Community Togetherness Plays Vital Role In Coping With Tragedies

Community solidarity and support have remarkable benefits for people coping with traumatic mass shootings, according to an American-Finnish research study recently published by the University of Turku. James Hawdon and John Ryan, both professors of sociology at Virginia Tech, with Finnish researchers Atte Oksanen and Pekka Räsänen, investigated the responses of four communities that suffered from similar tragedies in the United States and Finland. People in all four communities expressed their need for belonging after the shootings, and this solidarity appeared to have remarkable benefits for their well-being. The study, published Oct. 30, compared responses to tragedies at a shopping mall in Omaha, Neb., and at schools in Jokela and Kauhajoki, Finland, and Blacksburg, Va. After each of these incidents, the afflicted communities responded with displays of solidarity. Mass gatherings, community vigils, and spontaneously erected monuments to the victims all demonstrated that the community was in shock, yet united, the researchers said. The residents gathered to express their collective grief, and the intense rituals focused their attention on their collective loss and on each other. While there were similarities in how the communities responded to the tragedies, there were also differences. Community response was more evident in the United States, and the state, the media, and residents played an active role in promoting solidarity. In Finland, however, it appeared that neither the state nor the media emphasized informal social support generated by community solidarity. The reliance on state-sponsored crisis counseling and the media's tendency to focus stories primarily on the shooters, rather than the victims or communities, may have hindered the emergence of a beneficial solidarity and instead contributed to the emergence of a more stigmatizing behavior. Researchers say people assisting communities after tragedies should be careful not to let efforts to provide counseling interfere with the community's activities. Based on the team's research, participating in the activities of local businesses, religious establishments, volunteer organizations, and social clubs shortly after a tragedy promoted solidarity but seeing a crisis counselor did not.

Statin Drug Shows Promise For Fighting Malaria Effects

Researchers have discovered that adding lovastatin, a widely used cholesterol-lowering drug, to traditional antimalarial treatment decreases neuroinflammation and protects against cognitive impairment in a mouse model of cerebral malaria. Although there are differences between mouse models of cerebral malaria and human disease, these new findings indicate that statins are worthy of consideration in clinical trials of cerebral malaria, according to an article published in the Dec. 27 issue of PLOS Pathogens. Malaria, a parasitic infection that is transmitted to humans by the female Anopheles mosquito, is one of the leading infectious diseases worldwide. Cerebral malaria is a severe, potentially fatal neurologic complication of infection by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Studies of children with cerebral malaria show that cognitive deficits, such as impaired memory, learning, language, and mathematical abilities, persist in many survivors long after the infection itself is cured. "Over 500,000 children develop cerebral malaria each year in sub-Saharan Africa, and persistent cognitive dysfunction in survivors is not only a major public health concern, but also a significant socioeconomic burden," says Guy Zimmerman M.D., associate chair for research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Utah and senior co-author on the study. "There is an urgent and unmet medical need for therapies that treat or prevent cognitive impairment in cerebral malaria." Statins, a class of drugs best known for their ability to lower cholesterol, have also been shown to be active in modulating a variety of immune system responses. In their research, Zimmerman and his Brazilian colleagues evaluated the effect of statins in a mouse model of cerebral malaria. The researchers found that adding a drug called lovastatin to traditional antimalarial therapy prevented cognitive dysfunction in mice infected with cerebral malaria. They discovered that addition of lovastatin decreased white blood cell accumulation and leakiness in blood vessels in the brain. Lovastatin also reduced production of damaging oxygen-containing molecules and other factors that promote inflammation. "The molecular mechanisms that give rise to cerebral malaria and subsequent cognitive dysfunction are not yet known," says Zimmerman. "However, the fact that statin treatment decreases both injurious blood vessel inflammation and cognitive dysfunction suggests that a combination of vascular and inflammatory triggers leads to cerebral pathology and intellectual deficits." Zimmerman and his colleagues also studied lovastatin in an experimental model of bacterial sepsis, a severe whole-body inflammatory state that can also lead to cognitive impairment. They found that lovastatin also prevented cognitive impairment after bacterial sepsis. "Our findings are exciting because the clinical implications extend beyond cerebral malaria to other severe systemic inflammatory syndromes complicated by brain involvement," says Zimmerman. "We believe our observations are the first experimental evidence to support the possibility of using statins to reduce cognitive impairment in critically ill patients."