Nevin Manimala

Vaccine. 2025 Aug 29;63:127681. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2025.127681. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: In 2015, Argentina introduced the monovalent rotavirus vaccine into its National Immunization Program with a two-dose schedule at 2 and 4 months of age. This study assessed the impact of the universal rotavirus vaccination program on the burden of diarrheal disease in children under five years of age over a ten-year period, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

METHODS: A mixed ecological time-trend analysis was conducted using national and regional secondary data from surveillance and health information systems. Six indicators were evaluated: outpatient acute diarrhea cases, hospitalizations due to diarrhea, diarrhea-related deaths, intussusception hospitalizations in infants, laboratory-confirmed rotavirus cases, and rotavirus vaccine coverage. Trends were compared across four periods: pre-vaccination (2010-2014), post-vaccination pre-COVID-19 (2016-2019), during COVID-19 (2020-2021), and post-COVID-19 (2022-2024).

RESULTS: Compared to the pre-vaccination period, acute diarrhea rates declined by 59.6%, hospitalizations by 47.6%, and mortality by 59.7%. Laboratory-confirmed rotavirus positivity fell by 55.2%, with the most pronounced reductions observed in infants under one year of age. Although partial rebounds were noted post-COVID-19, all indicators remained below baseline levels. Intussusception hospitalizations in infants decreased by over 30% nationally, and no region showed rates exceeding pre-vaccine levels. Vaccine coverage declined during the pandemic and showed incomplete recovery. Statistical analyses confirmed significant differences by age group and period for most indicators, particularly highlighting the persistent vulnerability of infants to severe outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS: Ten years after the introduction of universal rotavirus vaccination in Argentina, a substantial and sustained reduction in the burden of diarrheal disease was observed across multiple indicators. While regional variability and post-pandemic fluctuations were noted, the overall benefit-risk profile of the vaccine remains strongly favorable. Continued efforts to strengthen vaccine coverage and surveillance systems are essential for consolidating these gains and ensuring timely detection of potential adverse trends.

PMID:40884908 | DOI:10.1016/j.vaccine.2025.127681

Neural Netw. 2025 Aug 20;193:108007. doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2025.108007. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Pan-sharpening, fusing high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) images with low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images, is critical for enhancing remote sensing image quality. Despite significant advancements in deep learning methods, research on the image upsampling process remains limited. Existing approaches either fail to effectively utilize the information from PAN images or struggle to balance spectral and spatial information, thereby constraining the performance of these models. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel Spatial-Frequency Domain Aggregation Upsampling (SFAU) method. Our method consists of three core modules: the Dual-Domain Nonlinear Fusion (DDNF), Region-Specific Attention Mechanism (RSAM), and Adaptive Feature Fusion Gate (AFFG). The DDNF module integrates Frequency-Aware Feature Aggregation (FAFA) and Spatial Domain Enhancement techniques, enabling the capture of high-frequency features while refining local structural details. The RSAM module adaptively refines feature representations and preserves spatial-spectral correlations. Finally, the AFFG module effectively combines the outputs from the DDNF and RSAM modules, ensuring a balanced integration of spatial and spectral information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other popular upsampling techniques and significantly enhances the performance of many leading pan-sharpening models, particularly in high-contrast and spectrally complex regions. Additionally, our approach shows strong generalization in real-world scenarios, highlighting its potential for practical remote sensing applications. Code is available at https://github.com/zacianfans/SFAU.

PMID:40884893 | DOI:10.1016/j.neunet.2025.108007

Health Place. 2025 Aug 29;95:103542. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2025.103542. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

For gay, bisexual, and other sexual minority men (SMM), geo-social exposures in residential and non-residential places are important to consider for health, as home, social, sexual, substance use, and healthcare-related locations may be different. We use survey data from a sample of 219 Black and Hispanic SMM within Los Angeles County to examine the places that individuals visit for eight specific activities, categorized as either lifestyle or healthcare-related. Spatial clustering techniques are used to identify hotspots, or places where individual’s activities are clustered in space, for each activity. We then use descriptive statistics to characterize each hotspot based on the socio-demographic characteristics of individuals who engaged in activities within the hotspot, and then assess whether activity-based hotspots overlap in space. We find unique spatial patterns of hotspots, distinct by activity. Additionally, lifestyle activity space hotspots are spatially patterned by socio-demographic characteristics, primarily along race and ethnic categories, whereas healthcare-related hotspots are not. The overlap, or spatial congruence of hotspots, is higher than we hypothesized, as hotspots of residential locations contained the majority of sex hotspots and substance use hotspots. Our work ultimately identifies four distinct areas of Los Angeles County in which activities are clustered among men in the sample, and health interventions can be tailored to the individuals and their activities in those places. Our findings demonstrate the importance of geographically and demographically targeted interventions, at a fine spatial scale, for health promotion among SMM, as interventions and policy to provide equitable care to reduce racial disparities in health among SMM are sorely needed.

PMID:40884879 | DOI:10.1016/j.healthplace.2025.103542

Mar Pollut Bull. 2025 Aug 29;222(Pt 1):118645. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2025.118645. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Acoustic methods offer an effective alternative to estimate suspended particle concentrations in marine environments, particularly in hard to access areas such as tropical reef systems influenced by river discharges. The present study evaluates the ability of a moored Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) to estimate chlorophyll-a and sediment concentrations in the water column of a Protected Coral Reef System in the southwestern region of the Gulf of Mexico near the state of Veracruz (Mexico). We analyzed the correlations between the backscatter intensity signal of a 1000-kHz ADCP with particle concentrations at different depths and climatic seasons. Results show a high correlation between the backscatter intensity signal of the ADCP and chlorophyll-a (0.79 < r² < 0.82; p < 0.05) and, a weaker correlation with sediments (0.58 < r² < 0.62; p < 0.05), varying according to depth and season. The particle distributions were notably influenced by wind velocity and river discharge, with significant seasonal differences in chlorophyll-a levels between the dry, cold fronts (northern), and rainy seasons, whereas we observed no statistical difference in sediment distribution among seasons.

PMID:40884860 | DOI:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2025.118645

J Infect Dis. 2025 Aug 30:jiaf458. doi: 10.1093/infdis/jiaf458. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Tetanus, Diphtheria and acellular Pertussis (Tdap) vaccination during pregnancy blunts the infant humoral immune response following primary immunization with pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs). While this effect typically resolves after the booster dose for most vaccine serotypes, its impact on nasopharyngeal carriage of pneumococcal vaccine serotypes remains unclear.

METHODS: A total of 3,298 nasopharyngeal swabs were collected from infants aged 6-30 months attending daycare centers in Belgium between 2018 and 2022, along with data on maternal Tdap vaccination status (clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT02888457). Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage and serotyping were assessed using culture-based methods (Quellung reaction) and molecular detection (LytA qPCR and serotype-specific qPCR). The association between Tdap vaccination during pregnancy and pneumococcal vaccine-related serotype carriage in infants was evaluated using logistic generalized estimating equation models.

RESULTS: PCV13-related serotype carriage was significantly higher in offspring of Tdap-vaccinated mothers during pregnancy compared to those born to Tdap-unvaccinated mothers. In addition, children who received a PCV10 or mixed PCV10/PCV13 schedule had significantly higher PCV13-related serotype carriage compared to those immunized exclusively with PCV13. No significant differences were observed in individual PCV13-related serotype carriage, except for a significantly higher carriage of the PCV13-related serotype 6C in children of Tdap-vaccinated mothers. No significant difference was found for non-vaccine serotype carriage.

CONCLUSIONS: Tdap vaccination during pregnancy was associated with increased pneumococcal vaccine-related serotype carriage in infants, though the clinical significance remains uncertain. Future studies integrating vaccine serotype carriage data with protective pneumococcal antibody levels are needed to inform future maternal and infant vaccination strategies.

PMID:40884828 | DOI:10.1093/infdis/jiaf458

Gigascience. 2025 Jan 6;14:giaf095. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giaf095.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Genomic variations, including single-nucleotide polymorphisms, small insertions and deletions, and structural variations, are crucial for understanding evolution and disease. However, comprehensive simulation tools for benchmarking genomic analysis methods are lacking. Existing simulators do not accurately represent the nonuniform distribution and length patterns of structural variations in human genomes, and simulating complex structural variations remains challenging.

RESULTS: We present BVSim, a flexible tool that provides probabilistic simulations of genomic variations, primarily focusing on human patterns while accommodating diverse species. BVSim effectively simulates both simple and complex structural variations and small variants by mimicking real-life variation distributions, which often exhibit higher frequencies near telomeres and within tandem repeat regions. Notably, BVSim allows users to input single or multiple benchmark samples from any reference genome, enabling the tool to summarize and represent the unique distribution patterns of structural variation positions and lengths specific to those species. Its compatibility with standard file formats facilitates seamless integration into various genomic research workflows, making it a very useful resource for benchmarking downstream tools such as variant callers. With numerical experiments, we show that BVSim generated more realistic sequences significantly different from other simulators’ outputs.

CONCLUSIONS: BVSim is written in Python and freely available to noncommercial users under the GPL3 license. Source code, application guide, and toy examples are provided on the GitHub page at https://github.com/YongyiLuo98/BVSim. The tool is registered in SciCrunch (RRID:SCR_026926), bio.tools (biotools:BVSim), and WorkflowHub (doi:10.48546/WORKFLOWHUB.WORKFLOW.1361.1).

PMID:40884802 | DOI:10.1093/gigascience/giaf095

Gigascience. 2025 Jan 6;14:giaf082. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giaf082.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Lateralization is the asymmetry in function and cognition between the brain hemispheres, with notable sex differences. Conventional neuroscience studies on lateralization use univariate statistical comparisons between male and female groups, with limited and ineffective validation for group specificity. This article proposes to model sex differences in brain functional network lateralization as a dual-classification problem: first-order classification of left versus right hemispheres and second-order classification of male versus female models. To capture sex-specific patterns, we developed an interpretable group-specific discriminant analysis (GSDA) for first-order classification, followed by logistic regression for second-order classification.

FINDINGS: Evaluations on 2 large-scale neuroimaging datasets show GSDA’s effectiveness in learning sex-specific patterns, significantly improving model group specificity over baseline methods. Major sex differences were identified in the strength of lateralization and interaction patterns within and between lobes.

CONCLUSIONS: The GSDA-based analysis challenges the conventional approach to investigating group-specific lateralization and indicates that previous findings on sex-specific lateralization will need revisits and revalidation. This method is generic and can be adapted for other group-specific analyses, such as treatment-specific or disease-specific studies.

PMID:40884801 | DOI:10.1093/gigascience/giaf082

JAMA Cardiol. 2025 Aug 30. doi: 10.1001/jamacardio.2025.3403. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

IMPORTANCE: Mounting evidence suggests transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) as preferred treatment for patients at low to intermediate surgical risk. However, limitations in study design and statistical power raise concerns about the generalizability of individual randomized clinical trials (RCTs) comparing TAVI and surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) to routine clinical practice.

OBJECTIVE: To compare 1-year outcomes of TAVI vs SAVR in patients with severe symptomatic aortic stenosis at low to intermediate surgical risk applying a 2-stage individual participant data (IPD) and aggregate meta-analyses.

DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE databases were searched for RCTs comparing TAVI and SAVR in patients with aortic stenosis until June 15, 2025.

STUDY SELECTION: RCTs were selected comparing TAVI vs SAVR in patients with severe symptomatic aortic stenosis at low or intermediate surgical risk with 1-year follow-up.

DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: IPD were obtained from all investigator-initiated RCTs (DEDICATE, NOTION, NOTION-2, and UK TAVI) and analyzed in 1- and 2-stage IPD meta-analyses. An overall meta-analysis was performed by adding aggregate data from industry-sponsored RCTs.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The primary end point was all-cause death or any stroke 1 year after randomization. Secondary end points included all-cause death, any stroke, disabling stroke, cardiovascular death, rehospitalization for cardiovascular cause, myocardial infarction, new-onset atrial fibrillation, new permanent pacemaker implantation, and aortic valve reintervention.

RESULTS: The IPD meta-analysis included 4 RCTs comprising 2873 patients (mean [SD] age, 76.7 [5.5] years; 805 [56.1%] male) at low to intermediate surgical risk randomly assigned to TAVI (n = 1439) or SAVR (n = 1434). At 1 year, the hazard ratio (HR) for the primary end point for TAVI compared to SAVR was 0.73 (95% CI, 0.56-0.95) in the 1-stage and 0.79 (95% CI, 0.49-1.27) in the 2-stage IPD meta-analysis. In the 2-stage overall meta-analysis the HR for the primary end point was 0.76 (95% CI, 0.60-0.97).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: In this IPD meta-analysis of 4 RCTs, and an overall meta-analysis of 8 RCTs of patients with severe symptomatic AS at low to intermediate risk, TAVI was associated with a reduction in the 1-year incidence of all-cause death or any stroke. These findings emphasize TAVI as alternative option in patients at low to intermediate risk. Long-term follow-up is warranted to evaluate sustainability of these findings.

PMID:40884787 | DOI:10.1001/jamacardio.2025.3403

Pediatr Hematol Oncol. 2025 Aug 30:1-11. doi: 10.1080/08880018.2025.2550516. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Children with relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) face higher rates of infection and treatment-related mortality than at initial diagnosis. Although immunotherapy is increasingly used in the relapsed setting, combination intensive chemotherapy remains the standard approach for reinduction. Serious infections during this phase can delay or preclude curative therapy. We aimed to describe the incidence and pattern of infections during reinduction in this high-risk population. In this single-center retrospective study, we reviewed charts of patients with relapsed ALL treated with combination chemotherapy reinduction at British Columbia Children’s Hospital between 2006 and 2022. Forty-three patients were included (median age 10.2 years at relapse). Most (90%) received a standard four-drug reinduction. Median duration of severe neutropenia was 20.8 days. About half (51%) experienced at least one infection, including 16% with confirmed or probable fungal infection. Infection was associated with significantly longer hospitalization (median 17 vs. 7 days; p = 0.006). While no predictors reached statistical significance, hyperglycemia and neutropenia ≥ 21 days were associated with higher odds of infection. Overall survival did not differ significantly by infection status (log-rank p = 0.43). Infectious complications remain common during reinduction chemotherapy for relapsed ALL despite advances in supportive care. While pharmacologic and clinical strategies may reduce risk, safer and more targeted reinduction approaches are urgently needed to optimize outcomes in this vulnerable group.

PMID:40884783 | DOI:10.1080/08880018.2025.2550516