Publications by authors named "Wilton K"

Objectives: In 2019, >71 million children aged <5 had spent their entire lives in conflict-affected settings. Compounding adversities including violence, poverty, and displacement have immediate and long-term effects on early childhood development, health, behavior, and well-being. In response, adaptations of Reach Up have been implemented in conflict and crisis settings.

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Midwives are the front-line workers providing maternity care for women in many countries. The role of the midwife includes providing information about, and recommendations for, maternal vaccination in pregnancy and for the baby in the postnatal period. Vaccinations recommended in pregnancy include those to prevent influenza, pertussis, tetanus and now COVID-19.

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Introduction: Pregnant women are at higher risk of severe illness from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) than non-pregnant women of a similar age. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that evidenced-based guidance was needed, and that it would need to be updated rapidly. The National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce provided a resource to guide care for people with COVID-19, including during pregnancy.

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Introduction: The perinatal period is a time when provision of responsive care offers a life course opportunity for positive change to improve health outcomes for mothers, infants and families. Australian perinatal systems carry the legacy of settler-colonialism, manifesting in racist events and interactions that First Nations parents encounter daily.

Objective: The dominance of a western risk lens, and conscious and unconscious bias in the child protection workforce, sustains disproportionately high numbers of First Nations infants being removed from their parents' care.

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Objective: Both erectile dysfunction (ED) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are associated with increased cardiovascular (CV) risk. It is unknown if these diagnoses are associated or if their combination confers additional CV risk. We aimed to define the incidence of ED in RA, and to determine if ED correlates with increased CV risk in RA.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to investigate the rate of erectile dysfunction (ED) among men with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) compared to those without it.
  • It found a baseline prevalence of 7% ED in men with PsA and 3% in the comparison group, with a slight increased risk of ED after the PsA diagnosis, although the results weren't statistically significant.
  • The study suggests that men with PsA may have a higher risk of ED, but further research is needed to confirm this and understand potential underlying factors.
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Natural killer (NK) cell-mediated killing involves the membrane fusion of preformed lytic granules. While the roles of actin and microtubules are well accepted during this process, the function of septins, another cytoskeletal component that associates with actin and microtubules, has not been investigated. Here we show that genetic depletion or pharmacologic stabilization of the septin cytoskeleton significantly inhibited NK cell cytotoxicity.

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Mitochondria play a variety of roles in the cell, far beyond their widely recognized role in ATP generation. One such role is the regulation and sequestration of calcium, which is done with the help of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) and its regulators, MICU1 and MICU2. Genetic variations in MICU1 and MICU2 have been reported to cause myopathy, developmental disability and neurological symptoms typical of mitochondrial disorders.

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Background: Intellectual disability is a complex multi-faceted condition with diverse underlying etiologies. One rare form of intellectual disability is secondary to the loss of TRAPPC9, an activator of NF-κB and a mediator of intracellular protein processing and trafficking. TRAPPC9 deficiency has been described in 48 patients with more than 15 pathologic variants.

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X-linked reticulate pigmentary disorder (XLPDR, Mendelian Inheritance in Man #301220) is a rare syndrome characterized by recurrent infections and sterile multiorgan inflammation. The syndrome is caused by an intronic mutation in POLA1, the gene encoding the catalytic subunit of DNA polymerase-α (Pol-α), which is responsible for Okazaki fragment synthesis during DNA replication. Reduced POLA1 expression in this condition triggers spontaneous type I interferon expression, which can be linked to the autoinflammatory manifestations of the disease.

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Article Synopsis
  • Clinical documentation improvement (CDI) is a growing initiative in Australia aimed at enhancing healthcare quality and patient safety.
  • CDI seeks to engage clinicians to improve medical record documentation in "real time" for better reporting and reimbursement.
  • The article discusses the relevance of CDI within the context of Australia's unique healthcare system.
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Natural killer (NK) cells eliminate abnormal cells through the release of cytolytic granule contents. In this process, NK cells must adhere to target cells through integrin-mediated adhesion, which is highly dependent on the generation of F-actin. Ena/VASP-like (EVL) is an actin regulatory protein previously shown to regulate integrin-mediated adhesion in other cell types, but its role in NK cell biology is not known.

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Purpose: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is highly prevalent in post-stroke patients and observational evidence suggests that untreated it is a harbinger of poorer outcomes in this population. Clinical trials on the impact of treatment of OSA with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) have countered difficulties with patient engagement and adherence to CPAP therapy. Real-world data on continuous positive airway pressure initiation and usage in the post-stroke population with obstructive sleep apnea is limited.

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During αβ T cell development, T cell antigen receptor (TCR) engagement transduces biochemical signals through a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network that dictates dichotomous cell fate decisions. It remains unclear how signal specificity is communicated, instructing either positive selection to advance cell differentiation or death by negative selection. Early signal discrimination might occur by PPI signatures differing qualitatively (customized, unique PPI combinations for each signal), quantitatively (graded amounts of a single PPI series), or kinetically (speed of PPI pathway progression).

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NK cells eliminate viral-infected and malignant cells through a highly orchestrated series of cytoskeletal rearrangements, resulting in the release of cytolytic granule contents toward the target cell. Central to this process is the convergence of cytolytic granules to a common point, the microtubule-organizing center (MTOC), before delivery to the synapse. In this study, we show that vasodialator-stimulated phosphoprotein (VASP), an actin regulatory protein, localizes to the cytolytic synapse, but surprisingly, shows no impact on conjugate formation or synaptic actin accumulation despite being required for human NK cell-mediated killing.

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Objective: To define the incidence of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and determine whether OSA diagnosis predicts future cardiovascular disease (CVD) and noncardiac vascular events.

Methods: Medical information pertaining to RA, OSA, CVD, and vascular diagnoses was extracted from a comprehensive medical record system for a geographically defined population of 813 patients previously diagnosed with RA and 813 age- and sex-matched comparator subjects.

Results: The risk for OSA in persons with RA versus comparators was elevated, although not reaching statistical significance (HR 1.

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Purpose: To evaluate the correlation between measurements from quantitative thoracic high-resolution CT (HRCT) analysis with "Computer-Aided Lung Informatics for Pathology Evaluation and Rating" (CALIPER) software and measurements from pulmonary function tests (PFTs) in patients with idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM)-associated interstitial lung disease (ILD).

Methods: A cohort of patients with IIM-associated ILD seen at Mayo Clinic was identified from medical record review. Retrospective analysis of HRCT data and PFTs at baseline and 1 year was performed.

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Traditional and biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) are effective medications for the management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, the effects of these medications on immune function raises concern that they may increase long-term cancer risk. The baseline risk for some cancers appears to differ in patients with RA compared to the general population, with the former having an increased risk of lymphoma, lung cancer and renal cancer, but a decreased risk of colorectal and breast cancer.

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Purpose: Sleep apnea (SA) is highly prevalent in post-stroke patients. Due to physical disability and relative inaccessibility of polysomnography (PSG) to test for SA, patients with stroke frequently remain undiagnosed and untreated. Portable SA monitoring can facilitate at-home or in-hospital testing for SA.

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Malignancy is a major cause of death in patients with inflammatory disease. The risk of individual malignancies is altered in some inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. This study aimed to examine malignancy incidence in patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA), a related inflammatory disease.

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Objective: The role of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in psoriatic arthritis (PsA) is poorly understood. We examined the prevalence of CVD risk factors at initial onset of PsA and compared the observed incidence of CVD events with that predicted by the Framingham Risk Score (FRS) to determine its applicability in this patient population.

Methods: A population-based incidence cohort of 158 patients with PsA who fulfilled Classification of Psoriatic Arthritis criteria for PsA in 1989-2008 was assembled.

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Background: There is significant interest in the generation of improved assays to clearly identify experimental mice possessing functional vision, a property that could qualify mice for inclusion in behavioral and neuroscience studies. Widely employed current methods rely on mouse responses to visual cues in assays of reflexes, depth perception, or cognitive memory. However, commonly assessed mouse reflexes can sometimes be ambiguous in their expression, while depth perception assays are sometimes confounded by variation in anxiety responses and exploratory conduct.

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