Evaluation of the upper airway microbiome and immune response with nasal epithelial lining fluid absorption and nasal washes.

Despite being commonly used to collect upper airway epithelial lining fluid, nasal washes are poorly reproducible, not suitable for serial sampling, and limited by a dilution effect. In contrast, nasal filters lack these limitations and are an attractive alternative. To examine whether nasal filters are superior to nasal washes as a sampling method for the characterization of the upper airway microbiome and immune response, we collected paired nasal filters and washes from a group of 40 healthy children and adults.

Delineation of the Individual Effects of Vitamin E Isoforms on Early Life Incident Wheezing.

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that maternal plasma alpha-tocopherol levels are associated with protection from childhood wheeze and that this protection is modified by gamma-tocopherol.

Study Design: We conducted a prospective nested study in the Infant Susceptibility to Pulmonary Infections and Asthma Following Respiratory Syncytial Virus Exposure birth cohort of 652 children with postpartum maternal plasma vitamin E isoforms used as a surrogate for pregnancy concentrations. Our outcomes were wheezing and recurrent wheezing over a 2-year period, ascertained using validated questionnaires.

Designing Decision-Support Technologies for Patient-Generated Data in Type 1 Diabetes.

People living with type 1 diabetes generate data as a byproduct of diabetes management. The development of decision support technologies can be enabled by harnessing these patient-generated data, but a major challenge is for these technologies to provide meaningful and highly personalized guidance to support individual patients' decision-making processes. In this paper, results from a year-long qualitative study were reported.

Leveraging Social Media to Promote Public Health Knowledge: Example of Cancer Awareness via Twitter.

Background: As social media becomes increasingly popular online venues for engaging in communication about public health issues, it is important to understand how users promote knowledge and awareness about specific topics.

Objective: The aim of this study is to examine the frequency of discussion and differences by race and ethnicity of cancer-related topics among unique users via Twitter.

Methods: Tweets were collected from April 1, 2014 through January 21, 2015 using the Twitter public streaming Application Programming Interface (API) to collect 1% of public tweets.

A systematic evaluation of websites offering information on chronic kidney disease.

In this study, we described the content and characteristics of 40 non-proprietary websites offering information about chronic kidney disease (CKD) and evaluated their information quality using the DISCERN scale and readability using Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level. The areas in which the websites scored the lowest on the DISCERN scale were whether the website discussed knowledge gaps, presented balanced information, and was clear about the information source. Websites that rated higher quality on the DISCERN scale were more difficult to read.

"I want your kidney!" Information seeking, sharing, and disclosure when soliciting a kidney donor online.

Objective: This study investigates how people use the Internet to search for an altruistic kidney donor. Although many opinion pieces on this phenomenon have been written, this is the first qualitative study focused on online kidney solicitation from the potential recipient's point of view.

Methods: Eight participants - four who successfully found donors and four who were still searching - were interviewed, and inductive content analysis was performed.

Exosome secretion is enhanced by invadopodia and drives invasive behavior.

Unconventional secretion of exosome vesicles from multivesicular endosomes (MVEs) occurs across a broad set of systems and is reported to be upregulated in cancer, where it promotes aggressive behavior. However, regulatory control of exosome secretion is poorly understood. Using cancer cells, we identified specialized invasive actin structures called invadopodia as specific and critical docking and secretion sites for CD63- and Rab27a-positive MVEs.

Network analysis of the focal adhesion to invadopodia transition identifies a PI3K-PKCα invasive signaling axis.

In cancer, deregulated signaling can produce an invasive cellular phenotype. We modeled the invasive transition as a theoretical switch between two cytoskeletal structures: focal adhesions and extracellular matrix-degrading invadopodia. We constructed molecular interaction networks of each structure and identified upstream regulatory hubs through computational analyses.