medical biology

BACKGROUND: Population-based studies for patients with fistulizing Crohn disease (CD), a severe complication of CD, are limited. OBJECTIVE: To report estimates of the prevalence and incidence rates of fistulizing CD in the United States and examine associated treatment patterns among incident cases. METHODS: This retrospective, observational cohort study used a US administrative claims database from January 1, 2016, to December 31, 2019, with at least 365 days' continuous insurance enrollment...

Immunotherapy has emerged as a promising approach to cancer treatment, offering improved survival rates and enhanced patients' quality of life. However, realizing the full potential of immunotherapy in clinical practice remains a challenge, as there is still plenty of room for modulating the complexity of the human immune system in favor of an antitumor immunogenicity. Nanotechnology, with its unique properties, holds promise in augmenting the efficacy of cancer immunotherapies in biotherapeutic protection and site- and time-controlled delivery of the immune modulator biologicals...

It is estimated that cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. The primary or secondary cause of cancer-related mortality for women is breast cancer. The main treatment method for different types of cancer is chemotherapy with drugs. Because of less water solubility of chemotherapy drugs or their inability to pass through membranes, their body absorbs them inadequately, which lowers the treatment's effectiveness. Drug specificity and pharmacokinetics can be changed by nanotechnology using nanoparticles...

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a debilitating chronic skin disorder characterized by painful inflammatory nodules, abscesses and sinus tracts involving intertriginous areas and has an adverse impact on patient quality of life. Over the past decade, the therapeutic options of HS have increased significantly to comprise multiple modalities, including topical medication, systemic therapies (mainly antibiotics, retinoids, and biologics), surgical approaches, and lifestyle modifications. Biologics alone or in combination with surgery remain the treatment of choice for moderate to severe disease...

In the United States, lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) encompassing around 85% of total lung cancer cases. Late-stage patients with metastatic disease have worsening prognosis, highlighting the importance of longitudinal disease monitoring. Liquid biopsy (LBx) represents a way for physicians to non-invasively track tumor analytes, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and understand tumor progression in real-time through analyzing longitudinal blood samples...

Surface electromyography (sEMG) signal is a kind of physiological signal reflecting muscle activity and muscle force. At present, the existing methods of recognizing human motion intention need more than two sensors to recognize more than two kinds of movements, the sensor pasting positions are special, and the hardware conditions for execution are high. In this work, a real-time motion intention recognition method based on Morse code is proposed and applied to the mechanical hand. The short-time and long-term muscle contraction signals collected by a single sEMG sensor were extracted and encoded with the Morse code method, and then the developed mapping method from Morse code to six hand movements were used to recognize hand movements...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are derived from the central nervous system and inherently difficult to camouflage, leading to the recent popularity of EEG-based emotion recognition. However, due to the non-stationary nature of EEG, inter-subject variabilities become obstacles for recognition models to well adapt to different subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called semi-supervised bipartite graph construction with active EEG sample selection (SBGASS) for cross-subject emotion recognition, which offers two significant advantages...

Neurodegenerative diseases often exhibit a strong link with sleep disruption, highlighting the importance of effective sleep stage monitoring. In this light, automatic sleep stage classification (ASSC) plays a pivotal role, now more streamlined than ever due to the advancements in deep learning (DL). However, the opaque nature of DL models can be a barrier in their clinical adoption, due to trust concerns among medical practitioners. To bridge this gap, we introduce SleepBoost, a transparent multi-level tree-based ensemble model specifically designed for ASSC...

Narrative structures, though invisible to the naked eye, guide our understanding of pandemics. Like curves and graphs, we can plot them, identify their patterns and organizing principles. These structures act upon our understanding of social and biological events just as much as the rhythms of viral replication and mutation. They order not only themselves but also social and health outcomes. This essay uses narrative precision to expand beyond Charles Rosenberg's influential dramaturgic model and develops new pandemic forms, scaled from the level of an individual line break to the multi-part series: Arc, a form of sequence...

BACKGROUND: The understanding of the pathophysiology of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has taken a major step forward with the research of new illness-related genes and further deciphering the involved molecular. Gene variants like human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DRB1 and PTPN22 1858T act as individual risk factors for RA. It also serves as a risk factor for the rate of progression of joint destruction and clinical manifestations in autoimmune diseases like RA. The focus of this study is to find out the association of chromosomal region 1q21-23 with RA and its connection with disease severity using the disease activity score (DAS) and distribution frequency of the prevalent alleles of such genes in an already recruited group of patients/controls of India, specifically Northwest Rajasthan...

AIMS: Electronic health records (EHR) linked to Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), biological specimens, and deep learning (DL) algorithms could potentially improve patient care through automated case detection and surveillance. We hypothesized that by applying keyword searches to routinely stored EHR, in conjunction with AI-powered automated reading of DICOM echocardiography images and analysing biomarkers from routinely stored plasma samples, we were able to identify heart failure (HF) patients...

BACKGROUND: The relative intensity of a physical activity (PA) can be estimated as the percent of one's maximal effort required. METHODS: We compared associations of relative and absolute intensity PA with incident major cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality in 5,633 women from the Objective Physical Activity and Cardiovascular Health Study (mean age 78.5±6.7). Absolute intensity was measured by accelerometry. Relative intensity was estimated by dividing accelerometer-estimated metabolic equivalents (METs) by maximal MET capacity...

BACKGROUND: Cardiometabolic risk (CMR) is associated with cognitive health, but the association can be affected by broader social, economic, and medical contexts. The US and China have very different developmental and epidemiological histories, and thus CMR among older people could be linked to cognitive function differently in the two countries. METHODS: Cross-sectional and longitudinal OLS regression models were estimated for each country using nationally representative samples of populations over age 50: 7,430/4,474 Americans and 6,108/3,655 Chinese in the cross-sectional/longitudinal samples...

INTRODUCTION: The main mission of the Australian and New Zealand Children's Haematology and Oncology Group (ANZCHOG) is to develop and facilitate local access to the world's leading evidence-based clinical trials for all paediatric cancers, including brain tumours, as soon as practically possible. Diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPGs) - a subset of a larger group of tumours now termed diffuse midline glioma, H3K27-altered (DMG) - are paediatric brain cancers with less than 10% survival at two years...

Saccharides and biocompounds as saccharide (sugar) complexes have various roles and biological functions in living organisms due to modifications via nucleophilic substitution, polymerization, and complex formation reactions. Mostly, mono-, di-, oligo-, and polysaccharides are stabilized to inactive glycosides, which are formed in metabolic pathways. Natural saccharides are important in food and environmental monitoring. Glycosides with various functionalities are significant in clinical and medical research...

Tumor resectability, which is increasingly determined based on preoperative chemotherapy, is critical in determining the best treatment for pancreatic cancers. The present study evaluated the usefulness of serum carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9) and the preoperative 8F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography standardized uptake value (SUV) percentage change (SUVmax%=[(SUVmax2-SUVmax1)/SUVmax1] ×100, where SUVmax1 and SUVmax2 represent the initial and delayed phases, respectively) as biological factors indicative of tumor resectability...

OBJECTIVES: To determine risk factors for the occurrence of adverse outcomes in patients with new-onset refractory status epilepsy (NORSE) and to construct a concomitant nomogram. METHODS: Seventy-six adult patients with NORSE who were admitted to the Department of Neurology, First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University between January 2016 and December 2022 were enrolled for the study. Participants were divided into two-those with good and poor functional outcomes-and their pertinent data was obtained from the hospital medical recording system...

AIM: To investigate how structural empowerment and power may contribute to and predict the reduction of medical errors. BACKGROUND: Medical errors threaten patient well-being, leading to adverse outcomes. Improving work conditions holds promise for reducing medical errors among nurses. METHODS: A multisite correlational cross-sectional design was utilized. Data were completed by 375 nurses from four hospitals in Jordan. Data collection occurred between September and November 2023 using sociodemographic, structural empowerment, and medical error questionnaires...

Introduction: It may take decades to develop cardiovascular dysfunction following exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation from medical therapy or from nuclear accidents. Since astronauts may be exposed continually to a complex space radiation environment unlike that experienced on Earth, it is unresolved whether there is a risk to cardiovascular health during long-term space exploration missions. Previously, we have described that mice exposed to a single dose of simplified Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR5-ion ) develop cardiovascular dysfunction by 12 months post-radiation...

BACKGROUND: Chronic inflammatory skin diseases (CISDs) are among the most common diseases in the Western world. Current estimates of medical care for CISDs are primarily based on surveys among patients in medical care facilities and on health insurance data. AIM: Survey-based examination to what extent CISD patients in health-aware environment consider their skin disease to be controlled. METHODS: The survey of CISD patients was carried out in 2022 among the employees of a pharmaceutical company located in Germany and Switzerland...