Long-Term Outcomes From a Randomized Controlled Trial of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Compared to Standard Medical Care for Improving Quality of Life in Muscle Disorders.

Introduction/aims: A previous randomized controlled trial showed that guided self-help acceptance and commitment therapy plus standard medical care (ACT+SMC) was superior to standard medical care alone (SMC) for improving quality of life (QoL) and mood at 9-weeks post randomization in a sample of people with muscle disorders (MD). This follow-up study evaluated whether these effects were maintained in the longer term alongside individual patterns of response.

Methods: The original study was a two-arm parallel group randomized controlled trial, which compared ACT+SMC to SMC.

The Feasibility of an Experimental Hypobaric Simulation to Evaluate the Safety of Closed-Loop Insulin Delivery Systems in Flight-Related Atmospheric Pressure Changes.

Hybrid closed-loop (HCL) systems remain underexplored within aviation, and as atmospheric pressure changes can independently affect insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring readings, this preliminary study assessed the feasibility of HCL safety evaluation, in both fasting and post-prandial states, by using hypobaric chamber to simulate flights. Participants with type 1 diabetes and on HCL were studied: Medtronic Guardian 4-Medtronic 780G-SmartGuard ( = 4), Dexcom G6-Omnipod DASH-Android APS ( = 1), and Dexcom G6-Ypsomed Pump-CamAPS ( = 1). Flight cabin pressures of 550 mmHg and 750 mmHg were simulated in a hypobaric chamber.

Brain and Lung Biomarker Responses to Hyperoxic Hypobaric Decompression.

Biomarker responses to intensive decompression indicate systemic proinflammatory responses and possible neurological stress. To further investigate responses, 12 additional brain and lung biomarkers were assayed. A total of 15 healthy men (20 to 50 yr) undertook consecutive same-day ascents to 25,000 ft (7620 m), following denitrogenation, breathing 100% oxygen.

Participant experiences of guided self-help Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for improving quality of life in muscle disease: a nested qualitative study within the ACTMus randomized controlled trial.

Introduction: In adults, muscle disease (MD) is typically a chronic long-term condition that can lead to a reduced quality of life (QoL). Previous research suggests that a psychological intervention, in particular Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), may help improve QoL for individuals living with chronic conditions such as MD.

Methods: This nested qualitative study was incorporated within a randomized controlled trial which evaluated a guided self-help ACT intervention for people living with MD to explore their experiences of the intervention.

Early Human Pathophysiological Responses to Exertional Hypobaric Decompression Stress.

Consistent blood biomarkers of hypobaric (altitude) decompression stress remain elusive. Recent laboratory investigation of decompression sickness risk at 25,000 ft (7620 m) enabled evaluation of early pathophysiological responses to exertional decompression stress. In this study, 15 healthy men, aged 20-50 yr, undertook 2 consecutive (same-day) ascents to 25,000 ft (7620 m) for 60 and 90 min, breathing 100% oxygen, each following 1 h of prior denitrogenation.

Do they really care? Specificity of social support issues in hoarding disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Objectives: Unmet interpersonal needs may play a role in excessive emotional attachments to objects for people with hoarding disorder (HD). Previous research indicates that social support (but not attachment difficulties) may be specific to HD. The study aimed to evaluate social networks and support in HD relative to clinical controls with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and healthy controls (HC).

The effect of sex and protein supplementation on bone metabolism during a 36-h military field exercise in energy deficit.

This study investigated sex differences in, and the effect of protein supplementation on, bone metabolism during a 36-h military field exercise. Forty-four British Army Officer cadets (14 women) completed a 36-h field exercise. Participants consumed either their habitual diet [ = 14 women (Women) and = 15 men (Men Controls)] or the habitual diet with an additional 46.

Association between external training loads and injury incidence during 44 weeks of military training.

Military training is physically arduous and associated with high injury incidence. Unlike in high-performance sport, the interaction between training load and injury has not been extensively researched in military personnel. Sixty-three (43 men, 20 women; age 24 ± 2 years; stature 1.

Adherence to the 2015 and 2020 British Society of Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes guidelines and outcomes in critically ill children with diabetic ketoacidosis: a retrospective cohort study.

Objectives: To compare clinical management and key outcomes of critically ill children with diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) in two cohorts (2015 cohort: managed according to the 2015 British Society of Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes (BSPED) guidelines; 2020 cohort: managed according to the 2020 BSPED guidelines).

Design: Retrospective cohort study using prospectively collected data.

Setting: A critical care advice and transport service based in London, and referring hospitals within the critical care network.

Nutrition and Physical Activity During British Army Officer Cadet Training: Part 1-Energy Balance and Energy Availability.

Military training is characterized by high daily energy expenditures which are difficult to match with energy intake, potentially resulting in negative energy balance (EB) and low energy availability (EA). The aim of this study was to quantify EB and EA during British Army Officer Cadet training. Thirteen (seven women) Officer Cadets (mean ± SD: age 24 ± 3 years) volunteered to participate.

Nutrition and Physical Activity in British Army Officer Cadet Training Part 2-Daily Distribution of Energy and Macronutrient Intake.

Dietary intake and physical activity impact performance and adaptation during training. The aims of this study were to compare energy and macronutrient intake during British Army Officer Cadet training with dietary guidelines and describe daily distribution of energy and macronutrient intake and estimated energy expenditure. Thirteen participants (seven women) were monitored during three discrete periods of military training for 9 days on-camp, 5 days of field exercise, and 9 days of a mixture of the two.

A randomised controlled trial of acceptance and commitment therapy for improving quality of life in people with muscle diseases.

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Background: Chronic muscle diseases (MD) are progressive and cause wasting and weakness in muscles and are associated with reduced quality of life (QoL). The ACTMuS trial examined whether Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as an adjunct to usual care improved QoL for such patients as compared to usual care alone.

Managing Hypertension, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease Risk via Short-Term Medical Trips: A Retrospective Longitudinal Study in Santo Domingo.

Background: Short-term medical trips (STMTs) from high-resource countries frequently provide care in low and middle-income countries. Little existing literature objectively tracks the long-term outcomes of these interventions on the receiving populations over time to assess potential benefits and to ensure no harm is being done.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to objectively analyze the outcomes of a biannual STMT to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on hypertension (HTN), diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM2), and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk over a five-year period (2015-2019).

Critical transition for colliding swarms.

Swarming patterns that emerge from the interaction of many mobile agents are a subject of great interest in fields ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In some application areas, multiple swarms effectively interact and collide, producing complex spatiotemporal patterns. Recent studies have begun to address swarm-on-swarm dynamics, and in particular the scattering of two large, colliding swarms with nonlinear interactions.

Swarm shedding in networks of self-propelled agents.

Understanding swarm pattern formation is of great interest because it occurs naturally in many physical and biological systems, and has artificial applications in robotics. In both natural and engineered swarms, agent communication is typically local and sparse. This is because, over a limited sensing or communication range, the number of interactions an agent has is much smaller than the total possible number.

Photochemical Internalization Enhanced Vaccination Is Safe, and Gives Promising Cellular Immune Responses to an HPV Peptide-Based Vaccine in a Phase I Clinical Study in Healthy Volunteers.

Background And Aims: Photochemical internalization (PCI) is a technology for inducing release of endocytosed antigens into the cell cytosol a light-induced process. Preclinical experiments have shown that PCI improves MHC class I antigen presentation, resulting in strongly enhanced CD8+ T-cell responses to polypeptide antigens. In PCI vaccination a mixture of the photosensitizing compound fimaporfin, vaccine antigens, and an adjuvant is administered intradermally followed by illumination of the vaccination site.

Stability of milling patterns in self-propelled swarms on surfaces.

In some physical and biological swarms, agents effectively move and interact along curved surfaces. The associated constraints and symmetries can affect collective-motion patterns, but little is known about pattern stability in the presence of surface curvature. To make progress, we construct a general model for self-propelled swarms moving on surfaces using Lagrangian mechanics.

Delay induced swarm pattern bifurcations in mixed reality experiments.

Swarms of coupled mobile agents subject to inter-agent wireless communication delays are known to exhibit multiple dynamic patterns in space that depend on the strength of the interactions and the magnitude of the communication delays. We experimentally demonstrate communication delay-induced bifurcations in the spatiotemporal patterns of robot swarms using two distinct hardware platforms in a mixed reality framework. Additionally, we make steps toward experimentally validating theoretically predicted parameter regions where transitions between swarm patterns occur.

Torus bifurcations of large-scale swarms having range dependent communication delay.

Dynamical emergent patterns of swarms are now fairly well established in nature and include flocking and rotational states. Recently, there has been great interest in engineering and physics to create artificial self-propelled agents that communicate over a network and operate with simple rules, with the goal of creating emergent self-organizing swarm patterns. In this paper, we show that when communicating networks have range dependent delays, rotational states, which are typically periodic, undergo a bifurcation and create swarm dynamics on a torus.

Unstable modes and bistability in delay-coupled swarms.

It is known that introducing time delays into the communication network of mobile-agent swarms produces coherent rotational patterns, from both theory and experiments. Often such spatiotemporal rotations can be bistable with other swarming patterns, such as milling and flocking. Yet, most known bifurcation results related to delay-coupled swarms rely on inaccurate mean-field techniques.

Longitudinal monitoring for the emergence of epidermal growth factor C797S resistance mutations in non-small cell lung cancer using blood-based droplet digital PCR.

Validation of assays for the C797S mutation as a biomarker for osimertinib resistance is promising in guiding treatment decision-making for multidrug resistant non-small cell lung cancer. A newly developed droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) assay was used to retrospectively evaluate the emergence of the C797S mutation in six remnant plasma samples in this case report. It was found that the detected emergence of C797S clearly correlated with clinical signs of treatment resistance.

Validity of energy expenditure estimation methods during 10 days of military training.

Wearable physical activity (PA) monitors have improved the ability to estimate free-living total energy expenditure (TEE) but their application during arduous military training alongside more well-established research methods has not been widely documented. This study aimed to assess the validity of two wrist-worn activity monitors and a PA log against doubly labeled water (DLW) during British Army Officer Cadet (OC) training. For 10 days of training, twenty (10 male and 10 female) OCs (mean ± SD: age 23 ± 2 years, height 1.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Muscle Disease (ACTMus): protocol for a two-arm randomised controlled trial of a brief guided self-help ACT programme for improving quality of life in people with muscle diseases.

Introduction: In adults, muscle disease (MD) is often a chronic long-term condition with no definitive cure. It causes wasting and weakness of the muscles resulting in a progressive decline in mobility, alongside other symptoms, and is typically associated with reduced quality of life (QoL). Previous research suggests that a psychological intervention, and in particular Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), may help improve QoL in MD.

Photochemical Internalization of Peptide Antigens Provides a Novel Strategy to Realize Therapeutic Cancer Vaccination.

Effective priming and activation of tumor-specific CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) is crucial for realizing the potential of therapeutic cancer vaccination. This requires cytosolic antigens that feed into the MHC class I presentation pathway, which is not efficiently achieved with most current vaccination technologies. Photochemical internalization (PCI) provides an emerging technology to route endocytosed material to the cytosol of cells, based on light-induced disruption of endosomal membranes using a photosensitizing compound.