Views on medical assistance in dying and related arguments: a survey of doctors and nurses at a university hospital.

Background: In 2021, a survey was conducted among doctors and nurses at Landspítali Iceland University Hospital (LIUH) regarding their views on medical assistance in dying (MAID) and the underlying arguments, the inclusion criteria and modality of implementation. Surveys on identically defined study groups in 1995 and 2010 were used for comparison.

Methods: The survey was sent to 357 doctors and 516 nurses working at LIUH.

The Uses and Experiences of Synchronous Communication Technology for Home-Dwelling Older Adults in a Home Care Services Context: Qualitative Systematic Review.

Background: European health care systems regard information and communication technology as a necessity in supporting future health care provision by community home care services to home-dwelling older adults. Communication technology enabling synchronous communication between 2 or more human actors at a distance constitutes a significant component of this ambition, but few reviews have synthesized research relating to this particular type of technology. As evaluations of information and communication technology in health care services favor measurements of effectiveness over the experiences and dynamics of putting these technologies into use, the nuances involved in technology implementation processes are often omitted.

Objects, faces, and spaces: Organizational principles of visual object perception as evidenced by individual differences in behavior.

What are the diagnostic dimensions on which objects differ visually? We constructed a two-dimensional object space based on such attributes captured by a deep convolutional neural network. These attributes can be approximated as stubby/spiky and animate-/inanimate-looking. If object space contributes to human visual cognition, this should have a measurable effect on object discrimination abilities.

Challenges in the Implementation of EU Risk Minimisation Measures for Medicinal Products in Clinical Practice Guidelines: Mixed Methods Multi-Case Study.

Introduction: Risk minimisation measures (RMMs) aim to ensure safe use of medicines, but their implementation in clinical practice is complicated by the diversity of stakeholders whose clinical decision making they seek to inform. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are considered integral in clinical decision making.

Objectives: To determine the extent to which RMMs are included in the relevant CPGs and to describe factors that determine RMM inclusion.

Bi-directional effects between inflammatory molecules and intracranial aneurysm.

Introduction: Although inflammation is closely associated with the pathogenesis of intracranial aneurysm (IA), detailed causal associations remain unclear. This study aimed to investigate the causality between circulating inflammatory molecules (IMs) and IA.

Materials And Methods: The bi-directional Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was conducted using two genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for inflammatory molecules (IMs) from Finnish and Icelandic populations, as well as GWAS datasets of IA cases and controls of European descent.

Biological validation of peak-width of skeletonized mean diffusivity as a VCID biomarker: The MarkVCID Consortium.

Background: Peak-width of skeletonized mean diffusivity (PSMD), a neuroimaging marker of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), has shown excellent instrumental properties. Here, we extend our work to perform a biological validation of PSMD.

Methods: We included 396 participants from the Biomarkers for Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia (MarkVCID-1) Consortium and three replication samples (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology = 6172, Rush University Medical Center = 287, University of California Davis Alzheimer's Disease Research Center = 567).

Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance with multiple paraproteins: A population-based screening study.

Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) is the precursor of multiple myeloma (MM) and related disorders. MGUS is characterized by asymptomatic paraproteinemia. In some cases, multiple paraproteins can be identified but the clinical implications of this phenomenon are poorly understood.

Considerations in the search for epistasis.

Epistasis refers to changes in the effect on phenotype of a unit of genetic information, such as a single nucleotide polymorphism or a gene, dependent on the context of other genetic units. Such interactions are both biologically plausible and good candidates to explain observations which are not fully explained by an additive heritability model. However, the search for epistasis has so far largely failed to recover this missing heritability.

A complex mechanism translating variation of a simple genetic architecture into alternative life histories.

Understanding the processes that link genotype to phenotype is a central challenge in biology. Despite progress in discovering genes associated with ecologically relevant traits, a poor understanding of the processes and functions via which molecules mediate evolutionary differences leaves us critically far from linking proximate and ultimate causes of evolution. This knowledge gap is particularly large in multifaceted phenotypes of ecological relevance such as life histories where multiple traits covary and influence fitness.

How can family members of patients in the intensive care unit be supported? A systematic review of qualitative reviews, meta-synthesis, and novel recommendations for nursing care.

Background: Families are an important part of the intensive care unit (ICU) team. Being a family member in the ICU can be distressing due to interacting factors, such as the critical condition of the patient, the responsibility of acting as the patient's advocate, and partaking in decision-making related to treatment. Nurses need to be aware of the family's well-being throughout the patient's ICU stay.

The Montenegrin 2022 Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth.

Background: The main purpose of this study was to summarize the results of the Montenegrin 2022 Report Card on physical activity (PA) for children and youth, which is used to identify and grade PA to help optimize the current situation and provide an improved basis for the creation of a future monitoring system.

Methods: Following the methodology established by the Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance, the Montenegrin team conducted an assessment of PA of Montenegrin children and youth through 12 separate indicators. Grades were awarded based on data found in available articles published up to 2022, including the grey literature, such as government and nongovernment reports, and online content from the same period.

How does color distribution learning affect goal-directed visuomotor behavior?

While the visual world is rich and complex, importantly, it nevertheless contains many statistical regularities. For example, environmental feature distributions tend to remain relatively stable from one moment to the next. Recent findings have shown how observers can learn surprising details of environmental color distributions, even when the colors belong to actively ignored stimuli such as distractors in visual search.

Platinum retention in plasma, urine, and normal colonic mucosa in cisplatin-treated testicular cancer survivors.

Testicular cancer survivors (TCS) treated with platinum-based chemotherapy have increased cancer risk. Platinum retention in healthy tissue may contribute to carcinogenesis. We assessed total platinum concentrations in plasma, urine, and normal colonic mucosa samples in TCS treated with cisplatin.

Variable resolution machine learning optimization of antennas using global sensitivity analysis.

The significance of rigorous optimization techniques in antenna engineering has grown significantly in recent years. For many design tasks, parameter tuning must be conducted globally, presenting a challenge due to associated computational costs. The popular bio-inspired routines often necessitate thousands of merit function calls to converge, generating prohibitive expenses whenever the design process relies on electromagnetic (EM) simulation models.

Karyotype evolution in response to chemoradiotherapy and upon recurrence of esophageal adenocarcinomas.

The genome of esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) is highly unstable and might evolve over time. Here, we track karyotype evolution in EACs in response to treatment and upon recurrence through multi-region and longitudinal analysis. To this end, we introduce L-PAC (low-purity inference of absolute copy-number alterations [CNAs]), a bio-informatics technique that allows inference of absolute CNAs of low-purity samples by leveraging the information of high-purity samples from the same cancer.