Duke University

Tramadol Co‐Administration with Oxycodone or Hydrocodone Increases Opioid Burden without Improving Postoperative Pain Control

Tramadol is frequently co-prescribed with oxycodone or hydrocodone after surgery under the assumption that its dual mechanism of action provides an opioid-sparing benefit. However, evidence supporting this practice is limited and inconsistent. We conducted a secondary analysis of...

Efficient nitrogen management as a win-win strategy for air quality, health, and climate

Reactive nitrogen (Nr) management links climate policy, air quality and food production, yet its combined impacts remain poorly quantified. Here, we conduct ensemble simulations with two global climate models, Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Community Earth System...

The Technology Dependence Index (TDI): Development and Validation in Neonatal and Pediatric Populations

The survival of infants and children with complex medical conditions continues to increase, underscoring the need to quantify technology dependence more effectively. Existing measures emphasize mortality risk and fail to capture the burden of ongoing technological support. To add...

Acoustic virtual walls enable open, scalable, and programmable microfluidics

Microfluidic platforms are widely used across biomedical research, chemical synthesis, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and materials science for precisely manipulating small volumes of fluids and suspended particles. However, conventional systems rely on narrow physical ch...

Authentic and Sustained Family Partnership in Neonatal and Pediatric Research

Improving the health and well-being of children requires sustained partnerships with parents, community members, advocates, and researchers to identify and answer high-impact research questions. Meaningful engagement with families and communities in the design, conduct, and disse...

Data-driven prediction of fifteen-year all-cause mortality among 2.3 million individuals in the VA

ABSTRACT We present a data-driven framework to predict 15-year all-cause mortality using outpatient administrative records for 2.3 million Veterans in the largest integrated U.S. healthcare system. Rather than relying on predefined clinical phenotypes, we used the 1,000 most comm...

Commensal bacteria inhibit viral infections via a tryptophan metabolite

Clinical outcomes following viral exposures exhibit substantial interindividual variability. Although developing evidence suggests commensal bacteria modulate viral infections, the specific bacteria and mechanisms remain underexplored. Here, we define a pathway by which viral inf...

Approximately optimal search on a higher-dimensional sliding puzzle

Abstract Higher-dimensional sliding puzzles are constructed on the vertices of a d -dimensional hypercube, where $$2^d-l$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:mi>d</mml:mi> </mml:msup> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mi>...

ICD ‐10‐ CM ‐Based Algorithms to Identify Bacteremia Incorporating Pathogen‐Specific Codes: A Validation Study

ABSTRACT Purpose Studying patients with bacteremia in real‐world data often requires using microbiologic data to confirm bacterial growth and species. When microbiologic data are unavailable, pathogen‐specific diagnostic codes may be used to classify the bacteremia type. We devel...

Genomic catalogue of giant viruses reveals expanded diversity and functional potential

Nucleocytoplasmic large DNA and Mirusviricota viruses exhibit taxonomic richness which continually expands due to metagenomic sequencing. Here we curate a database of giant virus metagenome-assembled genomes (GVMAGs V2), comprising 8,508 species-level representatives from 18,727...

Cranio-orbital craniotomy via an eyebrow incision for resection of anterior clinoid and tuberculum sella meningiomas

Abstract Background Anterior clinoid meningiomas (ACM) and tuberculum sella meningiomas (TSM) are anterior skull base tumors that commonly cause visual deterioration. The supraorbital keyhole approach may be used to resect these tumors but is limited by restricted intraoperative...

Longitudinal changes in gut microbiota across reproductive states in wild baboons

Background: In humans and other mammals, female reproduction is linked to extensive changes in physiology, immunity, hormones, and behavior. These changes likely shape, and may be shaped by, the composition of gut microbial communities. Characterizing the dynamics of gut microbia...

Physics-informed design of drug-excipient nanoparticles via free energy calculation and yoked deep learning

The discovery of self-assembling molecular systems is often constrained by the high computational cost of physics-based simulations and the limited generalizability of data-driven models trained on experimental datasets. This limits our ability to efficiently navigate massive des...

Illegal firearms markets: Transaction patterns, evolving sources, and importance in criminal misuse

In the United States, the legal status of the 30 to 40 million annual firearms transactions is defined by state and federal regulations. These regulations primarily aim to reduce criminal misuse while preserving access for the large majority of adults who lack a serious criminal...

Natural Killer Cell Phenotypic Changes and Activating Receptor Loss Posttrauma

BACKGROUND: Trauma induces significant physiological changes that can lead to substantial morbidity and mortality. Many of these changes alter immune homeostasis, which underlies seemingly disparate syndromes of systemic inflammation and global immune suppression, the causes of w...

A spatially discretized convolutional neural mass model for studying meso-scale spatio-temporal transformations in the rat hippocampus

The brain operates across multiple spatial and temporal scales, necessitating computationally efficient models that link micro-scale mechanisms to meso- and macro-scale dynamics. Here, we introduce a novel convolutional neural mass model (CNMM) that computes the meso-scale activi...

Suzetrigine as Part of Multimodal Therapy Enables Opioid-Free Recovery after Laparoscopic or Arthroscopic Procedures

Suzetrigine, a non-opioid voltage-gated sodium channel 1.8 (Na V 1.8) pain signal inhibitor with no addiction potential, is approved in the USA for moderate-to-severe acute pain. In this phase 4, single-arm study, suzetrigine (100 mg preoperatively, then 50 mg every 12 h) was adm...

Longitudinal evaluation of sleep disturbances in survivors of childhood cancer: a report from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study

Abstract Purpose The current study examines longitudinal changes in sleep disturbances and the risks they pose for new-onset health conditions in survivors of childhood cancer. Methods Five-year survivors ( N = 1081; median [range] age 50.0 [45.2–55.0] years) and siblings ( N = 2...

Using insertable cardiac monitors to test determinants of heart rate and activity in captive baboons

Insertable cardiac monitors (ICMs) provide fine-grained, continuous data on cardiac activity. These data have great potential to reveal individual physiology, energetics, and stress responses, with implications for animal health, cognition, welfare, and conservation. However, the...

LLM-based cell type annotation harmonization across single-cell studies using GCTHarmony

A major challenge in integrating previously analyzed single-cell RNA-seq studies is the inconsistency of cell type annotations. To address this, we developed GCTHarmony, an LLM-based method for harmonizing cell type annotations across single-cell studies. Utilizing OpenAI's text...