Publications by authors named "Posner J"

Maternal adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are linked to negative health and developmental outcomes in offspring. However, whether maternal ACEs influence infant weight gain in the first months of life, and if this effect differs by infant sex, remains unclear. This study included 352 full-term newborns from low-risk pregnancies and their mothers in low-income settings in Brazil.

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Background & Aims: Mood disorders and disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBI) are highly prevalent, commonly comorbid, and lack fully effective therapies. Although selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are first-line pharmacological treatments for these disorders, they may impart adverse effects, including anxiety, anhedonia, dysmotility, and, in children exposed in utero, an increased risk of cognitive, mood, and gastrointestinal disorders. SSRIs act systemically to block the serotonin reuptake transporter and enhance serotonergic signaling in the brain, intestinal epithelium, and enteric neurons.

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Quantitatively mapping enzyme sequence-catalysis landscapes remains a critical challenge in understanding enzyme function, evolution, and design. Here, we expand an emerging microfluidic platform to measure catalytic constants- and -for hundreds of diverse naturally occurring sequences and mutants of the model enzyme Adenylate Kinase (ADK). This enables us to dissect the sequence-catalysis landscape's topology, navigability, and mechanistic underpinnings, revealing distinct catalytic peaks organized by structural motifs.

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Background: Adolescence is a critical developmental period for the study of anorexia nervosa (AN), an illness characterized by extreme restriction of food intake. The maturation of the reward system during adolescence combined with recent neurobiological models of AN led to the hypothesis that early on in illness, restrictive food choices would be associated with activity in nucleus accumbens reward regions, rather than caudate regions identified among adults with AN.

Methods: Healthy adolescents (HC, n = 41) and adolescents with AN or atypical AN (atypAN, n = 76) completed a Food Choice Task during fMRI scanning.

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Robust segmentation is critical for deriving quantitative measures from large-scale, multi-center, and longitudinal medical scans. Manually annotating medical scans, however, is expensive and labor-intensive and may not always be available in every domain. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a well-studied technique that alleviates this label-scarcity problem by leveraging available labels from another domain.

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  • Childhood maltreatment (CM) can affect the children of those who experienced it, and the biological processes behind this are not well understood.
  • This study examined how maternal experiences of CM relate to the expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) in maternal and perinatal tissues by analyzing samples from 43 pregnant women.
  • It found that higher levels of maternal CM were linked to lower levels of a specific miRNA (hsa-miR-582-3p) in cord blood, suggesting a potential impact on the genetic development of the offspring.
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  • Isothermal nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) are efficient for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics of infectious diseases, offering advantages over traditional PCR tests in terms of speed and cost.
  • Despite the progress in using paper-based devices for POC NAATs, challenges like integrating liquid components and low detection limits restrict their commercial viability.
  • This study presents a coin cell-based vibration mixing platform that enhances the performance of recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) for detecting HIV-1 DNA and RNA, achieving improved detection sensitivity and reduced reaction time without needing extra heating.
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Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by severe restriction of calorie intake, which persists despite serious medical and psychological sequelae of starvation. Several prior studies have identified impaired feedback learning among individuals with AN, but whether it reflects a disturbance in learning from positive feedback (i.e.

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  • Person-centered care (PCC) is essential for enhancing client experiences and improving HIV outcomes, but there is limited information on how to evaluate it in treatment settings.
  • A study in Ghana developed the PCC assessment tool (PCC-AT) to evaluate HIV clinics, focusing on reliability and content validity from both clients' and providers' perspectives.
  • Results showed that while the PCC framework matched clients' priorities and two of the three domains had consistent scores between clients and providers, differences in perspectives highlighted the need for ongoing client feedback to improve ART services.
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Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by a tendency to limit intake of food, with specific restriction of foods that are generally considered highly palatable. This observation raises questions about whether reward processing is disturbed in AN. This study examined whether adolescents with AN differ from healthy control peers (HC) in anticipatory and consummatory reward processing.

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  • Person-centered care (PCC) in HIV treatment has shown potential in reducing access inequities and enhancing treatment outcomes, but there is no standardized way to measure it.
  • This study in Zambia aims to evaluate a newly developed PCC assessment tool (PCC-AT) by comparing its scores with key HIV service delivery indicators, hypothesizing that higher scores correlate with better treatment outcomes.
  • Data collection is ongoing across 30 health facilities with a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, and results are expected by September 2024, potentially contributing to a better understanding of PCC measurement in HIV services.
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Introduction: Person-centered care (PCC) is considered a fundamental approach to address clients' needs. There is a dearth of data on specific actions that HIV treatment providers identify as priorities to strengthen PCC.

Objective: This study team developed the Person-Centered Care Assessment Tool (PCC-AT), which measures PCC service delivery within HIV treatment settings.

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Background: Having multiple previous generations with depression in the family increases offspring risk for psychopathology. Parental depression has been associated with smaller subcortical brain volumes in their children, but whether two prior generations with depression is associated with further decreases is unclear.

Methods: Using two independent cohorts, 1) a Three-Generation Study (TGS, N = 65) with direct clinical interviews of adults and children across all three generations, and 2) the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD, N = 10,626) of 9-10 year-old children with family history assessed by a caregiver, we tested whether having more generations of depression in the family was associated with smaller subcortical volumes (using structural MRI).

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Background: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a serious psychiatric illness that remains difficult to treat. Elucidating the neural mechanisms of AN is necessary to identify novel treatment targets and improve outcomes. A growing body of literature points to a role for dorsal fronto-striatal circuitry in the pathophysiology of AN, with increasing evidence of abnormal task-based fMRI activation within this network among patients with AN.

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  • * The new assay developed combines duplexed reverse transcriptase recombinase polymerase amplification with MS2 bacteriophage as a process control, allowing for internal verification of the testing steps.
  • * This assay provides highly sensitive detection of SARS-CoV-2 with results in under 25 minutes, visual readout options, and requires minimal equipment, making it more accessible and reducing the chances of false negatives.
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Study Objectives: To characterize children and youth newly diagnosed with insomnia and to describe their use of sleep and other related prescription medications.

Methods: Within a commercial claims database (January 1, 2016-December 31, 2021), we identified children and youth (2-24 years) with a newly recorded insomnia diagnosis (G47.0x; F51.

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Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe mental illness with substantial morbidity and mortality. The central, salient disturbance in AN is restriction of food intake, leading to inappropriately low body weight. Onset of illness is most common during mid-adolescence, and approximately 1% of female individuals are affected over a lifetime, across all socioeconomic classes.

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Person-centered care (PCC) aims to improve client's experiences in HIV care while advancing outcomes. This study team developed the PCC assessment tool (PCC-AT) to assess PCC service performance in HIV treatment settings in Ghana. Study objectives aimed to describe the range of PCC-AT scores within and across study facilities and examine the feasibility of PCC-AT implementation in diverse HIV treatment settings.

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Preclinical evidence suggests that inter-individual variation in the structure of the hypothalamus at birth is associated with variation in the intrauterine environment, with downstream implications for future disease susceptibility. However, scientific advancement in humans is limited by a lack of validated methods for the automatic segmentation of the newborn hypothalamus. N = 215 healthy full-term infants with paired T1-/T2-weighted MR images across four sites were considered for primary analyses (mean postmenstrual age = 44.

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  • Person-centered care (PCC) in HIV services focuses on enhancing client experiences and improving treatment outcomes, requiring collaboration between providers and clients to determine priorities.
  • Challenges include providers often overlooking non-clinical concerns and clients feeling restrained due to language barriers and power imbalances, highlighting the need for standard practices in PCC.
  • A study in Ghana proposed a five-step minimum practice standard for PCC based on contrasting perspectives from clients and providers, emphasizing the necessity for clear operational guidelines in order to effectively implement PCC.
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The University of Washington's Engineering Innovation in Health program is a yearlong engineering design course sequence where senior undergraduate and graduate engineering students across different disciplines work in teams with health professionals to address their unmet needs. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, these team- and project-based courses shifted from an in-person to remote course environment. Here, we share innovative teaching strategies for a team-based, remote course environment.

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  • The study focuses on person-centered care (PCC) in HIV treatment, aiming to improve access and quality while addressing healthcare inequities.
  • It develops a PCC assessment tool (PCC-AT) to evaluate how well PCC is implemented across different treatment settings, testing its validity, reliability, and feasibility.
  • The research includes piloting the tool in five health facilities, gathering feedback through focus groups and interviews to ensure comprehensive understanding and effectiveness of PCC delivery.
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Background: Sleep difficulties are common in pregnancy, yet poor prenatal sleep may be related to negative long-term outcomes for the offspring, including risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Existing studies are few and have not examined timing of exposure effects or offspring sex moderation. We thus aimed to test the hypotheses that poor sleep health in pregnancy is associated with increased risk for ADHD symptoms and offspring sleep problems at approximately 4 years of age.

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Blunted responses to reward feedback have been linked to major depressive disorder (MDD) and depression risk. Using a monetary incentive delay task (win, loss, break-even), we investigated the impact of family risk for depression and lifetime history of MDD and anxiety disorder with 72-channel electroencephalograms (EEG) recorded from 29 high-risk and 32 low-risk individuals (15-58 years, 30 male). Linked-mastoid surface potentials (ERPs) and their corresponding reference-free current source densities (CSDs) were quantified by temporal principal components analysis (PCA).

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  • * Researchers examined the brain connectivity of 92 infants, comparing those born to mothers with a history of CM to those without, assessing how this might differ based on the infant's sex.
  • * Results showed that male infants from maltreated mothers had increased fronto-limbic connectivity, linked to later behavioral issues, while no significant effects were found in female infants, indicating a need for more studies on these intergenerational effects.
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