Publications by authors named "R M Gladstone"
Importance: Early preterm birth (ie, at less than 34 weeks' gestation) confers a high risk for adverse health outcomes, yet no universal screening strategy exists, preventing targeted delivery of effective interventions.
Objective: To evaluate the ability of midpregnancy placental growth factor (PlGF) screening to identify pregnancies at highest risk for early preterm birth.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This prospective cohort study was conducted at an urban, tertiary care center from 2020 to 2023.
Article Synopsis
- Streptococcus pneumoniae is a significant global health threat, but pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) have notably decreased cases of targeted serotypes.
- Research conducted over 41 years in Norway utilized whole-genome sequencing to analyze historical and contemporary isolates of S. pneumoniae, revealing shifts in serotype populations.
- Findings indicate that while PCVs have decreased invasive disease, they also led to some serotype switching to non-vaccine types, indicating a dynamic evolutionary response in the bacterial population.
Article Synopsis
- Invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) remains a serious global issue, particularly concerning non-vaccine serotypes, even after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCV) in South Africa.
- The study analyzed over 3,000 IPD genomes from children between 2005-2020, observing a drop in incidence for vaccine-type bacteria in the late-PCV13 period, but some continued to pose a threat.
- Notably, non-vaccine serotypes showed rising drug resistance and lineage diversity, indicating the need for ongoing genomic surveillance to inform health policies and future vaccine developments.
Article Synopsis
- The study aimed to evaluate the risk and prevalence of hospital-acquired bacterial infections in intensive care units during the first wave of COVID-19 by using advanced deep-sequencing techniques.
- Conducted in a hard-hit region in northern Italy, the research involved collecting and analyzing samples from patients in both regular wards and ICUs to identify specific bacterial pathogens.
- The findings highlighted the effectiveness of this novel sequencing approach in tracking bacterial transmission and understanding antimicrobial resistance during a time of increased patient load.
Studies of bacterial adaptation and evolution are hampered by the difficulty of measuring traits such as virulence, drug resistance, and transmissibility in large populations. In contrast, it is now feasible to obtain high-quality complete assemblies of many bacterial genomes thanks to scalable high-accuracy long-read sequencing technologies. To exploit this opportunity, we introduce a phenotype- and alignment-free method for discovering coselected and epistatically interacting genomic variation from genome assemblies covering both core and accessory parts of genomes.
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