Background: The data is evolving on exhaled carbon dioxide (ECO) levels for preterm infants requiring stabilisation.
Objectives: To establish the trends of ECO levels during the first 10 minutes of stabilisation in preterm infants at birth.
Methods: We conducted a multi-centre, prospective observational study.
Chronic, unresolved inflammation has long been speculated to serve as an initiating and propagating factor in numerous neurodegenerative diseases, including a leading cause of irreversible blindness in the elderly, age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Intracellular multiprotein complexes called inflammasomes in combination with activated caspases facilitate production of pro-inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin 1 beta. Specifically, the nucleotide-binding oligomerization (NOD)-like receptor protein 3 (NLRP3) has received heightened attention due to the wide range of stimuli to which it can respond and its potential involvement in AMD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Colleges and universities need effective strategies to help students develop medication-use behaviors that positively support their well-being. This pilot study evaluated the utility of Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning (FTSL), an evidence-based instructional strategy, to create long-lasting changes in students' well-being during a pharmacy general education course.
Participants And Methods: Using a mixed methods survey design, we assessed 84 undergraduate students' changes in self-reported well-being at three different time points (pre-intervention, post-intervention, and 6-month follow-up) through five variables (safe medication practices, general healthcare behaviors, healthcare self-efficacy, safe medication storage, and safe medication disposal).
A significant challenge in chemical biology is to understand and modulate protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Given that many PPIs involve a folded protein domain and a peptide sequence that is intrinsically disordered in isolation, peptides represent powerful tools to understand PPIs. Using the interaction between small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) and SUMO-interacting motifs (SIMs), here we show that -methylation of the peptide backbone can effectively restrict accessible peptide conformations, predisposing them for protein recognition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRespiratory virus infections in humans cause a broad-spectrum of diseases that result in substantial morbidity and mortality annually worldwide. To reduce the global burden of respiratory viral diseases, preventative and therapeutic interventions that are accessible and effective are urgently needed, especially in countries that are disproportionately affected. Repurposing generic medicine has the potential to bring new treatments for infectious diseases to patients efficiently and equitably.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prior studies suggest that prenatal per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposures are associated with shorter breastfeeding duration. Studies assessing PFAS mixtures and populations in North America are sparse.
Methods: We quantified PFAS concentrations in maternal plasma collected during pregnancy in the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study (2010-2017).
Beneficial effects on health outcomes have been observed from exposure to spaces with substantial green vegetation ("greenspace"). This includes studies of greenspace exposure on birth outcomes; however, these have been conducted largely in urban regions. We characterized residential exposure to greenspace and land cover diversity during pregnancy in rural northern New England, USA, investigating whether variation in greenspace or diversity related to newborn outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg
March 2024
Background: Maize flour in Uganda is milled by hundreds of enterprises, mostly small- (5-20 metric tons [MT]/day) and micro-scale (<5 MT/day) mills or firms. A mandatory maize flour fortification program exists for medium-scale mills (>20 MT/day) and policymakers are considering including smaller-scale millers.
Objective: We estimated the private and public costs of maize flour fortification at different scales and explored their implications for extending the mandatory fortification to include smaller-scale mills.
This case report discusses a 46-year-old female with no prior surgical history who presented with severe abdominal pain and generalized tenderness. She was found to have a small bowel obstruction secondary to internal hernia caused by a rare congenital pelvic peritoneal defect in the Pouch of Douglas. She required diagnostic laparoscopy and repair of the pelvic peritoneal defect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 37-year-old gravida 5, para 3 woman presented with an unplanned pregnancy 6 weeks after experiencing a cardiac arrest caused by ventricular fibrillation from coronary vasospasm. She opted to continue the pregnancy with medical management despite ongoing chest pain and delivered a healthy female infant via vaginal delivery at 37 weeks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArsenic is related to neurodevelopmental outcomes and is associated with the composition of the gut microbiome. Data on the modifying role of the microbiome are limited. We probed suggestive relationships between arsenic and social behaviors to quantify the modifying role of the infant gut microbiome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrenatal exposure to metals/metalloids, even at common US population levels, may pose risks to fetal health, and affect children's lung function. Yet, the combined effects of simultaneous prenatal exposures on children's lung function remain largely unexplored. This study analyzed 11 metals (As speciation, Cd, Co, Cu, Mo, Ni, Pb, Sb, Se, Sn, Zn) in maternal urine during weeks 24-28 of gestation and evaluated lung function, including forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume in the first second of expiration (FEV), in 316 US mother-child pairs at around age 7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenome-wide association studies have identified multiple Alzheimer's disease risk loci with small effect sizes. Polygenic risk scores, which aggregate these variants, are associated with grey matter structural changes. However, genome-wide scores do not allow mechanistic interpretations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenes Chromosomes Cancer
October 2023
Cribriform adenocarcinoma of salivary gland (CASG) is a rare form of salivary gland neoplasm that mostly arises from minor salivary glands. We report a case of CASG with high-grade transformation harboring a novel STRN3::PRKD1 fusion. A 59-year-old male presented with a palatal mass.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Breastfeeding has significant health benefits for infants and birthing persons, including reduced risk of chronic disease. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusively breastfeeding infants for 6 months and recently extended its recommendation for continuing to breastfeed with supplementation of solid foods from one to two years. Studies consistently identify lower breastfeeding rates among US infants, with regional and demographic variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSynthetic biology applications would benefit from protein modules of reduced complexity that function orthogonally to cellular components. As many subcellular processes depend on peptide-protein or protein-protein interactions, designed polypeptides that can bring together other proteins controllably are particularly useful. Thanks to established sequence-to-structure relationships, helical bundles provide good starting points for such designs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Both late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) and ageing have a strong genetic component. In each case, many associated variants have been discovered, but how much missing heritability remains to be discovered is debated. Variability in the estimation of SNP-based heritability could explain the differences in reported heritability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe aimed to investigate the joint, class-specific, and individual impacts of (i) PFAS, (ii) toxic metals and metalloids (referred to collectively as "metals"), and (iii) essential elements on birth outcomes in a prospective pregnancy cohort using both established and recent mixture modeling approaches. Participants included 537 mother-child pairs from the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study. Concentrations of 6 metals and 5 PFAS were measured in maternal toenail clippings and plasma, respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Human milk is rich in essential nutrients and immune-activating compounds but is also a source of toxicants including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Evidence suggests that immune-related effects of PFAS may, in part, be due to alterations of the microbiome. We aimed to identify the association between milk PFAS exposure and the infant gut microbiome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn utero and early life exposure to inorganic arsenic (iAs) alters immune response in experimental animals and is associated with an increased risk of infant infections. iAs exposure is related to differences in the gut microbiota diversity, community structure, and the relative abundance of individual microbial taxa both in laboratory and human studies. Metabolomics permits a direct measure of molecular products of microbial and host metabolic processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring infancy, the interplay between the developing immune system and the microbiome is critical. We examined whether blood immune cell composition at birth in the umbilical cord (inferred by DNA methylation profiling) related to the early infant gut microbiome (assessed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing) among 73 infants in the New Hampshire Birth Cohort Study. We used generalized estimating equations and controlled for false discovery rate to select microbial taxa associated with immune cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolygenic risk scores (PRS) have been widely adopted as a tool for measuring common variant liability and they have been shown to predict lifetime risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) development. However, the relationship between PRS and AD pathogenesis is largely unknown. To this end, we performed a differential gene-expression and associated disrupted biological pathway analyses of AD PRS vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: We investigated the structural brain networks of 562 young adults in relation to polygenic risk for Alzheimer's disease, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and genotype data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.
Methods: Diffusion MRI data were used to perform whole-brain tractography and generate structural brain networks for the whole-brain connectome, and for the default mode, limbic and visual subnetworks. The mean clustering coefficient, mean betweenness centrality, characteristic path length, global efficiency and mean nodal strength were calculated for these networks, for each participant.