H3K36 methylation regulates cell plasticity and regeneration in the intestinal epithelium.

Plasticity is needed during development and homeostasis to generate diverse cell types from stem and progenitor cells. Following differentiation, plasticity must be restricted in specialized cells to maintain tissue integrity and function. For this reason, specialized cell identity is stable under homeostatic conditions; however, cells in some tissues regain plasticity during injury-induced regeneration.

The NExT trial: Protocol for a two-phase randomized controlled trial testing transcranial magnetic stimulation to augment exposure therapy for youth with OCD.

Background: Exposure with Response Prevention (ERP) is a first-line treatment for OCD, but even when combined with first-line medications it is insufficiently effective for approximately half of patients. Compulsivity in OCD is thought to arise from an imbalance of two distinct neural circuits associated with specific subregions of striatum. Targeted modulation of these circuits via key cortical nodes (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [dlPFC] or presupplementary motor area [pSMA]) has the potential to improve ERP efficacy by decreasing compulsions during therapy.

The centre for health informatics: a novel approach to accelerating the field of health data science.

Precision Medicine and Precision Public Health are approaches to improve population health. Achieving these goals requires innovation in health informatics. The Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) within the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) at the University of Calgary (UC), Canada, was created to respond to this need by fostering multidisciplinary collaborations, building capacity by recruiting and training outstanding faculty and students, and harnessing Alberta's rich health data to advance health informatics.

Executive Functioning, Family Accommodation, and Treatment Response in Youth with OCD and Comorbid ADHD in a Partial Hospital Program.

Few studies have examined differential treatment response, rates of familial accommodation (FA), and executive functioning (EF) in youth with OCD vs. OCD + ADHD, particularly in a partial hospital program (PHP). The current study includes 138 youth diagnosed with OCD only and 102 youth diagnosed with OCD + ADHD in a PHP setting for a total sample of 240 youth (and their families).

Prospective Association of Parenting Stress with Later Child Behavior Problems in Early Childhood Autism.

Purpose: Autistic children are reported to display higher levels of externalizing and internalizing behaviors than neurotypical children, and their parents report more stress than parents of neurotypical children. It is unclear whether child behavior difficulties contribute to increased parenting stress, whether parenting stress contributes to child behavior difficulties, or whether the relationship may be bidirectional.

Methods: We investigated prospective bidirectional associations between parenting stress and child externalizing and internalizing behaviors when autistic children were aged on average 3.

Rapidly Enlarging Parotid Mass in a Person Living with HIV: A Case of Multiple Myeloma with Extramedullary Plasmacytoma.

BACKGROUND The differential diagnosis for a parotid mass is broad, including infectious, autoimmune, and neoplastic etiologies. In people with HIV, regardless of viral suppression or immune status, neoplastic causes are more common. This report describes the evaluation of a woman with a large parotid mass, with an ultimate diagnosis of multiple myeloma with extramedullary plasmacytoma.

Recommendation-making in the emergency department: A qualitative study of how Canadian emergency physicians guide treatment decisions about resuscitation in critically ill patients.

Study Objective: Emergency physicians are frequently responsible for making time-sensitive decisions around the provision of life-sustaining treatment. These decisions can involve goals of care or code status discussion, which will often substantially alter a patient's care pathway. A central part of these conversations that has received relatively little attention are recommendations for care.

Parent-identified barriers to accessing exposure therapy: A qualitative study using process mapping.

Background: Youth with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) rarely access exposure therapy, an evidence-based treatment. Known barriers include transportation, waitlists, and provider availability. Efforts to improve access to exposure require an understanding of the process that families take to find therapists, yet no prior studies have examined parents' perspectives of the steps involved.

Imaging of Brain Structural and Functional Effects in People With Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Before the introduction of antiretroviral therapy, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection was often accompanied by central nervous system (CNS) opportunistic infections and HIV encephalopathy marked by profound structural and functional alterations detectable with neuroimaging. Treatment with antiretroviral therapy nearly eliminated CNS opportunistic infections, while neuropsychiatric impairment and peripheral nerve and organ damage have persisted among virally suppressed people with HIV (PWH), suggesting ongoing brain injury. Neuroimaging research must use methods sensitive for detecting subtle HIV-associated brain structural and functional abnormalities, while allowing for adjustments for potential confounders, such as age, sex, substance use, hepatitis C coinfection, cardiovascular risk, and others.

Small-molecule screen reveals pathways that regulate C4 secretion in stem cell-derived astrocytes.

In the brain, the complement system plays a crucial role in the immune response and in synaptic elimination during normal development and disease. Here, we sought to identify pathways that modulate the production of complement component 4 (C4), recently associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. To design a disease-relevant assay, we first developed a rapid and robust 3D protocol capable of producing large numbers of astrocytes from pluripotent cells.

Effects of SARS-CoV-2 Infection on Attention, Memory, and Sensorimotor Performance.

Background: Recovery after SARS-CoV-2 infection is extremely variable, with some individuals recovering quickly, and others experiencing persistent long-term symptoms or developing new symptoms after the acute phase of infection, including fatigue, poor concentration, impaired attention, or memory deficits. Many existing studies reporting cognitive deficits associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection are limited by the exclusive use of self-reported measures or a lack of adequate comparison groups.

Methods: Forty-five participants, ages 18-70, (11 Long-COVID, 14 COVID, and 20 No-COVID) underwent behavioral testing with the NIH Toolbox Neuro-Quality of Life survey and selected psychometric tests, including a flanker interference task and the d2 Test of Attention.

Identifying barriers and facilitators to palliative care integration in the management of hospitalized patients with COVID-19: A qualitative study.

Background: Palliative care is well suited to support patients hospitalized with COVID-19, but integration into care has been variable and generally poor.

Aim: To understand barriers and facilitators of palliative care integration for hospitalized patients with COVID-19.

Methods: Internists, Intensivists and palliative care physicians completed semi-structured interviews about their experiences providing care to patients with COVID-19.

Rapid deployment of a virtual simulation curriculum to prepare for critical care triage during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada, an Emergency Standard of Care for Major Surge was created to establish a uniform process for the "triage" of finite critical care resources. This proposed departure from usual clinical care highlighted the need for an educational tool to prepare physicians for making and communicating difficult triage decisions. We created a just-in-time, virtual, simulation-based curriculum and evaluated its impact for our group of academic Emergency Physicians.

GWAS and genomic prediction of milk urea nitrogen in Australian and New Zealand dairy cattle.

Background: Urinary nitrogen leakage is an environmental concern in dairy cattle. Selection for reduced urinary nitrogen leakage may be done using indicator traits such as milk urea nitrogen (MUN). The result of a previous study indicated that the genetic correlation between MUN in Australia (AUS) and MUN in New Zealand (NZL) was only low to moderate (between 0.

ROBUST WHITE MATTER HYPERINTENSITY SEGMENTATION ON UNSEEN DOMAIN.

Typical machine learning frameworks heavily rely on an underlying assumption that training and test data follow the same distribution. In medical imaging which increasingly begun acquiring datasets from multiple sites or scanners, this identical distribution assumption often fails to hold due to systematic variability induced by site or scanner dependent factors. Therefore, we cannot simply expect a model trained on a given dataset to consistently work well, or generalize, on a dataset from another distribution.

MULTI-DOMAIN LEARNING BY META-LEARNING: TAKING OPTIMAL STEPS IN MULTI-DOMAIN LOSS LANDSCAPES BY INNER-LOOP LEARNING.

We consider a model-agnostic solution to the problem of Multi-Domain Learning (MDL) for multi-modal applications. Many existing MDL techniques are model-dependent solutions which explicitly require nontrivial architectural changes to construct domain-specific modules. Thus, properly applying these MDL techniques for new problems with well-established models, e.

A multi-scanner neuroimaging data harmonization using RAVEL and ComBat.

Modern neuroimaging studies frequently combine data collected from multiple scanners and experimental conditions. Such data often contain substantial technical variability associated with image intensity scale (image intensity scales are not the same in different images) and scanner effects (images obtained from different scanners contain substantial technical biases). Here we evaluate and compare results of data analysis methods without any data transformation (RAW), with intensity normalization using RAVEL, with regional harmonization methods using ComBat, and a combination of RAVEL and ComBat.

Chlamydia Treatment Practices and Time to Treatment in Massachusetts: Directly Observed Therapy Versus Pharmacy Prescriptions.

Background: Directly observed therapy (DOT) is recommended for the treatment of chlamydia, however pharmacy prescriptions are frequently used. Adherence to DOT and the association between treatment method and time to treatment is unknown.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of a randomized 2% of laboratory-confirmed chlamydia infections reported to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health from January 1, 2019 to May 31, 2019.

Trajectory of Change in Parental Accommodation and Its Relation to Symptom Severity and Impairment in Pediatric OCD.

Family accommodation (FA) has been shown to relate to poorer treatment outcomes in pediatric obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), yet few studies have examined the trajectory of change in FA throughout treatment and its relation to treatment outcomes. This study examined change in FA in relation to change in symptom severity and impairment in 63 youth receiving a family-based intervention for early-onset OCD. FA, symptom severity and functional impairment were assessed at baseline, week 5, week 9, and post-treatment (week 14).

Glycolysis Inhibition Induces Functional and Metabolic Exhaustion of CD4 T Cells in Type 1 Diabetes.

In Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), CD4 T cells initiate autoimmune attack of pancreatic islet β cells. Importantly, bioenergetic programs dictate T cell function, with specific pathways required for progression through the T cell lifecycle. During activation, CD4 T cells undergo metabolic reprogramming to the less efficient aerobic glycolysis, similarly to highly proliferative cancer cells.

Lesion location may attenuate response to strategy training in acute stroke.

Background: Strategy training, a rehabilitation intervention, reduces disability and improves functional skills associated with goal-directed behavior. Stroke lesions impacting selected ventromedial regions of interest associated with initiation of goal-directed behavior may attenuate intervention response. If so, strategy training may not be optimal for people with stroke lesions in these regions.

Genome-wide fine-mapping identifies pleiotropic and functional variants that predict many traits across global cattle populations.

The difficulty in finding causative mutations has hampered their use in genomic prediction. Here, we present a methodology to fine-map potentially causal variants genome-wide by integrating the functional, evolutionary and pleiotropic information of variants using GWAS, variant clustering and Bayesian mixture models. Our analysis of 17 million sequence variants in 44,000+ Australian dairy cattle for 34 traits suggests, on average, one pleiotropic QTL existing in each 50 kb chromosome-segment.

Meta-analysis of brain metabolite differences in HIV infection.

Background: Numerous studies have used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) neurometabolite measurements to study HIV infection effects. While many have reported differences in total N-Acetylaspartate (tNAA), myo-Inositol (mI), and total Choline (tCho), there have been no meta-analyses performed to evaluate concordance across studies.

Purpose: To evaluate the consistency of HIV serostatus effects on brain metabolites.

Improving Genomic Prediction of Crossbred and Purebred Dairy Cattle.

This study assessed the accuracy and bias of genomic prediction (GP) in purebred Holstein (H) and Jersey (J) as well as crossbred (H and J) validation cows using different reference sets and prediction strategies. The reference sets were made up of different combinations of 36,695 H and J purebreds and crossbreds. Additionally, the effect of using different sets of marker genotypes on GP was studied (conventional panel: 50k, custom panel enriched with, or close to, causal mutations: XT_50k, and conventional high-density with a limited custom set: pruned HDnGBS).