Bridging the Housing and Health Policy Divide: Lessons in Community Development from Memphis and Baltimore.

Governments and nonprofits routinely partner to launch place-based initiatives in distressed neighborhoods with the goal of stabilizing real estate markets, reclaiming vacant properties, abating public nuisances, and reducing crime. Public health impacts and outcomes are rarely the major policy drivers in the design and implementation of these neighborhood scale initiatives. In this article, we examine recent Health Impact Assessments in Baltimore, Maryland and Memphis, Tennessee to show how public health concepts, principles, and practices can be infused into existing and new programs and policies, and how public health programs can help to improve population health by addressing the upstream social determinants of health.

"Connected Access": Titrating the Right Dose of Access in the Digital Age.

The concept of access to health care has been dominated by the visit-based paradigm. However, with the advent of telehealth, wearables, and mobile applications, much of the information that is exchanged at the time of the provider encounter can be transmitted virtually. This calls for a reconceptualization of access that is not so heavily reliant on "the visit.

The Drug Overdose Epidemic and Deceased-Donor Transplantation in the United States: A National Registry Study.

Background: The epidemic of drug overdose deaths in the United States has led to an increase in organ donors.

Objective: To characterize donors who died of overdose and to analyze outcomes among transplant recipients.

Design: Prospective observational cohort study.

Fatigability, Exercise Intolerance, and Abnormal Skeletal Muscle Energetics in Heart Failure.

Background: Among central and peripheral factors contributing to exercise intolerance (EI) in heart failure (HF), the extent to which skeletal muscle (SM) energy metabolic abnormalities occur and contribute to EI and increased fatigability in HF patients with reduced or preserved ejection fraction (HFrEF and HFpEF, respectively) are not known. An energetic plantar flexion exercise fatigability test and magnetic resonance spectroscopy were used to probe the mechanistic in vivo relationships among SM high-energy phosphate concentrations, mitochondrial function, and EI in HFrEF and HFpEF patients and in healthy controls.

Methods And Results: Resting SM high-energy phosphate concentrations and ATP flux rates were normal in HFrEF and HFpEF patients.

Antipneumolysin antibody titers in HIV-seropositive injection drug users before and after pneumococcal bacteremia.

Lower baseline antipneumolysin antibody (alpha-PLY) levels have been found in populations with a higher incidence of pneumococcal infections. To determine whether predisease alpha-PLY titer is associated with invasive pneumococcal disease in HIV-seropositive injection drug users (IDU), we utilized a prospective cohort of IDU in Baltimore to compare alpha-PLY titers before bacteremia in 28 HIV- seropositive IDU cases with alpha-PLY titers in 56 matched (CD4 and seroconversion date) HIV-seropositive IDU control subjects and 28 matched (calendar time) HIV-seronegative IDU control subjects remaining free of pneumococcal disease. We also compared the postinfection fold-rise of alpha-PLY titers in cases relative to the change in alpha-PLY titers in control subjects during the same interval; alpha-PLY titers were measured using quantitative ELISA, and functional activity was assessed using antihemolysin assays.