Pretransplant survival of patients with end-stage heart failure under competing risks.

Heart transplantation is the gold standard of care for end-stage heart failure in the United States. Donor hearts are a scarce resource, however the current allocation policy-proposed in 2016 and implemented in 2018-has not addressed certain disparities. Between 2005 and 2016, the number of active candidates increased 127%, whereas transplant rates decreased 27.

Genetic capitalism and stabilizing selection of antimicrobial resistance genotypes in Escherichia coli.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in pathogenic strains of bacteria, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli), adversely impacts personal and public health. In this study, we examine competing hypotheses for the evolution of AMR including (i) 'genetic capitalism' in which genotypes that confer antibiotic resistance are gained and not often lost in lineages, and (ii) 'stabilizing selection' in which genotypes that confer antibiotic resistance are gained and lost often.

Metapopulation Model from Pathogen's Perspective: A Versatile Framework to Quantify Pathogen Transfer and Circulation between Environment and Hosts.

Metapopulation models have been primarily explored in infectious disease epidemiology to study host subpopulation movements and between-host contact structures. They also have the potential to investigate environmental pathogen transferring. In this study, we demonstrate that metapopulation models serve as an ideal modeling framework to characterize and quantify pathogen transfer between environment and hosts.

Accuracy of the Pediatric End-stage Liver Disease Score in Estimating Pretransplant Mortality Among Pediatric Liver Transplant Candidates.

Importance: Fair allocation of livers between pediatric and adult recipients is critically dependent on the accuracy of mortality estimates afforded by the Pediatric End-stage Liver Disease (PELD) and Model for End-stage Liver Disease, respectively. Widespread reliance on exceptions for pediatric recipients suggests that the 2 systems may not be comparable.

Objective: To evaluate the accuracy of the PELD score in estimating 90-day pretransplant mortality among pediatric patients on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) waiting list.

Gray's time-varying coefficients model for posttransplant survival of pediatric liver transplant recipients with a diagnosis of cancer.

Transplantation is often the only viable treatment for pediatric patients with end-stage liver disease. Making well-informed decisions on when to proceed with transplantation requires accurate predictors of transplant survival. The standard Cox proportional hazards (PH) model assumes that covariate effects are time-invariant on right-censored failure time; however, this assumption may not always hold.