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Percutaneous cannulation with regard to cardiopulmonary avoid inside robot mitral valve surgical procedure together with absolutely no genitals problems.
Respondent-driven sampling has been an effective sampling strategy for HIV research in many settings, but has had limited success among some youth in the United States. We evaluated a modified RDS approach for sampling Black and Latinx sexual and gender minority youth (BLSGMY) and evaluates how lived experiences and social contexts of BLSGMY youth may impact traditional RDS assumptions.

RDS was implemented in three cities to engage BLSGMY in HIV prevention or care intervention trials. RDS was modified to include targeted seed recruitment from venues, internet, and health clinics, and provided options for electronic or paper coupons. Qualitative interviews were conducted among a sub-sample of RDS participants to explore their experiences with RDS. Interviews were coded using RDS assumptions as an analytic framework.

Between August 2017 and October 2019, 405 participants were enrolled, 1,670 coupons were distributed, with 133 returned, yielding a 0.079 return rate. #link# The maximum recruitment depth was 4 wavecluding those that incorporate social media, may support recruitment for community-based research but may challenge assumptions of reciprocal relationships. Research hesitancy and situational barriers must be addressed in recruitment and study designs.Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading cause of death worldwide. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over 80 loci that are associated with COPD and emphysema, however for most of these loci the causal variant and gene are unknown. Here, we utilize lung splice quantitative trait loci (sQTL) data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) and short read sequencing data from the Lung Tissue Research Consortium (LTRC) to characterize a locus in nephronectin ( NPNT ) associated with COPD case-control status and lung function. We found that the rs34712979 variant is associated with alternative splice junction use in NPNT , specifically for the junction connecting the 2nd and 4th exons (chr4105898001-105927336) (p=4.02×10 -38 ). This association colocalized with GWAS data for COPD and lung spirometry measures with a posterior probability of 94%, indicating that the same causal genetic variants in NPNT underlie the associations with COPD risk, spirometric measures of lung function, and splicing. Investigation of NPNT short read sequencing revealed that rs34712979 creates a cryptic splice acceptor site which results in the inclusion of a 3 nucleotide exon extension, coding for a serine residue near the N-terminus of the protein. Using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) long read sequencing we identified 13 NPNT isoforms, 6 of which are predicted to be protein coding. Two of these are full length isoforms which differ only in the 3 nucleotide exon extension whose occurrence differs by genotype. Overall, our data indicate that rs34712979 modulates COPD risk and lung function by creating a novel splice acceptor which results in the inclusion of a 3 nucelotide sequence coding for a serine in the nephronectin protein sequence. Our findings implicate NPNT splicing in contributing to COPD risk, and identify a novel serine insertion in the nephronectin protein that warrants further study.
To characterize GW441756 in blood biomarkers, leukocyte composition, and gene expression following laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG).

LSG is an effective treatment for obesity, leading to sustainable weight loss and improvements in obesity-related co-morbidities and inflammatory profiles. However, the effects of LSG on immune function and metabolism remain uncertain.

Prospective data was collected from 23 enrolled human subjects from a single institution. Parameters of weight, co-morbidities, and trends in blood biomarkers and leukocyte subsets were observed from pre-operative baseline to one year in three-month follow-up intervals. RNA-sequencing was performed on pairs of whole blood samples from the first six subjects of the study (baseline and three months post-surgery) to identify genome-wide gene expression changes associated with undergoing LSG.

LSG led to a significant decrease in mean total body weight loss (18.1%) at three months and among diabetic subjects a reduction in HbA1c. Improvements in clinical inflammatory and hormonal biomarkers were demonstrated as early as three months after LSG. A reduction in neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio was observed, driven by a reduction in absolute neutrophil counts. Gene set enrichment analyses of differential whole blood gene expression demonstrated that after three months, LSG induced transcriptomic changes not only in inflammatory cytokine pathways but also in several key metabolic pathways related to energy metabolism.

LSG induces significant changes in the composition and metabolism of immune cells as early as three months post-operatively. Further evaluation is required of bariatric surgery's effects on immunometabolism and consequences for host defense and metabolic disease.
LSG induces significant changes in the composition and metabolism of immune cells as early as three months post-operatively. Further evaluation is required of bariatric surgery's effects on immunometabolism and consequences for host defense and metabolic disease.Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP) is an autosomal dominant disorder caused by mutation of the APC gene presenting with numerous colorectal adenomatous polyps and a near 100% risk of colon cancer. Preliminary research findings from our group indicate that FAP patients experience significant deficits across many cognitive domains. In the current study, fMRI brain metrics in a FAP population and matched controls were used to further the mechanistic understanding of reported cognitive deficits. This research identified and characterized any possible differences in resting brain networks and associations between neural network changes and cognition from 34 participants (18 FAP patients, 16 healthy controls). Functional connectivity analysis was performed using FSL with independent component analysis (ICA) to identify functional networks. Significant differences between cases and controls were observed in 8 well-established resting state networks. With the addition of an aggregate cognitive measure as a covariate, these differences were virtually non-existent, indicating a strong correlation between cognition and brain activity at the network level. link2 The data indicate robust and pervasive effects on functional neural network activity among FAP patients and these effects are likely involved in cognitive deficits associated with this disease.As economic woes of the COVID-19 pandemic deepen, strategies are being formulated to avoid the need for prolonged stay-at-home orders, while implementing risk-based quarantine, testing, contact tracing and surveillance protocols. link3 Given limited resources and the significant economic, public health and operational challenges of the current 14-day quarantine recommendation, it is vital to understand if more efficient but equally effective quarantine and testing strategies can be deployed. To this end, we developed a mathematical model to quantify the probability of post-quarantine transmission that varied across a range of possible quarantine durations, timings of molecular testing, and estimated incubation periods. We found that a 13-day quarantine with testing on entry, a nine-day quarantine with testing on exit, and an eight-day quarantine with testing on both entry and exit each provide equivalent or lower probability of post-quarantine transmission compared to a 14-day quarantine with no testing. We found tquarantine and timing of testing that can minimize economic impacts, disruptions to operational integrity, and COVID-related public health risks.We implemented an automated analysis of lexical aspects of semi-structured speech produced by healthy elderly controls (n=37) and three patient groups with frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) behavioral variant FTD (n=74), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA, n=42), and nonfluent/agrammatic PPA (naPPA, n=22). Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that the three patient groups and controls would differ in the counts of part-of-speech (POS) categories and several lexical measures. With a natural language processing program, we automatically tagged POS categories of all words produced during a picture description task. We further counted the number of wh -words, and we rated nouns for abstractness, ambiguity, frequency, familiarity, and age of acquisition. We also computed the cross-entropy estimation, which is a measure of word predictability, and lexical diversity for each description. We validated a subset of the POS data that were automatically tagged with the Google Universal POS scheme alyzing FTD patients' speech.COVID-19 has highlighted social and health injustices in the US. Structural inequalities have increased the likelihood of immigrants contracting COVID-19, by being essential workers and through poverty that forces this population to continue working. Rural and urban immigrant families may face different concerns. Using a telephone survey in May 2020 of 105 Latinx families in an existing study, quantitative and qualitative data were gathered on work and household economics, childcare and education, healthcare, and community climate. Analyses show that, although rural and urban groups experienced substantial economic effects, impacts were more acute for urban families. Rural workers reported fewer workplace protective measures for COVID-19. For both groups, fear and worry, particularly about finances and children, dominated reports of their situations with numerous reports of experiencing stress and anxiety. The experience of the pandemic is interpreted as an example of contextual vulnerability of a population already experiencing structural violence through social injustice.This study presents a natural language processing (NLP) tool to extract quantitative smoking information (e.g., Pack-Year, Quit Year, Smoking Year, and Pack per Day) from clinical notes and standardized them into Pack-Year unit. We annotated a corpus of 200 clinical notes from patients who had low-dose CT imaging procedures for lung cancer screening and developed an NLP system using a two-layer rule-engine structure. We divided the 200 notes into a training set and a test set and developed the NLP system only using the training set. The experimental results on the test set showed that our NLP system achieved the best F1 scores of 0.963 and 0.946 for lenient and strict evaluation, respectively.
Accepted as a presentation at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI) Workshop on Health Natural Language Processing (HealthNLP 2020). https//ohnlp.github.io/HealthNLP2020/healthnlp2020# .
Accepted as a presentation at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI) Workshop on Health Natural Language Processing (HealthNLP 2020). https//ohnlp.github.io/HealthNLP2020/healthnlp2020# .
Early deficiencies in testing capacity contributed to poor control of transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In the context of marked improvement in SARS-CoV-2 testing infrastructure, we sought to examine the alignment of testing with epidemic intensity to mitigate subsequent waves of COVID-19 in Massachusetts.

We compiled publicly available weekly SARS-CoV-2 molecular testing data for period (May 27 to October 14, 2020) following the initial COVID-19 wave. We defined testing intensity as weekly SARS-CoV-2 tests performed per 100,000 population and used weekly test positivity (percent of tests positive) as a measure of epidemic intensity. We considered optimal alignment of testing resources to be matching community ranks of testing and positivity. In communities with a lower rank of testing than positivity in a given week, the testing gap was calculated as the additional tests required to achieve matching ranks. Multivariable Poisson modeling was utilized to assess for trends and association with community characteristics.
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