Objectives: Increasing ceftriaxone-resistant is of public health concern. A cluster of ceftriaxone-resistant was identified in 2022, which was linked to heterosexuals from the Asia-Pacific region who were studying at UK universities. The possibility of further transmission within and beyond this network was of concern, particularly as not all gonococcal cases have a positive culture for antimicrobial susceptibility testing to be performed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Hypothesis: In accordance with the Cognitive Model of Negative Symptoms, defeatist performance beliefs (DPBs) are an important psychosocial mechanism of negative symptoms in schizophrenia-spectrum groups. DPBs are also mediators of negative symptom improvement in clinical trials. Despite the clinical significance of DPBs and their inclusion as a mechanism of change measure in clinical trials, the psychometric properties of the DPB scale have not been examined in any schizophrenia-spectrum group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHip fractures are a frequent cause of hospitalization in the elderly population and can lead to significant morbidity and mortality. As the population continues to age, the incidence of hip fractures is expected to increase. The internist/hospitalist plays a critical role in the care of this population as many patients have multiple medical comorbidities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModern HIV-1 treatment effectively suppresses viral amplification in people living with HIV. However, the persistence of HIV-1 DNA as proviruses integrated into the human genome remains the main barrier to achieving a cure. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) offers increased sensitivity for characterising archived drug resistance mutations (DRMs) in HIV-1 DNA for improved treatment options.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCan Med Educ J
September 2023
Background: Training future doctors in the skills of evidence-based medicine (EBM) is clearly important. Journal club (JCs) are well-recognized educational interventions for teaching EBM. In contrast to postgraduate medical education, JCs use in undergraduate medical education (UME) has not been adequately explored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground A recent randomized trial, the MICHELLE trial, demonstrated improved posthospital outcomes with a 35-day course of prophylactic rivaroxaban for patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at high risk of venous thromboembolism. We explored how often these findings may apply to an unselected clinical population of patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Methods and Results Using a 35-hospital retrospective cohort of patients hospitalized between March 7, 2020, and January 23, 2021, with COVID-19 (MI-COVID19 database), we quantified the percentage of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who would be eligible for rivaroxaban at discharge per MICHELLE trial criteria and report clinical event rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: A lack of universal definitions for response and remission in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has hampered the comparability of results across trials. To address this problem, we conducted an individual participant data diagnostic test accuracy meta-analysis to evaluate the discriminative ability of the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS) in determining response and remission. We also aimed to generate empirically derived cutoffs on the CY-BOCS for these outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Ergot, caused by the fungal pathogen Claviceps purpurea, infects the female flowers of a range of cereal crops, including wheat. To understand the interaction between C. purpurea and hexaploid wheat we undertook an extensive examination of the reprogramming of the wheat transcriptome in response to C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common complication of COVID-19. It is not well understood how hospitals have managed VTE prevention and the effect of prevention strategies on mortality.
Objective: To characterize frequency, variation across hospitals, and change over time in VTE prophylaxis and treatment-dose anticoagulation in patients hospitalized for COVID-19, as well as the association of anticoagulation strategies with in-hospital and 60-day mortality.
The ongoing pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 calls for rapid and cost-effective methods to accurately identify infected individuals. The vast majority of patient samples is assessed for viral RNA presence by RT-qPCR. Our biomedical research institute, in collaboration between partner hospitals and an accredited clinical diagnostic laboratory, established a diagnostic testing pipeline that has reported on more than 252,000 RT-qPCR results since its commencement at the beginning of April 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Emergence of variants with specific mutations in key epitopes in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 raises concerns pertinent to mass vaccination campaigns and use of monoclonal antibodies. We aimed to describe the emergence of the B.1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe widespread use of complementary products poses a challenge to clinicians in the perioperative period and may increase perioperative risk. Because dietary supplements are regulated differently from traditional pharmaceuticals and guidance is often lacking, the Society for Perioperative Assessment and Quality Improvement convened a group of experts to review available literature and create a set of consensus recommendations for the perioperative management of these supplements. Using a modified Delphi method, the authors developed recommendations for perioperative management of 83 dietary supplements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAll coronaviruses known to have recently emerged as human pathogens probably originated in bats. Here we use a single experimental platform based on immunodeficient mice implanted with human lung tissue (hereafter, human lung-only mice (LoM)) to demonstrate the efficient in vivo replication of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), as well as two endogenous SARS-like bat coronaviruses that show potential for emergence as human pathogens. Virus replication in this model occurs in bona fide human lung tissue and does not require any type of adaptation of the virus or the host.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring development, cells gain positional information through the interpretation of dynamic morphogen gradients. A proposed mechanism for interpreting opposing morphogen gradients is mutual inhibition of downstream transcription factors, but isolating the role of this specific motif within a natural network remains a challenge. Here, we engineer a synthetic morphogen-induced mutual inhibition circuit in E.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReaction-diffusion processes across layered media arise in several scientific domains such as pattern-forming E. coli on agar substrates, epidermal-mesenchymal coupling in development, and symmetry-breaking in cell polarization. We develop a modeling framework for bilayer reaction-diffusion systems and relate it to a range of existing models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAll known recently emerged human coronaviruses likely originated in bats. Here, we used a single experimental platform based on human lung-only mice (LoM) to demonstrate efficient in vivo replication of all recently emerged human coronaviruses (SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2) and two highly relevant endogenous pre-pandemic SARS-like bat coronaviruses. Virus replication in this model occurs in bona fide human lung tissue and does not require any type of adaptation of the virus or the host.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMovement, behavioral, and neuropsychiatric disorders in children have been linked to infections and a group of anti-neuronal autoantibodies, implying dopamine receptor-mediated encephalitis within the basal ganglia. The purpose of this study was to determine if anti-neuronal biomarkers, when used as a group, confirmed the acute disease in Sydenham chorea (SC) and pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcal infections (PANDAS). IgG autoantibodies against four neuronal autoantigens (tubulin, lysoganglioside G, and dopamine receptors D1 and D2) were detected in SC sera (N=8), sera and/or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from two groups of PANDAS cases (N=25 first group and N=35 second group), sera from Tourette's syndrome (N=18), obsessive-compulsive disorder (N=25), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (N=18), and healthy controls (N=28) by direct enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).
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