Publications by authors named "Forster K"

Juvenile crossbred pigs are widely used for acute and chronic animal testing due to their anatomical and physiological resemblance to humans. They are particularly prevalent in preclinical cardiovascular research, including studies investigating extracorporeal resuscitation and mechanical circulatory support devices. However, the availability of comprehensive laboratory reference values is limited.

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Recognizing others' affective states is essential for successful social interactions. Alexithymia, characterized by difficulties in identifying and describing one's own emotions, has been linked to deficits in recognizing emotions and mental states in others. To investigate how neural correlates of affective state recognition are affected by different facets of alexithymia, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with 53 healthy participants (aged 19-36 years, 51% female) using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) and three different measures of alexithymia [Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA), Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire].

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Empathy as one of the basic prerequisites for successful social interactions seems to be aberrant in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). Although understanding empathic impairments in MDD is crucial considering the frequently reported social skill deficits in patients, the current state of research is still inconclusive, pointing to both elevated and impaired levels of empathy. In this review, we extend previous reports of MDD-related aberrations in self-reported and behavioral empathy by shedding light on the neural correlates of empathy in MDD.

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Background: Individuals with transfusion-dependent β-thalassemia (TDT) experience symptoms and functional impacts that reduce their health-related quality of life. However, EQ-5D-derived health utility index scores in TDT often indicate good HRQoL, suggesting the EQ-5D may not adequately capture the impact of TDT. This study explored the disease and treatment burden of TDT and examined the appropriateness of the EQ-5D-5L descriptive system (DS) in measuring HRQoL in TDT.

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Childhood maltreatment (CM) is associated with increased limbic activity, while social support is linked to decreased limbic activity towards negative stimuli. Our study aimed to explore the interaction of perceived social support with CM, and their combined impact on limbic activity in negative emotion processing. A total of 130 healthy individuals (HC) underwent a negative emotional face processing paradigm.

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Article Synopsis
  • Niraparib has been recently funded in Canada for maintaining ovarian cancer treatment after chemotherapy, but its real-world safety remains unclear.
  • A cohort study was conducted involving 514 patients across four Canadian provinces, analyzing their characteristics and adverse events when using niraparib from June 2019 to December 2022.
  • Results showed that significant hematological issues like anemia, neutropenia, and thrombocytopenia affected 11-16% of patients, but these rates were relatively low, possibly due to careful prescribing and monitoring by healthcare providers.
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Background: The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated the need and implementation of digital innovations, especially in medicine.

Objective: To gain a better understanding of the stress associated with digital transformation in physicians, this study aims to identify working conditions that are stress relevant for physicians and differ in dependence on digital transformation. In addition, we examined the potential role of individual characteristics (ie, age, gender, and actual implementation of a digital innovation within the last 3 years) in digitalization-associated differences in these working conditions.

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Background: Long-term survival after premature birth is significantly determined by development of morbidities, primarily affecting the cardio-respiratory or central nervous system. Existing studies are limited to pairwise morbidity associations, thereby lacking a holistic understanding of morbidity co-occurrence and respective risk profiles.

Methods: Our study, for the first time, aimed at delineating and characterizing morbidity profiles at near-term age and investigated the most prevalent morbidities in preterm infants: bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), pulmonary hypertension (PH), mild cardiac defects, perinatal brain pathology and retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).

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The technology acceptance model (TAM) has not been applied beyond the technological context, despite its widespread applications. This study extends the TAM to consumer goods and validates the conceptualised consumer goods acceptance model (CGAM) using tea-to-go as a proxy for consumer goods. An exploratory research approach based on a quota sample is used to adjust and test the CGAM, showing that the adjusted CGAM and its measures are reliable and valid, thus supporting the hypothesis that extending the TAM to a non-technological context is possible.

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Internalizing symptoms such as elevated stress and sustained negative affect can be important warning signs for developing mental disorders. A recent theoretical framework suggests a complex interplay of empathy, theory of mind (ToM), and negative thinking processes as a crucial risk combination for internalizing symptoms. To disentangle these relationships, this study utilizes neural, behavioral, and self-report data to examine how the interplay between empathy, ToM, and negative thinking processes relates to stress and negative affect.

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Patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show alterations in both gray matter volume (GMV) and white matter (WM) integrity compared with healthy controls (HC). However, it remains unclear whether the phenotypically distinct BD subtypes (BD-I and BD-II) also exhibit brain structural differences. This study investigated GMV and WM differences between HC, BD-I, and BD-II, along with clinical and genetic associations.

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Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is the most severe complication in preterm infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and associated with significant mortality. Diagnostic and treatment strategies, however, still lack standardization. By the use of a survey study (PH in BPD), we assessed clinical practice (diagnosis, treatment, follow-up) in preterm infants with early postnatal persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn (PPHN) as well as at risk for or with established BPD-associated PH between 06/2018 and 10/2020 in two-thirds of all German perinatal centers with >70 very low birthweight infants/year including their cardiology departments and outpatient units.

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Purpose: To analyze the performance of deep learning (DL) models for segmentation of the neonatal lung in MRI and investigate the use of automated MRI-based features for assessment of neonatal lung disease.

Materials And Methods: Quiet-breathing MRI was prospectively performed in two independent cohorts of preterm infants (median gestational age, 26.57 weeks; IQR, 25.

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Around 42% of individuals with cancer experience distress. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can reduce distress, but effects are small, and mechanisms unclear. This review aimed to identify associations between ACT processes and distress in cancer.

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Background: Pulmonary vascular disease (PVD) affects the majority of preterm neonates with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and significantly determines long-term mortality through undetected progression into pulmonary hypertension. Our objectives were to associate characteristics of pulmonary artery (PA) flow and cardiac function with BPD-associated PVD near term using advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for improved risk stratification.

Methods: Preterms <32 weeks postmenstrual age (PMA) with/without BPD were clinically monitored including standard echocardiography and prospectively enrolled for 3 T MRI in spontaneous sleep near term (AIRR (Attention to Infants at Respiratory Risks) study).

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Objective: To describe the clinical presentation, diagnostic imaging findings, surgical technique, histopathological diagnosis, and postoperative outcome in 3 cats with extensive vaginal masses.

Animals: Medical records of cats diagnosed with vaginal masses that had a bilateral pubic and ischial osteotomy and vaginectomy between 2004 and 2022 were retrospectively reviewed. Three cats met the inclusion criteria.

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Introduction: Bile has long been considered sterile. Recent studies show that bacteria can frequently be detected in bile and certain bacterial species are associated with bile duct-associated liver disease.

Objectives: To detect bacterial species and antibiotic resistance in bile in bile duct-associated liver disease.

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Background: Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on emotion processing in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show hyperactivity of limbic-striatal brain areas and hypoactivity in inferior frontal areas compared to healthy participants. However, heterogeneous results in patients with different disease states and different valences of emotional stimuli have been identified.

Methods: To integrate previous results and elucidate the impact of disease state and stimulus valence, we conducted a systematic literature search for journal articles in the Web of Science Core Collection including MEDLINE databases and employed a coordinate-based-meta-analysis of functional-MRI studies comparing emotion processing in BD-patients with healthy participants using seed-based d mapping (SDM) to test for between-subjects-effects.

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Repeated hospitalizations are a characteristic of severe disease courses in patients with affective disorders (PAD). To elucidate how a hospitalization during a nine-year follow-up in PAD affects brain structure, a longitudinal case-control study (mean [SD] follow-up period 8.98 [2.

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Introduction: Inflammation is a key driver of morbidity in the vulnerable preterm infant exposed to pre- and postnatal hazards and significantly contributes to chronic lung disease, bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). However, the early changes in innate immunity associated with BPD development are incompletely understood.

Methods: In very immature preterm infants below 32 weeks gestational age (GA; n=30 infants), monocyte subtypes were identified by Flow Cytometry at birth and throughout the postnatal course including intracellular TNF expression upon LPS stimulation.

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This study measures patient's concordance between clinical reference pathways with survival or cost among a population-based cohort of colon cancer patients applying a continuous measure of concordance. The primary hypothesis is that a higher concordance score with the clinical pathway is significantly associated with longer survival or lower cost. The study informs whether patient's adherence to a defined clinical pathway is beneficial to patients' outcomes or health system.

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Objectives: To elucidate the relationship between the course of bipolar disorder (BD) and structural brain changes across the life span, we conducted a systematic review of longitudinal imaging studies in adolescent and adult BD patients.

Methods: Eleven studies with 329 BD patients and 277 controls met our PICOS criteria (participants, intervention, comparison, outcome and study design): BD diagnosis based on DSM criteria, natural course of disease, comparison of grey matter changes in BD individuals over ≥1-year interval between scans.

Results: The selected studies yielded heterogeneous findings, partly due to varying patient characteristics, data acquisition and statistical models.

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Precise, repeatable genetic access to specific neurons via GAL4/UAS and related methods is a key advantage of neuroscience. Neuronal targeting is typically documented using light microscopy of full GAL4 expression patterns, which generally lack the single-cell resolution required for reliable cell type identification. Here, we use stochastic GAL4 labeling with the MultiColor FlpOut approach to generate cellular resolution confocal images at large scale.

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