Vaccination Against Influenza and Pneumococcus During Pretravel Health Consultations in the United States: Interventions and Missed Opportunities.

Background: Infections by and influenza viruses are vaccine-preventable diseases causing great morbidity and mortality. We evaluated pneumococcal and influenza vaccination practices during pre-international travel health consultations.

Methods: We evaluated data on pretravel visits over a 10-year period (1 July 2012 through 31 June 2022) from 31 sites in Global TravEpiNet (GTEN), a consortium of US healthcare facilities providing pretravel health consultations.

mHealth-Augmented Care for Reducing Depression Symptom Severity Among Patients With Chronic Pain: Exploratory, Retrospective Cohort Study.

Background: Depression and chronic pain are commonly comorbid, mutually reinforcing, and debilitating. Emerging approaches to mobile behavioral health care (mHealth) promise to improve outcomes for patients with comorbid depression and chronic pain by integrating with existing care models to bolster support and continuity between clinical visits; however, the evidence base supporting the use of mHealth to augment care for this patient population is limited.

Objective: To develop an evidence base that sets the stage for future research, we aimed to explore the associations between changes in depression severity and various integrated care models, with and without mHealth augmentation, among patients with comorbid depression and nonmalignant chronic pain.

5-FU Weakens Defensive Functions of the Junctional Epithelium.

Aim: To investigate additional factors contributing to the pathophysiology of chemotherapy-induced oral mucositis and periodontitis beyond the systemic immune suppression caused by the chemotherapeutic agent 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU).

Methods: 5-Fluorouracil was topically delivered to the non-keratinized, rapidly proliferating junctional epithelium (JE) surrounding the dentition, and acts as an immunologic and functional barrier to bacterial ingression. Various techniques, including EdU incorporation, quantitative immunohistochemistry (qIHC), histology, enzymatic activity assays, and micro-computed tomographic (μCT) imaging, were employed to analyze the JE at multiple time points following topical 5-FU treatment.

Preoperative hemoglobin to albumin ratio as a prognostic predictor for patients with colorectal cancer surgery.

The purpose of this study was to identify whether the preoperative hemoglobin to albumin ratio (HAR) could predict the prognosis of patients who underwent colorectal cancer (CRC) radical resection. This study enrolled 4018 consecutive CRC patients, calculating HAR as the hemoglobin count divided by albumin count. Patients were divided into the high and low HAR groups based on a cut-off value (0.