Exploring Adolescents' Understanding, Experiences and Beliefs About Pain: A Qualitative Study.

Background: Pain is prevalent across the lifespan and contributes to significant societal and economic burdens. The public often holds misconceptions about pain and pain management. Despite this, there are no well-resourced public health initiatives delivering information about pain and pain management to the public.

Design of CONQUEST, a novel, randomized, placebo-controlled, Phase 2b platform clinical trial to investigate new treatments for patients with early active systemic sclerosis with interstitial lung disease.

Objective: Safe, effective therapies are urgently needed for patients with systemic sclerosis. However, clinical trial recruitment is challenging given the limited number of people with systemic sclerosis and further restrictions imposed by eligibility criteria. Innovative approaches are needed to accelerate development of new therapies.

PLAbDab-nano: a database of camelid and shark nanobodies from patents and literature.

Nanobodies are essential proteins of the adaptive immune systems of camelid and shark species, complementing conventional antibodies. Properties such as their relatively small size, solubility and high thermostability make VHH (variable heavy domain of the heavy chain) and VNAR (variable new antigen receptor) modalities a promising therapeutic format and a valuable resource for a wide range of biological applications. The volume of academic literature and patents related to nanobodies has risen significantly over the past decade.

Neurovascular coupling during hypercapnia in cerebral blood flow regulation.

Neuronal activity consumes cellular energy and generates carbon dioxide (CO). To counter this metabolic challenge, synaptic signalling communicates with nearby microvasculature to increase local blood flow. Is this process solely based on feedforward synaptic signalling, or is the generated CO also involved? This question was addressed in mice in a new Nature Communications publication by Tournissac and colleagues where they showed that neurovascular coupling is not affected by exogenous CO or its associated acidification.

Assessment of combined α-GAL enzyme activity and lyso-GL3 for Fabry disease screening in women with chronic kidney disease.

Introduction: The spectrum of clinical presentation of Fabry disease (FD) in women is broad and challenging. The aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of an alternative screening method for FD in women.

Methods: A collaborative multicenter cross-sectional study to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of the combination of two tests (α-GAL enzyme activity assay and lyso-GL3 assay) for the diagnosis of FD in women.