Niemann-Pick disease, type C1 (NPC1) is an inborn error of intracellular cholesterol transport. Impaired function of NPC1 leads to endolysosomal accumulation of unesterified cholesterol, which results in progressive neurodegeneration. Although the age of onset is variable, classical NPC1 is a pediatric disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2024
After prolonged paralysis, paraplegic spinal cord injury (SCI) patients typically lose the ability to generate the expected electroencephalogram (EEG) α/β modulation associated with leg movements. Brain computer interface (BCI)-controlled ambulation devices have emerged as a way to restore brain-controlled walking, but this loss of EEG signal modulation may impede the ability to operate such systems and prolonged training may be necessary to restore this physiologic phenomenon. To address this issue, this study explores the use of immersive virtual reality (VR) in providing more convincing feedback to enhance learning within a BCI training paradigm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2024
Current treatments for paraplegia induced by spinal cord injury (SCI) are often limited by the severity of the injury. The accompanying loss of sensory and motor functions often results in reliance on wheelchairs, which in turn causes reduced quality of life and increased risk of co-morbidities. While brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for ambulation have shown promise in restoring or replacing lower extremity motor functions, none so far have simultaneously implemented sensory feedback functions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2024
The failure of human neuronal stem cells to integrate with brain tissue suggests the need to provide functional cues to modify and re-organize the existing naive network. Understanding how human neural networks respond to external stimuli is crucial to realizing this goal. Here, we stimulate a human induced pluripotent stem cell (hIPSC)-derived neural network on a microelectrode array in a Hebbian fashion to explore the resulting network changes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2024
In-vitro models of neuronal networks have become a powerful tool for modeling network activity in the human brain. The exploration of network properties has largely been made possible via microelectrode arrays (MEAs). However, addressing certain tissue engineering challenges remains imperative for their long-term utilization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Dementia is one of the most pressing health concerns among the ageing population, imposing significant health, financial and caregiving burdens on people with dementia (PWD), their families and caregivers. Building the capacity of nursing students is essential for effectively improving quality of life for affected people. This study aimed to assess nursing students' knowledge and attitudes toward dementia and its associated factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFloods, which occur when the amount of precipitation surpasses the capacity of an area to drain it adequately, have detrimental consequences on the survival and future generations of fishes. However, few works have reported the prediction of this natural phenomenon in a relation to certain fish species, especially in fast-flowing rivers. In the specific context of the northern mountainous provinces of Vietnam, where the Spinibarbus sp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Cachexia Sarcopenia Muscle
February 2025
Background: Falls and sarcopenia are significant public health issues in Vietnam. Despite muscle strength being a critical predictor for these conditions, reference data on muscle strength within the Vietnamese population are lacking.
Purpose: To establish the reference ranges for muscle strength among Vietnamese individuals.
The urban setting notwithstanding, rice cultivation prevails on the outskirts of Hanoi, with the burning of rice straw in the fields posing a significant challenge. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct spatial mapping of rice distribution, assess dry biomass, and determine emissions from rice straw burning within Hanoi city. The efficacy of the deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) model has been evident in accurately mapping the spatial distribution of rice in Hanoi, where rice cultivation extensively thrives in suburban areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTransfer-RNA-derived fragments (tRFs) are a novel class of small non-coding RNAs that have been implicated in oncogenesis. tRFs may act as post-transcriptional regulators by recruiting AGO proteins and binding to highly complementary regions of mRNA at seed regions, resulting in the knockdown of the transcript. Therefore, tRFs may be critical to tumorigenesis and warrant investigation as potential biomarkers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Dementia is one of the most pressing health concerns in ageing population, posing significant burdens not only on the well-being and independence of people with dementia (PWD), but also on their families and communities. Building capacity for nursing students is essential for effectively enhancing the quality of life for affected people. However, various studies have highlighted knowledge gaps concerning dementia among nursing students worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Cranial radiation therapy (RT) for brain cancers leads to an irreversible decline in cognitive function without an available remedy. Radiation-induced cognitive deficits (RICD) are a particularly pressing problem for the survivors of pediatric and low grade glioma (LGG) cancers who often live long post-RT lives. Radiation-induced elevated neuroinflammation and gliosis, triggered by the detrimental CNS complement cascade, lead to excessive synaptic and cognitive loss.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Combinatorial blockade of Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) and Programmed Cell Death Protein 1 (PD-1) significantly improve the progression-free survival of individuals with metastatic cancers, including melanoma. In addition to unleashing anti-tumor immunity, combination immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) disrupts immune-regulatory networks critical for maintaining homeostasis in various tissues, including the central nervous system (CNS). Although ICI- and cancer-related cognitive impairments (CRCI) in survivors are increasingly becoming evident, our understanding of ICI-induced immune-related adverse effects (IREA) in the CNS remains incomplete.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In the United States, there are over seven million stroke survivors, with many facing gait impairments due to foot drop. This restricts their community ambulation and hinders functional independence, leading to several long-term health complications. Despite the best available physical therapy, gait function is incompletely recovered, and this occurs mainly during the acute phase post-stroke.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Niemann-Pick disease, type C1 (NPC1) is a rare lysosomal disorder with progressive neurological manifestations, historically recognized as a pediatric disease. However, awareness of the adult-onset (AO) subtype is increasing, often with non-specific symptoms leading to delayed and misdiagnosis. Dysphagia, commonly recognized as a clinical morbidity in NPC1, raises concerns for swallowing safety and aspiration risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study aims to estimate the maximum power consumption that guarantees a thermally safe operation for a titanium-enclosed chest wall unit (CWU) subcutaneously implanted in the pre-pectoral area. This unit is a central piece of an envisioned fully-implantable bi-directional brain-computer interface (BD-BCI). To this end, we created a thermal simulation model using the finite element method implemented in COMSOL.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst
December 2024
This work presents a bi-directional brain-computer interface (BD-BCI) including a high-dynamic-range (HDR) two-step time-domain neural acquisition (TTNA) system and a high-voltage (HV) multipolar neural stimulation system incorporating dual-mode time-based charge balancing (DTCB) technique. The proposed TTNA includes four independent recording modules that can sense microvolt neural signals while tolerating large stimulation artifacts. In addition, it exhibits an integrated input-referred noise of 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common cause of dementia, females have higher prevalence and faster progression, but sex-specific molecular findings in AD are limited. Here, we comprehensively examined and validated 7,006 aptamers targeting 6,162 proteins in cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) from 2,077 amyloid/tau positive cases and controls to identify sex-specific proteomic signatures of AD. In discovery (N=1,766), we identified 330 male-specific and 121 female-specific proteomic alternations in CSF (FDR <0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: People who support Veterans as they transition from their military service into civilian life may be at an increased risk of psychological distress. Existing studies focus primarily on paid family caregivers, but few studies include spouses and informal non-family "care partners." We sought to identify key challenges faced by care partners of Veterans with invisible injuries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng
October 2023
The aim of this study is to estimate the maximum power consumption that guarantees the thermal safety of a skull unit (SU). The SU is part of a fully-implantable bi-directional brain computer-interface (BD-BCI) system that aims to restore walking and leg sensation to those with spinal cord injury (SCI). To estimate the SU power budget, we created a bio-heat model using the finite element method (FEM) implemented in COMSOL.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInvasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have shown promise in restoring motor function to those paralyzed by neurological injuries. These systems also have the ability to restore sensation via cortical electrostimulation. Cortical stimulation produces strong artifacts that can obscure neural signals or saturate recording amplifiers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHistoplasmosis is an endemic infection caused by , leading to a broad spectrum of disease from asymptomatic to severe disseminated disease. To diagnose Histoplasmosis, culture remains the gold standard for the laboratory diagnosis; however, this fungus grows slowly, taking a long time 2 to 3 weeks or may take up to 8 weeks. Therefore, some other methods such as bone marrow examination play an essential role in rapid identification and early diagnosis, especially in cases of severe disseminated disease.
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