Associations between common genetic variants and income provide insights about the socio-economic health gradient.

We conducted a genome-wide association study on income among individuals of European descent (N = 668,288) to investigate the relationship between socio-economic status and health disparities. We identified 162 genomic loci associated with a common genetic factor underlying various income measures, all with small effect sizes (the Income Factor). Our polygenic index captures 1-5% of income variance, with only one fourth due to direct genetic effects.

Activation of Wnt/β-catenin in neural progenitor cells regulates blood-brain barrier development and promotes neuroinflammation.

The central nervous system (CNS) requires specialized blood vessels to support neural function within specific microenvironments. During neurovascular development, endothelial Wnt/β-catenin signaling is required for BBB development within the brain parenchyma, whereas fenestrated blood vessels that lack BBB properties do not require Wnt/β-catenin signaling. Here, we used zebrafish to further characterize this phenotypic heterogeneity of the CNS vasculature.

Interleukin-17: A pleiotropic cytokine implicated in inflammatory, infectious, and malignant disorders.

IL-17A, referred to as IL-17, is the founding member of a family of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-17B, IL-17C, IL-17D, IL-17E (or IL-25), and IL-17F, which act via receptors IL-17RA to IL-17RE, and elicit potent cellular responses that impact diverse diseases. IL-17's interactions with various cytokines include forming a heterodimer with IL-17F and being stimulated by IL-23's activation of Th17 cells, which can lead to inflammation and autoimmunity. IL-17 is implicated in infectious diseases and inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, promoting neutrophil recruitment and anti-bacterial immunity, but potentially exacerbating fungal and viral infections, revealing its dual role as protective and pathologic.

Sexual identity, sexual behavior, and drug use behaviors among people who use drugs in the rural U.S.

Introduction: People who use drugs (PWUD) are at risk of HIV infection, but the frequency and distribution of transmission-associated behaviors within rural communities is not well understood. Further, while interventions designed to more explicitly affirm individuals' sexual orientation and behaviors may be more effective, descriptions of behavior variability by orientation are lacking. We sought to describe how disease transmission behaviors and overdose risk vary by sexual orientation and activity among rural PWUD.

Tactical Behaviors in Men's and Women's Middle-Distance Global Championship Track Finals.

Purpose: To analyze tactical behaviors associated with performance in track middle-distance global championship finals.

Methods: Finalists' season-best finishing race time, 100-m section times, and intermediate positions were obtained from 800- and 1500-m men's and women's finals in 2 Olympic Games and 5 World Championships. Differences between medalists, fourth- to eighth-ranked (T8), and ninth- to 12th/13th-ranked finalists in relative performance (relative to season-best), race time, and section times were determined.

Assessing Readability of Patient Education Materials on Adult-Acquired Buried Penis.

Introduction: Adult-acquired buried penis (AABP) is an increasingly prevalent condition characterized by the penis "buried" in prepubic/suprapubic tissue. AABP affects urinary and sexual function, hygiene, and psychosocial well-being. Because many affected individuals are unfamiliar with the condition or hesitant to seek medical help, accessible, high-quality patient education materials (PEMs) are necessary.

A Sneaky Culprit: Secondary Infectious Keratitis Due to Brevundimonas diminuta.

Purpose: To describe a rare case of infectious keratitis secondary to Brevundimonas diminuta, a gram-negative bacillus with fluoroquinolone resistance and rare clinical isolation.

Methods: A 50-year-old man with contact lens overuse presented with a large corneal ulcer and hand motion visual acuity. Initial treatment with fortified topical tobramycin and vancomycin yielded slow improvement, and initial culture grew Staphylococcus epidermidis, Staphylococcus hominis, and Corynebacterium bovis.

Multidimensional scaling improves distance-based clustering for microbiome data.

Motivation: Clustering patients into subgroups based on their microbial compositions can greatly enhance our understanding of the role of microbes in human health and disease etiology. Distance-based clustering methods, such as partitioning around medoids (PAM), are popular due to their computational efficiency and absence of distributional assumptions. However, the performance of these methods can be suboptimal when true cluster memberships are driven by differences in the abundance of only a few microbes, a situation known as the sparse signal scenario.

International Urogynecology Consultation Chapter 3 Committee 1 - Pessary Management.

Introduction And Hypothesis: This manuscript is part of the International Urogynecological Consultation (IUC) on Pelvic Organ Prolapse (POP), Chapter 3, Committee 1 focusing on pessary management of POP.

Methods: A narrative review was conducted by an international, multi-disciplinary group of clinicians working in the field of pelvic health following a search of the literature using the MeSH terms "pelvic organ prolapse" OR "urogenital prolapse" OR "vaginal prolapse" OR "uterovaginal prolapse" AND "pessary" OR "support device" OR "intravaginal device." Relevant studies, as determined after review using the Covidence manuscript review platform, were included.

Fear conditioning modulates the intrinsic excitability of ventral hippocampal CA1 neurons in male rats.

The hippocampus has a known role in learning and memory, with the ventral subregion supporting many learning tasks involving affective responding, including fear conditioning. Altered neuronal intrinsic excitability reflects experience-dependent plasticity that supports learning-related behavioral changes. Such changes have previously been observed in the dorsal hippocampus following fear conditioning, but little work has examined the effect of fear conditioning on ventral hippocampal intrinsic plasticity.

Measurement of multidifferential cross sections for dijet production in proton-proton collisions at .

A measurement of the dijet production cross section is reported based on proton-proton collision data collected in 2016 at by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of up to 36.3 . Jets are reconstructed with the anti- algorithm for distance parameters of and 0.

Nurse Perspectives on Labor Union Participation Prior to Implementation of a Collective Bargaining Agreement: A Qualitative Study.

Patient advocacy is a duty for professional nurses; however, not all nurses are empowered to advocate for meeting patients' needs. Participation in labor unions may serve as a venue for nurses with limited institutional decision-making authority to advocate for patient needs; however, unionization can be a time-intensive and fraught process. This study examined how nurses participating in a new union in an urban United States hospital described their reasons for participating in a labor union during collective bargaining.

Urban sensing in the era of large language models.

Urban sensing has become increasingly important as cities evolve into the centers of human activities. Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for urban sensing based on commonsense and worldview that emerged through their language-centric framework. This paper illustrates the transformative impact of LLMs, particularly in the potential of advancing next-generation urban sensing for exploring urban mechanisms.

The fungal microbiota modulate neonatal oxygen-induced lung injury.

Background: The immature lungs of very preterm infants are exposed to supraphysiologic oxygen, contributing to bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a chronic lung disease that is the most common morbidity of prematurity. While the microbiota significantly influences neonatal health, the relationship between the intestinal microbiome, particularly micro-eukaryotic members such as fungi and yeast, and lung injury severity in newborns remains unknown.

Results: Here, we show that the fungal microbiota modulates hyperoxia-induced lung injury severity in very low birth weight premature infants and preclinical pseudohumanized and altered fungal colonization mouse models.

Assessing online chat-based artificial intelligence models for weight loss recommendation appropriateness and bias in the presence of guideline incongruence.

Background And Aim: Managing obesity requires a comprehensive approach that involves therapeutic lifestyle changes, medications, or metabolic surgery. Many patients seek health information from online sources and artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot before consulting health professionals. This study aims to evaluate the appropriateness of the responses of Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to questions on pharmacologic and surgical management of obesity and assess for bias in their responses to either the ADA or AACE guidelines.

Rethinking the residual approach: leveraging statistical learning to operationalize cognitive resilience in Alzheimer's disease.

Cognitive resilience (CR) describes the phenomenon of individuals evading cognitive decline despite prominent Alzheimer's disease neuropathology. Operationalization and measurement of this latent construct is non-trivial as it cannot be directly observed. The residual approach has been widely applied to estimate CR, where the degree of resilience is estimated through a linear model's residuals.

Promoting Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Medical and Scientific Writing and Publishing of Research: A Statement from the Inaugural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Advocacy Team of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM) has a long-standing history of publishing manuscripts focused on health equity and is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in scientific writing and publishing. This is extremely important in the current climate where false narratives and attacks on DEI and health equity are rampant. To demonstrate their commitment to DEI and health equity, the JGIM Editors-in-Chief created an inaugural DEI Advocacy Team.

How childhood adversity affects components of decision making.

Extreme and chronic adverse experiences in childhood are linked to disruptions in a wide range of behavioral processes, including self-regulation, increased risk taking, and impulsivity. One proposed mechanism for these effects is alterations in how children learn and use information about rewards and risk in their environment. This type of decision making is a complex and multifaceted process consisting of distinct subcomponents, each of which may have varying effects on behavior.

The Potential of Spinal Cord Stimulation in Treating Spinal Cord Injury.

Purpose Of The Review: In the United States, spinal cord injuries affect approximately 18,000 individuals annually, most commonly resulting from mechanical trauma. The consequent paraplegia severely impairs motor functions, creating an urgent need for innovative therapeutic strategies that extend beyond traditional rehabilitation and pharmacotherapy. This review assesses the effectiveness of Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS) in improving motor function in patients with spinal cord injuries, with a particular focus on paraplegia.

DNA methylation dynamics in the small intestine of egg-selected laying hens along egg production stages.

Decades of artificial selection have markedly enhanced egg production efficiency, yet the epigenetic underpinnings, notably DNA methylation dynamics in the gut, remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigate how breeds and developmental stages influence DNA methylation profiles in laying hens, and their potential relationship to laying performance and gut health. We compared two highly selected laying hen strains, Lohmann Brown-Classic (LB) and Lohmann LSL-Classic (LSL), which exhibited similar egg production but divergent physiological, metabolic, and immunological characteristics.

Accuracy and variability in clinical predictions of speech recognition outcomes for cochlear implant users.

Objectives: An improvement in speech perception is a major well-documented benefit of cochlear implantation (CI), which is commonly discussed with CI candidates to set expectations. However, a large variability exists in speech perception outcomes. We evaluated the accuracy of clinical predictions of post-CI speech perception scores.

Use of digital image analysis to improve rigor and efficiency of physeal bone growth measurements.

In larger, translational animal models, manual measurements of longitudinal bone growth using fluorochrome labels is tedious and may be prone to less rigor due to variations in reader experience, sampling differences, and photobleaching that limits the repeatability of measurements. This study assesses the reliability of three different digital methods to assist in measurement of distance between pulsed fluorochrome labels. Forty-five tibial physes from skeletally immature New Zealand White rabbits were pulsed with fluorochrome labels and measured using Fully Manual Technique (FMT), Manual Digital Measurement (MDM), Computer Assisted Image Processing (AIP), and Fully Automated Measurement (FAM).