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Individuals diagnosed with congestive heart failure (CHF) have a 50% five-year mortality rate and approximately 650,000 new cases of CHF are diagnosed annually. Plant-based diets are known to improve plasma lipid concentrations, reduce blood pressure, and as part of a lifestyle intervention, lead to the regression of atherosclerotic lesions. However, a paucity of data exists with regards to plant-based diets in the treatment of CHF. Three patients diagnosed with CHF opted to undergo a dietary intervention consisting of a defined plant-based diet as an adjunct to standard medical treatment for CHF. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging was performed. Patients’ consumed the defined plant-based diet for an average of ˜79 days. Follow-up cardiac magnetic resonance images revealed a 92% increase in ejection fraction [mean ± standard deviation for all data] (22.0 ± 6.9% vs 42.2 ± 18.4%), 21% reduction in left ventricular mass (214 ± 90 g vs 170 ± 102 g), 62% increase in stroke volume (55.8 ± 24.3 cc vs 90.3 ± 30.6 cc) and a 17% increase in cardiac output (3.6 ± 1.2 L/min vs 4.2 ± 1.6 L/min). In patient 1, 90–95% ostial stenosis of the left anterior descending artery nearly completely regressed following the dietary intervention. All patients subjectively reported significant clinical improvements, including less angina, shortness of breath and fatigue. As an adjunct treatment, a defined plant-based diet may contribute to the reversal of cardiac morphological and functional abnormalities in the setting of CHF.

Objective To investigate the effectiveness of facilitated physical activity as an adjunctive treatment for adults with depression presenting in primary care.Design Pragmatic, multicentre, two arm parallel randomised controlled trial.Setting General practices in Bristol and Exeter.Participants 361 adults aged 18-69 who had recently consulted their general practitioner with symptoms of depression. All those randomised had a diagnosis of an episode of depression as assessed by the clinical interview schedule-revised and a Beck depression inventory score of 14 or more.Interventions In addition to usual care, intervention participants were offered up to three face to face sessions and 10 telephone calls with a trained physical activity facilitator over eight months. The intervention was based on theory and aimed to provide individually tailored support and encouragement to engage in physical activity.Main outcome measures The primary outcome was self reported symptoms of depression, assessed with the Beck depression inventory at four months post-randomisation. Secondary outcomes included use of antidepressants and physical activity at the four, eight, and 12 month follow-up points, and symptoms of depression at eight and 12 month follow-up.Results There was no evidence that participants offered the physical activity intervention reported improvement in mood by the four month follow-up point compared with those in the usual care group; adjusted between group difference in mean Beck depression inventory score −0.54 (95% confidence interval −3.06 to 1.99; P=0.68). Similarly, there was no evidence that the intervention group reported a change in mood by the eight and 12 month follow-up points. Nor was there evidence that the intervention reduced antidepressant use compared with usual care (adjusted odds ratio 0.63, 95% confidence interval 0.19 to 2.06; P=0.44) over the duration of the trial. However, participants allocated to the intervention group reported more physical activity during the follow-up period than those allocated to the usual care group (adjusted odds ratio 2.27, 95% confidence interval 1.32 to 3.89; P=0.003).Conclusions The addition of a facilitated physical activity intervention to usual care did not improve depression outcome or reduce use of antidepressants compared with usual care alone.Trial registration Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN16900744.

Infectious diseases have shaped the human population genetic structure, and genetic variation influences the susceptibility to many viral diseases. However, a variety of challenges have made the implementation of traditional human Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) approaches to study these infectious outcomes challenging. In contrast, mouse models of infectious diseases provide an experimental control and precision, which facilitates analyses and mechanistic studies of the role of genetic variation on infection. Here we use a genetic mapping cross between two distinct Collaborative Cross mouse strains with respect to SARS-CoV disease outcomes. We find several loci control differential disease outcome for a variety of traits in the context of SARS-CoV infection. Importantly, we identify a locus on mouse Chromosome 9 that shows conserved synteny with a human GWAS locus for SARS-CoV-2 severe disease. We follow-up and confirm a role for this locus, and identify two candidate genes, and that both play a key role in regulating the severity of SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 and a distantly related bat sarbecovirus disease outcomes. As such we provide a template for using experimental mouse crosses to identify and characterize multitrait loci that regulate pathogenic infectious outcomes across species.

We report the first detection of gravitational lensing due to galaxy clusters using only the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The lensing signal is obtained using a new estimator that extracts the lensing dipole signature from stacked images formed by rotating the cluster-centered Stokes \\(Q/U\\) map cutouts along the direction of the locally measured background CMB polarization gradient. Using data from the SPTpol 500 deg\\(^{2}\\) survey at the locations of roughly 18,000 clusters with richness \\(\\lambda \\ge 10\\) from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year-3 full galaxy cluster catalog, we detect lensing at \\(4.8\\sigma\\). The mean stacked mass of the selected sample is found to be \\((1.43 \\pm 0.4)\\ \\times 10^{14}\\ {\\rm M_{\\odot}}\\) which is in good agreement with optical weak lensing based estimates using DES data and CMB-lensing based estimates using SPTpol temperature data. This measurement is a key first step for cluster cosmology with future low-noise CMB surveys, like CMB-S4, for which CMB polarization will be the primary channel for cluster lensing measurements.

We present a search for anisotropic cosmic birefringence in 500 deg\\(^2\\) of southern sky observed at 150 GHz with the SPTpol camera on the South Pole Telescope. We reconstruct a map of cosmic polarization rotation anisotropies using higher-order correlations between the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) \\(E\\) and \\(B\\) fields. We then measure the angular power spectrum of this map, which is found to be consistent with zero. The non-detection is translated into an upper limit on the amplitude of the scale-invariant cosmic rotation power spectrum, \\(L(L+1)C_L^{\\alpha\\alpha}/2\\pi < 0.10 \\times 10^{-4}\\) rad\\(^2\\) (0.033 deg\\(^2\\), 95% C.L.). This upper limit can be used to place constraints on the strength of primordial magnetic fields, \\(B_{1 \\rm Mpc} < 17 {\\rm nG} \\) (95% C.L.), and on the coupling constant of the Chern-Simons electromagnetic term \\(g_{a\\gamma} < 4.0 \\times 10^{-2}/H_I \\) (95% C.L.), where \\(H_I\\) is the inflationary Hubble scale. For the first time, we also cross-correlate the CMB temperature fluctuations with the reconstructed rotation angle map, a signal expected to be non-vanishing in certain theoretical scenarios, and find no detectable signal. We perform a suite of systematics and consistency checks and find no evidence for contamination.

We use cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps from the 500 deg\\(^{2}\\) SPTpol survey to measure the stacked lensing convergence of galaxy clusters from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year-3 redMaPPer (RM) cluster catalog. The lensing signal is extracted through a modified quadratic estimator designed to be unbiased by the thermal Sunyaev-Zel{'}dovich (tSZ) effect. The modified estimator uses a tSZ-free map, constructed from the SPTpol 95 and 150 GHz datasets, to estimate the background CMB gradient. For lensing reconstruction, we employ two versions of the RM catalog: a flux-limited sample containing 4003 clusters and a volume-limited sample with 1741 clusters. We detect lensing at a significance of 8.7\\(\\sigma\\)(6.7\\(\\sigma\\)) with the flux(volume)-limited sample. By modeling the reconstructed convergence using the Navarro-Frenk-White profile, we find the average lensing masses to be \\(M_{200m}\\) = (\\(1.62^{+0.32}_{-0.25}\\) [stat.] \\(\\pm\\) 0.04 [sys.]) and (\\(1.28^{+0.14}_{-0.18}\\) [stat.] \\(\\pm\\) 0.03 [sys.]) \\(\\times\\ 10^{14}\\ M_{\\odot}\\) for the volume- and flux-limited samples respectively. The systematic error budget is much smaller than the statistical uncertainty and is dominated by the uncertainties in the RM cluster centroids. We use the volume-limited sample to calibrate the normalization of the mass-richness scaling relation, and find a result consistent with the galaxy weak-lensing measurements from DES (Mcclintock et al. 2018).