Publications by authors named "Meer J"

Mitigating climate change in soil ecosystems involves complex plant and microbial processes regulating carbon pools and flows. Here, we advocate for the use of soil microbiome interventions to help increase soil carbon stocks and curb greenhouse gas emissions from managed soils. Direct interventions include the introduction of microbial strains, consortia, phage, and soil transplants, whereas indirect interventions include managing soil conditions or additives to modulate community composition or its activities.

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  • The study explores the experiences and needs of informal caregivers (ICs) involved in shared decision-making (SDM) for patients over 70 with severe aortic stenosis (AS).
  • It found that while most ICs prefer to be collaborative partners in decision-making, they often feel overlooked by healthcare professionals when it comes to discussing the patient's daily life.
  • Higher perceived involvement in SDM is linked to better quality of life and lower distress for ICs, emphasizing the need for professionals to actively include them in the decision-making process.
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The rapid growth of mobile phone usage and its use of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) have raised concerns about potential health risks. Researchers have conducted studies to examine the effects of RF-EMF on the brain using electroencephalography (EEG). We conducted a systematic quality assessment and meta-analysis of published research in this field to establish high-quality studies as references for future protocols.

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Bacterial species interactions significantly shape growth and behavior in communities, determining the emergence of community functions. Typically, these interactions are studied through bulk population measurements, overlooking the role of cell-to-cell variability and spatial context. This study uses real-time surface growth measurements of thousands of sparsely positioned microcolonies to investigate interactions and kinetic variations in monocultures and cocultures of and under substrate competition (succinate) or substrate independence (d-mannitol and putrescine).

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  • * Researchers analyzed data from over 1500 patients and found that women reported higher sleepiness on the Epworth Sleepiness Scale compared to men, with specific age-related trends observed in different patient groups.
  • * Notably, in women with narcoleptic conditions, an increase in daytime sleepiness was linked to age, while weight gain appeared later, suggesting a complex relationship that warrants further research for targeted treatment approaches.
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Improved neural understanding of posttraumatic growth (PTG) is required for effective trauma care. PTG is the advantageous psychological change some individuals derive from their struggle to overcome trauma. This comprehensive review critically examined the limited neural PTG research, to identify electrophysiological training targets for future research examining neurofeedback to enhance PTG, and provides novel insights into the emerging neural theory of PTG.

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  • The study investigates the frequency of psychiatric disorders in patients with narcolepsy type-1 (NT1) and other central disorders of hypersomnolence (OCH), finding that 38 out of 90 patients (27% of NT1 and 48% of OCH) had at least one psychiatric issue.
  • Major depressive episodes and suicidality were the most common psychiatric conditions observed, with a notable prevalence among females.
  • Those with psychiatric comorbidities experienced more severe fatigue, apathy, disturbed sleep, and poorer overall quality of life, indicating a negative impact on their daily functioning due to the combination of these disorders and hypersomnolence symptoms.
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  • Colonoscopy surveillance for colorectal cancer (CRC) can be burdensome for patients, and stool tests might help reduce the need for colonoscopies by identifying individuals at higher risk.
  • This study involved 3453 participants aged 50-75 who completed multiple stool tests and colonoscopies to assess the accuracy of these methods for detecting advanced neoplasia.
  • Results indicated that stool-based strategies could effectively reduce colonoscopy frequency by 15%-41% while being safer and more cost-effective, particularly with fecal immunochemical tests (FITs), although multitarget stool DNA testing was found to be more expensive.
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Bacteria in nature often thrive in fragmented environments, like soil pores, plant roots or plant leaves, leading to smaller isolated habitats, shared with fewer species. This spatial fragmentation can significantly influence bacterial interactions, affecting overall community diversity. To investigate this, we contrast paired bacterial growth in tiny picoliter droplets (1-3 cells per 35 pL up to 3-8 cells per species in 268 pL) with larger, uniform liquid cultures (about 2 million cells per 140 µl).

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Melancholia has been proposed as a qualitatively distinct depressive subtype associated with a characteristic symptom profile (psychomotor retardation, profound anhedonia) and a better response to biological therapies. Existing work has suggested that individuals with melancholia are blunted in their display of positive emotions and differ in their neural response to emotionally evocative stimuli. Here, we unify these brain and behavioural findings amongst a carefully phenotyped group of seventy depressed participants, drawn from an established Australian database (the Australian Genetics of Depression Study) and further enriched for melancholia (high ratings of psychomotor retardation and anhedonia).

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The laws of thermodynamics apply to biophysical systems on the nanoscale as described by the framework of stochastic thermodynamics. This theory provides universal, exact relations for quantities like work, which have been verified in experiments where a fully resolved description allows direct access to such quantities. Complementary studies consider partially hidden, coarse-grained descriptions, in which the mean entropy production typically is not directly accessible but can be bounded in terms of observable quantities.

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Inspired by the positive impact of serious games on science understanding and motivated by personal interests in scientific outreach, we developed "Bacttle," an easy-to-play microbiology board game with adaptive difficulty, targeting any player from 7 years old onward. Bacttle addresses both the lay public and teachers for use in classrooms as a way of introducing microbiology concepts. The layout of the game and its mechanism are the result of multiple rounds of trial, feedback, and re-design.

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Background: Early identification of an acute respiratory infection is important for reducing transmission and enabling earlier therapeutic intervention. We aimed to prospectively evaluate the feasibility of home-based diagnostic self-testing of viral pathogens in individuals prompted to do so on the basis of self-reported symptoms or individual changes in physiological parameters detected via a wearable sensor.

Methods: DETECT-AHEAD was a prospective, decentralised, randomised controlled trial carried out in a subpopulation of an existing cohort (DETECT) of individuals enrolled in a digital-only observational study in the USA.

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Objective: Summaries of health research can be a complementary way to return value to participants. We assess how research participants engage with summaries via email communication and how this can be improved.

Materials And Methods: We look at correlations between demographic subgroups and engagement in a longitudinal dataset of 305 626 participants (77% are classified as underrepresented in biomedical research) from the All of Us Research Program.

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Over the past years, insights in the cancer neuroscience field increased rapidly, and a potential role for neurons in colorectal carcinogenesis has been recognized. However, knowledge on the neuronal distribution, subtypes, origin, and associations with clinicopathological characteristics in human studies is sparse. In this study, colorectal tumor tissues from the Netherlands Cohort Study on diet and cancer (n = 490) and an in-cohort validation population (n = 529) were immunohistochemically stained for the pan-neuronal markers neurofilament (NF) and protein gene product 9.

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  • The study aimed to identify risk factors for acute kidney injury (AKI) and assess its impact on mortality in patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB), considering variables like recurrent AKI episodes and competing risks.
  • A total of 453 patients were analyzed, revealing that 43% experienced AKI episodes, with age, comorbidity, septic shock, persistent bacteraemia, and vancomycin therapy linked to an increased AKI risk.
  • The findings highlighted that AKI significantly raises the risk of 90-day mortality in SAB patients, indicating a worse clinical outcome than previously understood, especially in those treated with vancomycin.
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Purpose: This study aims to enhance the clinical use of automated sleep-scoring algorithms by incorporating an uncertainty estimation approach to efficiently assist clinicians in the manual review of predicted hypnograms, a necessity due to the notable inter-scorer variability inherent in polysomnography (PSG) databases. Our efforts target the extent of review required to achieve predefined agreement levels, examining both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) data, and considering subjects' diagnoses.

Patients And Methods: A total of 19,578 PSGs from 13 open-access databases were used to train U-Sleep, a state-of-the-art sleep-scoring algorithm.

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  • The Swiss Primary Hypersomnolence and Narcolepsy Cohort Study (SPHYNCS) aims to discover new biomarkers for central disorders of hypersomnolence, particularly focusing on narcolepsy type 1 (NT1) and its distinction from healthy controls.
  • Researchers used Fitbit smartwatches to gather data on physical activity, heart rate, and sleep over a year, achieving an impressive adherence rate of 80% among participants.
  • Findings revealed that NT1 patients showed increased sleep fragmentation and specific changes in sleep and heart rate metrics compared to healthy controls, indicating the potential for wearable technology to assist in the diagnosis and management of narcolepsy in the future.
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Childhood adversity, a prevalent experience, is related to a higher risk for externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. Alterations in the development of cognitive processes, for example in the attention-interference domain may link childhood adversity and psychopathology. Interfering stimuli can vary in their salience, i.

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Microbiome engineering - the targeted manipulation of microbial communities - is considered a promising strategy to restore ecosystems, but experimental support and mechanistic understanding are required. Here, we show that bacterial inoculants for soil microbiome engineering may fail to establish because they inadvertently facilitate growth of native resident microbiomes. By generating soil microcosms in presence or absence of standardized soil resident communities, we show how different nutrient availabilities limit outgrowth of focal bacterial inoculants (three Pseudomonads), and how this might be improved by adding an artificial, inoculant-selective nutrient niche.

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Background Aims: The success of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) as therapy for hematologic conditions is negatively impacted by the occurrence of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Tissue damage, caused, for example, by chemotherapy and radiotherapy, is a key factor in GVHD pathogenesis. Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) are important mediators of tissue repair and homeostasis.

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  • - The 2023 Duke-ISCVID criteria were developed to enhance the classification of infective endocarditis (IE) for better research and clinical outcomes, requiring further external validation.
  • - A study at Amsterdam University Medical Center reviewed 595 patients with suspected IE, finding that the new criteria were more sensitive and specific compared to earlier criteria, highlighting their effectiveness in diagnosis.
  • - Overall, the new criteria showed significant improvements in diagnostic accuracy, particularly due to changes in major microbiological and imaging requirements, marking a notable advancement in how suspected IE cases are classified.
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