Suicide rates have increased across the United States — and in dozens of states by more than 30 percent, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on public health data from 1999 to 2016.

Among suicide victims counted in 2015 in 27 states, 54 percent had no known mental health condition, researchers say in the June 8 report. For those who died, circumstances surrounding their suicide included relationship or job problems, the loss of a home, legal troubles and physical health issues. These factors played a role whether suicide victims had a diagnosed medical condition or not.
With suicide, “there’s no one cause. It’s a confluence of contributors at a particular stress point in time,” says clinical psychologist Jill Harkavy-Friedman, the vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in New York City. “It’s very important to know that it’s not just mental illness; it’s many factors.”

Overall, close to 45,000 Americans died by suicide in 2016. Suicide is one of three top causes of death on the rise in the country, and has contributed to a drop in U.S. life expectancy (SN Online: 12/21/07).
By state or jurisdiction, the rates of suicide in the most recent period studied (2014 to 2016) ranged from 6.9 per 100,000 people in the District of Columbia to 29.2 per 100,000 for Montana.
“Suicide is a public health problem that can be prevented,” said Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director, in a news conference on June 7. “That’s why it’s so important to understand the range of factors and circumstances that contribute to suicide risk.”

Starting that prevention early by teaching elementary school kids problem-solving and coping skills and how to take care of their mental and physical health is key, Harkavy-Friedman says.

To reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

The story of how some of the massive stone statues on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, ended up wearing stone hats involves ramps, ropes and remarkably few workers, a contested new analysis suggests.

No more than 15 people were needed to manipulate ropes that rolled stone cylinders, or pukao, up ramps to the top of forward-leaning statues, say archaeologist Sean Hixon of Penn State and his colleagues. The hatlike cylinders were then tipped over to rest atop statues, the researchers propose online May 31 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
After clearing the ramp away, workers then carved statues’ bases flat so that the figures assumed their iconic, upright positions.

Several possible ways in which Rapa Nui inhabitants put pukao on statues have previously been proposed, including sliding pukao up wooden ramps.

“Our group is the first to consider which pukao transport and placement scenario is most consistent with the archaeological record of these multi-ton objects,” Hixon says. The researchers accounted for possible ways in which stone cylinders with the physical features of pukao could have been leveraged onto statues’ heads.

Covering just 164 square kilometers, Rapa Nui sits in the Pacific Ocean about 3,700 kilometers west of Chile. Polynesian travelers first reached the island by the 1200s (SN Online: 1/5/15).
Those people made nearly 1,000 human statues from volcanic rock. Hundreds of them, measuring up to 10 meters tall and weighing up to 74 metric tons, were moved to stone platforms, many on the coast. A team led by study coauthor Carl Lipo of Binghamton University in New York concluded in 2013 that islanders used ropes to rock upright statues enough so that the huge stones waddled down prepared dirt roads to display sites. Some statues fell along the way and were left on the side of the road. Those left-behind rocks reveal bases carved on a slight diagonal rather than flat.
The pukao were carved from a distinctive, red-hued rock. Weighing up to nearly 12 metric tons, the cylinders were probably laid on their sides and rolled down dirt roads to statue sites, where they were carved into their final shapes, the researchers say. Rock chips are still scattered around the statue sites from that activity.

Ramps made of soil and stones provided access to the tops of statues, Hixon’s group proposes. A technique called parbuckling would have enabled a small group of people to roll cylinders up ramps. In that scenario, islanders would have wrapped a long, doubled-over rope made from a local shrub around a cylinder placed on its side. One of the rope’s ends would be anchored at or near the ramp’s top and held in place by several individuals. Another group would have pulled on the rope’s free end to roll the cylinder uphill.

At the top of the ramp, islanders would have tipped the pukao into place on a statue’s head, although it’s unclear precisely how the tipping was done. Shallow indentations on the bottoms of cylinders, identified on 3-D models of 10 pukao left at a quarry site, enabled a snug fit atop the statues, the researchers say.

Archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg of UCLA regards the new scenario as dubious. Base angles on Rapa Nui statues varied considerably, making them difficult and dangerous to maneuver upright, Van Tilburg says. And parbuckling pukao up long ramps would not have reduced the total effort required to move the massive cylinders to where they needed to be, she contends.

A more plausible plan, in Van Tilburg’s view, involved transporting statues and pukao together. Van Tilburg directed a 1998 experiment in which a tree-trunk frame was used to transport a replica stone statue and pukao to an experimental platform. Ropes were used to pull the frame-encased replicas, lying prone, across the rungs of a wooden, ladderlike ramp up to the platform. Six to eight families could have completed this process, she estimates.

However Rapa Nui’s statues and pukao were moved and set up, they along with other impressive stone monuments, such as England’s Stonehenge (SN Online: 9/6/12), were built by small communities rather than states or kingdoms, Lipo says.

A new kind of artificial diamond is a cut above the rest for quantum memory.

Unlike other synthetic diamonds, which could either store quantum information for a long time or transmit it clearly, the new diamond can do both. This designer crystal, described in the July 6 Science, could be a key building block in a quantum internet. Such a futuristic communications network would allow people to send supersecure messages and connect quantum computers around the world (SN: 10/15/16, p. 13).
Synthetic diamond can serve as quantum storage thanks to a type of flaw in its carbon lattice, where two neighboring carbon atoms are replaced with one noncarbon atom and an empty space (SN: 4/5/08, p. 216). This pairing exhibits a quantum property known as spin, which can be in an “up” state, a “down” state or both at once. Each of those states reflects a bit of quantum data, or qubit, that may be 1, 0 or both at once. A diamond transmits qubits by encoding them in light particles, or photons, that travel through fiber-optic cables.

Qubit-storing diamond defects are typically made with nitrogen atoms, which can store quantum data for milliseconds — a relatively long time in the quantum realm (SN: 4/23/11, p. 14). But nitrogen defects can’t communicate that data clearly. They emit light particles at a broad range of frequencies, which muddles the quantum information written into the photons.

Defects made with silicon atoms emit light more precisely, but until now haven’t been able to store qubits for longer than several nanoseconds due to their electrical interactions with nearby particles, explains Nathalie de Leon, an electrical engineer at Princeton University.

De Leon and colleagues got around this problem by forging silicon defects in a diamond infused with boron. This extra chemical ingredient shielded the delicate silicon defects from electrical interactions with nearby particles, extending the defects’ quantum memory. The boron-infused crystal nearly rivaled the long-term quantum memory of nitrogen defects, storing qubits for about a millisecond. And it gave a clean photon readout, emitting about 90 percent of its photons at the exact same frequency — compared to just 3 percent of photons spat out by nitrogen defects.
Tweaking the environment of the silicon defects was “an extremely creative way” to help keep a better grip on qubits, says Evelyn Hu, an applied physicist and electrical engineer at Harvard University not involved in the work.

This new artificial diamond could be used to construct devices called quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communications, says David Awschalom, a physicist and quantum engineer at the University of Chicago who wasn’t involved in the work. Qubit-carrying photons can travel only up to about 100 kilometers through optical fiber before their signal gets scrambled (SN: 9/30/17, p. 8). Quantum repeaters that catch, store and re-emit photons could serve as stepping stones between fiber-optic cables to extend the reach of future networks.

When you hear the word bee, the image that pops to mind is probably a honeybee. Maybe a bumblebee. But for conservation biologist Thor Hanson, author of the new book Buzz, the world is abuzz with thousands of kinds of bees, each as beautiful and intriguing as the flowers on which they land.

Speaking from his “raccoon shack” on San Juan Island in Washington — a backyard shed converted to an office and bee-watching space, and named for its previous inhabitants — Hanson shares what he’s learned about how bees helped drive human evolution, the amazing birds that lead people to honey, and what a Big Mac would look like without bees. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
SN: This bee book is unusual — it isn’t mainly about honeybees. Why did you write about lesser-known bees?

Hanson: I made a deliberate decision because I thought the celebrity bees, the honeybees, would steal the show. It was high time to turn a stage light onto these 20,000 other species of bees, which have habits that are less familiar but just as fascinating. For example, most people think of hives when they think of bees, but actually most bees are solitary.

SN: You write that this book is an “exploration of how the very nature of bees makes them so utterly necessary.” So let’s cut to the chase: Why are bees necessary?
Hanson: First is the deep connection between bees and flowering plants. They’ve had a partnership from an early stage; each spurs the other in terms of diversity. It’s an incredible role that bees have played in shaping the natural world. They’re also important to our lifestyle, first for their role in the human diet. It’s often said that one of every three bites of food depends on bees.

But there are all these other connections that we don’t think about: Bees have provided light from beeswax candles and sweetness from honey. Early industrial uses of wax included making bronze sculptures with wax molds, batiks in Indonesia and wax tablets to write on.

You can trace our relationship with bees back not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of years. The role of honey in the human diet goes back into prehistory. That source of sugar may have even helped fuel the expansion of our brain size. It may have helped us become who we are.
SN: One of the most astonishing examples of our relationship with bees has to do with a bird called the honeyguide. Tell me about that.

Hanson: Hunter-gatherers in Africa follow this bird to bees’ nests, and have for generations (SN: 8/20/16, p. 10). The honeyguide is very good at locating a hive. But on its own, it can’t access the nest. So once it locates one, the next thing it does is look for people. It hops around on branches and makes a piercing cry to get attention, then leads a person to the honey. People climb the tree or dig out the nest, and honeyguides feed on the remains.

What’s funny is how long it took biologists to figure out this relationship. The original explanation was that the honeyguide coevolved with the honey badger, which also raids nests for honey. Then a biologist pointed out that badgers are nocturnal, and the birds aren’t. Also, no one has ever seen a honeyguide leading a badger. It makes more sense that the relationship evolved on the savannah with people out looking for honey every day.

SN: One of the book’s most hilariously geeky moments is when you go to McDonald’s and pick apart a Big Mac. Why did you do that?

Hanson: I wanted to look for the significance of bees in an unexpected place. And you don’t think of bees when you go into McDonald’s — you just don’t! I didn’t care how much people stared. I sat there with my tweezers, pulling all the seeds off the bun. I ended up with one pile you could have without bees [meat and bun] and one you couldn’t [including not only the veggies, but also the cheese and special sauce]. We could still eat, but it would be pretty dull.

SN: You’re worried about bees. Why?

Hanson: It’s the four p’s: pesticides, pathogens, parasites and poor nutrition. Poor nutrition is one that people don’t think of. We ship honeybees all over the place, and they get force-fed almond blossoms for three weeks, then they’re packed onto trucks and shipped off to pollinate apples. It’s not a healthy lifestyle, and not a varied diet.

SN: You say that bees are one of the few insects that inspire fondness instead of fear. Why do you think that is?

Hanson: Bees have been with us from the beginning. Our primordial sweet tooth led us to follow these creatures, then we domesticated bees very early on, setting out hives and reusing good sites in baobab trees. I think we have a very deep connection to these creatures.

China’s Chang’e-4 lander and rover just became the first spacecraft to land on the farside of the moon.

The lander touched down at 9:26 p.m. Eastern time on January 2, according to an announcement from the China National Space Administration. The spacecraft is part of a series of Chinese space missions named Chang’e (pronounced CHONG-uh) for the Chinese goddess of the moon.

A small rover dubbed Yutu 2, or Jade Rabbit 2, rolled off the craft several hours after landing. The rover will explore the terrain around the 186-kilometer-wide Von Kármán crater located inside the 2,500-kilometer-wide South Pole–Aitken basin. The basin, one of the largest and oldest impact features in the solar system, could contain exposed parts of the moon’s interior that might reveal details of its formation and early history (SN: 11/24/18, p. 14).
Chang’e-4 will measure some of the region’s composition, use ground-penetrating radar to probe just below the surface, and take panoramic images of a landscape that has never been seen from the ground before. It will also make measurements of charged particles and radiation, which could help support future astronaut missions, and test whether plants and insects can grow together on the moon.
Because the moon always shows the same face to Earth, it is impossible to communicate directly with spacecraft on the farside. A relay satellite named Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, that launched in May 2018 will beam signals between Chang’e-4 and Earth (SN Online: 5/20/18).
The landing marks China’s second lunar landing, and a step towards more ambitious moon missions. The Chinese space agency is planning another mission to collect moon rock samples later in 2019.

A genetic hack to make photosynthesis more efficient could be a boon for agricultural production, at least for some plants.

This feat of genetic engineering simplifies a complex, energy-expensive operation that many plants must perform during photosynthesis known as photorespiration. In field tests, genetically modifying tobacco in this way increased plant growth by over 40 percent. If it produces similar results in other crops, that could help farmers meet the food demands of a growing global population, researchers report in the Jan. 4 Science.
Streamlining photorespiration is “a great step forward in efforts to enhance photosynthesis,” says Spencer Whitney, a plant biochemist at Australian National University in Canberra not involved in the work.

Now that the agricultural industry has mostly optimized the use of yield-boosting tools like pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation, researchers are trying to micromanage and improve plant growth by designing ways to make photosynthesis more efficient (SN: 12/24/16, p. 6).

Photorespiration is a major roadblock to achieving such efficiency. It occurs in many plants, such as soybeans, rice and wheat, when an enzyme called Rubisco — whose main job is to help transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars that fuel plant growth — accidentally snatches an oxygen molecule out of the atmosphere instead.

That Rubisco-oxygen interaction, which happens about 20 percent of the time, generates the toxic compound glycolate, which a plant must recycle into useful molecules through photorespiration. This process comprises a long chain of chemical reactions that span four compartments in a plant cell. All told, completing a cycle of photorespiration is like driving from Maine to Florida by way of California. That waste of energy can cut crop yields by 20 to 50 percent, depending on plant species and environmental conditions.Streamlining photorespiration is “a great step forward in efforts to enhance photosynthesis,” says Spencer Whitney, a plant biochemist at Australian National University in Canberra not involved in the work.

Now that the agricultural industry has mostly optimized the use of yield-boosting tools like pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation, researchers are trying to micromanage and improve plant growth by designing ways to make photosynthesis more efficient (SN: 12/24/16, p. 6).

Photorespiration is a major roadblock to achieving such efficiency. It occurs in many plants, such as soybeans, rice and wheat, when an enzyme called Rubisco — whose main job is to help transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars that fuel plant growth — accidentally snatches an oxygen molecule out of the atmosphere instead.

That Rubisco-oxygen interaction, which happens about 20 percent of the time, generates the toxic compound glycolate, which a plant must recycle into useful molecules through photorespiration. This process comprises a long chain of chemical reactions that span four compartments in a plant cell. All told, completing a cycle of photorespiration is like driving from Maine to Florida by way of California. That waste of energy can cut crop yields by 20 to 50 percent, depending on plant species and environmental conditions.
Using genetic engineering, researchers have now designed a more direct chemical pathway for photorespiration that is confined to a single cell compartment — the cellular equivalent of a Maine-to-Florida road trip straight down the East Coast.

Paul South, a molecular biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Urbana, Ill., and colleagues embedded genetic directions for this shortcut, written on pieces of algae and pumpkin DNA, in tobacco plant cells. The researchers also genetically engineered the cells to not produce a chemical that allows glycolate to travel between cell compartments to prevent the glycolate from taking its normal route through the cell.
Unlike previous experiments with human-designed photorespiration pathways, South’s team tested its photorespiration detour in plants grown in fields under real-world farming conditions. Genetically altered tobacco produced 41 percent more biomass than tobacco that hadn’t been modified.
“It’s very exciting” to see how well this genetic tweak worked in tobacco, says Veronica Maurino, a plant physiologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany not involved in the research, but “you can’t say, ‘It’s functioning. Now it will function everywhere.’”

Experiments with different types of plants will reveal whether this photorespiration fix creates the same benefits for other crops as it does for tobacco. South’s team is currently running greenhouse experiments on potatoes with the new set of genetic modifications, and plans to do similar tests with soybeans, black-eyed peas and rice.

The vetting process for such genetic modifications to be approved for use on commercial farms, including more field testing, will probably take at least another five to 10 years, says Andreas Weber, a plant biochemist also at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf who coauthored a commentary on the study that appears in the same issue of Science. In the meantime, he expects that researchers will continue trying to design even more efficient photorespiration shortcuts, but South’s team “has now set a pretty high bar.”

Marathoners queuing up for a big race tend to go with the flow, surging toward the start line like a fluid.

Using footage of runners moving in groups toward the start of the Chicago Marathon, researchers developed a theory that treats the crowd like a liquid to explain its movement. The theory correctly predicted the motion of crowds of runners at marathons in two other locations, physicists report in the Jan. 4 Science.

Previous studies have devised rules for how individuals act within a crowd and used that behavior to describe crowd motion (SN: 1/10/15, p. 15). But to understand how wine swirls in a glass, you don’t need to know the behavior of each molecule. So physicists Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo of École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France considered the crowd as a whole.

At the start of a marathon, runners arrange themselves into groups known as corrals, which individually advance to the starting line. Marathon staff members form a line in front of each corral, periodically holding participants back until there’s space to move forward. The researchers filmed this start-and-stop process at four marathons, including the Chicago Marathon in 2016 and 2017. The movements of the staff set off a change in crowd density and speed that traveled through the throng akin to waves produced when water is pushed, the team found. Similar effects occurred at marathons in Paris and Atlanta in 2017.

Marathon crowds are a special type in that everyone travels in the same direction. Eventually, this type of research could lead to new insight into other crowd formations, including those packed more tightly than marathon crowds, with pedestrians literally shoulder to shoulder. Such crowds sometimes result in deadly stampedes, such as the 2015 event at the hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (SN: 4/7/07, p. 213). Better understanding of these crowd dynamics could help prevent similar tragedies.

Treatments for pain and other common health problems often fall short, leading to untold misery and frustration. So it’s not hard to understand the lure of a treatment that promises to be benign, natural and good for just about everything that ails you. Enter cannabidiol, or CBD.

So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved only one drug containing the chemical: a treatment for rare and severe forms of epilepsy. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying CBD to relieve arthritis, morning sickness, pain, depression, anxiety, addiction, inflammation and acne. And it hasn’t kept companies from marketing the heck out of CBD-infused anything. It’s the sort of situation that gets us wondering: What’s the science here?
The science is skimpy at best, neuroscience writer Laura Sanders reports in this issue. Clinical trials, some of which included children, were conducted to determine safety and efficacy before the FDA approved the first CBD-based epilepsy drug in 2018. But much less research has been done on CBD with regard to other ailments.

Adding to the intrigue, CBD can be extracted from marijuana, though CBD lacks the capacity to induce a buzzy high like its sister molecule THC. So government restrictions have been tight, and scientists have had a hard time getting access to CBD for studies. That makes it less likely that we’ll get clear answers anytime soon on whether CBD is indeed a panacea, or just another triumph of hype.

The surplus of unknowns hasn’t stopped companies from marketing hundreds of CBD products as treatments, attempting to avoid scrutiny by adding disclaimers that the products “are not intended to diagnose, treat or cure or prevent any disease.” But with such large gaps in the research, people trying these products in the hope of benefit become inadvertent guinea pigs.

The process of science may be frustratingly slow, but it can get the job done. In the last decade, clinical trials on vitamin D, for example, have found that despite much excitement surrounding the “sunshine vitamin,” there’s no definitive evidence of benefits in preventing heart disease or cancer. In our recent cover story “Vitamin D supplements aren’t living up to their hype,” contributing correspondent Laura Beil described the years of effort needed to develop that data (SN: 2/2/19, p. 16).
As journalists, we see a big part of our mission as making sure that people have access to accurate, timely information about medical research, so people can make informed decisions for themselves and their families. That’s especially important when it involves products that people can self-prescribe. These two articles — by skilled journalists who put weeks of effort into reading studies, talking with researchers and investigating the business side — are great examples of how sophisticated and useful consumer science journalism can be. Most people look for health information online, but Googling a term like “CBD oil” serves up a muddle of marketing masquerading as impartial information.

CBD may end up being a worthwhile treatment for some problems beyond epilepsy; it’s too early to know. But while we wait for the evidence, it’s essential to know where the science stands right now.

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Grains of dust from the edge of the solar system could be finding their way to Earth. And NASA may already have a handful of the debris, researchers report.

With an estimated 40,000 tons of space dust settling in Earth’s stratosphere every year, the U.S. space agency has been flying balloon and aircraft missions since the 1970s to collect samples. The particles, which can be just a few tens of micrometers wide, have long been thought to come mostly from comets and asteroids closer to the sun than Jupiter (SN Online: 3/19/19).

But it turns out that some of the particles may have come from the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of icy objects orbiting beyond Neptune, NASA planetary scientist Lindsay Keller said March 21 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Studying those particles could reveal what distant, mysterious objects in the Kuiper Belt are made of, and perhaps how they formed (SN Online: 3/18/19).

“We’re not going to get a mission out to a Kuiper Belt object to actually collect [dust] samples anytime soon,” Keller said. “But we have samples of these things in the stratospheric dust collections here at NASA.”
One way to find a dust grain’s home is to probe the particle for microscopic tracks where heavy charged particles from solar flares punched through. The more tracks a grain has, the longer it has wandered in space — and the more likely it originated far from Earth, says Keller, who works at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But to determine precisely how long a dust grain has spent traveling space, Keller first needed to know how many tracks a grain typically picks up per year. Measuring that rate required a sample with a known age and known track density — criteria met only by moon rocks brought back on the Apollo missions. But the last track-rate estimate was done in 1975 and with less precise instruments than are available today.
So Keller and planetary scientist George Flynn of SUNY Plattsburgh reexamined that same Apollo rock with a modern electron microscope. They found that the rate at which rocks pick up flare tracks was about 20 times lower than the previous study estimated.

That means it takes longer for dust flakes to pick up tracks than astronomers assumed. When Keller and Flynn counted the number of tracks in 14 atmospheric dust grains, the pair found that some of the particles must have spent millions of years out in space — far too long to have come just from between Mars and Jupiter.

Grains specifically from the Kuiper Belt would have wandered 10 million years to reach Earth’s stratosphere, the researchers calculated. That’s “pretty solid evidence that we’re collecting Kuiper Belt dust right here,” Keller says.
Four of the particles contained minerals that had to have formed through interactions with liquid water. That’s surprising; the Kuiper Belt is thought to be too cold for water to be liquid.

“Many of these particles, if they in fact are from the Kuiper Belt, tell you that some of the minerals in Kuiper Belt objects formed in the presence of liquid water,” Keller says. The water probably came from collisions between Kuiper Belt objects that produced enough heat to melt ice, he says.

“I think it’s incredible if Lindsay Keller has shown that he has pieces of Kuiper Belt dust in his lab,” says planetary scientist Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. But more work needs to be done to confirm that the dust really came from the Kuiper Belt, he says, and wasn’t just sitting on an asteroid for millions of years. “Lindsay needs to get a lot more samples,” Lisse says. “But I do think he’s on to something.”

Lisse works on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which found plenty of dust in the outer solar system and measured its abundance near Pluto when the spacecraft flew past the dwarf planet in 2015. Based on those results, he finds it unsurprising that some of that dust has made it to Earth. But it is “really cool,” he says. “We can actually try to figure out what the Kuiper Belt is made of.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated April 8, 2019, to correct that the newly calculated flare track rate was about 20 times lower than the rate calculated in 1975, not two orders of a magnitude lower.

A drug that treats a rare form of cystic fibrosis may have even better results if given before birth, a study in ferrets suggests.

The drug, known by the generic name ivacaftor, can restore the function of a faulty version of the CFTR protein, called CFTRG551D. The normal CFTR protein controls the flow of charged atoms in cells that make mucus, sweat, saliva, tears and digestive enzymes. People who are missing the CFTR gene and its protein, or have two copies of a damaged version of the gene, develop the lung disease cystic fibrosis, as well as diabetes, digestive problems and male infertility.
Ivacaftor can reduce lung problems in patients with the G551D protein defect, with treatment usually starting when a patient is a year old. But if the results of the new animal study carry over to humans, an even earlier start date could prove more effective in preventing damage to multiple organs.

Researchers used ferret embryos with two copies of the G551D version of the CFTR gene. Giving the drug to mothers while the ferrets were in the womb and then continuing treatment of the babies after birth prevented male infertility, pancreas problems and lung disease in the baby ferrets, called kits, researchers report March 27 in Science Translational Medicine. The drug has to be used continuously to prevent organ damage — when the drug was discontinued, the kits’ pancreases began to fail and lung disease set in.

Cystic fibrosis affects about 30,000 people in the United States and 70,000 worldwide. But only up to 5 percent of patients have the G551D defect.

Other researchers are testing combinations of three drugs, including ivacaftor, aimed at helping the roughly 90 percent of cystic fibrosis patients afflicted by another genetic mutation that causes the CFTR protein to lack an amino acid (SN: 11/24/18, p. 11). Those drug combos, if proven effective, might also work better if administered early, cystic fibrosis researcher Thomas Ferkol of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis writes in a commentary published with the study.