University of Pennsylvania

Total-body [11C]carfentanil PET: Liver-brain axis in methadone vs. buprenorphine treatment

Abstract Purpose To examine the relationship between brain mu opioid receptor (MOR) availability and liver activity in opioid use disorder (OUD) patients treated with methadone (MET) or buprenorphine (BUP). Methods 10 OUD patients, 5 treated with MET and 5 with BUP, as well as 13...

Single-Molecule Imaging Reveals ERK-Dependent Spatial Translation in Cardiomyocytes

BACKGROUND: Translational control of gene expression is crucial in cardiomyocytes, particularly in response to hypertrophic stimuli. The ERK (extracellular signal-regulated kinase) pathway plays a key role in inducing cardiac hypertrophy and regulating specific protein translatio...

Assessing the need for reproductive genetic counseling among adults with cystic fibrosis

Abstract Background Reproductive health has become an increasingly important focus for people with cystic fibrosis (CF), and guidelines have recommended routine inclusion of genetic counselors on care teams to address questions regarding infertility, pregnancy planning, prenatal...

Engineering a biomimetic multiphasic suture anchor system for enhanced rotator cuff enthesis regeneration

Abstract Conventional suture anchor methods in rotator cuff repair often fail to replicate the native tendon-to-bone interface, leading to re-tears due to stress concentrations and poor biological integration at anchor sites. To address these challenges, we engineered a biomimeti...

Selecting the number of components in PCA via random signflips

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a foundational tool in modern data analysis, and a crucial step in PCA is selecting the number of components to keep. However, classical selection methods (e.g., scree plots, parallel analysis, etc.) lack statistical guarantees in the increas...

Longitudinal weighted and trimmed treatment effects with flip interventions

Weighting and trimming are popular methods for addressing positivity violations in causal inference. While well-studied with single-timepoint data, standard methods do not easily generalize to longitudinal data and remain vulnerable to time-varying positivity violations. We exten...

Improved specificity of a probe-based real-time PCR for the detection of Dirofilaria immitis in canine blood

Abstract Background Dirofilaria immitis is a vector-borne filarioid nematode distributed worldwide and endemic across most of North America. In dogs, it is considered the most important parasite and a known cause of acquired cardiomyopathy. Clinically, canine heartworm disease ca...

Restoration of oscillatory shear stress in humans activates an endothelial protective genetic program and prevents DVT

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in critically ill patients. DVT clots typically form in the sinus of the deep venous valves and are strongly associated with immobility and reduced venous flow. Physical activity alters venous blood flow, gene...

A nose-to-brain circuit underlies anxiety regulation by nasal afferent frequency in mice

Slow nasal breathing alleviates negative moods, but the precise nose-to-limbic pathways and their causal contributions remain unclear. Here, we identify a pathway in mice from olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) in the nasal cavity to mitral cells in the olfactory bulb (OB), then to...

Corticolimbic structure-function coupling is sensitive to childhood adversity and buffers adversity-related symptoms during development

Abstract Childhood adversity is a potent predictor of mental health problems across the lifespan, and a rich cross-species literature implicates stress-sensitive corticolimbic circuits in adversity-related psychopathology. Structure-function coupling (SFC) is a promising multimod...

Long-Term Fatigue After Treatment for Breast Cancer

Importance Patients with breast cancer (BC) may have long-term fatigue after treatment, which is associated with reduced quality of life. Objective To identify cardiac, psychological, and cancer treatment factors associated with fatigue before and 24 months after BC treatment. De...

Conformal network link prediction with false discovery rate control under unstructured missingness

We propose a new method for predicting multiple missing links in partially observed networks while controlling the false discovery rate (FDR), a largely unresolved challenge in network analysis. The main difficulty lies in handling complex dependencies and unknown missing pattern...

Conceptual Shift inOur Understanding of DegenerateRadical Spin Systems: Spin-Rotation Coupling Turned on Its Head

Abstract For most chemists, Kramers’ degeneracy refers to the fact that for any radical system, every potential energy surface is at least doubly degenerate (with spin up and spin down, time-reversed solutions) for all nuclear positions X. Yet, as is well-known to the community o...

Climate adaptation as evolvability

Abstract Standard approaches to climate adaptation, commonly understood as the protection of infrastructure, social systems, and ecosystems from adverse climate impacts, are too closely tied to the biological concept of adaptation and the ecological notion of stability . Instead,...

Hemodynamic Effects of Topical Oxymetazoline During Pediatric Flexible Bronchoscopy

BACKGROUND: Bleeding is a well-recognized complication in flexible bronchoscopy, especially with advanced procedures. Oxymetazoline is a topical vasoconstrictor often used to reduce or treat bleeding in the nares and airways. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on...

Effectiveness of a Personalized Robot-Assisted Trunk and Lower Limb Rehabilitation in Patients with Chronic Stroke

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinical effectiveness of a newly developed trunk-lower limb rehabilitation robot in patients with chronic stroke. DESIGN: Randomized controlled trial conducted at a rehabilitation center. Forty patients with chronic stroke (mean age 59.48±7.63 years...

A Recurrent Tympanicum Paraganglioma With a SDHD Pathogenic Variant: First Reported Case

ABSTRACT Objective The aim of this study is to describe a clinical case of a SDHD germline mutation associated tympanic paraganglioma (TPGL). Patients A female patient seen in the otology clinic at a tertiary care center with a diagnosis of tympanic paraganglioma and significant...

A multicenter pilot study of nivolumab with drug-eluting bead transarterial chemoembolization in patients with liver-limited hepatocellular carcinoma

Background Drug-eluting bead transarterial chemoembolization (deb-TACE) is a standard for liver-limited, locally advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and may enhance response to immune checkpoint inhibition through tumor immune microenvironment modulation. We evaluated nivolum...

Uncertainty-inspired open-set model for identifying infantile fundus abnormalities

Accurate and safe identification of infantile fundus abnormalities is critical for large-scale screening, yet remains challenging because of heterogeneous disease presentations and overconfident predictions by conventional artificial intelligence (AI) models. In this study, we ai...

Mining of NovelHuman DPP-IV-Targeting Tripeptidesthrough Multicomputational Screening and In Vitro Validation for DiabetesTherapy

Abstract Inhibition of human dipeptidyl peptidase IV (hDPP-IV) is considered an effective strategy in the management of type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, the lack of high-throughput screening approaches and the high cost of experimental evaluation have limited the discovery of pept...