The heart of the matter: a re-iteration of the role of the social determinants of health in addressing health inequity in Central Australia.

The persisting life-expectancy 'gap' between First Nations and non-First Nations Australians is fundamentally driven by the social determinants of health. These include income and social protection, access to adequate housing and food security, among others. These factors are particularly prominent in Central Australia.

Acceptability and quality of the 'Grog Survey App' brief intervention: Helping Aboriginal Australians reflect on their drinking using a digital health tool.

Introduction: The Grog Survey App is a validated, visual and interactive self-administered application for tablet computers that is designed to help Aboriginal Australians describe their alcohol consumption. Each person who completes the App also receives a brief intervention with feedback tailored to their survey responses. We aimed to qualitatively assess the acceptability and perceived quality of the Grog App's brief intervention, among higher risk consumers and health providers at an Aboriginal residential rehabilitation centre.

Screening for Cognitive Decline by Lay Navigators: A Scoping Review.

Innovative ways of screening for cognitive decline are urgently needed to increase detection and access to early treatment, particularly for those at highest risk for morbidity and mortality. The aim of this scoping review was to identify how cognitive screening is conducted within primary care and other clinical settings, specifically focusing on the use of lay navigators. Using Arksey and O'Malley's framework for scoping reviews, inclusive of collaborators' feedback, we included English-language research articles published after 2010 and identified ten articles.

Countering stereotypes: Exploring the characteristics of Aboriginal Australians who do not drink alcohol in a community representative sample.

Introduction: Contrary to stereotypes, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are more likely to abstain from drinking than other Australians. We explored characteristics and experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who do not drink alcohol.

Method: We conducted a cross-sectional, representative survey of 775 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians (16+ years) in remote and urban South Australia.

Evaluating the effects of virulence genotype, swarming motility, and multi-locus sequence types of Escherichia coli on layer chicken embryos.

Aims: To determine the effects of swarming motility (SM) and multi-locus sequence types (MLST) on the main effect of virulence genotype of Escherichia coli through an embryos lethality assay between the 12th and 18th days of incubation.

Methods And Results: We collected 58 E. coli isolates from asymptomatic commercial hens (n = 42) and lesions of colibacillosis cases (n = 16), then classified their virulence genotype as avirulent, moderately virulent, virulent-healthy, and virulent-colibacillosis categories by the presence of five virulence-associated genes (iroN, ompT, hlyF, iutA, and iss).

Optimal phase-based control of strongly perturbed limit cycle oscillators using phase reduction techniques.

Phase reduction is a well-established technique for analysis and control of weakly perturbed limit cycle oscillators. However, its accuracy is diminished in a strongly perturbed setting where information about the amplitude dynamics must also be considered. In this paper, we consider phase-based control of general limit cycle oscillators in both weakly and strongly perturbed regimes.

The influence of synaptic plasticity on critical coupling estimates for neural populations.

The presence or absence of synaptic plasticity can dramatically influence the collective behavior of populations of coupled neurons. In this work, we consider spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) and its resulting influence on phase cohesion in computational models of heterogeneous populations of conductance-based neurons. STDP allows for the influence of individual synapses to change over time, strengthening or weakening depending on the relative timing of the relevant action potentials.

Leaf acclimation to soil flooding and light availability underlies photosynthetic capacity of , an endangered shrub of bottomland forests in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, USA.

is an endangered shrub indigenous to the broadleaf forest of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV). In this region, extant colonies of the species are found in periodically ponded habitats where a diversity of broadleaf trees can form well-developed overstory and sub-canopies-these habitat characteristics suggest that soil flooding and light availability are primary drivers of ecophysiology. To understand how these two factors affect its photosynthetic capacity, we quantified leaf characteristics and photosynthetic response of plants grown in a large-scaled, field setting of three distinct soil flooding levels (no flood, 0 day; short-term flood, 45 days; and extended flood, 90 days) each containing three distinct light availability levels (high light, 30% shade cloth; intermediate light, 63% shade cloth; and low light, 95% shade cloth).

Case management for integrated care of older people with frailty in community settings.

Background: Ageing populations globally have contributed to increasing numbers of people living with frailty, which has significant implications for use of health and care services and costs. The British Geriatrics Society defines frailty as "a distinctive health state related to the ageing process in which multiple body systems gradually lose their inbuilt reserves". This leads to an increased susceptibility to adverse outcomes, such as reduced physical function, poorer quality of life, hospital admissions, and mortality.

Profiling mechanisms that drive acute oral toxicity in mammals and its prediction via machine learning.

We present a mechanistic machine-learning quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) model to predict mammalian acute oral toxicity. We trained our model using a rat acute toxicity database compiled by the US National Toxicology Program. We profiled the database using new and published profilers and identified the most plausible mechanisms that drive high acute toxicity (LD50 ≤ 50 mg/kg; GHS categories 1 or 2).

Shared decision-making in persons living with dementia: A scoping review.

Evidence supports that older adults with cognitive impairment can reliably communicate their values and choices, even as cognition may decline. Shared decision-making, including the patient, family members, and healthcare providers, is critical to patient-centered care. The aim of this scoping review was to synthesize what is known about shared decision-making in persons living with dementia.

Optimal entrainment for removal of pinned spiral waves.

Cardiac fibrillation is caused by self-sustaining spiral waves that occur in the myocardium, some of which can be pinned to anatomical obstacles, making them more difficult to eliminate. A small electrical stimulation is often sufficient to unpin these spirals but only if it is applied during the vulnerable unpinning window. Even if these unpinning windows can be inferred from data, when multiple pinned spirals exist, their unpinning windows will not generally overlap.

Current status and future directions for a neurotoxicity hazard assessment framework that integrates approaches.

Neurotoxicology is the study of adverse effects on the structure or function of the developing or mature adult nervous system following exposure to chemical, biological, or physical agents. The development of more informative alternative methods to assess developmental (DNT) and adult (NT) neurotoxicity induced by xenobiotics is critically needed. The use of such alternative methods including approaches that predict DNT or NT from chemical structure (e.

Control of coupled neural oscillations using near-periodic inputs.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a commonly used treatment for medication resistant Parkinson's disease and is an emerging treatment for other neurological disorders. More recently, phase-specific adaptive DBS (aDBS), whereby the application of stimulation is locked to a particular phase of tremor, has been proposed as a strategy to improve therapeutic efficacy and decrease side effects. In this work, in the context of these phase-specific aDBS strategies, we investigate the dynamical behavior of large populations of coupled neurons in response to near-periodic stimulation, namely, stimulation that is periodic except for a slowly changing amplitude and phase offset that can be used to coordinate the timing of applied input with a specified phase of model oscillations.

Data-driven identification of dynamical models using adaptive parameter sets.

This paper presents two data-driven model identification techniques for dynamical systems with fixed point attractors. Both strategies implement adaptive parameter update rules to limit truncation errors in the inferred dynamical models. The first strategy can be considered an extension of the dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc) algorithm.

Biomarker Metabolites Discriminate between Physiological States of Field, Cave and White-nose Syndrome Diseased Bats.

Analysis of volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions using electronic-nose (e-nose) devices has shown promise for early detection of white-nose syndrome (WNS) in bats. Tricolored bats, , from three separate sampling groups defined by environmental conditions, levels of physical activity, and WNS-disease status were captured temporarily for collection of VOC emissions to determine relationships between these combinations of factors and physiological states, (Pd)-infection status, and metabolic conditions. Physiologically active (non-torpid) healthy individuals were captured outside of caves in Arkansas and Louisiana.

Exploiting circadian memory to hasten recovery from circadian misalignment.

Recent years have seen a sustained interest in the development of circadian reentrainment strategies to limit the deleterious effects of jet lag. Due to the dynamical complexity of many circadian models, phase-based model reduction techniques are often an imperative first step in the analysis. However, amplitude coordinates that capture lingering effects (i.

Data-driven inference of high-accuracy isostable-based dynamical models in response to external inputs.

Isostable reduction is a powerful technique that can be used to characterize behaviors of nonlinear dynamical systems using a basis of slowly decaying eigenfunctions of the Koopman operator. When the underlying dynamical equations are known, previously developed numerical techniques allow for high-order accuracy computation of isostable reduced models. However, in situations where the dynamical equations are unknown, few general techniques are available that provide reliable estimates of the isostable reduced equations, especially in applications where large magnitude inputs are considered.

Data-driven phase-isostable reduction for optimal nonfeedback stabilization of cardiac alternans.

Phase-isostable reduction is an emerging model reduction strategy that can be used to accurately replicate nonlinear behaviors in systems for which standard phase reduction techniques fail. In this work, we derive relationships between the cycle-to-cycle variance of the reduced isostable coordinates for systems subject to both additive white noise and periodic stimulation. Using this information, we propose a data-driven technique for inferring nonlinear terms of the phase-isostable coordinate reduction framework.

CATMoS: Collaborative Acute Toxicity Modeling Suite.

Background: Humans are exposed to tens of thousands of chemical substances that need to be assessed for their potential toxicity. Acute systemic toxicity testing serves as the basis for regulatory hazard classification, labeling, and risk management. However, it is cost- and time-prohibitive to evaluate all new and existing chemicals using traditional rodent acute toxicity tests.

Degenerate isostable reduction for fixed-point and limit-cycle attractors with defective linearizations.

Isostable coordinates provide a convenient framework for understanding the transient behavior of dynamical systems with stable attractors. These isostable coordinates are often used to characterize the slowest decaying eigenfunctions of the Koopman operator; by neglecting the rapidly decaying Koopman eigenfunctions a reduced order model can be obtained. Existing work has focused primarily on nondegenerate isostable coordinates, that is, isostable coordinates that are associated with eigenvalues that have identical algebraic and geometric multiplicities.

Analysis of input-induced oscillations using the isostable coordinate framework.

Many reduced order modeling techniques for oscillatory dynamical systems are only applicable when the underlying system admits a stable periodic orbit in the absence of input. By contrast, very few reduction frameworks can be applied when the oscillations themselves are induced by coupling or other exogenous inputs. In this work, the behavior of such input-induced oscillations is considered.

Optimal open-loop desynchronization of neural oscillator populations.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an increasingly used medical treatment for various neurological disorders. While its mechanisms are not fully understood, experimental evidence suggests that through application of periodic electrical stimulation DBS may act to desynchronize pathologically synchronized populations of neurons resulting desirable changes to a larger brain circuit. However, the underlying mathematical mechanisms by which periodic stimulation can engender desynchronization in a coupled population of neurons is not well understood.