JAMA Netw Open
December 2024
Importance: Young Black women bear a disproportionate burden of breast cancer deaths compared with White women, yet they remain underrepresented in genomic studies.
Objective: To evaluate the association of biological factors, including West African genetic ancestry, and nonbiological factors with disease-free survival (DFS) among young Black women with breast cancer.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This observational cohort study included Black women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer between January 1, 2005, and December 31, 2016.
Background: Understanding underlying mechanisms of heterogeneity in test-seeking and reporting behaviour during an infectious disease outbreak can help to protect vulnerable populations and guide equity-driven interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic probably exerted different stresses on individuals in different sociodemographic groups and ensuring fair access to and usage of COVID-19 tests was a crucial element of England's testing programme. We aimed to investigate the relationship between sociodemographic factors and COVID-19 testing behaviours in England during the COVID-19 pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: Successful acute migraine treatment potentially prevents emergency room (ER) consultations but requires that the diagnosis of migraine was given earlier. The aim of this study is to quantify the problem of missed migraine diagnosis prior to ER visits.
Methods: Inclusion criterion for this single-center prospective study was the presentation at the ER for acute headache.
Obesity is an established risk factor for breast cancer development and worsened prognosis; however, the mechanisms for this association - and the potential benefits of weight loss - have not been fully explored. The adipose environment surrounding breast tumors, which is inflamed in obesity, has been implicated in tumor progression. An emerging therapeutic target for cancer is TREM2, a transmembrane receptor of the immunoglobulin superfamily that is expressed on macrophages in adipose tissue and tumors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The aim of this study is to prospectively evaluate whether women with copper-containing intrauterine devices (Cu-IUD), currently listed as MR conditional, can safely undergo 3.0 Tesla (3 T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Methods: 73 women, age 18-54 years old, with a Cu-IUD who were undergoing MRI for any reason were included consecutively.
Many medicinal products are initially developed and tested in adults, and often, only a limited amount of data on their safety and efficacy in children exist. Consequently, paediatric healthcare providers sometimes need to make informed decisions about using medicinal products in children based on available fragmentary data. Ethical guidelines emphasise the importance of protecting children and ensuring they receive safe and effective medical treatments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Combinations of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI, including anti-PD-1/PD-L1) and chemotherapy have been FDA approved for metastatic and early-stage triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), but most patients do not benefit. B7-H4 is a B7 family ligand with proposed immunosuppressive functions being explored as a cancer immunotherapy target and may be associated with anti-PD-L1 resistance. However, little is known about its regulation and effect on immune cell function in breast cancers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh frequency oscillations are important novel biomarkers of epileptogenic tissue. The interaction of oscillations across different time scales is revealed as cross-frequency coupling (CFC) representing a high-order structure in the functional organization of brain rhythms. New artificial intelligence methods such as deep learning neural networks can provide powerful tools for automated analysis of EEG.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Clinical examination alone cannot reliably rule out significant traumatic abdominal injury. Computed tomography (CT) has become the primary method for evaluating blunt abdominal trauma and clinicians rely heavily on it to rule out abdominal injury. Ultrasound examination may miss significant abdominal injury particularly in stable patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF"Children are not small adults with respect to the treatment with medicinal products." This statement of the WHO was the basis for the initiative of the European Commission for the establishment of a paediatric regulation in 2007 to improve the health of children by facilitating the development of medicines for children and adolescents. Seventeen years later, in the field of herbal medicinal products, results are still sobering.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Agents targeting programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) have demonstrated efficacy in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) when combined with chemotherapy and are now the standard of care in patients with PD-L1-positive metastatic disease. In contrast to microtubule-targeting agents, the effect of combining platinum compounds with programmed cell death 1 (PD-1)/PD-L1 immunotherapy has not been extensively determined.
Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of atezolizumab with carboplatin in patients with metastatic TNBC.
Am J Respir Crit Care Med
January 2024
Multiciliated cell (MCC) loss and/or dysfunction is common in the small airways of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but it is unclear if this contributes to COPD lung pathology. To determine if loss of p73 causes a COPD-like phenotype in mice and explore whether smoking or COPD impact p73 expression. p73 mice were crossed with Shh-Cre mice to generate mice lacking MCCs in the airway epithelium.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenomic and transcriptomic analysis has furthered our understanding of many tumors. Yet, thyroid cancer management is largely guided by staging and histology, with few molecular prognostic and treatment biomarkers. Here, we utilize a large cohort of 251 patients with 312 samples from two tertiary medical centers and perform DNA/RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and multiplex immunofluorescence to identify biomarkers of aggressive thyroid malignancy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Despite the success of immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) in treating cancer, patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) often develop resistance to therapy, and the underlying mechanisms are unclear. MHC-I expression is essential for antigen presentation and T-cell-directed immunotherapy responses. This study demonstrates that TNBC patients display intratumor heterogeneity in regional MHC-I expression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolygenic scores (PGSs) are individual-level measures that aggregate the genome-wide genetic predisposition to a given trait. As PGS have predominantly been developed using European-ancestry samples, trait prediction using such European ancestry-derived PGS is less accurate in non-European ancestry individuals. Although there has been recent progress in combining multiple PGS trained on distinct populations, the problem of how to maximize performance given a multiple-ancestry cohort is largely unexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTriple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a heterogeneous disease with varying responses to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). The identification of biomarkers to predict NAC response and inform personalized treatment strategies is essential. In this study, we conducted large-scale gene expression meta-analyses to identify genes associated with NAC response and survival outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of handheld ultrasound devices from a technical and data protection point of view, device properties, functionality, documentation, indications, delegation of performance, applications by doctors, students and non-medical staff is examined and discussed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present as a guiding framework for statistical modelling to assist policy makers asking multiple questions using diverse datasets in the face of an evolving pandemic response. Interoperability provides an important set of principles for future pandemic preparedness, through the joint design and deployment of adaptable systems of statistical models for disease surveillance using probabilistic reasoning. We illustrate this through case studies for inferring and characterising spatial-temporal prevalence and reproduction numbers of SARS-CoV-2 infections in England.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ R Stat Soc Ser C Appl Stat
April 2022
Obtaining up to date information on the number of UK COVID-19 regional infections is hampered by the reporting lag in positive test results for people with COVID-19 symptoms. In the UK, for 'Pillar 2' swab tests for those showing symptoms, it can take up to five days for results to be collated. We make use of the stability of the under reporting process over time to motivate a statistical temporal model that infers the final total count given the partial count information as it arrives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Systematic imaging reduces the rate of missed appendicitis and negative appendectomies in patients with suspected acute appendicitis (AA). Little is known about the utility of ultrasound as a first diagnostic measure in patients with suspected AA. The aim of this retrospective study is to determine whether ultrasound, performed by emergency physicians or radiologists, can be used as first diagnostic measure in suspected cases to rule out AA and to avoid unnecessary CT.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHemorrhage is the cause of death in 30-40% of severely injured patients due to trauma and the most frequent avoidable cause of death. In civilian emergency medical services, the majority of life-threatening hemorrhages are found in incompressible body regions (e.g.
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