At least a quarter of adult patients with severe brain injury in a disorder of consciousness may have cognitive abilities that are hidden due to motor impairment. In this case series, we developed a tool that extracted acoustic and semantic processing biomarkers from electroencephalography recorded while participants listened to a story. We tested our method on two male adolescent survivors of severe brain injury and showed evidence of acoustic and semantic processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Secondary mitral regurgitation (MR) is common in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and is associated with poor outcomes. However, there is little evidence regarding secondary MR in advanced HFrEF. Poor outcomes for MR intervention suggest a need for further risk stratification.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aims: Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) produces long-term reverse remodelling which requires greater adenosine triphosphate delivery to the contractile machinery. Whilst the heart retains some metabolic flexibility in non-ischaemic cardiomyopathy, whether this correlates with reverse remodelling is unknown. This study investigated whether CRT acutely changes cardiac substrate uptake, and whether this translates to favourable reverse remodelling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The Cognitive and Linguistic Scale (CALS) was developed to serially monitor cognitive recovery of children and young people after severe acquired brain injury, during inpatient rehabilitation. The CALS can be used to derive Cognitive Ability Estimates (CAE), which are Rasch-propertied (unidimensional, interval-scale) and therefore may be ideally applied for use in research including within the context of clinical trials. Here, we used established statistical distribution-based and expert consensus-based methods to estimate the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) for CAE derived from the CALS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Sci Technol
December 2024
Characterization of chemicals in household products is important for understanding this potential source of chemical exposure. Increasingly, suspect screening and nontargeted analysis techniques are used to characterize as many chemical signatures as possible. Solids such as household products are most conveniently prepared using solvent extraction, revealing what chemicals are contained within the product matrix but providing no information about the potential of those chemicals to leave the matrix and cause actual exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn health, the human heart is able to match ATP supply and demand perfectly. It requires 6 kg of ATP per day to satisfy demands of external work (mechanical force generation) and internal work (ion movements and basal metabolism). The heart is able to link supply with demand via direct responses to ADP and AMP concentrations but calcium concentrations within myocytes play a key role, signalling both inotropy, chronotropy and matched increases in ATP production.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To understand how methylphenidate (MPH) is used in youth with traumatic brain injury (TBI) during inpatient pediatric rehabilitation.
Setting: Inpatient pediatric rehabilitation.
Participants: In total, 234 children with TBI; 62 of whom received MPH and 172 who did not.
Arch Phys Med Rehabil
July 2024
Objective: To assess feasibility of routine delirium screening using the Cornell Assessment of Pediatric Delirium (CAPD) in children admitted for rehabilitation with acquired brain injury (ABI), report on the prevalence of positive delirium screens in this population, and explore longitudinal trends in CAPD scores and their association with rehabilitation outcomes.
Design: Retrospective study.
Setting: Pediatric inpatient rehabilitation unit.
Background: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, post-COVID syndrome (persistent symptoms/complications lasting >12 weeks) continues to pose medical and economic challenges. In military personnel, where optimal fitness is crucial, prolonged limitations affecting their ability to perform duties has occupational and psychological implications, impacting deployability and retention. Research investigating post-COVID syndrome exercise capacity and cardiopulmonary effects in military personnel is limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur Heart J Imaging Methods Pract
September 2023
Aims: Left ventricular (LV) pressure-volume (PV) loops provide gold-standard physiological information but require invasive measurements of ventricular intracavity pressure, limiting clinical and research applications. A non-invasive method for the computation of PV loops from magnetic resonance imaging and brachial cuff blood pressure has recently been proposed. Here we evaluated the fidelity of the non-invasive PV algorithm against invasive LV pressures in humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Soc Mass Spectrom
August 2023
This work demonstrates high-throughput screening of personal care products to provide an overview of potential exposure. Sixty-seven products from five categories (body/fragrance oil, cleaning product, hair care, hand/body wash, lotion, sunscreen) were rapidly extracted and then analyzed using suspect screening by two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) high-resolution mass spectrometry (GCxGC-HRT). Initial peak finding and integration were performed using commercial software, followed by batch processing using the machine learning program Highlight.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The failing heart is traditionally described as metabolically inflexible and oxygen starved, causing energetic deficit and contractile dysfunction. Current metabolic modulator therapies aim to increase glucose oxidation to increase oxygen efficiency of adenosine triphosphate production, with mixed results.
Methods: To investigate metabolic flexibility and oxygen delivery in the failing heart, 20 patients with nonischemic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (left ventricular ejection fraction 34.
Background: Heart transplantation (HTx) after donation after circulatory death (DCD) is an expanding practice but is associated with increased warm ischemic time. The impact of DCD HTx on cardiac mechanics and myocardial fibrosis has not been reported. We aimed to compare cardiac mechanics and myocardial fibrosis using cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging in donation after brain death (DBD) and DCD HTx recipients and healthy controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurol Clin Pract
June 2022
Background And Objectives: Following severe brain injury, up to 16% of adults showing no clinical signs of cognitive function nonetheless have preserved cognitive capacities detectable via neuroimaging and neurophysiology; this has been designated cognitive-motor dissociation (CMD). Pediatric medicine lacks both practice guidelines for identifying covert cognition and epidemiologic data regarding CMD prevalence.
Methods: We applied a diverse battery of neuroimaging and neurophysiologic tests to evaluate 2 adolescents (aged 15 and 18 years) who had shown no clinical evidence of preserved cognitive function following brain injury at age 9 and 13 years, respectively.
Neuropsychologists working in a pediatric neurorehabilitation setting provide care for children and adolescents with acquired brain injuries (ABI) and play a vital role on the interdisciplinary treatment team. This role draws on influences from the field of clinical neuropsychology and its pediatric subspecialty, as well as rehabilitation psychology. This combination of specialties is uniquely suited for working with ABI across the continuum of recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Physiol
December 2021
Although intravenous nitrates are commonly used in clinical medicine, they have been shown to increase myocardial oxygen consumption and inhibit complex IV of the electron transport chain. As such we sought to measure whether myocardial energetics were impaired during glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) infusion. 10 healthy volunteers underwent cardiac magnetic resonance imaging to assess cardiac function and phosphorus magnetic resonance spectroscopy to measure Phosphocreatine/ATP (PCr/ATP) ratio and creatine kinase forward rate constant (CK ) before and during an intravenous infusion of GTN.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Transient pulmonary congestion during exercise is emerging as an important determinant of reduced exercise capacity in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). We sought to determine whether an abnormal cardiac energetic state underpins this process.
Methods: We recruited patients across the spectrum of diastolic dysfunction and HFpEF (controls, n=11; type 2 diabetes, n=9; HFpEF, n=14; and severe diastolic dysfunction attributable to cardiac amyloidosis, n=9).
Objectives: To describe dosing practices for amantadine hydrochloride and related adverse effects among children and young adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) admitted to pediatric inpatient rehabilitation units.
Setting: Eight pediatric acute inpatient rehabilitation units located throughout the United States comprising the Pediatric Brain Injury Consortium.
Participants: Two-hundred thirty-four children and young adults aged 2 months to 21 years with TBI.
Objectives: To characterize the demographics, clinical course, and predictors of cognitive recovery among children and young adults receiving inpatient rehabilitation following pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Design: Retrospective observational, multicenter study.
Setting: Eight acute pediatric inpatient rehabilitation facilities in the United States with specialized programs for treating patients with TBI.
Purpose: Phosphorus saturation-transfer experiments can quantify metabolic fluxes noninvasively. Typically, the forward flux through the creatine kinase reaction is investigated by observing the decrease in phosphocreatine (PCr) after saturation of γ-ATP. The quantification of total ATP utilization is currently underexplored, as it requires simultaneous saturation of inorganic phosphate ( ) and PCr.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTraumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in children; survivors experience long-term cognitive and motor deficits. To date, studies predicting outcome following pediatric TBI have primarily focused on acute behavioral responses and proxy measures of injury severity; unsurprisingly, these measures explain very little of the variance following heterogenous injury. In adults, certain acute imaging biomarkers help predict cognitive and motor recovery following moderate to severe TBI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNicotinic acid receptor agonists have previously been shown to cause acute reductions in cardiac contractility. We sought to uncover the changes in cardiac metabolism underlying these alterations in function. In nine humans, we recorded cardiac energetics and function before and after a single oral dose of nicotinic acid using cardiac MRI to demonstrate contractile function and Phosphorus-31 ( P) magnetic resonance spectroscopy to demonstrate myocardial energetics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBlood flow in the vasculature can be characterised by dimensionless numbers commonly used to define the level of instabilities in the flow, for example the Reynolds number, Re. Haemodynamics play a key role in cardiovascular disease (CVD) progression. Genetic studies have identified mechanosensitive genes with causal roles in CVD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiovasc Diagn Ther
June 2020
The heart has a massive adenosine triphosphate (ATP) requirement, produced from the oxidation of metabolic substrates such as fat and glucose. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy offers a unique opportunity to probe this biochemistry: Phosphorus spectroscopy can demonstrate the production of ATP and quantify levels of the transport molecule phosphocreatine while 13Carbon spectroscopy can demonstrate the metabolic fates of glucose in real time. These techniques allow the metabolic deficits in heart failure to be interrogated and can be a potential future clinical tool.
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