ANTHROPOMETRIC AND PHYSICAL FITNESS PROFILES OF YOUTH ATHLETES

Mason Thieu1, Quincy R. Johnson1,Yang Yang1, Dayton Sealey2, Clay Frels2, Dimitrije Cabarkapa1, & Andrew C. Fry1, FACSM 1University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; 2Department of Kinesiology and Sport Science, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Kearney, Nebraska Youth sports participation, competitiveness, and training intensity continues to increase. However, more information is needed regarding the anthropometric and physical fitness profile of today’s youth athletes. Common strategies for profiling anthropometric and physical fitness characteristics of athletes across their lifespan include the sit and reach (SR), functional movement screen (FMS), isometric mid-thigh pull (IMTP), and the countermovement jump (CMJ) tests. PURPOSE: This study aimed to assess SR, FMS, IMTP, and CMJ performance of youth athletes. METHODS: Youth athletes participating in a community-based strength and conditioning program (male; n=15, age=10.7±0.9, height=157.7±9.2cm, weight=53.2±14.3kg, female; n=6, age=10.2±0.4, height=146.9±8.7cm, weight=40.4±8.2kg) participated in this study. Each athlete performed a SR test, FMS test, two maximum effort IMTPs, and two maximum effort CMJs. Mann-Whitney U Tests (p\u3c0.05) were performed using sex as the grouping variable. RESULTS: Among the variables analyzed, significant differences were found in SR performance (p=0.026), FMS total score (p=0.018), IMTP peak force (p=0.006), and CMJ peak propulsive power (p=0.016) between sexes. The mean ± SD is reported in Table 1. CONCLUSION: Significant differences in anthropometric and physical fitness were observed between male and female youth athletes. While sex differences in anthropometrics have been well reported, the present study provides novel insights on physical fitness data measuring muscular strength and power for youth athletes. These findings can be utilized by coaches, physical educators, strength and conditioning professionals, and sport scientists to better understand the youth athlete population and contribute to their long-term development of athletic qualities

Robotic Surgery in Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery: A Review

Recent advancements in robotics technology have allowed more complex surgical procedures to be performed using minimally invasive approaches. In this article, we reviewed the role of robotic assistance in Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery. We highlight the advantages of robot-assisted surgery and its clinical application in this field

Exploring the feasibility of introducing triple artemisinin-based combination therapy in the malaria treatment policy in Vietnam

BACKGROUND: This study investigates the processes regarding changing malaria treatment policies in Vietnam. Moreover, it explores the feasibility of introducing triple artemisinin-based combination therapy (TACT) in Vietnam to support the national malaria control and elimination plan. METHODS: Data were collected via 12 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, combined with a review of policy documents. RESULTS: TACT is considered as a useful backup strategy in case future treatment failures with current artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) would occur. Moreover, TACT is also considered as a promising strategy to prevent the re-establishment of malaria. However, regulatory procedures and implementation timelines for TACT were expected to be lengthy. Therefore, strategies to engage national decision-makers, regulators, and suppliers should be initiated soon, stipulating the benefits of TACT deployment. In Vietnam, a procedure to apply for an import permit without registration that has previously been applied to the introduction of artesunate-pyronaridine was proposed to accelerate the introduction of TACT. Global-level support through the World Health Organization recommendations and prequalification were considered critical for supporting the introduction of TACT in Vietnam. CONCLUSIONS: Appropriate approach strategies and early stakeholder engagement will be needed to accelerate the introduction of TACT in Vietnam

Anti-tumor activity mediated by protein and peptide transduction of HIV viral protein R (Vpr)

Peptides that are capable of traversing the cell membrane, via protein transduction domains (PTDs), are attractive either directly as drugs or indirectly as carriers for the delivery of therapeutic molecules. One such PTD, a HIV-1 Tat derived peptide has successfully delivered a variety of "cargoes" including proteins, peptides and nucleic acids into cells. There also exists other naturally occurring membrane permeable peptides which have potential as PTDs. Specifically, one of the accessory proteins of HIV (viral protein R; i.e., Vpr), which is important in controlling viral pathogenesis, possesses cell transduction domain characteristics. Related to these characteristics, Vpr has also been demonstrated to induce cell cycle arrest and host/target cell apoptosis, suggesting a potential anticancer activity for this protein. In this report we assessed the ability of Vpr protein or peptides, with or without conjugation to a PTD, to mediate anti-cancer activity against several tumor cell lines. Specifically, several Vpr peptides spanning carboxy amino acids 65-83 induced significant (i.e., greater than 50%) in vitro growth inhibition/toxicity of murine B16.F10 melanoma cells. Likewise, in in vitro experiments with other tumor cell lines, conjugation of Vpr to the Tat derived PTD and transfection of this construct into cells enhanced the induction of in vitro apoptosis by this protein when compared to the effects of transfection of cells with unconjugated Vpr. These results underscore the potential for Vpr based reagents as well as PTDs to enhance anti-tumor activity, and warrants further examination of Vpr protein and derived peptides as potential therapeutic agents against progressive cell proliferative diseases such as cancer. ©2009 Landes Bioscience

The Molecular and Spatial Epidemiology of Typhoid Fever in Rural Cambodia.

Typhoid fever, caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi, is an endemic cause of febrile disease in Cambodia. The aim of this study was to better understand the epidemiology of pediatric typhoid fever in Cambodia. We accessed routine blood culture data from Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) in Siem Reap province between 2007 and 2014, and performed whole genome sequencing (WGS) on the isolated bacteria to characterize the S. Typhi population. The resulting phylogenetic information was combined with conventional epidemiological approaches to investigate the spatiotemporal distribution of S. Typhi and population-level risk factors for reported disease. During the study period, there were 262 cases of typhoid within a 100 km radius of AHC, with a median patient age of 8.2 years (IQR: 5.1-11.5 years). The majority of infections occurred during the rainy season, and commune incidences as high as 11.36/1,000 in children aged <15 years were observed over the study period. A population-based risk factor analysis found that access to water within households and increasing distance from Tonle Sap Lake were protective. Spatial mapping and WGS provided additional resolution for these findings, and confirmed that proximity to the lake was associated with discrete spatiotemporal disease clusters. We confirmed the dominance of MDR H58 S. Typhi in this population, and found substantial evidence of diversification (at least seven sublineages) within this single lineage. We conclude that there is a substantial burden of pediatric typhoid fever in rural communes in Cambodia. Our data provide a platform for additional population-based typhoid fever studies in this location, and suggest that this would be a suitable setting in which to introduce a school-based vaccination programme with Vi conjugate vaccines

Broadening horizons: the case for capturing function and the role of health informatics in its use

Background Human activity and the interaction between health conditions and activity is a critical part of understanding the overall function of individuals. The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) models function as all aspects of an individual’s interaction with the world, including organismal concepts such as individual body structures, functions, and pathologies, as well as the outcomes of the individual’s interaction with their environment, referred to as activity and participation. Function, particularly activity and participation outcomes, is an important indicator of health at both the level of an individual and the population level, as it is highly correlated with quality of life and a critical component of identifying resource needs. Since it reflects the cumulative impact of health conditions on individuals and is not disease specific, its use as a health indicator helps to address major barriers to holistic, patient-centered care that result from multiple, and often competing, disease specific interventions. While the need for better information on function has been widely endorsed, this has not translated into its routine incorporation into modern health systems. Purpose We present the importance of capturing information on activity as a core component of modern health systems and identify specific steps and analytic methods that can be used to make it more available to utilize in improving patient care. We identify challenges in the use of activity and participation information, such as a lack of consistent documentation and diversity of data specificity and representation across providers, health systems, and national surveys. We describe how activity and participation information can be more effectively captured, and how health informatics methodologies, including natural language processing (NLP), can enable automatically locating, extracting, and organizing this information on a large scale, supporting standardization and utilization with minimal additional provider burden. We examine the analytic requirements and potential challenges of capturing this information with informatics, and describe how data-driven techniques can combine with common standards and documentation practices to make activity and participation information standardized and accessible for improving patient care. Recommendations We recommend four specific actions to improve the capture and analysis of activity and participation information throughout the continuum of care: (1) make activity and participation annotation standards and datasets available to the broader research community; (2) define common research problems in automatically processing activity and participation information; (3) develop robust, machine-readable ontologies for function that describe the components of activity and participation information and their relationships; and (4) establish standards for how and when to document activity and participation status during clinical encounters. We further provide specific short-term goals to make significant progress in each of these areas within a reasonable time frame

A comprehensive study of mobility functioning information in clinical notes: Entity hierarchy, corpus annotation, and sequence labeling

Background Secondary use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has mostly focused on health conditions (diseases and drugs). Function is an important health indicator in addition to morbidity and mortality. Nevertheless, function has been overlooked in accessing patients’ health status. The World Health Organization (WHO)’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is considered the international standard for describing and coding function and health states. We pioneer the first comprehensive analysis and identification of functioning concepts in the Mobility domain of the ICF. Results Using physical therapy notes at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, we induced a hierarchical order of mobility-related entities including 5 entities types, 3 relations, 8 attributes, and 33 attribute values. Two domain experts manually curated a gold standard corpus of 14,281 nested entity mentions from 400 clinical notes. Inter-annotator agreement (IAA) of exact matching averaged 92.3 % F1-score on mention text spans, and 96.6 % Cohen’s kappa on attributes assignments. A high-performance Ensemble machine learning model for named entity recognition (NER) was trained and evaluated using the gold standard corpus. Average F1-score on exact entity matching of our Ensemble method (84.90 %) outperformed popular NER methods: Conditional Random Field (80.4 %), Recurrent Neural Network (81.82 %), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (82.33 %). Conclusions The results of this study show that mobility functioning information can be reliably captured from clinical notes once adequate resources are provided for sequence labeling methods. We expect that functioning concepts in other domains of the ICF can be identified in similar fashion

Hippocampal and cortical mechanisms at retrieval explain variability in episodic remembering in older adults

Age-related episodic memory decline is characterized by striking heterogeneity across individuals. Hippocampal pattern completion is a fundamental process supporting episodic memory. Yet, the degree to which this mechanism is impaired with age, and contributes to variability in episodic memory, remains unclear. We combine univariate and multivariate analyses of fMRI data from a large cohort of cognitively normal older adults (N=100) to measure hippocampal activity and cortical reinstatement during retrieval of trial-unique associations. Trial-wise analyses revealed that (a) hippocampal activity scaled with reinstatement strength, (b) cortical reinstatement partially mediated the relationship between hippocampal activity and associative retrieval, (c) older age weakened cortical reinstatement and its relationship to memory behaviour. Moreover, individual differences in the strength of hippocampal activity and cortical reinstatement explained unique variance in performance across multiple assays of episodic memory. These results indicate that fMRI indices of hippocampal pattern completion explain within-and across-individual memory variability in older adults

A novel ciprofloxacin-resistant subclade of H58 Salmonella Typhi is associated with fluoroquinolone treatment failure.

The interplay between bacterial antimicrobial susceptibility, phylogenetics and patient outcome is poorly understood. During a typhoid clinical treatment trial in Nepal, we observed several treatment failures and isolated highly fluoroquinolone-resistant Salmonella Typhi (S. Typhi). Seventy-eight S. Typhi isolates were genome sequenced and clinical observations, treatment failures and fever clearance times (FCTs) were stratified by lineage. Most fluoroquinolone-resistant S. Typhi belonged to a specific H58 subclade. Treatment failure with S. Typhi-H58 was significantly less frequent with ceftriaxone (3/31; 9.7%) than gatifloxacin (15/34; 44.1%)(Hazard Ratio 0.19, p=0.002). Further, for gatifloxacin-treated patients, those infected with fluoroquinolone-resistant organisms had significantly higher median FCTs (8.2 days) than those infected with susceptible (2.96) or intermediately resistant organisms (4.01)(pS. Typhi clade internationally, but there are no data regarding disease outcome with this organism. We report an emergent new subclade of S. Typhi-H58 that is associated with fluoroquinolone treatment failure