Category: Nevin Manimala

Am J Case Rep. 2023 Mar 18;24:e938878. doi: 10.12659/AJCR.938878.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), including vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), is an extremely rare adverse effect, mostly seen after initial vaccination with the viral vector-based AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine. It is characterized by mild to severe thrombocytopenia and venous or arterial thrombosis. CASE REPORT Herein, we present a case of an 18-year-old male patient who developed Level 1 TTS (probable VITT) eight days after immunization with the ChADOx1 nCOV-19 vaccine (Covishield; AZ-Oxford). Initial investigations revealed severe thrombocytopenia, hemiparesis, and intracranial hemorrhage, after which the patient was treated conservatively. However, a decompressive craniotomy was performed later due to patient deterioration. One week after surgery, the patient developed bilious vomiting, lower-gastrointestinal bleeding, and abdominal distension. An abdominal CT scan was performed that showed thrombosis of the portal vein with occlusion of the left iliac vein. The patient underwent an exploratory laparotomy followed by resection and anastomosis of the small bowel due to massive gut gangrene. Due to persistent thrombocytopenia after surgery, intravenous immune globulin (IVIG) was administered. The platelet count increased thereafter, and the patient stabilized. He was discharged on the 33rd day after admission and was followed up for a year. No post-hospitalization complications were observed in the follow-up period. CONCLUSIONS Although vaccines have been proven to be highly safe and effective to end the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused pandemic, there is still a small risk of developing rare complications, including TTS and VITT. Early diagnosis and prompt intervention are key for patient management.

PMID:36932639 | DOI:10.12659/AJCR.938878

Med Sci Monit. 2023 Mar 18;29:e938566. doi: 10.12659/MSM.938566.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND This study evaluated the clinical efficacy of polylactic acid (PLA) membranes in guiding bone regeneration in anterior maxillary implants. MATERIAL AND METHODS Forty-eight participants with maxillary anterior tooth loss requiring implantation with guided bone regeneration were recruited and randomly divided into 2 groups (n=24): the PLA membrane (experimental) and the Bio-Gide membrane (control) group. Wound healing was observed at 1 week and 1 month postoperatively. Cone beam CT was performed immediately and at 6 and 36 months postoperatively. Soft-tissue parameters were measured at 18 and 36 months postoperatively. Implant stability quotient (ISQ) and patient satisfaction were separately evaluated at 6 and 18 months after the operation. The independent sample t test and chi-square test were preformed to analyze quantitative and descriptive statistics, respectively. RESULTS No implants were lost and there were no statistically significant differences in ISQ between the 2 groups. The labial bone plates in the experimental group exhibited a non-significantly greater extent of absorption than did the control group at 6 and 18 months postoperatively. Soft-tissue parameters did not reveal inferior results for the experimental group. Patients in both groups were satisfied. CONCLUSIONS PLA membranes are comparable to Bio-Gide in terms of the effectiveness and safety and can be used as a barrier membrane to guide bone regeneration in clinical practice.

PMID:36932638 | DOI:10.12659/MSM.938566

Phys Rev E. 2023 Feb;107(2):L022201. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.L022201.

ABSTRACT

Extreme events are unusual and rare large-amplitude fluctuations can occur unexpectedly in nonlinear dynamical systems. Events above the extreme event threshold of the probability distribution of a nonlinear process characterize extreme events. Different mechanisms for the generation of extreme events and their prediction measures have been reported in the literature. Based on the properties of extreme events, such as those that are rare in the frequency of occurrence and extreme in amplitude, various studies have shown that extreme events are both linear and nonlinear in nature. Interestingly, in this Letter, we report on a special class of extreme events which are nonchaotic and nonperiodic. These nonchaotic extreme events appear in between the quasiperiodic and chaotic dynamics of the system. We report the existence of such extreme events with various statistical measures and characterization techniques.

PMID:36932627 | DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.107.L022201

Phys Rev E. 2023 Feb;107(2-1):024135. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024135.

ABSTRACT

For driven open systems in contact with multiple heat reservoirs, we find the marginal distributions of work or heat do not satisfy any fluctuation theorem, but only the joint distribution of work and heat satisfies a family of fluctuation theorems. A hierarchical structure of these fluctuation theorems is discovered from microreversibility of the dynamics by adopting a step-by-step coarse-graining procedure in both classical and quantum regimes. Thus, we put all fluctuation theorems concerning work and heat into a unified framework. We also propose a general method to calculate the joint statistics of work and heat in the situation of multiple heat reservoirs via the Feynman-Kac equation. For a classical Brownian particle in contact with multiple heat reservoirs, we verify the validity of the fluctuation theorems for the joint distribution of work and heat.

PMID:36932622 | DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024135

Phys Rev E. 2023 Feb;107(2-1):024210. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024210.

ABSTRACT

We consider a quantum many-body system-the Bose-Hubbard system on three sites-which has a classical limit, and which is neither strongly chaotic nor integrable but rather shows a mixture of the two types of behavior. We compare quantum measures of chaos (eigenvalue statistics and eigenvector structure) in the quantum system, with classical measures of chaos (Lyapunov exponents) in the corresponding classical system. As a function of energy and interaction strength, we demonstrate a strong overall correspondence between the two cases. In contrast to both strongly chaotic and integrable systems, the largest Lyapunov exponent is shown to be a multivalued function of energy.

PMID:36932617 | DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024210

Phys Rev E. 2023 Feb;107(2-1):024603. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024603.

ABSTRACT

This study aims to examine experimental conditions in which active particles are forced by their surroundings to move forward and backward in a continuous oscillatory manner. The experimental design is based on using a vibrating self-propelled toyrobot called hexbug, which is placed inside a narrow channel closed on one end by a rigid moving wall. Using the end-wall velocity as a controlling factor, the main forward mode of the hexbug movement can be turned to mostly rearward mode. We investigate the bouncing hexbug motion on both experimental and theoretical grounds. The Brownian model of active particles with inertia is employed in the theoretical framework. The model itself uses a pulsed Langevin equation in order to simulate abrupt changes in velocity that mimic hexbug propulsion in the moments when its legs make contact with the base plate. Significant directional asymmetry is caused by the legs bending backward. We demonstrate that the simulation successfully reproduces the experimental characteristics of hexbug motion after regressing the spatial and temporal statistical characteristics, especially when directional asymmetry is under consideration.

PMID:36932604 | DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.107.024603

Phys Rev E. 2023 Feb;107(2-2):025103. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.107.025103.

ABSTRACT

A three-dimensional blunt-base bluff body in a uniform flow is subjected to long-time stochastic dynamics of switching between two opposite wake states. This dynamic is investigated experimentally within the Reynolds number range Re ≃10^{4}-10^{5}. Long-time statistics coupled to a sensitivity analysis to the body attitude (defined as the pitch angle of the body with respect to the incoming flow) show that the wake switching rate decreases as Re increases. Equipping the body with passive roughness elements (turbulators) modifies the boundary layers before separation, seen as the inlet condition for the wake dynamic. Depending on their location and Re, the viscous sublayer length scale and the turbulent layer thickness can be modified independently. This sensitivity analysis to the inlet condition shows that a decrease of the viscous sublayer length scale at a given turbulent layer thickness leads to a decrease in the switching rate, whereas the modification of the turbulent layer thickness has almost no effect on the switching rate.

PMID:36932601 | DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.107.025103

Hum Genet. 2023 Mar 17. doi: 10.1007/s00439-023-02541-5. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Self-domestication could contribute to shaping the biology of human brain and consequently the predisposition to neurodevelopmental disorders. Leveraging genome-wide data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, we tested the enrichment of self-domestication and neural crest function loci with respect to the heritability of autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia (SCZ in East Asian and European ancestries, EAS and EUR, respectively), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome (TS). Considering only self-domestication and neural-crest-function annotations in the linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) model, our partitioned heritability analysis revealed statistically significant enrichments across all disorders investigated. The estimates of the heritability enrichments for self-domestication loci were similar across neurodevelopmental disorders, ranging from 0.902 (EAS SCZ, p = 4.55 × 10^-20) to 1.577 (TS, p = 5.85 × 10^-5). Conversely, a wider spectrum of heritability enrichment estimates was present for neural crest function with the highest enrichment observed for TS (enrichment = 3.453, p = 2.88 × 10^-3) and the lowest for EAS SCZ (enrichment = 1.971, p = 3.81 × 10^-3). Although these estimates appear to be strong, the enrichments for self-domestication and neural crest function were null once we included additional annotations related to different genomic features. This indicates that the effect of self-domestication on the polygenic architecture of neurodevelopmental disorders is not independent of other functions of human genome.

PMID:36930228 | DOI:10.1007/s00439-023-02541-5

JMIR Ment Health. 2023 Mar 17;10:e42646. doi: 10.2196/42646.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Social interactions are important for well-being, and therefore, researchers are increasingly attempting to capture people’s social environment. Many different disciplines have developed tools to measure the social environment, which can be highly variable over time. The experience sampling method (ESM) is often used in psychology to study the dynamics within a person and the social environment. In addition, passive sensing is often used to capture social behavior via sensors from smartphones or other wearable devices. Furthermore, sociologists use egocentric networks to track how social relationships are changing. Each of these methods is likely to tap into different but important parts of people’s social environment. Thus far, the development and implementation of these methods have occurred mostly separately from each other.

OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to synthesize the literature on how these methods are currently used to capture the changing social environment in relation to well-being and assess how to best combine these methods to study well-being.

METHODS: We conducted a scoping review according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines.

RESULTS: We included 275 studies. In total, 3 important points follow from our review. First, each method captures a different but important part of the social environment at a different temporal resolution. Second, measures are rarely validated (>70% of ESM studies and 50% of passive sensing studies were not validated), which undermines the robustness of the conclusions drawn. Third, a combination of methods is currently lacking (only 15/275, 5.5% of the studies combined ESM and passive sensing, and no studies combined all 3 methods) but is essential in understanding well-being.

CONCLUSIONS: We highlight that the practice of using poorly validated measures hampers progress in understanding the relationship between the changing social environment and well-being. We conclude that different methods should be combined more often to reduce the participants’ burden and form a holistic perspective on the social environment.

PMID:36930210 | DOI:10.2196/42646

JMIR Public Health Surveill. 2023 Mar 17;9:e40503. doi: 10.2196/40503.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The sexual health of transmasculine (TM) people-those who identify as male, men, or nonbinary and were assigned a female sex at birth-is understudied. One barrier to conducting HIV- and sexually transmitted infection (STI)-related research with this population is how to best capture sexual risk data in an acceptable, gender-affirming, and accurate manner.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to report on the community-based process of developing, piloting, and refining a digitally deployed measure to assess self-reported sexual behaviors associated with HIV and STI transmission for research with TM adults.

METHODS: A multicomponent process was used to develop a digital-assisted self-interview to assess HIV and STI risk in TM people: gathering input from a Community Task Force; working with an interdisciplinary team of content experts in transgender medicine, epidemiology, and infectious diseases; conducting web-based focus groups; and iteratively refining the measure. We field-tested the measure with 141 TM people in the greater Boston, Massachusetts area to assess HIV and STI risk. Descriptive statistics characterized the distribution of sexual behaviors and HIV and STI transmission risk by the gender identity of sexual partners.

RESULTS: The Transmasculine Sexual Health Assessment (TM-SHA) measures the broad range of potential sexual behaviors TM people may engage in, including those which may confer risk for STIs and not just for HIV infection (ie, oral-genital contact); incorporates gender-affirming language (ie, genital or frontal vs vaginal); and asks sexual partnership characteristics (ie, partner gender). Among 141 individual participants (mean age 27, SD 5 years; range 21-29 years; n=21, 14.9% multiracial), 259 sexual partnerships and 15 sexual risk behaviors were reported. Participants engaged in a wide range of sexual behaviors, including fingering or fisting (receiving: n=170, 65.6%; performing: n=173, 66.8%), oral-genital sex (receiving: n=182, 70.3%; performing: n=216, 83.4%), anal-genital sex (receptive: n=31, 11.9%; insertive: n=9, 3.5%), frontal-genital sex (receptive: n=105, 40.5%; insertive: n=46, 17.8%), and sharing toys or prosthetics during insertive sex (n=62, 23.9%). Overall barrier use for each sexual behavior ranged from 10.9% (20/182) to 81% (25/31). Frontal receptive sex with genitals and no protective barrier was the highest (21/42, 50%) with cisgender male partners. In total, 14.9% (21/141) of participants reported a lifetime diagnosis of STI. The sexual history tool was highly acceptable to TM participants.

CONCLUSIONS: The TM-SHA is one of the first digital sexual health risk measures developed specifically with and exclusively for TM people. TM-SHA successfully integrates gender-affirming language and branching logic to capture a wide array of sexual behaviors. The measure elicits sexual behavior information needed to assess HIV and STI transmission risk behaviors. A strength of the tool is that detailed partner-by-partner data can be used to model partnership-level characteristics, not just individual-level participant data, to inform HIV and STI interventions.

PMID:36930204 | DOI:10.2196/40503