Publications by authors named "Webber A"

Background: Diversity in the physician workforce is critical for quality patient care. Students from low-income backgrounds represent an increasing proportion of medical school matriculants, yet little research has addressed their medical school experiences.

Objective: To explore the medical school experiences of students from low-income backgrounds using a modified version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (physiologic, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization) as a theoretical framework.

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Neoadjuvant immunotherapies have shown antitumor activity in melanoma. Substudy 02C of the global, rolling-arm, phase 1/2, adaptive-design KEYMAKER-U02 trial is evaluating neoadjuvant pembrolizumab (anti-PD-1) alone or in combination, followed by adjuvant pembrolizumab, for stage IIIB-D melanoma. Here we report results from the first three arms: pembrolizumab plus vibostolimab (anti-TIGIT), pembrolizumab plus gebasaxturev (coxsackievirus A21) and pembrolizumab monotherapy.

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Background: Prolonged Grief Disorder is a multidimensional condition with adverse health consequences. We hypothesized that enhanced negative emotional bias characterizes this disorder and underlies its key clinical symptoms.

Methods: In a cross-sectional design, chronically grieving older adults (61.

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Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess fine motor skills and reading proficiency in adults with amblyopia and/or strabismus, and to determine how these relate to clinical measures of vision and self-reported vision-related quality of life.

Methods: Fine motor skills (Manual dexterity - Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency [BOT-2]) and reading performance (International Reading Speed Texts [IReST]) were assessed in 23 adults with non-strabismic amblyopia, 20 with non-amblyopic strabismus, 52 with both amblyopia and strabismus, and 19 with normal visual development. Visual acuity and binocular function score (BFS), obtained from stereoacuity and presence/absence of suppression, were also determined.

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Purpose To identify and characterize incident cases of strabismus and interocular visual acuity among infants post lensectomy for congenital cataract. Method This was a single-centre retrospective chart review of all children aged less than 12 months who underwent lensectomy from 1st January 2014 to 1st January 2021. Cases were identified from theatre coding and electronic medical records.

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Background: The tumor immune microenvironment in cancer treatment response and resistance is of increasing interest. This retrospective study characterized and investigated programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1), PD-L2, and the immune gene expression signature and their association with clinical outcomes in locoregionally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (LA HNSCC).

Patients And Methods: PD-L1 and PD-L2 expression on tumor and immune-infiltrating cells (positivity defined as combined positive score or immunohistochemistry proportion score >1) and T-cell-inflamed gene expression profile (TcellGEP) were evaluated in patients with LA HNSCC treated in South Korea from 2000 to 2015.

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  • Racial and ethnic discrimination in medical education must be investigated to reduce disparities and promote inclusivity among students.
  • The study analyzed data from over 37,000 medical students to explore how experiences of racial discrimination impact their personal and professional identity development.
  • Results indicated that while most students felt supported in their development, African American or Black students reported significantly lower support compared to other racial and ethnic groups.
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  • Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is an autoimmune disease characterized by fibrosis, and the study investigates the role of soluble CD13 (sCD13) and its signaling through the bradykinin receptor B1 (B1R) in SSc pathogenesis.
  • Researchers found elevated levels of CD13, B1R, and MMP14 in skin from SSc patients, which contributed to fibrosis through signaling pathways activated by TGF-β and sCD13.
  • The study concludes that targeting the sCD13-B1R axis could represent a novel and effective therapeutic strategy for treating skin fibrosis in SSc.
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  • Accurate forecasts improve public health responses to seasonal influenza, with 26 teams providing predictions for hospital admissions in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
  • Six out of 23 models performed better than the baseline in 2021-22, while 12 out of 18 models did so in 2022-23, with the FluSight ensemble being highly ranked in both seasons.
  • Despite its accuracy, the FluSight ensemble and other models struggled with longer forecast periods, especially during times of rapid change in influenza patterns.
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Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors alone, or in combination with chemotherapy failed to provide meaningful clinical activity for patients with microsatellite stable (MSS) colorectal cancer (CRC). ONC201 is a small molecule that inactivates AKT and ERK signaling and actives the TRAIL pathway. Preclinical studies indicated potential benefits of combining ONC201 with checkpoint inhibitors.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, forecasting COVID-19 trends to support planning and response was a priority for scientists and decision makers alike. In the United States, COVID-19 forecasting was coordinated by a large group of universities, companies, and government entities led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub (https://covid19forecasthub.org).

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Better understanding of the host responses to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infections is required to prevent tuberculosis and develop new therapeutic interventions. The host transcription factor BHLHE40 is essential for controlling M. tuberculosis infection, in part by repressing Il10 expression, where excess IL-10 contributes to the early susceptibility of Bhlhe40-/- mice to M.

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Background: Over 50% of hospitalized patients have comorbid psychiatric diagnoses, resulting in increased risk of morbidity such as longer lengths of stay, worse health-related quality of life, and increased mortality. However, data regarding colorectal surgery postoperative outcomes in patients with psychiatric diagnoses (PD) are limited.

Methods: We queried a single institution's National Surgical Quality Improvement Program from 2013-2019 for major colorectal procedures.

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The landscape of ambulatory surgery is changing, and tonsillectomy with or without adenoidectomy is one of the most common pediatric surgical procedures performed nationally. The number of children undergoing tonsillectomy on an ambulatory basis continues to increase. The 2 most common indications for tonsillectomy are recurrent throat infections and obstructive sleep-disordered breathing.

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  • MEK inhibitors show potential for immune modulation and may work well with PD-1 inhibitors, leading to a study of selumetinib (a MEK inhibitor) combined with pembrolizumab (an anti-PD-1 antibody) in patients with advanced solid tumors.
  • In this phase 1b trial, 32 patients received a specific schedule of pembrolizumab and selumetinib, with toxicity and safety being primary concerns; dose adjustments were made based on the side effects experienced.
  • While the study did not reach its target for dose-limiting toxicities and found no new safety concerns, the combination treatment resulted in limited tumor response, leading to the decision to stop the trial early due to insufficient efficacy
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  • Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) affects cognitive functions, especially in older adults experiencing early grief, but the specific neuropsychological impacts are not well understood.
  • A study compared neuropsychological performance among older bereaved adults (with high and low grief symptoms) and non-bereaved individuals, revealing that those with high grief experienced greater impairments in executive functioning, attention, and processing speed.
  • Findings suggest that poorer cognitive performance correlates with higher grief intensity, particularly within the first six months after a loss, indicating that early grief may hinder cognitive functioning and could potentially affect the development of integrated grief or PGD.
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Accurate forecasts can enable more effective public health responses during seasonal influenza epidemics. Forecasting teams were asked to provide national and jurisdiction-specific probabilistic predictions of weekly confirmed influenza hospital admissions for one through four weeks ahead for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 influenza seasons. Across both seasons, 26 teams submitted forecasts, with the submitting teams varying between seasons.

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Importance: First-generation (FG) medical students remain underrepresented in medicine despite ongoing national efforts to increase diversity; understanding the challenges faced by this student population is essential to building holistic policies, practices, and learning environments that promote professional actualization. Although FG students have been extensively studied in the undergraduate literature, there is little research investigating how FG students experience medical education or opportunities for educators to intervene.

Objective: To explore challenges that FG students experience in undergraduate medical education and identify opportunities to improve foundational FG support.

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Purpose: The Queensland Children's Hospital Paediatric Optometry Alignment Program commenced with a pilot phase to assess its feasibility, effectiveness and acceptability. This study identified the barriers that hinder effective interprofessional collaboration and the facilitators that contribute to its success, and assessed changes in optometrists' satisfaction since the pilot phase of the collaborative care programme.

Methods: Qualitative deductive and inductive content analysis was applied to open-ended free-text survey responses collected in 2018 from the optometrists involved in the Program's pilot phase.

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TH17 cells are implicated in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE). We previously reported that the transcription factor basic helix-loop-helix family member e40 (BHLHE40) marks cytokine-producing pathogenic TH cells during EAE, and that its expression in T cells is required for clinical disease. In this study, using dual reporter mice, we show BHLHE40 expression within TH1/17 and ex-TH17 cells following EAE induction.

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Purpose Of Review: The aim of this article is to briefly review the pediatric ambulatory surgery landscape, identify two of the most common comorbidities affecting this population, examine the influence of pediatric obesity and sleep disordered breathing (SDB)/obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) on perioperative care, and provide information that can be used when formulating site specific criteria for ambulatory surgical centers.

Recent Findings: Most pediatric surgeries performed are now ambulatory, a majority of which take place outside of academic centers. Children with comorbidities such as obesity and SDB/OSA are undergoing surgical or diagnostic procedures which were previously deemed unacceptable for ambulatory surgery.

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Clinical Relevance: Valid and updated clinical indicators can serve as important tools in assessing and improving eyecare delivery.

Background: Indicators for diabetic eyecare in Australia were previously developed from guidelines published before 2013 and then used to assess the appropriateness of care delivery through a nationwide patient record card audit (the iCareTrack study). To reflect emerging evidence and contemporary practice, this study aimed to update clinical indicators for optometric care for people with type 2 diabetes in Australia.

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Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has demonstrated remarkable success as an immunotherapy for hematological malignancies, and its potential for treating solid tumors is an active area of research. However, limited trafficking and mobility of T cells within the tumor microenvironment (TME) present challenges for CAR T cell therapy in solid tumors. To gain a better understanding of CAR T cell function in solid tumors, we subjected CD70-specific CAR T cells to a challenge by evaluating their immune trafficking and infiltration through a confined 3D microchannel network in a bio-conjugated liquid-like solid (LLS) medium.

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  • This study examines how various demographic, environmental, lifestyle, and healthcare factors impact breast cancer mortality rates across different U.S. counties.
  • The analysis utilized data from the SEER database for adult female breast cancer patients between 2015 and 2019, employing advanced statistical methods to identify geographic variations in mortality associations.
  • Results indicated that higher obesity rates increase and lower mammogram screening rates decrease breast cancer mortality rates, with the effect of these factors being consistent across the country, while other factors varied geographically.
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