Measured energy expenditure according to the phases of critical illness: A descriptive cohort study.

Background: Indirect calorimetry is recommended for directing energy provision in the intensive care unit (ICU). However, limited reports exist of measured energy expenditure according to the phases of critical illness in large cohorts of patients during ICU admission. This study aimed to analyze measured energy expenditure overall in adult patients who were critically ill and across the different phases of critical illness.

The impact of exposure to green or bluespace on dietary intake and food choices among adults-A systematic literature review.

Extensive research has shown that spending time in natural greenspaces has a positive impact on health. However, there is limited evidence regarding potential factors that may influence these effects. This review aimed to assess the strength of the evidence and potential impact of exposure to green and bluespaces on dietary outcomes in adults.

'The upside-down' healthcare professional students' experiences of delirium: an all-Ireland focus group study.

Background: Delirium is a complex neuropsychiatric syndrome characterised by an acute state of confusion, with a substantial impact on medical inpatients. Despite its growing recognition as a global healthcare concern, delirium remains underdiagnosed, partly due to a lack of awareness among healthcare professionals. The aim of this study was to explore how healthcare professional students experience caring for individuals experiencing delirium, the influence of their current pre-registration healthcare education, and importance of interprofessional teamwork in their role.

Systematic changes in neural selectivity reflect the acquired salience of category-diagnostic dimensions.

Humans and other animals develop remarkable behavioral specializations for identifying, differentiating, and acting on classes of ecologically important signals. Ultimately, this expertise is flexible enough to support diverse perceptual judgments: a voice, for example, simultaneously conveys what a talker says as well as myriad cues about her identity and state. Mature perception across complex signals thus involves both discovering and learning regularities that best inform diverse perceptual judgments, and weighting this information flexibly as task demands change.

Distributional learning drives statistical suppression and deafening.

Unlabelled: Humans and other animals use information about how likely it is for something to happen. The absolute and relative probability of an event influences a remarkable breadth of behaviors, from foraging for food to comprehending linguistic constructions -- even when these probabilities are learned implicitly. It is less clear how, and under what circumstances, statistical learning of simple probabilities might drive changes in perception and cognition.

First seizure while driving: Clinical features and prognosis.

Objectives: Patients with epilepsy are ineligible to drive until seizure free for an appropriate period given the risk of a seizure-related motor vehicle accident. Driving restrictions also apply to patients after their first-ever seizure. However, it is unclear whether a longer period of non-driving is required if the first seizure occurred while driving.

Speech-to-song transformation in perception and production.

The speech-to-song transformation is an illusion in which certain spoken phrases are perceived as more song-like after being repeated several times. The present study addresses whether this perceptual transformation leads to a corresponding change in how accurately participants imitate pitch/time patterns in speech. We used illusion-inducing (illusion stimuli) and non-inducing (control stimuli) spoken phrases as stimuli.

Mediterranean diet for the management of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease in non-Mediterranean, Western countries: What's known and what's needed?

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is the most common liver disease worldwide, affecting 30% of the population in Western countries. MASLD is considered the hepatic manifestation of the metabolic syndrome, pathophysiologically underpinned by insulin resistance and frequently co-exists with hypertension, central obesity and dyslipidaemia. Currently, safe and effective pharmacotherapies for MASLD are limited, making weight loss with lifestyle changes the mainstay therapy.

Ligand Shell Thickness of PEGylated Gold Nanoparticles Controls Cellular Uptake and Radiation Enhancement.

The drive to improve the safety and efficacy of radiotherapies for cancers has prompted the development of nanomaterials that can locally amplify the radiation dose at a tumor without damaging the surrounding healthy tissue. Gold nanoparticles (Au NPs), in particular, exhibit promising radiosensitizing properties under kilovolt X-ray exposure, although the precise mechanism behind this enhancement is not fully understood. While most studies recognize the involvement of factors such as core composition, size, shape, and ligand chemistry in the effectiveness of Au NPs for radiation-induced cancer treatment, there is a scarcity of direct assessments that connect the photophysical properties of the nanomaterial with the observed cellular or biological outcomes.

Mediterranean Diet in Older Irish Adults: Prevalence, Patterns, Predictors and Pertinence.

The Mediterranean diet (MD) shows the strongest evidence in support of healthy aging and prevention of age-related diseases. It is associated with a decreased risk of chronic disease, such as cardiovascular disease, obesity, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and cognitive disease. Given the health-promoting aspects of this diet, we conducted a secondary analysis of data from the LifeAge study ("Promoting the shift: sedentary Lifestyle towards active Ageing-LifeAge" Project No 603121-EPP-1-2018-1-ES-SPO-SCP) with the primary aim to determine the proportion of older Irish adults adhering to the MD and to examine the association between adherence to the MD (assessed using the Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS) scoring tool) and anthropometric risk factors of non-communicable diseases.

Brain mechanisms of rumination and negative self-referential processing in adolescent depression.

Background: Depression is linked to cognitive biases towards more negative and less positive self-relevant information. Rumination, perseverative negative thinking about the past and the self, may contribute to these biases.

Methods: 159 adolescents (12-18 years), with a range of depression symptoms, completed the SRET during fMRI.

Effects of a telehealth-delivered Mediterranean diet intervention in adults with Rheumatoid Arthritis (MEDRA): a randomised controlled trial.

Objective: To compare the effects a Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) versus the Irish Healthy Eating Guidelines (HEG) on physical function and quality of life in adults with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Ireland.

Methods: Forty-four adults with RA were randomised (1:1) to the MedDiet or HEG for 12 weeks. The intervention included three video teleconsultations and two follow-up telephone calls facilitated by a Registered Dietitian (RD).

Challenges in designing a randomized, double-blind noninferiority trial for treatment of acne: The SD-ACNE trial.

Background/aims: Excessive use of antibiotics has led to development of antibiotic resistance and other antibiotic-associated complications. Dermatologists prescribe more antibiotics per clinician than any other major specialty, with much of this use for acne. Alternative acne treatments are available but are used much less often than antibiotics, at least partially because dermatologists feel that they are less effective.

Voice actors show enhanced neural tracking of pitch, prosody perception, and music perception.

Experiences with sound that make strong demands on the precision of perception, such as musical training and experience speaking a tone language, can enhance auditory neural encoding. Are high demands on the precision of perception necessary for training to drive auditory neural plasticity? Voice actors are an ideal subject population for answering this question. Voice acting requires exaggerating prosodic cues to convey emotion, character, and linguistic structure, drawing upon attention to sound, memory for sound features, and accurate sound production, but not fine perceptual precision.

Digital education about delirium for health care professional students: a mixed methods systematic review.

Background: Competence in delirium care begins with pre-registration education for health care professionals. Although a common complication for hospitalised patients, delirium is avoidable and reversible. Delirium requires early recognition in person-centred care.

Rewiring the Sex-Determination Pathway During the Evolution of Self-Fertility.

Although evolution is driven by changes in how regulatory pathways control development, we know little about the molecular details underlying these transitions. The TRA-2 domain that mediates contact with TRA-1 is conserved in Caenorhabditis. By comparing the interaction of these proteins in two species, we identified a striking change in how sexual development is controlled.

Long-term outcomes of older adults with acute COVID-19 following inpatient geriatric rehabilitation: a prospective cohort study from the Republic of Ireland.

Background: There is a paucity of research reporting the long-term outcomes of older adults who have completed geriatric rehabilitation following COVID-19.

Aim: The primary aim of this study is to describe the long-term functional outcomes of a cohort of older adults with acute COVID-19 who have completed inpatient geriatric rehabilitation.

Methods: This is a subgroup analysis of Irish data from a pan-European prospective cohort study.

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness.

Co-design and mixed methods evaluation of an interdisciplinary digital resource for undergraduate health profession students to improve the prevention, recognition, and management of delirium in Ireland: a study protocol.

Background: Delirium is a common symptom of acute illness which is potentially avoidable with early recognition and intervention. Despite being a growing concern globally, delirium remains underdiagnosed and poorly reported, with limited understanding of effective delirium education for undergraduate health profession students. Digital resources could be an effective approach to improving professional knowledge of delirium, but studies utilising these with more than one profession are limited, and no evidence-based, interdisciplinary, digital delirium education resources are reported.

Rapid spectrophotometric detection for optimized production of landomycins and characterization of their therapeutic potential.

Microbial-derived natural products remain a major source of structurally diverse bioactive compounds and chemical scaffolds that have the potential as new therapeutics to target drug-resistant pathogens and cancers. In particular, genome mining has revealed the vast number of cryptic or low-yield biosynthetic gene clusters in the genus Streptomyces. However, low natural product yields-improvements to which have been hindered by the lack of high throughput methods-have slowed the discovery and development of many potential therapeutics.

The assessment of dietary carotenoid intake of the Cardio-Med FFQ using food records and biomarkers in an Australian cardiology cohort: a pilot validation.

Dietary carotenoids are associated with lower risk of CHD. Assessment of dietary carotenoid intake using questionnaires can be susceptible to measurement error. Consequently, there is a need to validate data collected from FFQs which measure carotenoid intake.

Effect of a person-centred goals-of-care form and clinical communication training on shared decision-making and outcomes in an acute hospital: a prospective longitudinal interventional study.

Background: Patients with a life-limiting illness (LLI) requiring hospitalisation have a high likelihood of deterioration and 12-month mortality. To avoid non-aligned care, we need to understand our patients' goals and values.

Aim: To describe the association between the implementation of a shared decision-making (SDM) programme and documentation of goals of care (GoC) for hospitalised patients with LLI.

Introduction of a bleepless intern on-call era.

Background: The current bleep communication system between nurses and interns on-call in most Irish hospitals has been linked with interruption in patient care, disruption to workflow, inefficiency, increased burden and stress to the on-call health staff. A new electronic system was introduced in a University Hospital to replace and eliminate bleep usage during on-call hours.

Methods: An Intern on-call task electronic template was generated using Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet.