Association of Perioperative Glucagon-like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonist Use and Postoperative Outcomes.

Objective: To assess rates of surgical complications and postoperative readmission in diabetic patients with and without active perioperative prescriptions for GLP-1 RA medications.

Background: With the rapid growth of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) use in the United States, it is important to understand the potential effect of these drugs on surgical outcomes broadly.

Methods: In this retrospective, observational cohort analysis, patients with a diagnosis of type 1 or type 2 diabetes undergoing a surgical procedure at a multicenter quaternary-care healthcare system between February 2020 to July 2023 were included.

Quantification of Internal Disc Strain Under Dynamic Loading Via High-Frequency Ultrasound.

Measurement of internal intervertebral disc strain is paramount for understanding the underlying mechanisms of injury and validating computational models. Although advancements in noninvasive imaging and image processing have made it possible to quantify strain, they often rely on visual markers that alter tissue mechanics and are limited to static testing that is not reflective of physiologic loading conditions. The purpose of this study was to integrate high-frequency ultrasound and texture correlation to quantify disc strain during dynamic loading.

Development of the First Patient-Reported Experience Measure (PREM) for Hearing Loss in Audiology Care-My Hearing PREM.

Context: Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) provide important insights into the challenges experienced when living with a chronic condition. Although patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) exist in audiology, there are no validated PREMs to help clinicians understand patient perspectives and identify areas where patients may need additional support or interventions.

Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate content for the new 'My Hearing PREM', which captures lived experiences of hearing loss from patients' perspectives.

Postmarketing Surveillance of Inferior Vena Cava Filters Among US Medicare Beneficiaries: The SAFE-IVC Study.

Importance: Inferior vena cava filters (IVCFs) are commonly used to prevent pulmonary embolism in selected clinical scenarios, despite limited evidence to support their use. Current recommendations from professional societies and the US Food and Drug Administration endorse timely IVCF retrieval when clinically feasible. Current IVCF treatment patterns and outcomes remain poorly described.

Deep learning enables accurate soft tissue tendon deformation estimation in vivo via ultrasound imaging.

Image-based deformation estimation is an important tool used in a variety of engineering problems, including crack propagation, fracture, and fatigue failure. These tools have been important in biomechanics research where measuring in vitro and in vivo tissue deformations are important for evaluating tissue health and disease progression. However, accurately measuring tissue deformation in vivo is particularly challenging due to limited image signal-to-noise ratio.

Customizable, biocompatible implants for dorsal nasal augmentation: An in vivo pilot study of eight polylactic acid scaffold designs.

Augmentation of the nasal dorsum often requires implantation of structural material. Existing methods include autologous, cadaveric or alloplastic materials and injectable hydrogels. Each of these options is associated with considerable limitations.

Integrin mechanosensing relies on a pivot-clip mechanism to reinforce cell adhesion.

Cells intricately sense mechanical forces from their surroundings, driving biophysical and biochemical activities. This mechanosensing phenomenon occurs at the cell-matrix interface, where mechanical forces resulting from cellular motion, such as migration or matrix stretching, are exchanged through surface receptors, primarily integrins, and their corresponding matrix ligands. A pivotal player in this interaction is the αβ integrin and fibronectin (FN) bond, known for its role in establishing cell adhesion sites for migration.

Brain Expression Levels of Commonly Measured Blood Biomarkers of Neurological Damage Differ with Respect to Sex, Race, and Age.

It is increasingly evident that blood biomarkers have potential to improve the diagnosis and management of both acute and chronic neurological conditions. The most well-studied candidates, and arguably those with the broadest utility, are proteins that are highly enriched in neural tissues and released into circulation upon cellular damage. It is currently unknown how the brain expression levels of these proteins is influenced by demographic factors such as sex, race, and age.

'The burden is very much on yourself': A qualitative study to understand the illness and treatment burden of hearing loss across the life course.

Introduction: Hearing loss is a chronic health condition that rises sharply with age. The way people respond to and cope with health conditions is influenced by their capacity to perform illness and treatment-related work. The aim was to explore the cumulative burdens of living with hearing loss and the resources mobilised to ease the burdens.

Dataset including whole blood gene expression profiles and matched leukocyte counts with utility for benchmarking cellular deconvolution pipelines.

Objectives: Cellular deconvolution is a valuable computational process that can infer the cellular composition of heterogeneous tissue samples from bulk RNA-sequencing data. Benchmark testing is a crucial step in the development and evaluation of new cellular deconvolution algorithms, and also plays a key role in the process of building and optimizing deconvolution pipelines for specific experimental applications. However, few in vivo benchmarking datasets exist, particularly for whole blood, which is the single most profiled human tissue.

Ru-Induced Defect Engineering in CoO Lattice for High Performance Electrochemical Reduction of Nitrate to Ammonium.

Amidst these growing sustainability concerns, producing NH via electrochemical NO reduction reaction (NORR) emerges as a promising alternative to the conventional Haber-Bosch process. In a pioneering approach, this study introduces Ru incorporation into CoO lattices at the nanoscale and further couples it with electroreduction conditioning (ERC) treatment as a strategy to enhance metal oxide reducibility and induce oxygen vacancies, advancing NH production from NORR. Here, supported by a suite of ex situ and in situ characterization measurements, the findings reveal that Ru enrichment promotes Co species reduction and oxygen vacancy formation.

The financial toxicity of postbariatric body contouring surgery: a survey study of an urban tertiary care center's patients.

Background: Patients with obesity who undergo bariatric surgery achieve sustained weight loss but are often left with excess skin folds that cause functional and psychological deficits. To remove excess skin, patients can undergo postbariatric BCS; however, cost and lack of insurance coverage present a significant barrier for many patients.

Objectives: This study aimed to characterize the financial impact of treatment on all patients who received bariatric surgery and to compare between those receiving only bariatric surgery and those with postbariatric BCS.

Online capacity building for the health workforce: the case of the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response for the African region.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Office for Africa (AFRO) has developed a comprehensive capacity devel-opment programme to support the successful implementation of the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response 3rd edition Technical Guidelines (IDSR). As part of the learning program, a series of asyn-chronous online courses are offered on OpenWHO in English, French and Portuguese. This paper describes the use of five IDSR online courses and reports on feedback received from learners on Course 1 in the English series.

Review of state-of-the-art micro and macro-bioreactors for the intervertebral disc.

Lower back pain continues to be a global epidemic, limiting quality of life and ability to work, due in large part to symptomatic disc degeneration. Development of more effective and less invasive biological strategies are needed to treat disc degeneration. In vitro models such as macro- or micro-bioreactors or mechanically active organ-chips hold great promise in reducing the need for animal studies that may have limited clinical translatability, due to harsher and more complex mechanical loading environments in human discs than in most animal models.

Effect of Passaging on Bovine Chondrocyte Gene Expression and Engineered Cartilage Production.

Tissue engineering strategies show great potential for repairing osteochondral defects in osteoarthritic joints; however, these approaches often rely on passaging cells multiple times to obtain enough cells to produce functional tissue. Unfortunately, monolayer expansion culture causes chondrocyte dedifferentiation, which is accompanied by a phenotypical and morphological shift in chondrocyte properties that leads to a reduction in the quality of cartilage produced. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate transcriptional variations during expansion culture and determine how differences in cell phenotype from monolayer expansion alter development of functional engineered cartilage.

Graphene and MOF Assembly: Enhanced Fabrication and Functional Derivative via MOF Amorphization.

The integration of graphene and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) has numerous implications across various domains, but fabricating such assemblies is often complicated and time-consuming. Herein, a one-step preparation of graphene-MOF assembly is presented by directly impregnating vertical graphene (VG) arrays into the zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) precursors under ambient conditions. This approach can effectively assemble multiple ZIFs, including ZIF-7, ZIF-8, and ZIF-67, resulting in their uniform dispersion on the VG with adjustable sizes and shapes.

A Systems Approach to Biomechanics, Mechanobiology, and Biotransport.

The human body represents a collection of interacting systems that range in scale from nanometers to meters. Investigations from a systems perspective focus on how the parts work together to enact changes across spatial scales, and further our understanding of how systems function and fail. Here, we highlight systems approaches presented at the 2022 Summer Biomechanics, Bio-engineering, and Biotransport Conference in the areas of solid mechanics; fluid mechanics; tissue and cellular engineering; biotransport; and design, dynamics, and rehabilitation; and biomechanics education.

Financial (dis)incentives to surgical management of head and neck cancer care.

Background: Patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) often require complex surgical reconstruction. This retrospective, cross-sectional study compares financial factors influencing HNC and breast cancer (BC) care to examine care disparities.

Methods: Pricing data from 2012 to 2021 was abstracted from the CMS Physician Fee Schedule Look-Up Tool.

Understanding the etiopathogenesis of lumbar intervertebral disc herniation: From clinical evidence to basic scientific research.

Lumbar intervertebral disc herniation, as a leading cause of low back pain, productivity loss, and disability, is a common musculoskeletal disorder that results in significant socioeconomic burdens. Despite extensive clinical and basic scientific research efforts, herniation etiopathogenesis, particularly its initiation and progression, is not well understood. Understanding herniation etiopathogenesis is essential for developing effective preventive measures and therapeutic interventions.

Priming chondrocytes during expansion alters cell behavior and improves matrix production in 3D culture.

Objective: Cartilage tissue engineering strategies that use autologous chondrocytes require in vitro expansion of cells to obtain enough cells to produce functional engineered tissue. However, chondrocytes dedifferentiate during expansion culture, limiting their ability to produce chondrogenic tissue and their utility for cell-based cartilage repair strategies. The current study identified conditions that favor cartilage production and the mechanobiological mechanisms responsible for these benefits.

Donor white blood cell differential is the single largest determinant of whole blood gene expression patterns.

It has become widely accepted that sample cellular composition is a significant determinant of the gene expression patterns observed in any transcriptomic experiment performed with bulk tissue. Despite this, many investigations currently performed with whole blood do not experimentally account for possible inter-specimen differences in cellularity, and often assume that any observed gene expression differences are a result of true differences in nuclear transcription. In order to determine how confounding of an assumption this may be, in this study, we recruited a large cohort of human donors (n = 138) and used a combination of next generation sequencing and flow cytometry to quantify and compare the underlying contributions of variance in leukocyte counts versus variance in other biological factors to overall variance in whole blood transcript levels.

Variability in donor leukocyte counts confound the use of common RNA sequencing data normalization strategies in transcriptomic biomarker studies performed with whole blood.

Gene expression data generated from whole blood via next generation sequencing is frequently used in studies aimed at identifying mRNA-based biomarker panels with utility for diagnosis or monitoring of human disease. These investigations often employ data normalization techniques more typically used for analysis of data originating from solid tissues, which largely operate under the general assumption that specimens have similar transcriptome composition. However, this assumption may be violated when working with data generated from whole blood, which is more cellularly dynamic, leading to potential confounds.

Variation in the practice of wide local excision for melanoma in Ireland and the UK: a questionnaire survey.

Background: Wide local excision (WLE) is standard practice in the management of melanoma, but no national or international guidelines exist regarding its technique.

Objectives: To assess variation in the practice of WLE and to explore the effect of clinicians' specialty and grade on such variation.

Methods: This was an international, anonymized, cross-sectional study.