Randomized Controlled Trial of Telephone-delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Versus Supportive Care for Chronic Back Pain.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a telephone-delivered, home-based cognitive-behavioral intervention for chronic low back pain in comparison to a matched supportive care (SC) treatment.

Methods: Participants (N=66) were patients with chronic back pain that were randomized to either an 8-week Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or a SC condition matched for contact frequency, format, and time. Participants completed validated measures of improvement in back pain disability, pain severity, and overall improvement.

Hip Surveillance for Children With Cerebral Palsy: A Survey of the POSNA Membership.

Background: Currently, hip surveillance programs for children with cerebral palsy exist in Europe, Australasia, and parts of Canada, but a neuromuscular hip surveillance program has yet to be adopted in the United States. The purpose of this study was to report the current orthopaedic practice of hip surveillance in children with cerebral palsy, identify areas of practice variation, and suggest steps moving forward to generate guidelines for national neuromuscular hip surveillance.

Methods: The entire membership of the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America (POSNA) was surveyed in 2016 for information regarding their practice for hip surveillance in children with cerebral palsy.

Spinal epidural hematoma following a thoracic epidural in a child with sickle cell disease.

Acute liver dysfunction in the perioperative period may increase the risk of epidural hematoma in a patient with a neuraxial catheter. Coagulation testing needs to be carefully monitored in these patients. An epidural hematoma should be ruled out urgently by CT or MRI in cases of a persistent motor block.

Factors associated with maintenance of body mass index in the Jackson Heart Study: A prospective cohort study secondary analysis.

The purpose of this study was to compare the relationship of diet quality, physical activity, and environmental factors with body mass index (BMI) maintenance in African American adults. We analyzed data from 4041 participants in the Jackson Heart Study, a prospective cohort study based in Jackson, Mississippi. Exposures were baseline American Heart Association diet quality score, American Heart Association physical activity categories, the built environment, the food environment, and neighborhood safety.

Clinical Practice Guideline for Management of Primary Aldosteronism: What is New in the 2016 Update?

Primary Aldosteronism is the single most common cause of secondary hypertension and is associated with increased target organ injury. The Endocrine Society has recently released the updated Clinical Practice Guideline for Primary Aldosteronism entitled "The Management of Primary Aldosteronism: Case Detection, Diagnosis, and Treatment: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline". We review the updated Clinical Practice Guideline, highlighting the new recommendations and the implications that they may have in clinical practice.

Magnesium Sulfate Prevents Placental Ischemia-Induced Increases in Brain Water Content and Cerebrospinal Fluid Cytokines in Pregnant Rats.

Magnesium sulfate (MgSO) is the most widely used therapy in the clinic to prevent the progression of preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy, to eclampsia. Eclampsia, manifested as unexplained seizures and/or coma during pregnancy or postpartum, accounts for ~13% of maternal deaths worldwide. While MgSO continues to be used in the clinic, the mechanisms by which it exerts its protective actions are not well understood.

Surface Proteins and Pneumolysin of Encapsulated and Nonencapsulated Streptococcus pneumoniae Mediate Virulence in a Chinchilla Model of Otitis Media.

Streptococcus pneumoniae infections result in a range of human diseases and are responsible for almost one million deaths annually. Pneumococcal disease is mediated in part through surface structures and an anti-phagocytic capsule. Recent studies have shown that nonencapsulated S.

Defining the Binding Region in Factor H to Develop a Therapeutic Factor H-Fc Fusion Protein against Non-Typeable Haemophilus influenzae.

Non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) cause a range of illnesses including otitis media, sinusitis, and exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, infections that contribute to the problem of antibiotic resistance and are themselves often intractable to standard antibiotic treatment regimens. We investigated a strategy to exploit binding of the complement inhibitor Factor H (FH) to NTHi as a functional target for an immunotherapeutic containing the NTHi binding domain of FH fused to the Fc domain of IgG1. Chimeric proteins containing the regions that most FH-binding bacteria use to engage human FH, domains 6 and 7 (FH6,7/Fc) and/or 18 through 20 (FH18-20/Fc), were evaluated for binding to NTHi.

Race, Social and Environmental Conditions, and Health Behaviors in Men.

Although understanding race differences in health behaviors among men is an important step in reducing disparities in leading causes of death in the United States, progress has been stifled when using national data because of the confounding of race, socioeconomic status, and residential segregation. The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of disparities in health behaviors among African American and white men in the Exploring Health Disparities in Integrated Communities Study-Southwest Baltimore, which was conducted in a racially integrated neighborhood of Baltimore to data from the 2003 National Health Interview Survey. After adjusting for age, marital status, insurance, income, educational attainment, poor or fair health, and obesity status, African American men in National Health Interview Survey had greater odds of being physically inactive (odds ratio [OR] = 1.

"If you do nothing about stress, the next thing you know, you're shattered": Perspectives on African American men's stress, coping and health from African American men and key women in their lives.

Stress has been implicated as a key contributor to poor health outcomes; however, few studies have examined how African American men and women explicitly describe the relationships among stress, coping, and African American men's health. In this paper, we explore strategies men use to cope with stress, and beliefs about the consequences of stress for African American men's health behaviors, morbidity and mortality from the perspectives of African American men and women. A phenomenological analytic approach was used to examine focus group data collected from 154 African American men (18 focus groups) and 77 African American women (8 focus groups).

Emotion regulation in disordered eating: Psychometric properties of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale among Spanish adults and its interrelations with personality and clinical severity.

Objective: The aims of the study were to (1) validate the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) in a sample of Spanish adults with and without eating disorders, and (2) explore the role of emotion regulation difficulties in eating disorders (ED), including its mediating role in the relation between key personality traits and ED severity.

Methods: One hundred and thirty four patients (121 female, mean age = 29 years) with anorexia nervosa (n = 30), bulimia nervosa (n = 54), binge eating (n = 20), or Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorders (n = 30) and 74 healthy control participants (51 female, mean age = 21 years) reported on general psychopathology, ED severity, personality traits and difficulties in emotion regulation. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the psychometrics of the DERS in this Spanish sample (Aim 1).

Association of Rare Loss-Of-Function Alleles in HAL, Serum Histidine: Levels and Incident Coronary Heart Disease.

Background: Histidine is a semiessential amino acid with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Few data are available on the associations between genetic variants, histidine levels, and incident coronary heart disease (CHD) in a population-based sample.

Methods And Results: By conducting whole exome sequencing on 1152 African Americans in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study and focusing on loss-of-function (LoF) variants, we identified 3 novel rare LoF variants in HAL, a gene that encodes histidine ammonia-lyase in the first step of histidine catabolism.

Environmental dependency of amphibian-ranavirus genotypic interactions: evolutionary perspectives on infectious diseases.

The context-dependent investigations of host-pathogen genotypic interactions, where environmental factors are explicitly incorporated, allow the assessment of both coevolutionary history and contemporary ecological influences. Such a functional explanatory framework is particularly valuable for describing mortality trends and identifying drivers of disease risk more accurately. Using two common North American frog species (Lithobates pipiens and Lithobates sylvaticus) and three strains of frog virus 3 (FV3) at different temperatures, we conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the influence of host species/genotype, ranavirus strains, temperature, and their interactions, in determining mortality and infection patterns.

Angiotensin II-induced endothelial dysfunction is temporally linked with increases in interleukin-6 and vascular macrophage accumulation.

Angiotensin II (Ang II) is associated with vascular hypertrophy, endothelial dysfunction and activation of a number of inflammatory molecules, however the linear events involved in the development of hypertension and endothelial dysfunction produced in response to Ang II are not well defined. The goal of this study was to examine the dose- and temporal-dependent development of endothelial dysfunction in response to Ang II. Blood pressure and responses of carotid arteries were examined in control (C57Bl/6) mice and in mice infused with 50, 100, 200, 400, or 1000 ng/kg/min Ang II for either 14 or 28 Days.

Maternally sequestered therapeutic polypeptides - a new approach for the management of preeclampsia.

The last several decades have seen intensive research into the molecular mechanisms underlying the symptoms of preeclampsia. While the underlying cause of preeclampsia is believed to be defective placental development and resulting placental ischemia, it is only recently that the links between the ischemic placenta and maternal symptomatic manifestation have been elucidated. Several different pathways have been implicated in the development of the disorder; most notably production of the anti-angiogenic protein sFlt-1, induction of auto-immunity and inflammation, and production of reactive oxygen species.

Monetary reward speeds up voluntary saccades.

Past studies have shown that reward contingency is critical for sensorimotor learning, and reward expectation speeds up saccades in animals. Whether monetary reward speeds up saccades in human remains unknown. Here we addressed this issue by employing a conditional saccade task, in which human subjects performed a series of non-reflexive, visually-guided horizontal saccades.

TH17- and IL-17- mediated autoantibodies and placental oxidative stress play a role in the pathophysiology of pre-eclampsia.

Pre-eclampsia is a multisystem disorder of pregnancy that affects 5-8% of pregnancies. The pathophysiologic mechanisms that lead to the development of pre-eclampsia are poorly understood. Higher than normal levels of circulating TH17 is observed in preeclamptic women compared to women with normal pregnancy.

Adenosine limits the therapeutic effectiveness of anti-CTLA4 mAb in a mouse melanoma model.

Combination therapies for melanoma that target immune-regulatory networks are entering clinical practice, and more are under investigation in preclinical or clinical studies. Adenosine plays a key role in regulating melanoma progression. We investigated the effectiveness of cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4) antibody (mAb) in combination with either modulators of adenosine receptors (AR) activation or an inhibitor of adenosine production in a murine model of melanoma.

Associations of adiponectin with individual European ancestry in African Americans: the Jackson Heart Study.

Background: Compared with European Americans, African Americans (AAs) exhibit lower levels of the cardio-metabolically protective adiponectin even after accounting for adiposity measures. Because few studies have examined in AA the association between adiponectin and genetic admixture, a dense panel of ancestry informative markers (AIMs) was used to estimate the individual proportions of European ancestry (PEA) for the AAs enrolled in a large community-based cohort, the Jackson Heart Study (JHS). We tested the hypothesis that plasma adiponectin and PEA are directly associated and assessed the interaction with a series of cardio-metabolic risk factors.

Feed-forward and feedback projections of midbrain reticular formation neurons in the cat.

Gaze changes involving the eyes and head are orchestrated by brainstem gaze centers found within the superior colliculus (SC), paramedian pontine reticular formation (PPRF), and medullary reticular formation (MdRF). The mesencephalic reticular formation (MRF) also plays a role in gaze. It receives a major input from the ipsilateral SC and contains cells that fire in relation to gaze changes.