Publications by authors named "MUELLER E"

A growing literature within the field of air pollution exposure assessment addresses the issue of environmental justice. Leveraging the increasing availability of exposure datasets with broad spatial coverage and high spatial resolution, a number of works have assessed inequalities in exposure across racial/ethnic and other socioeconomic groupings. However, environmental justice research presents the additional need to evaluate exposure inequity-inequality that is systematic, unfair, and avoidable-which may be framed in several ways.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Frontal alpha asymmetry was thought to indicate levels of approach motivation, but recent studies found little connection between it and personality traits.
  • A study using data from the CoScience project (n=740) measured frontal asymmetry during different tasks to see if it varied based on approach motivation.
  • The results showed that frontal asymmetry wasn't significantly influenced by the tasks and did not correlate with self-reported personality traits, undermining its validity as a marker for approach motivation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The Lyme disease agent is a complex bacterium with a segmented genome, including multiple chromosomes and over 20 plasmids, which can remain dormant in ticks for extended periods without losing the ability to grow when nutrients are available.
  • Research reveals that when cultured cells are deprived of nutrients, they quickly lose their ability to reproduce, partly due to the loss of essential genetic elements.
  • Interestingly, unlike lab-cultured cells, ticks that have been starved for up to 14 months maintain their cell growth abilities and do not lose plasmids, indicating that the tick's midgut supports the bacterium's genome and growth during starvation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Bladder health encompasses total bladder well-being and not merely the absence of urinary symptoms. While much is known about the prevalence of urinary symptoms in women, little is known about the distribution of bladder health (eg, optimal to poor).

Objective: We report the distributions of multiple dimensions of bladder health and function in a population-based sample of community-dwelling women, overall and separately in women without urinary symptoms to begin to explore bladder health dimensions that may precede the onset of symptoms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Bacterial biofilm control around dental implants is critical for the health of the peri-implant soft tissue and longevity of dental implants. The patient's role in regular biofilm removal around dental implants is just as important as that of the dental hygienist. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between at-home dental implant care and patients' perceptions of peri-implant soft tissue health.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23) is a bone-secreted protein widely recognized as a critical regulator of skeletal and mineral metabolism. However, little is known about the nonskeletal production of FGF23 and its role in tissues other than bone. Growing evidence indicates that circulating FGF23 levels rise with a high-fat diet (HFD) and they are positively correlated with body mass index (BMI) in humans.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The deep continental crust represents a vast potential habitat for microbial life where its activity remains poorly constrained. Organic acids like acetate are common in these ecosystems, but their role in the subsurface carbon cycle - including the mechanism and rate of their turnover - is still unclear. Here, we develop an isotope-exchange 'clock' based on the abiotic equilibration of H-isotopes between acetate and water, which can be used to define the maximum in situ acetate residence time.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The study aimed to test the Cope 360 app with caregivers, focusing on acceptance, perceptions, and potential improvements after one week of usage.
  • * Ten caregivers, mostly women with some college education, participated in the beta test; they generally found the app easy to use and helpful for managing their child's medical needs, although suggestions for further improvement were noted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Metabolic dysfunction in the liver represents a predominant feature in the early stages of alcohol-associated liver disease (ALD). However, the mechanisms underlying this are only partially understood. To investigate the metabolic characteristics of the liver in ALD, we did a relative quantification of polar metabolites and lipids in the liver of mice with experimental ALD using untargeted metabolomics and untargeted lipidomics.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Women currently lack a comprehensive tool to report their toileting decisions and bladder symptoms, which are influenced by real-world factors that may affect bladder health.
  • The PLUS research consortium developed and tested WhereIGo, a mobile app aimed at capturing various environmental and social influences on women's toileting choices, including unique features for reporting urge sensations.
  • The app underwent usability testing with community women to measure its effectiveness, employing a user-friendly design and gathering real-time data while adhering to a limit on screen taps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Bladder health in high school and collegiate females is not well understood.

Objective: The objective of this study was to compare toileting behaviors, lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTSs), and fluid intake in female athletes and nonathletes.

Study Design: English-speaking nulliparous females aged 13-23 years were recruited.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Uroflowmetry is often used to assess lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). Criteria for characterization of flow patterns are not well established, and subjective interpretation is the most common approach for flow curve classification. We assessed the reliability of uroflowmetry curve interpretation in adult women.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Different blood group systems have been characterized in people and other mammals. In domestic cats, the blood group system plays the most important clinical role and has been investigated extensively-from the phenotype to the molecular genetics. In non-domestic felids, phenotypic blood typing has been performed by different methods to detect the antigens, but the four informative markers in domestic cats were not able to identify types and () in non-domestic cats.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Antibody-mediated receptor activation is successfully used to develop medical treatments. If the activation induces a pathological response, such antibodies are also excellent tools for defining molecular mechanisms of target receptor malfunction and designing rescue therapies. Prominent examples are naturally occurring autoantibodies inducing the severe blistering disease pemphigus vulgaris (PV).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The oligosaccharyltransferase (OST) complex, particularly the STT3A/B enzymes, plays a crucial role in this glycosylation and has emerged as a promising target for broad-spectrum antiviral drugs.
  • * The study highlights the balance between the antiviral potential of STT3A/B inhibitors, like NGI-1, and the need to assess their safety for humans, leading to the discovery of improved compounds that ensure both efficacy and lower toxicity risks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prior research suggests that cognitive control, indicated by NoGo N2 amplitudes in Go/NoGo tasks, is associated with dispositional anxiety. This negative association tends to be reduced in anxiety-enhancing experimental conditions. However, anxiety-reducing conditions have not yet been investigated systematically.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers studied chronic diarrhea in rhesus macaques, which is often linked to various gastrointestinal issues, and found that it occurs spontaneously in these primates.
  • The study tracked stool consistency and assessed inflammation through various methods over 12 years, finding recurrent diarrhea and inflammation despite normal endoscopic results.
  • By applying left vagal nerve stimulation for 9 weeks, the severity of diarrhea and inflammation significantly decreased, suggesting that this model can help in understanding diarrhea and its treatments in ways that human studies cannot.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: In non-impaired human locomotion, sagittal-plane slope adaptation of the foot-ankle complex is a volitional function driven by neuromotor control to support upright posture and forward ambulation. Loss of this adaptation due to transtibial amputation can lead to instability and compensatory motions as most commercially-available prosthetic feet do not permit automatic slope adjustments. A selection of slope-adaptive feet (SAF) have been developed to promote biomimetic ankle motion while ambulating over slopes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Context: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the significance of public health laboratories across the United States, while also revealing weaknesses in the laboratory system.

Objective: To identify actionable recommendations for building a more resilient public health laboratory system based on previously published lessons learned from COVID-19.

Design, Setting, And Participants: In April 2023, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, in cooperation with RAND , convened a 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Three-dimensional (3D) printed medical devices include orthopedic and craniofacial implants, surgical tools, and external prosthetics that have been directly used in patients. While the advances of additive manufacturing techniques in the production of medical devices have been on the rise, clinical translation of living cellular constructs face significant limitations in terms of regulatory affairs, process technology, and materials development. In this perspective, the current status-quo of 3D and four-dimensional (4D) (bio)printing is summarized, current advancements are discussed and the challenges that need to be addressed for improved industrial translation and clinical applications of bioprinting are highlighted.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To illustrate the challenges encountered when gathering rapidly synthesized evidence in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Methods: In this article, we describe the challenges encountered when we performed a systematic literature review (SLR) of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the efficacy and safety of treatments for severe COVID-19. The methods of the SLR are described in full, to show the context of our objectives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The placebo-reward hypothesis postulates that positive effects of treatment expectations on health (i.e., placebo effects) and reward processing share common neural underpinnings.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: We assumed that in Palliative Care, even in common clinical situations, the choice of drugs differs substantially between physicians. Therefore, we assessed the practice of pharmaceutical treatment choices of physicians for cancer pain and opioid-induced nausea and vomiting (OINV) and the rationale for their choices.

Methods: An online survey was conducted with physicians covering the following domains: i) Cancer pain therapy: non-opioids in addition to opioids: choice of drug ii) prevention of OINV: choice of drug and mode of application.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: We aimed to estimate the prevalence of a wide range of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in US women, and explore associations with bother and discussion with health care providers, friends, and family.

Materials And Methods: We analyzed baseline data collected from May 2022 to December 2023 in the RISE FOR HEALTH study-a large, regionally representative cohort study of adult female community members. LUTS and related bother were measured by the 10-item Symptoms of Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunction Research Network Symptom Index, and discussion was assessed by a study-specific item.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) based therapies hold promise in regenerative medicine, their clinical application remains challenging due to issues such as immunocompatibility. MSC-derived exosomes are a promising off-the-shelf therapy for promoting wound healing in a cell-free manner. However, the potential to customize the content of MSC-exosomes, and understanding how such modifications influence exosome effects on tissue regeneration remain underexplored.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF