The polarization of politics and public opinion and their effects on racial inequality in COVID mortality.

Evidence from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. indicated that the virus had vastly different effects across races, with black Americans faring worse on dimensions including illness, hospitalization and death.

Years of life lost to COVID-19 in 81 countries.

Understanding the mortality impact of COVID-19 requires not only counting the dead, but analyzing how premature the deaths are. We calculate years of life lost (YLL) across 81 countries due to COVID-19 attributable deaths, and also conduct an analysis based on estimated excess deaths. We find that over 20.

Thyroid ultrasound and nodule malignancy risk: a "real world" assessment of ultrasound reporting and agreement of ultrasound-based malignancy risk estimates with cytology and histology findings.

Aims: Thyroid nodule malignancy risk is increasingly estimated using ultrasound characteristics. We assessed ultrasound reports of nodules and compared ultrasound-based malignancy risk assessments with cytology and histology findings.

Methods: We identified patients with thyroid ultrasound (55% by private provider, 45% by DHB) and cytology at CMDHB over 18 months.

Americans preferred Syrian refugees who are female, English-speaking, and Christian on the eve of Donald Trump's election.

What types of refugees do Americans prefer for admission into the United States? Scholars have explored the immigrant characteristics that appeal to Americans and the characteristics that Europeans prioritize in asylum-seekers, but we currently do not know which refugee characteristics Americans prefer. We conduct a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of 1800 US adults, manipulating refugee attributes in pairs of Syrian refugee profiles, and ask respondents to rate each refugee's appeal. Our focus on Syrian refugees in a 2016 survey experiment allows us to speak to the concurrent refugee crisis on the eve of a polarizing election, while also identifying religious discrimination, holding constant the refugee's national origin.

Perspective taking can promote short-term inclusionary behavior toward Syrian refugees.

Social scientists have shown how easily individuals are moved to exclude outgroup members. Can we foster inclusion instead? This study leverages one of the most significant humanitarian crises of our time to test whether, and under what conditions, American citizens adopt more inclusionary behavior toward Syrian refugees. We conduct a nationally representative survey of over 5,000 American citizens in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election and experimentally test whether a perspective-taking exercise increases inclusionary behavior in the form of an anonymous letter supportive of refugees to be sent to the 45th President of the United States.

Drug treatment of scrub typhus: a systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled clinical trials.

Scrub typhus, a potentially fatal infection caused by the pathogen Orientia tsutsugamushi, has a wide geographical distribution. This systematic review analyses the evidence from prospective controlled clinical studies for the efficacy of antibiotics in the treatment of scrub typhus. PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Cochrane Library, CINAHL and clinical trial registries in China, India and Sri Lanka were searched for controlled prospective clinical trials (randomized, quasi-randomized or non-randomized) enrolling patients with confirmed scrub typhus for treatment with antibiotics.

Network-guided interaction mining for the blood pressure phenotype of unrelated individuals in genetic analysis workshop 19.

Interactions between genes are an important part of the genetic architecture of complex diseases. In this paper, we use literature-guided individual genes known to be associated with type 2 diabetes (referred to as "seed genes") to create a larger list of genes that share implied or direct networks with these seed genes. This larger list of genes are known to interact with each other, but whether they interact in ways to influence hypertension in individuals presents an interesting question.

Identifying regions of disease-related variants in admixed populations with the summation partition approach.

We propose a new method for identifying disease-related regions of single nucleotide variants in recently admixed populations. We use principal component analysis to derive both global and local ancestry information. We then use the summation partition approach to search for disease-related regions based on both rare variants and the local ancestral information of each region.

Framework for making better predictions by directly estimating variables' predictivity.

We propose approaching prediction from a framework grounded in the theoretical correct prediction rate of a variable set as a parameter of interest. This framework allows us to define a measure of predictivity that enables assessing variable sets for, preferably high, predictivity. We first define the prediction rate for a variable set and consider, and ultimately reject, the naive estimator, a statistic based on the observed sample data, due to its inflated bias for moderate sample size and its sensitivity to noisy useless variables.

Why significant variables aren't automatically good predictors.

Thus far, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been disappointing in the inability of investigators to use the results of identified, statistically significant variants in complex diseases to make predictions useful for personalized medicine. Why are significant variables not leading to good prediction of outcomes? We point out that this problem is prevalent in simple as well as complex data, in the sciences as well as the social sciences. We offer a brief explanation and some statistical insights on why higher significance cannot automatically imply stronger predictivity and illustrate through simulations and a real breast cancer example.

Syringocoele of the bulbourethral duct with additional lower genito-urinary anomalies.

The ultrasonographic (US) appearance of a syringocoele of the bulbourethral (Cowper) duct, with correlative urethrocystoscopic images, is demonstrated. An infant boy, 5 weeks of age, who presented with E. coli infection of the urinary tract also had bilateral hydroureteronephrosis, small bilateral simple ureterocoeles, and posterior urethral valve leaflets.