Meaningful Engagement as a Cornerstone for Implementing the Key Recommendations to Advance the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women Living With HIV Across Policy, Practice, and Research in Canada.

In 2022, a community-academic collaborative team published 5 key recommendations for developing a national action plan to advance the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of women living with HIV in Canada. In 2023, a national gathering was convened to strategize implementation of the recommendations across policy, practice, and research settings. Discussions highlighted that meaningful engagement of women living with HIV (recommendation 1) is foundational to implementing the other recommendations.

Translating Evidence-Based Self-Management Interventions Using a Stepped-Care Approach for Patients With Cancer and Their Caregivers: A Pilot Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial Design.

Background: Self-directed interventions are cost-effective for patients with cancer and their family caregivers, but barriers to use can compromise adherence and efficacy.

Aim: Pilot a Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) to develop a time-varying dyadic self-management intervention that follows a stepped-care approach in providing different types of guidance to optimize the delivery of Coping-Together, a dyadic self-directed self-management intervention.

Methods: 48 patients with cancer and their caregivers were randomized in Stage 1 to: (a) Coping-Together (included a workbook and 6 booklets) or (b) Coping-Together + lay telephone guidance.

External validation of AI-based scoring systems in the ICU: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used to predict clinical deterioration in intensive care unit (ICU) patients through scoring systems. Although promising, such algorithms often overfit their training cohort and perform worse at new hospitals. Thus, external validation is a critical - but frequently overlooked - step to establish the reliability of predicted risk scores to translate them into clinical practice.

The identification of a SARs-CoV2 S2 protein derived peptide with super-antigen-like stimulatory properties on T-cells.

Severe COVID-19 can trigger a cytokine storm, leading to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with similarities to superantigen-induced toxic shock syndrome. An outstanding question is whether SARS-CoV-2 protein sequences can directly induce inflammatory responses. In this study, we identify a region in the SARS-CoV-2 S2 spike protein with sequence homology to bacterial super-antigens (termed P3).

Anti-PD-1 amplifies costimulation in melanoma-infiltrating T1-like Foxp3 regulatory T cells to alleviate local immunosuppression.

Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors targeting programmed cell death protein-1 (PD-1) are the first line of treatment for many solid tumors including melanoma. PD-1 blockade enhances the effector functions of melanoma-infiltrating CD8 T cells, leading to durable tumor remissions. However, 55% of patients with melanoma do not respond to treatment.

Pharmacological characterization of cannabidiol as a negative allosteric modulator of the 5-HT receptor.

Promising clinical evidence suggests that psychedelic compounds, like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have therapeutic value for treatment of psychiatric disorders. However, they often produce hallucinations and dissociative states, likely mediated by the serotonin (5-HT) receptor 5-HT, raising challenges regarding therapeutic scalability. Given the reported antipsychotic effects of cannabidiol (CBD) and its promiscuous binding at many receptors, we assessed whether CBD could modulate 5-HT signalling.

Efficacy and Safety of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists for Weight Loss Among Adults Without Diabetes : A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.

Background: Recent randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have investigated glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) and dual or triple co-agonists for weight loss among adults with overweight or obesity and without diabetes.

Purpose: To assess the efficacy and safety of GLP-1 RAs and co-agonists for the treatment of obesity among adults without diabetes.

Data Sources: MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane CENTRAL from inception to 4 October 2024.

Plasma pTau181 and amyloid markers predict conversion to dementia in idiopathic REM sleep behaviour disorder.

Blood-based biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology have been intensively investigated as markers for AD-related neurodegeneration. Comorbid AD pathology is common in dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). Accordingly, we hypothesized that plasma biomarkers associated with AD pathology might be useful to predict DLB in a cohort of idiopathic/isolated REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD), an incipient synucleinopathy.

The Impact of Chronic Temporomandibular Disorders on Fatigue and Daily Life: A Qualitative Phenomenological Study.

Introduction: Chronic temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) affect a notable portion of the population, with a prevalence of 5% to 12%. These conditions often lead individuals to adopt a soft-food diet to manage pain, but such dietary adjustments can inadvertently cause nutritional deficiencies. This issue may be compounded by medications used to manage TMD symptoms, which can contribute to fatigue and reduced daily functioning.

Bivalent SMAC mimetic APG-1387 reduces HIV reservoirs and limits viral rebound in humanized mice.

Latent viral reservoirs (VRs) represent a main barrier to HIV cure. Thus, developing new approaches that can purge and eliminate VRs paves the path toward achieving an HIV-1 cure. APG-1387, a bivalent SMAC mimetic (SM), efficiently reactivates latent HIV expression in T cell line models and enhances active caspase 3 expression, a condition that typically leads to apoptosis.

Photo-crosslinked Diels-Alder and thiol-ene polymer networks.

Compositions of ethylene glycol dicyclopentenyl ether methacrylate (EGDEMA), a vegetable oil based alkyl methacrylate (C13MA), and furfuryl methacrylate (FMA) were terpolymerized for dual-crosslinked networks with tailored mechanical and thermal properties. Specifically, initiators for continuous activator regeneration (ICAR) atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) afforded materials with tailored glass transition temperature ( ) and incorporation of furan and norbornene functionalities within a single chain. The terpolymer with high furan and norbornene functionality (Ter2: = 0.

Predicting CRISPR-Cas9 off-target effects in human primary cells using bidirectional LSTM with BERT embedding.

Motivation: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 system is a ground-breaking genome editing tool, which has revolutionized cell and gene therapies. One of the essential components involved in this system that ensures its success is the design of an optimal single-guide RNA (sgRNA) with high on-target cleavage efficiency and low off-target effects. This is challenging as many conditions need to be considered, and empirically testing every design is time-consuming and costly.

Enhancing the quality of lentil proteins via combination with whey proteins based on a dual process: a novel strategy through the incorporation of complexation and fermentation.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing a distinguished alternative to human consumption of animal-based proteins. The application of lentil proteins in the food industry is typically limited due to their poor solubility and digestibility. An innovative method of balancing lentil-whey protein (LP-WP) complexes with higher-quality protein properties was established to address this issue, which coupled a pH-shifting approach with fermentation treatment.

COVID-19 policies and tuberculosis services in private health sectors of India, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented challenges in the field of global health. Nigeria, Indonesia and India are three high tuberculosis (TB) burden countries with large private health sectors. Both TB and the private health sector faced challenges in these countries because of COVID-19.

IBD in the elderly population: Epidemiology, long-term disease course, surgery rates and biological use - data from the Veszprem county cohort between 1977-2020.

Background And Aims: Limited data are available on long-term disease outcomes in elderly-onset (EO) inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) from well-defined population-based cohorts. Our aim was to analyze incidence, disease course, surgery rates and therapeutic strategies of EO IBD in a prospective population-based cohort.

Methods: EO IBD was defined if diagnosis was established at ≥60years of age.

Human Auditory-Motor Networks Show Frequency-Specific Phase-Based Coupling in Resting-State MEG.

Perception and production of music and speech rely on auditory-motor coupling, a mechanism which has been linked to temporally precise oscillatory coupling between auditory and motor regions of the human brain, particularly in the beta frequency band. Recently, brain imaging studies using magnetoencephalography (MEG) have also shown that accurate auditory temporal predictions specifically depend on phase coherence between auditory and motor cortical regions. However, it is not yet clear whether this tight oscillatory phase coupling is an intrinsic feature of the auditory-motor loop, or whether it is only elicited by task demands.

Substantia nigra degeneration in spinocerebellar ataxia 2 and 7 using neuromelanin-sensitive imaging.

Objective: Spinocerebellar ataxias (SCA) are neurodegenerative diseases with widespread lesions across the central nervous system. Ataxia and spasticity are usually predominant, but patients may also present with parkinsonism. We aimed to characterize substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) degeneration in SCA2 and 7 using neuromelanin-sensitive imaging.

Disentangling the effect of sex from brain size on brain organization and cognitive functioning.

Neuroanatomical sex differences estimated in neuroimaging studies are confounded by total intracranial volume (TIV) as a major biological factor. Employing a matching approach widely used for causal modeling, we disentangled the effect of TIV from sex to study sex-differentiated brain aging trajectories, their relation to functional networks and cytoarchitectonic classes, brain allometry, and cognition. Using data from the UK Biobank, we created subsamples that removed, maintained, or exaggerated the TIV differences in the original sample.

"I'm trying to figure out who the hell I am": Examining the psychosocial and mental health experience of individuals learning "Not Parent Expected" news from a direct-to-consumer DNA ancestry test.

Background: According to recent estimates, around 30 million people have taken Direct-to-Consumer DNA ancestry tests, typically marketed as a fun, harmless and exciting process of discovery. These tests estimate a user's ethnic ancestry, also matching users with biological relations on their database. This matching can produce a surprising 'not parent expected' discovery, where a user learns that an assumed parent (typically the father) is not a biological parent.