California and Oregon NICU Wildfire Disaster Preparedness Tools.

The 2020 wildfire season was devastating to the Western United States and affected the region's NICUs. In this study, we ask the question, "what tools/strategies do medical professionals deem as important and most helpful as they are preparing for wildfire disaster response?" It is a follow up to our previous study: Learning from Wildfire Disaster Experience in California NICUs. We reevaluated how California NICUs dealt with the 2020 wildfires and expanded to Oregon and Southwest (SW) Washington NICUs.

Delivery room oxygen physiology and respiratory interventions for newborns with cyanotic congenital heart disease.

Objective: To characterize pulse oxygen saturation (SpO) trajectories and respiratory interventions after birth for newborns with cyanotic congenital heart disease (CCHD).

Study Design: Retrospective single-site study of newborns ≥32 weeks gestation with CCHD: single ventricle with critical aortic obstruction (SV-CAO), critical pulmonic obstruction (CPO), transposition of the great arteries (TGA). Minute-to-minute SpO values and respiratory interventions were summarized and compared.

Learning from Wildfire Disaster Experience in California NICUs.

Wildfires have been affecting California greatly, and vulnerable patients in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are not exempt. Our aim was to learn how personnel working in NICUs of California hospitals handled issues of neonatal transfer during wildfire disasters in recent years, with an ultimate goal to share lessons learned with healthcare teams on disaster preparedness. We identified California fires through newspaper articles and the CalFire.

Epithelial Migration and Non-adhesive Periderm Are Required for Digit Separation during Mammalian Development.

The fusion of digits or toes, syndactyly, can be part of complex syndromes, including van der Woude syndrome. A subset of van der Woude cases is caused by dominant-negative mutations in the epithelial transcription factor Grainyhead like-3 (GRHL3), and Grhl3mice have soft-tissue syndactyly. Although impaired interdigital cell death of mesenchymal cells causes syndactyly in multiple genetic mutants, Grhl3 embryos had normal interdigital cell death, suggesting alternative mechanisms for syndactyly.