Background: Inulin and inulin-derived fructooligosaccharides (FOS) are well-known prebiotics for use in companion animals and livestock. The mechanisms by which FOS contribute to health has not been fully established. Further, the fine chemistry of fructan structures from diverse sources, such as graminan-type fructans found in cereal crops, has not been fully elucidated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCarbohydrates are chemically and structurally diverse biomolecules, serving numerous and varied roles in agricultural ecosystems. Crops and horticulture products are inherent sources of carbohydrates that are consumed by humans and non-human animals alike; however carbohydrates are also present in other agricultural materials, such as soil and compost, human and animal tissues, milk and dairy products, and honey. The biosynthesis, modification, and flow of carbohydrates within and between agricultural ecosystems is intimately related with microbial communities that colonize and thrive within these environments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Rising opioid-related death rates have prompted reductions of opioid prescribing, yet limited data exist on population-level associations between opioid prescribing and opioid-related deaths.
Objective: To evaluate population-level associations between five opioid prescribing measures and opioid-related deaths.
Design: An ecological panel analysis was performed using linear regression models with year and commuting zone fixed effects.
Organ Sci (Linthicum)
January 2021
Although a substantial body of work has investigated drivers of tie formation, there is growing interest in understanding why relationships decay or dissolve altogether. The networks literature has tended to conceptualize tie decay as driven by processes similar to those underlying tie formation. Yet information that is revealed through ongoing interactions can exert different effects on tie formation and tie decay.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Organizations have a key role to play in supporting healthcare workers (HCWs) and mitigating stress during COVID-19. We aimed to understand whether perceptions of support and communication by local leadership were associated with reduced reports of stress and burnout among frontline HCWs.
Methods: We conducted cross-sectional surveys embedded within emergency department (ED) workflow during the first wave of COVID-19 from April 9, 2020 to June 15th, 2020 within three EDs of a multisite health system in the Northeast United States.
Objective: The authors examined changes in buprenorphine treatment following Medicaid expansion, including the contribution of Medicaid-financed prescriptions.
Methods: Buprenorphine pharmacy claims for patients were identified in the 2012-2018 IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription Data (LRx) data set, including 79.8% of U.
The human diet is temporally and spatially dynamic, and influenced by culture, regional food systems, socioeconomics, and consumer preference. Such factors result in enormous structural diversity of ingested glycans that are refractory to digestion by human enzymes. To convert these glycans into metabolizable nutrients and energy, humans rely upon the catalytic potential encoded within the gut microbiome, a rich collective of microorganisms residing in the gastrointestinal tract.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCanola meal (CM), the protein-rich by-product of canola oil extraction, has shown promise as an alternative feedstuff and protein supplement in poultry diets, yet its use has been limited due to the abundance of plant cell wall fibre, specifically non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) and lignin. The addition of exogenous enzymes to promote the digestion of CM NSP in chickens has potential to increase the metabolizable energy of CM. We isolated chicken cecal bacteria from a continuous-flow mini-bioreactor system and selected for those with the ability to metabolize CM NSP.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Investigating primary care provider (PCP)-team communication can provide insight into how colleagues work together to become high-functioning teams more able to address an increasingly complex set of tasks associated with chronic disease management.
Objective: To assess how PCP communication with their care team relates to patients' health.
Research Design: Longitudinal study of how 3 aspects of PCP-care team communication-participation, time spent listening, and uninterrupted speaking length-relate to disease management of patients with hypertension or diabetes, and the effect of these team communication behaviors on PCP-patient communication as a pathway by which this relationship might exist.
Substantial increases in opioid-related morbidity and mortality have motivated the implementation of federal policies to expand the buprenorphine prescribing capacity of primary care providers and other clinicians. Using a national prescription database that covered 72-92 percent of the US population during 2010-18, we analyzed trends in buprenorphine treatment by prescriber specialty. Buprenorphine treatment rates by primary care providers increased from 12.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study assessed the number of individuals receiving treatment for opioid use disorder in the United States by age group and sex using a national prescription database to compare between the number of buprenorphine prescriptions filled and the number of US opioid-related overdose deaths.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYeast α-mannan (YM) is a densely branched N-linked glycan that decorates the surface of yeast cell walls. Owing to the high degree of branching, cleavage of the backbone of YM appears to rely on the coupled action of side-chain-cleaving enzymes. Upon examining the genome sequences of bovine-adapted Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron strains, isolated for their ability to degrade YM, we have identified a tandem pair of genes inserted into an orphan pathway predicted to be involved in YM metabolism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis case series study provides a national estimate of opioid and benzodiazepine coprescribing before and after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) boxed warning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSSM Popul Health
August 2019
To understand how institutional environments and socioeconomic backgrounds may influence health outcomes, we examined the relationship among special education environments, socioeconomic status (SES), and likelihood of ADHD remission in children. While the majority of children experience remission by adulthood, the likelihood of remission varies across different SES levels and education environments. We find that for low SES children the likelihood of remission is higher in states that have more inclusive special education regimes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe pharmaceutical industry spends roughly 15 billion dollars annually on detailing - providing gifts, information, samples, trips, honoraria and other inducements - to physicians in order to encourage them to prescribe their drugs. In response, several states in the United States adopted policies that restrict detailing. Some states banned gifts from pharmaceutical companies to doctors, other states simply required physicians to disclose the gifts they receive, while most states allowed unrestricted detailing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To examine the association between payments made by the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals to physicians and prescribing by physicians within hospital referral regions.
Design: Cross sectional analysis of 2013 and 2014 Open Payments and Medicare Part D prescribing data for two classes of commonly prescribed, commonly marketed drugs: oral anticoagulants and non-insulin diabetes drugs, overall and stratified by physician and payment type.
Setting: 306 hospital referral regions, United States.
J Child Adolesc Psychopharmacol
August 2016
Objective: To describe national stimulant treatment patterns among young people focusing on patient age and prescribing specialty.
Methods: Stimulant prescriptions to patients aged 3-24 were analyzed from the 2008 IMS LifeLink LRx Longitudinal Prescription database (n = 3,147,352), which includes 60% of all U.S.
Objective: Despite safety risks associated with antipsychotic medications, little is known about their use in older adults. This article describes patterns of antipsychotic treatment of older and younger adults in the United States.
Method: The IMS LifeLink LRx Longitudinal Prescription database was analyzed retrospectively, focusing on adults who filled antipsychotic prescriptions.
JAMA Psychiatry
September 2015
Importance: Despite concerns about rising treatment of young people with antipsychotic medications, little is known about trends and patterns of their use in the United States.
Objective: To describe antipsychotic prescription patterns among young people in the United States, focusing on age and sex.
Design, Setting, And Participants: A retrospective descriptive analysis of antipsychotic prescriptions among patients aged 1 to 24 years was performed with data from calendar years 2006 (n = 765,829), 2008 (n = 858,216), and 2010 (n = 851,874), including a subset from calendar year 2009 with service claims data (n = 53,896).
Background: Given growth in kidney transplant waitlists and discard rates, donor kidney acceptance is an important problem. We used network analysis to examine whether organ procurement organization (OPO) network centrality affects discard and outcomes.
Methods: We identified 106,160 deceased donor kidneys recovered for transplant from 2000 to 2010 in Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.
Importance: Although concern exists regarding the rate of benzodiazepine use, especially long-term use by older adults, little information is available concerning patterns of benzodiazepine use in the United States.
Objective: To describe benzodiazepine prescription patterns in the United States focusing on patient age and duration of use.
Design, Setting, And Participants: A retrospective descriptive analysis of benzodiazepine prescriptions was performed with the 2008 LifeLink LRx Longitudinal Prescription database (IMS Health Inc), which includes approximately 60% of all retail pharmacies in the United States.