Reliability, validity, and responsiveness of a smartphone-based manikin to support pain self-reporting.

Introduction: Many people worldwide suffer from chronic pain. Improving our knowledge on chronic pain prevalence and management requires methods to collect pain self-reports in large populations. Smartphone-based tools could aid data collection by allowing people to use their own device, but the measurement properties of such tools are largely unknown.

Best Practices for the Electronic Implementation and Migration of Patient-Reported Outcome Measures.

While the use of electronic methods to collect patient-reported outcome data in clinical trials continues to increase, it remains the case that many patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) have originally been developed and validated on paper. Careful consideration during the move from paper PROMs to electronic format is required to preserve the integrity of the measure and ensure a "faithful migration." Relevant literature has long called out the importance of following migration best practices during this process; nevertheless, such best practices are distributed across multiple documents.

Feasibility and acceptability to use a smartphone-based manikin for daily longitudinal self-reporting of chronic pain.

Background: As management of chronic pain continues to be suboptimal, there is a need for tools that support frequent, longitudinal pain self-reporting to improve our understanding of pain. This study aimed to assess the feasibility and acceptability of daily pain self-reporting using a smartphone-based pain manikin.

Methods: For this prospective feasibility study, we recruited adults with lived experience of painful musculoskeletal condition.

Exploring the Cross-cultural Acceptability of Digital Tools for Pain Self-reporting: Qualitative Study.

Background: Culture and ethnicity influence how people communicate about their pain. This makes it challenging to develop pain self-report tools that are acceptable across ethnic groups.

Objective: We aimed to inform the development of cross-culturally acceptable digital pain self-report tools by better understanding the similarities and differences between ethnic groups in pain experiences and self-reporting needs.

The Impact of Multivesicular Release on the Transmission of Sensory Information by Ribbon Synapses.

The statistics of vesicle release determine how synapses transfer information, but the classical Poisson model of independent release does not always hold at the first stages of vision and hearing. There, ribbon synapses also encode sensory signals as events comprising two or more vesicles released simultaneously. The implications of such coordinated multivesicular release (MVR) for spike generation are not known.

A Phase I/IIa study of autologous tolerogenic dendritic cells immunotherapy in kidney transplant recipients.

Kidney transplant survival is shortened by chronic rejection and side effects of standard immunosuppressive drugs. Cell-based immunotherapy with tolerogenic dendritic cells has long been recognized as a promising approach to reduce general immunosuppression. Published trials report the safety and the absence of therapy-related adverse reactions in patients treated with tolerogenic dendritic cells suffering from several inflammatory diseases.

Remote sampling of biomarkers of inflammation with linked patient generated health data in patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases: an Ecological Momentary Assessment feasibility study.

Background: People with rheumatic diseases experience troublesome fluctuations in fatigue. Debated causes include pain, mood and inflammation. To determine the relationships between these potential causes, serial assessments are required but are methodologically challenging.

Diurnal changes in the efficiency of information transmission at a sensory synapse.

Neuromodulators adapt sensory circuits to changes in the external world or the animal's internal state and synapses are key control sites for such plasticity. Less clear is how neuromodulation alters the amount of information transmitted through the circuit. We investigated this question in the context of the diurnal regulation of visual processing in the retina of zebrafish, focusing on ribbon synapses of bipolar cells.

Sleep Disturbance and Quality of Life in Rheumatoid Arthritis: Prospective mHealth Study.

Background: Sleep disturbances and poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL) are common in people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Sleep disturbances, such as less total sleep time, more waking periods after sleep onset, and higher levels of nonrestorative sleep, may be a driver of HRQoL. However, understanding whether these sleep disturbances reduce HRQoL has, to date, been challenging because of the need to collect complex time-varying data at high resolution.

Development of a Mobile Digital Manikin to Measure Pain Location and Intensity.

Painful conditions are prevalent and substantially contribute to disability worldwide. Digital manikins are body-shaped drawings to facilitate self-reporting of pain. Some of them have been validated, but without allowing for recording of location-specific pain intensity and for use on a smartphone.

Regulatory cell therapy in kidney transplantation (The ONE Study): a harmonised design and analysis of seven non-randomised, single-arm, phase 1/2A trials.

Background: Use of cell-based medicinal products (CBMPs) represents a state-of-the-art approach for reducing general immunosuppression in organ transplantation. We tested multiple regulatory CBMPs in kidney transplant trials to establish the safety of regulatory CBMPs when combined with reduced immunosuppressive treatment.

Methods: The ONE Study consisted of seven investigator-led, single-arm trials done internationally at eight hospitals in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the USA (60 week follow-up).

How the weather affects the pain of citizen scientists using a smartphone app.

Patients with chronic pain commonly believe their pain is related to the weather. Scientific evidence to support their beliefs is inconclusive, in part due to difficulties in getting a large dataset of patients frequently recording their pain symptoms during a variety of weather conditions. Smartphones allow the opportunity to collect data to overcome these difficulties.

The BRadykinesia Akinesia INcoordination (BRAIN) Tap Test: Capturing the Sequence Effect.

Background: The BRadykinesia Akinesia INcoordination (BRAIN) tap test is an online keyboard tapping task that has been previously validated to assess upper limb motor function in Parkinson's disease (PD).

Objectives: To develop a new parameter that detects a sequence effect and to reliably distinguish between PD patients and medication. In addition, we sought to validate a mobile version of the test for use on smartphones and tablet devices.

An amplitude code transmits information at a visual synapse.

Most neurons transmit information digitally using spikes that trigger the release of synaptic vesicles with low probability. The first stages of vision and hearing are distinct in that they operate with analog signals, but it is unclear how these are recoded for synaptic transmission. By imaging the release of glutamate in live zebrafish, we demonstrate that ribbon synapses of retinal bipolar cells encode contrast through changes in both the frequency and amplitude of release events.

Spikeling: A low-cost hardware implementation of a spiking neuron for neuroscience teaching and outreach.

Understanding how neurons encode and compute information is fundamental to our study of the brain, but opportunities for hands-on experience with neurophysiological techniques on live neurons are scarce in science education. Here, we present Spikeling, an open source in silico implementation of a spiking neuron that costs £25 and mimics a wide range of neuronal behaviours for classroom education and public neuroscience outreach. Spikeling is based on an Arduino microcontroller running the computationally efficient Izhikevich model of a spiking neuron.

Quality of life, sleep and rheumatoid arthritis (QUASAR): a protocol for a prospective UK mHealth study to investigate the relationship between sleep and quality of life in adults with rheumatoid arthritis.

Introduction: People with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) frequently report reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL), the impact one's health has on physical, emotional and social well-being. There are likely numerous causes for poor HRQoL, but people with RA have identified sleep disturbances as a key contributor to their well-being. This study will identify sleep/wake rhythm-associated parameters that predict HRQoL in patients with RA.

Erratum: Author Correction: Using a smartphone-based self-management platform to support medication adherence and clinical consultation in Parkinson's disease.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/s41531-016-0003-z.].

Using a smartphone-based self-management platform to support medication adherence and clinical consultation in Parkinson's disease.

The progressive nature of Parkinson's disease, its complex treatment regimens and the high rates of comorbid conditions make self-management and treatment adherence a challenge. Clinicians have limited face-to-face consultation time with Parkinson's disease patients, making it difficult to comprehensively address non-adherence. Here we share the results from a multi-centre (seven centres) randomised controlled trial conducted in England and Scotland to assess the impact of using a smartphone-based Parkinson's tracker app to promote patient self-management, enhance treatment adherence and quality of clinical consultation.

Cloudy with a Chance of Pain: Engagement and Subsequent Attrition of Daily Data Entry in a Smartphone Pilot Study Tracking Weather, Disease Severity, and Physical Activity in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Background: The increasing ownership of smartphones provides major opportunities for epidemiological research through self-reported and passively collected data.

Objective: This pilot study aimed to codesign a smartphone app to assess associations between weather and joint pain in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to study the success of daily self-reported data entry over a 60-day period and the enablers of and barriers to data collection.

Methods: A patient and public involvement group (n=5) and 2 focus groups of patients with RA (n=9) supported the codesign of the app collecting self-reported symptoms.

In silico and in vitro methods to identify ebola virus VP35-dsRNA inhibitors.

Ebola virus continues to be problematic as sporadic outbreaks in Africa continue to arise, and as terrorist organizations have considered the virus for bioterrorism use. Several proteins within the virus have been targeted for antiviral chemotherapy, including VP35, a dsRNA binding protein that promotes viral replication, protects dsRNA from degradation, and prevents detection of the viral genome by immune complexes. To augment the scope of our antiviral research, we have now employed molecular modeling techniques to enrich the population of compounds for further testing in vitro.

Pathogen-induced rapid evolution in a vertebrate life-history trait.

Anthropogenic factors, including climate warming, are increasing the incidence and prevalence of infectious diseases worldwide. Infectious diseases caused by pathogenic parasites can have severe impacts on host survival, thereby altering the selection regime and inducing evolutionary responses in their hosts. Knowledge about such evolutionary consequences in natural populations is critical to mitigate potential ecological and economic effects.

Harvest-induced disruptive selection increases variance in fitness-related traits.

The form of Darwinian selection has important ecological and management implications. Negative effects of harvesting are often ascribed to size truncation (i.e.

Antagonistic selection from predators and pathogens alters food-web structure.

Selection can alter predator-prey interactions. However, whether and how complex food-webs respond to selection remain largely unknown. We show in the field that antagonistic selection from predators and pathogens on prey body-size can be a primary driver of food-web functioning.