Publications by authors named "Gunn J"

Floating treatment wetlands (FTW)s that can uptake nutrients and metals from water, and/or trap suspended solids in their roots, are becoming viable options to treat urban, agriculture and sewage runoffs. However, current FTW designs favor aerobic processes and short-term storage of metals, which are ineffective in acid mine drainage (AMD) environments. Many also function poorly in northern latitudes with strong seasonality and several months of sub-zero temperatures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Significance: Photodynamic therapy (PDT) involves complex light-drug-pathophysiology interactions that can be affected by multiple parameters and often leads to large variations in treatment outcome from patient to patient. Direct PDT dosimetry technologies have been sought to optimize the control variables (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Frailty significantly impacts mortality risk after myocardial infarction in older patients, with frail individuals showing a 49% death rate within 12 months compared to 9% for non-frail patients.
  • Incorporating the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) into the GRACE model improved risk prediction, as indicated by an increase in Area Under the Curve (AUC) from 0.80 to 0.86.
  • The study validated these findings across two cohorts, demonstrating that the CFS enhances the GRACE model's ability to classify patients' mortality risk effectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Recent efforts have demonstrated the ability of computational models to predict fractional flow reserve from coronary artery imaging without the need for invasive instrumentation. However, these models include only larger coronary arteries as smaller side branches cannot be resolved and are therefore neglected. The goal of this study was to evaluate the impact of neglecting the flow to these side branches when computing angiography-derived fractional flow reserve (vFFR) and indices of volumetric coronary artery blood flow.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study demonstrates remote imaging for in vivo detection of radiation-induced tumor microstructural changes by tracking the diffusive spread of injected intratumor UV excited tattoo ink using Cherenkov-excited luminescence imaging (CELI). Micro-liter quantities of luminescent tattoo ink with UV absorption and visible emission were injected at a depth of 2 mm into mouse tumors prior to receiving a high dose treatment of radiation. X-rays from a clinical linear accelerator were used to excite phosphorescent compounds within the tattoo ink through Cherenkov emission.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Many clinical studies and epidemiological investigations have clearly demonstrated that women are twice as likely to develop cholesterol gallstones as men, and oral contraceptives and other estrogen therapies dramatically increase that risk. Further, animal studies have revealed that estrogen promotes cholesterol gallstone formation through the estrogen receptor (ER) α, but not ERβ, pathway. More importantly, some genetic and pathophysiological studies have found that G protein-coupled estrogen receptor (GPER) 1 is a new gallstone gene, , on chromosome 5 in mice and produces additional lithogenic actions, working independently of ERα, to markedly increase cholelithogenesis in female mice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: Postpericardiotomy syndrome (PPS) is a relatively common complication after cardiac surgery. However, long-term follow-up data on the adverse events and mortality of PPS patients requiring invasive interventions are scarce.

Methods: We sought to assess the occurrence of mortality, new-onset atrial fibrillation (AF), cerebrovascular events, and major bleeds in PPS patients requiring medical attention in a combination database of 671 patients who underwent isolated surgical aortic valve replacement with a bioprosthesis (n = 361) or mechanical prosthesis (n = 310) between 2002 and 2014 (Cardiovascular Research Consortium-A Prospective Project to Identify Biomarkers of Morbidity and Mortality in Cardiovascular Interventional Patients [CAREBANK] 2016-2018).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: When possible, a single-stent technique to treat coronary bifurcation disease is preferable. However, when 2 stents are required, there is scope to improve on existing techniques. The crush technique has already been improved with the introduction of double-kissing (DK) and minicrush.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Karst aquifers provide drinking water for 10% of the world's population, support agriculture, groundwater-dependent activities, and ecosystems. These aquifers are characterised by complex groundwater-flow systems, hence, they are extremely vulnerable and protecting them requires an in-depth understanding of the systems. Poor data accessibility has limited advances in karst research and realistic representation of karst processes in large-scale hydrological studies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Almost all of global maternal mortality caused by HDP occurs in low to middle-income countries (LMIC). However, limited guidance is available to local primary care practitioners who are usually the main health care providers. This review examined existing international practice guidelines to identify potential practices to improve HDP management in Indonesian primary care settings.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

serovar Typhi causes 14.3 million acute cases of typhoid fever that are responsible for 136,000 deaths each year. Chronic infections occur in 3%-5% of those infected and Typhi persists primarily in the gallbladder by forming biofilms on cholesterol gallstones, but how these bacterial communities evade host immunity is not known.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Tattoo fiducials are commonly used in radiotherapy patient alignment, and recent studies have examined the use of UV-excited luminescent tattoo ink as a cosmetic substitute to make these visible under UV illumination. The goal of this study was to show how luminescent tattoo inks could be excited with MV radiation and imaged during beam delivery for direct visualization of field position.

Methods: A survey of nine UV-sensitive tattoo inks with various emission spectra were investigated using both UV and MV excitation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Eating fish provides numerous health benefits, but it is also a dominant pathway for human exposure to contaminants. Many studies have examined mercury (Hg) accumulation in fish, but fewer have considered other elements, such as arsenic (As) and chromium (Cr). Recently, freshwater fish from several pristine boreal systems across northern Ontario, Canada, have been reported with elevated concentrations of As and Cr for reasons that are not well understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Because of the subjective nature of current pain assessments, limited efficacy of treatment options and risks associated with opioid abuse and diversion, the need for objective data to assist with chronic pain management has never been greater. Successful identification of mechanistic biomarkers would not only improve our understanding and ability to accurately diagnose pain disorders but would also facilitate the development of disease-modifying pain drugs.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to determine and evaluate the prevalence of abnormal biomarker findings in a population of patients with chronic pain.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

ABY-029, an anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) Affibody molecule labeled with IRDye 800CW, has been used in three Phase 0 microdosing clinical trials for fluorescence guided surgery. In May of 2019, the clinical trials were put on hold because the ABY-029 produced under Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for human administration had come to the end of term in which the drug product was known to be stable. Stability testing was halted due to limitations in supply of a suitable reference standard and a required test product being discontinued from commercial sale.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aberrant NLRP3 inflammasome activation contributes to the development of endotoxemia. The importance of negative regulation of NLRP3 inflammasomes remains poorly understood. Here, we show that the E3 ubiquitin ligase Cbl-b is essential for preventing endotoxemia induced by a sub-lethal dose of LPS via a caspase-11/NLRP3-dependent manner.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hypoxia in solid tumors is thought to be an important factor in resistance to therapy, but the extreme microscopic heterogeneity of the partial pressures of oxygen (pO) between the capillaries makes it difficult to characterize the scope of this phenomenon without invasive sampling of oxygen distributions throughout the tissue. Here we develop a non-invasive method to track spatial oxygen distributions in tumors during fractionated radiotherapy, using oxygen-dependent quenching of phosphorescence, oxygen probe Oxyphor PtG4 and the radiotherapy-induced Cherenkov light to excite and image the phosphorescence lifetimes within the tissue. Mice bearing MDA-MB-231 breast cancer and FaDu head neck cancer xenografts show different pO responses during each of the 5 fractions (5 Gy per fraction), delivered from a clinical linear accelerator.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In 2019, the United States experienced an outbreak of e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury (EVALI) (1). Most EVALI patients have reported using tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-containing e-cigarette, or vaping, products obtained from informal sources (2,3), and vitamin E acetate in these products has been closely linked with EVALI (4,5). However, some EVALI patients report using only nicotine-containing products.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: In light of emerging evidence questioning the safety of antidepressants, it is timely to investigate the appropriateness of antidepressant prescribing. This study estimated the prevalence of possible over- and under-treatment with antidepressants among primary care attendees and investigated the factors associated with potentially inappropriate antidepressant use.

Methods: In all, 789 adult primary care patients with depressive symptoms were recruited from 30 general practices in Victoria, Australia, in 2005 and followed up every 3 months in 2006 and annually from 2007 to 2011.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study explores the impact of primary tumor resection (PTR) and metastasectomy on survival in stage IV colon cancer patients, revealing mixed results.
  • Out of 31,172 patients analyzed, those who underwent surgery had a median overall survival (OS) of 21.8 months, compared to 7.5 months for those who did not have surgery.
  • Although both PTR and PTR with metastasectomy improved survival rates, there was no significant survival advantage for patients who underwent metastasectomy compared to those who only had PTR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Coronary artery disease is a common co-morbidity of aortic stenosis. When needed, adding coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) to surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) is the standard treatment method, but the impact of concomitant CABG on long-term outcomes is uncertain. We compared long-term outcomes of SAVR patients with and without CABG.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Psychological distress among taxi drivers is 5 times higher than that in the general population, and more than half of all drivers have experienced 3 or more potentially traumatic events in their lifetime. Nevertheless, help-seeking for mental health problems in this male-dominated, predominately immigrant workforce is low. Mobile technologies have the potential to increase mental health awareness, teach self-help skills, and encourage help-seeking in this hard-to-reach population.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF