Publications by authors named "Aaron Wong"

Background: High-flow nasal oxygen (HFNO) therapy delivers humidified, heated air with flow rates of up to 60 L/min with oxygen entrained. HFNO has advantages over conventional oxygen therapy, including precise and reliable fraction of inspired oxygen delivery, therefore is recommended as first-line treatment for people with acute hypoxaemic respiratory failure.

Objectives: This pilot study aimed to determine the feasibility and acceptability of domiciliary nasal high flow (NHF) without entrained oxygen for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and severe breathlessness.

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Patients with advanced cancer often experience bothersome symptoms requiring specialist palliative care input. Oncology clinical trials commonly include a list of prohibited medications while on trial, to avoid potential drug interactions with the investigational product. This case series illustrates how recent opioid shortages combined with prohibited opioids in clinical trials significantly impacted cancer pain control and quality of life.

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Aim: Physician visual assessment (PVA) in invasive coronary angiography (ICA) is clinically used to determine stenosis severity and guide coronary intervention. However, PVA provides limited information regarding the haemodynamic significance of stenosis. This prospective study aimed to develop a model combining visual diameter stenosis (DS) and quantitative coronary angiography (QCA)-derived parameters to diagnose ischaemic lesions using invasive fractional flow reserve (FFR) with pharmacologically induced maximal hyperaemia as the gold standard.

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Aims: To examine the associations between and polymorphisms, plasma oxycodone and metabolite concentrations, and oxycodone response (dose, pain scores, and adverse effects) in people with pain from advanced cancer.

Patients & Methods: This multi-center prospective cohort study included clinical data, questionnaires (pain and adverse effects), and blood (pharmacokinetics, DNA). Negative binomial regression and logistic regression were used.

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Article Synopsis
  • Macrophages are diverse cells that inhabit all body tissues, with specific types residing in organs and additional subtypes recruited during injury.
  • A specific population of recruited macrophages, marked by certain gene expressions, has been linked to fibrosis in various injury and cancer models.
  • Blocking Notch2 increases these macrophages in the lungs, but evidence suggests they actually help reduce fibrosis rather than cause it, highlighting their potential protective role during lung injuries.
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  • This study assesses the effectiveness of the potassium binder sodium zirconium cyclosilicate (SZC) in managing potassium levels and helping heart failure patients with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) start and maintain RAAS inhibitors.
  • In a sample of 44 patients, SZC reduced mean potassium levels significantly and allowed for increased use of various heart failure therapies, showing high rates of adherence to guideline-recommended dosing.
  • The results indicated improved heart failure outcomes, including reduced hospitalization rates and enhancements in heart function, with no negative effects on kidney function or blood pressure noted.
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The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) is a genome editing tool widely used in biological research and clinical therapeutics. Natural human genetic variations, through altering the sequence context of CRISPR-Cas9 target regions, can significantly affect its DNA repair outcomes and ultimately lead to different editing efficiencies. However, these effects have not been systematically studied, even as CRISPR-Cas9 is broadly applied to primary cells and patient samples that harbor such genetic diversity.

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  • Sleep disturbances are common in advanced cancer patients, affecting 30-78% of them, yet there are few rigorous studies on treatment options.
  • This study tested the effectiveness and safety of temazepam and prolonged-release melatonin against a placebo for treating insomnia in advanced cancer patients, with a total of 21 participants.
  • Both temazepam and melatonin resulted in a significant reduction in insomnia severity compared to placebo, but did not improve overall quality of life; further research with more participants is needed to confirm these results.
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The influence of pharmacogenomics on opioid response, particularly with (rs4680) and (rs1799971) variants, has been studied individually and in combination. However, most studies are in a noncancer context and not all their possible variant combinations have been examined. This study examined (rs4680) and (rs1799971), and their allele combinations, in advanced cancer to examine associations with pain scores, opioid dose, and adverse effects.

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  • Discrimination and generalization of responses are essential for adapting to changing environments, particularly in understanding Pavlovian conditioning responses.
  • In an experiment, mice were trained to associate a 10 kHz tone with a puff of air (CS+) while being exposed to other tones (CS-) without the air puff to investigate how different training methods affect response generalization.
  • Results showed that higher differences between CS+ and CS- tones led to increased generalization in probability and amplitude of eyelid responses, but not in timing, emphasizing the importance of discrimination in learning.
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Ischemia-reperfusion is an unavoidable step of organ transplantation. Development of therapeutics for lung injury during transplantation has proved challenging; understanding lung injury from human data at the single-cell resolution is required to accelerate the development of therapeutics. Donor lung biopsies from 6 human lung transplant cases were collected at the end of cold preservation and 2-hour reperfusion and underwent single-cell RNA sequencing.

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The accurate estimation of limb state is necessary for movement planning and execution. While state estimation requires both feedforward and feedback information, we focus here on the latter. Prior literature has shown that integrating visual and proprioceptive feedback improves estimates of static limb position.

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Wound healing in response to acute injury is mediated by the coordinated and transient activation of parenchymal, stromal, and immune cells that resolves to homeostasis. Environmental, genetic, and epigenetic factors associated with inflammation and aging can lead to persistent activation of the microenvironment and fibrosis. Here, we identify opposing roles of interleukin-4 (IL-4) cytokine signaling in interstitial macrophages and type II alveolar epithelial cells (ATIIs).

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Individuals who have experienced a left hemisphere cerebrovascular accident (LCVA) have been shown to make errors in naturalistic action tasks designed to assess the ability to perform everyday activities such as preparing a cup of coffee. Naturalistic action errors in this population are often attributed to limb apraxia, a common deficit in the representation and performance of object-related actions. However, naturalistic action impairments are also observed in right hemisphere stroke and traumatic brain injury, populations infrequently associated with apraxia, and errors across all these populations are influenced by overall severity.

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The human lung is a complex organ that comprises diverse populations of epithelial, mesenchymal, vascular, and immune cells, which gains even greater complexity during disease states. To effectively study the lung at a single-cell level, a dissociation protocol that achieves the highest yield of viable cells of interest with minimal dissociation-associated protein or transcription changes is key. Here, we detail a rapid collagenase-based dissociation protocol (Col-Short) that provides a high-yield single-cell suspension that is suitable for a variety of downstream applications.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study looked at when patients with advanced cancer start taking opioid pain medicine after being diagnosed.
  • Most patients got referrals to palliative care (special care for serious illnesses) about 54 days after their diagnosis.
  • People with pancreatic cancer started taking opioids the fastest, but they also had the shortest time to live after diagnosis.
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Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is characterized by inflammation and fibrosis in the kidney. Renal biopsies and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) remain the standard of care, but these endpoints have limitations in detecting the stage, progression, and spatial distribution of fibrotic pathology in the kidney. MRI diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has emerged as a promising noninvasive technology to evaluate renal fibrosis in vivo both in clinical and preclinical studies.

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Background: The administration of intravenous cangrelor at reperfusion achieves faster onset of platelet P2Y12 inhibition than oral ticagrelor and has been shown to reduce myocardial infarction (MI) size in the preclinical setting. We hypothesized that the administration of cangrelor at reperfusion will reduce MI size and prevent microvascular obstruction in patients with ST-segment-elevation MI undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention.

Methods: This was a phase 2, multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial conducted between November 2017 to November 2021 in 6 cardiac centers in Singapore.

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Salicylate is commonly used to induce tinnitus in animals, but its underlying mechanism of action is still debated. We therefore tested its effects on the firing properties of neurons in the mouse inferior colliculus (IC). Salicylate induced a large decrease in the spontaneous activity and an increase of ∼20 dB SPL in the minimum threshold of single units.

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Article Synopsis
  • People often have thoughts that pop into their heads without anything triggering them, like daydreams or remembering fun times.
  • A study reviewed a lot of research to see how these random thoughts affect how people feel emotionally, finding that they usually relate to feeling worse.
  • However, the relationship between these thoughts and feelings isn’t the same for everyone and depends on what the thoughts are about and how we measure them.
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Background And Aims: What is the relationship between blood tests for iron deficiency, including anaemia, and the response to intravenous iron in patients with heart failure?

Methods: In the IRONMAN trial, 1137 patients with heart failure, ejection fraction ≤ 45%, and either serum ferritin < 100 µg/L or transferrin saturation (TSAT) < 20% were randomized to intravenous ferric derisomaltose (FDI) or usual care. Relationships were investigated between baseline anaemia severity, ferritin and TSAT, to changes in haemoglobin from baseline to 4 months, Minnesota Living with Heart Failure (MLwHF) score and 6-minute walk distance achieved at 4 months, and clinical events, including heart failure hospitalization (recurrent) or cardiovascular death.

Results: The rise in haemoglobin after administering FDI, adjusted for usual care, was greater for lower baseline TSAT (Pinteraction < .

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