"The Heart of the Center": Exploring the Role of the Patient Care Technician in US Dialysis Care.

Rationale & Objective: Dialysis patient care technicians (PCTs) provide essential, frontline care for patients receiving in-center hemodialysis. We qualitatively explored perceptions of the PCT job role, responsibilities, and training among current PCTs, non-PCT dialysis staff, and patients receiving hemodialysis.

Study Design: Focus group study.

Examining Engagement Calendar Deviations in Assisted Living: A Focus on Residents With Dementia.

Early in our longitudinal qualitative study on meaningful engagement and quality of life among assisted living (AL) residents with dementia, researchers observed differences between the activities scheduled on monthly engagement calendars and those taking place. Yet, we were unable to identify any research examining such deviations or their implications. Thus, drawing on data from three diverse AL communities studied over a one-year period, we aim to: 1) examine deviations in scheduled engagement programming; 2) identify influential factors; and 3) understand resident outcomes.

Serious Mental Illness, Substance Use Disorder, and Nursing Home Care: A Narrative Review of the Literature.

The prevalence of serious mental illness (SMI) and substance use disorders (SUD) among residents in skilled nursing homes is increasing yet staff are generally not equipped to care for these residents. There is a pressing need to identify and assess practices, including training, intervention, screening, and service integration, that can support nursing home staff to better support residents with SMI and SUD. This narrative literature review examines the literature to identify what is known about this population as well as the current state of care, barriers to better care, and promising practices to support improved outcomes.

Continuing Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Older Adults.

The rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented a multi-faceted challenge to older adults, carers, and care institutions globally. A wide range of policies aimed at protecting older adults from serious illness and death from COVID-19 - including prioritizing vaccination for older adults, mandating vaccination among health care workers, and stringent isolation measures - achieved some success in mitigating these outcomes. However, older adults continue to bear the burden of risk for these most severe outcomes.

[The relationship between comorbidity factors and in-hospital mortality in patients with carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae pneumonia].

This study aimed to explore the relationship between comorbidity factors and in-hospital mortality related to factors in patients with carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) pneumonia. This study collected clinical data from 218 patients with CRKP pneumonia in Beijing hospital from November 2011 to December 2023, analyzed the number of comorbidities carried by CRKP pneumonia patients, comorbidity patterns, Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) scores, and comorbidity of underlying diseases, and explored the relationship between various indicators and comorbidity factors and in-hospital mortality in CRKP pneumonia patients. The Ward.

'They Don't Want to Label It': Insights from Communities Not Enrolled in the Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities.

More than 800 municipalities and 11 states and territories in the United States have joined the Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities (NAFSC); however, to our knowledge, no studies have examined the many communities that have not joined. The present study explored the factors that inhibit communities from joining the NAFSC. Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 community leaders in Massachusetts and Maine.

Housing and Community Partner Views on the Benefits of Housing with Services: The Right Care, Right Place, Right Time Program.

Background And Objectives: Older adult-focused housing with services programs seek to improve access to supportive services, particularly among individuals residing in subsidized housing. The Right Care, Right Place, Right Time (R3) program comprises two on-site wellness teams responsible for 400 participants across seven housing sites in Greater Boston. These embedded teams work directly with residents to address health-related needs and access to services.

Multi-stage automatic and rapid ablation and needle trajectory planning method for CT-guided percutaneous liver tumor ablation.

Background: Computer-assisted planning methods have increasingly contributed to preoperative ablation planning; however, these methods cannot automatically obtain the final optimal solution within a short time and are rarely validated in practice, greatly limiting their clinical applicability.

Purpose: We aimed to propose a full-automatic multi-stage ablation and needle trajectory planning method for CT-guided percutaneous liver ablation to attain the final optimal plans under multiple clinical constraints rapidly.

Methods: Our proposed method integrates the ablation zone planning fulfilling complete tumor coverage and critical structure avoidance while reaching a trade-off between ablation number and healthy tissue damage, and needle trajectory planning under multiple clinical constraints.

GPR34 is a metabolic immune checkpoint for ILC1-mediated antitumor immunity.

Type 1 innate lymphoid cells (ILC1s) are a class of tissue-resident cells with antitumor activity, suggesting its possible role in solid tumor immune surveillance, but it is not clear whether manipulating ILC1s can induce potent antitumor immune responses. Here, we found that G-protein-coupled receptor 34 (GPR34), a receptor for lysophosphatidylserine (LysoPS), was highly expressed on ILC1s but not on conventional natural killer cells in the tumor microenvironment. LysoPS was enriched in the tumor microenvironment and could inhibit ILC1 activation via GPR34.

Dementia: Common Syndromes and Modifiable Risk and Protective Factors.

Dementia is an umbrella term for multiple conditions that lead to progressive cognitive decline and impaired activities of daily living. Neuropsychological evaluation is essential for characterizing the distinct cognitive and behavioral profile that can aid in the diagnostic process and treatment planning for dementia. Modifiable risk factors for dementia such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, cognitive and social engagement, and stress provide important avenues for prevention.

Dementia Care Among United States Dialysis Providers: A Mixed Methods Study Evaluating Clinician Comfort and Knowledge.

Rationale & Objective: Given the high burden of dementia in dialysis patients, the dialysis workforce needs to be prepared to provide high-quality, person-centered dementia care. We explored comfort with and knowledge of dementia among US dialysis care providers.

Study Design: Web-based survey.

Dementia-focused programs in older adult centers and health care use among individuals with dementia.

There is growing attention to community-based services for preventing adverse health care outcomes among people aging with dementia. We explored whether the availability of dementia-centered programming within older adult centers (ie, senior centers)-specifically, adult day services (ADS), social adult day centers (SADCs), memory cafes, and caregiver support-is associated with reduced hospitalization, emergency room use, and total Medicare costs for community-dwelling individuals ages 75 and older with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), and whether associations differ by the relative size of the local jurisdiction. We used a novel dataset that links Medicare claims data with data from an organizational census of municipally based Massachusetts older adult centers.

Loneliness, cerebrovascular and Alzheimer's disease pathology, and cognition.

Introduction: Loneliness has a rising public health impact, but research involving neuropathology and representative cohorts has been limited.

Methods: Inverse odds of selection weights were generalized from the autopsy sample of Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center cohorts (N = 680; 89 ± 9 years old; 25% dementia) to the US-representative Health and Retirement Study (N = 8469; 76 ± 7 years old; 5% dementia) to extend external validity. Regressions tested cross-sectional associations between loneliness and (1) Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cerebrovascular pathology; (2) five cognitive domains; and (3) relationships between pathology and cognition, adjusting for depression.

Shock Wave Therapy Alleviates Hypoxia/Reoxygenation-Induced Cardiomyocyte Injury by Inhibiting Both Apoptosis and Ferroptosis.

Shock wave therapy (SWT) is a new alternative therapy for patients with severe coronary artery disease that improves myocardial ischemic symptoms by delivering low-energy shock wave stimulation to ischaemic myocardium with low-energy pulsed waves. However, the specific mechanism of its protective effect is not fully understood, especially for the protective mechanism in cardiomyocytes after hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R). We selected a rat H9c2 cardiomyocyte cell line to establish a stable H/R cardiomyocyte injury model by hypoxia/reoxygenation, and then used SWT for therapeutic intervention to explore its cardiomyocyte protective mechanisms.

Racial Discrimination, Religious Coping, and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Among African American Women and Men.

Objective: This cross-sectional study examined whether religious coping buffered the associations between racial discrimination and several modifiable cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors-systolic and diastolic blood pressure (BP), glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), body mass index (BMI), and cholesterol-in a sample of African American women and men.

Methods: Participant data were taken from the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across the Life Span study (N = 815; 55.2% women; 30-64 years old).

CM082 suppresses hypoxia-induced retinal neovascularization in larval zebrafish.

Retinal neovascularization is a common feature of several ocular neovascular diseases, which are the leading cause of blindness in the world. Current treatments are administered through invasive intravitreal injections, leading to poor patient compliance, serious ocular complications and heavy economic burdens. Thus, an alternative less or non-invasive therapeutic strategy is in demand.

Cisplatin resistance-related transcriptome and methylome integration identifies as a novel prognostic biomarker in small cell lung cancer.

Platinum-based chemo-resistance is the major issue for the treatment of small cell lung cancer (SCLC). The integrative analysis of multi-omics data is a reliable approach for discovering novel biomarkers associated with chemo-resistance. Here, multi-omics integrative analysis and Cox regression found that higher expression of was associated with poorer survival of SCLC patients who received chemotherapy.

Enhancing undergraduate education and research in aging to eliminate health disparities (ENGAGED) - A pipeline program to advance diversity in aging research.

The Enhancing Undergraduate Education and Research in Aging to Eliminate Health Disparities (ENGAGED) program takes advantage of the broad, multidisciplinary research established in the area of aging at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and its partner institutions, Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem State University. The ENGAGED program is designed to provide undergraduate students who are underrepresented in the biomedical sciences an opportunity to participate in educational and research training in aging and health disparities. Funded since August 2019, ENGAGED has provided 73 academic year internships and 46 summer internships, with another 8 internships starting in Fall 2023.