nhats

INTRODUCTION: Disparities in stroke outcomes, influenced by the use of systemic thrombolysis, endovascular therapies, and rehabilitation services, have been identified. Our study assesses these disparities in mortality after stroke between rural and urban areas across the United States (US). METHODS: We analyzed the CDC data on deaths attributed to cerebrovascular disease from 1999-2020. Data was categorized into rural and urban regions for comparative purposes...

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is associated with endothelial dysfunction, which results in delayed wound healing. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) play a vital role in supporting endothelial cells (EC) and promoting wound healing via paracrine effects through their secretome-containing extracellular vesicles. We previously reported the impaired wound healing ability of adipose tissue-derived MSC from T2DM donors; however, whether extracellular vesicles isolated from T2DM adipose tissue-derived MSC (dEV) exhibit altered functions in comparison to those derived from healthy donors (nEV) is still unclear...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: To assess prevalence of missed outpatient radiology appointments and sociodemographic factors associated with no-shows vs. cancellations. METHODS: Adults with outpatient radiology appointments in 2022 and January 2023 at a single tertiary academic health center were included. Generalized estimating equation regression was used to evaluate sociodemographic factors associated with missed vs. completed appointments, no-shows vs. cancellations and time interval between cancellations and appointments...

PURPOSE: Deep learning-based analysis of micro-ultrasound images to detect cancerous lesions is a promising tool for improving prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis. An ideal model should confidently identify cancer while responding with appropriate uncertainty when presented with out-of-distribution inputs that arise during deployment due to imaging artifacts and the biological heterogeneity of patients and prostatic tissue. METHODS: Using micro-ultrasound data from 693 patients across 5 clinical centers who underwent micro-ultrasound guided prostate biopsy, we train and evaluate convolutional neural network models for PCa detection...

The global threat of antibiotic resistance has increased the importance of the detection of antibiotics. Conventional methods to detect antibiotics are time-consuming and require expensive specialized equipment. Here, we present a simple and rapid biosensor for detecting ampicillin, a commonly used antibiotic. Our method is based on the fluorescent properties of chitosan-coated Mn-doped ZnS micromaterials combined with the β-lactamase enzyme. The biosensors exhibited the highest sensitivity in a linear working range of 13...

PURPOSE: To compare safety and efficacy of isolated and combined UV-light corneal crosslinking (CXL) and fine-needle diathermy (FND) to regress pathological corneal vessels in vivo. METHODS: Mice with inflamed and pathologically vascularized corneas received CXL or FND as monotherapy or a combination of both treatments. Corneal pathological blood and lymphatic vessels, immune cells and the morphology of anterior segment structures were evaluated. RESULTS: All three approaches were able to regress blood and lymphatic vessels in mice...

In this work, twenty-four stable dimers of RCHZ with R = H, F, Cl, Br, CH3 or NH2 and Z = O, S, Se or Te were determined. It was found that the stability of most dimers is primarily contributed by the electrostatic force, except for the dominant role of the induction term in those involving a Te atom, which has been rarely observed. Both electron-donating and -withdrawing groups in substituted formaldehyde cause an increase in the strength of nonconventional Csp2 -H⋯Z hydrogen bonds, as well as the dimers, in which the electron donating effect plays a more crucial role...

Leishmaniasis, an infectious disease caused by pathogenic Leishmania parasites, affects millions of people in developing countries, and its re-emergence in developed countries, particularly in Europe, poses a growing public health concern. The limitations of current treatments and the absence of effective vaccines necessitate the development of novel therapeutics. In this study, we focused on identifying small molecule inhibitors which prevents the interaction between peroxin 5 (PEX5) and peroxisomal targeting signal 1 (PTS1), pivotal for kinetoplastid parasite survival...

This study investigates the effect of GnRHa pretreatment on pregnancy outcomes in artificial endometrial preparation for frozen-thawed embryo transfer (AC-FET) cycles. A systematic review of English language studies published before 1 September 2022, was conducted, excluding conference papers and preprints. Forty-one studies involving 43,021 participants were analyzed using meta-analysis, with a sensitivity analysis ensuring result robustness. The study found that GnRHa pretreatment generally improved the clinical pregnancy rate (CPR), implantation rate (IR), and live birth rate (LBR)...

Youth with HIV (YWH) face challenges in achieving viral suppression, particularly in the Southern United States, and welcome novel interventions responsive to community needs. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) describes factors that influence behavior change, and the Positive Youth Development (PYD) supports youth-focused program design. We applied TPB and PYD to explore factors supporting care engagement and challenges for YWH in South Texas. We conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with YWH and 7 focus groups with 26 stakeholders informed by TPB, PYD, and themes from a youth advisory board (YAB)...

Various models have been established to culture whole follicles of the Preantral stage; however, the process remains inefficient and is an ongoing challenge formation. It is reported that oocyte-cumulus-granulosa complexes (OCGCs) isolated from Early Antral follicles (EAFs) undergo in vitro growth (IVG) and acquire meiotic competence in some animals. However, IVG for the oocyte-granulosa complexes (OGCs) from Preantral Follicles (PAFs) has not been firmly established. The present study indicated that the use of a modified medium with Ascorbic Acid (50 μM) facilitated granulosa cell proliferation, promoted cumulus cell differentiations, and increased antrum formation for the OGCs isolated from PAFs (0...

Endogenous tags have become invaluable tools to visualize and study native proteins in live cells. However, generating human cell lines carrying endogenous tags is difficult due to the low efficiency of homology-directed repair. Recently, an engineered split mNeonGreen protein was used to generate a large-scale endogenous tag library in HEK293 cells. Using split mNeonGreen for large-scale endogenous tagging in human iPSCs would open the door to studying protein function in healthy cells and across differentiated cell types...

BACKGROUND: The emotional impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on people with dementia has been quantified. However, little is known about the impact of change in home-care use owing to the pandemic. OBJECTIVE: To determine the longitudinal association between dementia, change in home-care use, and depressive symptoms during the pandemic. METHODS: We included data of 43,782 home-dwelling older adults from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), Study of health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS)...

Antioxidants play an important role in the prevention of oxidative stress and have been widely used in medicine and healthcare. However, natural antioxidants have several limitations such as low stability, difficult long-term storage, and high cost of large-scale production. Along with significant advances in nanotechnology, nanomaterials have emerged as a promising solution to improve the limitations of natural antioxidants because of their high stability, easy storage, time effectiveness, and low cost. Among various types of nanomaterials exhibiting antioxidant activity, metal-based nanoantioxidants show excellent reactivity because of the presence of an unpaired electron in their atomic structure...

Twelve compounds were isolated from Mussaenda saigonensis aerial parts through phytochemical analysis and the genus Mussaenda is the first place where the compounds 4-6 and 11-12 have been found. Based on the ability to inhibit NO production in RAW264.7 cells, compound 2 has demonstrated the strongest anti-inflammatory activity in vitro with an IC50 of 7.6 μM, as opposed to L-NMMA's IC50 of 41.3 μM. Compound 12 was found to be the most effective inhibitor of alpha-glucosidase enzyme in vitro , with an IC50 value of 42...

The synergy of long-range dependencies from transformers and local representations of image content from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has led to advanced architectures and increased performance for various medical image analysis tasks due to their complementary benefits. However, compared with CNNs, transformers require considerably more training data, due to a larger number of parameters and an absence of inductive bias. The need for increasingly large datasets continues to be problematic, particularly in the context of medical imaging, where both annotation efforts and data protection result in limited data availability...

PURPOSE: The standard of care for prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis is the histopathological analysis of tissue samples obtained via transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) guided biopsy. Models built with deep neural networks (DNNs) hold the potential for direct PCa detection from TRUS, which allows targeted biopsy and subsequently enhances outcomes. Yet, there are ongoing challenges with training robust models, stemming from issues such as noisy labels, out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and limited labeled data...

BACKGROUND: US-Mexico (US-MX) border regions are impacted by socioeconomic disadvantages. Alcohol use disorder remains widely prevalent in US-MX border regions, which may increase the risk of alcoholic liver disease (ALD). GOALS: We aimed to characterize ALD mortality trends in border regions compared to non-border regions from 1999 to 2020 in the United States (US). METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional analysis using the CDC repository...

BACKGROUND: Financial incentives in capitated Medicare Advantage (MA) plans may lead to inadequate rehabilitation. We therefore investigated if MA enrollees had worse long-term physical performance and functional outcomes after rehabilitation. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective cohort study of Medicare beneficiaries in the nationally representative National Health and Aging Trends Study. We compared MA and fee-for-service (FFS) beneficiaries reporting rehabilitation between 2014 and 2017 by change in (1) Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) and (2) NHATS-derived Functional Independence Measure (FIM) from the previous year, using t-tests incorporating inverse-probability weighting and complex survey design...

The depletion of reliable energy sources and the environmental and climatic repercussions of polluting energy sources have become global challenges. Hence, many countries have adopted various renewable energy sources including hydrogen. Hydrogen is a future energy carrier in the global energy system and has the potential to produce zero carbon emissions. For the non-fossil energy sources, hydrogen and electricity are considered the dominant energy carriers for providing end-user services, because they can satisfy most of the consumer requirements...