Prescribing of pancreatic enzyme therapy for malabsorption in unresectable pancreatic cancer: Cross-sectional survey across New Zealand and Australia.

Objective: To investigate the practices of clinicians prescribing pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy (PERT) for unresectable pancreatic cancer in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.

Methods: A mixed media advertising campaign was used to recruit appropriate clinicians to complete a questionnaire that collected demographic data, information regarding prescribed medication, and awareness of PERT guidelines.

Results: The study recruited 161 clinicians, with 93 and 68 respondents from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia respectively.

Policy, system and service design influence on healthcare inequities for people with end-of-life chronic obstructive airways disease, their support people and health professionals.

Background: People with end-of-life chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) experience debilitating physical limitations, with a high mortality rate. Our research has shown health system design and delivery leads to inequitable outcomes. Enabling people with end-of-life COPD, their support people, and health professionals to partner in setting the agenda for resource allocation may inform health service improvement.

Recent genetic drift in the co-diversified gut bacterial symbionts of laboratory mice.

Laboratory mice () harbor gut bacterial strains that are distinct from those of wild mice but whose evolutionary histories are poorly understood. Understanding the divergence of laboratory-mouse gut microbiota (LGM) from wild-mouse gut microbiota (WGM) is critical, because LGM and WGM have been previously shown to differentially affect mouse immune-cell proliferation, infection resistance, cancer progression, and ability to model drug outcomes for humans. Here, we show that laboratory mice have retained gut bacterial symbiont lineages that diversified in parallel (co-diversified) with rodent species for > 25 million years, but that LGM strains of these ancestral symbionts have experienced accelerated accumulation of genetic load during the past ~ 120 years of captivity.

Hackflex library preparation enables low-cost metagenomic profiling.

Shotgun metagenomic sequencing provides valuable insights into microbial communities, but the high cost of library preparation with standard kits and protocols is a barrier for many. New methods such as Hackflex use diluted commercially available reagents to greatly reduce library preparation costs. However, these methods have not been systematically validated for metagenomic sequencing.