Quantitative chest computed tomography predicts mortality in systemic sclerosis: A longitudinal study.

Objective: Quantitative chest computed tomography (qCT) methods are new tools that objectively measure parenchymal abnormalities and vascular features on CT images in patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD). We aimed to investigate whether the qCT measures are predictors of 5-year mortality in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc).

Methods: Patients diagnosed with SSc were retrospectively selected from 2011 to 2022.

Variance (un)explained: Experimental conditions and temporal dependencies explain similarly small proportions of reaction time variability in linear models of perceptual and cognitive tasks.

Any series of sensorimotor actions shows fluctuations in speed and accuracy from repetition to repetition, even when the sensory input and motor output requirements remain identical over time. Such fluctuations are particularly prominent in reaction time (RT) series from laboratory neurocognitive tasks. Despite their omnipresent nature, trial-to-trial fluctuations remain poorly understood.

Safety of CoronaVac and ChAdOx1 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: data from the Brazilian multicentric study safer.

Background: Patients with immune-mediated rheumatic diseases (IMRDs) have been prioritized for COVID-19 vaccination to mitigate the infection severity risks. Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are at a high risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes, especially those under immunosuppression or with associated comorbidities. However, few studies have assessed the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine in patients with RA.

Dissociating prosodic from syntactic delta activity during natural speech comprehension.

Decoding human speech requires the brain to segment the incoming acoustic signal into meaningful linguistic units, ranging from syllables and words to phrases. Integrating these linguistic constituents into a coherent percept sets the root of compositional meaning and hence understanding. One important cue for segmentation in natural speech is prosodic cues, such as pauses, but their interplay with higher-level linguistic processing is still unknown.

Low densities of immune cells indicate unfavourable overall survival in patients suffering from squamous cell carcinoma of the lung.

Carcinogenesis and tumor proliferation are characterized by a complex interaction of cancer cells with the tumor microenvironment. In particular, a tumor-promoting effect can be assumed for the stroma and its fibroblasts. An influence of the immune system on non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is now also suspected.

Multisensory perception depends on the reliability of the type of judgment.

The brain engages the processes of multisensory integration and recalibration to deal with discrepant multisensory signals. These processes consider the reliability of each sensory input, with the more reliable modality receiving the stronger weight. Sensory reliability is typically assessed via the variability of participants' judgments, yet these can be shaped by factors both external and internal to the nervous system.

The role of sustainability integration into the corporate strategy - A perspective on analysts' perceptions and buy recommendations.

Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role in analysts' assessments of companies. Companies can address this importance through a sustainability strategy by choosing between a sustainability strategy independent from the corporate strategy (standalone sustainability strategy) or integrating sustainability into their corporate strategy (integrated strategy). For this purpose, we investigate the effects of different stages of sustainability integration into the corporate strategy on analysts' perceptions and buy recommendations.

Both stimulus-specific and configurational features of multiple visual stimuli shape the spatial ventriloquism effect.

Studies on multisensory perception often focus on simplistic conditions in which one single stimulus is presented per modality. Yet, in everyday life, we usually encounter multiple signals per modality. To understand how multiple signals within and across the senses are combined, we extended the classical audio-visual spatial ventriloquism paradigm to combine two visual stimuli with one sound.

Detection of Spatially Localized Sounds Is Robust to Saccades and Concurrent Eye Movement-Related Eardrum Oscillations (EMREOs).

Hearing is an active process, and recent studies show that even the ear is affected by cognitive states or motor actions. One example are movements of the eardrum induced by saccadic eye movements, known as "eye movement-related eardrum oscillations" (EMREOs). While these are systematically shaped by the direction and size of saccades, the consequences of saccadic eye movements and their resulting EMREOs for hearing remain unclear.

The challenge of making the right choice: patient avatars in the era of cancer immunotherapies.

Immunotherapies are a key therapeutic strategy to fight cancer. Diverse approaches are used to activate tumor-directed immunity and to overcome tumor immune escape. The dynamic interplay between tumor cells and their tumor(immune)microenvironment (T(I)ME) poses a major challenge to create appropriate model systems.

Cumulative multisensory discrepancies shape the ventriloquism aftereffect but not the ventriloquism bias.

Multisensory integration and recalibration are two processes by which perception deals with discrepant signals. Both are often studied in the spatial ventriloquism paradigm. There, integration is probed by the presentation of discrepant audio-visual stimuli, while recalibration manifests as an aftereffect in subsequent judgements of unisensory sounds.

Different time scales of common-cause evidence shape multisensory integration, recalibration and motor adaptation.

Perceptual coherence in the face of discrepant multisensory signals is achieved via the processes of multisensory integration, recalibration and sometimes motor adaptation. These supposedly operate on different time scales, with integration reducing immediate sensory discrepancies and recalibration and motor adaptation reflecting the cumulative influence of their recent history. Importantly, whether discrepant signals are bound during perception is guided by the brains' inference of whether they originate from a common cause.

Spatiotemporal GPCR signaling illuminated by genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are ligand-activated cell membrane proteins and represent the most important class of drug targets. GPCRs adopt several active conformations that stimulate different intracellular G proteins (and other transducers) and thereby modulate second messenger levels, eventually resulting in receptor-specific cell responses. It is increasingly accepted that not only the type of active signaling protein but also the duration of its stimulation and the subcellular location from where receptors signal distinctly contribute to the overall cell response.

Microparticles: potential new contributors to the pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis?

Background: Microparticles (MPs) are membrane-derived vesicles released from cells undergoing activation or apoptosis with diverse proinflammatory and prothrombotic activities, that have been implicated in the pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis (SSc). We aimed to evaluate the plasma levels of platelet-derived microparticles (PMPs), endothelial cell-derived microparticles (EMPs), and monocyte-derived microparticles (MMPs) in SSc patients, and the association between MPs and the clinical features of SSc.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 70 patients with SSc and 35 age- and sex-matched healthy controls were evaluated.

A fast data-driven method for inverse microphone array signal processing.

Microphone arrays have long been used to characterize and locate sound sources. However, existing algorithms for processing the signals are computationally expensive and, consequently, different methods need to be explored. Recently, the trained iterative soft thresholding algorithm (TISTA), a data-driven solver for inverse problems, was shown to improve on existing approaches.

Treatment of Inflammatory Arthritis in Systemic Sclerosis.

Joint involvement, including arthralgia, inflammatory arthritis, joint contractures and overlapping with rheumatoid arthritis, is a common manifestation and is associated with impared quality of life in systemic sclerosis (SSc). Few studies have evaluated the treatment of arthritis in SSc. Pharmacological approach includes low-dose corticosteroids, methotrexate, and hydroxychloroquine.

Steady state visual evoked potentials reveal a signature of the pitch-size crossmodal association in visual cortex.

Crossmodal correspondences describe our tendency to associate sensory features from different modalities with each other, such as the pitch of a sound with the size of a visual object. While such crossmodal correspondences (or associations) are described in many behavioural studies their neurophysiological correlates remain unclear. Under the current working model of multisensory perception both a low- and a high-level account seem plausible.

Vascular parameters and endothelin-1 measurements in glaucoma patients with low- and high-tension optic disc hemorrhages.

This prospective study aimed to compare vascular parameters (endothelin-1 [ET-1] blood levels, laser Doppler imaging [LDI] of distal phalanxes, and nailfold capillaroscopy) between open-angle glaucoma patients with low- and high-tension optic disc hemorrhages (LTDH and HTDH, respectively). The 33 enrolled patients (mean age, 62.3 ± 13 years) were classified as LTDH or HTDH if they presented at the time of DH detection an intraocular pressure (IOP) < 16 mmHg or ≥ 16 mmHg, respectively.

Short-term effects of visuomotor discrepancies on multisensory integration, proprioceptive recalibration, and motor adaptation.

Information about the position of our hand is provided by multisensory signals that are often not perfectly aligned. Discrepancies between the seen and felt hand position or its movement trajectory engage the processes of ) multisensory integration, ) sensory recalibration, and ) motor adaptation, which adjust perception and behavioral responses to apparently discrepant signals. To foster our understanding of the coemergence of these three processes, we probed their short-term dependence on multisensory discrepancies in a visuomotor task that has served as a model for multisensory perception and motor control previously.

The roles of nucleoid-associated proteins and topoisomerases in chromosome structure, strand segregation, and the generation of phenotypic heterogeneity in bacteria.

How to adapt to a changing environment is a fundamental, recurrent problem confronting cells. One solution is for cells to organize their constituents into a limited number of spatially extended, functionally relevant, macromolecular assemblies or hyperstructures, and then to segregate these hyperstructures asymmetrically into daughter cells. This asymmetric segregation becomes a particularly powerful way of generating a coherent phenotypic diversity when the segregation of certain hyperstructures is with only one of the parental DNA strands and when this pattern of segregation continues over successive generations.

Peripheral Microvascular Abnormalities Associated with Open-Angle Glaucoma.

Purpose: To investigate peripheral microvascular abnormalities associated with patients with open-angle glaucoma (OAG).

Design: This was a cross-sectional study.

Participants: Patients with OAG and controls.

The rubber hand illusion is accompanied by a distributed reduction of alpha and beta power in the EEG.

Previous studies have reported correlates of bodily self-illusions such as the rubber hand in signatures of rhythmic brain activity. However, individual studies focused on specific variations of the rubber hand paradigm, used different experimental setups to induce this, or used different control conditions to isolate the neurophysiological signatures related to the illusory state, leaving the specificity of the reported illusion-signatures unclear. We here quantified correlates of the rubber hand illusion in EEG-derived oscillatory brain activity and asked two questions: which of the observed correlates are robust to the precise nature of the control conditions used as contrast for the illusory state, and whether such correlates emerge directly around the subjective illusion onset.