Publications by authors named "McCoy E"

Background: Psychotic disorders are characterized by white matter (WM) abnormalities; however, their relationship with the various aspects of illness presentation remains unclear. Sleep disturbances are common in psychosis, and emerging evidence suggests that sleep plays a critical role in WM physiology. Therefore, it is plausible that sleep disturbances are associated with impaired WM integrity in these disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Preterm birth is a leading risk factor for atypicalities in cognitive and sensory processing, but it is unclear how prematurity impacts circuits that support these functions. To address this, we trained adult mice born a day early (preterm mice) on a visual discrimination task and found that they commit more errors and fail to achieve high levels of performance. Using , we found that the neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) and the V1-projecting prefrontal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are hyper-responsive to the reward, reminiscent of cue processing in adolescence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Preterm birth is linked to cognitive and sensory processing issues, but the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear, prompting researchers to study preterm mice and their performance on visual tasks.
  • The study reveals that preterm mice struggle with visual discrimination, displaying hyper-responsive neurons related to rewards while showing impaired activity in prefrontal circuits during errors.
  • Environmental enrichment intended to enhance sensory development did not improve performance in preterm mice, indicating that early interventions may have limited effectiveness in addressing cognitive deficits associated with preterm birth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Accumulating evidence suggests that rapid eye movement sleep (REM) supports the consolidation of extinction memory. REM is disrupted in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and REM abnormalities after traumatic events increase the risk of developing PTSD. Therefore, it was hypothesized that abnormal REM in trauma-exposed individuals may pave the way for PTSD by interfering with the processing of extinction memory.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In soybean (Glycine max ), limiting whole-plant transpiration rate (TR) response to increasing vapor pressure deficit (VPD) has been associated with the 'slow-wilting' phenotype and with water-conservation enabling higher yields under terminal drought. Despite the promise of this trait, it is still unknown whether it has a genetic basis in soybean, a challenge limiting the prospects of breeding climate-resilient varieties. Here, we present the results of a first attempt at a high-throughput phenotyping of TR and stomatal conductance response curves to increasing VPD conducted on a soybean mapping population consisting of 140 recombinant inbred lines (RIL).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objective: Few studies have explored the relationship between social drivers of health and pediatric low-value care (LVC). We assessed the relationship between Childhood Opportunity Index (COI) 2.0 and LVC in children's hospitals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Previous studies in adults admitted to pediatric hospitals primarily investigated associations between complex chronic condition characteristics and patient outcomes. Our study explored the association of age with length of stay (LOS) and total cost in these adults, accounting for other patient factors. Using the Pediatric Health Information System, we included 1,215,736 patient encounters from 2021 to 2022.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Facial grimacing is used to quantify spontaneous pain in mice and other mammals, but scoring relies on humans with different levels of proficiency. Here, we developed a cloud-based software platform called PainFace ( http://painface.net ) that uses machine learning to detect 4 facial action units of the mouse grimace scale (orbitals, nose, ears, whiskers) and score facial grimaces of black-coated C57BL/6 male and female mice on a 0 to 8 scale.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) are characterized by white matter (WM) abnormalities, however, their relationship with illness presentation is not clear. Sleep disturbances are common in both disorders, and recent evidence suggests that sleep plays a critical role in WM physiology. Therefore, it is plausible that sleep disturbances are associated with impaired WM integrity in these disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The open field assay is used to study anxiety-related traits and anxiolytic drugs in rodents. This assay entails measuring locomotor activity and time spent in the center of a chamber that is maintained at ambient room temperature. However, the ambient temperature in most laboratories varies daily and seasonally and can differ between buildings.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To evaluate the effect of curricular content reduction in an integrated course sequence spanning 3 years of a Doctor of Pharmacy curriculum on student examination scores and course grades.

Methods: This 2-year, prepost study compared student overall average and final examination scores and overall course grades after the transition from a 5-day to a 4-day week of an integrated learning experience (ILE) course sequence. In addition, an anonymous, optional 23-item survey was distributed to first to third year pharmacy students asking about the 4-day week change, how they utilized the non-ILE day, and additional demographic and social characteristics to identify factors influencing success on examination and course performance during the 4-day week.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Online research methods have grown in popularity due in part to the globalised and far-reaching nature of the internet but also linked to the Covid-19 pandemic whereby restrictions to travel and face to face contact necessitated a shift in methods of research recruitment and data collection. Ethical guidance exists to support researchers in conducting online research, however this is lacking within health fields. This scoping review aims to synthesise formal ethical guidance for applying online methods within health research as well as provide examples of where guidance has been used.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study evaluates how many hospitalized children with UTIs receive narrow-spectrum versus broad-spectrum antibiotics and their outcomes.
  • About 5% of children were given narrow-spectrum antibiotics, with variations among hospitals, despite high susceptibility of E. coli in many facilities.
  • Patients treated with narrow-spectrum antibiotics had shorter hospital stays and lower costs, but no difference in emergency department revisits or readmissions was observed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Research into low-value routine testing at children's hospitals has not consistently evaluated changing patterns of testing over time.

Objectives: To identify changes in routine laboratory testing rates at children's hospitals over ten years and the association with patient outcomes.

Design, Settings, And Participants: We performed a multi-center, retrospective cohort study of children aged 0-18 hospitalized with common, lower-severity diagnoses at 28 children's hospitals in the Pediatric Health Information Systems database.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Image segmentation is commonly used to estimate the location and shape of plants and their external structures. Segmentation masks are then used to localize landmarks of interest and compute other geometric features that correspond to the plant's phenotype. Despite its prevalence, segmentation-based approaches are laborious (requiring extensive annotation to train) and error-prone (derived geometric features are sensitive to instance mask integrity).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: Intrauterine device (IUD) users often encounter barriers to desired removal. Self-removal, while previously found to be successful only 19% of the time, may mitigate these obstacles. Our primary objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of our previously developed IUD self-removal guide.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Violence is a leading cause of death and disability for young people and has serious impacts on prospects across the lifecourse. The education sector is a crucial setting for preventing youth violence through incorporating programmes that address attitudes and behaviours. The Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) programme aims to change harmful attitudes and norms, and increase non-violent bystander intervention, through a peer mentoring approach.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Phlebotomy for hospitalized children has consequences (e.g., pain, iatrogenic anemia), and unnecessary testing is a modifiable source of waste in healthcare.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Yellow mosaic disease (YMD) is one of the major devastating constraints to soybean production in Pakistan. In the present study, we report the identification of resistant soybean germplasm and a novel mutation linked with disease susceptibility. Diverse soybean germplasm were screened to identify YMD-resistant lines under natural field conditions during 2016-2020.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Image segmentation is commonly used to estimate the location and shape of plants and their external structures. Segmentation masks are then used to localize landmarks of interest and compute other geometric features that correspond to the plant's phenotype. Despite its prevalence, segmentation-based approaches are laborious (requiring extensive annotation to train), and error-prone (derived geometric features are sensitive to instance mask integrity).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Accumulating evidence suggests that rapid eye movement sleep (REM) supports the consolidation of extinction memory. REM is disrupted in PTSD, and REM abnormalities after traumatic events increase the risk of developing PTSD. Therefore, it was hypothesized that abnormal REM in trauma-exposed individuals may pave the way for PTSD by interfering with the processing of extinction memory.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This work investigates the application of Computer Vision to the problem of the automated counting and measuring of crabs and lobsters onboard fishing boats. The aim is to provide catch count and measurement data for these key commercial crustacean species. This can provide vital input data for stock assessment models, to enable the sustainable management of these species.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: National Institutes of Health funding to address basic reproductive health for common female conditions remains disproportionately low, in part because of low success rates of grant applications by obstetrician-gynecologists.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the scholarly productivity of individuals supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Women's Reproductive Health Research K12 career development award, created to advance careers of obstetrician-gynecologist physician-scientists.

Study Design: We performed a cohort study of individuals who completed at least 2 years of Women's Reproductive Health Research training by June 30, 2015, and had at least 5-year follow-up.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The E3 ubiquitin ligase Ube3a is biallelically expressed in neural progenitors and glial cells, suggesting that UBE3A gain-of-function mutations might cause neurodevelopmental disorders irrespective of parent of origin. Here, we engineered a mouse line that harbors an autism-linked UBE3A (T503A in mouse) gain-of-function mutation and evaluated phenotypes in animals that inherited the mutant allele paternally, maternally, or from both parents. We find that paternally and maternally expressed UBE3A results in elevated UBE3A activity in neural progenitors and glial cells.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF