Social Determinants of Health and Medication Adherence in Older Adults with Prevalent Chronic Conditions in the United States: An Analysis of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2009-2018.

Background: The older adult population is rapidly expanding in the United States (US), with a high prevalence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Medication nonadherence is prevalent in this population, with less evidence on the influence of social determinants of health (SDoH). Thus, the objective of this study was to identify and prioritize SDoH associated with medication adherence among US older adults with these comorbidities.

Medical indemnity knowledge and awareness among international medical graduates in Ireland.

Background: Medical indemnity (MI) has become an important topic in the era of increasing number of medico-legal cases in Ireland. However, there is a sensible difference in understanding and usage of medical indemnity between Irish and international medical graduates.

Aim: This study aimed to investigate the knowledge and awareness of medical indemnity among international medical graduates in Ireland.

Use of Preferred Source of Contraception Among Users of the Pill, Patch, and Ring in the US.

Importance: Individuals who use contraceptive pills, patches, and rings must frequently interact with the health care system for continued and consistent use. As options for obtaining these methods expand, better understanding contraceptive users' preferences for source of contraception can help facilitate access.

Objective: To describe use of preferred source of contraception and to understand associations between prior reproductive health care experiences and preference for traditional in-person sources vs alternative sources.

Spontaneous Globe Rupture following Prolonged Uncontrolled Elevated Intraocular Pressure.

We report two glaucoma patients who experienced unusual instances of spontaneous globe rupture. The patients arrived at the Bowen University Teaching Hospital's emergency ophthalmology unit with a history of bleeding from one eye without any history of ocular trauma. They were known glaucoma patients with poor control of their intraocular pressures (IOP).

Utilizing digitized occurrence records of Midwestern feral to develop ecological niche models.

Hemp ( L.) has historically played a vital role in agriculture across the globe. Feral and wild populations have served as genetic resources for breeding, conservation, and adaptation to changing environmental conditions.

Cyclization Scaffolding for Improved Vaccine Immunogen Stability: Application to Tau Protein in Alzheimer's Disease.

Effective scaffolding of immunogens is crucial for generating conformationally selective antibodies through active immunization, particularly in the treatment of protein misfolding diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Previous computational work has revealed that a disorder-prone region of the tau protein, when in a stacked form, is predicted to structurally resemble a small, soluble protofibril, having conformational properties similar to those of experimental in vitro tau oligomers. Such an oligomeric structural mimic has the potential to serve as a vaccine immunogen design for Alzheimer's disease.

Applying a zero-corrected, gravity model estimator reduces bias due to heterogeneity in healthcare utilization in community-scale, passive surveillance datasets of endemic diseases.

Data on population health are vital to evidence-based decision making but are rarely adequately localized or updated in continuous time. They also suffer from low ascertainment rates, particularly in rural areas where barriers to healthcare can cause infrequent touch points with the health system. Here, we demonstrate a novel statistical method to estimate the incidence of endemic diseases at the community level from passive surveillance data collected at primary health centers.

Assessment of public knowledge and attitude toward antibiotics use and resistance: a community pharmacy-based survey.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance is a public health challenge affecting all aspects of healthcare systems. Policies to reduce antimicrobial resistance should be implemented and monitored in community pharmacies, because they are patients' first point of care. Public awareness of relevant knowledge and attitudes on antimicrobials is a feasible strategy to mitigate the spread of antimicrobial resistance by exploiting the relationship between pharmacists and patients in the community pharmacy setting.

De Novo Design of a β-Helix Tau Protein Scaffold: An Oligomer-Selective Vaccine Immunogen Candidate for Alzheimer's Disease.

Tau pathology is associated with many neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), where the spatio-temporal pattern of tau neurofibrillary tangles strongly correlates with disease progression, which motivates therapeutics selective for misfolded tau. Here, we introduce a new avidity-enhanced, multi-epitope approach for protein-misfolding immunogen design, which is predicted to mimic the conformational state of an exposed epitope in toxic tau oligomers. A predicted oligomer-selective tau epitope KLDFK was scaffolded by designing a β-helix structure that incorporated multiple instances of the 16-residue tau fragment VKSEKLDFKDRVQSKI.

PROTHON: A Local Order Parameter-Based Method for Efficient Comparison of Protein Ensembles.

The comparison of protein conformational ensembles is of central importance in structural biology. However, there are few computational methods for ensemble comparison, and those that are readily available, such as ENCORE, utilize methods that are sufficiently computationally expensive to be prohibitive for large ensembles. Here, a new method is presented for efficient representation and comparison of protein conformational ensembles.

Maternal health equity in Georgia: a Delphi consensus approach to definition and research priorities.

Background: Pregnancy-related mortality in the United States is the greatest among all high-income countries, and Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates-almost twice the national rate. Furthermore, inequities exist in rates of pregnancy-related deaths. In Georgia, non-Hispanic Black women are nearly 3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than non-Hispanic White women.

A novel versatile concept of cardioplegia delivery in cardiac surgery: The ReverseTWO cardioplegia circuit system.

Nowadays, the necessity of having a cardioplegia circuit capable of being adapted in order to administer different types of cardioplegia is strategically fundamental, both for the perfusionist and for the cardiac surgeon. This allows to avoid cutting tubes, guarantees sterility and, most of all, limits the number of cardioplegia circuits for the different strategies of cardiac arrest. The novel "ReverseTWO cardioplegia circuit system" is the development of the precedent "Reverse system" where mainly the 4:1 and crystalloid cardioplegia were used, It has the advantage of allowing immediate change of cardioplegia set-up versus four types of cardioplegia technique, when the strategy is unexpectedly changed before the beginning of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB), is safe and enables the perfusionist to use one single custom pack of cardioplegia.

Response to the Letter to the Editor-in-Chief Regarding the Paper "The Benefits of Adding Manual Therapy to Exercise Therapy for Improving Pain and Function in Patients with Knee or Hip Osteoarthritis: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis".

Author response to the JOSPT Letter to the Editor-in-Chief "Leveraging the short-term benefits of manual therapy which includes exercise over exercise therapy alone appears justified for knee osteoarthritis" .

Ensemble Generation for Linear and Cyclic Peptides Using a Reservoir Replica Exchange Molecular Dynamics Implementation in GROMACS.

The profile of shapes presented by a cyclic peptide modulates its therapeutic efficacy and is represented by the ensemble of its sampled conformations. Although some algorithms excel at creating a diverse ensemble of cyclic peptide conformations, they seldom address the entropic contribution of flexible conformations and often have significant practical difficulty producing an ensemble with converged and reliable thermodynamic properties. In this study, an accelerated molecular dynamics (MD) method, namely, reservoir replica exchange MD (R-REMD or Res-REMD), was implemented in GROMACS ver.

Rational Generation of Monoclonal Antibodies Selective for Pathogenic Forms of Alpha-Synuclein.

Misfolded toxic forms of alpha-synuclein (α-Syn) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of synucleinopathies, including Parkinson's disease (PD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), and multiple system atrophy (MSA). The α-Syn oligomers and soluble fibrils have been shown to mediate neurotoxicity and cell-to-cell propagation of pathology. To generate antibodies capable of selectively targeting pathogenic forms of α-Syn, computational modeling was used to predict conformational epitopes likely to become exposed on oligomers and small soluble fibrils, but not on monomers or fully formed insoluble fibrils.

The Benefits of Adding Manual Therapy to Exercise Therapy for Improving Pain and Function in Patients With Knee or Hip Osteoarthritis: A Systematic Review With Meta-analysis.

To evaluate if there was an additional benefit of combining manual therapy (MT) and exercise therapy over exercise therapy alone on pain and function in patients with hip or knee osteoarthritis. Intervention systematic review We (1) searched 4 databases from inception to June 20, 2021; (2) hand searched a reference list of included trials and relevant systematic reviews; and (3) contacted 2 researchers in the field. We included randomized controlled trials that compared MT and exercise therapy to similar exercise therapy programs alone in patients with hip or knee osteoarthritis.

Optimizing Epitope Conformational Ensembles Using α-Synuclein Cyclic Peptide "Glycindel" Scaffolds: A Customized Immunogen Method for Generating Oligomer-Selective Antibodies for Parkinson's Disease.

Effectively presenting epitopes on immunogens, in order to raise conformationally selective antibodies through active immunization, is a central problem in treating protein misfolding diseases, particularly neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease. We seek to selectively target conformations enriched in toxic, oligomeric propagating species while sparing the healthy forms of the protein that are often more abundant. To this end, we computationally modeled scaffolded epitopes in cyclic peptides by inserting/deleting a variable number of flanking glycines ("glycindels") to best mimic a misfolding-specific conformation of an epitope of α-synuclein enriched in the oligomer ensemble, as characterized by a region most readily disordered and solvent-exposed in a stressed, partially denatured protofibril.

[Not Available].

Objective: The study aims to assess the level of implementation of road safety interventions in Benin.

Method: The research is based on an evaluative study of road safety aimed to analyze the implementation and logic of road safety interventions, conducted in Benin in 2019. It combined a review of the gray literature and a qualitative component.

A review of biotechnological approaches towards crop improvement in African yam bean ( Hochst. Ex A. Rich.).

Globally, climate change is a major factor that contributes significantly to food and nutrition insecurity, limiting crop yield and availability. Although efforts are being made to curb food insecurity, millions of people still suffer from malnutrition. For the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal of Food Security to be achieved, diverse cropping systems must be developed instead of relying mainly on a few staple crops.

Predictive genotype-phenotype relations using genetic diversity in African yam bean (Sphenostylis stenocarpa (Hochst. ex. A. Rich) Harms).

Background: African Yam Bean (AYB) is an understudied and underutilized tuberous legume of tropical West and Central African origin. In these geographical regions, both seeds and tubers of AYB are important components of people's diets and a potential target as a nutritional security crop. The understanding of the genetic diversity among AYB accessions is thus an important component for both conservation and potential breeding programs.

A non-empirical intermolecular force-field for trinitrobenzene and its application in crystal structure prediction.

An anisotropic atom-atom distributed intermolecular force-field (DIFF) for rigid trinitrobenzene (TNB) is developed using distributed multipole moments, dipolar polarizabilities, and dispersion coefficients derived from the charge density of the isolated molecule. The short-range parameters of the force-field are fitted to first- and second-order symmetry-adapted perturbation theory dimer interaction energy calculations using the distributed density-overlap model to guide the parameterization of the short-range anisotropy. The second-order calculations are used for fitting the damping coefficients of the long-range dispersion and polarization and also for relaxing the isotropic short-range coefficients in the final model, DIFF-srL2(rel).

Are within and/or between session improvements in pain and function prognostic of medium and long-term improvements in musculoskeletal problems? A systematic review.

Background: Initial or between session improvements in pain and/or function are often considered to be predictive of ultimate outcomes in musculoskeletal problems.

Objective: To determine the long-term prognostic value of within and between session improvements to pain and function.

Design: Systematic review of relevant literature.