Maternal hypertension may be an underrecognized but important risk factor for perinatal death in low resource settings. We investigated the association of maternal hypertension and perinatal mortality in rural Bangladesh. This nested, matched case-control study used data from a 2019 cross-sectional survey and demographic surveillance database in Baliakandi, Bangladesh.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization marked the removal of the constitutional right to abortion in the USA, introducing a complex ethical and legal landscape for patients and providers. This shift has had immediate health and equity repercussions, but it is also crucial to examine the broader impacts on states, health-care systems, and society as a whole. Restrictions on abortion access extend beyond immediate reproductive care concerns, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of the ruling's consequences across micro and macro levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision, which revoked the constitutional right to abortion in the USA, has impacted the national medical workforce. Impacts vary across states, but providers in states with restrictive abortion laws now must contend with evolving legal and ethical challenges that have the potential to affect workforce safety, mental health, education, and training opportunities, in addition to having serious impacts on patient health and far-reaching societal consequences. Moreover, Dobbs has consequences on almost every facet of the medical workforce, including on physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and others who work within the health-care system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol
April 2024
This study demonstrates that changes in mindfulness predict subsequent changes in well-being in a data set including individuals who recently engaged in psychedelic use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this commentary, we advance the notion that mutant KRAS (mKRAS) is an ideal tumor neoantigen that is amenable for targeting by the adaptive immune system. Recent progress highlights key advances on various fronts that validate mKRAS as a molecular target and support further pursuit as an immunological target. Because mKRAS is an intracellular membrane localized protein and not normally expressed on the cell surface, we surmise that proteasome degradation will generate short peptides that bind to HLA class I (HLA-I) molecules in the endoplasmic reticulum for transport through the Golgi for display on the cell surface.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Cell Infect Microbiol
November 2023
While () bacteria are part of the human commensal flora, opportunistic invasion following breach of the epithelial layers can lead to a wide array of infection syndromes at both local and distant sites. Despite ubiquitous exposure from early infancy, the life-long risk of opportunistic infection is facilitated by a broad repertoire of virulence proteins. These proteins play a key role in inhibiting development of a long-term protective immune response by mechanisms ranging from dysregulation of the complement cascade to the disruption of leukocyte migration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth care systems in low- and middle-income countries may not meet the needs of pregnant women where the burden of diabetes and hypertension is rapidly increasing. We asked recently pregnant women about ever having been screened for or diagnosed with hypertension or diabetes and their ANC-seeking experiences in a cross-sectional survey. We used chi-squared tests and logistic regression to test the associations between self-reported coverage of hypertension and diabetes screening, diagnoses, and elements of ANC by age, wealth, educational attainment, and gravidity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
February 2023
Arsenic is a naturally occurring toxicant in groundwater, which increases cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. American Indian populations are disproportionately exposed to arsenic in drinking water. The Strong Heart Water Study (SHWS), through a community-centered approach for intervention development and implementation, delivered an arsenic mitigation program for private well users in American Indian communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite the success of CAR-T cell cancer immunotherapy, challenges in efficacy and safety remain. Investigators have begun to enhance CAR-T cells with the expression of accessory molecules to address these challenges. Current systems rely on constitutive transgene expression or multiple viral vectors, resulting in unregulated response and product heterogeneity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeasonal plasticity in male courtship in butterflies is due to variation in levels of the steroid hormone 20E (20-hydroxyecdysone) during pupation. Wet season (WS) males have high levels of 20E and become active courters. Dry season (DS) males have lower levels of 20E and reduced courtship rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdolescents and young adults (AYAs) may be cared for in a pediatric or adult ICU. Specific needs of AYAs differ from those of populations typically found in either ICU. This review identifies research focused on experiences of AYAs in ICUs, their family members, and the health care professionals who care for them, revealing limited research about AYAs in ICUs: 10 articles met inclusion criteria and findings revealed that AYAs want to be treated as individuals and need health care professionals to partner with them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYarkoni argues that researchers making broad inferences often use impoverished statistical models that fail to include important sources of variation as random effects. We argue, however, that for many common study designs, random effects are inappropriate and insufficient to draw general inferences, as the source of variation is not random, but systematic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The use of telemedicine has grown exponentially over the last decade, but its widespread adoption has been hindered, at least in part, by uncertainty over reimbursement rate for services. The aim of this study is to compare reimbursement rates of telemedicine and in-person visits in an academic oral and maxillofacial surgery practice.
Methods: The investigators implemented a retrospective cohort study.
Arsenic and uranium in unregulated private wells affect many rural populations across the US. The distribution of these contaminants in the private wells of most American Indian communities is poorly characterized, and seldom studied together. Here, we evaluate the association between drinking water arsenic and uranium levels in wells (n = 441) from three tribal regions in North Dakota and South Dakota participating in the Strong Heart Water Study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: This study evaluates the toxicity and tumor response with concurrent nab-paclitaxel chemoradiotherapy (CRT) compared with standard (5-fluorouracil or gemcitabine) CRT.
Materials And Methods: Fifty patients with borderline resectable or unresectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma from 2014 to 2017 were divided into 2 groups: concurrent nab-paclitaxel (100 to 125 mg/m2 weekly) CRT (median: 2.1 Gy fraction size and 52.
Activating RAS missense mutations are among the most prevalent genomic alterations observed in human cancers and drive oncogenesis in the three most lethal tumor types. Emerging evidence suggests mutant KRAS (mKRAS) may be targeted immunologically, but mKRAS epitopes remain poorly defined. Here we employ a multi-omics approach to characterize HLA class I-restricted mKRAS epitopes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCancer immunotherapy tools include antibodies, vaccines, cytokines, oncolytic viruses, bispecific molecules, and cellular therapies. This review will focus on adoptive cellular therapy, which involves the isolation of a patient's own immune cells followed by their ex vivo expansion and reinfusion. The majority of adoptive cellular therapy strategies utilize T cells isolated from tumor or peripheral blood, but may utilize other immune cell subsets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLike many tumor types, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) exhibits a rich network of tumor-derived cytokines and chemokines that drive recruitment of myeloid cells to the tumor microenvironment (TME). These cells, which include tumor-associated macrophages and myeloid derived suppressor cells, block the recruitment and priming of T cells, resulting in T cell exclusion within the TME. Genetic or pharmacologic disruption of this chemokine/cytokine network reliably converts the PDAC TME to a T cell-high phenotype and sensitizes tumors to immunotherapy across multiple preclinical models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) is among the most immune-resistant tumor types. Its unique genomic landscape shaped by oncogenic drivers promotes immune suppression from the earliest stages of tumor inception to subvert adaptive T cell immunity. Single-agent immune modulators have thus far proven clinically ineffective, and multi-modal therapies targeting mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance are likely needed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To explore the barriers faced by parents of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities when obtaining and using Developmental Disability Services (DDS) to support adolescent transition.
Methods: The authors conducted a basic interpretive qualitative study using semistructured interviews. Interviews were manually coded by the team of university-based researchers using constant comparative analysis.