromarone (a gout medication), tolfenamic acid, and diflunisal (anti-inflammatories).

These drugs allowed the antibiotics to attack their targets without killing beneficial bacteria. Maier says this novel approach, combining antibiotics with protective drugs, could reduce the harmful side effects of antibiotics, including psychosis. It will, however, take time to become a standard protocol.

Antibiotics are amazing drugs that have saved millions of lives, but in nature, nothing is black and white. The stories told here demonstrate that the gut-brain connection is vulnerable to antibiotics. That’s an important factor to consider the next time you get an infection.

RESILIENCE-
Covid Long Haulers Show Us How to Transform Healthcare.
The lived experience of disease is a power tool for developing effective care.
Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

KEY POINTS-
Covid long haulers built a thriving community in the midst of the pandemic.
Patient-led research could transform medical research across diseases.
Ordinary people facing a death-defying problem can leverage science and democracy to create a better society for all.
On a cold night in February 2021, I lay in the dark in my parents’ basement, worried that illness might be my permanent future.

It was months after Covid struck me and stayed with me. The disease felt like a phantom demon was clawing out my nervous system. Each night my 69-year-old mother gave me a massage. It felt like she was squeezing energy back into my dying muscles.

Just over a year earlier, I had written the story with the highest reader engagement of any story CNN published in 2019. And it came during a big year for the biggest online news outlet in the world. Buoyed by a string of chart-topping stories, I had plunged directly into covering the pandemic. It felt like the most exhilarating time in history to be a science writer.

Then, nine months in, the virus got to me. I still wasn’t better months after I had tested positive. Long Covid is often discussed as fatigue and brain fog. However, it’s better described as a total deadness of the body, in which one’s ability to create energy feels compromised, down to the cellular level. And I felt like it was impossible to form a coherent thought at all.

I was just 31 years old and used to commanding an audience of millions of readers. But I wondered whether I’d ever write again.

I was used to running four miles a day. Now, my 66-year-old father had to wait patiently by when I was out of breath walking five houses down the street.

My brain couldn’t handle the stimulation of looking at a computer screen. I sat still, cautiously scrawling words in a notebook, describing my days with just the slightest sliver of energy and focus, all that I could muster. They became a chapter of my book The Long Haul, the drive at the heart of the story, a story about the millions living with the long-term effects of Covid-19 and their potential for changing the healthcare system forever.

“People don’t buy what you’re selling,” best-selling author Simon Sinek says in a famous TED Talk. “They buy why you’re selling it.”

I am selling a hope for science and democracy at a time when these ideas are being tested to the breaking point. I am selling it because I believe these ideas have helped save my own life. And I believe a patient revolution—like the one that brought attention to long Covid in the first place— ought to transform all of healthcare.

Start with Why
Thirteen years before the pandemic, a junior in high school, I was a student council president in a small town in middle Georgia. I came down with a mysterious post-viral disease.

More than a dozen doctors couldn’t even find a diagnosis, let alone a treatment. After six months the answer became myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome, often called ME/CFS.

During sleepless nights I scoured online forums, which told me that the disease was under-researched, there were no treatments, and I could expect to be disabled for decades. Reading those words established the plot of my young life.

I lay in bed reading the memoirs of a young senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. He was mounting a long-shot presidential campaign, speaking of the “audacity” of hope. He was a hero to root for when irrational hope against cynicism was the only thing that felt real in my own life, too.

In those quiet moments in the dark, I constructed a new self. To write is to build one’s own soul on the page.

The greatest accomplishment in my life is that I’ve since fully recovered from ME/CFS, thanks in large part to an incredible family, a brilliant doctor, relentless patience, and dogged adherence to a robust treatment protocol.

But now, tens of millions around the world are falling sick in exactly the same way from long Covid. And most don’t have the benefits I’ve had, or a community of fellow patients to build them up.

I wrote about my recovery, first in 2012 in an op-ed for USA Today, and then later barnstorming the country after college to produce a feature-length documentary about ME/CFS called Forgotten Plague. I landed a job at CNN. Sitting alone at a computer station after work in a TV control room in 2015, I dialed into a video call. I joined the first-ever board meeting of a new nonprofit called the ME Action Network.

I was intoxicated by the vision of my fellow innovative patients around the country. We were propelled by a community desperate for answers. The organization we founded was designed to “ignite a global revolution in ME care.” We were powered by digital tools pioneered by alumni of the Obama campaign and sought to bring a 21st century organizing sensibility to disrupting the most severe and prevalent disease you’ve never heard of.

We painstakingly built the organization over the next four years. Then a global pandemic broke out. The science showed that more than 10% of those infected with the novel coronavirus could develop debilitating effects for months or years after. And no one was talking about it.

At ME Action, we knew this global health emergency was a greatest opportunity to reimagine and transform care for a dozen post-infectious diseases, including ME/CFS and Lyme. Our advocacy movement would help educate new Covid long haulers on how to manage their condition early on so that they might avert the disablities plaguing those in the ME/CFS community.

When long Covid hit me, I started reliving the nightmare I thought I’d escaped. As I regained function, the words poured out of me.

The Power of Community
Hundreds of studies show significant disruptions across a dozen organ systems in Covid long haulers. But because the disease is “new” and hasn’t been covered in medical schools, clinicians don’t have a set algorithm or protocol to follow when treating patients. Often the symptoms are bewilderingly complex. Most patient experience some degree of gaslighting, with doctors telling them that symptoms were “all in the head.”

Public health leaders originally declared that Covid would be deadly for a select few but pass by in a couple weeks for everyone else. When their expected recoveries didn’t materialize, tens of thousands of patients piled into the online Body Politic support group. Peer support from a community of sufferers was exponentially better than anything else on offer.

The “body politic” is a term long used by political philosophers referring to the mass of citizens that comprises a state. It’s a has resonance for a bottom-up movement of patients pushing for innovation and care—a fusion of science and democracy. Sitting at the nexus of lived experience and scientific expertise, the patient revolution they have started is a model for thinking about problem-solving across society.

Experience has shown me that expertise is greatest in the community living with the issue. After my documentary film was released, I joined the Stanford Medicine X community as an ePatient Scholar. Whether the conditions was narcolepsy, diabetes, or glioblastoma, patients voiced a common refrain: “I am alive today because of a patient community.”

With 1 in 4 people in the world living with some kind of disability, there’s tremendous untapped opportunity for building alliances around shared need and forging new forms of power forcing science forward because lives hang in the balance.

Those with the lived experience of a disease end up being the most effective problem-solvers. And there’s a movement galvanizing around that powerful idea.

Believing in Hope
One of my heroes is patient-physician-scientist David Fajgenbaum, the author of Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope into Action. As a medical student, he nearly died five times from Castleman disease, a rare autoimmune condition in which the body wages an all-out assault on itself. But he experimented on himself and found that a widely available drug could save his own life. Now he’s applying that same vision and drive to repurposing drugs for other diseases and may have unlocked a methodology to save millions. Faigenbaum's story of turning hope into action is a powerful reminder that hope is the most important tool of science, the spark that gets the impossible done.

STRESS-
Good News: Stress Is Going to Kill You.
...But it’s going to take longer than ever.
Reviewed by Davia Sills

KEY POINTS-
Stress is endemic to modern society.
People are convinced that stress is leading to their demise, and it's true that stress can contribute to life-threatening illnesses.
Compared to 100 years ago, dying of stress-related illness in our 70s or 80s is a luxury.

Welcome to Stress on the Brain. In this blog, I'll be writing about stress and its impacts on the way we think, the way we behave, and the way we get sick. When I first meet someone and the conversation turns to my area of research, the most common response I get is, "You should study me because I'm so stressed!" This response reflects our culture's attitudes: Stress negatively affects the way we think. Stress negatively affects our health. Stress is going to kill us.

What I tell people in response is both good and bad news. The bad news? Stress is going to kill you. The good news? It's probably going to take a long time.

What do I mean by this? Consider that 100 years ago, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was about 54 years. Compare that to our current life expectancy of 76 years (in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available).

What was killing people so young 100 years ago?
Among the top five causes of death in 1923 were infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza. Today, by contrast, four of the top five causes of death are stress-related: heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and stroke. (I haven't forgotten that over 1 million Americans recently died from another infectious disease, COVID-19, but the point remains that most of the maladies that kill us today are made worse by stress.)

Why is this good news? One hundred years ago, most deaths of American adults were due to infectious diseases occurring in their 50s. Today, by contrast, we have the luxury of dying of stress in our late 70s or even older.

Much of this difference is due to the massive successes of public health.
Clean drinking water. Centralized sanitation. Improvements in maternal and infant health programs. These programs have shifted the causes of death for most Americans from acute infections to chronic diseases. Such chronic diseases are strongly impacted by lifestyle factors such as diet and stress.

Take, for example, the number-one killer of adults, heart disease. The cardiovascular system, including the heart and blood vessels, is a particularly sensitive target of stress. The system includes a pump (the heart) and a sequence of elastic tubes (blood vessels), which are always working.

One of the primary stress responses is to increase blood flow to working muscles to outrun a predator on the proverbial savannah. Just like with any mechanical system, the cardiovascular system will eventually wear out with increased use, as when under chronic stress. Modern stress rarely necessitates running from a predator, so the increased wear and tear on our cardiovascular system is for naught. It just hastens the eventual breakdown of the system.

This doesn't sound like good news, either. But hold on. Advances in cardiovascular medicine reduce the negative impact of the modern lifestyle on our hearts and blood vessels. The negative impact that stress can have on the cardiovascular system can be counteracted with improvements in diet, exercise, and medicine, prolonging the health of the system into our eighth or ninth decade. The impact of stress is still there, but our modern mitigation techniques allow us to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system for much longer.

If all this sounds too good to be true, you're correct. I'm glossing over a great deal, including the threat of future pandemics, increased number of deaths of despair, and the widening income gap, all of which threaten to wipe out some of the increases in life expectancy we've seen over the last 100 years. My message is this: You can now survive stress for longer than ever in our species' history. Yes, stress will kill you. Until then, stay vigilant to maintain and expand on the gains that we've made. Future generations may have the luxury of being stressed for even longer!