The current kidney transplant waitlisting criterion is based on a single measurement of kidney function (estimated glomerular filtration rate [eGFR] ≤20 ml/min/1.73 m²) and does not consider an individual’s risk of progressing to kidney failure.

A new study reveals that inclusion of a patient’s two-year risk of progression to kidney failure (using the Kidney Failure Risk Equation [KFRE], which incorporates age, sex, urine albumin, and eGFR) as a decision-making tool toward pre-emptive listing for kidney transplantation, has the potential to improve patient outcomes and reduce racial disparities. The findings were presented at ASN Kidney Week 2025, held November 5–9.

When examining the use of the two-year risk of progression to kidney failure of ≥25% based on the KFRE as a listing criterion and comparing it with the current eGFR ≤20 criterion, investigators found that among 10,368 US veterans with chronic kidney disease in 2022 who would meet at least one of the criteria, 60% met both and 20% met only one or the other.

In 2022, veterans who only qualified by the eGFR ≤20 criterion were older (71 years) than those who only qualify by KFRE ≥25% (53 years).

Also, using the kidney disease progression criteria only, more males, minorities (Hispanic, Black, and Asian), and those with diabetes and/or albuminuria would be waitlisted. When examining longitudinal data (2006–2019) to assess outcomes, the group who met both criteria or the KFRE ≥25% only, had the highest rates of kidney failure and lower mortality compared with those who only met the eGFR ≤20 criterion.

“Expanding the waitlisting criteria for kidney transplantation to include risk of kidney failure prioritizes individualized approaches to care and could improve outcomes in younger patients with chronic kidney disease, as well as improve racial parity in access to kidney transplantation,” said corresponding author Jennifer L. Bragg-Gresham, MS, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan Medical School.

“This approach will continue to be studied prospectively and in populations beyond veterans to verify its potential to improve patient outcomes.”

You keep your trusty reusable bottle filled with only clear, delicious water. Do you still need to wash it?

Experts say reusable bottles get grubby no matter what liquid they’re filled with, and it’s important to clean them regularly.

Water bottles pick up germs from our mouths when we take a sip, and from our hands when we touch the straw or lid. They’re covered in tiny, tough-to-reach nooks and crannies which can become breeding grounds for mold, bacteria and other microbes if left un-scrubbed.

“It seems like something mundane, but it is extremely important,” said nurse practitioner Michele Knepper, who works at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Unclean water bottles can cause stomach aches and itchy throats and even exacerbate allergies and asthma.

Experts disagree on when and how you should wash them, but they’re all in agreement on one thing: Give your water bottle a tender loving clean, because something is better than nothing at all.

“Is it that big of a deal? No. But it’s also not difficult to just wash your water bottle,” said Dr. Mike Ren, a family medicine physician at Baylor College of Medicine.

Some tips for a squeaky clean water bottle

Experts say the gunk doesn’t care what your water bottle is made of. Reusable metal, plastic and glass bottles all grow germy, but plastic bottles are more likely to get scratches or dings on the inside where microbial life can cozy up.

The best cleaning routine is a simple one: Use a sponge or bottle brush to scrub inside and out with warm, soapy water, rinse it out and let it dry so it’s ready for the next refill. A narrow or pipe cleaner-shaped tool can be useful to get into straws and tight crevices.

For a deeper wash, scientists recommend popping the bottle in the dishwasher if it’s safe to do so, or dissolving a denture or retainer-cleaning tablet in the bottle overnight. Scrubbing with a warm water solution of vinegar or baking soda works too.

Many experts recommend doing a simple, soapy water clean every day and a deeper clean once a week. If daily cleaning feels a little extra, Ren said to try to get to it at least every other week or so while maintaining other good habits like rinsing the mouthpiece over the sink during each refill.

But if you fill your reusable bottle with other beverages like protein shakes or exercise drinks, it really is important to clean every day. Sugary drinks leave a residue that bacteria love to snack on.

Do you need to dump the water in your bottle every day?

Is it okay to leave water in a reusable bottle overnight? Experts disagree.

Some say to dump the dregs out every refill, while others recommend emptying every few hours. Ren says it’s likely okay to leave some inside overnight, but to empty old water at least every few days.

“Guidelines are guidelines,” Ren said. “Everyone’s going to do it a little bit differently.”

If there’s visible mold on the bottle or the liquid inside has a weird smell, don’t drink it. Avoid refilling disposable plastic water bottles since chemicals can leach into the water, and they’re even more full of cracks and crevices that can harbor germs.

Water bottle cleaning routines may not all look the same—but it’s important to keep up the habit, said Ivy Sun, a hospitality expert at Georgia Southern University who has studied water bottle contamination. She washes her and her kids’ bottles with soapy water every day.

“This is just a very small step that we do, but it can largely help with our health,” Sun said.

© 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

In a new study of more than 40,000 patients, researchers at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City have found that patients who have no evidence of calcium in their coronary arteries are not only significantly less likely to die from heart conditions—including heart attacks and heart failure—but also are at reduced risk of death from non-cardiac medical conditions.

Coronary artery calcium (CAC) is a strong predictor of how likely someone is to develop clinical coronary artery disease. It is an excellent measure of coronary plaque burden.

When cholesterol-laden plaque builds up in the coronary arteries, blood flow to heart muscle is limited, and plaque rupture with coronary thrombosis can block off blood flow completely, leading to unstable angina or a heart attack.

As plaques age, they attract calcium, which can be imaged with computed tomography. If someone has a coronary artery calcium (CAC) score of zero, the chance that their coronary arteries are clear of advanced plaques is very high. If CAC is present, then their risk of a future heart attack is much greater and in proportion to the CAC score.

In the Intermountain Health study, researchers found that patients with any level of coronary artery calcium have more than two times greater risk of dying of any medical condition than patients with no evidence of CAC—including medical conditions not related to heart health.

“We know that not having any coronary artery calcium is a predictor of being in good coronary health, but we were surprised to find that it may also be a sign you’re in good general health,” said Jeffrey L. Anderson, MD, distinguished clinical and research physician at Intermountain Health and principal investigator of the study.

“Someone’s coronary artery calcium score could be a more powerful predictor of a person’s overall health than we previously thought. We don’t know the mechanism for this extended benefit, but coronary plaque may be correlated with plaque in blood vessels in other parts of the body, and having atherosclerosis may also negatively impact immune surveillance, an important protective mechanism against cancer.”

Findings from the study were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2025 in New Orleans on Saturday, Nov. 8.

In the large, retrospective study, Intermountain researchers reviewed the medical records of 40,018 Intermountain Health patients, whose doctors determined they were at risk of having or developing heart disease, and as part of that care, underwent a PET/CT stress test.

Of the patients in the study, 7,967 had no evidence of coronary artery calcium, and 32,051 had some levels of CAC. Researchers then followed up with patients for five years and reviewed all-cause mortality of people with a CAC score of zero compared to those with a CAC score of greater than zero.

Researchers found that people who had any level of coronary artery calcium were 2 to 3 times more likely to have died than those without CAC in those five years.

Even more surprising, of those with CAC who died, only about one quarter did so from cardiovascular disease. That means most of these patients died of something else, i.e., non-cardiovascular diseases.

Researchers say they’re not sure why patients’ all-cause mortality rates were higher for those with evidence of coronary artery calcium. The next step in this research, they say, is to examine those non-cardiovascular deaths, and better stratify the causes behind them.

“This may help uncover the mechanism of why a coronary artery calcium score predicts death due to non-coronary artery problems,” said Dr. Anderson. “It’s not clear to us right now, and it requires more study, but it’s a very interesting observation and suggests that coronary artery calcium has prognostic value beyond just heart attacks and other heart -related causes.”

Countries agreed Friday to phase out the use of mercury-based dental amalgams in tooth fillings by 2034, in a move that will change dentistry around the world.

At a conference in Geneva, signatories to a treaty aimed at protecting human health and the environment from mercury pollution called time on mercury amalgams.

Nations agreed “to end the use of dental amalgam by 2034, marking a historic milestone in reducing mercury pollution,” the conference announced in its closing statement.

The World Health Organization considers mercury one of the top 10 chemicals of major public health concern, calling it “toxic to human health.”

Some countries have already banned its use in dental amalgam, a common filling material used for more than 175 years.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury is an international treaty to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of mercury and mercury compounds.

More than 150 countries are party to the convention, which was adopted in 2013 and came into force in 2017.

Parties at this week’s conference adopted amendments “establishing a global phase-out of dental amalgam by 2034,” the closing statement said.

“This science-based, time-bound agreement marks a decisive step toward the total elimination of mercury use in dentistry and a safer future for all communities.”

African initiative

The treaty already stipulated that signatories must take measures to phase out the use of mercury-based dental amalgams.

However, a bloc of African countries wanted a deadline, with a ban on their production, import and export, starting in 2030.

As the conference opened Monday, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked why mercury was deemed “dangerous in batteries, in over-the-counter medications and make-up,” but acceptable in dental fillings.

“It’s inexcusable that governments around the world still allow mercury-based compounds in health care—and safe alternatives exist,” he said in a video message.

A few countries opposed the idea of a phase-out by 2030, including Iran and India, and Britain, which said it was too soon.

But countries came together and agreed a phase-out by 2034.

“We have just opened the door to another chapter of the mercury history book,” said the convention’s executive secretary Monika Stankiewicz.

“Mercury pollution is a scourge.”

However, “by understanding one another and bridging our differences, we can make a difference in the lives of people everywhere.”

The European Union’s representative called it “an important milestone in making mercury history: a step that will bring lasting benefits for human health and the environment globally.”

Mexico, speaking for the Latin American and Caribbean countries, called it an “ambitious but realistic step towards a future free from mercury.”

Skin-lightening cosmetics

Overall, the conference adopted 21 decisions aimed at better protecting human health and the environment from mercury pollution.

Countries also agreed to step up efforts to eliminate skin-lightening cosmetics containing mercury, through curbing illegal trade and strengthening enforcement.

When added to cosmetics, mercury lightens the skin by suppressing melanin production. However, the process is not permanent and is dangerous to health.

The conference heard that sales of such products have soared, especially online.

Countries also moving away from the use of mercury in small-scale gold mining, and the feasibility of mercury-free catalysts for the production of vinyl chloride monomer (VCM)—a key component of PVC plastic.

The conference’s president Osvaldo Alvarez Perez said, “We have set ambitious new goals, and left mercury a little further behind.”

© 2025 AFP

Reading brain activity with advanced technologies is not a new concept. However, most techniques have focused on identifying single words associated with an object or action a person is seeing or thinking of, or matching up brain signals that correspond to spoken words. Some methods used caption databases or deep neural networks, but these approaches were limited by database word coverage or introduced information not present in the brain. Generating detailed, structured descriptions of complex visual perceptions or thoughts remains difficult.

A study, recently published in Science Advances, takes a new approach. Researchers involved in the study have developed what they refer to as a “mind-captioning” technique that uses an iterative optimization process, where a masked language model (MLM) generates text descriptions by aligning text features with brain-decoded features.

The technique also incorporates linear models trained to decode semantic features from a deep language model using brain activity from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The result is a detailed text description of what a participant is seeing in their brain.

Generating video captions from human perception

For the first part of the experiment, six people watched 2,196 short videos while their brain activity was scanned with fMRI. The videos featured various random objects, scenes, actions, and events, and the six subjects were native Japanese speakers and non-native English speakers.

The same videos previously underwent a kind of crowdsourced text captioning by other viewers, which was processed by a pretrained LM, called DeBERTa-large that extracted particular features. These features were matched to brain activity and text was generated through an iterative process by the MLM model, called RoBERTa-large.

“Initially, the descriptions were fragmented and lacked clear meaning. However, through iterative optimization, these descriptions naturally evolved to have a coherent structure and effectively capture the key aspects of the viewed videos. Notably, the resultant descriptions accurately reflected the content, including the dynamic changes in the viewed events. Furthermore, even when specific objects were not correctly identified, the descriptions still successfully conveyed the presence of interactions among multiple objects,” the study authors explain.

The team then compared the generated descriptions to both correct and incorrect captions across various numbers of candidates to determine accuracy, which they say was around 50%. They note that this level of accuracy surpasses other current approaches and holds promise for future improvement.

Reading memories

The same six participants were later asked to recall the videos under fMRI to test out the method’s ability to read memory, instead of visual experience. The results for this part of the experiment were also promising.

“The analysis successfully generated descriptions that accurately reflected the content of the recalled videos, although accuracy varied among individuals. These descriptions were more similar to the captions of the recalled videos than to irrelevant ones, with proficient subjects achieving nearly 40% accuracy in identifying recalled videos from 100 candidates,” the study authors write.

For people who have a diminished or lost capacity to speak, such as those who have had a stroke, this new technology could eventually serve as a way to restore communication. The fact that the system has proven itself capable of picking up on deeper meanings and relationships, instead of simple word associations, could allow these individuals to regain much more of their communication ability than some of the other brain-computer interface methods. Still, further optimization is necessary before getting to that point.

Ethical considerations and future directions

Regardless of some of the more positive applications for mind-captioning devices capable of reading human thought, there are certainly legitimate concerns regarding privacy and potential misuse of brain-to-text technology.

The researchers involved in the study note that consent will remain a major ethical consideration when employing mind-reading techniques. Before more widespread use of these technologies is common, important questions about mental privacy and the future of brain-computer interfaces will need to be addressed.

Still, the study offers up a new tool for scientific research into how the brain represents complex experiences and a potential boon for nonverbal individuals.

The study authors write, “Together, our approach balances interpretability, generalizability, and performance—establishing a transparent framework for decoding nonverbal thought into language and paving the way for systematic investigation of how structured semantics are encoded across the human brain.”

© 2025 Science X Network