Caregiving is Associated with Lower Brain Age in Humans.

Middle-aged adults who are parents have better average cognitive performance and lower average brain age compared with middle-aged adults without children, raising the possibility that caregiving slows brain aging. Here, we investigate this hypothesis in two additional groups of caregivers: grandmothers and caregivers for people living with dementia (PLWD). Demographic, questionnaire, and structural MRI data were acquired from n=50 grandmothers, n=24 caregivers of PLWD and n=37 non-caregiver controls, and BrainAge was estimated.

Differing Realties among Assisted Living Residents with Dementia: Understanding Care Partner Responses.

Background And Objectives: Persons living with dementia can experience confusion in terms of orientation to time, place, and scenario. The ways care partners respond are apt to shape quality of life and care experiences. With a focus on assisted living (AL) residents with dementia, we seek to: 1) examine differing realities and care partner responses and 2) identify influential resident and care partner factors, other contributing contextual conditions, and response outcomes.

Standardizing research methods for opioid dose comparison: the NIH HEAL morphine milligram equivalent calculator.

We developed the National Institutes of Health helping to end addiction long-term initiative morphine milligram equivalent (MME) calculator to standardize MME calculations across pain research studies, addressing a critical barrier to effective research synthesis and meta-analysis. The tool provides evidence-based mapping factors for 29 opioids through a research electronic data capture-based calculator and companion Web site (research-mme.wakehealth.

532- and 52-symmetric Au helicoids synthesized through controlled seed twinning and aspect ratio.

Chiral plasmonic crystals with 5-fold symmetries were synthesized from Au icosahedra, decahedra, and pentatwinned nanorods, unraveling the effects of seed twinning and aspect ratio on chiral overgrowth directed by L-glutathione. The influence of seed size on the overgrowth from pentatwinned nanorods was also studied, giving insight into the role volumetric strain plays in chiral crystal formation. Single particle reconstructions were obtained using electron tomography, and optical simulations on the measured structures verify their optical chirality.

Chromatin enables precise and scalable gene regulation with factors of limited specificity.

Biophysical constraints limit the specificity with which transcription factors (TFs) can target regulatory DNA. While individual nontarget binding events may be low affinity, the sheer number of such interactions could present a challenge for gene regulation by degrading its precision or possibly leading to an erroneous induction state. Chromatin can prevent nontarget binding by rendering DNA physically inaccessible to TFs, at the cost of energy-consuming remodeling orchestrated by pioneer factors (PFs).