CD4 Co-Receptor Regulates Sex-Specific NK Cell Responses to Acute Infection.

Immunity to ( ) is sexually dimorphic in humans and mice, with females having higher morbidity and mortality during immune dysfunction and HIV-AIDS. The mechanisms underlying these sex differences are unclear. We investigated how a lack of CD4+ T cells (CD4 co-receptor KO) impacted survival in mice.

Assessment of Clinical Reasoning During a High Stakes Medical Student OSCE.

Background & Need For Innovation: Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are commonly employed to assess clinical skills. While several existing tools address components of clinical reasoning, including the Assessment of Reasoning Tool, none are calibrated for competency-based assessment of medical students (UME) in an OSCE setting.

Goal Of Innovation: We sought to create a clinical reasoning assessment for use in a high-stakes, summative medical student OSCE.

Cognitive Symptoms Across Diverse Cancers.

Importance: Psychosocial health services for adults with cancer should include support for cognitive symptoms and symptom clusters.

Objective: To characterize the frequency and severity of cognitive symptoms and to identify demographic and clinical risk factors associated with moderate to severe cognitive symptoms among outpatient adults with cancer seeking psychosocial support.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study analyzed data from routine patient-reported symptom screening during clinic appointments at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Canada, between January 1, 2013, and December 31, 2019.

A phase 2 study of a longitudinal multidimensional rehabilitation program for allogeneic blood and marrow transplantation patients.

Allogeneic blood and marrow transplantation (alloBMT) is a curative treatment for blood cancers associated with various treatment-related adverse events and morbidities for which rehabilitation programs are currently limited. A phase 2 randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and impact of CaRE-4-alloBMT, a longitudinal, multidimensional cancer rehabilitation program for patients undergoing alloBMT. The primary outcomes included the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and the methods.

Dietary management for pyridoxine-dependent epilepsy due to α-aminoadipic semialdehyde dehydrogenase deficiency, a follow-on from the international consortium guidelines.

Pyridoxine-dependent epilepsy (PDE-ALDH7A1) is a neurometabolic disorder in the lysine metabolism pathway. In 2014 and 2021, the International PDE consortium published consensus guidelines about diagnosis and management. In this follow-on, a literature review was performed and nutrition management was evaluated through an international dietary questionnaire with 40 respondents.

Gonadotropin elevation is ootoxic to ovulatory oocytes and inhibits oocyte maturation, and activin decoy receptor ActRIIB:Fc therapeutically restores maturation.

Background: Elevated FSH often occurs in women of advanced maternal age (AMA, age ≥ 35) and in infertility patients undergoing controlled ovarian stimulation (COS). There is controversy on whether high endogenous FSH contributes to infertility and whether high exogenous FSH adversely impacts patient pregnancy rates.

Methods: The senescence-accelerated mouse-prone-8 (SAMP8) model of female reproductive aging was employed to assess the separate impacts of age and high FSH activity on the percentages (%) of viable and mature ovulated oocytes recovered after gonadotropin treatment.

CaRE@ELLICSR: Effects of a clinically integrated, group-based, multidimensional cancer rehabilitation program.

Background: Although oncology clinical practice guidelines recognize the need and benefits of exercise, the implementation of these services into cancer care delivery remains limited. We developed and evaluated the impact of a clinically integrated 8-week exercise and education program (CaRE@ELLICSR).

Methods: We conducted a mixed methods, prospective cohort study to examine the effects of the program.

A Feasibility Randomized Controlled Trial of Prehabilitation During Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for Women with Breast Cancer: A Mixed Methods Study.

Background: Limited data exist regarding the role of multimodal prehabilitation during neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) for breast cancer. Determining large trial feasibility and identifying signals of prehabilitation benefit are needed.

Patients And Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled feasibility trial of multimodal prehabilitation versus usual care during NACT among women diagnosed with non-metastatic breast cancer.

Neural alpha oscillations index context-driven perception of ambiguous vowel sequences.

Perception of bistable stimuli is influenced by prior context. In some cases, the interpretation matches with how the preceding stimulus was perceived; in others, it tends to be the opposite of the previous stimulus percept. We measured high-density electroencephalography (EEG) while participants were presented with a sequence of vowels that varied in formant transition, promoting the perception of one or two auditory streams followed by an ambiguous bistable sequence.

Maternal age and gonadotrophin elevation cooperatively decrease viable ovulated oocytes and increase ootoxicity, chromosome-, and spindle-misalignments: '2-Hit' and 'FSH-OoToxicity' mechanisms as new reproductive aging hypotheses.

While there is consensus that advanced maternal age (AMA) reduces oocyte yield and quality, the notion that high FSH reduces oocyte quality and causes aneuploidy remains controversial, perhaps due to difficulties controlling the confounding variables of age and FSH levels. Here, contributions of age and gonadotrophin elevation were separately controlled using a mouse model of human female reproductive aging. Ovulated oocytes were collected from young and midlife mice after 0-, 2.

Trends in Radiation Dose to the Contralateral Breast During Breast Cancer Radiation Therapy.

Over 4 million survivors of breast cancer live in the United States, 35% of whom were treated before 2009. Approximately half of patients with breast cancer receive radiation therapy, which exposes the untreated contralateral breast to radiation and increases the risk of a subsequent contralateral breast cancer (CBC). Radiation oncology has strived to reduce unwanted radiation dose, but it is unknown whether a corresponding decline in actual dose received to the untreated contralateral breast has occurred.

Modality-Specific Perceptual Learning of Vocoded Auditory versus Lipread Speech: Different Effects of Prior Information.

Traditionally, speech perception training paradigms have not adequately taken into account the possibility that there may be modality-specific requirements for perceptual learning with auditory-only (AO) versus visual-only (VO) speech stimuli. The study reported here investigated the hypothesis that there are modality-specific differences in how prior information is used by normal-hearing participants during vocoded versus VO speech training. Two different experiments, one with vocoded AO speech (Experiment 1) and one with VO, lipread, speech (Experiment 2), investigated the effects of giving different types of information to trainees on each trial during training.

Single-shot optical neural network.

Analog optical and electronic hardware has emerged as a promising alternative to digital electronics to improve the efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, previous work has been limited in scalability (input vector length ≈ 100 elements) or has required nonstandard DNN models and retraining, hindering widespread adoption. Here, we present an analog, CMOS-compatible DNN processor that uses free-space optics to reconfigurably distribute an input vector and optoelectronics for static, updatable weighting and the nonlinearity-with ≈ 1000 and beyond.

Metamodal Coupling of Vibrotactile and Auditory Speech Processing Systems through Matched Stimulus Representations.

It has been postulated that the brain is organized by "metamodal," sensory-independent cortical modules capable of performing tasks (e.g., word recognition) in both "standard" and novel sensory modalities.

A longitudinal multidimensional rehabilitation program for patients undergoing allogeneic blood and marrow transplantation (CaRE-4-alloBMT): Protocol for a phase II feasibility pilot randomized controlled trial.

Background: Allogeneic blood and marrow transplantation (alloBMT) is a curative treatment for blood cancers associated with various treatment-related adverse events and morbidities. Current rehabilitation programs are limited for patients undergoing alloBMT and research is urgently needed to test the acceptability and effectiveness of these programs. In response, we developed a 6-month multidimensional longitudinal rehabilitation program that spans from pre transplant to 3 months post transplant discharge (CaRE-4-alloBMT).

Fear of cancer recurrence therapy (FORT): A randomized controlled trial.

Objective: Most fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) interventions have small effects, and few target FCR. This randomized controlled trial (RCT) with breast and gynecological cancer survivors evaluated the efficacy of a cognitive-existential fear of recurrence therapy (FORT) compared to an attention placebo control group (living well with cancer [LWWC]) on FCR.

Method: One hundred and sixty-four women with clinical levels of FCR and cancer distress were randomly assigned to 6-weekly, 120 min FORT (n = 80) or LWWC (n = 84) group sessions.

Neurocognitive impairment, neurobehavioral symptoms, fatigue, sleep disturbance, and depressive symptoms in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma.

Background: In addition to poor survival rates, individuals with glioblastoma (GBM) are at risk of neurocognitive impairment due to multiple factors. This study aimed to characterize neurocognitive impairment, neurobehavioral symptoms, fatigue, sleep disturbance, and depressive symptoms in newly diagnosed GBM patients; and to examine whether neurobehavioral symptoms, fatigue, sleep, and depressive symptoms influence neurocognitive performance.

Methods: This study was part of a prospective, inception cohort, single-arm exercise intervention in which GBM patients underwent a neuropsychological assessment shortly after diagnosis (median 4 weeks; ie, baseline) and 3, 6, 12, and 18 months later, or until tumor progression.

Neurocognitive Performance in Adults Treated With Radiation for a Primary Brain Tumor.

Purpose: The contributory effects of radiation dose to different brain regions on neurocognitive performance after radiation therapy (RT) for primary brain tumors is not well known.

Methods And Materials: In this retrospective cohort study, 30 patients with brain tumors treated with photon RT were identified, and radiation dosimetric parameters across brain regions were calculated. All patients had longitudinal neurocognitive evaluations at baseline and after treatment.

Intelligibility and detectability of speech measured diotically and dichotically in groups of listeners with, at most, "slight" hearing loss.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if a group of listeners having thresholds at 4 kHz exceeding 7.5 dB HL, and no more than "slight" hearing loss, would exhibit degradations in performance when "target" stimuli were masked tokens of speech. Intelligibility thresholds and detection thresholds were measured separately for speech masked by flat-spectrum noise or speech-shaped noise.