Aural Foreign Bodies in Children

Background: Pediatric aural foreign bodies (FB) are relative medical emergencies. Primary care physicians, pediatricians, and otorhinolaryngologists commonly encounter them. Objective: The objective was to carry out a retrospective analysis of pediatric aural FB managed in otorhinolaryngology department of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, Nigeria. Materials and Methods: A total of 157 children with aural FB managed at the Department of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, Nigeria, from January 2015 to December 2018 were reviewed with regard to the type of FB, location, in the ear, methods of removal,  complications, age, and sex. Results: Of the 157 children, 54.1% were males and 45.9% females. Male: female ratio was 1.2:1. Ninety‑five (60.5%) were below the age of 5 years, 46 (29.3%) were 6–10 years of age, and 16 (10.2%) were in the age group of 11–15 years. The most common objects were beads, papers, and cotton. Most presentations (86%) were within 24 h. Seven patients (4.5%) required surgical removal under general anesthesia. Most of the patients (92.4%) had no complications. Morbidities include bleeding from the ear canal 6 (3.8%), canal abrasions/lacerations 4 (2.5%), and tympanic membrane perforations 2 (1.3%). Conclusion: Aural FBs are common conditions in children in our environment. Most of these can be successfully removed by skillful personnel,  adequate immobilization, and proper instrumentation. Pediatricians, family physicians, and other health workers should not hesitate to refer to otorhinolaryngologists, uncooperative/apprehensive children, those with a history of attempted removal by their parents or caregivers, or FB whose contour, composition and position in the canal cannot be fully assessed. Keywords: Aural, children, foreign bodie

The neuroimmunology of chronic pain: from rodents to humans

Chronic pain, encompassing conditions, such as low back pain, arthritis, persistent post-surgical pain, fibromyalgia, and neuropathic pain disorders, is highly prevalent but remains poorly treated. The vast majority of therapeutics are directed solely at neurons, despite the fact that signaling between immune cells, glia, and neurons is now recognized as indispensable for the initiation and maintenance of chronic pain. This review highlights recent advances in understanding fundamental neuroimmune signaling mechanisms and novel therapeutic targets in rodent models of chronic pain. We further discuss new technological developments to study, diagnose, and quantify neuroimmune contributions to chronic pain in patient populations.Peter M. Grace, Vivianne L. Tawfik, Camilla I. Svensson, Michael D. Burton, Marco L. Loggia and Mark R. Hutchinso

Mapping of poverty and likely zoonoses hotspots

The objective of this report is to present data and expert knowledge on poverty and zoonoses hotspots to inform prioritisation of study areas on the transmission of disease in emerging livestock systems in the developing world, where prevention of zoonotic disease might bring greatest benefit to poor people

Efeito depressor do sistema nervoso central (SNC) do extrato orgânico de Pfaffia glomerata Spreng. (Amaranthaceae)

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Barriers to ecological restoration in Europe: expert perspectives

Ecological restoration is key to counteracting anthropogenic degradation of biodiversity and to reducing disaster risk. However, there is limited knowledge of barriers hindering the wider implementation of restoration practices, despite high-level political priority to halt the loss of biodiversity. In Europe, progress on ecological restoration has been slow and insufficient to meet international agreements and comply with European Union Nature Directives. We assessed European restoration experts' perceptions on barriers to restoration in Europe, and their relative importance, through a multiple expert consultation using a Delphi process. We found that experts share a common multi-dimensional concept of ecological restoration. Experts identified a large number of barriers (33) to the advancement of ecological restoration in Europe. Major barriers pertained to the socio-economic, not the environmental, domain. The three most important being insufficient funding, conflicting interests among different stakeholders, and low political priority given to restoration. Our results emphasize the need to increase political commitment at all levels, comply with existing nature laws, and optimize the use of financial resources by increasing funds for ecological restoration and eradicate environmentally harmful subsidies. The experts also call for the integration of ecological restoration into land-use planning and facilitating stakeholders' collaboration. Our study identifies key barriers, discusses ways to overcome the main barriers to ER in Europe, and contributes knowledge to support the implementation of the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, and the EU 2030 Restoration Plan in particular. © 2021 The Authors. Restoration Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. on behalf of Society for Ecological Restoration.We are particularly thankful to experts participating in the Delphi process for their generosity in sharing their time and knowledge, and the European Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SERE), Réseau d'Échanges et de Valorisation en Écologie de la Restauration (REVER), Finnish Board on Ecological Restoration (FBER), Working Group on Ecological Restoration of the Spanish Association for Terrestrial Ecology (ER-AEET), Dutch Knowledge Network for Restoration and Management of Nature (OBN), German Restoration Network (GRN), UK Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM), Portuguese Network of Ecological Restoration (RPRE), Iberian Center for River Restoration (CIREF), and European Federation of Soil Bioengineering (EFIB) for suggesting candidates to the consulting process. We appreciate the support given by BiodivERsA (project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 ERA-NET COFUND scheme), and the EKLIPSE project (European Union Horizon 2020 grant agreement 690474), and particularly by Juliette C. Young. JCS research is financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Education and Universities and European Regional Development Funds (FEDER; project COSTERA, RTI2018-095954-B-I00). PMRG research is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through FCT Investigator Program grant number IF/00059/2015, and Centro de Estudos Florestais is supported by FCT grants UID/AGR/00239/2019 and UIDB/00239/2020

Dynamic Assessment of Baroreflex Control of Heart Rate During Induction of Propofol Anesthesia Using a Point Process Method

In this article, we present a point process method to assess dynamic baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) by estimating the baroreflex gain as focal component of a simplified closed-loop model of the cardiovascular system. Specifically, an inverse Gaussian probability distribution is used to model the heartbeat interval, whereas the instantaneous mean is identified by linear and bilinear bivariate regressions on both the previous R−R intervals (RR) and blood pressure (BP) beat-to-beat measures. The instantaneous baroreflex gain is estimated as the feedback branch of the loop with a point-process filter, while the RRBP feedforward transfer function representing heart contractility and vasculature effects is simultaneously estimated by a recursive least-squares filter. These two closed-loop gains provide a direct assessment of baroreflex control of heart rate (HR). In addition, the dynamic coherence, cross bispectrum, and their power ratio can also be estimated. All statistical indices provide a valuable quantitative assessment of the interaction between heartbeat dynamics and hemodynamics. To illustrate the application, we have applied the proposed point process model to experimental recordings from 11 healthy subjects in order to monitor cardiovascular regulation under propofol anesthesia. We present quantitative results during transient periods, as well as statistical analyses on steady-state epochs before and after propofol administration. Our findings validate the ability of the algorithm to provide a reliable and fast-tracking assessment of BRS, and show a clear overall reduction in baroreflex gain from the baseline period to the start of propofol anesthesia, confirming that instantaneous evaluation of arterial baroreflex control of HR may yield important implications in clinical practice, particularly during anesthesia and in postoperative care.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-HL084502)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant K25-NS05758)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant DP2- OD006454)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32NS048005)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32NS048005)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-DA015644)Massachusetts General Hospital (Clinical Research Center, UL1 Grant RR025758

Erratum: "A Gravitational-wave Measurement of the Hubble Constant Following the Second Observing Run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo" (2021, ApJ, 909, 218)

[no abstract available

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe