Demoralization's link to depression and anxiety symptoms: A network analysis.

Demoralization represents a clinical syndrome conceptualized as maladaptive coping to a stressor associated with discouragement, feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and a loss of meaning in life. It is a prevalent comorbidity in individuals with severe physical illnesses and affects a substantial proportion of the general population when facing global stressors like the COVID-19 pandemic. The main aim of the study was to test whether demoralization and features of depression and anxiety might reflect distinct entities within the general population, specifically in older adults, and to explore symptom interconnections, using a network psychometrics approach.

Ultrasound-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound for symptomatic uterine fibroids: clinical outcome of two European centers.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to assess the clinical outcome and mid-term efficacy of ultrasound-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound (USgHIFU) as a treatment for symptomatic uterine fibroids at two major European HIFU centers.

Materials And Methods: This bi-center longitudinal clinical study involved the treatment of 100 patients with symptomatic uterine fibroids using USgHIFU (n = 59 in Germany, n = 41 in Bulgaria). Clinical outcomes were evaluated at 6 weeks, 6 months, and 1 year follow-up utilizing the uterine fibroid symptoms-quality of life questionnaire for fibroid-related symptoms and health-related quality of life as well as MRI imaging for determining the fibroid volume.

Two coacting shadow enhancers regulate twin of eyeless expression during early Drosophila development.

The Drosophila PAX6 homolog twin of eyeless (toy) sits at the pinnacle of the genetic pathway controlling eye development, the retinal determination network. Expression of toy in the embryo is first detectable at cellular blastoderm stage 5 in an anterior-dorsal band in the presumptive procephalic neuroectoderm, which gives rise to the primordia of the visual system and brain. Although several maternal and gap transcription factors that generate positional information in the embryo have been implicated in controlling toy, the regulation of toy expression in the early embryo is currently not well characterized.

Microbial species and intraspecies units exist and are maintained by ecological cohesiveness coupled to high homologous recombination.

Recent genomic analyses have revealed that microbial communities are predominantly composed of persistent, sequence-discrete species and intraspecies units (genomovars), but the mechanisms that create and maintain these units remain unclear. By analyzing closely-related isolate genomes from the same or related samples and identifying recent recombination events using a novel bioinformatics methodology, we show that high ecological cohesiveness coupled to frequent-enough and unbiased (i.e.

Pain in Palliative Cancer Patients - Analysis of the German National Palliative Care Registry.

Context: Palliative care aims to improve the quality of life in patients with progressive diseases such as cancer. Effective cancer pain management is a major challenge of palliative treatment. Empirical data on the prevalence of cancer pain, the efficiency of pain treatment and influencing factors are scarce.

Depressive symptomatology, NT-proBNP levels and health status in patients with heart failure: a prospective observational study.

Background: Depressive symptoms frequently occur in patients with heart failure (HF). However, research on the relationship between these symptoms and N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), a key biomarker for HF severity and treatment, is scarce and yields inconsistent results.

Aims: This study investigates the relationship among depressive symptomatology, NT-proBNP and health status in a cohort of patients with HF.

A natural ANI gap that can define intra-species units of bacteriophages and other viruses.

Unlabelled: Despite the importance of intra-species variants of viruses for causing disease and/or disrupting ecosystem functioning, there is no universally applicable standard to define these. A (natural) gap in whole-genome average nucleotide identity (ANI) values around 95% is commonly used to define species, especially for bacteriophages, but whether a similar gap exists within species that can be used to define intra-species units has not been evaluated yet. Whole-genome comparisons among members of 1,016 bacteriophage () species revealed a region of low frequency of ANI values around 99.

New insights into recalled parental behavior in social anxiety disorder: A cluster analytic approach.

Background: Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a highly heterogeneous disorder. To enlighten its heterogeneity, this study focused on recalled parental behavior and aimed to empirically identify if there are subgroups of SAD based on recalled parental behavior by means of cluster analysis. Further, the study investigated whether those subgroups differed on clinical, trauma, and personality variables.

Study Protocol of a Randomized, Two-Arm, Phase I/II Trial Investigating the Feasibility, Safety, and Efficacy of Local Treatment with US-Guided High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound in Combination with Palliative Chemotherapy in Inoperable Pancreatic Cancer.

Background: Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PaC) still has a dismal prognosis, and despite medical advances, a bleak 5-year survival rate of only 8%, largely due to late diagnosis and limited curative surgical options for most patients. Frontline palliative treatment shows some survival advantages. However, the high disease mortality is accompanied by high morbidity including cancer-related pain and additional symptoms, which strongly impair patients' quality of life (QOL).

A specialized population of monocyte-derived tracheal macrophages promote airway epithelial regeneration through a CCR2-dependent mechanism.

Macrophages are critical for maintenance and repair of mucosal tissues. While functionally distinct subtypes of macrophage are known to have important roles in injury response and repair in the lungs, little is known about macrophages in the proximal conducting airways. Single-cell RNA sequencing and flow cytometry demonstrated murine tracheal macrophages are largely monocyte-derived and are phenotypically distinct from lung macrophages at homeostasis.

Clinical experience with shear wave elastography (SWE) for assessing healthy uterus in a transabdominal approach.

Aim of the study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance and feasibility of transabdominal ultrasound shear wave elastography (SWE) in assessing sonoelastographic features of the uterus. Twenty-seven premenopausal women were enrolled between 2021 and 2022. Transabdominal SWE measured myometrial stiffness in various uterine segments.

Sulfur oxidation and reduction are coupled to nitrogen fixation in the roots of the salt marsh foundation plant Spartina alterniflora.

Heterotrophic activity, primarily driven by sulfate-reducing prokaryotes, has traditionally been linked to nitrogen fixation in the root zone of coastal marine plants, leaving the role of chemolithoautotrophy in this process unexplored. Here, we show that sulfur oxidation coupled to nitrogen fixation is a previously overlooked process providing nitrogen to coastal marine macrophytes. In this study, we recovered 239 metagenome-assembled genomes from a salt marsh dominated by the foundation plant Spartina alterniflora, including diazotrophic sulfate-reducing and sulfur-oxidizing bacteria.

Potential routes of plastics biotransformation involving novel plastizymes revealed by global multi-omic analysis of plastic associated microbes.

Despite increasing efforts across various disciplines, the fate, transport, and impact of synthetic plastics on the environment and public health remain poorly understood. To better elucidate the microbial ecology of plastic waste and its potential for biotransformation, we conducted a large-scale analysis of all publicly available meta-omic studies investigating plastics (n = 27) in the environment. Notably, we observed low prevalence of known plastic degraders throughout most environments, except for substantial enrichment in riverine systems.

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To investigate macular and peripapillary vascular density (VD) in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) compared to healthy controls. :Whole face scans of the superficial and deep macular layers and whole face and peripapillary scans of the radial peripapillary capillaries (RPC) were obtained using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA, AngioVueR, Optovue) in ten patients with AN and ten age-matched controls.The primary objective was to determine whether there was a difference between the vessel density (VD) in the above areas in AN and controls.

Graph Attention-Based Fusion of Pathology Images and Gene Expression for Prediction of Cancer Survival.

Multimodal machine learning models are being developed to analyze pathology images and other modalities, such as gene expression, to gain clinical and biological insights. However, most frameworks for multimodal data fusion do not fully account for the interactions between different modalities. Here, we present an attention-based fusion architecture that integrates a graph representation of pathology images with gene expression data and concomitantly learns from the fused information to predict patient-specific survival.

Preliminary results of anti-inflammatory cytokine concentrations predicting therapy outcome in panic disorder.

Background: Patients with panic disorder (PD) show alterations of the immune reactivity to acute stress, which could serve as a marker for effective treatment. Nevertheless, the effect of immune reactivity under acute stress before treatment on therapy outcome remains unclear.

Methods: A total of  = 16 PD patients performed the Trier Social Test.

"The Water in Which We Swim:" A Unique, Post-Clerkship Multidisciplinary Course.

Objective: To improve patient outcomes and promote health equity, medical students must be taught not only biomedicine, but also the social sciences to understand the larger contexts in which patients live and health care operates. Yet, most undergraduate medical education does not explicitly cover these topics in a required, longitudinal curriculum.

Methods: In January 2015 at Harvard Medical School, we created a two-part sequence (pre- and post-clerkship) of required, 4-week multidisciplinary courses-"Essentials of the Profession I and II"-to fill this gap.

Towards estimating the number of strains that make up a natural bacterial population.

What a strain is and how many strains make up a natural bacterial population remain elusive concepts despite their apparent importance for assessing the role of intra-population diversity in disease emergence or response to environmental perturbations. To advance these concepts, we sequenced 138 randomly selected Salinibacter ruber isolates from two solar salterns and assessed these genomes against companion short-read metagenomes from the same samples. The distribution of genome-aggregate average nucleotide identity (ANI) values among these isolates revealed a bimodal distribution, with four-fold lower occurrence of values between 99.

Treating pain in patients with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome : Multidisciplinary management of a multisystemic disease.

Background: The clinical picture of people with Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS) is complex and involves a variety of potential causes of pain. This poses major challenges to patients and healthcare professionals alike in terms of diagnosis and management of the condition.

Objectives: The aim of the article was to provide an overview of the specific pain management needs of patients with EDS and address their background.

Emotion-centered versus fact-centered medical information to alleviate pain and anxiety in prostate biopsy: A randomized trial.

Background: To test the efficacy of emotion-centered (EC) versus fact-centered (FC) written medical information for prostate biopsy to alleviate pain and anxiety in a randomized controlled trial.

Methods: In a single-center, single-blinded study participants were randomized to receive FC or EC (DRKS00022361; 2020). In the EC, the focus was on possible stress reactions and stress-reducing strategies.

An ANI gap within bacterial species that advances the definitions of intra-species units.

Bacterial strains and clonal complexes are two cornerstone concepts for microbiology that remain loosely defined, which confuses communication and research. Here we identify a natural gap in genome sequence comparisons among isolate genomes of all well-sequenced species that has gone unnoticed so far and could be used to more accurately and precisely define these and related concepts compared to current methods. These findings advance the molecular toolbox for accurately delineating and following the important units of diversity within prokaryotic species and thus should greatly facilitate future epidemiological and micro-diversity studies across clinical and environmental settings.