Psychological induction of interoceptive hunger cues and their effect on food desire.

Certain interoceptive hunger cues are caused by gut physiology. These interoceptive cues may have psychological consequences, namely an ability to enhance the desire to eat, which are independent of their physiological cause. Testing this idea is difficult because the physiological processes are normally linked to any consequence.

Cross-sectional study evaluating the effectiveness of the Mozambique-Canada maternal health project abstraction tool for maternal near miss identification in Inhambane province, Mozambique.

Objectives: The objectives of this study are to determine whether the additional clinical criteria of the Mozambique maternal near miss abstraction tool enhance the effectiveness of the original WHO abstraction tool in identifying maternal near miss cases and also evaluate the impact of sociodemographic factors on maternal near miss identification.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Setting: Two secondary referral hospitals in Inhambane province, Mozambique from 2021 to 2022.

Removing lead from the global economy.

Lead, an element toxic to countless biological processes, occurs naturally in the earth's lithosphere and is geologically sequestered from the biosphere at the earth's surface. When humans remove lead from the lithosphere and distribute it throughout the economy, its toxic effects impact throughout the web of life. Lead mining and manufacturing is a small industry that generates enormous harms.

The 'DIMPLE SIGN' of Intra-Aortic Cord.

Background: With increasing use of imaging to diagnose human pathology, newer aortic anomalies are being identified. An intra-aortic cord is one such abnormality, which requires differentiating from an intimal flap of dissection, to avoid major surgery or prolonged surveillance. The aim of this study was to bring forth a unique feature of the intra-aortic cord on imaging, using volume rendering reformatting and identify similar findings in published literature and hence establish the role of the 'Dimple' sign.

Fetal Gene Regulatory Gene Deletions are Associated with Poor Cognition and Altered Cortical Morphology in Schizophrenia and Community-Based Samples.

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) are characterized by substantial clinical and genetic heterogeneity. Multiple recurrent copy number variants (CNVs) increase risk for SSDs; however, how known risk CNVs and broader genome-wide CNVs influence clinical variability is unclear. The current study examined associations between borderline intellectual functioning or childhood-onset psychosis, known risk CNVs, and burden of deletions affecting genes in 18 previously validated neurodevelopmental gene-sets in 618 SSD individuals.

Sensitivity to Vibrotactile Stimulation in the Hand and Wrist: Effects of Motion, Temporal Patterns, and Biological Sex.

Objective: We investigated the impact of low-tempo, repetitive hand movements on vibrotactile sensitivity by employing various temporal and spatial patterns in the hand and wrist area.

Background: The investigation of a human's ability to perceive vibrotactile stimuli during dynamic hand movements remains understudied, despite the prevalence of slow to mild hand motions in applications such as hand navigation or gesture control using haptic gloves in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).

Method: We investigated vibrotactile sensitivity, analyzing the impact of various factors, including (static and low-tempo repetitive hand movements), (Single or Double vibrations with varying onset times), (hand and wrist), and .

Evidence of turmeric adulteration with lead chromate across South Asia.

Food adulteration with toxic chemicals is a global public health threat. Lead chromate adulterated spices have been linked with lead poisoning in many countries, from Bangladesh to the United States. This study systematically assessed lead chromate adulteration in turmeric, a spice that is consumed daily across South Asia.

DR-BERT: A protein language model to annotate disordered regions.

Despite their lack of a rigid structure, intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) in proteins play important roles in cellular functions, including mediating protein-protein interactions. Therefore, it is important to computationally annotate IDRs with high accuracy. In this study, we present Disordered Region prediction using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (DR-BERT), a compact protein language model.

Rapid Market Screening to assess lead concentrations in consumer products across 25 low- and middle-income countries.

Lead exposure can have serious consequences for health and development. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are considered irreversible. Young children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning.

Understanding the relationship between surfing performance and fin design.

This research aimed to determine whether accomplished surfers could accurately perceive how changes to surfboard fin design affected their surfing performance. Four different surfboard fins, including conventional, single-grooved, and double-grooved fins, were developed using computer-aided design combined with additive manufacturing (3D printing). We systematically installed these 3D-printed fins into instrumented surfboards, which six accomplished surfers rode on waves in the ocean in a random order while blinded to the fin condition.

Realist evaluation of maternity waiting home intervention models in Inhambane, Mozambique: protocol for a comparative embedded case study, the Mozambique-Canada Maternal Health Project.

Introduction: This is a study protocol that tests and refines realist theories regarding the uptake and scale-up of the linked maternity waiting home (hereafter MWH) and facility birth intervention in the Mozambican context. The theories were developed through a realist review of MWH-facility birth literature from low-income and middle-income countries. The aim of the proposed study is to contribute to a contextually refined understanding of the causal chains underlying MWH-facility birth adoption by pregnant women and their families, communities, the health system and donors.

Reductions in spice lead levels in the republic of Georgia: 2020-2022.

Spice adulteration using yellow lead chromate-based pigments has been documented as a growing global health concern. Spices from the Republic of Georgia with extremely high levels of lead, up to an order of magnitude higher than any other spices worldwide, have been implicated as sources of child lead poisoning. The objectives of this study were to 1) evaluate lead concentrations in spices sampled across the country of Georgia between 2020 and 2022, and 2) assess factors associated with spice adulteration, specifically the role of spice quality and regulatory enforcement.

Menopause Osteoporosis and Bone Intervention Using Lifestyle Exercise: A Randomized Controlled Study.

Background: The aim of the study was to examine the feasibility for postmenopausal women of a bone-strengthening jumping intervention, which has been previously successful for premenopausal women.

Materials And Methods: Forty-nine participants (mean ± standard deviation [SD] age = 57.8 ± 4.

VENUM (Vascular Education iN Undergraduate Medicine): a multicentre evaluation of undergraduate vascular education in the UK.

Introduction: Vascular surgery is a recognised surgical subspecialty covering an array of circulatory conditions predominately affecting geriatric and diabetic patients. As such, a wide breadth of clinicians will see patients with vascular pathologies, but it is unclear how detailed their knowledge base is. Key to this is the education of medical students, which has been poorly documented during undergraduate training in the UK.

Oral inflammatory load predicts vascular function in a young adult population: a pilot study.

Background: The periodontium is a highly vascularized area of the mouth, and periodontitis initiates negative functional and structural changes in the vasculature. However, mild oral inflammation, including levels experienced by many apparently healthy individuals, has an unclear impact on cardiovascular function. The purpose of this pilot study is to investigate the effects of objectively measured whole mouth oral inflammatory load (OIL) on vascular function in apparently healthy individuals.

COVID-19 case rates, spatial mobility, and neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics in Toronto: a spatial-temporal analysis.

Objectives: This study has two primary research objectives: (1) to investigate the spatial clustering pattern of mobility reductions and COVID-19 cases in Toronto and their relationships with marginalized populations, and (2) to identify the most relevant socioeconomic characteristics that relate to human mobility and COVID-19 case rates in Toronto's neighbourhoods during five distinct time periods of the pandemic.

Methods: Using a spatial-quantitative approach, we combined hot spot analyses, Pearson correlation analyses, and Wilcoxon two-sample tests to analyze datasets including COVID-19 cases, a mobile device-derived indicator measuring neighbourhood-level time away from home (i.e.

Decolonizing drug-resistant with phage and probiotics: breaking the frequency-dependent dominance of residents.

Widespread antibiotic resistance in commensal bacteria creates a persistent challenge for human health. Resident drug-resistant microbes can prevent clinical interventions, colonize wounds post-surgery, pass resistance traits to pathogens or move to more harmful niches following routine interventions such as catheterization. Accelerating the removal of resistant bacteria or actively decolonizing particular lineages from hosts could therefore have a number of long-term benefits.

Mutators can drive the evolution of multi-resistance to antibiotics.

Antibiotic combination therapies are an approach used to counter the evolution of resistance; their purported benefit is they can stop the successive emergence of independent resistance mutations in the same genome. Here, we show that bacterial populations with 'mutators', organisms with defects in DNA repair, readily evolve resistance to combination antibiotic treatment when there is a delay in reaching inhibitory concentrations of antibiotic-under conditions where purely wild-type populations cannot. In populations of Escherichia coli subjected to combination treatment, we detected a diverse array of acquired mutations, including multiple alleles in the canonical targets of resistance for the two drugs, as well as mutations in multi-drug efflux pumps and genes involved in DNA replication and repair.

Food safety policy enforcement and associated actions reduce lead chromate adulteration in turmeric across Bangladesh.

Turmeric adulterated with lead chromate pigment has been previously identified as a primary source of lead exposure in Bangladesh. This study assesses the impact of a multi-faceted intervention between 2017 and 2021 to reduce lead-tainted turmeric in Bangladesh. The intervention involved: i) disseminating findings from scientific studies via news media that identified turmeric as a source of lead poisoning, ii) educating consumers and businesspeople about the risks of lead chromate in turmeric via public notices and face-to-face meetings, and iii) collaborating with the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority to utilize a rapid lead detection technology to enforce policy disallowing turmeric adulteration.