Publications by authors named "Kain A"

This article examines the need for reform in medical school admissions to better align with the collaborative and patient-centered nature of contemporary healthcare. Traditional admissions processes prioritize academic excellence, often neglecting essential interpersonal and team-based skills. We advocate for several strategies to address this gap.

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Health-related internet use presents both opportunities and challenges for patients and physicians and requires a comprehensive understanding to improve individual health care in atopic dermatitis (AD). To explore differences between regular and irregular disease-related internet users, reasons for disease-related internet use, and its relevance to the patient-physician relationship in AD. This cross-sectional study recruited 221 adults with AD online and from a German university clinic between August 2021 and February 2022.

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Hearing-impaired (HI) listeners have been shown to exhibit increased fusion of dichotic vowels, even with different fundamental frequency (F0), leading to binaural spectral averaging and interference. To determine if similar fusion and averaging occurs for consonants, four natural and synthesized stop consonants (/pa/, /ba/, /ka/, /ga/) at three F0s of 74, 106, and 185 Hz were presented dichotically-with ΔF0 varied-to normal-hearing (NH) and HI listeners. Listeners identified the one or two consonants perceived, and response options included /ta/ and /da/ as fused percepts.

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Background: Herpes zoster (HZ) and its complication postherpetic neuralgia (PHN), whose incidence are both expected to increase with an ageing population, have demonstrated high costs on healthcare systems and burden on individual quality of life. Previous studies have shown the possibility of assessing public interest in a disease and factors that influence search behaviour using internet search data. The aim of this study was to analyze internet search data for HZ in Germany to evaluate public interest in the disease and relevant influential temporal and geographic factors that modify search behavior.

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Background: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways and one of the most important non-communicable diseases worldwide. Analyzing crowdsourced data can help understand public interest and unmet needs as well as potential factors influencing search behavior.

Objective: The study aimed to investigate asthma-related web search data in Europe to identify possible regional and seasonal variations and to assess public interest.

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A wealth of evidence indicates that humans can engage two types of mechanisms to solve category-learning tasks: declarative mechanisms, which involve forming and testing verbalizable decision rules, and associative mechanisms, which involve gradually linking stimuli to appropriate behavioral responses. In contrast to declarative mechanisms, associative mechanisms have received surprisingly little attention in the broader category-learning literature. Although various forms of associatively driven artificial intelligence (AI) have matched-and even surpassed-humans' performance on several challenging problems, associative learning is routinely dismissed as being too simple to power the impressive cognitive achievements of both humans and non-human species.

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Alopecia areata is a common skin disease which is associated with psychosocial and financial burden. No curative therapy exists and, hence, affected persons resort to self-financed cosmetic solutions. However, studies on the economic impact of alopecia areata on individuals are limited.

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Background: Tinea capitis and tinea corporis are highly prevalent fungal skin infections, which globally are mainly caused by Microsporum canis and Trichophyton rubrum, respectively. While in the United States and Great Britain Trichophyton tonsurans is widely prevalent as a causative pathogen, it so far only plays a minor role in Germany.

Objectives: Since the frequency of pathogenic species varies regionally and temporally, this study assesses the proportion of Trichophyton tonsurans infections in the dermatology department of a large university hospital in Germany from 2019 to 2022 and thoroughly characterises the affected patient population.

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Purpose: This study investigated the effects of three clear speech variants on sentence intelligibility and speaking effort for speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and age- and sex-matched neurologically healthy controls.

Method: Fourteen speakers with PD and 14 neurologically healthy speakers participated. Each speaker was recorded reading 18 sentences from the Speech Intelligibility Test in their habitual speaking style and for three clear speech variants: clear (SC; given instructions to speak clearly), hearing impaired (HI; given instructions to speak with someone with a hearing impairment), and overenunciate (OE; given instructions to overenunciate each word).

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Objective: The impact of laryngeal dysfunction on airflow has not been well characterized in motor neuron disease (MND). This study aimed to detect and characterize extreme airflow oscillations informally observed during volitional cough and forced vital capacity (FVC) tasks in individuals with MND who demonstrated neurolaryngeal impairments including reduced speed and extent of vocal fold abduction compared to healthy controls during volitional cough expulsion. The extreme airflow oscillations in the MND group, when viewed as a flow-volume loop, appeared similar to the "sawtooth-sign.

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Purpose: Scabies is a World Health Organization-defined neglected tropical disease and a growing public health issue worldwide. It is difficult to obtain reliable data on prevalence due to the lack of standardized tests. The aim of this study was to assess scabies online search behavior in Germany to identify local differences using Google search volume.

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Article Synopsis
  • SARS-CoV-2 enters human cells by the Spike protein attaching to the ACE2 receptor, prompting researchers to use a targeted CRISPRi screen to explore ways to block this interaction.
  • The study identifies the BRD2 protein as crucial for the transcription of ACE2 in lung and heart cells, with BRD2 inhibitors being effective at hindering ACE2 expression and preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection.
  • Furthermore, the inhibition of BRD2 not only stops virus replication in Syrian hamsters but also impacts the transcription of other genes involved in the immune response, marking BRD2 as a significant target for COVID-19 therapies.
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Objective: Reading a passage out loud is a commonly used task in the perceptual assessment of dysarthria. The extent to which perceptual characteristics remain unchanged or stable over the time course of a passage is largely unknown. This study investigated crowdsourced visual analogue scale (VAS) judgments of intelligibility across a reading passage as a function of cued speaking styles commonly used in treatment to maximize intelligibility.

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Purpose This exploratory study sought to identify acoustic variables explaining rate-related variation in intelligibility for speakers with dysarthria secondary to multiple sclerosis. Method Seven speakers with dysarthria due to multiple sclerosis produced the same set of Harvard sentences at habitual and slow rates. Speakers were selected from a larger corpus on the basis of rate-related intelligibility characteristics.

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Speech sound disorders affect 10% of preschool and school-age children, adversely affecting their communication, academic performance, and interaction level. Effective pronunciation training requires prolonged supervised practice and interaction. Unfortunately, many children have limited or no access to a speech-language pathologist.

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Background: Mindset, or one's beliefs about the ability to change one's outcomes, has been studied in the educational domain but not in surgical settings. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of parental health mindset on children's recovery.

Methods: Participants were part of a larger National Institutes of Health-funded trial that included 1470 children undergoing outpatient tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy.

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Background: This investigation aimed to examine the impact of parental psychosocial variables on the administration of opioids to young children experiencing postoperative pain.

Methods: Participants in this longitudinal analysis were children ages 2-12 undergoing tonsillectomy with or without adenoidectomy and their parents. Parents completed validated instruments assessing trait anxiety, perceived stress, and coping style before surgery, and children and parents completed instruments assessing pain and administration of opioids and acetaminophen on days 1, 2, 3, and 7 at home after surgery.

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Objectives: Cancer-related pain in children is prevalent and undermanaged. Mobile health (mHealth) applications provide a promising avenue to address the gap in pain management in children with cancer. Pain Buddy is a multicomponent mHealth application developed to manage cancer-related pain in children.

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Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems aim to help a child learn the correct pronunciations of words. However, while there are many online commercial CAPT apps, there is no consensus among Speech Language Therapists (SLPs) or non-professionals about which CAPT systems, if any, work well. The prevailing assumption is that practicing with such programs is less reliable and thus does not provide the feedback necessary to allow children to improve their performance.

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Aim: Fundoplication is required for children with chronic recurrent gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The aim of this study was to report parental perceptions of symptoms and overall satisfaction with the long-term course following fundoplication with special reference to patients with GERD risk factors.

Methods: We studied 34 patients, with a median age of 6.

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Phonological disorders affect 10% of preschool and school-age children, adversely affecting their communication, academic performance, and interaction level. Effective pronunciation training requires prolonged supervised practice and interaction. Unfortunately, many children do not have access or only limited access to a speech-language pathologist.

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Previous studies have shown that "clear" speech, where the speaker intentionally tries to enunciate, has better intelligibility than "conversational" speech, which is produced in regular conversation. However, conversational and clear speech vary along a number of acoustic dimensions and it is unclear what aspects of clear speech lead to better intelligibility. Previously, Kain et al.

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