Relating normal human cardiac development to the anatomical findings in the congenitally malformed heart.

A proper appreciation of cardiac development can now provide the necessary background to understand the anatomical findings in the congenitally malformed heart. We recently presented an account of human cardiac development based on reconstructions of histological datasets from human embryos aged between 3.5 and 8 weeks subsequent to conception.

Cardiac development demystified by use of the HDBR atlas.

Much has been learned over the last half century regarding the molecular and genetic changes that take place during cardiac development. As yet, however, these advances have not been translated into knowledge regarding the marked changes that take place in the anatomical arrangements of the different cardiac components. As such, therefore, many aspects of cardiac development are still described on the basis of speculation rather than evidence.

Spatial transcriptomics reveals novel genes during the remodelling of the embryonic human arterial valves.

Abnormalities of the arterial valves, including bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) are amongst the most common congenital defects and are a significant cause of morbidity as well as predisposition to disease in later life. Despite this, and compounded by their small size and relative inaccessibility, there is still much to understand about how the arterial valves form and remodel during embryogenesis, both at the morphological and genetic level. Here we set out to address this in human embryos, using Spatial Transcriptomics (ST).

Development of the arterial roots and ventricular outflow tracts.

The separation of the outflow tract of the developing heart into the systemic and pulmonary arterial channels remains controversial and poorly understood. The definitive outflow tracts have three components. The developing outflow tract, in contrast, has usually been described in two parts.

Insect collecting bias in Arizona with a preliminary checklist of the beetles from the Sand Tank Mountains.

Background: The State of Arizona in the south-western United States supports a high diversity of insects. Digitised occurrence records, especially from preserved specimens in natural history collections, are an important and growing resource to understand biodiversity and biogeography. Underlying bias in how insects are collected and what that means for interpreting patterns of insect diversity is largely untested.

Hospice Nurse Ethics and Institutional Policies Toward Medical Aid in Dying.

A significant number of hospices in U.S. jurisdictions where medical aid in dying is legal have implemented policies that require nurses to leave the room when a patient ingests aid-in-dying medication.

Interpersonal early adversity demonstrates dissimilarity from early socioeconomic disadvantage in the course of human brain development: A meta-analysis.

It has been established that early-life adversity impacts brain development, but the role of development itself has largely been ignored. We take a developmentally-sensitive approach to examine the neurodevelopmental sequelae of early adversity in a preregistered meta-analysis of 27,234 youth (birth to 18-years-old), providing the largest group of adversity-exposed youth to date. Findings demonstrate that early-life adversity does not have an ontogenetically uniform impact on brain volumes, but instead exhibits age-, experience-, and region-specific associations.

Interpersonal early adversity demonstrates dissimilarity from early socioeconomic disadvantage in the course of human brain development: A meta-analysis.

It has been established that early-life adversity impacts brain development, but the role of development itself has largely been ignored. We take a developmentally-sensitive approach to examine the neurodevelopmental sequelae of early adversity in a preregistered meta-analysis of 27,234 youth (birth to 18-years-old), providing the largest group of adversity-exposed youth to date. Findings demonstrate that early-life adversity does not have an ontogenetically uniform impact on brain volumes, but instead exhibits age-, experience-, and region-specific associations.

Impact of supportive housing health homes program on medicaid utilization for persons diagnosed with HIV (PDWH).

Unstable housing among persons diagnosed with HIV (PDWH) has been consistently linked to poor HIV-related care engagement. We examined the relationship between enrollment in a supportive housing program and health care utilization (use of outpatient services, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospitalizations) for a group of unstably housed, Medicaid and Health Homes (HH)-enrolled PDWH in New York State. We analyzed monthly longitudinal data consisting of linked supportive housing data, HH data, and Medicaid claims from New York State (excluding New York City) between 2012 and 2017 using time series models.

How Important Is Temptation Spending? Maybe Less than We Thought.

Temptation plays a key role in theoretical work on spending and saving in developing countries. The limited empirical evidence on its importance, however, suggests that cash transfers do not induce increases in temptation spending. This paper expands the evidence base by studying the effect of randomized exposure to temptation on spending decisions in rural Malawi.

Sulcal Cavitation in Linear Head Acceleration: Possible Correlation With Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a significant public health and financial concern that is affecting tens of thousands of people in the United States annually. There were over a million hospital visits related to TBI in 2017. Along with immediate and short-term morbidity from TBI, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) can have life-altering, chronic morbidity, yet the direct linkage of how head impacts lead to this pathology remains unknown.

Tyramide signal amplification coupled with multiple immunolabeling and RNAScope in situ hybridization in formaldehyde-fixed paraffin-embedded human fetal brain.

Several strategies have been recently introduced to improve the practicality of multiple immunolabeling and RNA in situ hybridization protocols. Tyramide signal amplification (TSA) is a powerful method used to improve the detection sensitivity of immunohistochemistry. RNAScope is a novel commercially available in situ hybridization assay for the detection of RNA expression.

Exploring the design space of AAV transient-transfection in suspension cell lines.

The safety and utility of adeno-associated virus (AAV) to modulate target gene expression has been well demonstrated, and AAV vectors are a leading gene therapy platform. However, manufacturing presents challenges in terms of productivity and scalability as compared to incumbent therapeutic modalities. In particular, a pivot from adherent cell- to suspension culture-based AAV manufacturing processes requires enhanced study of the transfection step.

Health knowledge and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa.

Providing health information is a non-pharmaceutical intervention designed to reduce disease transmission and infection risk by encouraging behavior change. But does knowledge change behavior? We test whether coronavirus health knowledge promotes protective risk mitigation behaviors early in the Covid-19 pandemic in samples from four African countries (Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania). Despite reputations for weak health sectors and low average levels of education, health knowledge of the symptoms and transmission mechanisms was high in all countries in the two months after the virus entered the country.

Localizing Clinical Patterns of Blast Traumatic Brain Injury Through Computational Modeling and Simulation.

Blast traumatic brain injury is ubiquitous in modern military conflict with significant morbidity and mortality. Yet the mechanism by which blast overpressure waves cause specific intracranial injury in humans remains unclear. Reviewing of both the clinical experience of neurointensivists and neurosurgeons who treated service members exposed to blast have revealed a pattern of injury to cerebral blood vessels, manifested as subarachnoid hemorrhage, pseudoaneurysm, and early diffuse cerebral edema.

You Know What I Know: Interviewer Knowledge Effects in Subjective Expectation Elicitation.

Directly eliciting individuals' subjective beliefs via surveys is increasingly popular in social science research, but doing so via face-to-face surveys has an important downside: the interviewer's knowledge of the topic may spill over onto the respondent's recorded beliefs. Using a randomized experiment that used interviewers to implement an information treatment, we show that reported beliefs are significantly shifted by interviewer knowledge. Trained interviewers primed respondents to use the exact numbers used in the training, nudging them away from higher answers; recorded responses decreased by about 0.

A natural language processing approach for identifying temporal disease onset information from mental healthcare text.

Receiving timely and appropriate treatment is crucial for better health outcomes, and research on the contribution of specific variables is essential. In the mental health domain, an important research variable is the date of psychosis symptom onset, as longer delays in treatment are associated with worse intervention outcomes. The growing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) within mental health services provides an invaluable opportunity to study this problem at scale retrospectively.

Replication Study: A coding-independent function of gene and pseudogene mRNAs regulates tumour biology.

As part of the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology we published a Registered Report (Khan et al., 2015), that described how we intended to replicate selected experiments from the paper "A coding-independent function of gene and pseudogene mRNAs regulates tumour biology" (Poliseno et al., 2010).

Materials Characterization of Cranial Simulants for Blast-Induced Traumatic Brain Injury.

Introduction: The mechanical response of brain tissue to high-speed forces in the blast and blunt traumatic brain injury is poorly understood. Object-to-object variation and interspecies differences are current limitations in animal and cadaver studies conducted to study damage mechanisms. Biofidelic and transparent tissue simulants allow the use of high-speed optical diagnostics during a blast event, making it possible to observe deformations and damage patterns for comparison to observed injuries seen post-mortem in traumatic brain injury victims.

Green Infrastructure Design Influences Communities of Urban Soil Bacteria.

The importance of natural ecosystem processes is often overlooked in urban areas. Green Infrastructure (GI) features have been constructed in urban areas as elements to capture and treat excess urban runoff while providing a range of ancillary benefits, e.g.

Engineering safer care coordination from hospital to home: lessons from the USA.

The safe transition of a patient from hospital into the community requires effective coordination between healthcare professionals across organisational boundaries. Preventing transition-associated failures can be especially challenging when multiple disciplines are involved and the patient has extensive care needs. The field of systems engineering is increasingly recognised as useful to help understand, improve and redesign such complex healthcare processes to improve patient experience and outcomes.

Income Timing and Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment.

People in developing countries sometimes desire deferred income streams, which replace more-frequent income flows with a single, later lump sum. We study the effects of short-term wage deferral using a randomized experiment with participants in a temporary cash-for-work program. Workers who are assigned to lump-sum payments are five percentage points more likely to purchase a high-return investment.

Molecular testing of adult Pacific salmon and trout (Oncorhynchus spp.) for several RNA viruses demonstrates widespread distribution of piscine orthoreovirus in Alaska and Washington.

This research was initiated in conjunction with a systematic, multiagency surveillance effort in the United States (U.S.) in response to reported findings of infectious salmon anaemia virus (ISAV) RNA in British Columbia, Canada.