The College of Arts and Sciences, is a liberal arts college of the University of Cincinnati. Located in the university's main campus in Cincinnati, Ohio, the college is commonly referred to as Arts and Sciences or simply A&S. As the largest and most diverse college, A&S is the academic heart of the University of Cincinnati and home to twenty-one departments, eight co-op programs, several interdisciplinary programs, and 407 full-time faculty members..
Transgender/gender diverse (TGD) people are underscreened for breast cancer. A barrier to screening is anticipated discrimination during screening encounters. This pilot study evaluates a training session for breast imaging professionals (clinical support specialists, technologists, and radiologists) on LGBTQIA+-inclusive breast cancer screening visits. Training topics included terminology, an overview of the guidelines, principles of trauma-informed care, and strategies for creating a welcoming and inclusive environment. Pre- and post-surveys gathered participants’ demographic information, frequency of LGBTQIA+ patient interactions, and previous exposure to LGBTQIA+ training and assessed changes in knowledge, self-reported knowledge, and attitudes toward gender diversity. In pre-surveys, participants reported frequent interactions with LGBTQIA+ patients and little previous training. A 45-min didactic training that included storytelling of relevant experiences resulted in a significant increase in participants’ self-reported knowledge of LGBTQIA+ terminology with a large effect size. After training, participants correctly answered more directly assessed knowledge questions (small effect size), with a trend toward attitudes more accepting of gender diversity (medium effect size), but neither reached statistical significance. Continued efforts to implement and evaluate inclusive education for the entire clinical team are essential to enabling more inclusive and welcoming clinical encounters that will reduce the disparities in breast cancer screening for TGD populations.
DEK is an estrogen-responsive chromatin-remodeling protein broadly expressed in the murine and human brain, with high expression in memory-relevant regions such as the hippocampus. Prior work from our group and others has linked DEK loss to cellular features associated with Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease-related dementias. Notably, our group has demonstrated that DEK expression declines with increasing dementia severity in women, but not in age-matched men, suggesting a sex-specific relationship between DEK loss and cognitive vulnerability. Together, these findings support a potential neuroprotective role for DEK; however, functional consequences of DEK loss in vivo were unknown. Here, we examined behavioral and molecular consequences of Dek loss using male and female constitutive knockout (cKO) mice assessed across cognitive, sensorimotor, and affective domains. Across assays, Dek cKO mice of both sexes exhibited intact locomotor activity, anxiety-related behavior, sensorimotor gating, and fear-associated memory. In contrast, female Dek cKO mice displayed selective impairments in cognitive flexibility despite preserved spatial learning and memory, a phenotype not observed in males and indicative of female-specific vulnerability following DEK loss. This sex difference, observed during Morris water maze reversal learning, suggests disruption of hippocampal-prefrontal circuitry. Guided by known sex differences in hippocampal DEK expression, transcriptomic profiling of hippocampal tissue revealed shared and sex-specific consequences of Dek deficiency, including alterations in cytoskeletal organization, neuronal signaling, chromatin regulatory mechanisms, and cellular stress pathways. Collectively, these findings demonstrate sex- and cognitive-domain-specific effects of DEK loss and support further investigation of DEK in executive function and hippocampal-prefrontal cortex-mediated cognition.
The MeMed BV® (MMBV) is a semi-quantitative assay that uses chemiluminescent immunoassay technology to measure three host proteins in adult and pediatric serum samples. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the potential utility of the LIAISON® MeMed BV® (LMMBV) test as part of the diagnostic work-up for adult patients with suspected acute respiratory infections, sepsis, and/or fever without source presenting to the emergency department, including patients that had potential immune-modulating conditions or trauma that would have excluded them from previously published evaluations of this assay. The LMMBV assay identified suspected bacterial infections with a positive percent agreement (PPA) of 94.1% and a negative percent agreement (NPA) of 41.7% compared to overall clinical impression. These pilot findings suggest that the LMMBV assay performs with a high PPA for bacterial infections compared to clinical impression documented in the electronic health record (EHR), even in an adult patient population with potentially confounding conditions and co-morbidities that have not been studied before; research to further explore expanded use in this population is warranted. Laboratory testing, even when equivocal to the clinical impression, can improve healthcare providers’ confidence when making decisions of antimicrobial stewardship helping them justify (both to themselves and their patients) not empirically prescribing antibiotics in cases that the likelihood of a bacterial infection is low.
Blockchain, the base of Bitcoin, has recently received broad attention. Blockchain acts as an immutable ledger that allows transactions to take place in a decentralized manner. Blockchain-based applications are growing, covering many sectors, including financial services. The reputation of Blockchain, the base of Bitcoin, has recently received broad attention. Blockchain acts as management, and the internet of things (IoT). During disaster events, timely and targeted information provision and exchange could provide great help to the stricken population in difficult and complicated environments. This chapter reports a service-oriented system, called BlockchainDisaster Rescue Wings, for providing emergency support to sufferers and rescuers in disasters. The authors identify the most frequent request sequence patterns (FRSP) of Rescue Wings, and develop a new application for efficiently scheduling the requests to minimize the response delay. The system has been tested in several disaster rescue drills, and has been successfully applied.
