Tag: pubmed

Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2024 Dec 16:1-12. doi: 10.1044/2024_AJSLP-24-00238. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to describe the evolution and prevalence of parent-reported problematic feeding behaviors and eating skills in infants born prior to 34 weeks at the time of eating solid foods between 8 and 24 months of age, and to explore the associations between problematic feeding and the impact on the parent and family.

METHOD: Parents of eligible children (N = 35) completed an online survey when their child was 8, 10, 12, 18, and 24 months corrected age. The survey included the Pediatric Eating Assessment Tool (PediEAT), Child Oral and Motor Proficiency Scale (ChOMPS), and the Feeding Impact Scales-Family and Parent.

RESULTS: The prevalence of problematic feeding behaviors, as measured by the PediEAT, decreased from 63% at 8 months to 29% at 24 months. The prevalence of problematic eating skills, as measured by the ChOMPS, ranged from 30% to 56% between 8 and 24 months, with the highest prevalence between 10 and 18 months. The impact of feeding on the family and parent, as measured by the Feeding Impact Scales, was higher in families of children with problematic feeding than those without problematic feeding; however, given the small sample size, this was only statistically significant at 10 and 24 months.

CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of problematic feeding in this population of infants under 34 weeks was 43%-44% over the first 2 years of life. Infants born preterm should be considered at elevated risk for problematic feeding and monitored closely with timely referrals. Identifying prevention strategies in the neonatal intensive care unit will be critical.

PMID:39680806 | DOI:10.1044/2024_AJSLP-24-00238

Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2024 Dec 16:1-14. doi: 10.1044/2024_AJSLP-23-00249. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Naming difficulties are commonly reported in the acute and subacute stages of recovery of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and across severity levels. Previous studies, however, have used samples of mixed chronicity (acute and chronic) and severity (mild and severe) and then aggregated data across individuals from these distinct groups. Thus, we have little knowledge about the persistence of naming difficulties into the chronic stage of recovery in individuals with moderate-severe TBI.

PURPOSE: To increase the rigor and reproducibility of naming research in TBI, the present study sought to determine the presence and profile of naming disruptions into the chronic stage of moderate-severe TBI using a confrontation naming assessment.

METHOD: Thirty-three individuals aged 24-55 years in the chronic epoch of moderate-severe TBI and 33 demographically matched noninjured comparison (NC) participants completed the Philadelphia Naming Test (PNT). A mixed-effects logistic regression model predicting the probability of a correct response as a function of group was fit to the data.

RESULTS: Participants with TBI performed well on the PNT (all participants with TBI had over 90% accuracy). However, participants with TBI were statistically less likely to correctly name an item relative to demographically matched NC participants.

CONCLUSIONS: This study provides empirical evidence that naming difficulties persist into the chronic epoch of moderate-severe TBI. Despite high accuracy on the PNT, nearly 60% of these individuals with TBI reported continued difficulty with word finding in their daily lives. This discrepancy leaves open the possibility that, at this stage of injury, word-finding issues may be more reliably evoked and studied when the assessment is embedded within cognitively demanding and ecologically valid contexts (i.e., discourse, conversation). Further investigation of naming deficits in chronic moderate-severe TBI using a more naturalistic assessment is warranted.

PMID:39680803 | DOI:10.1044/2024_AJSLP-23-00249

Int J Radiat Biol. 2024 Dec 16:1-11. doi: 10.1080/09553002.2024.2440870. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: In cases of radiological or nuclear events, biological dosimetry enables decisions whether an individual was exposed to ionizing radiation and the estimation of the dose. Several statistical methods are used to assess uncertainties. The stringency of the applied method has an impact on the lowest dose that can be detected. To obtain reliable and comparable results, it is crucial to harmonize the applied statistical methods.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: The decision threshold and detection limit of the statistical methods were derived for variable cell numbers. The coverage of the 95% confidence intervals as well as the false-positive and false-negative rates of the methods were compared based on simulations. The evaluated methods included a graphical method, the propagation of errors and a Bayesian method.

RESULTS: The minimum resolvable doses, the doses at the detection limit and the coverage were relatively variable between the compared methods. The Bayesian method showed the best coverage, lowest resolvable doses and had false-positive rates close to 5%. The graphical method with the combination of two 83% confidence intervals also showed promising results. The other methods were either too conservative or underestimated the uncertainties for some doses or cell numbers.

CONCLUSIONS: The assessment of the lower dose limits is a central part of biological dosimetry and the applied statistical methods have a strong influence on the interpretation of the results. Simulations enable comparisons between methods and provide important information for the harmonization and standardization of the uncertainty assessment.

PMID:39680794 | DOI:10.1080/09553002.2024.2440870

J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2024 Dec 16:1-12. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00360. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: When using the spatiotemporal index (STI) to measure variability across repetitions of the same stimulus, researchers will typically screen and remove productions that contain errors or disfluencies. However, this screening process is highly subjective, reduces the amount of data available, and may generate samples that are less representative of true speech difficulties. In this study, we quantify the degree to which the STI is skewed by the inclusion of highly deviating productions and whether alternative calculations could better facilitate their inclusion.

METHOD: First, we conducted a controlled simulation to quantify how highly deviating productions skew STI values. The traditional STI calculation was compared to three robust alternative measures proposed to reduce the influence of outlying productions. Next, using audio recordings from typically developing (TD) children and children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), we investigated how effectively each STI measure differentiated the two groups.

RESULTS: Simulation findings demonstrated that the STI can be heavily skewed (more than doubling in value) by the inclusion of a single outlying production. In contrast, the robust alternative measures were all able to incorporate multiple outlying productions before their value was significantly altered. The proposed best-5 STI measure produced larger group differences between TD children and children with CAS compared to the traditional STI in both “Mom pets the puppy” and “Buy Bobby a puppy” stimuli.

CONCLUSIONS: The STI is highly sensitive to outlying productions and requires careful consideration of the repetitions included in its calculation. However, conservative approaches to data removal may be problematic when studying populations that are prone to fluency errors. In these scenarios, more robust alternatives to the STI, such as the best-5 STI measure, may provide a more practical approach to measuring speech variability.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27973236.

PMID:39680792 | DOI:10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00360

Int J Epidemiol. 2024 Dec 16;54(1):dyae164. doi: 10.1093/ije/dyae164.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: There have been reports of sharp declines in acute coronary syndrome (ACS) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study aims to assess nationwide ACS emergency department (ED) visit rates across age and sex subgroups and the general population, with a comparison before and throughout the pandemic’s various phases.

METHODS: A multiple interrupted time series analysis was used to assess 61 349 ACS nationwide hospital visits from January 2018 to December 2021 at monthly intervals. The study period was divided into three periods: January 2018-February 2020 (pre-pandemic period); March 2020-January 2021 (early-pandemic period); February 2021-December 2021 (late-pandemic period). Segmented regression with a seasonally adjusted autoregressive moving average structure was used to build predictive models with an estimated reference trendline (counterfactual).

RESULTS: Over 11 months of the early-pandemic period (lockdowns), the largest decrease in visits was seen in women aged 65 and above, of 18.4% [incidence rate ratio (IRR) 0.82; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.77-0.86]. The lowest decrease was observed in men aged 25-64, of 7.2% (IRR 0.93; 0.91-0.94). During the late-pandemic period, which included high vaccination coverage and no lockdowns, the largest further decrease was in women aged 25-64 of 20.1% (IRR 0.80; 0.75-0.84) on average.

CONCLUSIONS: The pandemic influenced ACS ED visits variably, with substantial declines during phases of high COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. Older individuals, particularly women, demonstrated the largest decrease in ACS ED visits, highlighting the need for tailored public health strategies to maintain public confidence in access to critical care during future health emergencies.

PMID:39680786 | DOI:10.1093/ije/dyae164

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Dec 24;121(52):e2321971121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2321971121. Epub 2024 Dec 16.

ABSTRACT

Phase transitions are ubiquitous across life, yet hard to quantify and describe accurately. In this work, we develop an approach for characterizing generic attributes of phase transitions from very limited observations made deep within different phases’ domains of stability. Our approach is called thermodynamic maps (TM), which combines statistical mechanics and molecular simulations with score-based generative models. TM enable learning the temperature dependence of arbitrary thermodynamic observables across a wide range of temperatures. We show its usefulness by calculating phase transition attributes such as melting temperature, temperature-dependent heat capacities, and critical exponents. For instance, we demonstrate the ability of TM to infer the ferromagnetic phase transition of the Ising model, including temperature-dependent heat capacity and critical exponents, despite never having seen samples from the transition region. In addition, we efficiently characterize the temperature-dependent conformational ensemble and compute melting curves of the two RNA systems: a GCAA tetraloop and the HIV-TAR RNA, which are notoriously hard to sample due to glassy-like energy landscapes.

PMID:39680772 | DOI:10.1073/pnas.2321971121

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Dec 24;121(52):e2419650121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2419650121. Epub 2024 Dec 16.

ABSTRACT

For human infants, producing recognizable speech is more than a cognitive process. It is a motor skill that requires infants to learn to coordinate multiple muscles of varying functions across their body. This coordination is directly linked to ongoing fluctuations in heart rate; a physiological process that can scaffold behavior. We investigated whether ongoing fluctuations in heart rate coincide with vocal production and word formation in 24-mo-old infants. Infants were most likely to produce a vocalization when heart rate fluctuations reached a peak (local maximum) or trough (local minimum). Vocalizations produced at the peak were longer than expected by chance. Functionally, vocalizations produced just before the trough, while heart rate is decelerating, were more likely to be recognized as a word by naive listeners. Thus, for the developing infant, heart rate fluctuations align with the timing of vocal productions and are associated with their duration and the likelihood of producing recognizable speech. Our results have broad and immediate implications for understanding normative language development, the evolutionary basis and physiological process of vocal production, and potential early indicators of speech and communication disorders.

PMID:39680757 | DOI:10.1073/pnas.2419650121

Brief Bioinform. 2024 Nov 22;26(1):bbae649. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbae649.

ABSTRACT

Single-cell multi-omics refers to the various types of biological data at the single-cell level. These data have enabled insight and resolution to cellular phenotypes, biological processes, and developmental stages. Current advances hold high potential for breakthroughs by integrating multiple different omics layers. However, singlecell multi-omics data usually have different feature dimensions and direct or indirect relationships. How to keep the data structure of these different data and extract hidden relationships is a major challenge for omics data integration, and effective integration models are urgently needed. In this paper, we propose an irregular tensor decomposition model (GSTRPCA) based on tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA). We developed a weighted threshold model for the decomposition of irregular tensor data by combining low-rank and sparsity constraints, which requires that the low-dimensional embeddings of the data remain lowrank and sparse. The major advantage of the GSTRPCA algorithm is its ability to keep the original data structure and explore hidden related features among omics data. For GSTRPCA, we also designed an effective algorithm that theoretically guarantees global convergence for the tensor decomposition. The computational experiments on irregular tensor datasets demonstrate that GSTRPCA significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art methods and hence confirm the superiority of GSTRPCA in clustering single-cell multiomics data. To our knowledge, this is the first tensor decomposition method for irregular tensor data to keep the data structure and hence improve the clustering performance for single-cell multi-omics data. GSTRPCA is a Matlabbased algorithm, and the code is available from https://github.com/GGL-B/GSTRPCA.

PMID:39680741 | DOI:10.1093/bib/bbae649

J Bras Nefrol. 2025 Apr-Jun;47(2):e20240146. doi: 10.1590/2175-8239-JBN-2024-0146en.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Visual Abstract is a visual summary of the most relevant information from a scientific article, presented as an infographic. Despite the growing use of Visual Abstracts by journals around the world, studies evaluating their components to guide their development remain scarce.

OBJECTIVE: The primary objective of this study is to identify the aesthetic perceptions of Visual Abstracts components by physicians and medical students.

METHODS: Cross-sectional study, using a virtual questionnaire sent via email to a convenience sample comprising physicians and medical students. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, with means and standard deviation or median and interquartile range, depending on the type of the variable distribution. Categorical variables are presented in absolute and relative numbers.

RESULT: The research sample consisted mainly of medical students (65%), who were female (57.2%), with a median age of 23.5 years (IQR 21-42.25). The majority of respondents declared no prior knowledge on Visual Abstracts (61.7%). Of the analyzed variables, preferences included icons (56.7%), in a monochrome style (36.7%), second-dimensional (81.1%), and moderately detailed layout (56.7%), using the “original” color (91.7%), and structured in IMRaD format (73.9%).

CONCLUSION: Several visual components influence the aesthetic perception of physicians and medical students regarding Visual Abstracts, with particular emphasis on textual objectivity, clarity of colors, and the use of icons.

PMID:39680739 | DOI:10.1590/2175-8239-JBN-2024-0146en

JMIR Med Educ. 2024 Dec 16;10:e56132. doi: 10.2196/56132.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Biochemistry is a cornerstone of medical education. Its knowledge is integral to the understanding of complex biological processes and how they are applied in several areas in health care. Also, its significance is reflected in the way it informs the practice of medicine, which can guide and help in both diagnosis and treatment. However, the retention of biochemistry knowledge over time remains a dilemma. Long-term retention of such crucial information is extremely important, as it forms the foundation upon which clinical skills are developed and refined. The effectiveness of biochemistry education, and consequently its long-term retention, is influenced by several factors. Educational methods play a critical role; interactional and integrative teaching approaches have been suggested to enhance retention compared with traditional didactic methods. The frequency and context in which biochemistry knowledge is applied in clinical settings can significantly impact its retention. Practical application reinforces theoretical understanding, making the knowledge more accessible in the long term. Prior knowledge (familiarity) of information suggests that it is stored in long-term memory, which makes its retention in the long term easier to recall.

OBJECTIVES: This investigation was conducted at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The aim of the study is to understand the dynamics of long-term retention of biochemistry among medical students. Specifically, it looks for the association between students’ familiarity with biochemistry content and actual knowledge retention levels.

METHODS: A cross-sectional correlational survey involving 240 students from King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences was conducted. Participants were recruited via nonprobability convenience sampling. A validated biochemistry assessment tool with 20 questions was used to gauge students’ retention in biomolecules, catalysis, bioenergetics, and metabolism. To assess students’ familiarity with the knowledge content of test questions, each question is accompanied by options that indicate students’ prior knowledge of the content of the question. Statistical analyses tests such as Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and chi-square tests were used.

RESULTS: Our findings revealed a significant correlation between students’ familiarity of the content with their knowledge retention in the biomolecules (r=0.491; P<.001), catalysis (r=0.500; P<.001), bioenergetics (r=0.528; P<.001), and metabolism (r=0.564; P<.001) biochemistry knowledge domains.

CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the significance of familiarity (prior knowledge) in evaluating the retention of biochemistry knowledge. Although limited in terms of generalizability and inherent biases, the research highlights the crucial significance of student’s familiarity in actual knowledge retention of several biochemistry domains. These results might be used by educators to customize instructional methods in order to improve students’ long-term retention of biochemistry information and boost their clinical performance.

PMID:39680441 | DOI:10.2196/56132