Objective To develop a predictive tool capable of early identification of the risk of acute respiratory failure within 48 hours of hospital admission in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Method A retrospective cohort of 257 CAP patients (median age: 76.0 years, IQR: 68.0-84.0; 56.4% male) was analyzed, among whom 148 (57.6%) developed respiratory failure within […]

Background Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of acute lower respiratory infections worldwide, with high morbidity among infants and older adults. Recent approvals of long-acting monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and vaccines offer new prevention opportunities, but their impact in Asian settings remains uncertain. Methods We developed age-structured SEIR transmission models for Hong Kong, Beijing, […]

Walking, stopping and maintaining posture are essential motor behaviors, yet the underlying neural processes remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate neural activity behind locomotion and its walk-to-stop transition. Based on a new theory of the lumbar spinal cord(1, 2) we propose and predict that spinal population activity contains limit cycle dynamics to drive walking and […]

Background Living evidence syntheses (LES) represent continual updates for an important topic for decision-making where there is uncertainty in the evidence. Whereas best practices for traditional evidence syntheses in health care are well established, they are not for LES. This study aimed to establish globally relevant, agreed-upon standards for considering, conducting, publishing, and implementing LES […]

Importance: Women are consistently reported to experience steeper rates after an Alzheimers disease (AD) diagnosis. We tested if this could be due to a sex-specific cognitive reserve based in verbal memory. Objective: To determine whether the divergence in verbal memory trajectories from cognitively normal (CN) to AD varies by sex. Design: We employed a longitudinal […]

Background: Endoscopic sinus surgery (ESS) continues to be widely used as a treatment for refractory chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS). With advancements in technology and surgical technique, we might expect fewer surgical complications to occur in the modern era as compared to established rates that are often quoted in the literature and patient counseling. Methods: We queried […]

Astrocyte diversity is currently expanding both between and within specific brain regions. Here, we assessed the spatial distribution and transcriptomic profile of two hippocampal astrocyte subpopulations, defined by combinatorial expression of the cell surface astrocyte markers ACSA-1 or GLAST/SLC1A3, and ACSA-2 or ATP1B2. Fluorescence activated cell sorting and genome-wide transcriptomics by bulk RNAseq uncovered distinct […]

Animals can associate events with their outcomes, even if there is a long delay between the two. For example, in conditioned taste aversion, animals gain an aversion to a taste (the conditioned stimulus, CS) if sickness (an unconditioned stimulus, US) is induced up to 12 hours later. Established correlational plasticity mechanisms, operating on timescales of […]

Behavioural ecologists aim to understand the causes of animal social structure. Connecting theoretical models of social structure with empirical observations remains, however, a formidable challenge. While most of the current statistical methods for animal social network analysis rely on data that are aggregated over time and summarised as one behavioural dimension (e.g., an adjacency-matrix), common […]

Neuroscience-inspired neural networks bridge biology and technology, offering powerful tools to model brain function while enabling adaptive, efficient control in robotics. In this work, we present a neuroscience-inspired synaptic learning rule based on the synchronization of synaptic inputs to single excitatory neurons within a feedforward spiking neural network. The model consists of three excitatory layers […]