Publications by authors named "T Van Laar"
Background: Pharmaceutical care for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) is complex. Specialized pharmaceutical care provided by a dedicated pharmacy team member (pharmabuddy) for these patients may reduce medication-related problems. The feasibility of this service for PD patients is unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Limited treatment options with a rapid onset of action are available to treat off episodes in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Therefore, the development of rapid onset formulations, for instance with levodopa, is warranted, which was the reason to investigate an inhalable formulation of levodopa.
Objectives: The primary objective was to determine the duration until maximum effect is reached of inhaled levodopa on the improvement of motor function of PD patients.
Article Synopsis
- Hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc) screening is used in blood establishments worldwide to help prevent the transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV), especially from donors with occult HBV infection (OBI).
- A survey conducted revealed varied practices in HBV screening across 30 responses from 25 countries, with some establishments screening all donations for anti-HBc and HBV DNA, while others had different approaches, leading to inconsistencies in donor deferral strategies.
- The findings highlight the need for improved confirmation of anti-HBc results to minimize unnecessary donor deferrals while balancing the risk of transmission from anti-HBc negative OBI donors, particularly in high-endemic regions where sensitive HBV DNA testing is crucial.
The free energy principle (FEP) describes (biological) agents as minimizing a variational free energy (FE) with respect to a generative model of their environment. Active inference (AIF) is a corollary of the FEP that describes how agents explore and exploit their environment by minimizing an expected FE objective. In two related papers, we describe a scalable, epistemic approach to synthetic AIF by message passing on free-form Forney-style factor graphs (FFGs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present the results of 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of the microbiota from preen oil and the cloaca of chipping sparrows () collected near Mountain Lake Biological Station in Pembroke, VA.
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