Publications by authors named "Michael D Wood"

There is considerable uncertainty regarding radiation's effects on biodiversity in natural complex ecosystems typically subjected to multiple environmental disturbances and stresses. In this study we characterised the relationships between soil microbial communities and estimated total absorbed dose rates to bacteria, grassy vegetation and trees in the Red Forest region of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Samples were taken from sites of contrasting ecological histories and along burn and no burn areas following a wildfire.

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Background: Exposure to opioids after surgery is the initial contact for some people who develop chronic opioid use disorder. Hence, effective postoperative pain management, with less reliance on opioids, is critical. The Perioperative Opioid Quality Improvement (POQI) program developed (1) a digital health platform leveraging patient-survey-reported risk factors and (2) a postsurgical pain risk stratification algorithm to personalize perioperative care by integrating several commercially available digital health solutions into a combined platform.

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Objective: Acute agitation in pediatrics is commonly encountered in hospital settings, can contribute to significant physical and psychological distress, and management is highly varied in practice. As such, the development of a standardized pharmacologic guideline is paramount. We aimed to develop a novel clinical pathway (CP) for management of acute agitation for all hospitalized pediatric patients in Canada.

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Article Synopsis
  • Dysregulation of IL17A is linked to various inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, and using antibodies to inhibit it has shown to be an effective treatment option.
  • Researchers discovered a new class of small molecule inhibitors targeting IL17A through a DNA-encoded chemical library screening process.
  • These innovative inhibitors operate by binding symmetrically to the central cavities of the IL17A homodimer, utilizing a previously unknown interaction mode, and have been optimized for effectiveness in living organisms.
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Maintenance of the health of our oceans is critical for the survival of the oceanic food chain upon which humanity is dependent. Zooplanktonic copepods are among the most numerous multicellular organisms on earth. As the base of the primary consumer food web, they constitute a major biomass in oceans, being an important food source for fish and functioning in the carbon cycle.

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Background: Risk identification and communication tools have the potential to improve health care by supporting clinician-patient or family discussion of treatment risks and benefits and helping patients make more informed decisions; however, they have yet to be tailored to pediatric surgery. User-centered design principles can help to ensure the successful development and uptake of health care tools.

Objective: We aimed to develop and evaluate the usability of an easy-to-use tool to communicate a child's risk of postoperative pain to improve informed and collaborative preoperative decision-making between clinicians and families.

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Background: Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of individuals struggling with eating disorders (EDs) increased substantially. Body Brave (a not-for-profit) created and implemented a web-based stepped-care Recovery Support Programme (RSP) to improve access to community-based ED services. This quality improvement study describes the RSP and assesses its ability to deliver timely access to treatment and platform engagement.

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Purpose: Cerebral autoregulation (CA) is a mechanism that acts to maintain consistent cerebral perfusion across a range of blood pressures, and impaired CA is associated with delirium. Individualized CA-derived blood pressure targets are poorly characterized in critically ill patients and the association with intensive care unit (ICU) delirium is unknown. Our objectives were to characterize optimal mean arterial pressure (MAP) ranges in critically ill adults without brain injury and determine whether deviations from these targets contribute to ICU delirium.

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Benefit finding has been identified as a buffer of the combat exposure-PTSD symptom link in soldiers. However, benefit finding may have a limited buffering capacity on the combat-PTSD symptom link over the course of a soldier's post-deployment recovery period. In the present study, soldiers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) were surveyed at two different time periods post-deployment: Time 1 was 4 months post-deployment ( = 1,510), and Time 2 was at 9 months post-deployment ( = 783).

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Minimizing arsenic intake from food consumption is a key aspect of the public health response in arsenic (As)-contaminated regions. In many of these regions, rice is the predominant staple food. Here, we present a validated maximum allowable concentration of total As in paddy soil and provide the first derivation of a maximum allowable soil concentration for bioavailable As.

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Background: The perioperative period is a data-rich environment with potential for innovation through digital health tools and predictive analytics to optimize patients' health with targeted prehabilitation. Although some risk factors for postoperative pain following pediatric surgery are already known, the systematic use of preoperative information to guide personalized interventions is not yet widespread in clinical practice.

Objective: Our long-term goal is to reduce the incidence of persistent postsurgical pain (PPSP) and long-term opioid use in children by developing personalized pain risk prediction models that can guide clinicians and families to identify targeted prehabilitation strategies.

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Initially associated with cancer diagnosis and therapy, the sigma 2 receptor (σR) has recently been implicated in several disorders of the central nervous system (CNS). It remained a poorly characterized target until we identified it as the transmembrane protein 97 (TMEM97). As part of a program to identify novel compounds that bind with high affinity and selectivity to σR/TMEM97 relative to the sigma 1 receptor (σR) and other CNS proteins, we employed a scaffold simplification strategy to design novel sets of piperazine-substituted aminotetralins based on analogous norbenzomorphans that we previously developed.

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Background: Reproductive effects of ionizing radiation in organisms have been observed under laboratory and field conditions. Such assessments often rely on associations between exposure and effects, and thus lacking a detailed mechanistic understanding of causality between effects occurring at different levels of biological organization. The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP), a conceptual knowledge framework to capture, organize, evaluate and visualize the scientific knowledge of relevant toxicological effects, has the potential to evaluate the causal relationships between molecular, cellular, individual, and population effects.

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Background: Pediatric surgery is associated with a risk of postoperative pain that can impact the family's quality of life. Although some risk factors for postoperative pain are known, these are often not consistently communicated to families. In addition, although tools for risk communication exist in other domains, none are tailored to pediatric surgery.

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In Zamfara state, Nigeria, rice is cultivated in fields contaminated with Pb (lead) from artisanal and illicit mining activities. Rice grown in such contaminated agricultural areas risks not only Pb contamination but also contamination from other toxic elements, like arsenic (As); co-contamination of Pb and As in rice cultivated in mining impacted areas has been previously reported and rice is a hyperaccumulator of As. A field study was conducted with ten different commonly-cultivated Nigerian rice varieties in the mining-impacted farmlands of Dareta village, Zamfara State.

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Anthropogenic releases of radiation are of ongoing importance for environmental protection, but the radiation doses at which natural systems begin to show effects are controversial. More certainty is required in this area to achieve optimal regulation for radioactive substances. We recently carried out a large survey (268 sampled animals and 20 sites) of the association between environmental radiation exposures and small mammal gut-associated microbiomes (fungal and bacterial) in the Chornobyl Exclusion zone (CEZ).

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Although it is an integral part of global change, most of the research addressing the effects of climate change on forests have overlooked the role of environmental pollution. Similarly, most studies investigating the effects of air pollutants on forests have generally neglected the impacts of climate change. We review the current knowledge on combined air pollution and climate change effects on global forest ecosystems and identify several key research priorities as a roadmap for the future.

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Although soil organisms are essential for ecosystem function, the impacts of radiation on soil biological activity at highly contaminated sites has been relatively poorly studied. In April-May 2016, we conducted the first largescale deployment of bait lamina to estimate soil organism (largely soil invertebrate) feeding activity in situ at study plots in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). Across our 53 study plots, estimated weighted absorbed dose rates to soil organisms ranged from 0.

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Predictions of radionuclide dose rates to freshwater organisms can be used to evaluate the radiological environmental impacts of releases from uranium mining and milling projects. These predictions help inform decisions on the implementation of mitigation measures. The objective of this study was to identify how dose rate modelling could be improved to reduce uncertainty in predictions to non-human biota.

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Interactions between hosts and their resident microbial communities are a fundamental component of fitness for both agents. Though recent research has highlighted the importance of interactions between animals and their bacterial communities, comparative evidence for fungi is lacking, especially in natural populations. Using data from 49 species, we present novel evidence of strong covariation between fungal and bacterial communities across the host phylogeny, indicative of recruitment by hosts for specific suites of microbes.

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Background: Kinarm Standard Tests (KSTs) is a suite of upper limb tasks to assess sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, which produces granular performance data that reflect spatial and temporal aspects of behavior (>100 variables per individual). We have previously used principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data using the Kinarm End-Point Lab (EP). Here, we performed PCA using data from the Kinarm Exoskeleton Lab (EXO), and determined agreement of PCA results across EP and EXO platforms in healthy participants.

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