Co-exposure to urban particulate matter and aircraft noise adversely impacts the cerebro-pulmonary-cardiovascular axis in mice

Worldwide, up to 8.8 million excess deaths/year have been attributed to air pollution, mainly due to the exposure to fine particulate matter (PM). Traffic-related noise is an additional contributor to global mortality and morbidity. Both health risk factors substantially contribute to cardiovascular, metabolic and neuropsychiatric sequelae. Studies on the combined exposure are rare and urgently needed because of frequent co-occurrence of both risk factors in urban and industrial settings. To study the synergistic effects of PM and noise, we used an exposure system equipped with aerosol generator and loud-speakers, where C57BL/6 mice were acutely exposed for 3d to either ambient PM (NIST particles) and/or noise (aircraft landing and take-off events). The combination of both stressors caused endothelial dysfunction, increased blood pressure, oxidative stress and inflammation. An additive impairment of endothelial function was observed in isolated aortic rings and even more pronounced in cerebral and retinal arterioles. The increase in oxidative stress and inflammation markers together with RNA sequencing data indicate that noise particularly affects the brain and PM particularly affects the lungs. Noise also increased levels of circulating stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline, while PM increased levels of circulating cytokines CD68 and MCP-1. The combination of both stressors has additive adverse effects on the cardiovascular system that are based on PM-induced systemic inflammation and noise-triggered stress hormone signaling. We demonstrate an additive upregulation of ACE-2 in the lung, suggesting that there may be an increased vulnerability to COVID-19 infection. The data warrant further mechanistic studies to characterize the propagation of primary target tissue damage (lung, brain) to remote organs such as aorta and heart by combined noise and PM exposure.Copyright © 2023

Forging ahead from adaptations of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from multiple pharmacy programs

The introduction of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the Spring semester of 2020 sent many educational units, elementary to higher education, scrambling to move content to remote learning. Within a professional program, this push highlighted gaps or potential pitfalls in preparing students to enter the health care field. This article highlights lessons learned in remote teaching during the pandemic from six unique colleges and schools of pharmacy: Auburn University, Drake University, Purdue University, University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, Texas Tech University Health Science Center, and University of Utah. These lessons learned pertain to remote content delivery, student engagement, skill development, and assessments within the classroom and experiential settings. Within the classroom setting, the challenges, literature, personal experiences, and key recommendations for lecture-based learning, group-based learning, lab-based learning, and assessments are described. Similarly, for the experiential setting, the challenges, literature, personal experiences, and key recommendations are also described, including training learners for remote patient care as well as examples for remote experiential activities and assessment. Forging ahead, there will be a continued need for future research for remote learning within pharmacy education.