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GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Suicide has geographical differences, with people in the rural mountains of the West more likely than those in the more urbanized East to take their own lives, a new University of Florida study shows.

The nationwide study spanning three decades found that location is also a factor in suicide whether people lived in, had left or were just visiting some of the mountain states.

“Suicide levels for visitors to the western states were actually a little higher than they were for people who lived there, which means that something about simply being in the region, even temporarily, predicts an elevated suicide risk,” said Ilan Shrira, a University of Florida psychologist. “For residents, suicides were high whether they were in their hometown or outside the region, suggesting that characteristics of the people were also partly responsible.”

The study, scheduled to be published this year in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, examines whether elevated suicide levels are the result of individuals’ characteristics or the geographic region they live in. The researchers studied suicide patterns of both nonresidents visiting other regions and residents traveling away from home to try to determine whether the heightened suicide risk was due to the people or the place.

“It turns out that both factors are important,” said Shrira, who worked with Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego.

The results also suggest that access to guns plays a role in the higher suicide incidence in western states, Shrira said. “Firearm suicides accounted for 63 percent of all suicides in the region, which is even higher than the proportion in the rest of the country,” he said.

However, guns do not entirely explain the region’s excessive suicides, Shrira said. Other contributing factors may include social isolation and fewer mental health facilities, he said.

“In sparsely populated areas, people tend to have weaker social support networks and feel less strongly connected to their community,” he said. “The resulting social isolation may leave people vulnerable to suicide and the lack of mental health facilities makes it more difficult for them to get help.”

Using data from United States death records between 1973 and 2004, which covered more than 66 million people, the study focused on states with the highest and lowest suicide rates. High suicide states, defined as those ranked in the top 15 spots every year, consisted of Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming. Low suicide states, which were taken from the bottom 15 spots, were Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.

“The most distinctive feature of these two regions is their population density,” he said. “They comprise some of the most and least densely populated states in the country. Higher population density generally means lower suicide rates.”

In the low suicide states, residents’ low suicide risk skyrocketed once they left the area, Shrira said. However, there was no protective benefit for people visiting the region, he said.

Besides population density, another striking difference between the two regions is the proportion of people who own guns, with the low suicide region holding some of the lowest gun ownership rates in the country, he said.

“The use of firearms, or rather the disuse of firearms, was likely a major factor in the region’s low suicide levels,” Shrira said. Only 38 percent of this region’s suicides were committed with guns, which was well below the national average of 58 percent, he said.

“The overall pattern suggests that the extreme suicide rates in each region are due to a combination of at least two factors,” Shrira said. “The first is the available means to carry out suicides – whether or not guns are readily accessible to people. The second factor involves the geographical setting – such as how many people are around and how socially isolated people feel. Together, the setting and the means to commit suicide contribute to the highest and lowest suicide rates in the country.”

The findings highlight the importance of designing treatment and prevention strategies that address the underlying risk factors of suicide in different regions, he said.

“This study is another clear demonstration that a major cause of suicide in the United States is the ready availability of firearms,” said Matthew Miller, a professor of health policy and injury prevention at Harvard School of Public Health who has done extensive research on suicide. “These findings are consistent with a large body of empirical research.”

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Sonic hedgehog, a gene that plays a crucial rule in the positioning and growth of limbs, fingers and toes, has been confirmed in an unexpected place in the embryos of developing mice — the layer of cells that creates the skin.

Named for a video game character, Sonic hedgehog describes both a gene and the protein it produces in the body. Its study is important to increase understanding of human birth defects.

It was thought to be exclusively present in the cell layer that builds bone and muscle, called the mesoderm. But University of Florida Genetics Institute researchers have discovered that Sonic hedgehog is also at work in mice limb buds in what is known as the ectoderm, the cell layer that gives rise to the skin in vertebrates.

Finding Sonic hedgehog in this layer of cells is loosely akin to discovering that yeast has crept from the batter to the frosting, where it has the surprising effect of limiting how much the cake will rise. More literally, instead of causing appendages to grow, Sonic hedgehog seems to act as a failsafe mechanism to keep additional digits from developing.

“Sonic hedgehog protein determines how your limbs form, and why your pinky is at the bottom of your hand and your thumb is at the top,” said Brian D. Harfe, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at the UF College of Medicine. “But what’s been previously published is only part of the picture. We determined that Sonic hedgehog signaling is required in the ectoderm to have normal digit formation. Get rid of it, and an extra digit forms.”

In this case, when scientists disrupted Sonic hedgehog signaling in a small region of the limb buds of embryonic mice, an additional digit began to arise in what would be the mouse paw.

The discovery, to appear online in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that Sonic hedgehog’s role in the growth of appendages is far more complex than originally thought. Developmental biologists may have to rethink established theories about how limbs are patterned in vertebrates — an effort that could provide insight into human birth defects.

“We used technology where a viral protein seeks out specific sequences of DNA,” said Cortney M. Bouldin, a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Biomedical Sciences in the department of molecular genetics and microbiology. “We concentrated on disabling a protein essential for Sonic hedgehog signaling. Although it has been removed from the limb before, we wanted to specifically remove it from the ectoderm. When we did that, in the latter stages of development, we saw extra cartilage and the early beginnings of another digit.”

Sonic hedgehog signaling in the ectoderm of limb buds may act as a buffering system that prevents unneeded growth, Bouldin said.

The UF research was sparked by studies of gene activity in the limb buds of mice by William J. Scott, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati. Scott used a microarray experiment to examine gene expression levels in the ectoderm of mice limb buds, finding activity that could not be possible without the presence of Sonic hedgehog.

UF researchers were able to advance this investigation from cell studies to developing mice embryos by knocking out gene expression in a small region of the ectodermal layer. It allowed them to observe early limb development in the absence of Sonic hedgehog signaling.

“The view had been if you reduce signaling, if anything you would get fewer fingers,” said Scott, who did not participate in the UF research. “We now know we can’t disregard Sonic hedgehog signaling in the ectoderm. It still has its predominant effect in the tissue where it is made, but it does something more than we thought it did previously. When we try to understand problems that arise with limb growth in humans, we will be able to examine those possibilities.”

Harfe said the next phase of the work will be to observe what happens when Sonic hedgehog signaling is disrupted through larger segments of the ectodermal layer. Ultimately, researchers hope the work will lead to quality of life improvements for people.

“We would like to repair limb defects in humans and enhance regeneration of limbs, helping people who might cut off fingers in an accident, for example,” Harfe said.

The work was funded by the UF College of Medicine.

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Instead of spending spring break on a cruise or ski trip, some University of Florida College of Fine Arts students are helping residents in rural communities along the Gulf of Mexico where the oyster-harvesting industry has been hurt by the cold winter.

In February, the USDA declared Franklin County an agricultural disaster area, less than two weeks after Franklin County commissioners declared a local state of emergency. Due to the freezing weather of the past months and closings of the Apalachicola Bay due to flooding upriver, many seafood workers, particularly oyster harvesters, are out of work and facing hardships. Without work, many of these workers and their families have lost income, their utilities or their homes. According to a report from Big Bend Community Organizations Active in Disaster, between 1,000 and 1,300 families are suffering financially because of closings in Apalachicola Bay. An effort called BayAid was established to address area emergency needs and is working with the UF group of faculty, staff and students.

The UF project is called AIM for the Panhandle and the team is led by Jill Sonke, professor of theatre and dance and director of the UF Center for the Arts in Healthcare, a program operated within the university’s College of Fine Arts.

AIM for the Panhandle will work directly with workers at seafood broker houses, providing health screenings and education while collecting oral histories and engaging residents in community art projects with health care messages, including the construction of a mural. The group has assembled toiletry and art supply kits to distribute to affected families. Students were required to read local books about Franklin County, which were purchased at the Downtown Bookstore in Franklin County.

“I am excited to be a part of this project because experiential learning always impacts me much more deeply than merely words on the pages of a book,” said Shamar Brown, a graduate digital arts and sciences student at UF. ”Though we will be going to offer help in these hard times, I feel that I will learn much more from the residents in the end.”

AIM for the Panhandle is a multiyear project, supported by the State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment of the Arts, designed to create a working model for arts in health care programs in rural communities.

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Cleaning up water spills could soon become a thing of the past, thanks to a new technology that makes surfaces resistant to dirt, dust and liquids. University of Florida researchers have developed a new coating modeled after the way spiders repel liquids. It turns out a spider’s microscopic hairs keep it free of water and droplets of dirt. Engineers have discovered these mini-hairs can work on almost any surface.

Wolfgang Sigmund/UF materials science engineer: “Even in the household, surfaces of tables and of any other material that you’d like to have repellency of liquids.”

Experts say past attempts at water or dirt repelling technology don’t work as well because they can be scratched off or easily removed, and could prove unsafe.

Wolfgang Sigmund/UF materials science engineer: “Currently Teflon is actually controversial because of health risks that people associate with it. And therefore, it’s important to have a different method to render surfaces super hydrophobic and dirt repellant. And this is possible with this new method where no chemicals are needed.”

The technology could eventually come in the form of a spray-on product.

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GAINESVILLE, FL. — The humble papaya is gaining credibility in Western medicine for anticancer powers that folk cultures have recognized for generations.

University of Florida researcher Dr. Nam Dang, and colleagues in Japan have documented papaya’s dramatic anticancer effect against a broad range of lab-grown tumors, including cancers of the cervix, breast, liver, lung and pancreas. The researchers used an extract made from dried papaya leaves, and the anticancer effects were stronger when cells received larger doses of the tea.

In a paper published in the Feb. 17 issue of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Dang and his colleagues also documented for the first time that papaya leaf extract boosts the production of key signaling molecules called Th1-type cytokines. This regulation of the immune system, in addition to papaya’s direct antitumor effect on various cancers, suggests possible therapeutic strategies that use the immune system to fight cancers.

The papaya extract did not have any toxic effects on normal cells, avoiding a common and devastating consequence of many cancer therapy regimens. The success of the papaya extract in acting on cancer without toxicity is consistent with reports from indigenous populations in Australia and his native Vietnam, said Dang, a professor of medicine and medical director of the UF Shands Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office.

“Based on what I have seen and heard in a clinical setting, nobody who takes this extract experiences demonstrable toxicity; it seems like you could take it for a long time — as long as it is effective,” he said.

Researchers exposed 10 different types of cancer cell cultures to four strengths of papaya leaf extract and measured the effect after 24 hours. Papaya slowed the growth of tumors in all the cultures.

To identify the mechanism by which papaya checked the growth of the cultures, the team focused on a cell line for T lymphoma. Their results suggested that at least one of the mechanisms employed by the papaya extract is inducing cell death.

In a similar analysis, the team also looked at the effect of papaya extract on the production of antitumor molecules known as cytokines. Papaya was shown to promote the production of Th1-type cytokines, important in the regulation of the immune system. For that reason, the study findings raise the possibility of future use of papaya extract components in immune-related conditions such as inflammation, autoimmune disease and some cancers.

Bharat B. Aggarwal, a researcher at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, already is so convinced of papaya’s restorative powers that he has a serving of the fruit every day.

“We have always known that papaya has a lot of interesting things in there,” said Aggarwal, a professor in the center’s department of experimental therapeutics who was not involved in the UF research. Foremost among papaya’s health-promoting agents is papain, papaya’s signature enzyme, which is found in both the fruit and the leaves.

“This paper has not gone too much into identifying the components responsible for the activity, which is just fine. I think that is a good beginning,” Aggarwal said.

Aggarwal also noted that papaya extract’s success in reducing cancer in laboratory cell cultures must next be replicated in animal and human studies.

“I hope Dr. Dang takes it further, because I think we need enthusiastic people like him to move it forward,” Aggarwal said.

Dang and a colleague have applied to patent the process to distill the papaya extract through the University of Tokyo; the next step in the research is to identify the specific compounds in the papaya extract active against the cancer cell lines. For this stage, Dang has partnered with Hendrik Luesch, a fellow UF Shands Cancer Center member and a professor of medicinal chemistry. Luesch is an expert in the identification and synthesis of natural products for medicinal purposes, and recently discovered a coral reef compound that inhibits cancer cell growth in cell lines.

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Biostatistics professor Babette Brumback was quoted in a March 4 Palm Beach Post story about a new report finding a high incidence of brain cancer across South Florida.

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Darryl Heard, professor of zoological medicine, was quoted in a March 4 Orlando Sentinel story about the demise of a 63-year-old elephant at the Central Florida Zoo & Botanical Gardens.

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Law professor Bob Dekle was quoted in a March 4 South Florida Sun-Sentinel story about a Broward County circuit judge accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a prosecutor.

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A commentary co-authored by Dr. Marco Pahor, director of the Institute on Aging, was cited in a March 2 New York Times column about the benefits of physical activity for older people.

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Computer science professor Sumi Helal was the subject of a cover story in the March issue of Florida Trend. See related news release.

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