Detecting early stages of Alzheimer's disease using a web-based cognitive battery.

Portable and efficient cognitive screening measures are needed to address the growing need for effective early detection of Alzheimer's disease. The Neurotrack Cognitive Battery (NCB) offers an appealing, web-based application that may be sensitive to early cognitive changes associated with Alzheimer's disease. The NCB contains measures that were conceptually derived from animal lesion studies.

Vaginal metatranscriptome meta-analysis reveals functional BV subgroups and novel colonisation strategies.

Background: The application of '-omics' technologies to study bacterial vaginosis (BV) has uncovered vast differences in composition and scale between the vaginal microbiomes of healthy and BV patients. Compared to amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomic approaches focusing on a single or few species, investigating the transcriptome of the vaginal microbiome at a system-wide level can provide insight into the functions which are actively expressed and differential between states of health and disease.

Results: We conducted a meta-analysis of vaginal metatranscriptomes from three studies, split into exploratory (n = 42) and validation (n = 297) datasets, accounting for the compositional nature of sequencing data and differences in scale between healthy and BV microbiomes.

Nitazene opioids and the heart: Identification of a cardiac ion channel target for illicit nitazene opioids.

The growing use of nitazene synthetic opioids heralds a new phase of the opioid crisis. However, limited information exists on the toxic effects of these drugs, aside from a propensity for respiratory depression. With restricted research availability of nitazenes, we used machine-learning-based tools to evaluate five nitazene compounds' interaction potential with the hERG potassium channel, a key drug antitarget in the heart.

Impact of 'street' benzodiazepines on drug-related deaths in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Introduction: 'Street' benzodiazepines (BZD) are structurally and pharmacologically related to BZDs licensed for human use. In this study we investigated how street BZDs contribute to overall BZD use and death prevalences in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Methods: Data were analysed from deaths reported to the National Programme on Substance Use Mortality with post-mortem BZD detections (1999-2021), BZDs seized from music festivals (2017-2021) and drug samples with BZD detections submitted to Welsh Emerging Drugs and Identification of Novel Substances (WEDINOS) (2017-2021).

Assessing the Fiscal Burden of Overweight and Obesity in Japan through Application of a Public Economic Framework.

Obesity continues to represent a significant public health concern, with a broad impact from both a health and economic perspective. This analysis assesses the fiscal consequences of overweight and obesity (OAO) in Japan by capturing obesity-attributable lost tax revenue and increased government transfers using a government perspective. The fiscal burden of OAO was estimated using an age-specific prevalence model, which tracked the Japanese population across different body mass index (BMI) categories.