Publications by authors named "O'Connor D"

Neurons coordinate their activity to produce an astonishing variety of motor behaviors. Our present understanding of motor control has grown rapidly thanks to new methods for recording and analyzing populations of many individual neurons over time. In contrast, current methods for recording the nervous system's actual motor output - the activation of muscle fibers by motor neurons - typically cannot detect the individual electrical events produced by muscle fibers during natural behaviors and scale poorly across species and muscle groups.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer to occur in women worldwide. In the UK, the NHS cervical screening programme invites eligible individuals to take part in screening every 3-5 years. At present, around 70% of individuals attend screening when invited.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Macaques provide the most widely used nonhuman primate models for studying the immunology and pathogenesis of human diseases. Although the macaque major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region shares most features with the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region, macaques have an expanded repertoire of MHC class I genes. Although a chimera of two rhesus macaque MHC haplotypes was first published in 2004, the structural diversity of MHC genomic organization in macaques remains poorly understood owing to a lack of adequate genomic reference sequences.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is a compression neuropathy of the median nerve causing pain and numbness and tingling typically in the thumb, index and middle finger. It sometimes results in muscle wasting, diminished sensitivity and loss of dexterity. Splinting the wrist (with or without the hand) using an orthosis is usually offered to people with mild-to-moderate findings, but its effectiveness remains unclear.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

When there is an inadequate supply of mother's milk, pasteurized donor human milk is preferred over formula to supplement feeds for preterm infants. Although providing donor milk helps to improve feeding tolerance and reduce necrotizing enterocolitis, changes to its composition and reductions in bioactivity during processing, are thought to contribute to the slower growth often exhibited by these infants. To improve the clinical outcomes of recipient infants by maximizing the quality of donor milk, research is currently investigating strategies to optimize all aspects of processing, including pooling, pasteurization, and freezing; however, reviews of this literature typically only summarize the impact of a processing technique on composition or bioactivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study looked at how HIV-1-infected cells break down over time, especially during treatment to control the virus.
  • Researchers tracked these cells in monkeys for 4 years while they received treatment, finding different phases of decay in the infected cells.
  • The results showed that the treatment worked well and that some cells can still persist even after the initial infection, indicating virus changes over time during the treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport. Despite recognition that such performance depends on a range of cognitive factors, how common these factors are across performance domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the performance field in the form of a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie performance under pressure.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Understanding gait development is essential for identifying motor impairments in neurodevelopmental disorders. Defining typical gait development in a rhesus macaque model is critical prior to characterizing abnormal gait. The goal of this study was to 1) explore the feasibility of using the Noldus Catwalk to assess gait in infant rhesus macaques and 2) provide preliminary normative data of gait development during the first month of life.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Electronic health record datasets have been used to determine the prevalence of musculoskeletal complaints in general practice but not to examine the associated characteristics and healthcare utilisation at the primary care level.

Aim: To describe the prevalence and characteristics of patients presenting to general practitioners with musculoskeletal complaints.

Design And Setting: A five-year analysis within three Primary Health Networks (PHNs) in Victoria, Australia.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The impact of high temperature short time (HTST, 72 °C, 15 s), Holder pasteurization- (63 °C, 30 min) and high hydrostatic pressure (HHP, 600 MPa-10 min) was evaluated on the digestibility of human milk protein concentrate (HMPC) by using a static in vitro gastrointestinal digestion system. The results showed that the processing steps used to produce the HMPC induced a decrease in readily available nitrogen (non-protein nitrogen and peptides). Overall, digestibility was similar between pasteurized and raw HMPC (degree of hydrolysis ranged from 26 to 34 %).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Rapid growth and excess weight in early childhood are associated with obesity risk. While maternal preconception BMI has been identified as a potential risk factor, the role of paternal preconception BMI is less clear.

Objectives: To examine the association between paternal preconception BMI and age- and sex-standardized WHO BMI z-score (zBMI) growth rates, zBMI, and weight status, in 0- to 10-year-old children.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The use of item libraries for patient-reported outcome (PRO) measurement in oncology allows for the customisation of PRO assessment to measure key health-related quality of life concepts of relevance to the target population and intervention. However, no high-level recommendations exist to guide users on the design and implementation of these customised PRO measures (item lists) across different PRO measurement systems. To address this issue, a working group was set up, including international stakeholders (academic, independent, industry, health technology assessment, regulatory, and patient advocacy), with the goal of creating recommendations for the use of item libraries in oncology trials.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • School-based occupational therapy (SBOT) plays a crucial role in promoting inclusion in educational settings, suggesting the need for multitiered service delivery models to effectively support all students, especially those at risk.
  • A study mapped evidence from peer-reviewed literature regarding SBOT interventions for elementary school children, focusing on different tiers of support for various needs.
  • Findings revealed that most studies emphasized direct individual interventions for children with specific diagnoses, highlighting a gap in whole-school approaches and a need for better evidence on multitiered models to improve inclusion and participation in schools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Holder pasteurization (HoP) (62.5 °C, 30 min) of donor human milk is widely used to inactivate potential pathogens but may lead to denaturation and aggregation of bioactive proteins, reducing their functionality. In contrast, high pressure processing (HPP) is a non-thermal technique that minimally affects assessed bioactive components; however, it is unclear how HPP affects protein digestion, and retention of functional bioactive proteins.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Differentiating infants with adverse events following immunisation (AEFIs) or invasive bacterial infection (IBI) is a significant clinical challenge. Young infants post vaccination are therefore often admitted to the hospital for parenteral antibiotics to avoid missing rare cases of IBI.

Methods: During a service evaluation project, we conducted a single-centre retrospective observational study of infants with IBI, urinary tract infection (UTI) or AEFI from two previously published cohorts.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: Mobile health (mHealth) technology has increased dramatically in the wake of the pandemic. Less research has focused on people with mobility impairing (PMI) disabilities. This study determined the prevalence of mHealth use among PMI adults during the COVID-19 escalation and examines demographic, health and COVID-19 concerns correlates.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective. Job strain has been implicated in a variety of adverse health outcomes, particularly cardiometabolic and inflammatory diseases. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects remain largely unknown.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cohorts of healthy younger adults (18-50yrs) and healthy older adults (60-75yrs) were immunized intramuscularly or intranasally with an adenovirus-vectored RSV vaccine (PanAd3-RSV) as a prime dose and boosted with PanAd3-RSV or a poxvirus-vectored vaccine (MVA-RSV) encoding the same insert. Whole blood gene expression was measured at baseline, 3- and 7-days post vaccination. Intramuscular prime vaccination with PanAd3-RSV induced differential expression of 643 genes (DEGs, FDR < 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To benefit allergy patients and the medical practitioners, pollen information should be available in both a reliable and timely manner; the latter is only recently possible due to automatic monitoring. To evaluate the performance of all currently available automatic instruments, an international intercomparison campaign was jointly organised by the EUMETNET AutoPollen Programme and the ADOPT COST Action in Munich, Germany (March-July 2021). The automatic systems (hardware plus identification algorithms) were compared with manual Hirst-type traps.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Elevated body mass index (BMI) and rapid growth in early childhood are important predictors of obesity risk. The association between maternal preconception BMI and child growth rates is unclear.

Objectives: To assess the association between measured maternal preconception BMI and child age- and sex- standardized WHO BMI z-score (zBMI) growth rates and mean zBMI, in children aged 0-10 years old.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Difficulty with attention is an important symptom in many conditions in psychiatry, including neurodiverse conditions such as autism. There is a need to better understand the neurobiological correlates of attention and leverage these findings in healthcare settings. Nevertheless, it remains unclear if it is possible to build dimensional predictive models of attentional state in a sample that includes participants with neurodiverse conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the effects of consuming non-nutritive sweeteners and sweetness enhancers (S&SEs) on appetite and related health outcomes, particularly focusing on how acute versus repeated intake influences these factors in food consumption.
  • - Conducted as part of the SWEET Project, the research includes five double-blind trials with 213 participants across Europe, comparing traditional sugar-sweetened products to those reformulated with S&SEs in various food forms.
  • - Ethical approvals have been obtained, and findings will be shared in open-access journals and an online research data archive, ensuring transparency and accessibility of the results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF