Real Effect or Bias? Good Practices for Evaluating the Robustness of Evidence From Comparative Observational Studies Through Quantitative Sensitivity Analysis for Unmeasured Confounding.

The assumption of "no unmeasured confounders" is a critical but unverifiable assumption required for causal inference yet quantitative sensitivity analyses to assess robustness of real-world evidence remains under-utilized. The lack of use is likely in part due to complexity of implementation and often specific and restrictive data requirements for application of each method. With the advent of methods that are broadly applicable in that they do not require identification of a specific unmeasured confounder-along with publicly available code for implementation-roadblocks toward broader use of sensitivity analyses are decreasing.

Better individual-level risk models can improve the targeting and life-saving potential of early-mortality interventions.

Infant mortality remains high and uneven in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Even low-cost, highly effective therapies can only save lives in proportion to how successfully they can be targeted to those children who, absent the treatment, would have died. This places great value on maximizing the accuracy of any targeting or means-testing algorithm.

Political leadership has limited impact on fossil fuel taxes and subsidies.

For countries to rapidly decarbonize, they need strong leadership, according to both academic studies and popular accounts. But leadership is difficult to measure, and its importance is unclear. We use original data to investigate the role of presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs in 155 countries from 1990 to 2015 in changing their countries' gasoline taxes and subsidies.

Trusted authorities can change minds and shift norms during conflict.

The reintegration of former members of violent extremist groups is a pressing policy challenge. Governments and policymakers often have to change minds among reticent populations and shift perceived community norms in order to pave the way for peaceful reintegration. How can they do so on a mass scale? Previous research shows that messages from trusted authorities can be effective in creating attitude change and shifting perceptions of social norms.

Pre-existing conditions in Hispanics/Latinxs that are COVID-19 risk factors.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has exposed health care disparities in minority groups including Hispanics/Latinxs (HL). Studies of COVID-19 risk factors for HL have relied on county-level data. We investigated COVID-19 risk factors in HL using individual-level, electronic health records in a Los Angeles health system between March 9, 2020, and August 31, 2020.

Credible learning of hydroxychloroquine and dexamethasone effects on COVID-19 mortality outside of randomized trials.

Objectives: To investigate the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and dexamethasone on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) mortality using patient data outside of randomized trials.

Design: Phenotypes derived from electronic health records were analyzed using the stability-controlled quasi-experiment (SCQE) to provide a range of possible causal effects of hydroxychloroquine and dexamethasone on COVID-19 mortality.

Setting And Participants: Data from 2,007 COVID-19 positive patients hospitalized at a large university hospital system over the course of 200 days and not enrolled in randomized trials were analyzed using SCQE.

Inference without randomization or ignorability: A stability-controlled quasi-experiment on the prevention of tuberculosis.

The stability-controlled quasi-experiment (SCQE) is an approach to study the effects of nonrandomized, newly adopted treatments. While covariate adjustment techniques rely on a "no unobserved confounding" assumption, SCQE imposes an assumption on the change in the average nontreatment outcome between successive cohorts (the "baseline trend"). We provide inferential tools for SCQE and its first application, examining whether isoniazid preventive therapy (IPT) reduced tuberculosis (TB) incidence among 26 715 HIV patients in Tanzania.

Prior diagnoses and medications as risk factors for COVID-19 in a Los Angeles Health System.

With the continuing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic coupled with phased reopening, it is critical to identify risk factors associated with susceptibility and severity of disease in a diverse population to help shape government policies, guide clinical decision making, and prioritize future COVID-19 research. In this retrospective case-control study, we used de-identified electronic health records (EHR) from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Health System between March 9, 2020 and June 14, 2020 to identify risk factors for COVID-19 susceptibility (severe acute respiratory distress syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) PCR test positive), inpatient admission, and severe outcomes (treatment in an intensive care unit or intubation). Of the 26,602 individuals tested by PCR for SARS-CoV-2, 992 were COVID-19 positive (3.

Principle ERP reduction and analysis: Estimating and using principle ERP waveforms underlying ERPs across tasks, subjects and electrodes.

Event-related potentials (ERP) waveforms are the summation of many overlapping signals. Changes in the peak or mean amplitude of a waveform over a given time period, therefore, cannot reliably be attributed to a particular ERP component of ex ante interest, as is the standard approach to ERP analysis. Though this problem is widely recognized, it is not well addressed in practice.

Estimating Causal Effects of New Treatments Despite Self-Selection: The Case of Experimental Medical Treatments.

Providing terminally ill patients with access to experimental treatments, as allowed by recent "right to try" laws and "expanded access" programs, poses a variety of ethical questions. While practitioners and investigators may assume it is impossible to learn the effects of these treatment without randomized trials, this paper describes a simple tool to estimate the effects of these experimental treatments on those who take them, despite the problem of selection into treatment, and without assumptions about the selection process. The key assumption is that the average outcome, such as survival, would remain stable over time in the absence of the new treatment.

Chemoreflex function and brain blood flow during upright posture in men and women.

Orthostatic intolerance is more common in women than men, and some studies have found that women in the early follicular (EF) phase of the menstrual cycle experience the greatest feelings of lightheadedness. Chemoreflex function while supine or upright was investigated to determine the potential contribution of ventilatory control to these phenomena. Men (n = 13) and women (n = 14) were tested while supine and 70° upright (head-up tilt [HUT]) and given: (1) normoxia or (2) hypercapnia (5% CO ).

Stress-testing the affect misattribution procedure: Heterogeneous control of affect misattribution procedure effects under incentives.

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is widely used to measure sensitive attitudes towards classes of stimuli, by estimating the effect that affectively charged prime images have on subsequent judgements of neutral target images. We test its resistance to efforts to conceal one's attitudes, by replicating the standard AMP design while offering small incentives to conceal attitudes towards the prime images. We find that although the average AMP effect remains positive, it decreases significantly in magnitude.

Influence of sex, menstrual cycle, and oral contraceptives on cerebrovascular resistance and cardiorespiratory function during Valsalva or standing.

Women experience orthostatic intolerance more than men, and they experience faintness more in the early follicular [i.e., low-hormone (LH)] than luteal [i.

Solution structural characterization of an array of nanoscale aqueous inorganic (0 ≤ ≤ 6) clusters by H-NMR and QM computations.

NMR spectroscopy is the go-to technique for determining the solution structures of organic, organometallic, and even macromolecular species. However, structure determination of nanoscale aqueous inorganic clusters by NMR spectroscopy remains an unexplored territory. The few hydroxo-bridged inorganic species well characterized by H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (H-NMR) do not provide enough information for signal assignment and prediction of new samples.

The epidemiology of lethal violence in Darfur: using micro-data to explore complex patterns of ongoing armed conflict.

This article describes and analyzes patterns of lethal violence in Darfur, Sudan, during 2008-09, drawing upon a uniquely detailed dataset generated by the United Nations-African Union hybrid operation in Darfur (UNAMID), combined with data generated through aggregation of reports from open-source venues. These data enable detailed analysis of patterns of perpetrator/victim and belligerent groups over time, and show how violence changed over the four years following the height of armed conflict in 2003-05. During the reference period, violent incidents were sporadic and diverse and included: battles between the major combatants; battles among subgroups of combatant coalitions that were ostensibly allied; inter-tribal conflict; incidents of one-sided violence against civilians by different parties; and incidents of banditry.

Prerequisite for enhancing student learning outcomes in medical education.

Anyone achieving a grade of "A" has performed at a very good level. The label, "triple A", is sometimes used to distinguish those who are particularly outstanding. In this paper, teaching techniques that facilitate adults becoming triple A learners are discussed.

Effect of an integrated teaching intervention on clinical decision analysis: a randomized, controlled study of undergraduate medical students.

A four-hour integrated teaching session on clinical decision analysis has been developed and introduced as part of the Life Long Learning Skills course for medical students at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The feasibility and effectiveness of teaching the principles and practice of clinical decision analysis to final-year undergraduate medical students was evaluated. One hundred and thirty-two students were randomly assigned to medical (intervention) and surgical rotations (control) and were assessed two weeks before and three weeks following a teaching session.

Efficacy of novel rifamycin derivatives against rifamycin-sensitive and -resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates in murine models of infection.

Novel rifamycins (new chemical entities [NCEs]) having MICs of 0.002 to 0.03 microg/ml against Staphylococcus aureus and retaining some activity against rifampin-resistant mutants were tested for in vivo efficacy against susceptible and rifampin-resistant strains of S.

Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex resolves conflict from distracting stimuli by boosting attention toward relevant events.

In everyday life, we often focus greater attention on behaviorally relevant stimuli to limit the processing of distracting events. For example, when distracting voices intrude upon a conversation at a noisy social gathering, we concentrate more attention on the speaker of interest to better comprehend his or her speech. In the present study, we investigated whether dorsal/caudal regions of the anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), thought to make a major contribution to cognitive control, boost attentional resources toward behaviorally relevant stimuli as a means for limiting the processing of distracting events.

Mechanisms of moving the mind's eye: planning and execution of spatial shifts of attention.

The usefulness of attentional orienting, both in the real world and in the laboratory, depends not only on the ability to attend to objects or other inputs but also on the ability to shift attention between them. Although understanding the basic characteristics of these shifts is a critical step toward understanding the brain mechanisms that produce them, the literature remains unresolved on a very basic and potentially revealing characteristic of these shifts-namely, whether attention takes longer to shift a farther distance across the visual field. We addressed this question using a series of behavioral tasks involving the voluntary orienting of attention to locations in the visual field.

Functional parcellation of attentional control regions of the brain.

Recently, a number of investigators have examined the neural loci of psychological processes enabling the control of visual spatial attention using cued-attention paradigms in combination with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Findings from these studies have provided strong evidence for the involvement of a fronto-parietal network in attentional control. In the present study, we build upon this previous work to further investigate these attentional control systems.

How to minimize inappropriate utilization of Accident and Emergency Departments: improve the validity of classifying the general practice cases amongst the A&E attendees.

Studies have found that one-third to two-thirds of all patients attending Accident and Emergency (A and E) Departments could be managed appropriately by general practitioners (GPs). There is also evidence that referral to GPs can be acceptable to patients. The question of primary concern is screening non-urgent cases with high degrees of sensitivity (S), specificity (SP), and positive predictive value (PPV).

Effects of practice on executive control investigated with fMRI.

Various models of executive control predict that practice should modulate the recruitment of executive brain mechanisms. To investigate this issue, we asked 15 participants to perform a cued global/local attention task while brain activity was recorded with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Practice significantly reduced the recruitment of left inferior parietal regions that were engaged when participants oriented attention in response to global and local cue stimuli.