Sinusitis and rhinitis among US veterans deployed to Southwest Asia and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001.

Background: Post-9/11 veterans were exposed to environmental and occupational pollutants during deployment.

Objective: Our aim was to determine associations between deployment-related exposures and sinusitis and rhinitis.

Methods: Between April 2018 and March 2020, veterans with land-based deployment after 9/11 who were living within 25 miles of 6 Department of Veteran Affairs medical centers were randomly chosen by using a Defense Manpower Data Center roster.

Assessment of Home-based Monitoring in Adults with Chronic Lung Disease. An Official American Thoracic Society Research Statement.

There is increasing interest in the use of home-based monitoring in people with chronic lung diseases to improve access to care, support patient self-management, and facilitate the collection of information for clinical care and research. However, integration of home-based monitoring into clinical and research settings requires careful consideration of test performance and other attributes. There is no published guidance from professional respiratory societies to advance the science of home-based monitoring for chronic lung disease.

The Future of Health Technology Assessment in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.

In recent decades, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have turned to health technology assessment (HTA) to prioritize health care interventions in pursuit of universal health coverage. HTA has demonstrated its value through significant cost savings, as shown by Thailand and Brazil, where HTA processes facilitated substantial government savings and drug price reductions. Despite these successes, many LMICs still struggle with insufficient capacity to conduct HTA or incorporate its findings into policy decisions.

"Veteran to Veteran, There's Automatically a Trust": A Qualitative Study of Veterans' Experiences in a Peer Health-Coaching Program for Hypertension.

Introduction: Veteran peer Coaches Optimizing and Advancing Cardiac Health was an randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test the effectiveness of a peer support intervention to reduce blood pressure among veterans with hypertension and 1 or more cardiovascular risks. The authors studied participant perceptions of the intervention, including barriers and facilitators to participation, factors promoting behavior change, and disease self-management practices.

Methods: The authors enrolled participants at their exit visit for the Veteran peer Coaches Optimizing and Advancing Cardiac Health study.

TFEB controls expression of human syncytins during cell-cell fusion.

During human development, a temporary organ is formed, the placenta, which invades the uterine wall to support nutrient, oxygen, and waste exchange between the mother and fetus until birth. Most of the human placenta is formed by a syncytial villous structure lined by syncytialized trophoblasts, a specialized cell type that forms via cell-cell fusion of underlying progenitor cells. Genetic and functional studies have characterized the membrane protein fusogens Syncytin-1 and Syncytin-2, both of which are necessary and sufficient for human trophoblast cell-cell fusion.

Introduction to the Special Issue on "Building Institutions for Priority Setting in Health".

In the pursuit of universal health coverage, countries are invariably confronted with questions about which services to pay with public funds, to whom, and at what cost. Such priority-setting processes have major ramifications for the costs and benefits of care delivered. These processes are not just technical, but also highly political and organizational in nature and expressions of social values.

Retrospective analysis of carboplatin-induced cumulative neutropenia in cancer-bearing dogs.

Objective: To determine the clinical significance of performing repeated postchemotherapy CBC for cancer-bearing dogs receiving ≥ 4 carboplatin treatments. The secondary aim was to identify risk factors associated with cumulative carboplatin-induced neutropenia in those dogs.

Animals: 40 client-owned dogs diagnosed with cancer.

OpenChemIE: An Information Extraction Toolkit for Chemistry Literature.

Information extraction from chemistry literature is vital for constructing up-to-date reaction databases for data-driven chemistry. Complete extraction requires combining information across text, tables, and figures, whereas prior work has mainly investigated extracting reactions from single modalities. In this paper, we present OpenChemIE to address this complex challenge and enable the extraction of reaction data at the document level.

Biomarkers of Inflammation and Longitudinal Evaluation of Lung Function, Physical Activity, and Grip Strength: A Secondary Analysis in the CASCADE Study.

Rationale: Physical activity, lung function, and grip strength are associated with exacerbations, hospitalizations, and mortality in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). We tested whether baseline inflammatory biomarkers were associated with longitudinal outcomes of these physiologic measurements.

Methods: The COPD Activity: Serotonin Transporter, Cytokines, and Depression (CASCADE) study was a prospective observational study of individuals with COPD.

Organizational Formation for Priority Setting: Historical Perspectives and Thematic Analysis of India's Health Technology Assessment Agency.

Countries pursuing universal health coverage must set priorities to determine which benefits to add to a national health program, but the roles that organizations play are less understood. This article investigates the case of the formation of an organization with a mandate for choice of technology for public health interventions and priorities, the Health Technology Assessment India. First, we narrate a chronology of agenda setting and adoption of national policy for organizational formation drawing on historical documentation, publicly available literature, and lived experiences from coauthors.

International Partnerships to Develop Evidence-informed Priority Setting Institutions: Ten Years of Experience from the International Decision Support Initiative (iDSI).

All health systems must set priorities. Evidence-informed priority-setting (EIPS) is a specific form of systematic priority-setting which involves explicit consideration of evidence to determine the healthcare interventions to be provided. The international Decision Support Initiative (iDSI) was established in 2013 as a collaborative platform to catalyze faster progress on EIPS, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Scaling of buccal mass growth and muscle activation determine the duration of feeding behaviours in the marine mollusc Aplysia californica.

The mechanical forces experienced during movement and the time constants of muscle activation are important determinants of the durations of behaviours, which may both be affected by size-dependent scaling. The mechanics of slow movements in small animals are dominated by elastic forces and are thus quasistatic (i.e.

COVID-19 Severity and Mortality in Veterans with Chronic Lung Disease.

Chronic lung diseases (CLDs) have been variably associated with a risk for more severe manifestations and death with coronavirus disease (COVID-19). To determine the risk overall and by type of CLD for severity of COVID-19 outcomes in a U.S.

Understanding China's shifting priorities and priority-setting processes in development assistance for health.

Over the past two decades, China has become a distinctive and increasingly important donor of development assistance for health (DAH). However, little is known about what factors influence China's priority-setting for DAH. In this study, we provide an updated analysis of trends in the priorities of Chinese DAH and compare them to comparable trends among OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors using data from the AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset (2000-2017, version 2.

Inflammatory Markers and Fatigue in Individuals With Moderate to Severe Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Background: Fatigue, a prevalent complex symptom among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is considered an important clinical indicator of disease severity. However, the underlying mechanisms of COPD-related fatigue are not fully understood.

Objectives: This analysis explored the relationships between peripheral inflammatory markers and COPD-related fatigue in people with moderate to severe COPD.

Association between self-reported falling risk and risk of hospitalization for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Rationale: The association between self-report falling risk in persons with COPD and hospitalization has not been previously explored.

Objective: To examine whether self-reported risk is associated with hospitalizations in patients with COPD.

Methods: A secondary analysis from a prospective observational cohort study of veterans with COPD.

Cognitive and Emotional Responses to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Exacerbations and Patterns of Care Seeking.

Cognitive and emotional responses associated with care seeking for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations are not well understood. We sought to define care-seeking profiles based on whether and when U.S.

Double-Strand Break Repair Pathways Differentially Affect Processing and Transduction by Dual AAV Vectors.

Recombinant adeno-associated viral vectors (rAAV) are a powerful tool for gene delivery but have a limited DNA carrying capacity. Efforts to expand this genetic payload have focused on engineering the vector components, such as dual trans-splicing vectors which double the delivery size by exploiting the natural concatenation of rAAV genomes in host nuclei. We hypothesized that inefficient dual vector transduction could be improved by modulating host factors which affect concatenation.

Predictors of Patient-reported and Pharmacy Refill Measures of Maintenance Inhaler Adherence in Veterans with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Suboptimal adherence to inhaled medications in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remains a challenge. To examine the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics and medication beliefs associated with adherence measured by self-report and pharmacy data. A cross-sectional analysis of data from a prospective observational cohort study of patients with COPD was completed.