Publications by authors named "Flannery J"

Patients with suspected or confirmed high-consequence infectious diseases (HCIDs) may present for care at any acute care facility. However, there are limited data to inform recommendations for the design, maintenance, and operation of isolation spaces for patients with suspected or confirmed HCIDs. To address this gap, we developed consensus statements by convening a group of 29 subject matter experts to participate in a modified Delphi process facilitated by a validated tool (the RAND-developed ExpertLens system).

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Patients with both age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and C3 glomerulonephritis (C3G) are challenged by the absence of effective therapies to reverse and eliminate their disease burden. Capitalizing on complement dysregulation as both a significant risk factor for AMD and the known pathophysiology of C3G, we investigated the potential for adeno-associated virus (AAV) delivery of complement factor H (CFH) to rescue C3G in a -/- mouse model of C3G. While past efforts to treat C3G using exogenous human CFH resulted in limited success before immune rejection led to a foreign protein response, our findings demonstrate the capacity for long-term AAV-mediated delivery of truncated CFH (tCFH) to restore inhibition of the alternative pathway of complement and ultimately reverse C3G without immune rejection.

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Reverse transcriptase loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) is a molecular diagnostic assay that is particularly useful for the detection of viral diseases of livestock. A major advantage of RT-LAMP is that it can be used either as a rapid field test or as a high-throughput screening tool in veterinary laboratories, with sensitivity comparable to the real-time RT-PCR assay. Unlike conventional or qPCR, RT-LAMP uses a strand displacement polymerase and a set of four to six primers that bind to several regions of the target nucleic acid.

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Transitioning a patient with chronic pain from a fentanyl patch to a buprenorphine patch has not been well described in the literature. Even after a patient removes their fentanyl patch, the residual fentanyl in the skin continues to be absorbed for hours. Due to the risk of precipitated withdrawal when initiating buprenorphine, this transition is a more challenging opioid rotation to plan safely.

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Unlabelled: African swine fever virus causes a lethal hemorrhagic disease in domestic swine and wild boar for which currently licensed commercial vaccines are only available in Vietnam. Development of subunit vaccines is complicated by the lack of information on protective antigens as well as suitable delivery systems. Our previous work showed that a pool of eight African swine fever virus genes vectored using an adenovirus prime and modified vaccinia virus boost could prevent fatal disease after challenge with a virulent genotype I isolate of the virus.

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Background: Chronic pain is a complex disease that requires interprofessional care for effective management. Despite the need for multidisciplinary care, disease and health care inequities can prevent individuals from attaining adequate treatment. Factors such as mental health, cost, and distance to a health care center can contribute to health care accessibility inequality.

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A recombinant, replication-defective, adenovirus-vectored vaccine expressing the H surface glycoprotein of peste des petits ruminants virus (PPRV) has previously been shown to protect goats from challenge with wild-type PPRV at up to 4 months post vaccination. Here, we present the results of a longer-term trial of the protection provided by such a vaccine, challenging animals at 6, 9, 12 and 15 months post vaccination. Vaccinated animals developed high levels of anti-PPRV H protein antibodies, which were virus-neutralising, and the level of these antibodies was maintained for the duration of the trial.

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Objective: The study aims to investigate the patient perspective on the pathway from healthcare practitioners' presentations of their cases at a Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) tele-clinic to the management of those patients' chronic pain.

Introduction: Managing patients with chronic and complex pain constitutes a prevalent, stressful challenge in the primary care setting. Primary care physicians typically have received little training in treating such patients and, until recently, have relied heavily on opioid and other pharmaceutical therapies as part of their regimen.

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African horse sickness is a severe and often fatal disease affecting all species of equids. The aetiological agent, African horse sickness virus (AHSV), can be differentiated into nine serotypes. The identification of AHSV serotypes is vital for disease management, as this can influence vaccine selection and help trace disease incursion routes.

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Article Synopsis
  • ADHD is often underdiagnosed and undertreated in girls, with inattentive symptoms persisting into adulthood, prompting the study of a digital therapeutic, AKL-T01, designed to improve attention.
  • In three clinical trials involving children, adolescents, and adults, researchers analyzed sex differences in efficacy, finding that girls showed more improvement in certain attention measures compared to boys in the child trial, while no significant differences were evident in the adolescent or adult trials.
  • The results suggest that AKL-T01 may enhance attentional functioning in girls with ADHD, indicating the need for objective attention assessments in children to counter gender biases in ADHD symptom reporting.
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Article Synopsis
  • - The study discusses the implementation of a Single-Entry Model (SEM) for managing chronic pain referrals across seven hospitals in Toronto to improve patient access and coordination of care over a six-year period.
  • - Following the SEM's introduction in 2017, there was a significant increase in referrals (93% rise) and providers (91% rise), while average wait times for chronic pain services decreased from about 299 days to 176 days.
  • - Despite the overall improvements, some specific pain conditions like chronic pelvic pain and fibromyalgia still face long wait times, suggesting a need for ongoing assessment and refinement of care in these areas.
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  • Adverse experiences during development can lead to negative long-term effects, but the neurobiological mechanisms behind this remain unclear, particularly during the adolescent brain's growth phase.
  • Two main frameworks are used to understand adversity: the cumulative risk model, which combines all types of negative experiences, and the dimensional model, which focuses on specific types, such as threat or deprivation, that have different effects on the brain.
  • A study of 179 adolescent girls found that categorizing adversity by specific dimensions of threat and deprivation better predicted brain changes than considering overall adversity; however, these dimensions did not show distinct relationships with brain development changes.
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Introduction: Bluetongue virus (BTV) is an arthropod-borne that is almost solely transmitted by biting midges and causes a globally important haemorrhagic disease, bluetongue (BT), in susceptible ruminants. Infection with BTV is characterised by immunosuppression and substantial lymphopenia at peak viraemia in the host.

Methods: In this study, the role of cell-mediated immunity and specific T-cell subsets in BTV pathogenesis, clinical outcome, viral dynamics, immune protection, and onwards transmission to a susceptible vector is defined in unprecedented detail for the first time, using an arboviral infection model system that closely mirrors natural infection and transmission of BTV.

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Addiction-like social media use (ASMU) is widely reported among adolescents and is associated with depression and other negative health outcomes. We aimed to identify developmental trajectories of neural social feedback processing that are linked to higher levels of ASMU in later adolescence. Within a longitudinal design, 103 adolescents completed a social incentive delay task during 1-3 fMRI scans (6-9th grade), and a 4th self-report assessment of ASMU and depressive symptoms ∼2 years later (10-11th grade).

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Background: Adolescent depression is a significant public health concern; however, access to effective mental health care is limited. Digital therapeutics (DTx) can improve access to evidence-based interventions; however, their efficacy in adolescents is sparsely documented.

Objective: This study aims to examine the efficacy of a mobile app DTx versus an active control as an adjunct treatment for adolescent depression symptoms.

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The purpose of this educational initiative was to transition a portion of onsite acute care/hospital clinical learning to an experience integrating virtual and low-fidelity simulation for undergraduate nursing students. The integrated simulation created a safe, nonthreatening environment for students to learn and develop competence and confidence to meet the demands of real-world practice settings. Virtual with low-fidelity simulation offered a standardized approach that fostered consistency in meeting clinical, course, and program outcomes.

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African swine fever virus (ASFV) is known to be very stable and can remain infectious over long periods of time especially at low temperatures and within different matrices, particularly those containing animal-derived organic material. However, there are some gaps in our knowledge pertaining to the survivability and infectivity of ASFV in groundwater. This study aims to determine the stability and infectivity of the cell culture-adapted ASFV strain BA71V by plaque assay after incubation of the virus within river water samples at three different environmentally relevant temperatures (4 °C, 15 °C, and 21 °C) over the course of 42 days.

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Macroscale gradients have emerged as a central principle for understanding functional brain organization. Previous studies have demonstrated that a principal gradient of connectivity in the human brain exists, with unimodal primary sensorimotor regions situated at one end and transmodal regions associated with the default mode network and representative of abstract functioning at the other. The functional significance and interpretation of macroscale gradients remains a central topic of discussion in the neuroimaging community, with some studies demonstrating that gradients may be described using meta-analytic functional decoding techniques.

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Objective: A large literature has identified exposure to early caregiving adversities as a potent risk for developing affective psychopathology, with depression, in particular, increasing across childhood into adolescence. Evidence suggests telomere erosion, a marker of biological aging, may underlie associations between adverse early-life experiences and later depressive behavior; yet, little is understood about this association during development.

Method: The current accelerated longitudinal study examined concurrent telomere length and depressive symptoms concurrently, 2 and 4 years later, from the preschool period through adolescence among children exposed (n =116) and not exposed (n = 242) to early previous institutional (PI) care.

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Background: High rates of adolescent depression demand for more effective, accessible treatment options. A virtual randomized controlled trial was used to assess the feasibility and acceptability of a 5-week, self-guided, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based mobile application, Spark, compared to a psychoeducational mobile application (Active Control) as an adjunct treatment for adolescents with depression during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: A community sample aged 13-21, with self-reported symptoms of depression, was recruited nationwide.

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Background: Habenula (HB) function is implicated in substance use disorders and is involved in inhibiting dopamine release in the ventral striatum (VS). While blunted VS reward responsivity is implicated in risk for later substance use, links between HB reinforcement processing and progression of use have not, to our knowledge, been examined among adolescents. In the present study, we longitudinally assessed HB and VS responsivity to social rewards and punishments across adolescence and examined associations with substance use.

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A substantial portion of critical adolescent development is occurring within digital environments. However, certain individual differences may lead adolescents to use digital media in diverse ways. In this chapter we suggest that the way teens use digital media influences how digital media affects their mental health.

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In vertebrates, gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)-secreting neurons control fertility by regulating gonadotrophs in the anterior pituitary. While it is known that acetylcholine (ACh) influences GnRH secretion, whether the effect is direct or indirect, and the specific ACh receptor (AChR) subtype(s) involved remain unclear. Here, we determined 1) whether ACh can modulate GnRH cellular activity and 2) a source of ACh afferents contacting GnRH neurons.

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Pubertal processes are associated with structural brain development, but studies have produced inconsistent findings that may relate to different measurements of puberty. Measuring both hormones and physical characteristics is important for capturing variation in neurobiological development. The current study explored associations between cortical thickness and latent factors from multi-method pubertal data in 174 early adolescent girls aged 10-13 years in the Transitions in Adolescent Girls (TAG) Study.

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