University of Massachusetts Boston

Unravelling the Itch: Cross‐Sectional Analysis of Pruritus Patterns in the PicnicHealth Primary Biliary Cholangitis Registry

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Pruritus in primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) worsens patients' health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP), a biomarker of PBC activity, has an unclear relationship with pruritus severity. METHODS: This retrospective, cross-section...

A Scoping Review of Integrated Care Models for Managing Depression in Older Adults

Background: Depression is a major health issue among older adults and is frequently accompanied by chronic physical conditions. Conventional care of depression in older adults is delivered through primary care settings and often fails to address the complex interactions between m...

Sex and age impact the developmental trajectory of perineuronal net number in the rat dorsal hippocampus

Abstract Background As there has been increased focus on sex differences in neuroscience research, perineuronal nets have come forward as a possible piece in the sex difference puzzle. There are sex differences in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD...

Sex and Self-reported Race: Factors Associated with Anal Mucosal Melanoma and Anal Mucosal Pigmentation?

Anal canal melanoma (ACM) is a rare, aggressive malignancy with an ominous prognosis. However, its associated factors are largely unknown. Therefore, we investigated potential independent associations of sex and self-reported race with ACM and physiological anal canal pigmentatio...

Estuarine benthic diversity declines with temperature across a tropical–temperate gradient

Estuarine benthic sediments are important habitats that support ecosystem health and productivity, but the drivers of large‐scale patterns in benthic diversity are not well documented. Using 18S amplicon sequencing of 425 sediment DNA samples from estuaries spanning 20° of latitu...

A data-driven single substitution to overcome bias from conventional single substitution for LOD missingness in covariates in least squares regression

The Limit of Detection (LOD) is the threshold below which a measurement is considered too low to be reliably quantified. Even though advanced statistical methods exist for dealing with the values below the LOD, simple approaches are still frequently used in real-world settings. C...

Artificial intelligence-enabled analysis of electron micrographs to assess mitochondrial morphology in triple-negative breast cancer

Advancements in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) have enabled in-depth studies of biological specimens, offering new avenues to large-scale imaging experiments with subcellular resolution. Mitochondrial morphology is of growing interest in cancer biology due to its crucial...

Economic (In)security and Living Arrangements in Later Life: Heterogeneity by Race-Ethnicity

Changes in economic security and living arrangements among the diverse, aging U.S. population are not experienced uniformly. Using Health and Retirement Study data linked to the Elder Index TM —an income measure of older adult needs—we estimated discrete-time competing risks mode...

Proteomic analysis of human chronic traumatic encephalopathy brain implicates proteasome and ribosome dysfunction in disease severity

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease that occurs in individuals with repeated head impacts (RHI) exposure, including contact sport athletes, military personnel, and domestic abuse victims. Despite growing recognition of CTE, the molecular mechanis...

Room-temperature multiferroicity in all–van der Waals heterostructures

Multiferroics host simultaneous and coupled ferroic orders, allowing disparate external stimuli to induce abrupt transformations in their structures and properties. Creating multiferroicity in two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) platforms would add the elements of strong qua...

Suffering, Trauma, and Relational Integration: Re-Envisioning Spiritual Care and Psychoanalysis in a Decolonial Age

Spiritual care is summoned by suffering—by ‘wounds’ that are psychological, relational, spiritual, embodied, and political at once. As disciplines continue to be entrenched and siloed amidst the growing sociopolitical tensions and global crises in a decolonial age, what is at sta...

Safety and Tolerability of Chronic Carvedilol in Pediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy: A Report from the Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry

Long-term studies on safety of beta-blockers in pediatric heart failure (HF) are scant. We describe the safety profile, dose ranges, and tolerability of carvedilol in pediatric dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). The Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry (PCMR) was used to identify patient...

Manipulation of biological systems by self-defecting and foreign agents

Biological systems maintain structure and function through hierarchical control, redundancy and surveillance across scales. These same features create leverage points for agents that establish a persistent presence in host systems, including foreign agents such as pathogens, para...