Social and Environmental Correlates of Childhood Obesity Among Southern California Communities.

Objective: This study aimed to identify key childhood obesity correlates in Southern California by analyzing individual components from four social determinants of health (SDoH) indices and explore their interactions.

Methods: We utilized publicly available data from 330 cities across 10 counties, incorporating childhood obesity rates from the 2019 California Department of Education Physical Fitness Test (684,419 children, 40% Latino). Fifty-two individual SDoH were obtained from the Healthy Places Index, Social Vulnerability Index, CalEnviroScreen, and Child Opportunity Index (2015-2019).

The complex and hazardous course for heterotaxy-associated congenital heart disease.

Objective: Patients with heterotaxy-associated congenital heart disease often require multiple operations, which may have a cumulative effect on their outcomes. This study aimed to define the cardiac surgical course in a large cohort and identify longitudinal risk factors for death/transplant.

Methods: All patients with heterotaxy-associated congenital heart disease who underwent cardiac surgery at one institution from 2005 to 2022 were retrospectively reviewed.

Qualitative Exploration of the Impact of Workplace Culture on Belonging, Burnout, and Career Exit for Women in Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Background: Gender disparities exist in cardiothoracic surgery (CT), though qualitative investigations are lacking. We aimed to explore the impact of workplace culture on belonging, burnout, and career exit for women in CT.

Study Design: We conducted virtual semi-structured interviews with women cardiothoracic surgeons in practice for ≥5 years across the United States from 9/2024 to 12/2024.

Addressing the Unmet Need for Treatment in Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma With Child-Pugh C Cirrhosis: A Case of a Woman With Hepatocellular Carcinoma and Advanced Liver Disease.

It has been another active year of advances in our understanding and treatment of liver cancer. Here, we explore major research updates discovered throughout the year of 2024. Despite these significant advances, the treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and Child-Pugh class C cirrhosis remains an unmet need.

Xenotransplantation Research -the Nonhuman Primate Model Is Preferable to the Human Decedent Model.

Over the past 40 years, the pig-to-nonhuman primate organ transplantation model has enabled progress in xenotransplantation to be made to the point that we are now carrying out initial US FDA-approved clinical experiments on "compassionate" grounds. More recently, the pig-to-human brain-dead decedent model was introduced with claims that this might replace (or at least augment) the pig-to-NHP model. There are, however, several limitations of the decedent model, most notably the very limited period during which the subject may remain sufficiently metabolically and hemodynamically stable to allow meaningful monitoring of the fate of a pig organ graft.