The intricate healing mechanism of chronic wounds and their multitude of healing-related obstacles, such as infections, compromised cellular processes, and impediments to the healing process, pose a significant healthcare problem. Exploration of metal oxide nanoparticles, such as yttrium oxide (YO) nanoparticles, can lead to innovative discoveries in the field of chronic wound healing by offering cues that promote cell proliferation in the scaffolds. To achieve this, YO nanoparticles were synthesized and incorporated within poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) nanofibrous scaffolds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Identifying the impact of environmental mixtures on human health is an important topic. However, such studies face challenges when exposure measurements lie below limit of detection (LOD). While various approaches for accommodating a single exposure subject to LOD have been used, their impact on mixture analysis has not been thoroughly investigated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Single-pollutant models have linked prenatal PM exposure to lower birthweight. However, analyzing air pollutant mixtures better captures pollutant interactions and total effects. Unfortunately, strong correlations between pollutants restrict traditional methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding the association between mixtures of environmental toxicants and time-to-pregnancy (TTP) is an important scientific question as sufficient evidence has emerged about the impact of individual toxicants on reproductive health and that individuals are exposed to a whole host of toxicants rather than an individual toxicant. Assessing mixtures of chemical effects on TTP poses significant statistical challenges, namely (i) TTP being a discrete survival outcome, typically subject to left truncation and right censoring, (ii) chemical exposures being strongly correlated, (iii) appropriate transformation to account for some lipid-binding chemicals, (iv) non-linear effects of some chemicals, and (v) high percentage of concentration below the limit of detection (LOD) for some chemicals. We propose a discrete frailty modeling framework (named Discnet) that allows selection of correlated covariates while appropriately addressing the methodological issues mentioned above.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Preterm birth is associated with lower neurocognitive performance. However, whether children's neurodevelopment improves with longer gestations within the full-term range (37-41 weeks) is unclear. Given the high rate of obstetric intervention in the USA, it is critical to determine whether long-term outcomes differ for children delivered at each week of term.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF