Publications by authors named "Raphaella Jackson"
Article Synopsis
- Urinary tract infections (UTIs) significantly contribute to hospitalizations and fatalities among individuals with dementia compared to matched controls and those with diabetes.
- A large study analyzed data from over 2.4 million people aged 50+ in Wales between 2000-2021, finding that UTIs in dementia and diabetes were linked to increased mortality rates, especially in those with both conditions.
- Delayed or untreated UTIs led to a notable increase in the risk of death, with 5.4% of untreated individuals with dementia dying within 60 days after diagnosis, rising to 5.9% for those also having diabetes.
Article Synopsis
- UTIs are common in older adults and especially impact those with dementia, making early detection essential due to barriers in reporting symptoms.
- Researchers tested low-cost home monitoring devices that track activity and physiology to develop an algorithm that predicts UTI risk, using data from over 27,000 person-days of monitoring.
- The developed machine learning model shows promising sensitivity (74.7%) and specificity (87.9%) for identifying UTIs, utilizing key features like bathroom visits and respiratory rates to alert healthcare providers for timely intervention.
Introduction: Insects share intimate relationships with microbes that play important roles in their biology. Yet our understanding of how host-bound microbial communities assemble and perpetuate over evolutionary time is limited. Ants host a wide range of microbes with diverse functions and are an emerging model for studying the evolution of insect microbiomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor over 300 million years, insects have relied on symbiotic microbes for nutrition and defence. However, it is unclear whether specific ecological conditions have repeatedly favoured the evolution of symbioses, and how this has influenced insect diversification. Here, using data on 1,850 microbe-insect symbioses across 402 insect families, we found that symbionts have allowed insects to specialize on a range of nutrient-imbalanced diets, including phloem, blood and wood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnts are among the most successful organisms on Earth. It has been suggested that forming symbioses with nutrient-supplementing microbes may have contributed to their success, by allowing ants to invade otherwise inaccessible niches. However, it is unclear whether ants have evolved symbioses repeatedly to overcome the same nutrient limitations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA symbiotic partnership with Blochmannia bacteria is thought to underpin the ecological success of carpenter ants. Disentangling the molecular interactions between the mutualistic partners supports an old hypothesis that many other ants also had similar symbioses and lost them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInsects evolve dependence-often extreme-on microbes for nutrition. This includes cases in which insects harbor multiple endosymbionts that function collectively as a metabolic unit [1-5]. How do these dependences originate [6], and is there a predictable sequence of events leading to the integration of new symbionts? While co-obligate symbioses, in which hosts rely on multiple nutrient-provisioning symbionts, have evolved numerous times across sap-feeding insects, there is only one known case in aphids, involving Buchnera aphidicola and Serratia symbiotica in the Lachninae subfamily [7-9].
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