Predicting preterm birth using electronic medical records from multiple prenatal visits.

This study aimed to predict preterm birth in nulliparous women using machine learning and easily accessible variables from prenatal visits. Elastic net regularized logistic regression models were developed and evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation on data from 8,830 women in the Nulliparous Pregnancy Outcomes Study: New Mothers-to-Be (nuMoM2b) dataset at three prenatal visits: - , - , and - weeks of gestational age (GA). The models' performance, assessed using Area Under the Curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, consistently improved with the incorporation of data from later prenatal visits.

Tactile tastes: Testing the relation between tactile thresholds, liking of textures and pickiness in eating.

The texture of foods plays an important role in the liking of foods. Especially for picky eaters, texture can be a reason to reject foods. Previous studies showed that picky eaters in general dislike tactile stimulation more, which can include the feel of sand in their hands and specific food textures in their mouth.

Pulmonary surfactant and prostaglandin E in airway smooth muscle relaxation of human and male guinea pigs.

Pulmonary surfactant serves as a barrier to respiratory epithelium but can also regulate airway smooth muscle (ASM) tone. Surfactant (SF) relaxes contracted ASM, similar to β-agonists, anticholinergics, nitric oxide, and prostanoids. The exact mechanism of surfactant relaxation and whether surfactant relaxes hyperresponsive ASM remains unknown.

Understanding dementia in minority ethnic communities: The perspectives of key stakeholders interviewed as part of the IDEAL programme.

Future populations of older adults in the UK, those aged 65+, will demonstrate increased diversity in terms of their ethnic identity resultant from the ageing of the post-war migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Caribbean. As a consequence, there will be an increase in the numbers of older adults from these communities living with age-related chronic diseases such as dementia. In response to these demographic changes, we need to develop a research, policy and practice agenda that is inclusive and provides evidence for the development of culturally diverse and effective models of service delivery.

A call for caution when using network methods to study multimorbidity: an illustration using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Objectives: To examine the impact of two key choices when conducting a network analysis (clustering methods and measure of association) on the number and type of multimorbidity clusters.

Study Design And Setting: Using cross-sectional self-reported data on 24 diseases from 30,097 community-living adults aged 45-85 from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, we conducted network analyses using 5 clustering methods and 11 association measures commonly used in multimorbidity studies. We compared the similarity among clusters using the adjusted Rand index (ARI); an ARI of 0 is equivalent to the diseases being randomly assigned to clusters, and 1 indicates perfect agreement.