Association of Duration of Recognized Hypertension and Stroke Risk: The REGARDS Study.

Background: The focus for reducing hypertension-related cardiovascular disease is the management of blood pressure. Limited data are available on the potential benefit of delaying the onset of hypertension.

Methods: Stroke-free Black and White participants from the REGARDS cohort study (Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke; recruited 2003-2007) were followed through 2022 for incident stroke events.

Door-In-Door-Out Times at Referring Hospitals and Outcomes of Hemorrhagic Stroke.

Study Objective: Interhospital transfer is often required in the care of patients with hemorrhagic stroke. Guidelines recommend a door-in-door-out (DIDO) time of ≤120 minutes at the transferring emergency department (ED); however, it is unknown whether DIDO times are related to clinical outcomes of hemorrhagic stroke.

Methods: Retrospective, observational cohort study using US registry data from Get With The Guidelines-Stroke participating hospitals.

Lipoprotein(a) among normotensive patients and risk of incident hypertension.

Lipoprotein(a) has been shown to be disruptive to local endothelial cells, whose integrity is critical to blood pressure (BP) regulation. Cross-sectional analysis has shown an association between lipoprotein(a) and prevalent hypertension, though it is unclear if lipoprotein(a) increases risk of incident hypertension. To assess this, the authors measured baseline lipoprotein(a) among 5307 normotensive patients (median age 26 years (interquartile range [IQR] 12-50) and used Cox proportional hazard models to generate hazard rations (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI; median follow-up 10-years).

Disparities in Emergency Medical Services Use, Prehospital Notification, and Symptom Onset to Arrival in Patients With Acute Stroke.

Background: Disparities in time to hospital presentation and prehospital stroke care may be important drivers in inequities in acute stroke treatment rates, functional outcomes, and mortality. It is unknown how patient-level factors, such as race and ethnicity and county-level socioeconomic status, affect these aspects of prehospital stroke care.

Methods: Cross-sectional study of patients with ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, and subarachnoid hemorrhage in the Get With the Guidelines-Stroke registry, presenting from July 2015 to December 2019, with symptom onset ≤24 hours.

Emergency Department Process Times and Door-In-Door-Out Times in Interhospital Transfers After Acute Ischemic Stroke.

Importance: Stroke treatment is exquisitely time sensitive. The door-in-door-out (DIDO) time, defined as the total time spent in the emergency department (ED) at a transferring hospital, is an important quality metric for the care of acute stroke. However, little is known about the contributions of specific process steps to delays and disparities in DIDO time.

Impact of Poverty on Stroke Recurrence: A Population-Based Study.

Background And Objectives: Poverty is associated with greater stroke incidence. The relationship between poverty and stroke recurrence is less clear.

Methods: In this population-based study, incident strokes within the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky region were ascertained during the 2015 study period and followed up for recurrence until December 31, 2018.

The significance of multipole interactions for the stability of regular structures composed from charged particles.

Identifying the forces responsible for stabilising binary particle lattices is key to the controlled fabrication of many new materials. Experiments have shown that the presence of charge can be integral to the formation of ordered arrays; however, a complete analysis of the forces responsible has not included many of the significant lattice types that may form during fabrication. A theory of many-body electrostatic interactions has been applied to six lattice stoichiometries, AB, AB, AB, AB, AB and AB, to show that induced multipole interactions can make a very significant (>80 %) contribution to the total lattice energy of arrays of charged particles.

Diffusion Restriction in the Splenium: A Comparative Study of Cytotoxic Lesions of the Corpus Callosum (CLOCCs) versus Lesions of Vascular Etiology.

Cytotoxic lesions of the corpus callosum (CLOCCs) have broad differential diagnoses. Differentiating these lesions from lesions of vascular etiology is of high clinical significance. We compared the clinical and radiological characteristics and outcomes between vascular splenial lesions and CLOCCs in a retrospective cohort study.

Association of Prior Stroke With Health Care Perceptions of Adequate Emergency Care in Women.

Background: Women with a history of stroke represent a vulnerable patient population due to their extant disability, morbidity, and risk of recurrence. The association between prior stroke with patient experience and perception of emergency medical care is unknown.

Methods: We utilized data from the Health Care Experiences and Perception cross-sectional, online survey from the American Heart Association Research Goes Red Registry.

A Quasi Time-Reversible Scheme Based on Density Matrix Extrapolation on the Grassmann Manifold for Born-Oppenheimer Molecular Dynamics.

This Letter introduces the so-called Quasi Time-Reversible scheme based on Grassmann extrapolation (QTR G-Ext) of density matrices for an accurate calculation of initial guesses in Born-Oppenheimer Molecular Dynamics (BOMD) simulations. The method shows excellent results on four large molecular systems that are representative of real-life production applications, ranging from 21 to 94 atoms simulated with Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory surrounded with a classical environment with 6k to 16k atoms. Namely, it clearly reduces the number of self-consistent field iterations while at the same time achieving energy-conserving simulations, resulting in a considerable speed-up of BOMD simulations even when tight convergence of the KS equations is required.

Diffusion-Restricted Lesions of the Splenium: Clinical Presentation, Radiographic Patterns, and Patient Outcomes.

Background And Objectives: Diffusion-restricted (DR) lesions of the splenium are encountered in a wide variety of pathologies, and their significance is often unclear. We sought to report the spectrum of clinical presentations, neuroimaging patterns, and the predictors of radiographic and clinical outcomes from DR splenial lesions.

Methods: This was a single-center, retrospective cohort study from January 1, 2009, to August 1, 2020.

Reduced basis surrogates for quantum spin systems based on tensor networks.

Within the reduced basis methods approach, an effective low-dimensional subspace of a quantum many-body Hilbert space is constructed in order to investigate, e.g., the ground-state phase diagram.

Door-in-Door-out Times for Interhospital Transfer of Patients With Stroke.

Importance: Treatments for time-sensitive acute stroke are not available at every hospital, often requiring interhospital transfer. Current guidelines recommend hospitals achieve a door-in-door-out time of no more than 120 minutes at the transferring emergency department (ED).

Objective: To evaluate door-in-door-out times for acute stroke transfers in the American Heart Association Get With The Guidelines-Stroke registry and to identify patient and hospital factors associated with door-in-door-out times.

Miniaturization of an Osmotic Pressure-Based Glucose Sensor for Continuous Intraperitoneal and Subcutaneous Glucose Monitoring by Means of Nanotechnology.

The Sencell sensor uses glucose-induced changes in an osmotic pressure chamber for continuous glucose measurement. A final device shall have the size of a grain of rice. The size limiting factor is the piezo-resistive pressure transducers inside the core sensor technology (resulting chamber volume: 70 µL.

Linear scaling computation of forces for the domain-decomposition linear Poisson-Boltzmann method.

The Linearized Poisson-Boltzmann (LPB) equation is a popular and widely accepted model for accounting solvent effects in computational (bio-) chemistry. In the present article, we derive the analytical forces using the domain-decomposition-based LPB-method with a van-der Waals or solvent-accessible surface. We present an efficient strategy to compute the forces and its implementation, allowing linear scaling of the method with respect to the number of atoms using the fast multipole method.

Household income is associated with functional outcomes in a multi-institutional cohort of patients with ischemic stroke and COVID-19.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened awareness of health disparities associated with socioeconomic status (SES) across the United States. We examined whether household income is associated with functional outcomes after stroke and COVID-19.

Materials And Methods: This was a multi-institutional, retrospective cohort study of consecutively hospitalized patients with SARS-CoV-2 and radiographically confirmed stroke presenting from March through November 2020 to any of five comprehensive stroke centers in metropolitan Chicago, Illinois, USA.

The Influence of Rapid Influenza Diagnostic Testing on Clinician Decision-Making for Patients With Acute Respiratory Infection in Urgent Care.

Background: The potential benefits of using rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs) in urgent care facilities for clinical care and prescribing practices are understudied. We compared antiviral and antibiotic prescribing, imaging, and laboratory ordering in clinical encounters with and without RIDT results.

Methods: We compared patients with acute respiratory infection (ARI) symptoms who received an RIDT and patients who did not at 2 urgent care facilities.

Infertility in systemic lupus erythematosus: what rheumatologists need to know in a new age of assisted reproductive technology.

Fertility is often a concern for women with SLE. In addition to known indirect factors that influence the ability of a woman with SLE to become pregnant, such as cytotoxic agents, other medications, advanced age and psychosocial effects of the disease, direct disease-related factors are believed to influence fertility. These include diminished ovarian reserve, menstrual irregularities (a function of disease activity) and the presence of antiphospholipid antibodies.

Carotid disease, cognition, and aging: time to redefine asymptomatic disease?

There is an increasing appreciation of the vascular contributions in the development of age-related cognitive impairment and dementia. Identifying risk and maintaining cognitive health for successful aging is ever relevant in our aging population. Carotid disease, a well-established risk factor for stroke and often a harbinger of other vascular disease states, is also emerging as another vascular risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.

Clinical Reasoning: A Young Adult Man With Cognitive Changes, Gait Difficulty, and Renal Insufficiency.

A 22-year-old right-handed man with recently diagnosed gout and renal insufficiency presented with 3 months of progressive gait instability and cognitive changes. He initially presented to an outside institution and underwent a broad workup, but an etiology for his symptoms was not found. On subsequent presentation to our institution, his examination revealed multidomain cognitive dysfunction, spasticity, hyperreflexia, and clonus.

Coarse-Graining ddCOSMO through an Interface between Tinker and the ddX Library.

The domain decomposition conductor-like screening model is an efficient way to compute the solvation energy of solutes within a polarizable continuum medium in a linear scaling computational time. Despite its efficiency, the application to very large systems is still challenging. A possibility to further accelerate the algorithm is resorting to coarse-graining strategies.