Toxicol Appl Pharmacol
December 2016
Chemicals that alter normal function of farnesoid X receptor (FXR) have been shown to affect the homeostasis of bile acids, glucose, and lipids. Several structural classes of environmental chemicals and drugs that modulated FXR transactivation were previously identified by quantitative high-throughput screening (qHTS) of the Tox21 10K chemical collection. In the present study, we validated the FXR antagonist activity of selected structural classes, including avermectin anthelmintics, dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers, 1,3-indandione rodenticides, and pyrethroid pesticides, using in vitro assay and quantitative structural-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis approaches.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Health Care Poor Underserved
April 2018
Traveling to and from university-based clinics is a major health care barrier for children with sickle cell disease in Alabama. To reduce this barrier, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) developed satellite clinics. This study seeks to determine if these satellite clinics provide a similar level of comprehensive care when compared with the university-based clinic using four surrogate markers: 1) attendance rates, 2) percentage of patients on hydroxyurea, 3) percentage of screening MRIs obtained, and 4) percentage of transcranial dopplers (TCD) completed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCell-free heme (CFH) and hemoglobin (Hb) have emerged as distinct mediators of acute injury characterized by inflammation and microcirculatory dysfunction in hemolytic conditions and critical illness. Several reports have shown changes in Hb and CFH in specific pathophysiological settings. Using PBS, plasma from patients with sickle cell disease, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients and supernatants from red cells units, we found that commonly used assays and commercially available kits do not distinguish between CFH and Hb.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) is the preferred surgical approach for the majority of patients with early-stage breast cancer. There are frequent issues regarding pathologic margin status, requiring margin re-excision, and, in the literature, there is significant variability in re-excision rates, suggesting this is a potential quality-of-care issue. Understanding the patient-, disease-, and physician-related factors influencing reoperation rates is of importance in an effort to minimize this occurrence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland-Saginaw-Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma-affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results indicated that although some participants were not concerned with living in a contaminated community, local residents largely perceived dioxin as a risk to individual health and the local environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) may experience many complications of the central nervous system (CNS) including stroke, silent cerebral infarcts, and neuropsychological deficits. Cranial epidural hematoma is a rare but potentially serious complication.
Procedure: Case series of cranial epidural hematomas in children with SCD from three different institutions is considered, along with a literature review of cranial epidural hematomas in this population.
Objective: Emerging integrative metacognitive therapies for schizophrenia seek to promote subjective aspects of recovery. Beyond symptom remission, they are concerned with shared meaning-making and intersubjective processes. It is unclear, however, how such therapies should understand and respond to psychotic content that threatens meaning-making in therapeutic contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPatients with schizophrenia have deficient sensory processing, undermining how they perceive and relate to a changing environment. This impairment can be captured by the reduced mismatch negativity (MMN) index, an electroencephalographic biomarker of psychosis. The biological factors contributing to MMN are unclear, though mouse research, in which genetic and optical methods could be applied, has given some insight.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIllusory line motion (ILM) refers to the perception of motion in a bar that is presented all at once next to an inducing stimulus. The experimental methods for producing and quantifying ILM are varied, and the resulting explanations are likewise at odds. The current study examined the explanations for ILM away from the inducing stimulus (bright or dark flash) using bars that either suddenly appear (onset bars) or suddenly disappear (offset bars).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Sleep-wake disturbances are experienced by as many as 75% of patients with cancer and are associated with poor symptom management, lower functionality, and decreased quality of life. Although promising sleep interventions exist, they require extensive resources and time.
Objectives: The objectives of this study were to develop a brief, self-administered sleep intervention and to evaluate the feasibility and potential efficacy of its implementation with adult patients with cancer who were about to receive, were receiving, or had received radiation therapy in an ambulatory cancer care setting.
Triflumezopyrim, a newly commercialized molecule from DuPont Crop Protection, belongs to the novel class of mesoionic insecticides. This study characterizes the biochemical and physiological action of this novel insecticide. Using membranes from the aphid, Myzus persicae, triflumezopyrim was found to displace (3)H-imidacloprid with a Ki value of 43 nM with competitive binding results indicating that triflumezopyrim binds to the orthosteric site of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol
June 2016
Circadian clocks are critical modulators of metabolism. However, mechanistic links between cell autonomous clocks and metabolic processes remain largely unknown. Here, we report that expression of the biotin transporter slc5a6 gene is decreased in hearts of two distinct genetic mouse models of cardiomyocyte-specific circadian clock disruption [i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMusicians undergo extensive training which enhances established neural links between auditory and motor areas of the brain. Long-term training develops, strengthens and enables flexibility in these connections allowing proficiency in performance. Previous research has indicated that passive listening of trained music results in the recruitment of premotor areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch has established the health benefits of psychological factors, including the way individuals appraise outcomes. Although many studies confirm that appraising outcomes as controllable is adaptive for health, a paradoxical possibility is largely ignored: Perceived control may be detrimental under some conditions. Our premise was that appraising health as controllable but at the same time ascribing little value to it might signal a dysfunctional psychological mindset that fosters a mistaken sense of invincibility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals with schizophrenia exhibit abnormalities in evoked brain responses in oddball paradigms. These could result from (a) insufficient salience-related cortical signaling (P300), (b) insufficient suppression of irrelevant aspects of the auditory environment, or (c) excessive neural noise. We tested whether disruption of ongoing auditory steady-state responses at predetermined frequencies informed which of these issues contribute to auditory stimulus relevance processing abnormalities in schizophrenia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Endorectal ultrasound (ERUS) is used to preoperatively assess locoregional stage in patients with rectal neoplasms. This study evaluates the accuracy of ERUS in determining the T stage of rectal neoplasms treated by transanal endoscopic microsurgery (TEM).
Methods: All patients in the St Paul's Hospital TEM database were evaluated and excluded if they had been treated with neoadjuvant therapy.
In recent years, an ever increasing range of technology-based applications have been developed with the goal of assisting in the delivery of more effective and efficient fall prevention interventions. Whilst there have been a number of studies that have surveyed technologies for a particular sub-domain of fall prevention, there is no existing research which surveys the full spectrum of falls prevention interventions and characterises the range of technologies that have augmented this landscape. This study presents a conceptual framework and survey of the state of the art of technology-based fall prevention systems which is derived from a systematic template analysis of studies presented in contemporary research literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Intellect Dev Disabil
January 2016
Physical activity promotion is of need for youth with developmental disabilities. Parental perceptions of physical activity benefits may influence youth behaviors. This study investigated the relationship between parental beliefs on the importance of physical activity and physical activity levels among youth with disabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe recovery movement has not only challenged traditional pessimism regarding schizophrenia but also presented opportunities for the possibilities for psychotherapy for people with the disorder. Though in the past psychotherapy models were often pitted against one another, recently there have been emergent reports of a range of integrative models sharing an emphasis on recovery and a number of conceptual elements. These shared elements include attention to the importance of interpersonal processes, personal narrative, and metacognition, with interest in their role in not only the disorder but also the processes by which people pursue recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Clinical phenomenology remains the primary means for classifying psychoses despite considerable evidence that this method incompletely captures biologically meaningful differentiations. Rather than relying on clinical diagnoses as the gold standard, this project drew on neurobiological heterogeneity among psychosis cases to delineate subgroups independent of their phenomenological manifestations.
Method: A large biomarker panel (neuropsychological, stop signal, saccadic control, and auditory stimulation paradigms) characterizing diverse aspects of brain function was collected on individuals with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder with psychosis (N=711), their first-degree relatives (N=883), and demographically comparable healthy subjects (N=278).
Coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROWs) have the potential to revolutionise integrated optics, to slow-light and enhance linear and non-linear optical phenomena. Here we exploit the broad resonances and subwavelength nature of localized surface plasmons in a compact CROW design where plasmonic nanoparticles are side coupled to a dielectric waveguide. The plasmonic CROW features a low loss central mode with a highly tunable dispersion, that avoids coupling to the plasmonic nanoparticles close to the band-edge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Int Neuropsychol Soc
November 2015
A growing body of literature has explored the influence of physical activity on brain structure and function. While the mechanisms of this relationship remain largely speculative, recent research suggests that one of the effects of physical exercise is an increase in synaptic long-term potentiation (LTP). This has not yet been explored directly in humans due to the difficulty of measuring LTP non-invasively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The complex molecular etiology of psychosis in schizophrenia (SZ) and psychotic bipolar disorder (PBP) is not well defined, presumably due to their multifactorial genetic architecture. Neurobiological correlates of psychosis can be identified through genetic associations of intermediate phenotypes such as event-related potential (ERP) from auditory paired stimulus processing (APSP). Various ERP components of APSP are heritable and aberrant in SZ, PBP and their relatives, but their multivariate genetic factors are less explored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Novel in vitro methods are being developed to identify chemicals that may interfere with estrogen receptor (ER) signaling, but the results are difficult to put into biological context because of reliance on reference chemicals established using results from other in vitro assays and because of the lack of high-quality in vivo reference data. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-validated rodent uterotrophic bioassay is considered the "gold standard" for identifying potential ER agonists.
Objectives: We performed a comprehensive literature review to identify and evaluate data from uterotrophic studies and to analyze study variability.
Atten Percept Psychophys
January 2016
We measured attentional orienting in an item-method-directed forgetting task. Words appeared singly, followed by an instruction to remember or forget. In Experiment 1, study words appeared at center; in Experiments 2 and 3, they appeared to the left and right.
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