❌

Normal view

Iron Physiology and Its Impact on Atopic Diseases: An EAACI Taskforce Report

Allergy. 2026 Apr 6. doi: 10.1111/all.70325. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Iron is essential for oxygen transport, energy metabolism, and immune regulation. Yet iron deficiency is the most common micronutrient disorder across all age groups, affecting nearly one quarter of the global population. Iron deficiency triggers nutritional immunity, a host defense mechanism that withholds and redistributes iron, contributing to increased morbidity and mortality. This review outlines normal iron physiology, distribution and absorption pathways and on the consequences of deficiency across body compartments, with particular attention to type 2-driven diseases. Beyond anemia, insufficient iron availability disrupts immune homeostasis by promoting type 2 inflammation, elevating IgE, and activating mast cells and eosinophils. Regulatory macrophages, the central hub of iron cycling, adopt an inflammatory, iron-sequestering state that reinforces malabsorption and redistribution. Epidemiology studies show higher iron-deficiency risk in allergic individuals; low maternal iron or early-life iron predisposes to eczema, wheeze, and asthma, while food-allergen elimination (notably cow's milk) further worsens anemia risk. Clinical evidence indicates that restoring iron status through diet, supplementation, or fortification lowers IgE levels, improves lung function, and alleviates symptoms of rhinitis, urticaria, and asthma. Iron may therefore represent a modifiable determinant of allergic disease development and severity. Integrating iron assessment and nutritional care into allergy management may reduce disease burden and slow the progression of allergic march.

PMID:41943501 | DOI:10.1111/all.70325

Determinants of the Uptake and Frequency of Use of a Web Portal Digital Health Intervention in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes and/or Coronary Heart Disease: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: The targeted application and design of digital health interventions (DHIs) require an understanding of usage determinants. Usage includes uptake (initial use) and frequency (extent of use), but it is unclear whether both components are driven by the same determinants. Objective: This study aimed to examine the determinants of uptake and frequency of use and assess whether they differ. Methods: The investigated DHI was a web portal provided in an intervention for improving disease-related self-management. This study is a secondary analysis of intervention group data from a parallel-group randomized controlled trial. Eligibility criteria were being an adult and being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and/or coronary heart disease. Sociodemographic, psychological, and health-related variables were examined as determinants. Determinants were analyzed using simple and multiple regression models. Uptake was analyzed using logistic regression, and frequency was analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs. Frequency was analyzed for those who used the DHI at least once. Except for sociodemographic variables, all other variables were standardized to a range from 0 to 1. For simple regression, inflation of the α error due to multiple testing was controlled via the approach of Benjamini and Hochberg, and for multiple regression, it was controlled via the significance of the complete multiple regression model. Results: Of 462 intervention group members, 199 (43.1%) used the web portal at least once. After controlling for inflation of the α error, simple regression for uptake yielded significant effects for higher education (B=0.56, 95% CI 0.18-0.95; =.004), openness (B=1.08, 95% CI 0.33-1.83; =.005), intention regarding physical activity (B=2.28, 95% CI 1.30-3.26;

Genomic history of early dogs in Europe

Nature, Published online: 25 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10112-7

Genome-wide analysis shows European dogs existed by 14,200 years ago, were already genetically distinct, received less Neolithic Southwest Asian admixture than humans did and contributed substantially to later European dogs.

A mechanism to initiate emergency type 2 myelopoiesis

Nature, Published online: 11 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10256-6

Myelopoiesis in response to a parasitic worm infection and the mechanism selective to this form of parasite are revealed.

Conditioned Activation Transport for T2I Safety Steering

arXiv:2603.03163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their impressive capabilities, current Text-to-Image (T2I) models remain prone to generating unsafe and toxic content. While activation steering offers a promising inference-time intervention, we observe that linear activation steering frequently degrades image quality when applied to benign prompts. To address this trade-off, we first construct SafeSteerDataset, a contrastive dataset containing 2300 safe and unsafe prompt pairs with high cosine similarity. Leveraging this data, we propose Conditioned Activation Transport (CAT), a framework that employs a geometry-based conditioning mechanism and nonlinear transport maps. By conditioning transport maps to activate only within unsafe activation regions, we minimize interference with benign queries. We validate our approach on two state-of-the-art architectures: Z-Image and Infinity. Experiments demonstrate that CAT generalizes effectively across these backbones, significantly reducing Attack Success Rate while maintaining image fidelity compared to unsteered generations. Warning: This paper contains potentially offensive text and images.

High Accuracy, Less Talk (HALT): Reliable LLMs through Capability-Aligned Finetuning

arXiv:2506.04051v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) currently respond to every prompt. However, they can produce incorrect answers when they lack knowledge or capability -- a problem known as hallucination. We instead propose post-training an LLM to generate content only when confident in its correctness and to otherwise (partially) abstain. Specifically, our method, HALT, produces capability-aligned post-training data that encodes what the model can and cannot reliably generate. We generate this data by splitting responses of the pretrained LLM into factual fragments (atomic statements or reasoning steps), and use ground truth information to identify incorrect fragments. We achieve capability-aligned finetuning responses by either removing incorrect fragments or replacing them with "Unsure from Here" -- according to a tunable threshold that allows practitioners to trade off response completeness and mean correctness of the response's fragments. We finetune four open-source models for biography writing, mathematics, coding, and medicine with HALT for three different trade-off thresholds. HALT effectively trades off response completeness for correctness, increasing the mean correctness of response fragments by 15% on average, while resulting in a 4% improvement in the F1 score (mean of completeness and correctness of the response) compared to the relevant baselines. By tuning HALT for highest correctness, we train a single reliable Llama3-70B model with correctness increased from 51% to 87% across all four domains while maintaining 53% of the response completeness achieved with standard finetuning.
❌