Finally online - sharing our findings that #Lyme disease bacteria can live in female reproductive organs for over a year and increase risk for gynecological disease!!! We found this increased risk in mice and humans! 😱 (thread below)
medrxiv.org/content/10.110… Mice with Lyme got cysts & tissue damage in their uterus and ovaries. The older the mice, the worse the damage was. We then studied 100,000s of human health records. People with Lyme had much higher rates of endometriosis & other problems. 📊👩‍⚕️

The absolute best post of the day, and probably of the month, was from the other place, but I'll tell you all about it here.
This public atlas came online to relate disease to protein levels found in the blood from thousands of people across many diseases, searchable by sex. 1/ The paper about it (published yesterday), is incredible! They highlighted proteins that show up across tons of diseases (GDF15) vs proteins that are disease specific, as well as proteins that show tremendous #SexDifferences in their disease involvement. 2/ cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

1/I finally have a moment to tell you why I think there's something really huge here in @arthur_courtin's new study. Because there's this superfamily of temperature sensing proteins I'm low key obsessed with and I don't think we have given enough consideration in immune cells...

https://twitter.com/ImmunoFever/status/1850921013002879482

2/Your ability to feel the heat of 🌶️ capsaicin depends on a protein called TRPV1, a critical member of the TRP superfamily of proteins. TRPV1 and the other TRPs aren't just expressed on nociceptive and peripheral neurons, but also immune cells and control inflammation responses

1/ The term "chronic EBV" used to elicit an🙄from many (most?) clinicians before this enormous study profiling over a million service people for decades found a causative association between Epstein Bar Virus (EBV) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… 2/ One must consider that most people are infected with EBV. For many, it would just have been one of many unremarkable "colds" without any directly associated lasting disease. Remarkably, the Bjornevik et al study found that EBV could take over a decade to trigger MS.

One of the craziest things I learned last week at #AAI2024 was that we have more free-floating extracellular mitochondria in our blood than white blood cells. This was not in any textbook that I ever read!

And the original paper:
sci.news/biology/cell-f…
faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fj… Wow! Thank you so much for all these interesting and thoughtful responses on all the different threads. I'm going to try to compile some of the most thought provoking ones into this thread to keep track. 2/

You've likely heard about gas stoves and indoor air pollution. But we don't have a gas stove. Yet, we had an indoor air pollution mystery that took me and my husband (both PhDs) 11 nights of bad air to figure out.

What the heck was going on? A 🧵 1/18 One morning in December I woke up and saw the PurpleAir (air quality sensor) bright red. A color I hadn't seen it since the wildfire smoke in California. A color I never expected to see living in the quiet suburbs of Boston. 2/

I learned something tremendous yesterday.
MENSTRUAL STIGMA is a driving force behind the tremendous diagnosis delays and lack of treatments available for gynecological diseases. This is a tremendous quality of life issue and this is something WE CAN CHANGE!!! 1/3 If we never talk about menstruation, those who are new to it have no way of knowing if what they are experiencing is "normal". Is it supposed to be this painful? Is there supposed to be this much bleeding? Are you supposed to still be able to focus and work and function? 2/3

1/ Can intramuscular vaccination induce an immune response that protects against not only disease (#COVID19), but viral infection and transmission of #SARSCoV2 in the local mucosa? In a new preprint by @GeorgieNahass et al we found that saliva may be KEY🧵
medrxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… 2/ Secreted *mucosal* antibodies 💦 protect from infection or spread of infection in the mucosa of the nose 👃 and mouth 👄. *Circulating* antibodies 🩸prevent systemic infection and disease. Which antibodies do we make after vaccination? @SalivaStudy💉

https://twitter.com/SalivaStudy/status/1332174878326210560?s=20

1/I've read many of your #scienceorigin stories, and after hesitating to share something so deeply personal, I've decided to because I imagine that many kindred experiences have been unfolding across the world over the last year. My #science origin story is one of loss and fear 2/that sparked a lifelong obsession with infectious disease. Before the pandemic, when I would speak to the public about the importance of vaccines, I would begin: Have you ever been afraid of something that was much smaller than you? Tiny.. so tiny you can't even see it? I am.

1/ The role of temperature in the immune response is the most obvious yet under-explored, under-considered variable that certainly impacts everything that we think we know from experiments done at 37 degrees. Let me give you a couple of my favorite examples. 2/ Thank you @CyrilPedia for bringing this one up. I absolutely love this paper and think it has huge implications for cytosolic pathogen recognition and energy from glycolysis vs mitochondrial respiration. How much is impacted by media and incubator temp?

https://twitter.com/CyrilPedia/status/1378271129555591170?s=19