Prevalence, Management, and Comorbidities of Adults With Atrial Fibrillation in the United States, 2019 to 2023.

Background: Due to evolving risk factor profiles and an aging population, atrial fibrillation poses a significant public health challenge in the United States. Therefore, a contemporary and nationally representative epidemiological study is necessary to reassess atrial fibrillation's impact on the health care system.

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to provide the most current and detailed assessment of atrial fibrillation's prevalence and management in the United States.

True Grit: The Tale of American Integrated Plastic Surgery Residency Applicants.

Introduction: Selecting candidates for plastic and reconstructive surgery (PRS) residency is complex, involving academic metrics and intrinsic personal qualities. "Grit"-perseverance and passion for long-term goals may be one of these valued qualities. This study investigates how grit scores relate to securing a PRS residency, hypothesizing that higher grit correlates with greater matching success.

Applications of mixed reality with medical imaging for training and clinical practice.

Purpose: This review summarizes the current use of extended reality (XR) including virtual reality (VR), mixed reality, and augmented reality (AR) in the medical field, ranging from medical imaging to training to preoperative planning. It covers the integration of these technologies into clinical practice and within medical training while discussing the challenges and future opportunities in this sphere. This will hopefully encourage more physicians to collaborate on integrating medicine and technology.

Restorative Justice Practices as a Foundation for Medical Education Innovation.

Background: Restorative justice (RJ) is an ethical lens that places emphasis on a community's connection and proliferative impact of actions, promoting communication and establishing methods for accountability. RJ practices can be applied on a spectrum, including proactive community-building practices, community discussions in response to an event, and restorative conferences addressing specific incidences of harm. This article describes an intervention that utilized RJ community-building practices within a medical education environment and evaluates its acceptability and feasibility.

Comparison of practice-related changes in dual task walking performance and neural efficiency between older adults with progressive and relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.

Background: There is limited research comparing both performance and brain control of walking between older adults with progressive and relapsing-remitting MS.

Objective: This study compared older adults with progressive and relapsing-remitting MS for differences in prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation in single- and dual-task-walking and practice-related effects on neural efficiency, walking, and cognitive performances.

Methods: Older adults with progressive (n = 32, age=65±6ys) and relapsing-remitting (n = 63, age=65±4ys) MS completed three conditions (single-task walk, single-task-alpha, i.

Neurochemical and Morphological Comparisons of Motor Nerve Organoids and Spinal-Cord Explants.

Organoids are multicellular structures formed from populations of individual cells allowing modeling of structural and functional aspects of organs and tissues in normal and diseased states. They offer unique opportunities to model and treat disease. Using a mouse embryonic stem cell line, we have cultured organoids that express markers of spinal cord motor neurons as well as motor neurons found within the peripheral nervous system.

Cytokine expression and cytokine-mediated cell-cell communication during skeletal muscle regeneration revealed by integrative analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing data.

Skeletal muscles undergo self-repair upon injury, owing to the resident muscle stem cells and their extensive communication with the microenvironment of injured muscles. Cytokines play a critical role in orchestrating intercell communication to ensure successful regeneration. Immune cells as well as other types of cells in the injury site, including muscle stem cells, are known to secret cytokines.

Seasonal influenza a virus lineages exhibit divergent abilities to antagonize interferon induction and signaling.

The circulation of seasonal influenza A viruses (IAVs) in humans relies on effective evasion and subversion of the host immune response. While the evolution of seasonal H1N1 and H3N2 viruses to avoid humoral immunity is well characterized, relatively little is known about the evolution of innate immune antagonism phenotypes in these viruses. Numerous studies have established that only a small subset of infected cells is responsible for initiating the type I and type III interferon (IFN) response during IAV infection, emphasizing the importance of single cell studies to accurately characterize the IFN response during infection.

Changes in Caregivers' Use of the Online Medical Record Pre- and Post-COVID: Analysis of the Health Information National Trends Survey, 2018-2022.

Little is known about online medical record (OMR) use among caregivers, including changes in OMR use through the COVID-19 pandemic. This study compares OMR use among caregivers and non-caregivers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifies reasons for non-use, and examines the association between caregiving status and characteristics with OMR use. Secondary data analysis of the nationally representative Health Information National Trends Survey data from 2018 to 2022 ( = 14,034).

The impact of mGlu2 or mGlu5 receptor activators on the production of l-arginine derivatives and the expression of PRMT5 or DDAH1 enzymes in animal models of cognitive decline.

l-arginine derivatives (ADMA, SDMA, NMMA) are endogenous inhibitors of nitric oxide (NO֗) production, which is essential in critical brain processes including blood-brain barrier (BBB) integrity and long-term potentiation (LTP). ADMA and NMMA are degraded by dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase 1 (DDAH1) and protein arginine methyltransferase 5 (PRMT5) is an emerging epigenetic enzyme that mainly represses transcription of target genes via symmetric dimethylation of arginine residues. There is no data concerning the impact of metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGlu) ligands on this aspect of brain physiology.

Differential antigenic imprinting effects between influenza H1N1 hemagglutinin and neuraminidase in a mouse model.

Unlabelled: Understanding how immune history influences influenza immunity is essential for developing effective vaccines and therapeutic strategies. This study examines the antigenic imprinting of influenza hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) using a mouse model with sequential infections by H1N1 virus strains exhibiting substantial antigenic differences in HA. In our pre-2009 influenza infection model, we observed that mice with more extensive infection histories produced higher levels of functional NA-inhibiting antibodies (NAI).

An Anechoic, High-Fidelity, Multidirectional Speech Corpus.

Introduction: We currently lack speech testing materials faithful to broader aspects of real-world auditory scenes such as speech directivity and extended high frequency (EHF; > 8 kHz) content that have demonstrable effects on speech perception. Here, we describe the development of a multidirectional, high-fidelity speech corpus using multichannel anechoic recordings that can be used for future studies of speech perception in complex environments by diverse listeners.

Design: Fifteen male and 15 female talkers (21.

SPLICER: a highly efficient base editing toolbox that enables in vivo therapeutic exon skipping.

Exon skipping technologies enable exclusion of targeted exons from mature mRNA transcripts, which have broad applications in medicine and biotechnology. Existing techniques including antisense oligonucleotides, targetable nucleases, and base editors, while effective for specific applications, remain hindered by transient effects, genotoxicity, and inconsistent exon skipping. To overcome these limitations, here we develop SPLICER, a toolbox of next-generation base editors containing near-PAMless Cas9 nickase variants fused to adenosine or cytosine deaminases for the simultaneous editing of splice acceptor (SA) and splice donor (SD) sequences.

Context-dependent effect of polyethylene glycol on the structure and dynamics of hirudin.

Hirudin is a bioactive small protein that binds thrombin to interrupt the blood clotting cascade. It contains an ordered and a disordered (IDR) region. Conjugating with polyethylene glycol (PEGylation) is an important modification of biopharmaceuticals to improve their lifetime and retention.

Plasma pTau217 ratio predicts continuous regional brain tau accumulation in amyloid-positive early Alzheimer's disease.

Background: This study examines whether phosphorylated plasma Tau217 ratio (pTau217R) can predict tau accumulation in different brain regions, as measured by positron emission tomography (PET) standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR), for staging Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: Plasma pTau217R was measured using immunoprecipitation-mass spectrometry. Models for predicting tau PET SUVR, developed with 144 early AD individuals using [F]MK6240, were validated in two validation sets, VS1 (98 early AD) and VS2 (47 preclinical/early AD with a different tracer, flortaucipir (Tauvid)), all amyloid-beta positive (Aβ+).

Impact of Paraben on Uterine Collagen: An Integrated and Targeted Correlative Approach Using Second Harmonic Generation Microscopy, Nanoindentation, and Atomic Force Microscopy.

This study investigates the structural and mechanical changes in uterine collagen following exposure to propylparaben (PP), using a combined methodology of Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) microscopy, Nanoindentation (NI), and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). SHG analysis identified significant disorganization in collagen fibril orientation in the circumferential layer and heterogeneous distribution of regions with elevated forward to backward ratios (F/B) across all uterine layers due to PP exposure. High F/B can indicate multiple potential fibril-level changes like thickened fibrils, higher crosslinking, fibril disorganization - changes not fully decipherable by SHG alone.

A modeling study on SARS-CoV-2 transmissions in primary and middle schools in Illinois.

Background: The global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus led to a statewide lockdown in Illinois starting in March 2020. To ensure students' and employees' safety for school reopening, protective measures, such as a statewide mask mandate and weekly testing, were in place in Illinois from Spring 2021 to Spring 2022. The study objective is to 1) estimate the in-school and external transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in elementary and middle schools under mask mandate and weekly surveillance and 2) estimate the impacts of protective measures such as testing and mask proportion and testing frequency on SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

How the Somatosensory System Adapts to the Motor Change in Stroke: A Hemispheric Shift?

Previous studies found that post-stroke motor impairments are associated with damage to the lesioned corticospinal tract and a maladaptive increase in indirect contralesional motor pathways. How the somatosensory system adapts to the change in the use of motor pathways and the role of adaptive sensory feedback to the abnormal movement control of the paretic arm remains largely unknown. We hypothesize that following a unilateral stroke, there is an adaptive hemispheric shift of somatosensory processing toward the contralesional sensorimotor areas to provide sensory feedback support to the contralesional indirect motor pathways.

A molecular toolkit for heterologous protein secretion across Bacteroides species.

Bacteroides species are abundant, prevalent, and stable members of the human gut microbiota, making them a promising chassis for developing long-term interventions for chronic diseases. Engineering Bacteroides as in situ bio-factories, however, requires efficient protein secretion tools, which are currently lacking. Here, we systematically investigate methods to enable heterologous protein secretion in Bacteroides.

Varicella zoster vasculopathy causing recurrent ischaemic strokes in an immunocompetent patient.

A 66-year-old woman reported 10 days of generalised weakness, falls and memory 'glitches'. She had developed left-sided ophthalmic herpes zoster 3 months before but was otherwise well. MR scan of brain showed acute left-sided ischaemic strokes and CT cerebral angiogram identified marked stenoses of the left anterior and middle cerebral arteries.