Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial disparities in postpartum visits at a Texas level IV maternal center.

Background: The primary aim of our study was to determine the attendance of postpartum visits stratified by race and if the COVID-19 pandemic affected racial disparities in postpartum visit attendance.

Methods: We searched our labor and delivery records from July 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019 and from July 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 and included patients who delivered liveborn infants. The final analysis was restricted to patients who identified as White or Caucasian only, Black or African American only, or Hispanic.

Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial disparities in neuraxial labor analgesia at a Texas level IV maternal care center.

We hypothesized that racial disparities in labor epidural analgesia at our hospital that existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic would be exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined patients who delivered vaginally at our hospital for the last 6 months of 2019 and the last 6 months of 2020. We performed joint testing of coefficient values, and the interaction term between race and year of delivery was not significant (0.

The importance of selection in the evolution of blindness in cavefish.

Background: Blindness has evolved repeatedly in cave-dwelling organisms, and many hypotheses have been proposed to explain this observation, including both accumulation of neutral loss-of-function mutations and adaptation to darkness. Investigating the loss of sight in cave dwellers presents an opportunity to understand the operation of fundamental evolutionary processes, including drift, selection, mutation, and migration.

Results: Here we model the evolution of blindness in caves.

APOE Stabilization by Exercise Prevents Aging Neurovascular Dysfunction and Complement Induction.

Aging is the major risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, but little is known about the processes that lead to age-related decline of brain structures and function. Here we use RNA-seq in combination with high resolution histological analyses to show that aging leads to a significant deterioration of neurovascular structures including basement membrane reduction, pericyte loss, and astrocyte dysfunction. Neurovascular decline was sufficient to cause vascular leakage and correlated strongly with an increase in neuroinflammation including up-regulation of complement component C1QA in microglia/monocytes.

Functional changes in inter- and intra-hemispheric cortical processing underlying degraded speech perception.

Previous studies suggest that at poorer signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), auditory cortical event-related potentials are weakened, prolonged, and show a shift in the functional lateralization of cerebral processing from left to right hemisphere. Increased right hemisphere involvement during speech-in-noise (SIN) processing may reflect the recruitment of additional brain resources to aid speech recognition or alternatively, the progressive loss of involvement from left linguistic brain areas as speech becomes more impoverished (i.e.