Publications by authors named "BRESSLER R"

Recent studies project that temperature-related mortality will be the largest source of damage from climate change, with particular concern for the elderly whom it is believed bear the largest heat-related mortality risk. We study heat and mortality in Mexico, a country that exhibits a unique combination of universal mortality microdata and among the most extreme levels of humid heat. Combining detailed measurements of wet-bulb temperature with age-specific mortality data, we find that younger people who are particularly vulnerable to heat: People under 35 years old account for 75% of recent heat-related deaths and 87% of heat-related lost life years, while those 50 and older account for 96% of cold-related deaths and 80% of cold-related lost life years.

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To examine the association between parental divorce or separation (PDS) and oral health outcomes in children and adolescents in the United States (U.S.), and learn whether the association was mediated by a lack of needed dental care in the past 12 months.

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Background: Health care is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to climate change and public health harms. Changes are needed to improve the environmental sustainability of health-care practices, but such changes should not sacrifice patient outcomes or financial sustainability. Alternative dosing strategies that reduce the frequency with which specialty drugs are administered, without sacrificing patient outcomes, are an attractive possibility for improving environmental sustainability.

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Police officers of the Special Forces are confronted with highly demanding situations in terms of stress, high tension and threats to their lives. Their tasks are specifically high-risk operations, such as arrests of armed suspects and anti-terror interventions. Improving the emotion regulation skills of police officers might be a vital investment, supporting them to stay calm and focused.

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Article Synopsis
  • Elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) levels are expected to increase global mortality, and the Australian health sector contributes significantly to these emissions, prompting investigations into decarbonisation strategies.
  • Using an Integrated Assessment Model, predictions indicate that decarbonising the Australian health sector by 2040 and 2050 could prevent 77,000 and 69,000 temperature-related deaths, with broader economic decarbonisation averting up to 1.1 million deaths.
  • The analysis suggests that early decarbonisation could lead to a welfare gain of $151 billion by reducing mortality from temperature changes, highlighting the importance of effective climate policy despite uncertainties and limitations in the scope of health impacts considered.
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Many studies project that climate change is expected to cause a significant number of excess deaths. Yet, in integrated assessment models that determine the social cost of carbon (SCC), human mortality impacts do not reflect the latest scientific understanding. We address this issue by estimating country-level mortality damage functions for temperature-related mortality with global spatial coverage.

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Many studies project that climate change can cause a significant number of excess deaths. Yet, in integrated assessment models (IAMs) that determine the social cost of carbon (SCC) and prescribe optimal climate policy, human mortality impacts are limited and not updated to the latest scientific understanding. This study extends the DICE-2016 IAM to explicitly include temperature-related mortality impacts by estimating a climate-mortality damage function.

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Purpose Of Review: Diverse musculoskeletal disorders and neuropathic symptoms of the face pose significant diagnostic challenges. In particular, temporal tendinosis is generally overlooked in the medical and dental literature and is therefore a poorly understood topic and often problematic cause of chronic orofacial pain. In this article, we explore temporal tendinosis as a cause of unresolved orofacial pain by reviewing the complex anatomy of the temporalis muscle, common presentations of temporal tendinosis, possible etiologies for injury and place a strong emphasis on required diagnostic evaluation and clinical management.

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Random Forest has become a standard data analysis tool in computational biology. However, extensions to existing implementations are often necessary to handle the complexity of biological datasets and their associated research questions. The growing size of these datasets requires high performance implementations.

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Genomic studies are now being undertaken on thousands of samples requiring new computational tools that can rapidly analyze data to identify clinically important features. Inferring structural variations in cancer genomes from mate-paired reads is a combinatorially difficult problem. We introduce Fastbreak, a fast and scalable toolkit that enables the analysis and visualization of large amounts of data from projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas.

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Background: As the volume, complexity and diversity of the information that scientists work with on a daily basis continues to rise, so too does the requirement for new analytic software. The analytic software must solve the dichotomy that exists between the need to allow for a high level of scientific reasoning, and the requirement to have an intuitive and easy to use tool which does not require specialist, and often arduous, training to use. Information visualization provides a solution to this problem, as it allows for direct manipulation and interaction with diverse and complex data.

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Hepatic fat accumulation resulting from increased de novo fatty acid synthesis leads to hepatic steatosis and hepatic insulin resistance. We have shown previously that acetyl-CoA carboxylase 2 (Acc2(-/-)) mutant mice, when fed a high-fat (HF) or high-fat, high-carbohydrate (HFHC) diet, are protected against diet-induced obesity and maintained whole body and hepatic insulin sensitivity. To determine the effect of an ACC2 deletion on hepatic fat metabolism, we studied the regulation of the enzymes involved in the lipogenic pathway under Western HFHC dietary and de novo lipogenic conditions.

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Background: The advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies and growth in data sizes has highlighted the need for scalable tools to perform quality assurance testing. These tests are necessary to ensure that data is of a minimum necessary standard for use in downstream analysis. In this paper we present the SAMQA tool to rapidly and robustly identify errors in population-scale sequence data.

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Background: High throughput sequencing has become an increasingly important tool for biological research. However, the existing software systems for managing and processing these data have not provided the flexible infrastructure that research requires.

Results: Existing software solutions provide static and well-established algorithms in a restrictive package.

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Concomitant administration of grapefruit juice can increase the plasma concentration of numerous drugs in humans and decrease the concentration of a few others. Such elevations of drug plasma concentrations have, on occasion, resulted in adverse clinical effects. Increased concentrations are primarily mediated by chemicals in grapefruit juice, which inhibit the CYP 3A4 drug-metabolizing enzyme in the small intestines.

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Patients over age 50 typically present with one chronic disease per decade. Each chronic disease typically requires long-term drug therapy, meaning most older patients require several drugs to maintain health. Simultaneously, use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has increased in the United States in the last 20 years, reaching 36% in 2002; herbal medicine use accounts for approximately 22% of all CAM use.

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Patients over age 50 typically present with one chronic disease per decade. Each chronic disease usually requires long-term drug therapy, meaning most older patients require several drugs to control their conditions and/or maintain their health. Simultaneously, the use of complementary and alternative medications (CAM) has increased in the United States over the last 20 years, reaching 36% in 2002; herbal medicine use accounts for approximately 22% of all CAM use.

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Geriatric patients typically present with one chronic disease per decade over age 50. Each chronic disease typically requires long-term drug therapy, meaning most older patients require several drugs to control their conditions and/or maintain their health. Simultaneously, the use of complementary and alternative medications (CAM) has increased in the United States over the last 20 years, reaching 36% in 2002; herbal medicine use accounts for approximately 22% of all CAM use.

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Phenylacetate (PA) is a reversible inhibitor of tumor cell growth and an inhibitor of mevalonate pyrophosphate decarboxylase (MPD). We hypothesized that MPD inhibition should lower rates of protein accumulation and accretion of cell number in all cell lines regardless of tumorigenic status or origin of the cell lines. PA treatment inhibited growth of MCF-7, NIH-3T3, Detroit 551, UT-2, NCTC-929, COS-1 and PC-3 cell lines.

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Physicians will treat larger numbers of elderly patients as the US population ages. Being treated simultaneously for more than 1 condition with multiple prescription drugs is only 1 reason why elderly patients are at greater risk of experiencing adverse drug reactions. The need for physicians to minimize the incidence of these reactions has become incumbent on both physicians and administrators.

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Background: Neutrophil-induced cardiomyocyte injury requires the expression of myocyte intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1 and ICAM-1-CD11b/CD18 adhesion. We have previously demonstrated interleukin (IL)-6 activity in postischemic cardiac lymph; IL-6 is the primary stimulus for myocyte ICAM- 1 induction. Furthermore, we found that induction of IL-6 mRNA occurred very early on reperfusion of the infarcted myocardium.

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Non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease that is common and is characterized by insulin insufficiency and resistance. Measures such as body weight reduction and exercise improve the metabolic defects, but pharmacological therapy is the most frequently used and successful therapy. The sulphonylureas stimulate insulin secretion.

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Background: The late-phase allergic reaction is an eosinophilic inflammatory response that begins several hours after allergen exposure, may persist for 24 hours, and is an important pathogenic mechanism in allergic disease.

Objective: Cultured naive human mast cells were used to investigate whether mast cells are a direct source of the eosinophil-promoting cytokines IL-5, IL-3, and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF).

Methods: Naive human mast cells were derived from bone marrow mononuclear cells cultured in the presence of stem-cell factor.

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