Publications by authors named "Walton M"

Kinesiophobia (KP) is the fear of movement or physical activity (PA) that is related to a medical condition. In adolescents, KP is associated with depression, anxiety, and impaired quality of life (QoL). Adolescents with heart disease (HD) often avoid PA.

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Flecainide acetate is a Class 1c anti-arrhythmic with a potent sodium voltage gated channel blockade which is utilized for the second-line treatment of tachyarrhythmias in children and adults. Given its narrow therapeutic index, the individualization of drug therapy is of utmost importance for clinicians. Despite efforts to improve anti-arrhythmic drug therapy, there remain knowledge gaps regarding the impact of variation in the genes relevant to flecainide's disposition and response.

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The escalating prevalence of cannabis use, and associated cannabis-use disorder (CUD), poses a significant public health challenge globally. With a notably wide treatment gap, especially among emerging adults (EAs; ages 18-25), addressing cannabis use and CUD remains a pivotal objective within the 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In this work, we develop an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm called reBandit which will be utilized in a mobile health study to deliver personalized mobile health interventions aimed at reducing cannabis use among EAs.

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Background: Diabetic retinopathy is a major cause of sight loss in people with diabetes. The most severe form, proliferative diabetic retinopathy, carries a high risk of vision loss, vitreous haemorrhage, macular oedema and other harms. Panretinal photocoagulation is the primary treatment for proliferative diabetic retinopathy.

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  • Veterans have a heightened risk for substance use and risky sexual behaviors, often as coping mechanisms for trauma.
  • In a study of 834 Veterans seeking therapy, over half reported heavy drinking, and many engaged in unprotected sex, particularly with regular partners.
  • Although risky sexual behaviors were prevalent, they were not directly linked to PTSD symptoms, indicating the need for further research to identify other influencing factors.
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Background: Children and young people with intellectual disability have poor healthcare and are at risk of patient safety events due to lack of staff training and consensus on competencies for safe and quality care. For the adoption of reasonable adjustments in mainstream paediatric healthcare clinical competencies needed to be adapted to an existing patient safety education framework.

Methods: Thirteen experts in intellectual disability health and patient safety participated in an eDelphi survey aimed at reaching consensus on core competencies required of the paediatric healthcare workforce.

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Introduction: Firearm injuries are a leading cause of death for youth/young-adults. We utilized latent class analysis to identify distinct motivational/behavioral patterns of firearm possession in a youth/young-adult emergency department sample to inform prevention strategies.

Methods: Cross-sectional data were obtained from surveys conducted among youth/young-adults (age = 16-29; n = 1311) seeking emergency department treatment (7/10/2017-6/25/2018).

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Mangrove productivity is crucial for the global carbon cycle, yet previous research has mostly focused on small-scale temporal changes or static global patterns, with limited investigation into global or regional temporal trends. This study used existing data on mangrove leaf litter to model mangrove Net Primary Productivity (NPP) on a monthly timescale from 1980 to 2094 across global regions defined by the Marine Ecoregions of the World framework. The models showed a slight global decrease in NPP of approximately 1.

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Animals can adapt their preferences for different types of reward according to physiological state, such as hunger or thirst. To explain this ability, we employ a simple multi-objective reinforcement learning model that learns multiple values according to different reward dimensions such as food or water. We show that by weighting these learned values according to the current needs, behaviour may be flexibly adapted to present preferences.

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To flexibly adapt to new situations, our brains must understand the regularities in the world, as well as those in our own patterns of behaviour. A wealth of findings is beginning to reveal the algorithms that we use to map the outside world. However, the biological algorithms that map the complex structured behaviours that we compose to reach our goals remain unknown.

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Background: High-risk alcohol consumption in the weeks before and after surgery poses significant risks for postoperative recovery. Despite this, elective surgical patients are rarely offered alcohol-focused education, interventions, or treatment. This paper describes the protocol of a research study designed to evaluate the effectiveness of brief, non-pharmacological, therapeutic approaches to reduce alcohol use before and after surgery.

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  • Identifying early events in neurodegenerative disorders, like Huntington's disease (HD), is essential for creating preventive treatments, particularly focusing on the role of dysfunctional indirect pathway spiny projection neurons (iSPNs) and increased dopamine levels.
  • The study reveals that genetic disruption of iSPN function in mice leads to heightened levels of striatal dopamine, potentially causing early symptoms like hyperkinesia, before observable dysfunction occurs.
  • By analyzing iSPNs, researchers found that reducing the protein GSTO2 could prevent dopaminergic issues and delay hyperkinetic symptoms, highlighting the significance of maintaining dopamine balance in HD progression.
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Background: Cannabis consumption has increased in recent years, as has cannabis use disorder. While researchers have explored public online community discussions of active cannabis use, less is known about the popularity and content of publicly available online communities intended to support cannabis cessation.

Objective: This study aims to examine the level of engagement and dominant content of an online community for cannabis cessation through 3 specific aims.

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The Community Firearm Violence Prevention Network (CFVP Network), funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supports a network of research projects that develop and test interventions through collaborations with community partners to prevent firearm violence, injury, and mortality. The CFVP Network presents a unique opportunity to accelerate the science of preventing firearm injuries. The data harmonization workgroup of the CFVP Network led the process of aligning studies across the three unique inaugural network projects, with particular attention to how the CFVP Network could address current gaps in the science.

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Background: Adolescent substance use is a growing public health concern, particularly given rising mortality rates from drug overdose deaths. The emergency department (ED) provides a unique opportunity to screen adolescents for substance use and provide brief interventions and linkage to care.

Objective Of The Review: This article provides a narrative review of the current evidence for ED screening and brief interventions for adolescents with substance use and identifies important opportunities, challenges, and areas for future research.

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Background: Emerging adult (EA) cannabis use is associated with increased risk for health consequences. Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) provide potential for preventing the escalation and consequences of cannabis use. Powered by mobile devices, JITAIs use decision rules that take the person's state and context as input, and output a recommended intervention (e.

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: For decades, the saccadic system has been a favorite target of neurophysiologists seeking to elucidate the neural control of eye movements, partly because saccades are characterized by a set of highly stereotyped relationships between amplitude, duration, and peak velocity. There is a large literature describing the dynamics and trajectories of these movements in normal primates, but there are no similarly detailed analyses for subjects with infantile strabismus syndrome. Previous studies have shown the amplitudes and directions of saccades often differ for the two eyes in this disorder, but it is unknown whether a similar disconjugacy exists for duration.

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Background: Acute unreconstructible 3- or 4-part proximal humerus fractures can be treated with hemiarthroplasty or reverse polarity shoulder arthroplasty. Randomized trials using implants from multiple different companies or uncemented implants have found superior results with reverse polarity arthroplasty.

Hypothesis: We tested the hypothesis that cemented reverse polarity arthroplasty produces a superior outcome compared to cemented hemiarthroplasty using one implant system in patients aged 65 years and over at 12 months follow-up as measured with the Constant Score.

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Objective: This study began as a single-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) to investigate the efficacy and safety of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for severe treatment-refractory agitation in advanced dementia. The aims are to assess agitation reduction using the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory (CMAI), evaluate tolerability and safety outcomes, and explore the long-term stability of agitation reduction and global functioning. Due to challenges encountered during implementation, including recruitment obstacles and operational difficulties, the study design was modified to an open-label format and other protocol amendments were implemented.

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Beliefs-attitudes toward some state of the environment-guide action selection and should be robust to variability but sensitive to meaningful change. Beliefs about volatility (expectation of change) are associated with paranoia in humans, but the brain regions responsible for volatility beliefs remain unknown. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is central to adaptive behavior, whereas the magnocellular mediodorsal thalamus (MDmc) is essential for arbitrating between perceptions and action policies.

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Background: The Aotearoa New Zealand COVID-19 pandemic response has been hailed as a success story, however, there are concerns about how equitable it has been. This study explored the experience of a collective of Māori health and social service providers in the greater Wellington region of Aotearoa New Zeland delivering COVID-19 responses.

Methods: The study was a collaboration between a large urban Māori health and social service provider, Tākiri Mai Te Ata whānau ora collective, and public health researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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Introduction: Social needs such as housing, employment, food, income and social isolation are having a significant impact on individuals, families and communities. Individuals are increasingly presenting to health settings with social needs, which are ill-equipped to address nonmedical needs. Social prescribing is a systematic approach connecting the health, social and community sectors to better address social needs and improve health and wellbeing.

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  • Many teens and young adults in the U.S. are using cannabis more often, which can cause health problems and the need for treatment.
  • * Researchers studied how and why people use cannabis, looking at different reasons over time to help make better solutions for cutting down usage in the future.
  • * They found that changes in these reasons can predict future issues, which is important for creating ways to help people stay healthy and use cannabis less.
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Background: The field of robotic-assisted surgery is rapidly growing as many robotic surgical devices are in development and about to enter the market. Currently, there is no universally accepted language for labeling the different robotic systems. To facilitate this communication, we created what is, to our knowledge, the first classification of surgical robotic technologies that organizes and classifies surgical robots used for endoscopy, laparoscopy and thoracoscopy.

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