Herpesvirus infections are ubiquitous, with over 95% of the adult population infected by at least one strain. While most of these infections resolve without treatment in healthy individuals, they can cause significant morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised, stem cell, or organ transplant patients. Current nucleoside standards of care provide meaningful benefit but are limited due to poor tolerability, resistance, and generally narrow spectrum of activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe non-linear optical process of laser harmonic generation (HG) enables the creation of high quality pulses of UV or even X-ray radiation, which have many potential uses at the frontiers of experimental science, ranging from lensless microscopy to ultrafast metrology and chiral science. Although many of the promising applications are enabled by generating harmonic modes with orbital angular momentum (OAM), independent control of the harmonic frequency and OAM level remains elusive. Here we show, through a theoretical approach, validated with 3D simulations, how unique 2-D harmonic progressions can be obtained, with both frequency and OAM level tuned independently, from tailored structured targets in both reflective and transmissive configurations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe widespread adoption of an agricultural circular economy requires the recovery of resources such as water, organic matter, and nutrients from livestock manure and sanitation. While this approach offers many benefits, we argue this is not without potential risks to human and environmental health that largely stem from the presence of contaminants in the recycled resources (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Accessible Summary What is known on the subject? Functioning is one of the most affected areas in schizophrenia. Social, occupational and personal domains are affected, and these deficits are responsible for a major part of the disability associated with the disorder. There are several instruments to measure functioning, but the HoNOS provides a wide assessment of impairment in 12 areas of functioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Schizophrenic symptoms are known to segregate into reality distortion, negative and disorganization syndromes, but the correlates of these syndromes with regional brain structural change are not well established. Cognitive impairment is a further clinical feature of schizophrenia, whose brain structural correlates are the subject of conflicting findings.
Methods: 165 patients with schizophrenia were rated for symptoms using the PANSS, and cognitive impairment was indexed by estimated premorbid-current IQ discrepancy.
As SARS-CoV-2 continues to circulate, antiviral treatments are needed to complement vaccines. The virus's main protease, 3CLPro, is an attractive drug target in part because it recognizes a unique cleavage site, which features a glutamine residue at the P1 position and is not utilized by human proteases. Herein, we report the invention of MK-7845, a novel reversible covalent 3CLPro inhibitor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProg Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry
April 2024
Different lines of evidence indicate that the structure and physiology of the basal ganglia and the thalamus is disturbed in schizophrenia. However, it is unknown whether the volume and shape of these subcortical structures are affected in schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations (AH), a core positive symptom of the disorder. We took structural MRI from 63 patients with schizophrenia, including 36 patients with AH and 27 patients who had never experienced AH (NAH), and 51 matched healthy controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Total hip arthroplasty (THA) is a common procedure for end stage osteoarthritis. The learning curve for THA is complex and challenging. One of the most difficult skills to master is acetabular reaming.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe lymphatic system possesses the main viral replication sites in the body following viral infection. Unfortunately, current antiretroviral agents penetrate the lymph nodes insufficiently when administered orally and, therefore, cannot access the lymphatic system sufficiently to interrupt this viral replication. For this reason, novel drug delivery systems aimed at enhancing the lymphatic uptake of antiretroviral drugs are highly desirable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMolnupiravir, an oral prodrug of N-hydroxycytidine (NHC), previously demonstrated broad antiviral activity against multiple RNA viruses and has shown a high barrier to the development of resistance. Here, we present the antiviral activity of NHC against recent SARS-CoV-2 variants and the results of resistance selection studies to better understand the potential for viral resistance to NHC. NHC activity against SARS-CoV-2 variants omicron (BA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSmart speakers and conversational agents have been accepted into our homes for a number of tasks such as playing music, interfacing with the internet of things, and more recently, general chit-chat. However, they have been less readily accepted in our workplaces. This may be due to data privacy and security concerns that exist with commercially available smart speakers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objective: Currently the videographic review of emergency intubations is an unstructured, qualitative process. We created a taxonomy of errors that impede the optimal procedural performance of emergency intubation.
Methods: This was a prospective, observational, study reviewing a convenience sample of deidentified laryngoscopy recordings of emergency department intubations that were qualitatively flagged before the study as demonstrating suboptimal technique.
Transdermal drug delivery is an alternative route of administration that offers avoidance of the associated drawbacks of orally and parenterally administered hydrophobics. However, owing to the extremely specific set of physicochemical characteristics required for passive transdermal drug permeation, the development of marketed transdermal products containing poorly soluble drugs has been severely limited. Microarray patches (MAPs) are a type of transdermal patch that differ from the traditional patch design due to the presence of tiny, micron-sized needles that permit enhanced drug permeation on their application surface.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizophrenia is a severe chronic mental illness characterised by impaired emotional and cognitive functioning. To treat this condition, antipsychotics are available in limited dosage forms, mainly oral and injectable formulations. Although injectable antipsychotics were designed to enhance adherence, they are invasive, painful and require a healthcare professional to be administered.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Emergency physicians are challenged to efficiently and reliably risk stratify patients presenting with chest pain (CP) to optimize diagnostic testing and avoid unnecessary hospital admissions. The objective of our study was to evaluate the impact of a HEART score-based decision aid (HSDA) integrated in the electronic health record on coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) utilization and diagnostic yield in adult emergency department (ED) CP patients with suspected acute coronary syndrome.
Methods: We conducted a before and after study to determine whether implementation of a mandatory computerized HSDA would reduce CCTA utilization in ED CP patients and improve the diagnostic yield of obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD) (≥50%).
HIV/AIDS remains a major global public health issue. While antiretroviral therapy is effective at reducing the viral load in the blood, up to 50% of those with HIV suffer from some degree of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder, due to the presence of the blood-brain barrier restricting drugs from crossing into the central nervous system and treating the viral reservoir there. One way to circumvent this is the nose-to-brain pathway.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A leading theory of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia is that they reflect reduced responsiveness to rewarding stimuli. This proposal has been linked to abnormal (reduced) dopamine function in the disorder, because phasic release of dopamine is known to code for reward prediction error (RPE). Nevertheless, few functional imaging studies have examined if patients with negative symptoms show reduced RPE-associated activations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Few studies have examined the functional brain correlates of the performance of the Stroop task in bipolar disorder (BD). It is also not known whether it is associated with failure of de-activation in the default mode network, as has been found in studies using other tasks.
Methods: Twenty-four BD patients and 48 age, sex and educationally estimated intellectual quotient (IQ) matched healthy subjects (HS) underwent a functional MRI during performance of the counting Stroop task.
The experience of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH, "hearing voices") in schizophrenia has been found to be associated with reduced auditory cortex activation during perception of real auditory stimuli like tones and speech. We re-examined this finding using 46 patients with schizophrenia (23 with frequent AVH and 23 hallucination-free), who underwent fMRI scanning while they heard words, sentences and reversed speech. Twenty-five matched healthy controls were also examined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImplantable drug-eluting devices that provide therapeutic cover over an extended period of time following a single administration have potential to improve the treatment of chronic conditions. These devices eliminate the requirement for regular and frequent drug administration, thus reducing the pill burden experienced by patients. Furthermore, the use of modern technologies, such as 3D printing, during implant development and manufacture renders this approach well-suited for the production of highly tuneable devices that can deliver treatment regimens which are personalised for the individual.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Relapse prevention is an important goal in the clinical management of psychosis. Cognitive deficits/deterioration can provide useful insights for monitoring relapse in psychosis patients.
Methods: This was a prospective, naturalistic 1-year follow-up study involving 110 psychosis patients with full clinical remission.