Branch retinal vein occlusion and Valsalva manoeuvre in wind instrument players and singers.

Clinical Relevance: There are many recognised risk factors for retinal vein occlusions. It is plausible that musicians who play wind instruments or use their voice as their primary instrument may be at increased risk of branch retinal vein occlusions through repeated Valsalva manoeuvre.

Background: Repeated valsalva manoeuvres are commonly performed by musicians using high resistance wind instruments.

Supervised Exercise for Patients With Metastatic Breast Cancer: A Cost-Utility Analysis Alongside the PREFERABLE-EFFECT Randomized Controlled Trial.

Purpose: To evaluate the cost utility of a 9-month supervised exercise program for patients with metastatic breast cancer (mBC), compared with control (usual care, supplemented with general activity advice and an activity tracker). Evidence on the cost-effectiveness of exercise for patients with mBC is essential for implementation in clinical practice and is currently lacking.

Methods: A cost-utility analysis was performed alongside the multinational PREFERABLE-EFFECT randomized controlled trial, conducted in 8 centers across Europe and Australia.

Nanoparticle Association with Brain Cells Is Augmented by Protein Coronas Formed in Cerebrospinal Fluid.

Neuronanomedicine harnesses nanoparticle technology for the treatment of neurological disorders. An unavoidable consequence of nanoparticle delivery to biological systems is the formation of a protein corona on the nanoparticle surface. Despite the well-established influence of the protein corona on nanoparticle behavior and fate, as well as FDA approval of neuro-targeted nanotherapeutics, the effect of a physiologically relevant protein corona on nanoparticle-brain cell interactions is insufficiently explored.

Floodplain forests drive fruit-eating fish diversity at the Amazon Basin-scale.

Unlike most rivers globally, nearly all lowland Amazonian rivers have unregulated flow, supporting seasonally flooded floodplain forests. Floodplain forests harbor a unique tree species assemblage adapted to flooding and specialized fauna, including fruit-eating fish that migrate seasonally into floodplains, favoring expansive floodplain areas. Frugivorous fish are forest-dependent fauna critical to forest regeneration via seed dispersal and support commercial and artisanal fisheries.

Pick-and-Place Transfer of Arbitrary-Metal Electrodes for van der Waals Device Fabrication.

Van der Waals electrode integration is a promising strategy to create nearly perfect interfaces between metals and 2D materials, with advantages such as eliminating Fermi-level pinning and reducing contact resistance. However, the lack of a simple, generalizable pick-and-place transfer technology has greatly hampered the wide use of this technique. We demonstrate the pick-and-place transfer of prefabricated electrodes from reusable polished hydrogenated diamond substrates without the use of any sacrificial layers due to the inherent low-energy and dangling-bond-free nature of the hydrogenated diamond surface.

Casein Kinases 2-dependent phosphorylation of the placental ligand VAR2CSA regulates Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes cytoadhesion.

Placental malaria is characterized by the massive accumulation and sequestration of infected erythrocytes in the placental intervillous blood spaces, causing severe birth outcomes. The variant surface antigen VAR2CSA is associated with Plasmodium falciparum sequestration in the placenta via its capacity to adhere to chondroitin sulfate A. We have previously shown that the extracellular region of VAR2CSA is phosphorylated on several residues and that the phosphorylation enhances the adhesive properties of CSA-binding infected erythrocytes.

Induction of stigma-like structures in saffron (Crocus sativus L.): Exploring factors and metabolite analysis.

Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) has held significant cultural and medicinal value since the Greek-Minoan civilization. As a triploid spice with vegetative propagation from the Iridaceae family, the three-branch style of C.

Multifaceted barriers associated with clinical breast examination in sub-Saharan Africa: A multilevel analytical approach.

Objectives: Clinical breast examination (CBE) open the pathway to early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. This study examined barriers to CBE uptake in seven sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries.

Methods: Data from the most current Demographic and Health Surveys of Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Kenya Mozambique, Senegal and Tanzania was used.

Hippocampal subfield volume alterations and associations with severity measures in long COVID and ME/CFS: A 7T MRI study.

Long COVID and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) patients share similar symptoms including post-exertional malaise, neurocognitive impairment, and memory loss. The neurocognitive impairment in both conditions might be linked to alterations in the hippocampal subfields. Therefore, this study compared alterations in hippocampal subfields of 17 long COVID, 29 ME/CFS patients, and 15 healthy controls (HC).

Subregions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate threat and protective information to meta-represent safety.

Pivotal to self-preservation is the ability to identify when we are safe and when we are in danger. Previous studies have focused on safety estimations based on the features of external threats and do not consider how the brain integrates other key factors, including estimates about our ability to protect ourselves. Here, we examine the neural systems underlying the online dynamic encoding of safety.

Capacity-building interventions for health extension workers in Ethiopia: A scoping review.

Introduction: Capacity-building interventions for health extension workers (HEWs) are key to providing quality health services to the community. Since Ethiopia's Health Extension Program was established, several types of capacity-building interventions have been developed to build HEW competencies. However, no comprehensive study has mapped the types of capacity-building interventions being used or the competencies targeted.

Exploring the associative relationship between general practice engagement and hospitalisation in older carers to potentially reduce hospital burden.

Background Caregiving is an essential yet often overlooked component of health care. Although carers play a pivotal role in reducing healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes, they are also prone to psychological and physical burdens that can lead to their own hospitalisation. This study aimed to explore the relationship between the frequency of interactions with general practitioners and hospitalisation rates among caregivers aged ≥45years in New South Wales, Australia.

Beta-Blockers and Cutaneous Melanoma Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Random-Effects Meta-Analysis.

Beta-blockers have generated an exciting discourse for their potential as a cheap, safe, and effective adjunctive therapy for cutaneous melanoma patients, but the field remains murky. This systematic review investigates the association between beta-blocker use and survival outcomes in cutaneous melanoma patients. We reviewed 12 studies with 21,582 patients in a network meta-analysis and found a benefit between beta-blocker use and disease-free survival but no other significant association for melanoma-specific or overall survival.

Sprouting sideways: queer temporalities and kinship in donor conception.

Temporal constructs are central to reproduction and kinship, as epitomised by the pervasive concept of the biological clock within public imaginaries. While queer scholarship has problematised linear models of kinship and reproductive temporality, the specific temporalities associated with donor-conceived families have received less scholarly attention, despite the increasing prevalence of these family structures. In this article, we explore the question: how does donor conception reconfigure temporal logics.

PHIStruct: Improving phage-host interaction prediction at low sequence similarity settings using structure-aware protein embeddings.

Motivation: Recent computational approaches for predicting phage-host interaction have explored the use of sequence-only protein language models to produce embeddings of phage proteins without manual feature engineering. However, these embeddings do not directly capture protein structure information and structure-informed signals related to host specificity.

Results: We present PHIStruct, a multilayer perceptron that takes in structure-aware embeddings of receptor-binding proteins, generated via the structure-aware protein language model SaProt, and then predicts the host from among the ESKAPEE genera.

Unfolding the Potential of Pyrrole- and Indole-Based Allylidene Hydrazine Carboximidamides as Antimicrobial Agents.

Antimicrobial drug resistance is a significant global health challenge, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths annually and severely impacting healthcare systems worldwide. Several reported antimicrobial compounds have a guanidine motif, as the positive charge on guanidine promotes cell lysis. Therefore, pyrrole- and indole-based allylidene hydrazine carboximidamide derivatives with guanidine motifs are proposed as antimicrobial agents that mimic cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs).

Broadband Long Wavelength Light Promotes Myopic Eye Growth and Alters Retinal Responses to Light Offset in Chick.

Purpose: Prolonged exposure to broadband light with a short-wavelength (blue) or long-wavelength (orange/red) bias is known to impact eye growth and refraction, but the mechanisms underlying this response are unknown. Thus, the present study investigated the effects of broadband blue and orange lights with well-differentiated spectrums on refractive development and global flash electroretinography (gfERG) measures of retinal function in the chick myopia model.

Methods: Chicks were raised for 4 days with monocular negative lenses, or no lens, under blue, orange, or white light.

Fluid Distribution: Response to Intermittent Pneumatic Compression in People With and Without Primary Lymphedema.

Current understanding of changes in fluid distribution in response to the application of compression in primary lymphedema (PLE) is limited. This study measured fluid distribution before and after one application of standardized intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC) in the lower limbs of people with PLE, compared with those without lymphedema. High-frequency ultrasound (HFU) was used to measure dermal fluid, bioimpedance to measure segmental fluid, and percent water content (PWC) to measure fluid at specific anatomical points.

Manipulation of Surface Spin Configurations for Enhanced Performance in Oxygen Evolution Reactions.

studies of the relationship between surface spin configurations and spin-related electrocatalytic reactions are crucial for understanding how magnetic catalysts enhance oxygen evolution reaction (OER) performance under magnetic fields. In this work, 2D FeSe nanosheets with rich surface spin configurations are synthesized via chemical vapor deposition. magnetic force microscopy and Raman spectroscopy reveal that a 200 mT magnetic field eliminates spin-disordered domain walls, forming a spin-ordered single-domain structure, which lowers the OER energy barrier, as confirmed by theoretical calculations.

Safety and Efficacy of IV Onasemnogene Abeparvovec for Pediatric Patients With Spinal Muscular Atrophy: The Phase 3b SMART Study.

Background And Objectives: Safety and efficacy of IV onasemnogene abeparvovec has been demonstrated for patients with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) weighing <8.5 kg. SMART was the first clinical trial to evaluate onasemnogene abeparvovec for participants weighing 8.

The continued evolution of the L2 cephalosporinase in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia: A key driver of beta-lactam resistance.

The Stenotrophomonas maltophilia L2 cephalosporinase is one of two beta-lactamases which afford S. maltophilia beta-lactam resistance. With the overuse of beta-lactams, selective pressures have contributed to the evolution of these proteins, generating proteins with an extended spectrum of activity.

Guidance on selecting and evaluating AI auto-segmentation systems in clinical radiotherapy: insights from a six-vendor analysis.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based auto-segmentation has demonstrated numerous benefits to clinical radiotherapy workflows. However, the rapidly changing regulatory, research, and market environment presents challenges around selecting and evaluating the most suitable solution. To support the clinical adoption of AI auto-segmentation systems, Selection Criteria recommendations were developed to enable a holistic evaluation of vendors, considering not only raw performance but associated risks uniquely related to the clinical deployment of AI.

Automated characterisation of cerebral microbleeds using their size and spatial distribution on brain MRI.

Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are small, hypointense hemosiderin deposits in the brain measuring 2-10 mm in diameter. As one of the important biomarkers of small vessel disease, they have been associated with various neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular diseases. Hence, automated detection, and subsequent extraction of clinically useful metrics (e.