Questionnaires of self-perception poorly correlate with instability elicited by walking balance perturbations.

Rehabilitation to prevent falls should not only directly address intrinsic and extrinsic factors, but also the neuropsychology of falls to promote safe and independent mobility in our aging population. The purpose of this study was to determine the relation between falls self-efficacy and objective responses to a series of walking balance perturbations. 29 healthy younger adults and 28 older adults completed four experimental trials, including unperturbed walking and walking while responding to three perturbations: mediolateral optical flow, treadmill-induced slips, and lateral waist-pulls; and three self-reported questionnaires: Activity-specific Balance Confidence, Falls Efficacy Scale, and the Fear of Falling Questionnaire-Revised.

Major Publications in the Critical Care Pharmacotherapy Literature: 2023.

Objectives: We aimed to summarize the most significant and impactful publications describing the pharmacotherapeutic care of critically ill patients in 2023.

Data Sources: PubMed/MEDLINE and the Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology Pharmacotherapy Literature Update.

Study Selection: Randomized controlled trials and prospective studies of adult critically ill patients assessing a pharmacotherapeutic intervention and reporting clinical endpoints published between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, were eligible for inclusion in this article.

Glaucoma Severity Stage at First Visit at a University Eye Clinic in Congo.

Prcis: Initial presentation of glaucoma at a major eye clinic mostly features advanced disease with a high proportion of blindness. This is likely a microcosm of a nationwide issue requiring concerted strategies to detect glaucoma early.

Purpose: To characterize the severity stage of new glaucoma patients in Congolese attending a university eye clinic.

A Critical Assessment of COVID-19 Genomic Vaccines.

Vaccines are instrumental tools to fight against novel and re-emerging pathogens and curb pandemics. Vaccination has been an integral part of the multifaceted public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Diverse vaccine platforms have been designed and are currently at different stages of development.

Targeting Human Proteins for Antiviral Drug Discovery and Repurposing Efforts: A Focus on Protein Kinases.

Despite the great technological and medical advances in fighting viral diseases, new therapies for most of them are still lacking, and existing antivirals suffer from major limitations regarding drug resistance and a limited spectrum of activity. In fact, most approved antivirals are directly acting antiviral (DAA) drugs, which interfere with viral proteins and confer great selectivity towards their viral targets but suffer from resistance and limited spectrum. Nowadays, host-targeted antivirals (HTAs) are on the rise, in the drug discovery and development pipelines, in academia and in the pharmaceutical industry.

A Review of the Recent Advances in Alzheimer's Disease Research and the Utilization of Network Biology Approaches for Prioritizing Diagnostics and Therapeutics.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a polygenic multifactorial neurodegenerative disease that, after decades of research and development, is still without a cure. There are some symptomatic treatments to manage the psychological symptoms but none of these drugs can halt disease progression. Additionally, over the last few years, many anti-AD drugs failed in late stages of clinical trials and many hypotheses surfaced to explain these failures, including the lack of clear understanding of disease pathways and processes.

Unlocking the Potential of the Human Microbiome for Identifying Disease Diagnostic Biomarkers.

The human microbiome encodes more than three million genes, outnumbering human genes by more than 100 times, while microbial cells in the human microbiota outnumber human cells by 10 times. Thus, the human microbiota and related microbiome constitute a vast source for identifying disease biomarkers and therapeutic drug targets. Herein, we review the evidence backing the exploitation of the human microbiome for identifying diagnostic biomarkers for human disease.

Management of Major Injuries to the Bile Duct at a Hepatobiliary Specialty Referral Center.

Introduction: Aim is to evaluate geographical and demographic factors influencing management of bile duct injuries occurring during cholecystectomy in a tertiary hepato-pancreato-biliary center in Southeast US.

Methods: All referrals for biliary injuries during cholecystectomy, between Jan 2017 and December 2020 were included.

Results: 19 patients were identified with a median age of 59 (47-65), average BMI of 30.

Changing opportunities for liver transplant for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma.

Introduction: Aim was to study the early impact of acuity circle-based allocation implementation system on liver transplantation for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients.

Methods: We assessed characteristics of HCC and non-HCC deceased donor orthotopic liver transplants (OLT) in the year before (2/2019-2/2020) and after (3/2020-2/2021) introduction of the acuity circle policy using the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN)/United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database.

Results: Total OLTs reduced from 6699 in the preacuity circle era to 6660 in the postacuity circle era (-.

Shedding the Light on Post-Vaccine Myocarditis and Pericarditis in COVID-19 and Non-COVID-19 Vaccine Recipients.

Myocarditis and pericarditis have been linked recently to COVID-19 vaccines without exploring the underlying mechanisms, or compared to cardiac adverse events post-non-COVID-19 vaccines. We introduce an informatics approach to study post-vaccine adverse events on the systems biology level to aid the prioritization of effective preventive measures and mechanism-based pharmacotherapy by integrating the analysis of adverse event reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) with systems biology methods. Our results indicated that post-vaccine myocarditis and pericarditis were associated most frequently with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines followed by live or live-attenuated non-COVID-19 vaccines such as smallpox and anthrax vaccines.

Identification of Tumor-Specific MRI Biomarkers Using Machine Learning (ML).

The identification of reliable and non-invasive oncology biomarkers remains a main priority in healthcare. There are only a few biomarkers that have been approved as diagnostic for cancer. The most frequently used cancer biomarkers are derived from either biological materials or imaging data.