Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Feasibility of an “Alien Language” Task for Prosody Assessment in Children With Down Syndrome

Background: Prosodic impairments are reported in children with Down syndrome (DS), yet current assessment tools often impose cognitive and linguistic demands that potentially obscure true prosodic ability. There is a need for accessible, low–verbal-load tasks to evaluate prosody...

Conference Goals And Learning Preferences Among Attendees at A National Surgical Meeting

Objective This study evaluated differences in conference goals and preferred learning modalities across demographic groups at a national surgical conference. Design An optional online survey collected demographic information (gender, practice type, role, years in independent prac...

Vanderbilt Integrated Community TMS for Opioid Recovery (VICTORY): Study protocol for a randomized, controlled trial of non-invasive brain stimulation to reduce craving in people with opioid use disorder

Background Individuals receiving buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) remain at high risk for treatment discontinuation and return to opioid use. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has shown efficacy in reducing craving and substance use in other substance u...

FOG1

Currently, there is no sensitive and specific diagnostic immunohistochemistry (IHC) marker to identify gastric and esophageal adenocarcinomas (GEAs). CDX2 is the most widely used tumor marker to determine gastrointestinal (GI) origin and has been shown to be an excellent marker f...

Why Metrics Matter in Thyroid Eye Disease

Importance Advances in the understanding of the pathophysiology of thyroid eye disease (TED) provide an opportunity to use novel, targeted therapeutic agents. However, our capacity to assess the efficacy and indications for the new agents is potentially limited by the clinical me...

Facial Phenotypic Pattern in Severe Congenital Neutropenia Type 4 (G6PC3 Deficiency): Description and Clinical Value

Severe congenital neutropenia type 4 (SCN4) is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in the third subunit of the enzyme glucose-6-phosphatase (G6PC3). Patients with mutations in G6PC3 suffer from congenital neutropenia and additional complex developmental abnormalit...

Beyond the Document: A Single‐Center Qualitative Study of Survivorship Care Plan Barriers and Opportunities Across Pediatric Oncology Stakeholders

BACKGROUND: Survivorship care plans (SCPs) summarize cancer treatment and guide risk-based follow-up for cancer survivors, yet remain difficult to create, share, and use. Stakeholder perspectives are needed to inform usable approaches. OBJECTIVE: To characterize how SCPs are crea...

Clostridioides difficile couples responses to host nutritional immunity and a commensal-derived antibiotic to enable growth in the gut

The Gram-positive opportunistic pathogen Clostridioides difficile colonizes the gut by adapting to an array of threats from the host and the microbiome. A potential threat from the microbiome is the antimicrobial peptide bacitracin, which is produced by the commensal Bacillus lic...

Artifact Correction of Clinical Diffusion Weighted Imaging in Acute Ischemic Stroke

ABSTRACT Background Susceptibility‐induced geometric distortions and non‐physiologic hyperintensities confound acute ischemic stroke diagnosis on diffusion weighted imaging (DWI). Reverse phase‐encoded imaging needed for artifact correction is rarely acquired acutely. Structural...

Household catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure and the socioeconomic burden of paediatric surgery: a cross-sectional study at the highest tertiary hospital in Zambia

Globally, about 81 million people per year are driven to financial catastrophe from the costs of surgery and other related nonmedical costs, with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) bearing the greatest burden. This study determined the catastrophic out-of-pocket (OOP) healt...

Ibrutinib therapy results in atrial fibrillation through modulation of the Src-Erk1/2 pathway

The Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor ibrutinib has revolutionized treatment for B-cell malignancies but increases the incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF) compared to conventional chemotherapy. The downstream signaling pathways through which ibrutinib leads to AF are unk...

Factors Associated With Receipt of Adjuvant Radiation in Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer

ABSTRACT Background Neoadjuvant radiotherapy (RT) has been the standard of care for locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) for over two decades. Adjuvant RT use in LARC represents a deviation from standard care and warrants further investigation. Objectives To identify factors ass...

Human-inherited RORγT deficiency encompasses genetic heterogeneity, T cell deficiency, and clinical homogeneity

Abstract We previously reported inherited RORγT deficiency in seven patients from three ancestries (Chilean, Palestinian, Saudi Arabian) with mycobacterial disease and chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis (CMC). We report here five additional patients from different ancestries (Afgh...

A Multicenter Prospective, Observational Study of Observation Versus Colectomy in Recurrent Diverticulitis

BACKGROUND: Understanding changes in quality of life that occur with colectomy is critical to decision-making in management of recurrent diverticulitis. We hypothesized that patients choosing colectomy at surgical consultation would report better disease-specific quality of life...

Characterization of Regioisomeric Conjugates Arising from Pixantrone at AP Sites in DNA

Abstract Alkylation at N7 of guanine leads to formation of abasic (AP) sites in DNA. These equilibrate between α and β anomers and form conjugates with 6,9-bis[(2-aminoethyl)amino]benzo[g]isoquinoline-5,10-dione (Pixantrone, PIX). NMR revealed that these conjugates formed as regi...

Characterizing Communication in Group Settings Following Traumatic Brain Injury: Development of the Multiparty Communication Questionnaire

Purpose: Group, or multiparty, settings present a particularly challenging communication context for speakers, who must keep track of a myriad of interpersonal, informational, and contextual factors and then flexibly adjust their language to meet the needs of the group. While the...

Early-life colonization with Clostridioides difficile remodels the developing gut

Clostridioides difficile causes severe disease in adults but commonly colonizes infants asymptomatically. The consequences of early-life colonization on host development remain unknown. In a neonatal mouse model, C. difficile colonization drove proinflammatory and tissue repair r...

Data distribution impacts the performance and generalisability of contrastive learning-based foundation models of electrocardiograms

Contrastive learning is a widely adopted self-supervised pretraining strategy, yet its dependence on cohort composition remains underexplored. We present Contrasting by Augmented Patient Electrocardiograms (CAPE) foundation model and pretrain on four cohorts (n = 5,203,269), from...

Statins Use in Veterans With Peripheral Artery Disease: Insights From the PEARLS Study

BACKGROUND: Guidelines recommend high-intensity statins in patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD). We examined contemporary use of statins among real-world patients with a new diagnosis of PAD. METHODS: Within a national registry of Veterans with incident PAD, we used phar...

Implementation of a passive bin-based perpetual medication inventory model within ambulatory clinics at an academic medical center

PURPOSE: Ambulatory clinics manage high-cost medications with little visibility into quantity or movement, leaving unrealized opportunities for inventory optimization. Automated dispensing cabinets, common in inpatient settings, address this issue but require significant capital...