BACKGROUND: Sotalol loading intravenously enables achieving blood levels of sotalol that are observed at maximal steady-state concentration (Cmax ss) in one-day permitting the measurement of maximum QTc effects. Rapid evaluation of the QTc effects permits determination of arrhythmic risk and thus permits discharge in 24-hours instead of the usual three-day oral load hospitalization. Given the […]

Many diseases begin developing years before symptoms appear1-3, yet biospecimens from these early stages are rarely available. We developed Chronos, a framework that uses privacy-preserving tokenization4 to link archived plasma samples with longitudinal clinical records, enabling the modeling of molecular trajectories across time. Starting with >100 million archived, routine-donation samples from 3 million plasma donors, […]

Vaccine-acquired immunity plays an important role in controlling the spread of many infectious diseases; however, vaccine efficacy can diminish over time. This work uses a mathematical model to study the effects of waning vaccination-acquired immunity on infection incidence. With an SEIR-type compartmental model that considers both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations (and their mixing), we present […]

Differences in looking to and processing of audiovisual speech have been theorized to contribute to heterogeneity in language ability in autistic children. Differential audiovisual speech processing has been indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically via amplitude suppression in response to audiovisual versus auditory-only speech, and linked with vocabulary in school aged children. This study used […]

Background and Objectives Bariatric surgery is a highly effective obesity treatment, yet it may predispose individuals to alcohol-related liver injury. While altered ethanol metabolism following procedures like Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) is well described, the long-term hepatic consequences, particularly the risk of portal hypertension in patients who develop alcohol-related hepatitis (AH,) remain poorly defined. Methods […]

Preclinical evidence indicates that cocaine exerts acute and chronic effects on astrocyte functioning, which in turn modulate cocaine-related impacts on neural integrity and brain function. However, human evidence for astrocytic involvement in cocaine users (CU) remains limited. Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is a marker of astrocyte activation with promising clinical utility in neurological conditions, […]

Mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR) endometrial tumors are often responsive to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), yet recurrence and variable treatment responses remain significant clinical challenges. Characterization of the tumor microenvironment, including immune cell composition and spatial organization, may reveal predictors of recurrence and ICI responsiveness. We performed multiplex immunofluorescence imaging on 16 dMMR endometrial tumors using a […]

Immune checkpoint blockade can produce long-lasting responses in patients with metastatic melanoma; notably, combined CTLA-4/PD-1 blockade has been associated with approximately 52% melanoma specific 10-year survival. Yet, nearly half of patients experience minimal clinical benefit, and intensified regimens come with substantial risk of severe immune-related toxicity. The precise determinants of immunotherapy response are incompletely defined, […]

Given emerging evidence on the waning of immunity from typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCV), the World Health Organization (WHO) commissioned a multi-model comparison to determine the optimal schedule in terms of health and economic impact to inform updated recommendations for TCV use across different settings. To identify optimal vaccination strategies across different incidence settings and vaccine […]

In recent years, researchers have paid increasing attention on potential associations between respiratory and ocular diseases. To examine whether asthma is independently associated with macular degeneration (MD) and whether asthma can serve as a predictor of MD using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Data from the 2020-2021 wave of ELSA were […]

Background Genetic testing is increasingly used in presurgical evaluation, but the yield of resection across germline genetic epilepsies remains uncertain. Methods We conducted a systematic review of MEDLINE (PubMed) and Scopus and added cases from three institutional cohorts and the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium (PERC) databases, including individuals with pathogenic/likely pathogenic germline variants besides tuberous […]

Background: Earlier age at menopause and shorter reproductive span (time from menarche to menopause) have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), presumably because of limited lifetime exposure to endogenous estrogen. Our intention is to determine whether genetic liability to earlier vs later menarche and menopause are associated with risk of common […]