Uterine artery embolization in Tanzania: a procedure with major public health implications.

Background: The burden of uterine fibroids is substantial in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with up to 80% of black women harboring them in their lifetime. While uterine artery embolization (UAE) has emerged as an effective alternative to surgery to manage this condition, the procedure is not available to the vast majority of women living in SSA due to limited access to interventional radiology (IR) in the region. One of the few countries in SSA now offering UAE in a public hospital setting is Tanzania.

Patients experience and satisfaction with immediate loading of implant-supported overdentures - A qualitative study.

Objectives: To explore the perspectives and experiences of edentate individuals in regard to the immediate-loading protocol of an implant-supported overdenture.

Methods: A qualitative approach and interpretive description methodology was used. Seventeen edentate individuals (mean age: 61.

Overlapping research efforts in a global pandemic: a rapid systematic review of COVID-19-related individual participant data meta-analyses.

Background: Individual participant data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs), which involve harmonising and analysing participant-level data from related studies, provide several advantages over aggregate data meta-analyses, which pool study-level findings. IPD-MAs are especially important for building and evaluating diagnostic and prognostic models, making them an important tool for informing the research and public health responses to COVID-19.

Methods: We conducted a rapid systematic review of protocols and publications from planned, ongoing, or completed COVID-19-related IPD-MAs to identify areas of overlap and maximise data request and harmonisation efforts.

Necrosis reduction efficacy of subdermal biomaterial mediated oxygen delivery in ischemic skin flaps.

Inadequate tissue blood supply as may be found in a wound or a poorly vascularised graft, can result in tissue ischemia and necrosis. As revascularization is a slow process relative to the proliferation of bacteria and the onset of tissue necrosis, extensive tissue damage and loss can occur before healing is underway. Necrosis can develop rapidly, and treatment options are limited such that loss of tissue following necrosis onset is considered unavoidable and irreversible.

Chronic stress in peer relationships moderates the association between pubertal development and neural response to emotional faces in adolescence.

Adolescence is a period of heightened risk for multiple forms of psychopathology, partly due to greater exposure to interpersonal stress. One way that interpersonal stress may increase risk for psychopathology is by altering the normative development of neural systems that support socio-affective processing. The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential component that reflects sustained attention to motivationally-salient information and is a promising marker of risk for stress-related psychopathology.

Parsing patterns of reward responsiveness: Initial evidence from latent profile analysis.

Variation in reward responsiveness has been linked to psychopathology. Reward responsiveness is a complex phenomenon that encompasses different temporal dimensions (i.e.

Neighbourhood social deprivation and risk of prostate cancer.

Background: Striking geographic variations in prostate cancer incidence suggest an aetiological role for spatially-distributed factors. We assessed whether neighbourhood social deprivation, which can reflect limited social contacts, unfavourable lifestyle and environmental exposures, is associated with prostate cancer risk.

Methods: In 2005-2012, we recruited 1931 incident prostate cancer cases and 1994 controls in a case-control study in Montreal, Canada.

Family structure and living arrangements as indicators of social isolation, and prostate cancer risk.

Social isolation has been linked to a poorer prostate cancer prognosis. Little is known about how it could also influence its incidence. We investigated the association between family structure and living arrangements as potential indicators of social isolation, and prostate cancer risk, globally and according to disease aggressiveness.

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of HPV Extended versus Partial Genotyping for Cervical Cancer Screening in Singapore.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) partial genotyping (PGT) identifies HPV16 and HPV18 individually, alongside 12 other high-risk HPV genotypes (hrHPV) collectively. HPV extended genotyping (XGT) identifies four additional hrHPV individually (HPV31, 45, 51, and 52), and reports the remaining eight in three groups (HPV33|58; 56|59|66; 35|39|68). Quality-adjusted life years (QALY), health care resource use, and costs of XGT were compared to PGT for cervical cancer screening in Singapore using DICE simulation.

Learning strategy impacts medical diagnostic reasoning in early learners.

Relating learned information to similar yet new scenarios, transfer of learning, is a key characteristic of expert reasoning in many fields including medicine. Psychological research indicates that transfer of learning is enhanced via active retrieval strategies. For diagnostic reasoning, this finding suggests that actively retrieving diagnostic information about patient cases could improve the ability to engage in transfer of learning to later diagnostic decisions.

Development of Neovasculature in Axially Vascularized Calcium Phosphate Cement Scaffolds.

Augmenting the vascular supply to generate new tissues, a crucial aspect in regenerative medicine, has been challenging. Recently, our group showed that calcium phosphate can induce the formation of a functional neo-angiosome without the need for microsurgical arterial anastomosis. This was a preclinical proof of concept for biomaterial-induced luminal sprouting of large-diameter vessels.

Risk factors for the intergenerational transmission of depression in women and girls: Understanding neural correlates of major depressive disorder and the role of early-onset maternal depression.

Deficits in neural reward processing have been implicated in the etiology of depression and have been observed in high-risk individuals. However, depression is a heterogeneous disorder, and not all depressed individuals exhibit blunted neural reward response, suggesting the need to examine more specific depression phenotypes. Early-onset depression, a well-defined phenotype, has been associated with greater intergenerational transmission of depression and appears more closely linked to neural reward processing deficits.

Phenomenological support for escape theory: a qualitative study using explicitation interviews with emotional eaters.

The current study explored the phenomenology of emotional eating, that is, the descriptive knowledge of what one perceives, senses, and knows in one's immediate awareness and experience during emotional eating. Eight individuals with emotional eating were interviewed twice using explicitation interviewing. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, which resulted in nine themes describing the diachronic (or temporal) unfolding of emotional eating and several sub-themes that described various synchronic (or experiential) dimensions of this unfolding.

MixEHR-Guided: A guided multi-modal topic modeling approach for large-scale automatic phenotyping using the electronic health record.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich clinical data collected at the point of the care, and their increasing adoption offers exciting opportunities for clinical informatics, disease risk prediction, and personalized treatment recommendation. However, effective use of EHR data for research and clinical decision support is often hampered by a lack of reliable disease labels. To compile gold-standard labels, researchers often rely on clinical experts to develop rule-based phenotyping algorithms from billing codes and other surrogate features.

Overt and implicit prosody contribute to neurophysiological responses previously attributed to grammatical processing.

Recent neurophysiological research suggests that slow cortical activity tracks hierarchical syntactic structure during online sentence processing. Here we tested an alternative hypothesis: electrophysiological activity peaks at constituent phrase as well as sentence frequencies reflect cortical tracking of overt or covert (implicit) prosodic grouping. Participants listened to series of sentences presented in three conditions while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded.

Identifying barriers and enablers to opt-out hepatitis C virus screening in provincial prisons in Quebec, Canada: A multilevel, multi-theory informed qualitative study with correctional and healthcare professional stakeholders.

Background: Diffuse implementation of hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment is dependent on universal screening for HCV, but screening strategies are heterogenous across prisons in the province of Quebec (Canada). We sought to identify barriers and enablers to universal opt-out HCV screening and to describe the multisectoral decision-making processes related to HCV screening in Quebec provincial prisons.

Methods: A multilevel, multi-theory informed qualitative descriptive approach was used to conduct semi-structured interviews.

In Vitro Toxicity Evaluation of Carrageenan on Cells and Tissues of the Oral Cavity.

Carrageenan is a highly potent anti-human papillomavirus (HPV) agent with the potential for formulation as a mouthwash against oral HPV infection. However, its toxic effect on tissues of the oral cavity is currently unknown. This study aims to evaluate the safety of carrageenan on human cells and tissues of the oral cavity.

Predicting the presence of depressive symptoms in the HIV-HCV co-infected population in Canada using supervised machine learning.

Background: Depression is common in the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-hepatitis C virus (HCV) co-infected population. Demographic, behavioural, and clinical data collected in research settings may be of help in identifying those at risk for clinical depression. We aimed to predict the presence of depressive symptoms indicative of a risk of depression and identify important classification predictors using supervised machine learning.

A joint hierarchical model for the number of cases and deaths due to COVID-19 across the boroughs of Montreal.

As of July 2021, Montreal is the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada with highest number of deaths. We aim to investigate the spatial distribution of the number of cases and deaths due to COVID-19 across the boroughs of Montreal. To this end, we propose that the cumulative numbers of cases and deaths in the 33 boroughs of Montreal are modelled through a bivariate hierarchical Bayesian model using Poisson distributions.

Estimating the lagged effect of price discounting: a time-series study on sugar sweetened beverage purchasing in a supermarket.

Background: Price discount is an unregulated obesogenic environmental risk factor for the purchasing of unhealthy food, including Sugar Sweetened Beverages (SSB). Sales of price discounted food items are known to increase during the period of discounting. However, the presence and extent of the lagged effect of discounting, a sustained level of sales after discounting ends, is previously unaccounted for.

The German version of the Mini Suffering State Examination (MSSE) for people with advanced dementia living in nursing homes.

Background: The Mini Suffering State Examination (MSSE) has been explicitly recommended to assess suffering in dementia patients. This study aimed to develop a German version of the MSSE and assess its psychometric properties involving people with advanced dementia (PAD) in a nursing home setting.

Methods: The MSSE was translated into German, and 95 primary nurses administered it cross-sectionally to 124 PAD in Zurich, Switzerland.

Maternal symptoms of depression and anxiety during the postpartum period moderate infants' neural response to emotional faces of their mother and of female strangers.

Affective exchanges between mothers and infants are key to the intergenerational transmission of depression and anxiety, possibly via adaptations in neural systems that support infants' attention to facial affect. The current study examined associations between postnatal maternal symptoms of depression, panic and social anxiety, maternal parenting behaviours, and infants' neural responses to emotional facial expressions portrayed by their mother and by female strangers. The Negative Central (Nc), an event-related potential component that indexes attention to salient stimuli and is sensitive to emotional expression, was recorded from 30 infants.

Transparent masks reduce the negative impact of opaque masks on understanding emotional states but not on sharing them.

While face masks provide necessary protection against disease spread, they occlude the lower face parts (chin, mouth, nose) and consequently impair the ability to accurately perceive facial emotions. Here we examined how wearing face masks impacted making inferences about emotional states of others (i.e.

Quantifying Patient Investment in Novel Neurological Drug Development.

While the drug development literature provides numerous estimates of the financial costs to bring a new drug to market, the investment of patient-participants in the research process has not been described. Trial participants and their caregivers, like companies, invest time and undertake risk when they participate in prelicense trials. We determined the average number of patient-participants needed to develop a novel neurological drug.