University of California, San Francisco

What my mother’s APOE result taught me about dementia risk

As genetic and biomarker-based dementia risk assessments become more widely used, the challenge is not only estimating risk, but returning it responsibly. Discussing my mother’s APOE genotype with her showed me how differently dementia risk can appear in a dataset, a family conve...

Examining the relationship between D3Cr muscle mass, physical performance, and functional limitation in postmenopausal women

BACKGROUND: The D3-creatine (D3Cr) dilution method provides a non-invasive and accurate assessment of muscle mass. Our objective was to examine the relationship between D3Cr muscle mass, objective measures of physical performance, and self-report physical function postmenopausal...

Randomized Quality Improvement Trials: An Overview and Proposed Framework for Ethical Oversight

Quality improvement (QI) is a routine part of health care delivery, but ineffective QI can have unintended consequences, waste resources, and paradoxically worsen health care quality. Randomized QI (RQI) trials use randomization to assign the QI intervention to some but not all p...

Leveragingthe Gut Microbiota for MechanisticallyInformed Therapeutics against Body-First Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract Although some symptoms of Parkinson’s disease can be pharmacologically alleviated, stopping disease progression is not currently possible. Motor impairment in Parkinson’s disease is associated with accumulation of aggregates of the protein α-synuclein (α-syn) in dopamine...

Importance of Global Health Opportunities in Residency Selection Among Otolaryngology Applicants

ABSTRACT Introduction Global health has become an increasing priority in medical training. In this cross‐sectional study, we seek to evaluate the importance of a residency program's global health opportunities on otolaryngology‐head and neck surgery (OHNS) applicants' residency s...

Study protocol for first national vasa previa perinatal registry

Vasa previa is a rare but potentially catastrophic obstetric condition characterized by unprotected fetal blood vessels over or adjacent to the internal cervical os. Although advances in prenatal ultrasound have dramatically improved neonatal survival through planned cesarean del...

Pendrin inhibitor PDSinh-C01 reverses salt-sensitive hypertension and metabolic acidosis in the 5/6 nephrectomy rat model

Abstract Pharmacological inhibition of the chloride-bicarbonate exchanger pendrin with PDSinh-C01 potentiates the diuretic action of furosemide in healthy mice. Because pendrin contributes to acid-base regulation and blood pressure control, it may represent an attractive therapeu...

Defining ‘psychedelic’

Humphry Osmond coined the term ‘psychedelic’ in 1956, conjoining ‘psyche’ for ‘soul’ and ‘delic’ for ‘to manifest’ or ‘illuminate’. Soul-illumination is a compound noun that describes a psychological state or process. Osmond intended for it to be a taxonomic noun—naming, not just...

Elevated Serum Renin Before Liver Transplantation Is Associated With Increased Intraoperative Vasopressor Requirements and Posttransplant Acute Kidney Injury

BACKGROUND: Derangements of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system may contribute to circulatory dysfunction in cirrhosis. We hypothesized that renin is elevated in patients undergoing liver transplantation (LT) and is associated with vasopressor requirements and postoperative...

A Tutorialon Automated Mass Spectral Analysis Using NucleoSpec for Compositional Assignment of Nucleic Acid-SilverComplexes and Nanoclusters

Abstract Nucleic acid–metal complexes, such as DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters (DNA-AgN) and Ag(I)-mediated DNA duplexes, show promise for applications ranging from biomedical imaging to bioelectronics and sensing. Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) is a powerf...

Regulation of DiverseEndogenous Metabolic and SignalingPathways by UDP-Glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs) Revealed by Metabolomicsof Knockout Mice

Abstract Uridine 5′-diphospho-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) enzymes play a critical role in hepatic and other metabolism of endogenous and exogenous small molecules. The addition of glucuronic acid via UGT increases the polarity and subsequent solubility of small molecules, helpi...

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...

Aligning protein-generative models to experimental fitness with ProteinDPO

Abstract Biological generative models can predict biological functions without task-specific training data but often under-perform specialized models. This is due to a fundamental ‘alignment gap’, where the rules learned during unsupervised training are not related to the functio...

Lessons learned from a Kaggle challenge for particle picking in cryo-electron tomography

Abstract The difficulty of particle picking in cryo-electron tomography remains a barrier to routine in situ structure determination. Machine learning is well-suited to overcome this bottleneck with efficient algorithms that generalize across molecular species. To spur new algori...

Changes in Outpatient and Telehealth Visits Among Undocumented Patients

Importance Anti-immigration policies in 2025 may influence outpatient care and telehealth among immigrant communities. Understanding visit patterns is essential for health systems leaders to prepare for shifts in health care use and ensure preventive care. Objective To compare ou...

Genome folding and nuclear speckles converge to orchestrate fibroblast activation

Fibroblasts adopt diverse cell states in response to inductive cues to maintain tissue homeostasis. We leveraged this cell-state plasticity to define how genome organization contributes to changes in cellular identity. We show that TGF-β reconfigures topologically associating dom...

Cofactor-Free Tau FilamentsAre Dynamic and UndergoStructural Evolution Driven by Thermodynamic Control

Abstract Tau filaments are a hallmark of neurodegenerative tauopathies, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Structural studies have revealed that patient-derived tau fibrils adopt distinct folds in different tauopathies; however, it is unclear what forces guide this process. To exp...

A Phase II Trial of Pembrolizumab plus Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor in Advanced Biliary Cancer

PURPOSE: Immune checkpoint inhibitors have limited activity as monotherapy in biliary cancers. Granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) is a pleiotropic immune cell growth factor which achieved prolonged survival when combined with ipilimumab in melanoma. We cond...

Spatial Regulation of Preameloblast Development in Response to Distal Mouse Incisor Injury

Enamel, the outermost mineralized tissue of the tooth, is produced by specialized dental epithelial cells called ameloblasts. Unlike human enamel, which lacks regenerative capacity, the mouse incisor grows throughout life, driven by adult stem cells residing in the labial cervica...

The choice-wide behavioral association study: data-driven identification of interpretable behavioral components

Behavior contains rich structure across many timescales, but there is a dearth of methods to identify relevant components, especially over the longer periods required for learning and decision-making. Inspired by the goals and techniques of genome-wide association studies, we pre...