Introduction: Cognitive deficits are common in psychiatric and mental health disorders, making the assessment of cognitive function in mental health treatment an important area of research. Cognitive Function Development Therapy (CFDT) is a novel therapeutic modality designed to enhance cognitive function and regulate the autonomic nervous system through targeted exercises and activities focused on attention networks and memory systems. The therapy is tracked and based on Primary Cognitive Function (PCF) scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAfter the near-complete cessation of commercial whaling, ship collisions have emerged as a primary threat to large whales, but knowledge of collision risk is lacking across most of the world's oceans. We compiled a dataset of 435,000 whale locations to generate global distribution models for four globally ranging species. We then combined >35 billion positions from 176,000 ships to produce a global estimate of whale-ship collision risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: One third of Australian children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes present with life-threatening diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) at diagnosis. Screening for early-stage, presymptomatic type 1 diabetes, with ongoing follow-up, can substantially reduce this risk (<5% risk). Several screening models are being trialled internationally, without consensus on the optimal approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Ophthalmol
December 2024
Purpose: To define the ophthalmic manifestations in KIF1A-associated neurologic disorder (KAND), a rare, progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by pathogenic variants in the KIFA1 gene.
Design: Cross-sectional study.
Methods: Clinical ophthalmic examination and multimodal imaging were performed for 24 participants enrolled in the KIF1AOutcome measures, Assessments, Longitudinal And endpoints (KOALA) Study.
Nat Ecol Evol
September 2024
Climate change is driving a rapid redistribution of life on Earth. Variability in the rates, magnitudes and directions of species' shifts can alter spatial overlap between predators and prey, with the potential to decouple trophic interactions. Although phenological mismatches between predator requirements and prey availability under climate change are well-established, 'spatial match-mismatch' dynamics remain poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective, rapid evaluation of cognitive function is critical for identifying situational impairment due to sleep deprivation. The present study used brain vital sign monitoring to evaluate acute changes in cognitive function for healthy adults. Thirty (30) participants were scanned using portable electroencephalography before and after either a night of regular sleep or a night of total sleep deprivation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-report and device-based measures of physical activity (PA) both have unique strengths and limitations; combining these measures should provide complementary and comprehensive insights to PA behaviours. Therefore, we aim to 1) identify PA clusters and clusters of change in PA based on self-reported daily activities and 2) assess differences in device-based PA between clusters in a lifestyle intervention, the PREVIEW diabetes prevention study. In total, 232 participants with overweight and prediabetes (147 women; 55.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForecasting weather has become commonplace, but as society faces novel and uncertain environmental conditions there is a critical need to forecast ecology. Forewarning of ecosystem conditions during climate extremes can support proactive decision-making, yet applications of ecological forecasts are still limited. We showcase the capacity for existing marine management tools to transition to a forecasting configuration and provide skilful ecological forecasts up to 12 months in advance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMarine heatwaves cause widespread environmental, biological, and socio-economic impacts, placing them at the forefront of 21st-century management challenges. However, heatwaves vary in intensity and evolution, and a paucity of information on how this variability impacts marine species limits our ability to proactively manage for these extreme events. Here, we model the effects of four recent heatwaves (2014, 2015, 2019, 2020) in the Northeastern Pacific on the distributions of 14 top predator species of ecological, cultural, and commercial importance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change drives species distribution shifts, affecting the availability of resources people rely upon for food and livelihoods. These impacts are complex, manifest at local scales, and have diverse effects across multiple species. However, for wild capture fisheries, current understanding is dominated by predictions for individual species at coarse spatial scales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Northwest Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico are among the fastest warming ocean regions, a trend that is expected to continue through this century with far-reaching implications for marine ecosystems. We examine the distribution of 12 highly migratory top predator species using predictive models and project expected habitat changes using downscaled climate models. Our models predict widespread losses of suitable habitat for most species, concurrent with substantial northward displacement of core habitats >500 km.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Non-invasive neuromodulation using translingual neurostimulation (TLNS) has been shown to advance rehabilitation outcomes, particularly when paired with physical therapy (PT). Together with motor gains, patient-reported observations of incidental improvements in cognitive function have been noted. Both studies in healthy individuals and case reports in clinical populations have linked TLNS to improvements in attention-related cognitive processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: To examine the clinical significance of thrombocytosis (platelets > 500 × 10 /L) in admitted children with an influenza-like illness.
Methods: We performed a database analysis consisting of patients evaluated at our medical centers with an influenza-like illness between 2009 and 2013. We included paediatric patients and examined the association between platelet count, respiratory viral infections, and admission outcomes (hospital length of stay and admission to the paediatric intensive care unit) using regression models adjusting for multiple variables.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are becoming an important tool for marine conservation and management. Yet while there is an increasing diversity and volume of marine biodiversity data for training SDMs, little practical guidance is available on how to leverage distinct data types to build robust models. We explored the effect of different data types on the fit, performance and predictive ability of SDMs by comparing models trained with four data types for a heavily exploited pelagic fish, the blue shark (Prionace glauca), in the Northwest Atlantic: two fishery dependent (conventional mark-recapture tags, fisheries observer records) and two fishery independent (satellite-linked electronic tags, pop-up archival tags).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Ther Methods Clin Dev
June 2023
Optogenetic gene therapies offer a promising strategy for restoring vision to patients with retinal degenerative diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Several clinical trials have begun in this area using different vectors and optogenetic proteins (Clinical Identifiers: NCT02556736, NCT03326336, NCT04945772, and NCT04278131). Here we present preclinical efficacy and safety data for the NCT04278131 trial, which uses an AAV2 vector and Chronos as the optogenetic protein.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAbstractUnifying models have shown that the amount of space used by animals (e.g., activity space, home range) scales allometrically with body mass for terrestrial taxa; however, such relationships are far less clear for marine species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForage fishes are key energy conduits that transfer primary and secondary productivity to higher trophic levels. As novel environmental conditions caused by climate change alter ecosystems and predator-prey dynamics, there is a critical need to understand how forage fish control bottom-up forcing of food web dynamics. In the northeast Pacific, northern anchovy () is an important forage species with high interannual variability in population size that subsequently impacts the foraging and reproductive ecology of marine predators.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhale entanglements with fishing gear, exacerbated by changing environmental conditions, pose significant risk to whale populations. Management tools used to reduce entanglement risk, for example temporary area restrictions on fishing, can have negative economic consequences for fishing communities. Balancing whale protection with sustaining productive fisheries is therefore a challenge experienced worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLaryngoscope Investig Otolaryngol
October 2022
Objective: During COVID-19, otolaryngology clinics rapidly implemented telehealth programs in accordance with social distancing guidelines and institutional policies. Our objectives are to evaluate the usefulness of telephone audio visits for underserved patients seeking otolaryngological care at an urban safety-net hospital and identify patient factors associated with telephone visit attendance.
Methods: In a retrospective review of all adult telephone visits in 2020, we compared the demographics and visit characteristics of patients who attended telehealth versus in-person visits and patients who attended versus missed telehealth visits.
Purpose: To describe cases of unilateral cone-rod dysfunction presenting in two middle-aged females.
Methods: This case series highlights two middle-aged female patients with progressive visual decline in one eye. Fundus photography, fundus autofluorescence (FAF), spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), multi-focal electroretinogram (mfERG), full-field electroretinogram(ffERG), and genetic testing were obtained.
Projecting the future distributions of commercially and ecologically important species has become a critical approach for ecosystem managers to strategically anticipate change, but large uncertainties in projections limit climate adaptation planning. Although distribution projections are primarily used to understand the scope of potential change-rather than accurately predict specific outcomes-it is nonetheless essential to understand where and why projections can give implausible results and to identify which processes contribute to uncertainty. Here, we use a series of simulated species distributions, an ensemble of 252 species distribution models, and an ensemble of three regional ocean climate projections, to isolate the influences of uncertainty from earth system model spread and from ecological modeling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To describe vitamin A deficiency using multimodal functional visual assessments and imaging.
Methods/case: A 50-year-old female with past medical history significant for Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery complained of nyctalopia and "yellowing" of vision.
Results: Vitamin A levels were noted to be < 0.
Chordoma is a rare bone tumor with genetic risk factors largely unknown. We conducted a whole-exome sequencing (WES) analysis of germline DNA from 19 familial chordoma cases in five pedigrees and 137 sporadic chordoma patients and identified 17 rare germline variants in PALB2 and BRCA2, whose products play essential roles in homologous recombination (HR) and tumor suppression. One PALB2 variant showed disease cosegregation in a family with four affected people or obligate gene carrier.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMarine heatwaves (MHWs)-periods of exceptionally warm ocean temperature lasting weeks to years-are now widely recognized for their capacity to disrupt marine ecosystems. The substantial ecological and socioeconomic impacts of these extreme events present significant challenges to marine resource managers, who would benefit from forewarning of MHWs to facilitate proactive decision-making. However, despite extensive research into the physical drivers of MHWs, there has been no comprehensive global assessment of our ability to predict these events.
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