‘Cocaine hippos,’ underground bees, and surprising science on aging and the heart

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As the available treatments for HIV have improved, so have the number of people living into middle and old age with HIV. In the US, more than half of people with HIV are now age 50 or older. And 4.2 million people in that cohort are living with HIV worldwide. But while people with HIV can now live longer lives with the help of medication, researchers have noted that they seem to develop age-associated conditions.

Things like bone density loss, heart and kidney disease, cognitive decline, and certain cancers at an earlier age than their HIV-negative peers. Some studies looking at epigenetic measures of aging, or the changes in your DNA that accumulate over time, suggest that HIV infections can accelerate a person's biological aging process by several years.

While we don't yet know for sure what factors might intersect to fuel this process, we do know that chronic inflammation is associated with accelerated aging. We also know that HIV causes chronic inflammation because the immune system is always on high alert due to the presence of the infection. Today, researchers at the annual meeting of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases presented their latest findings on this problem.

Their preprint paper suggests anti-retroviral therapy, or ART, which is the standard course of treatment for people with HIV. Does work to combat some of the virus's potential to speed up aging, bringing the average difference between biological and actual chronological age. From 10 years to about four after just around a year and a half of treatment. To come to these findings, the researchers developed a tool called a plasma proteomic aging.

Or PAC. Using the Swiss HIV cohort study, which has followed people living with HIV in Switzerland since 1988. They trained the PAC to analyze 416 different proteins found in the blood and associated with aging. They used the tool to look at a subset of study subjects who had supplied blood samples for several years after an HIV diagnosis, but before actually starting ART. When they looked at those subjects, they were able to track how biological aging accelerated with infection.

Treatment. In a press release, the study authors called for other researchers to use the tool on more diverse populations. To see if the results held up. Speaking of inflammation and health, an article in Scientific American's latest print issue dives into how this immune response can also drive heart disease. I'll let Siam's chief newsletter editor, Andrea Garleski, jump in to tell you more.

Scientists are now starting to pay attention to a new factor that they suspect is contributing to heart disease and that is chronic inflammation. Inflammation is the body's built-in alarm system. It activates when the immune system senses it's something untowards happening. For instance, when the body detects a virus or a bacteria, it recruits immune cells to the scene where those cells launch an all-out attack against that bacteria or virus and the cells they've infected.

But sometimes this process doesn't cool down or shut off, and instead it starts harming the body's healthy tissues. Such chronic inflammation, as it's called, it turns out may accelerate cardiovascular problems. In the case of the heart, when cholesterol builds up in the arteries, It can form these jagged needle like crystals and they tear the artery walls and trigger this inflammatory response. Prolonged inflammation actually can start to degrade heart function.

So now researchers are testing potential drugs for their ability to lower inflammation. One of these is a drug that's been around a while to treat gout, which is a disease of inflammation. That drug called culchicine was approved by the FDA in 2023 to treat heart disease.

Though study results of colchizine have been mixed, one clinical trial showed that those who took it had thirty percent less chance of cardiac incidence, especially when combined with statins. And there are several other drugs that target inflammation that are also in the pipeline. To stay updated on this story and to get the inside track on other science news, subscribe to my newsletter Today in Science. Thanks, Rachel.

And now for something completely different. Bees. Bees? Bees. A lot of bees. According to a study published last week, there could be nearly 5.6 million bees living beneath the earth in Ithaca, New York's East Lawn Cemetery. While news of such a great abundance of bees buzzing around underground, and in a graveyard no less, might put you on edge, this isn't some zombie horror story.

Adrena regularis is a species of ground nesting bee. Like some 70% of all bee species found in the US, these pollinators burrow underground instead of building hives. They're known for being solitary, nesting alone instead of in big colonies, but as this new study shows, that doesn't mean they're thin on the ground, or under the ground, as it were.

If you're just tuning in now, so to speak, the hippopotami or hippopotamuses, commonly known as cocaine hippos, were once owned by the late drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. He had four of the animals brought to his estate in the Antiquia region, quite illegally, I might add, in nineteen eighty one, and they've been feral since his death in nineteen ninety three.

Hippos are big, dangerous, and famously hungry animals, so the presence of this growing hippo population has posed more and more of a threat to local people. Plants, animals, and waterways. And these hungry, hungry hippos have been busy. By 2022, there were an estimated 200 or so cocaine hippo descendants on the loose, and the Colombian government started efforts to sterilize them.

A slow, expensive process that quite literally puts human lives on the line. They also started talking about relocating as many of them as possible. Unfortunately, last week, with at least 169 hippos still alive and kicking. The government announced plans to euthanize 80 of them. It seems that the sterilization efforts are no match for the cocaine hippo's rate of reproduction, and that none of the countries or zoos Colombia reached out to.

to have opted to take any hippos off of their hands. If this news upsets you, I totally get it, because hippos are very cute from a distance, but there are a few key things to keep in mind. For starters, hippos eat an average of 88 pounds of plant matter. Just from eating alone, they can have a huge impact on their ecosystems, and Colombia is not a place that they're native to.

So while it would obviously be ideal if no hippos had to cross that rainbow bridge, you really can't blame the Colombian government for deciding that the cocaine hippo era should finally come to an end. That's all for this week's news roundup. We'll be back on Wednesday with a special episode for Earth Day, and a surprisingly optimistic one at that.

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwange, Sushmita Patek, and Jeff Delvisio. Thanks again to Kendra Pierre Lewis for being a marvelous host in my absence. This episode was edited by Alex Seguira. Emily Mikowski, Shana Posis, and Aaron Shadek fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time.