Usutu virus (USUV) is an emerging mosquito-borne flavivirus known to induce neuroinvasive disease in birds, mice, and humans in European and African countries. The mechanisms of infection and dissemination remain poorly understood. Thus, elucidating how USUV spreads in a susceptible host is crucial for identifying therapeutic targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Lung disease is the most overrepresented cause of death in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Animal studies have demonstrated potentiated autoimmunity, arthritis, and profibrotic/inflammatory lung disease with a combination of airborne exposures and collagen-induced arthritis (CIA), a model that recapitulates features of RA-associated interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD). As patients with RA-ILD demonstrate unique circulating monocyte subpopulations, this study aims to characterize lung infiltrating monocytes/macrophages in a mouse model of RA-ILD and determine whether reducing these cells mitigates the development of lung disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo of the most well-studied types of reasoning are analogical reasoning (AR) and deductive reasoning (DR). Yet, our understanding of the relationship between reasoning abilities and their neuroanatomical basis remains surprisingly limited. We aimed to conduct fine-grained anatomical mapping of performance on tests of AR, DR and fluid intelligence (Gf), in a large sample of patients with unilateral focal frontal or posterior lesions and healthy controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfluential theories of complex behaviour invoke the notion of cognitive control modulated by conflict between counterfactual actions. Medial frontal cortex, notably the anterior cingulate cortex, has been variously posited as critical to such conflict detection, resolution, or monitoring, largely based on correlative data from functional imaging. Examining performance on the most widely used "conflict" task-Stroop-in a large cohort of patients with focal brain injury (N = 176), we compare anatomical patterns of lesion-inferred neural substrate dependence to those derived from functional imaging, meta-analytically summarised.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol
January 2025
The objective of this study was to assess fibrinogen (FIB) comodified with citrulline (CIT) and/or malondialdehyde-acetaldehyde (MAA) initiates macrophage-fibroblast interactions, leading to extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition that characterizes rheumatoid arthritis-associated interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD). Macrophages (Mϕ) were stimulated with native-FIB, FIB-CIT, FIB-MAA, or FIB-MAA-CIT. Supernatants (SNs) [Mϕ-SN (U-937-derived) or MϕP-SN (PBMC-derived)] or direct antigens were coincubated with human lung fibroblasts (HLFs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRheumatology (Oxford)
October 2024
Background: Environmental lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and microbial component-enriched organic dusts cause significant lung disease. These environmental exposures induce the recruitment and activation of distinct lung monocyte/macrophage subpopulations involved in disease pathogenesis. Aconitate decarboxylase 1 () was one of the most upregulated genes following LPS (vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Infect Dis
September 2024
Sensory functions of organs of the head and neck allow humans to interact with the environment and establish social bonds. With aging, smell, taste, vision, and hearing decline. Evidence suggests that accelerated impairment in sensory abilities can reflect a shift from healthy to pathological aging, including the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurological disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Nurs Educ
September 2024
Background: The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate the effects of curricular changes made to foster graduate students' understanding of how they can be catalysts of change. For more than a decade, the concept of the citizen nurse has been woven into coursework in nursing education, thus indicating an evaluation process was needed.
Method: Ten oral history interviews were completed with current students or alumni.
The quantification of cognitive powers rests on identifying a behavioural task that depends on them. Such dependence cannot be assured, for the powers a task invokes cannot be experimentally controlled or constrained a priori, resulting in unknown vulnerability to failure of specificity and generalisability. Evaluating a compact version of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), a widely used clinical test of fluid intelligence, we show that LaMa, a self-supervised artificial neural network trained solely on the completion of partially masked images of natural environmental scenes, achieves representative human-level test scores a prima vista, without any task-specific inductive bias or training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Environmental/occupational exposures cause significant lung diseases. Agricultural organic dust extracts (ODE) and bacterial component lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induce recruited, transitioning murine lung monocytes/macrophages, yet their cellular role remains unclear.
Methods: CCR2 RFP mice were intratracheally instilled with high concentration ODE (25%), LPS (10 μg), or gram-positive peptidoglycan (PGN, 100 μg) for monocyte/macrophage cell-trafficking studies.
Efficacious therapeutic options capable of resolving inflammatory lung disease associated with environmental and occupational exposures are lacking. This study sought to determine the preclinical therapeutic potential of lung-delivered recombinant interleukin (IL)-10 therapy following acute organic dust exposure in mice. Here, C57BL/6J mice were intratracheally instilled with swine confinement organic dust extract (ODE) (12.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Around the world, many organisations are working on ways to increase the use, sharing, and reuse of person-level data for research, evaluation, planning, and innovation while ensuring that data are secure and privacy is protected. As a contribution to broader efforts to improve data governance and management, in 2020 members of our team published 12 minimum specification essential requirements (min specs) to provide practical guidance for organisations establishing or operating data trusts and other forms of data infrastructure.
Approach And Aims: We convened an international team, consisting mostly of participants from Canada and the United States of America, to test and refine the original 12 min specs.
Int J Popul Data Sci
March 2024
Introduction: This paper presents a Four Question Framework to guide data integration partners in building a strong governance and legal foundation to support ethical data use.
Objectives: While this framework was developed based on work in the United States that routinely integrates public data, it is meant to be a simple, digestible tool that can be adapted to any context.
Methods: The framework was developed through a series of public deliberation workgroups and 15 years of field experience working with a diversity of data integration efforts across the United States.
Objectives: Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is associated with significant mortality in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients with key cellular players remaining largely unknown. This study aimed to characterize inflammatory and myeloid derived suppressor cell (MDSC) subpopulations in RA-ILD as compared to RA, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) without autoimmunity, and controls.
Methods: Peripheral blood was collected from patients with RA, RA-ILD, IPF, and controls (N = 60, 15/cohort).
Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol
March 2024
Respiratory-related diseases are a leading cause of death in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and are disproportionately higher in men, which may be attributable to environmental risk factors. Animal studies have demonstrated potentiated autoimmunity, arthritis, and profibrotic/inflammatory lung disease with a combination of airborne exposures and collagen-induced arthritis (CIA). This study aimed to determine whether hormone-dependent differences explained these observations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Commun
November 2023
Though phonemic fluency tasks are traditionally indexed by the number of correct responses, the underlying disorder may shape the specific choice of words-both correct and erroneous. We report the first comprehensive qualitative analysis of incorrect and correct words generated on the phonemic ('S') fluency test, in a large sample of patients ( = 239) with focal, unilateral frontal or posterior lesions and healthy controls ( = 136). We conducted detailed qualitative analyses of the single words generated in the phonemic fluency task using categorical descriptions for different types of errors, low-frequency words and clustering/switching.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol
February 2024
The function of micro- and macrovessels within the peripheral vasculature has been identified as a target for the investigation of potential cardiovascular-based promoters of cognitive decline. However, little remains known regarding the interaction of the micro- and macrovasculature as it relates to cognitive function, especially in cognitively healthy individuals. Therefore, our purpose was to unravel peripheral factors that contribute to the association between age and processing speed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRNA quantitation tools are often either high-throughput or cost-effective, but rarely are they both. Existing methods can profile the transcriptome at great expense or are limited to quantifying a handful of genes by labor constraints. A technique that permits more throughput at a reduced cost could enable multi-gene kinetic studies, gene regulatory network analysis, and combinatorial genetic screens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLung endothelia in the arteries, capillaries, and veins are heterogeneous in structure and function. Lung capillaries in particular represent a unique vascular niche, with a thin yet highly restrictive alveolar-capillary barrier that optimizes gas exchange. Capillary endothelium surveys the blood while simultaneously interpreting cues initiated within the alveolus and communicated via immediately adjacent type I and type II epithelial cells, fibroblasts, and pericytes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol
August 2023
Pneumonia elicits the production of cytotoxic beta amyloid (Aβ) that contributes to end-organ dysfunction, yet the mechanism(s) linking infection to activation of the amyloidogenic pathway that produces cytotoxic Aβ is unknown. Here, we tested the hypothesis that gamma-secretase activating protein (GSAP), which contributes to the amyloidogenic pathway in the brain, promotes end-organ dysfunction following bacterial pneumonia. First-in-kind knockout rats were generated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlzheimers Dement
September 2023
Introduction: Individuals living in rural communities are at heightened risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), which parallels other persistent place-based health disparities. Identifying multiple potentially modifiable risk factors specific to rural areas that contribute to ADRD is an essential first step in understanding the complex interplay between various barriers and facilitators.
Methods: An interdisciplinary, international group of ADRD researchers convened to address the overarching question of: "What can be done to begin minimizing the rural health disparities that contribute uniquely to ADRD?" In this state of the science appraisal, we explore what is known about the biological, behavioral, sociocultural, and environmental influences on ADRD disparities in rural settings.