Early Onset Bullous Emphysema Associated with Polysubstance Use

The burden of COPD in the United States is tremendous. This disease is not only among the leading causes of mortality annually, but also takes a heavy financial toll.1 Bullous emphysema is a severe variant of COPD. The primary identified risk factor for bullous emphysema is tobacco use; however, the impact of other substances is not clearly delineated.2 This case presents a patient diagnosed with severe bullous emphysema at age 33 with substantial disease progression over the course of 12 years associated with much scarcer tobacco use than would be expected but a prominent history of methamphetamine and marijuana use. Marijuana and amphetamine-type stimulants are the most widely used illicit substances in the world, and prevalence of both are increasing in the United States. In 2020, an estimated 14.2 million Americans had a marijuana use disorder and 1.5 million had a methamphetamine use disorder.3-7 A better understanding of how these substances may contribute to development and progression of chronic lung disease, both individually and perhaps synergistically, is necessary to guide discussions with patients and inform effective public health efforts

Culture Connect: Diversity Resource Toolkit

Culture Connect: Diversity Resource Toolkit Globally, refugees are displaced at high rates and must integrate into a society where they are an ethnic minority. Since 2016, the International Rescue Committee has resettled over 300 refugees in Missoula; about 20% of which are school-aged children. Therefore, it is important that schools facilitate refugee inclusivity and intercultural competence within student peer groups. To aid in solving this global problem, we developed a project using the three steps of Human-Centered Design that aimed to enhance teacher competence, knowledge and increase the access to resources needed to address this global problem in the classroom setting. For the inspiration phase, we reviewed relevant literature and interviewed experts. During ideation, we integrated ideas and insights collected to develop and design our project, which includes a print and online diversity resource educational toolkit for use by pre-service and in-service teachers in elementary classrooms. The implementation intended to involve piloting the toolkit for six weeks in Missoula elementary classrooms with potential adaptation for school settings with similar characteristics beyond the Missoula community. Our five objectives that guide the development of the toolkit components are to 1) reduce prejudice in schools with daily exposure and practice; 2) enhance multicultural education and widen cultural representation in classrooms; 3) supplement existing language acquisition support for refugee students/parents and teachers; 4) enhance classroom introductory period for refugee students by including diverse representation in the classroom and inspiring students to be welcoming of refugee children; 5) streamline access to educational resources for teachers. As part of the implementation, we conducted pre/post-surveys to assess attitude change among students and teachers. In addition, we obtained feedback from teachers globally on toolkit improvements for its sustainable implementation. The expected learning outcomes are to decrease prejudice and enhance intercultural competence necessary for welcoming communities for refugees in a diverse society

Clustering of Vibrio parahaemolyticus Isolates Using MLST and Whole-Genome Phylogenetics and Protein Motif Fingerprinting

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a ubiquitous and abundant member of native microbial assemblages in coastal waters and shellfish. Though V. parahaemolyticus is predominantly environmental, some strains have infected human hosts and caused outbreaks of seafood-related gastroenteritis. In order to understand differences among clinical and environmental V. parahaemolyticus strains, we used high quality DNA sequencing data to compare the genomes of V. parahaemolyticus isolates (n = 43) from a variety of geographic locations and clinical and environmental sample matrices. We used phylogenetic trees inferred from multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and whole-genome (WG) alignments, as well as a novel classification and genome clustering approach that relies on protein motif fingerprints (MFs), to assess relationships between V. parahaemolyticus strains and identify novel molecular targets associated with virulence. Differences in strain clustering at more than one position were observed between the MLST and WG phylogenetic trees. The WG phylogeny had higher support values and strain resolution since isolates of the same sequence type could be differentiated. The MF analysis revealed groups of protein motifs that were associated with the pathogenic MLST type ST36 and a large group of clinical strains isolated from human stool. A subset of the stool and ST36-associated protein motifs were selected for further analysis and the motif sequences were found in genes with a variety of functions, including transposases, secretion system components and effectors, and hypothetical proteins. DNA sequences associated with these protein motifs are candidate targets for future molecular assays in order to improve surveys of pathogenic V. parahaemolyticus in the environment and seafood

Association between cholesterol and 2,3-diphosphoglycerate in genetically selected hooded rat lines

We have developed two strains of hooded rats with differing erythrocyte oxygen affinities by selection on red cell 2,3-diphosphoglycerate levels. Genetic studies have shown that these strains differ at one DPG-level-determining locus. This article reports the results of a study which involved measurement of plasma cholesterol levels in rats from the strains and the F 2 progeny of strain intercrosses. Low-DPG strain rats, with high oxygen affinity, had significantly higher mean cholesterol levels than High-DPG rats. Animals from the extremes of the F 2 distribution of DPG levels showed similar, significantly different mean cholesterol levels, indicating that the negative association between DPG and cholesterol levels in strain rats was not due to inadvertent fixation of unrelated genes during selection on DPG. The possibility is discussed that high oxygen affinity, brought about by low DPG levels, may be causative in increasing cholesterol levels.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44127/1/10528_2004_Article_BF00484383.pd

Improving Photoelectron Counting and Particle Identification in Scintillation Detectors with Bayesian Techniques

Many current and future dark matter and neutrino detectors are designed to measure scintillation light with a large array of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). The energy resolution and particle identification capabilities of these detectors depend in part on the ability to accurately identify individual photoelectrons in PMT waveforms despite large variability in pulse amplitudes and pulse pileup. We describe a Bayesian technique that can identify the times of individual photoelectrons in a sampled PMT waveform without deconvolution, even when pileup is present. To demonstrate the technique, we apply it to the general problem of particle identification in single-phase liquid argon dark matter detectors. Using the output of the Bayesian photoelectron counting algorithm described in this paper, we construct several test statistics for rejection of backgrounds for dark matter searches in argon. Compared to simpler methods based on either observed charge or peak finding, the photoelectron counting technique improves both energy resolution and particle identification of low energy events in calibration data from the DEAP-1 detector and simulation of the larger MiniCLEAN dark matter detector.Comment: 16 pages, 16 figure

Calibration of muon reconstruction algorithms using an external muon tracking system at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

To help constrain the algorithms used in reconstructing high-energy muon events incident on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), a muon tracking system was installed. The system consisted of four planes of wire chambers, which were triggered by scintillator panels. The system was integrated with SNO's main data acquisition system and took data for a total of 95 live days. Using cosmic-ray events reconstructed in both the wire chambers and in SNO's water Cherenkov detector, the external muon tracking system was able to constrain the uncertainty on the muon direction to better than 0.6°

Publisher Correction: Toxoplasma Modulates Signature Pathways of Human Epilepsy, Neurodegeneration & Cancer.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper

A multilab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments