Publications by authors named "Angela Zhang"

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  • - The study analyzed how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted smoking behaviors among patients at federally qualified health centers in Georgia, focusing on the relationship between home smoking environments, stress levels, and smoking habits.
  • - Results indicated that many participants experienced increased stress and smoking during the pandemic, with more household members who smoke and heightened stress linked to greater smoking rates.
  • - The findings suggest that interventions targeting smoking restrictions at home and stress management could be effective strategies during periods of societal stress, although no significant association was found with quit attempts.
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  • Repeated measures microbiome studies provide insights into microbial communities' dynamics and health outcomes, but visualizing this complex data is challenging due to noise and confounding factors.
  • A new framework is proposed that utilizes Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) adjusted for covariates and linear mixed models (LMM) to enhance the visualization of such data, making it easier to see variations over time or within clusters.
  • The study showcases this method through simulations and real datasets, demonstrating its ability to reduce the influence of noise and effectively reveal significant microbial community variations.
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Retail food environments influence dietary health, yet efforts to improve them have had limited success. Recruiting informants from the food and beverage retail industry for insider information has been challenging due to the sensitivity of inquiries and proprietary protections. Moreover, which recruitment approaches are successful are seldom disseminated.

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Background: The beverage industry's role in undermining nutrition-related population health is a growing global concern. Industry strategies that affect policy, science, and public opinion are increasingly exposed. However, those used in the retail space-known as market strategies-remain largely unspecified.

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Doxorubicin is limited in its therapeutic utility due to its life-threatening cardiovascular side effects. Here, we present an integrated drug discovery pipeline combining human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes (iCMs), CRISPR interference and activation (CRISPRi/a) bidirectional pooled screens, and a small-molecule screening to identify therapeutic targets mitigating doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity (DIC) without compromising its oncological effects. The screens revealed several previously unreported candidate genes contributing to DIC, including carbonic anhydrase 12 (CA12).

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  • Choroidal vascularity index (CVI) is used to evaluate the choroid in various diseases, but this study focuses on its relation to natural aging by examining 309 healthy individuals aged 20 to over 70.
  • The study found that CVI is highest in the central area of the retina compared to the periphery, yet it does not significantly change with age, despite certain choroidal area parameters declining as one gets older.
  • This research established a normative database of CVI and other choroidal metrics, aiding in differentiating between normal aging and pathological changes in future studies.
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  • The study explored how age-related declines in gait are connected to proprioception, specifically focusing on susceptibility to proprioceptive illusions.
  • The researchers measured the effects of these illusions on gait in both young and older adults, finding that illusion perceivers showed greater errors in joint position matching.
  • The findings indicate that age does not affect susceptibility to these illusions, but those who do experience them have worse gait characteristics, suggesting a link to diminished proprioceptive acuity independent of age.
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Background: Rising global obesity rates are linked with inflammation and associated morbidities. These negative outcomes are generally more common in low-resource communities within high-income countries; however, it is unclear how frequent infectious disease exposures in these settings may influence the relationship between adiposity and inflammation.

Aim: We test associations between adiposity measures and distinct forms of inflammation among adults ( = 80) living in low-resource U.

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Although health-promotion interventions that recommend changes across multiple behavioral domains are a newer alternative to single-behavior interventions, their general efficacy and their mechanisms of change have not been fully ascertained. This comprehensive meta-analysis (6,878 effect sizes from 803 independent samples from 364 research reports, = 186,729 participants) examined the association between the number of behavioral recommendations in multiple-behavior interventions and behavioral and clinical change across eight domains (i.e.

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Animal agriculture is a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful environmental impacts, which underscores the need to shift away from the consumption of animal-based products. One promising nudge intervention is making plant-based meals the default option, so we tested this approach at six different university events across four academic institutions for effecting sustainable dietary change. Event attendees pre-selected their meal on one of two randomly assigned RSVP forms: one with a plant-based default and one with a meal with meat default.

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Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) is the gold standard for cardiac function assessment and plays a crucial role in diagnosing cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, its widespread application has been limited by the heavy resource burden of CMR interpretation. Here, to address this challenge, we developed and validated computerized CMR interpretation for screening and diagnosis of 11 types of CVD in 9,719 patients.

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Immunogenetic studies have shown that specific HLA-B residues (67, 70, 97, and 156) mediate the impact of HLA class I on HIV infection, but the molecular basis is not well understood. Here we evaluate the function of these residues within the protective HLA-B5701 allele. While mutation of Met67, Ser70, and Leu156 disrupt CD8 T cell recognition, substitution of Val97 had no significant impact.

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Restricting movement is a major focus in policy directives to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in aged care homes. In this article, we rethink dominant framing of restriction through a critical examination of the politics of good care and ethnographic attention to spatial extensions and interdependencies between residents, care workers, and assistive technologies. Drawing on ethnographic observations in two South Australian care facilities, analysis of aged care policies and national inquiries into aged care, and relevant media reporting, we examine how restriction to movement, misconceptualized as a good form of care, has suppressed residents' physical and social needs and ruptured abling assemblages of resident mobility.

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We previously studied 2-aryl-2-(3-indolyl)acetohydroxamates as potential agents against melanoma. These compounds were ineffective in a mouse melanoma xenograft model, most likely due to unfavorable metabolic properties, specifically due to glucuronidation of the N-hydroxyl of the hydoxamic moiety. In the present work, we prepared a series of analogues, 2-aryl-2-(3-indolyl)acetamides and their oxazoline derivatives, which do not contain the N-hydroxyl group.

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Understanding the cell-type composition and spatial organization of brain regions is crucial for interpreting brain computation and function. In the thalamus, the anterior thalamic nuclei (ATN) are involved in a wide variety of functions, yet the cell-type composition of the ATN remains unmapped at a single-cell and spatial resolution. Combining single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and multiplexed fluorescent in situ hybridization, we identify three discrete excitatory cell-type clusters that correspond to the known nuclei of the ATN and uncover marker genes, molecular pathways, and putative functions of these cell types.

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers performed a high-content screening in neuroblastoma cells to find cell cycle regulators affecting cell differentiation, discovering that knocking down CDKN3 induced significant neurite outgrowth and differentiation markers.
  • CDKN3 knockdown led to decreased proliferation markers and reduced colony formation in neuroblastoma cells, correlating high CDKN3 levels with poor patient survival in public datasets.
  • The study also revealed that differentiation molecules down-regulate CDKN3, while N-Myc promotes its expression, suggesting a complex regulatory network that plays a role in neuroblastoma progression.
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Background And Objectives: Correct child car restraint use significantly reduces risk of death and serious injury in motor vehicle crashes, but millions of US children ride with improper restraints. We created a tablet-based car restraint educational intervention using Computer Intervention Authoring Software (CIAS) and examined its impact on knowledge and behaviours among parents in the paediatric emergency department (PED).

Methods: This was a non-blinded, randomised controlled trial of parents of PED patients ages 0-12 years.

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Prolonged tachycardia-a risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality-can induce cardiomyopathy in the absence of structural disease in the heart. Here, by leveraging human patient data, a canine model of tachycardia and engineered heart tissue generated from human induced pluripotent stem cells, we show that metabolic rewiring during tachycardia drives contractile dysfunction by promoting tissue hypoxia, elevated glucose utilization and the suppression of oxidative phosphorylation. Mechanistically, a metabolic shift towards anaerobic glycolysis disrupts the redox balance of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), resulting in increased global protein acetylation (and in particular the acetylation of sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum Ca-ATPase), a molecular signature of heart failure.

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Due to the rampant rise in obesity and diabetes, consumers are desperately seeking for ways to reduce their sugar intake, but to date there are no options that are both accessible and without sacrifice of palatability. One of the most promising new ingredients in the food system as a non-nutritive sugar substitute with near perfect palatability is D-psicose. D-psicose is currently produced using an in vitro enzymatic isomerization of D-fructose, resulting in low yield and purity, and therefore requiring substantial downstream processing to obtain a high purity product.

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