Current clinical treatment strategies for the bypassing of small diameter (<6 mm) blood vessels in the management of cardiovascular disease frequently fail due to a lack of suitable autologous grafts, as well as infection, thrombosis, and intimal hyperplasia associated with synthetic grafts. The rapid advancement of 3D printing and regenerative medicine technologies enabling the manufacture of biological, tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVGs) with the ability to integrate, remodel, and repair in vivo, promises a paradigm shift in cardiovascular disease management. This review comprehensively covers current state-of-the-art biofabrication technologies for the development of biomimetic TEVGs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
November 2021
Healthcare professionals' exposure to work-family conflict negatively affects the health and well-being of the whole family and organizational outcomes. Specified workplace interventions are lacking. Therefore, the aim of the study was to evaluate the feasibility of a two-day group-treatment specifically designed for the needs of healthcare professionals with family responsibilities concerning participation, satisfaction with the intervention and family- and individual-related outcome variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFControlling the length of one-dimensional (1D) polymer nanostructures remains a key challenge on the way toward the applications of these structures. Here, we demonstrate that top-down processing facilitates a straightforward adjustment of the length of polyethylene oxide (PEO)-based supramolecular polymer bottlebrushes (SPBs) in aqueous solutions. These cylindrical structures self-assemble via directional hydrogen bonds formed by benzenetrisurea (BTU) or benzenetrispeptide (BTP) motifs located within the hydrophobic core of the fiber.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: In the Phase III COV-BARRIER (Efficacy and Safety of Baricitinib for the Treatment of Hospitalised Adults With COVID-19) trial, treatment with baricitinib, an oral selective Janus kinase 1/2 inhibitor, in addition to standard of care (SOC), was associated with significantly reduced mortality over 28 days in hospitalized patients with coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), with a safety profile similar to that of SOC alone. This study assessed the cost-effectiveness of baricitinib + SOC versus SOC alone (which included systemic corticosteroids and remdesivir) in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in the United States.
Methods: An economic model was developed to simulate inpatients' stay, discharge to postacute care, and recovery.
Nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) is a critical transcription factor involved in regulating cell activation, inflammation, and survival. The linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex (LUBAC) which consists of HOIL1, HOIP, and SHARPIN, catalyzes the linear ubiquitination of target proteins-a post-translational modification that is essential for NF-κB activation. Human germline pathogenic variants that dysregulate linear ubiquitination and NF-κB signaling are associated with immunodeficiency and/or autoinflammation including dermatitis, recurrent fevers, systemic inflammation and enteropathy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe typically slow down after committing an error, an effect termed post-error slowing (PES). Traditionally, PES has been calculated by subtracting post-correct from post-error RTs. Dutilh et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Foot dimension information is important both for footwear design and clinical applications. In recent years, noncontact three-dimensional (3-D) foot digitizers/scanners have become popular because they are noninvasive and are valid and reliable for most of the measures. Some of them also offer automated calculations of basic foot dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParamyxoviruses, negative-sense single-stranded RNA viruses, pose a critical threat to human public health. Currently, 78 species, 17 genera, and 4 subfamilies of paramyxoviruses are harbored by multiple natural reservoirs, including rodents, bats, birds, reptiles, and fish. Henipaviruses are critical zoonotic pathogens that cause severe acute respiratory distress and neurological diseases in humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenes involved in distinct diabetes types suggest shared disease mechanisms. Here we show that One Cut Homeobox 1 (ONECUT1) mutations cause monogenic recessive syndromic diabetes in two unrelated patients, characterized by intrauterine growth retardation, pancreas hypoplasia and gallbladder agenesis/hypoplasia, and early-onset diabetes in heterozygous relatives. Heterozygous carriers of rare coding variants of ONECUT1 define a distinctive subgroup of diabetic patients with early-onset, nonautoimmune diabetes, who respond well to diabetes treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) continues to rise, the question of how tree carbon (C) allocation is affected by this change remains. Studies show that C assimilation increases under elevated CO2 (eCO2). Yet, no detailed study has determined the fate of the surplus C, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTick-borne pathogens are contributing factors for the increased incidence of vector-borne diseases throughout the world, including Lyme borreliosis, one of the most prevalent spirochetes belonging to the Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato group. The present study focused on the detection of Borrelia species from hard ticks collected at U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman malignant hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) reside in bone marrow (BM) niches, which remain challenging to explore due to limited in vivo accessibility and constraints with humanized animal models. Several in vitro systems have been established to culture patient-derived HSPCs in specific microenvironments, but they do not fully recapitulate the complex features of native bone marrow. Our group previously reported that human osteoblastic BM niches (O-N), engineered by culturing mesenchymal stromal cells within three-dimensional (3D) porous scaffolds under perfusion flow in a bioreactor system, are capable of maintaining, expanding, and functionally regulating healthy human cord blood-derived HSPCs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The Pediatric Emergency Ruler (PaedER) is a height-based drug dose recommendation tool that was reported to reduce life-threatening medication errors by 90%. The PaedER was introduced into the Cologne Emergency Medical Service (EMS) in 2008 along with educational measures, publications, and lectures for pediatric drug safety. We reviewed the impact of these continuously ongoing measures on medication errors after 10 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTicks are vectors of a wide range of zoonotic viruses of medical and veterinary importance. Recently, metagenomics studies demonstrated that they are also the source of potentially pathogenic novel viruses. During the period from 2015 to 2017, questing ticks were collected by dragging the vegetation from geographically distant locations in the Republic of Korea (ROK) and a target-independent high-throughput sequencing method was utilized to study their virome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding how health care utilization responds to cost-sharing is of central importance for providing high quality care and limiting the growth of costs. We study whether the framing of cost-sharing incentives has an effect on health care utilization. For this we make use of a policy change in the Netherlands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 32-year-old man presented with painless macrohaematuria. An endoscopic stone removal of the upper moiety of a left double kidney with ureter duplex was performed 4 years ago. The inserted ureteral catheter (DJ) was not removed although it was communicated to the patient and written in the discharge report.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Vasc Surg Venous Lymphat Disord
January 2022
Background: Chronic venous disease is a frequent vascular condition. International societies have recommended the use of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) instruments in the assessment of patients with vascular diseases. Thus, the Freiburg Life Quality Assessment for chronic venous disease, 10-item questionnaire (FLQA-VS-10) was developed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDesign criteria for tissue-engineered materials in regenerative medicine include robust biological effectiveness, off-the-shelf availability, and scalable manufacturing under standardized conditions. For bone repair, existing strategies rely on primary autologous cells, associated with unpredictable performance, limited availability and complex logistic. Here, a conceptual shift based on the manufacturing of devitalized human hypertrophic cartilage (HyC), as cell-free material inducing bone formation by recapitulating the developmental process of endochondral ossification, is reported.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Microbiol
August 2021
Hospital-built environment colonization by healthcare-associated infections-related bacteria (HAIrB) and the interaction with their occupants have been studied to support more effective tools for HAI control. To investigate HAIrB dynamics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) profile we carried out a 6-month surveillance program in a developing country public hospital, targeting patients, hospital environment, and healthcare workers, using culture-dependent and culture-independent 16S rRNA gene sequencing methods. The bacterial abundance in both approaches shows that the HAIrB group has important representativeness, with the taxa Enterobacteriaceae, , , , and widely dispersed and abundant over the time at the five different hospital units included in the survey.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCannabis Cannabinoid Res
October 2022
Nurse practitioners (NPs) are authorizing providers for medical cannabis in many states, and may serve as a primary care clinician. We report findings from a nationally distributed 2-h continuing education (CE) module aimed to improve knowledge, confidence, and willingness to communicate with patients about cannabis. Data were electronically obtained from the CE platform pre- and post-test (=289) and a follow-up survey sent within 3 months postcompletion (=184, 63%).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging viruses have shown that timely detection of novel arboviruses with epidemic potential is essential to mitigate human health risks. There are rising concerns that emergent JEV genotype V (GV) is circulating in Asia, against which current vaccines may not be efficacious. To ascertain if JEV GV and other arboviruses are circulating in East Asia, we conducted next-generation sequencing on 260 pools of Culex tritaeniorhynchus and Culex bitaeniorhynchus mosquitoes (6540 specimens) collected at Camp Humphreys, Republic of Korea (ROK) in 2018.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase (PharmGKB) is an integrated online knowledge resource for the understanding of how genetic variation contributes to variation in drug response. Our focus includes not only pharmacogenomic information useful for clinical implementation (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNail involvement is frequent in people with psoriasis. It can considerably impair health-related quality of life (HRQoL) beyond the impairments due to other psoriasis symptoms, for example, because patients feel ashamed of visible nail defects or because of the functional impairment in manual activities and walking. In clinical trials on nail psoriasis, it is therefore crucial to assess whether the treatment reduces HRQoL impairments that are specific to nail psoriasis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Plasmodium vivax is transmitted by members of the Anopheles Hyrcanus Group that includes six species in the Republic of Korea: Anopheles sinensis sensu stricto (s.s.), Anopheles pullus, Anopheles kleini, Anopheles belenrae, Anopheles lesteri, and Anopheles sineroides.
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