University of Washington

In search of social belonging: a qualitative study of drivers of alcohol use and barriers to alcohol reduction among pregnant women in South Africa

Abstract Background Alcohol use during pregnancy remains a major public health concern in South Africa, particularly in communities with entrenched historical, social, and structural drivers of harmful drinking. Saldanha Bay, a peri-urban fishing community in the Western Cape, ha...

Multi-mode design for studying cyber aggression in texts, Facebook and Twitter messages among middle school youth

With the explosion of the internet, cyber aggression has become one of the fastest growing forms of interpersonal violence. Methods used to understand aggressive communications content have been limited primarily to surveys. Here, we present multiple methods - panel surveys, elec...

Solvation thermodynamics revisited

Most chemical and biochemical reactions occur in solution; however, many details of the thermodynamics of solvation are not well understood, especially with regard to the role of energy and entropy in the solvation process. Currently, a prevailing view in the field is that the so...

Prenatal exposure to wildfire fine particulate matter and fetal growth outcomes in the United States: Findings from the ECHO Cohort

Background: Increasing exposure to wildfire fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) may pose unique risks to fetal development. We assessed associations between prenatal wildfire PM 2.5 exposure and fetal growth outcomes, including birth weight at term, birth weight for gestational age...

Perceptions of Incidental Findings on Lung Cancer Screening Exams: A National Survey of Primary Care Clinicians and Radiologists

RATIONALE: Unlike other common cancer screenings, annual lung cancer screening often identifies a spectrum of incidental findings unrelated to lung cancer. While these findings could be actionable, how to best communicate and manage them can be a challenge, often falling upon pri...

Revised dust content and grain size of exposed water ice at the North Pole of Mars

Abstract Near the north pole of Mars, dusty water ice is exposed at the surface within the residual polar cap and in isolated high-latitude deposits. Its optical properties contain information about surface processes and climate evolution. However, the physical properties of mart...

Anatomy-aware, label-informed approach improves image registration for challenging datasets

Abstract Image registration-based volumetric morphometrics have emerged as a valuable method for identifying subtle morphological differences in neuroimaging and other biomedical images. However, accurate registration out-of-the-box remains challenging when overt morphological ph...

Maximum Allowable Contrast Dose and Risk of Acute Kidney Injury After Coronary Procedures

BACKGROUND: Recent studies have questioned whether iodinated contrast is causally related to acute kidney injury (AKI). AIM: We pursed a contemporary analysis to determine the impact of contrast dose on AKI following coronary procedures in an era of lower contrast doses and less...

The distribution of fitness effects of nonsynonymous mutations varies phylogenetically across animals

The distribution of fitness effects (DFE) describes the selection coefficients of newly arising mutations and fundamentally influences population genetic processes. However, the extent and mechanisms of differences in the DFE for non-synonymous mutations have not been systematica...

Deep Learning to Infer Ocean Dynamics

Inferring ocean dynamics remains challenging due to the complexity of multiscale nonlinear interactions, sparsity of observations, and limitations of numerical models. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful data-driven framework that exploits nonlinear dependencies across h...

AI at the Bedside: An Argument for a Training Wheels Approach

Bedside use of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms is increasingly common. Busy clinicians may welcome these generative AI (Gen AI) tools, which have the potential to streamline many time-consuming tasks and aid in patient care. Trainees may find them useful to quickly evaluat...

Integration of proteomic aging clocks in a phase 2a clinical trial supports simultaneous geroprotective assessment

Abstract Drugs for aging-related diseases may modulate aging itself, but standard clinical trial designs cannot detect such effects. Aging clocks could close this gap, but epigenetic models often yield inconsistent, hard-to-interpret results. In contrast, proteomic clocks, by tra...

Single‐cell RNA sequencing of peripheral blood defines two immunological subtypes of Sjögren's disease distinguished by anti‐SSA antibodies and aberrant B cell populations

OBJECTIVES: Sjögren's disease (SjD) is a heterogeneous autoimmune disorder characterized by substantial clinical and molecular diversity. This heterogeneity raises key questions regarding the existence of distinct pathogenic mechanisms underlying disease subtypes. The objective o...

Copper-Catalyzed Cross-Nucleophile Coupling of Organoboranes

Abstract Metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions are an essential tool for carbon–carbon bond formation and generally involve one electrophilic and one nucleophilic coupling partner. In the wake of these traditional cross-coupling reactions, cross-electrophile coupling has emerg...

Specificity, frequency, and phenotype of citrullinated-specific T cells vary with disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis

In rheumatoid arthritis (RA), CD4 + T cells specific for citrullinated antigens (cit-antigens) are key drivers of disease, but knowledge about epitopes and phenotypes remains limited. We characterized the frequency and phenotype of cit-specific CD4 + T cells in peripheral blood u...

Radiology considerations for the PREMIUM study: a multicenter randomized controlled trial of abbreviated MRI versus ultrasound for liver cancer screening in cirrhosis

Abstract This paper describes the rationale and radiology considerations in the implementation of the Preventing Liver Cancer Mortality through Imaging with Ultrasound versus MRI (PREMIUM) study. PREMIUM is a multicenter, randomized controlled trial sponsored by the Department of...

Reading Between the Lines: A Scoping Review of Large Language Models in Conversational Data Analysis

Transformer-based large language models are becoming increasingly popular in supporting qualitative analysis, but their applications and validation are often poorly characterized. This scoping review followed PRISMA-ScR rules to understand how such models are used in the analysis...

Late Miocene capybara in the Atacama Desert reveals a wetter climate and a transcontinental dispersal pathway

Abstract We report the oldest record of a capybara (Caviidae: Hydrochoerinae) in Chile, dated at ca. 8.8 Ma, which along with paleobotanical proxy records, indicates a markedly wetter late Miocene Atacama Desert. Today hyperarid, the Atacama contrasts sharply with the semiaquatic...

Elements on the move: How ungulate migration expands Alpine biogeochemical footprints

Through depositing waste products, animals influence the spatial distribution of elements across landscapes. Yet the relationship between animal movement and element distribution remains poorly characterized. We developed a spatially explicit agent-based model to test how migrato...

Best Case/Worst Case: A Multisite Randomized Trial of Scenario Planning for Patients With Late‐Stage Kidney Disease

BACKGROUND: Best Case/Worst Case (BC/WC) is a communication tool to support nephrologists and older adults with advanced chronic kidney disease with decisions about dialysis. We compared the effectiveness of training nephrologists to use BC/WC versus usual care on receipt of pall...