Assessing the impact of individual exposure to air pollution via biomarkers in sputum of children in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.

Understanding the impact of exposure to air pollution on children's health is critical for developing effective child health protection policies. Alveolar macrophage black carbon (AMBC) provides an indicator of personal exposure to air pollution. Hence, we aimed to examine air pollution exposure and its effects on children by measuring AMBC area and inflammatory cytokines in sputum.

Functional Connectivity Biomarker Extraction for Schizophrenia Based on Energy Landscape Machine Learning Techniques.

Brain connectivity represents the functional organization of the brain, which is an important indicator for evaluating neuropsychiatric disorders and treatment effects. Schizophrenia is associated with impaired functional connectivity but characterizing the complex abnormality patterns has been challenging. In this work, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to measure functional connectivity between 55 schizophrenia patients and 63 healthy controls across 246 regions of interest (ROIs) and extracted the disease-related connectivity patterns using energy landscape (EL) analysis.

Adherence to Life's Essential 8 is associated with delayed white matter aging.

Importance: The American Heart Association introduced Life's Essential 8 (LE8) as a checklist of healthy lifestyle factors to help older individuals maintain and improve cardiovascular health and live longer. How LE8 can foster healthy brain aging and interact with genetic risk factors to render the aging brain less vulnerable to dementia is not well understood.

Objective: To investigate the impact of LE8 on the white matter brain aging and the moderating effects of the allele.

Behavioral assessment of well-being in the naïve laboratory ferret (Mustela putorius furo).

Domestic ferrets (Mustela putorius furo) are an emerging model species in biomedical research. While behavioral studies are a critical translational tool for evaluating neurologic function in disease models and toxicology studies, there is a lack of ferret-specific behavioral assays and corresponding data on baseline behavior. Play behavior is a promising target for evaluation of psychological well-being, particularly because ferrets engage in solitary and social play well into adulthood.

Accelerating Heritability, Genetic Correlation, and Genome-Wide Association Imaging Genetic Analyses in Complex Pedigrees.

National and international biobanking efforts led to the collection of large and inclusive imaging genetics datasets that enable examination of the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to human brains in illness and health. High-resolution neuroimaging (~10 voxels) and genetic (10 single nucleotide polymorphic [SNP] variants) data are available in statistically powerful (N = 10) epidemiological and disorder-focused samples. Performing imaging genetics analyses at full resolution afforded in these datasets is a formidable computational task even under the assumption of unrelatedness among the subjects.

Imaging-genomic spatial-modality attentive fusion for studying neuropsychiatric disorders.

Multimodal learning has emerged as a powerful technique that leverages diverse data sources to enhance learning and decision-making processes. Adapting this approach to analyzing data collected from different biological domains is intuitive, especially for studying neuropsychiatric disorders. A complex neuropsychiatric disorder like schizophrenia (SZ) can affect multiple aspects of the brain and biologies.

A Site-Wise Reliability Analysis of the ABCD Diffusion Fractional Anisotropy and Cortical Thickness: Impact of Scanner Platforms.

The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project is the largest study of adolescent brain development. ABCD longitudinally tracks 11,868 participants aged 9-10 years from 21 sites using standardized protocols for multi-site MRI data collection and analysis. While the multi-site and multi-scanner study design enhances the robustness and generalizability of analysis results, it may also introduce nonbiological variances including scanner-related variations, subject motion, and deviations from protocols.

Tobacco Smoking Functional Networks: A Whole-Brain Connectome Analysis in 24,539 Individuals.

Introduction: Nicotine addiction, a multifaceted neuropsychiatric disorder, profoundly impacts brain functions through interactions with neural pathways. Despite its significance, the impact of tobacco smoking on the whole-brain functional connectome remains largely unexplored.

Methods: We conducted a whole-brain analysis on 24,539 adults aged 40 and above from the UK Biobank cohort.

Nongenetic and Genetic Factors Associated with White Matter Brain Aging: Exposome-Wide and Genome-Wide Association Study.

Background/objectives: Human brain aging is a complex process that affects various aspects of brain function and structure, increasing susceptibility to neurological and psychiatric disorders. A number of nongenetic (e.g.

N-Methyl-d-Aspartate Receptor Antibody and Sensory Gating Deficits in Non-smoking, Minimal Antipsychotic Medication Exposure, and First-Episode Patients With Schizophrenia.

Background And Hypothesis: Sensory gating deficit is considered a pathophysiological feature of schizophrenia, which has been linked to N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) hypofunction as one of the potential underlying mechanisms. Here, we hypothesize that higher levels of NMDAR antibody (Ab) may contribute to the sensory gating deficits in schizophrenia.

Study Design: We enrolled 72 non-smoking inpatients with first-episode schizophrenia (FES), most of them with only a relatively short duration of exposure to antipsychotic medications, and 51 non-smoking healthy controls (HC).

Acute toxicity and antidiabetic effect of the ethyl acetate fraction of Commelina diffusa Burm.f. on the high-fat diet and streptozotocin-induced type 2 diabetic mice.

Pharmacological studies proved that Commelina diffusa Burm.f. performs various biological activities.

Patient With a Diffuse Large B-Cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma in the Right Heart Chamber That Caused Cardiogenic Shock Was Well-Responded to Corticosteroids and Chemotherapy.

Heart tumors are sporadic. Secondary heart tumors are 30 times more common than primary ones. Depending on the location and origin of the tumor, clinical pictures vary from asymptomatic to severe manifestations such as arrhythmia, heart failure, pericardial effusion, and cardiogenic shock.

A cyclical marker system enables indefinite series of oligonucleotide-directed gene editing in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing in the model green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii relies on the use of selective marker genes to enrich for nonselectable target mutations. This becomes challenging when many sequential modifications are required in a single-cell line, as useful markers are limited. Here, we demonstrate a cyclical selection process which only requires a single marker gene to identify an almost infinite sequential series of CRISPR-based target gene modifications.

White matter and latency of visual evoked potentials during maturation: A miniature pig model of adolescent development.

Background: Continuous myelination of cerebral white matter (WM) during adolescence overlaps with the formation of higher cognitive skills and the onset of many neuropsychiatric disorders. We developed a miniature-pig model of adolescent brain development for neuroimaging and neurophysiological assessment during this critical period. Minipigs have gyroencephalic brains with a large cerebral WM compartment and a well-defined adolescence period.

Seroprevalence of anti-diphtheria toxoid antibody and implications for vaccination policy in Vietnam's South-central coast: a cross-sectional study.

Background: Diphtheria is a re-emerging infectious disease and public health concern worldwide and in Vietnam with increasing cases in recent years. This study aimed to assess the anti-diphtheria toxoid antibodies status in Khanh Hoa Province and identify factors contributing to the vaccination policy in the south-central coast of Vietnam.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional study to evaluate the seroprevalence of anti-diphtheria toxoid antibodies among 1,195 participants, aged 5 - 40 years in Khanh Hoa Province, Vietnam.

Microglial type I interferon signaling mediates chronic stress-induced synapse loss and social behavior deficits.

Inflammation and synapse loss have been associated with deficits in social behavior and are involved in pathophysiology of many neuropsychiatric disorders. Synapse loss, characterized by reduction in dendritic spines can significantly disrupt synaptic connectivity and neural circuitry underlying social behavior. Chronic stress is known to induce loss of spines and dendrites in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a brain region implicated in social behavior.

Triple-Phosphorescent Gold Nanoclusters Enabled by Isomerization of Terminal Thiouracils in the Surface Motifs.

Metal nanoclusters (NCs) hold great promise for expressing multipeak emission based on their well-defined total structure with diverse luminescent centers. Herein, we report the surface motif-dictated triple phosphorescence of Au NCs with dynamic color turning. The deprotonation-triggered isomerization of terminal thiouracils can evolve into a mutual transformation among their hierarchical motifs, thus serving a multipeak-emission expression with good tailoring.

Extracellular vesicle surface display enhances the therapeutic efficacy and safety profile of cancer immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy has emerged as a mainstay in cancer therapy, yet its efficacy is constrained by the risk of immune-related adverse events. In this study, we present a nanoparticle-based delivery system that enhances the therapeutic efficacy of immunomodulatory ligands while concurrently limiting systemic toxicity. We demonstrate that extracellular vesicles (EVs), lipid bilayer enclosed particles released by cells, can be efficiently engineered via inverse electron demand Diels-Alder (iEDDA)-mediated conjugation to display multiple immunomodulatory ligands on their surface.