Category: Statistics

J Anim Sci. 2026 Mar 30:skag106. doi: 10.1093/jas/skag106. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Improving nutrient utilization in nutrient-restricted diets is an important strategy to reduce feed costs and maintain productivity in broiler production. Dietary emulsifiers are commonly used to improve lipid digestion and overall nutrient utilization in poultry diets. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of a combination of lysophospholipids, synthetic emulsifier and monoglycerides (LEX) in energy- and amino acid-deficient broiler diets on growth performance, carcass traits, nutrient digestibility, and intestinal morphology from day 11 to 35. A total of 168 ten-day-old Ross 308 male broiler chicks were randomly assigned to one of three dietary treatments in a completely randomized design, with seven replicates and eight birds per cage. The dietary treatments were as follows: i) a positive control diet (PC) containing standard metabolizable energy and amino acid levels; ii) a negative control diet (NC) with 100 kcal/kg less metabolizable energy and 4.0% reduction in essential amino acids (lysine, methionine + cysteine, and threonine); iii) NC diet supplemented with 250 g/ton of LEX. Statistical analyses were conducted using the general linear model (GLM) procedure for one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), with significance declared at P < 0.05. Broilers fed the LEX-supplemented NC diet exhibited improved (P < 0.001) growth performance, including body weight at day 35 (1737.14 to 1903.46 g), average daily gain (day 11-35; 58.49 to 64.95 g/day), and feed conversion ratio (1.60 to 1.41 g/g), compared to those fed the NC diet alone. Apparent digestibility of crude protein and crude fat in both the jejunum and ileum was higher (P < 0.001) in birds receiving the LEX-supplemented NC diet than in those on the NC diet. In addition, LEX improved intestinal morphology, evidenced by increased villus height (920.87 to 1086.84 µm), crypt depth (126.74 to 161.28 µm) on day 35 (P < 0.05). However, there were no significant differences (P > 0.05) in carcass yield parameters, including breast and leg muscle weights and abdominal fat content, among the dietary treatments. In conclusion, supplementation of 250 g/ton of LEX to a broiler diet deficient in energy and amino acids effectively improved growth performance and nutrient utilization by enhancing protein and fat digestibility and promoting intestinal development. These findings suggest that a combination product based on lysophospholipids, synthetic emulsifier, and monoglycerides can serve as a practical and effective nutritional strategy to optimize production efficiency under nutrient-restricted feeding conditions in commercial broiler production.

PMID:41913048 | DOI:10.1093/jas/skag106

Clin Rheumatol. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1007/s10067-026-08083-1. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: Hyperuricemia (HUA) is a prevalent metabolic disorder linked to substantial morbidity. Oxidative stress is a key pathogenic mechanism, yet the cumulative effect of dietary and lifestyle pro- and anti-oxidants remains unclear. The Oxidative Balance Score (OBS) offers a comprehensive metric of oxidative potential. This study aimed to investigate the association between OBS and HUA in a large, nationally representative US adult population.

METHODS: This cross-sectional study included 29,876 adults aged ≥ 20 years from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007-2018. The OBS was constructed from 16 dietary and 4 lifestyle components. HUA was defined as serum uric acid ≥ 7.0 mg/dL for men and ≥ 6.0 mg/dL for women. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between OBS quartiles and HUA. Restricted cubic splines (RCS) were employed to model non-linear relationships. Subgroup analyses were conducted by gender, age, and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR).

RESULTS: The overall prevalence of HUA was 20.2%. A significant inverse association was observed between OBS and HUA. After adjusting for multiple confounders, participants in the highest OBS quartile (Q4, most anti-oxidant profile) had a 42% lower odds of HUA compared to those in the lowest quartile (Q1) (OR: 0.58, 95% CI: 0.51-0.66, P-trend < 0.001). This association was more pronounced for lifestyle OBS (OR for Q4 vs. Q1: 0.35, 95% CI: 0.29-0.42) than for dietary OBS (OR for Q4 vs. Q1: 0.70, 95% CI: 0.61-0.81). RCS analysis revealed a significant nonlinear relationship (P-nonlinearity < 0.001), with the protective effect of OBS plateauing at higher scores. The inverse association was consistent across gender and age subgroups but appeared stronger in individuals with normal renal function (eGFR ≥ 90 mL/min/1.73m²).

CONCLUSION: A higher OBS, reflecting a lifestyle and diet rich in antioxidants, is independently and non-linearly associated with a lower prevalence of hyperuricemia. These findings highlight the importance of a holistic approach targeting overall oxidative balance, particularly through modifiable lifestyle factors, for the primary prevention of hyperuricemia. Key Points • A higher Oxidative Balance Score is linked to lower hyperuricemia prevalence. • Lifestyle factors show a stronger protective association than dietary factors. • The relationship is nonlinear, with benefits plateauing at higher scores.

PMID:41913033 | DOI:10.1007/s10067-026-08083-1

Saudi Dent J. 2026 Mar 30;38(4):42. doi: 10.1007/s44445-026-00156-w.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Light-cured resin cements are widely used for veneer cementation due to their color stability and extended working time. However, polymerization through ceramic materials may be influenced by ceramic composition, thickness, and bonding substrate, potentially affecting bond strength. A quantitative comparison between lithium disilicate and translucent zirconia veneers under light-cured protocols remains limited.

OBJECTIVE: To compare the bond strength of lithium disilicate and translucent zirconia veneers luted with light-cured resin cements and to evaluate the influence of substrate type and veneer thickness.

METHODS: A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Six in vitro studies (64 specimens) met inclusion criteria. Random-effects models using restricted maximum likelihood estimation with Hartung-Knapp adjustment were applied. Subgroup analyses were performed according to ceramic material and substrate. An exploratory meta-regression assessed the association between veneer thickness and bond strength.

RESULTS: The pooled mean bond strength across all studies was 15.9 MPa. Lithium disilicate veneers demonstrated higher pooled bond strength (25.4 MPa) than translucent zirconia (12.1 MPa). Enamel substrates showed higher bond strength (21.1 MPa) compared with composite cores (11.3 MPa). Considerable heterogeneity was observed (I² = 98.2%). Meta-regression suggested an inverse trend between veneer thickness and bond strength; however, this finding was based on a limited dataset and should be interpreted cautiously.

CONCLUSION: Within the limitations of in vitro evidence, lithium disilicate and enamel bonding were associated with higher bond strength under light-cured cementation. Due to substantial heterogeneity and limited study numbers, these findings should be considered exploratory and not directly extrapolated to clinical performance.

PMID:41913027 | DOI:10.1007/s44445-026-00156-w

Ann Surg Oncol. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1245/s10434-026-19377-8. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: There is a significant risk of blood loss and transfusion requirements during surgeries for different cancers, raising perioperative morbidity and mortality. The antifibrinolytic drug tranexamic acid (TXA) has been studied to address this issue, but the results remain conflicting. This systematic review and meta-analysis pools all available evidence regarding the use of this medication in cancer surgeries.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: The PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane CENTRAL databases were used for data retrieval until 29 April 2025. Any randomized controlled trial involving surgical patients with cancer who received TXA as the intervention was included. The main addressed outcomes were perioperative blood loss, transfusion requirements, and complications. Study quality and evidence certainty were appraised with the Cochrane RoB 2.0 tool and the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) framework.

RESULTS: A total of 16 RCTs with 1830 patients were analyzed. TXA markedly reduced total, intraoperative, and postoperative blood loss compared with control. Hemoglobin changes were also smaller in the TXA group. Intraoperative blood component and perioperative red blood cell transfusions were lower with TXA. TXA was also linked to a modest reduction in operative time. No significant differences were observed between the groups for perioperative complications, reoperation rate, in-hospital or 30-day mortality, and length of hospital stay. GRADE assessments for the outcomes were mainly moderate or low, except for two that had very low certainty.

CONCLUSIONS: TXA appears to statistically improve perioperative outcomes in cancer surgeries while maintaining a favorable safety profile.

PMID:41913008 | DOI:10.1245/s10434-026-19377-8

Behav Res Methods. 2026 Mar 30;58(4):100. doi: 10.3758/s13428-026-02990-6.

ABSTRACT

Understanding how people covary in performance across experimental tasks is central to individual-difference psychology. The classic Pearson correlation has two strengths: (1) it is invariant to the scale of measurement, and (2) it is invariant to including additional variables in the analysis. However, it is susceptible to attenuation from measurement noise. Bayesian hierarchical models address this issue by modeling measurement error directly. Resulting estimates, however, depend on prior specifications and are not invariant to scale or variable inclusion. We compare three common priors-inverse Wishart (IW), scaled inverse Wishart (SIW), and LKJ-to assess robustness to prior assumptions in hierarchical settings. Our main tools are visualizing the priors and evaluating their effects on posterior estimates through simulation. When prior settings match ground truth, all priors recover true correlations accurately in low-dimensional settings. When prior variance is misspecified, the IW shows strong bias: low-variance priors inflate correlations, and high-variance priors deflate them. The SIW shows the same pattern but less severely, while the LKJ remains largely unaffected by scale misspecification. When more variables are added, the IW is most stable, whereas the SIW and LKJ show slight shrinkage toward lower correlations. The main drawback of the LKJ is computational speed-models with it can take orders of magnitude longer than those using IW or SIW. Overall, the LKJ provides the most accurate estimates, while the SIW offers a practical compromise for large-scale models where computational speed is crucial.

PMID:41912980 | DOI:10.3758/s13428-026-02990-6

Environ Monit Assess. 2026 Mar 30;198(4):386. doi: 10.1007/s10661-026-15225-0.

ABSTRACT

Urban air pollution is a major challenge for environmental health, especially in tropical cities where complex topography and fossil fuel dependence exacerbate poor air quality. Epiphytes, which rely on atmospheric water and nutrients, are particularly sensitive to airborne contaminants and represent promising biomonitors. This study compares the potential of vascular and non-vascular epiphytes to accumulate airborne pollutants, providing a direct assessment of their biomonitoring performance. We evaluated these epiphytes as biomonitors of urban air pollution in Medellín, Colombia. Six species were studied: three vascular epiphytes (Tillandsia recurvata, Pleopeltis macrocarpa, Rhipsalis baccifera), two bryophytes (Fabronia ciliaris, Kymatocalyx dominicensis), and one lichen (Flavoparmelia caperata). Host tree leaves were included for comparison. The samples were collected from 49 trees across sites representing contrasting pollution levels. We quantified magnetic susceptibility (χ) as a measure of particle accumulation, complemented by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP‒OES). The results revealed marked interspecific differences: vascular epiphytes presented significantly higher χ values than bryophytes, lichens, and host tree leaves did. T. recurvata presented the strongest response, with median χ values up to an order of magnitude greater. Non-vascular species reflected pollution differences only weakly, indicating limited suitability for active monitoring. SEM revealed abundant metal particles and microplastic debris on vascular epiphytes, whereas ICP‒OES confirmed elevated Ba, Cu, and Cr at polluted sites. These results provide the first integrated assessment of epiphyte functional groups for biomonitoring in a tropical city, demonstrating that vascular epiphytes, particularly T. recurvata, are robust, accessible and low-cost biomonitors.

PMID:41912976 | DOI:10.1007/s10661-026-15225-0

Neurol Sci. 2026 Mar 31;47(4):393. doi: 10.1007/s10072-026-08970-0.

NO ABSTRACT

PMID:41912973 | DOI:10.1007/s10072-026-08970-0

Odontology. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1007/s10266-026-01369-5. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to evaluate the color stability of contemporary bioactive restorative materials, including Equia Forte HT, GC Fuji II LC, ACTIVA BioACTIVE, Cention N, and a conventional composite resin, and to comparatively analyze their color changes following thermal aging and exposure to iron preparations. A total of 120 specimens were fabricated from five different restorative materials: Equia Forte, Cention N, ACTIVA BioACTIVE, Fuji II, and SolareX (n = 24 per group). All samples were initially subjected to thermal cycling, followed by immersion in two iron-containing solutions (Ferrum and Ocean) and one control solution (distilled water) for 72 h. Measurements were recorded at baseline (after 24 h of immersion in distilled water), after thermal cycling, and following staining procedures. Color difference (ΔE00) and lightness (L*) values were quantitatively assessed using a dental spectrophotometer based on the CIEDE2000 color evaluation system. Statistical analyses were performed using the Shapiro-Wilk test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and generalized linear models (GLM) approach. All analyses were conducted with SPSS version 22.0, with a significance level set at p < 0.05. A statistically significant difference was observed between the baseline and post-aging color values (p < 0.05). Among the materials tested, Equia Forte exhibited the greatest degree of color change, while ACTIVA BioACTIVE and SolareX demonstrated similar and comparatively lower levels of discoloration. Although no statistically significant difference was found between ACTIVA BioACTIVE and SolareX regarding total color change from baseline to final measurements (p > 0.05), the ΔE2 values of Equia Forte, Cention N, and Fuji II were significantly higher than those of the SolareX group (p < 0.05). Furthermore, significant differences were noted in the L* values before and after aging depending on the restorative material used (p < 0.05). Equia Forte showed the lowest L* values at both baseline (L1) and post-aging (L2), whereas ACTIVA BioACTIVE and SolareX presented the highest values. The findings of this in vitro study suggest that the color stability of restorative materials is influenced by intrinsic material properties as well as exposure to thermal aging and staining solutions. These factors should be considered when selecting restorative materials, particularly in esthetically demanding clinical situations.

PMID:41912967 | DOI:10.1007/s10266-026-01369-5

J Imaging Inform Med. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1007/s10278-026-01914-2. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Aligning radiological features with clinical text descriptions remains a key challenge for zero-shot disease recognition in chest radiography. We propose DVLM (Dual-Head Vision-Language Model with Neural Memory), a framework combining Vision Transformer visual encoding with ClinicalBERT-based text processing through parallel contrastive and supervised learning branches. A neural memory module stores disease-relevant patterns during training for improved generalization to unseen pathologies. We evaluated DVLM on CheXpert, MIMIC-CXR, and PadChest using multi-seed validation (five seeds $\times$ fivefold cross-validation), controlled ablation studies, and statistical significance testing. DVLM achieved 90.0% ± 0.28% macro-averaged AUROC on CheXpert (95% CI, 89.5-90.6%), with the neural memory module contributing +3.3% improvement ( $p<0.001$ , Cohen’s $d=0.89$ ). For zero-shot classification (25% held-out diseases), DVLM achieved 73.5% AUROC, outperforming MedKLIP by 2.3%. Temperature scaling reduced calibration error by 72%, and Grad-CAM localization achieved an IoU of 0.642 against radiologist annotations. Subgroup analysis confirmed equitable performance across demographic groups (maximum disparity, 1.3%). While DVLM demonstrates strong ranking capability suitable for triage applications, threshold-based classification for rare diseases remains limited (F1, 24.8-30.1%), indicating the need for radiologist confirmation in clinical deployment.

PMID:41912958 | DOI:10.1007/s10278-026-01914-2

J Gen Intern Med. 2026 Mar 30. doi: 10.1007/s11606-026-10370-1. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Gender and geographic inequities persist in academic medicine. This study examined the gender and country of affiliation of editors-in-chief (EICs) of general internal medicine journals and assessed disparities across journal impact levels.

METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of all journals indexed in the 2024 Journal Citation Reports under “MEDICINE, GENERAL & INTERNAL” with an impact factor ≥ 0.2. Gender and country of affiliation of EICs were extracted from journal websites, and journal country from the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Countries were categorized by World Bank income level. Descriptive statistics and weighted logistic regression models examined differences across impact quartiles (Q1-Q4). To contextualize findings, gender and geographic distributions of EICs in Q1 journals were compared with previously published authorship benchmarks from 202,092 publications in the 50 highest-impact journals (2012-2021).

RESULTS: Among 304 eligible journals, 347 EICs were identified; 77.8% were men and 22.2% were women, with no significant variation across impact quartiles. Most EICs were affiliated with high-income countries (67.2%), decreasing with journal impact (Q1: 85.9%; Q2: 75.7%; Q3-Q4: 48.6%; p < 0.001). In Q1 journals, 25.0% of EICs were women versus 40.6% female first authors and 33.0% female last authors in the benchmark study, indicating a more pronounced gender imbalance at the leadership level, while geographic patterns were similar.

CONCLUSION: EICs of general internal medicine journals are predominantly men and mainly affiliated with institutions in high-income countries, especially in high-impact journals. Initiatives promoting equity in scientific publishing should include editorial leadership, where disparities remain substantial.

PMID:41912938 | DOI:10.1007/s11606-026-10370-1