Unlocking insights: Clinical associations from the largest 6-minute walk test collection via the my Heart Counts Cardiovascular Health Study, a fully digital smartphone platform.

Background: The six-minute walk test (6MWT) is a prognostic sub-maximal exercise test used clinically as a measure of functional capacity. With the emergence of advanced sensors, 6MWTs are being performed remotely via smartphones and other devices. The My Heart Counts Cardiovascular Health Study is a smartphone application that serves as a digital platform for studies of human cardiovascular health, and has been used to perform 30,475 6MWTs on 8922 unique participants.

Institutional, neighborhood, and life stressors on loneliness among older adults.

Background: Loneliness is a public health epidemic in the United States (US), with older adults being vulnerable to experiencing loneliness. Predictors of loneliness are less understood among racial/ethnic groups of US older adults, and few studies have included perceived institutional discrimination (PID), stressful life events (SLE), and perceived neighborhood characteristics (PNC) as antecedent stressors of loneliness in diverse older adult samples. Our study assessed the relationship between these stressors and loneliness among specific racial/ethnic groups of older adults.

Competency Gaps Among Governmental Public Health Employees With and Without a Formal Public Health Degree: Where Are We Now?

Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine whether differences in self-reported core competency skill gaps among U.S. governmental public health workers with and without a formal degree in public health have changed since the last assessment in 2017.

Development of Effective Connectome from Infancy to Adolescence.

Delineating the normative developmental profile of functional connectome is important for both standardized assessment of individual growth and early detection of diseases. However, functional connectome has been mostly studied using functional connectivity (FC), where undirected connectivity strengths are estimated from statistical correlation of resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) signals. To address this limitation, we applied regression dynamic causal modeling (rDCM) to delineate the developmental trajectories of effective connectivity (EC), the directed causal influence among neuronal populations, in whole-brain networks from infancy to adolescence (0-22 years old) based on high-quality rs-fMRI data from Baby Connectome Project (BCP) and Human Connectome Project Development (HCP-D).

Spatial Localization of Collagen Hydroxylated Proline Site Variation as an Ancestral Trait in the Breast Cancer Microenvironment.

Collagen stroma interactions within the extracellular microenvironment of breast tissue play a significant role in breast cancer, including risk, progression, and outcomes. Hydroxylation of proline (HYP) is a common post-translational modification directly linked to breast cancer survival and progression. Changes in HYP status lead to alterations in epithelial cell signaling, extracellular matrix remodeling, and immune cell recruitment.