Publications by authors named "Omar Rivera"

Introduction: In 2015, the Army Office of the Surgeon General adapted a Veterans Health Administration course for health care teams to implement holistic health practices to improve the resiliency of health care teams and patient care. The Army course Move to Health was piloted in health care teams at 8 military clinics. During the 20-hour course, health care teams learned techniques to improve their resiliency and created action plans to incorporate holistic health into the workplace, a known factor in decreasing burnout.

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The speciation of radioactive tritium (T) in a naturally-established subtropical loblolly pine forest that has been irrigated with highly-contaminated pond water for the last 20 years is reported. This irrigation project was created to limit the underground transport of a tritium-rich plume which also contains low levels of toxic organics, metals and radionuclides such as carbon-14 (14C) from a nearby low-level waste burial ground. The levels of tritiated water (HTO) in the wood cores were not influenced by recent irrigation activities.

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Background: Warfarin is associated with poor outcomes after trauma, an effect correlated with elevations in the international normalized ratio (INR). In contrast, the novel oral anticoagulants (NOAs) have no validated laboratory measure to quantify coagulopathy. We sought to determine if use of NOAs was associated with elevated activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT) or INR levels among trauma patients or increased clotting times on thromboelastography (TEG).

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Introduction: Pancreatic trauma results in high morbidity and mortality, in part caused by the delay in diagnosis and subsequent organ dysfunction. Optimal operative management strategies remain unclear. We therefore sought to determine CT accuracy in diagnosing pancreatic injury and the morbidity and mortality associated with varying operative strategies.

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Purpose: To examine whether Army community members participating in a best-practice based workplace health promotion program (WHPP) experience goal-moderated improvements in health-related outcomes.

Design: Pretest/posttest outcome evaluation examining an autonomously participating client cohort over 1 year.

Setting: Army Wellness Center facilities on 19 Army installations.

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Article Synopsis
  • The evaluation focused on the implementation of a tobacco-free medical campus (TFMC) policy at a U.S. Army medical facility, examining its effects on employees' health and exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) over 12 months.
  • Results indicated that employees' exposure to SHS at work significantly decreased post-implementation, and there was a reduction in reported chronic bronchitis cases; however, the overall quit rates for tobacco users did not change.
  • Employee satisfaction with the TFMC policy was notably higher compared to the previous policy, but this satisfaction level varied based on whether the employees were smokers or non-smokers.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study examined the impact of novel oral anticoagulants (NOAs) on trauma outcomes, particularly focusing on intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) in comparison to traditional anticoagulants and antiplatelets.
  • A total of 1,847 trauma patients were enrolled, finding that those on NOAs had similar ICH rates and mortality compared to other anticoagulant groups.
  • The research concluded that patients using NOAs were not at a significantly higher risk for ICH or death, which challenges previous concerns regarding their safety in trauma situations.
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Two experiments tested the hypothesis that social perception recruits distinct limited-capacity processing resources that are distinguished by the cerebral hemispheres. To test this hypothesis, social perception efficiency was assessed after relevant hemispheric processing resources were depleted. In Experiment 1 prime faces were unilaterally presented for 30 ms, after which centrally presented target faces were categorised by sex.

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The limited capacity of face perception resources in the left cerebral hemisphere was examined using a sex categorization task. One study tested the hypothesis that sex categorization is impeded whenever feature extraction resources in the left hemisphere are simultaneously being utilized by another task. This hypothesis was tested by presenting prime faces for either 32 ms or 320 ms to either the left or right visual-field just before centrally presented target faces were categorized by sex.

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Background: Tumor initiation has been attributed to haploinsufficiency at a single locus for a large number of cancers. Patched1 (Ptc1) was one of the first such loci, and Ptc1 haploinsufficiency has been asserted to lead to medulloblastoma and rhabdomyosarcoma in mice.

Procedure: To study the role of Ptc1 in cerebellar tumor development and to create a preclinical therapeutic platform, we have generated a conditional Ptc1 haploinsufficiency model of medulloblastoma by inactivating Ptc1 in Pax7-expressing cells of the cerebellum.

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Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)-sulfotransferase (SULT2A1) is a phase II metabolizing/detoxifying enzyme with substrate preference for physiological hydroxysteroids, diverse drugs and other xenobiotics. The first-pass tissues (liver and intestine) express SULT2A1 at high levels. In senescent male rodents, Sult2A1 gene transcription in the liver is markedly enhanced and calorie restriction retards this increase.

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The dynamic interaction between the androgen receptor (AR) and steroid receptor coactivator-1 (SRC-1) was explored in living cells expressing chimeric forms of the receptor and the coactivator containing two spectral variants of jellyfish fluorescent protein. Laser scanning confocal imaging of transfected cells expressing fluorescently labeled SRC-1 revealed that in an unsynchronized cell population, the coactivator is distributed in approximately 40% cells as nuclear bodies of 0.2-1.

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The genetic makeup of the organism appears to dictate the species-specific rate of aging and the maximum life-span potential. The genotype is converted to phenotype through transcriptional and translational regulation. A group of gene regulatory proteins (transcription factors) play critical roles in controlling the rates of transcription of specific genes by directly interacting with regulatory sequences at gene promoters.

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