Publications by authors named "Kagan D"

Aspirin (Acetylsalicylic acid, ASA), one of the widely used non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs can easily end up in sewage effluents and thus it becomes necessary to investigate the effects of aspirin on behaviour of aquatic organisms. Previous studies in mammals have shown ASA to alter fear and anxiety-like behaviours. In the great pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis, ASA has been shown to block a 'sickness state' induced by lipopolysaccharide injection which upregulates immune and stress-related genes thus altering behavioural responses.

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The need to grapple with hepatitis C-related stigma and discrimination in Australian health-care settings has been recognised in public policy, and work is underway to address it. But how likely are people to raise a complaint when they experience stigma or discrimination? And how effective and accessible are complaints mechanisms? Given complaint procedures are considered important parts of the delivery of safe and ethical health care, these are important questions that have yet to be substantially explored. Drawing on interviews with people with lived experience of hepatitis C (n = 30), this article considers how affected people feel about complaints processes and the act of complaining.

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People with (a history of) hepatitis C have concerns about privacy and the confidentiality of their health information. This is often due to the association between hepatitis C and injecting drug use and related stigma. In Australia, recent data breaches at a major private health insurer and legislative reforms to increase access to electronic health records have heightened these concerns.

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Altered protein conformation can cause incurable neurodegenerative disorders. Mutations in , the gene encoding neuroserpin, can alter protein conformation resulting in cytotoxic aggregation leading to neuronal death. Familial encephalopathy with neuroserpin inclusion bodies (FENIB) is a rare autosomal dominant progressive myoclonic epilepsy that progresses to dementia and premature death.

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The dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) is the current gold standard biomarker of the timing of the central circadian clock in humans and is often assessed from saliva samples. To date, only one commercially available salivary melatonin assay is considered accurate at the low daytime levels required to accurately detect the DLMO (Novolytix RIA RK-DSM2). The aim of this study was to conduct the first independent evaluation of a newly improved enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA; Novolytix MLTN-96) and compare it with the recommended radioimmunoassay (RIA)-both in terms of melatonin concentrations and derived DLMOs.

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Article Synopsis
  • Direct-acting antiviral treatments for hepatitis C have led to a hopeful public health push in Australia, supported by government funding for universal access to treatment.
  • Concerns about treatment costs for both governments and individuals have emerged, influencing how cured patients perceive their experiences with treatment.
  • The article explores how notions of cost affect patients' views, portraying them as less deserving of care and reinforcing inequalities in health access despite the promise of effective treatment.
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Social interactions play an important role in learning and memory. There is great variability in the literature regarding the effects of social isolation on cognition. Here, we investigated how memory formation was affected when Lymnaea stagnalis, our model system, were socially isolated at three different time periods: before, during or after the configural learning training procedure.

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Since the advent of more effective, new-generation treatment for hepatitis C, immense resources have been devoted to delivering cure to as many people with the virus as possible. The scale-up of treatment aims to prevent liver disease, liver cancer and onward transmission of hepatitis C, but social research shows that people also approach treatment with its social promises in mind, including the hope that it might reduce or eradicate stigma from their lives. Such hopes reflect broader ideas about medical cure, which is seen as an end point to illness and its effects, and capable of restoring the self to a (previous) state of health and well-being.

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The Garcia effect is a unique form of conditioned taste aversion which requires that a novel food stimulus be followed sometime later by a sickness state associated with the novel food stimulus. The long-lasting associative memory resulting from the Garcia effect ensures that organisms avoid toxic foods in their environment. Considering its ecological relevance, we sought to investigate whether a brief encounter (5 min) with a novel, appetitive food stimulus can cause a persisting long-term memory (LTM) to form that would in turn block the Garcia effect in Lymnaea stagnalis.

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Article Synopsis
  • Nutritional status affects cognitive function, but the impact of food deprivation on learning and memory is debated.
  • The study tested the effects of 1-day and 3-days of food deprivation on snails' long-term memory (LTM) after a training session.
  • Results showed that while 1-day deprivation didn't improve LTM or gene expression, 3-days of deprivation enhanced LTM and altered the expression of genes related to neuroplasticity and stress.
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Modern health-care systems have customarily approached hepatitis C in ways that resemble the public health approach to HIV/AIDS known as 'HIV exceptionalism'. HIV exceptionalism describes the unusual emphasis on privacy, confidentiality and consent in approaches to HIV and was partly developed to address HIV/AIDS-related stigma. In the case of hepatitis C, exceptionalist approaches have included diagnosis and treatment by specialist physicians and other 'boutique' public health strategies.

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Background: A hackathon framework has been successfully applied to solving health care challenges, including COVID-19, without much documented evidence of nurses' baseline or acquired confidence.

Purpose: To understand differences in baseline confidence levels in starting a new venture, startup or project in the context of nurse-led hackathons.

Method: A retrospective secondary analysis of a presurvey of hackathon participants from two NurseHack4Health (NH4H) events held in 2021.

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Nowadays, detecting anomalous communities in networks is an essential task in research, as it helps discover insights into community-structured networks. Most of the existing methods leverage either information regarding attributes of vertices or the topological structure of communities. In this study, we introduce the Co-Membership-based Generic Anomalous Communities Detection Algorithm (referred as to ), a novel and generic method that utilizes the information of vertices co-membership in multiple communities.

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MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in learning and memory formation by controlling the expression of genes through epigenetic processes. Although miRNAs unquestionably play a role in memory, past literature focusing on whether miRNAs play key roles in the consolidation of associative long-term memory in Lymnaea contained confounding variables. Using operant conditioning of aerial respiratory behaviour, we investigated long-term memory (LTM) formation after injection of poly-L-lysine (PLL), an inhibitor of Dicer-mediated miRNA biogenesis, in Lymnaea stagnalis.

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In recent years, highly tolerable and effective drugs have emerged promising a radical new 'post-hepatitis C' world. Optimism about medical cure potentially overlooks discrimination and stigma associated with hepatitis C and injecting drug use. Legal frameworks are especially relevant to hepatitis futures, since the law has the potential to reinforce or alleviate stigma and discrimination.

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Background: Although patient-reported outcomes (PROs) have become important in the evaluation of spine surgery patients, the accuracy of patient recall of pre- or post-intervention  symptoms following epidural steroid injection remains unknown.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to: 1) characterize the accuracy of patient recollection of back/leg pain following epidural steroid injection; 2) characterize the direction and magnitude of recall bias; and 3) characterize factors that impact patient recollection.

Study Design: A prospective cohort study.

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The mechanisms associated with neophobia and anhedonia remain largely unknown. Neuropsychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia are associated with excessive fear and anhedonia, and have been linked to microRNA 137. We hypothesized that microRNAs (miRNAs) in the snail Lymnaea stagnalis are important for regulating feeding behaviour through either preventing neophobia or establishing hedonic value.

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Objective: To determine the proportion of glaucoma patients in Ontario aged 25-64 who lack insurance coverage for glaucoma medications and to assess the frequency of cost-related nonadherence to glaucoma medications.

Design: Cross-sectional study.

Participants: Glaucoma patients on medication from 2 glaucoma clinics in Toronto, Ontario.

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Background: COVID-19 is the most rapidly expanding coronavirus outbreak in the past 2 decades. To provide a swift response to a novel outbreak, prior knowledge from similar outbreaks is essential.

Results: Here, we study the volume of research conducted on previous coronavirus outbreaks, specifically SARS and MERS, relative to other infectious diseases by analyzing >35 million articles from the past 20 years.

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An inbred laboratory strain (W-strain) of is capable of configural learning. Configural learning, a higher form of learning, is an association between two stimuli experienced together that is different from the simple sum of their components. In our configural learning procedure, a food odour (carrot odour, CO) is experienced together with crayfish effluent (CE) (i.

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Context: Astaxanthin has been shown to provide important health benefits, such as functioning as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, and cardioprotective agent. Astaxanthin is a lipid-soluble molecule with low oral bioavailability, which limits its therapeutic potential. The low oral bioavailability is due to dissolution limitations in the gastrointestinal fluids.

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Sacubitril/valsartan (LCZ696) is the first angiotensin receptor neprilysin inhibitor approved to reduce cardiovascular mortality and hospitalization in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. As neprilysin (NEP) is one of several enzymes known to degrade amyloid-β (Aβ), there is a theoretical risk of Aβ accumulation following long-term NEP inhibition. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the potential effects of sacubitril/valsartan on central nervous system clearance of Aβ isoforms in cynomolgus monkeys using the sensitive Stable Isotope Labeling Kinetics (SILK™)-Aβ methodology.

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