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Prior to 2020, empirical research and reports on approaches to education during health crises were limited. They focused primarily on reporting local-level response and provided only limited analysis. Various historic epidemics, like SARS, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, provided important lessons about educational efficacy during major health emergencies. However, the sudden emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to an explosion of research on educating during a worldwide health crisis. This integrative literature review (Torraco 2005) uses the INEE Minimum Standards framework to conceptualize the response to pandemics and epidemics from 1990 to 2020. The research analyzes 124 empirical studies, practitioner and governmental reports, and historic accounts of Ebola, SARS, and other epidemics, as well as early responses to COVID-19, in order to understand how education stakeholders continued educating during widespread communicable illnesses. The high-level themes that emerged included the foundational role of context and community support; access to an equitable education in the digital age; the social-emotional wellbeing of teachers and students; teachers' role in adapting curriculum and pedagogy; the need for additional training and support for teachers; and the opportunity for a creative shift in practices and policies in education.

Novel approaches are needed to accurately classify and monitor sleep patterns in older adults, particularly those with cognitive impairment and non-normative sleep. Traditional methods ignore underlying sleep architecture in these patient populations, and other modern approaches tend to focus on healthy, normative patient populations. In this paper, we developed a model using a long-short-term memory neural network (LSTM) and trained it on a sample of older, non-normative patients. The 22 nights of data collected were trained on gold-standard polysomnography (PSG) as ground truth and were compared against the clinical standard threshold-based method for sleep detection. The LSTM more than doubled the traditional method's ability to detect clinically-relevant wakefulness during sleep (37.7% vs. 15%) without significantly sacrificing accuracy (67.7% vs. 75%) or precision (90.7% vs. 94%) of sleep classification.

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) comprise a group of chronic gastrointestinal disorders characterized by periods of relapse and remission. The mainstay of treatment is medical, involving medications such as steroids, immune modulators, monoclonal antibodies (categorized as biologics), and small molecules. These medications can provide profound therapeutic benefits, but they can also cause severe and irreversible toxicities. Clinicians may utilize laboratory tests in the diagnosis and management of IBD including assessment of disease activity, monitoring medication response or toxicity, surveillance of infectious complications, and detection of nutritional deficiencies. Routine use of laboratory tests may help clinicians avoid reactivation of life-threatening infections such as tuberculosis or hepatitis B virus upon initiation of immune suppressive therapy. They can also be used to detect vitamin deficiencies such as B12 deficiency, which has the potential to cause irreversible neurologic damage. While some laboratory tests constitute established practices, the utility of newer tests such therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) in the era of biologics is an evolving topic. Although clinical assessment with imaging, endoscopic, and histopathological examination is standard practice, laboratory tests serve as valuable adjuncts. We aim to explore the broad range of laboratory tests available to clinicians and to summarize their application in the current management of IBD in daily clinical practice, with special attention to updates in therapeutic drug monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sleep-wake disturbances frequently present in Veterans with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). These TBI-related sleep impairments confer significant burden and commonly exacerbate other functional impairments. Therapies to improve sleep following mTBI are limited and studies in Veterans are even more scarce. In our previous pilot work, morning bright light therapy (MBLT) was found to be a feasible behavioral sleep intervention in Veterans with a history of mTBI; however, this was single-arm, open-label, and non-randomized, and therefore was not intended to establish efficacy. The present study, LION (light vs ion therapy) extends this preliminary work as a fully powered, sham-controlled, participant-masked randomized controlled trial (NCT03968874), implemented as fully remote within the VA (target n = 120 complete). Randomization at 2:1 allocation ratio to: 1) active: MBLT (n = 80), and 2) sham: deactivated negative ion generator (n = 40); each with identical engagement parameters (60-min duration; within 2-hrs of waking; daily over 28-day duration). Participant masking via deception balanced expectancy assumptions across arms. Outcome measures were assessed following a 14-day baseline (pre-intervention), following 28-days of device engagement (post-intervention), and 28-days after the post-intervention assessment (follow-up). Primary outcomes were sleep measures, including continuous wrist-based actigraphy, self-report, and daily sleep dairy entries. Secondary/exploratory outcomes included cognition, mood, quality of life, circadian rhythm via dim light melatonin onset, and biofluid-based biomarkers. Participant drop out occurred in <10% of those enrolled, incomplete/missing data was present in <15% of key outcome variables, and overall fidelity adherence to the intervention was >85%, collectively establishing feasibility and acceptability for MBLT in Veterans with mTBI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is mainly performed to restore an anti-tumor immune response, called the graft-versus-tumor (GVT) effect, against leukemia, myeloma and lymphoma. This GVT reactivity is driven by donor T cells, and it can also cause lethal graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). We previously demonstrated that the colonization of mice with helminths preserves the GVT response while suppressing GVHD. As the T helper-2 (Th2) pathway is critical to helminthic immune regulation, we asked whether the genetic induction of Th2 signaling in donor T cells can restore helminthic immune regulation after BMT. Our studies utilized transgenic donor T lymphocytes that overexpress a constitutively active form of the Th2-associated transcription factor STAT6. Constitutively active STAT6 sustained the GVT response without causing severe acute GVHD, where transgenic T cells generated robust quantities of cytotoxic proteins important in GVT response, such as granzymes A and B, interferon-γ and Fas ligand, in addition to generating high quantities of Th2/regulatory cytokines. Bioinformatic analysis based on chromosome immune precipitation experiments indicated that STAT6 stimulates the expression of granzymes directly. Thus, in preserving the GVT response without causing GVHD mortality, our results indicate the therapeutic potential of restoring helminthic immune modulation by targeting STAT6 and STAT6-dependent T cell maturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we describe the synthesis and evaluation of a molecular corrosion sensor that can be applied in situ in aerospace coatings, then used to detect corrosion after the coating has been applied. A pH-sensitive molecule, 4-mercaptopyridin (4-MP), is attached to a gold nanoparticle to allow surface-enhanced Raman-scattering (SERS) for signal amplification. These SERS nanoparticles, when combined with an appropriate micron-sized carrier system, are incorporated directly into an MIL-SPEC coating and used to monitor the process onset and progression of corrosion using pH changes occurring at the metal–coating interface. The sensor can track corrosion spatially as it proceeds underneath the coating, due to the mobility of the proton front generated during corrosion and the homogeneous distribution of the sensor in the coating layer. To our knowledge, this report is the first time a 4-MP functionalized gold nanoparticle has been used, along with SERS spectroscopy, to monitor corrosion in an applied commercial coating in a fast, non-contact way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, anticoagulant rodenticides have emerged as an important factor reducing the survival of many birds of prey and some predatory mammals (Berny and Gaillet 2008, Jacquot et al. 2013, Poessel et al. 2015, Serieys et al. 2015, Murray 2017). Understanding the ecological factors driving the exposure of predators is a key component in assessing the risk posed by anticoagulant rodenticides. We have reviewed the literature to better understand and synthesize the ecological factors driving AR exposure in predators, focusing on landscape and environmental management, traits of the exposed predators and the most common exposure pathways. On a global scale, the large output of ARs, in particular the more toxic and persistent second generation ARs into urban and agricultural settings and the relatively large footprint of these landscapes, has led to widespread AR exposure of many species, ranging from insects to large carnivores (Dowding et al. 2010, Sánchez-Barbudo et al. 2012, Serieys et al. 2015, Alomar et al. 2018). The methods of applying ARs vary widely, and can range from fastening bait stations to the outside or inside perimeter of buildings, to placing AR bait in underground burrows in fields, to mass application of ARs in agricultural fields and orchards (Corrigan 2001, Rattner et al. 2014). The scale of AR field application varies from a couple of hectares to mass application of ARs on a regional scale (3,000 - 10,000 km²) to control rodent outbreaks (Jacquot et al. 2013, Baldwin et al. 2014). General inferences can be made with regards to the traits of the most affected predators. We determined that at-risk predators tend to be nocturnal opportunistic predators for which rodents are a key dietary component, seasonally or year-round (Birks 1998, Jacquot et al. 2013, Hindmarch and Elliott 2015, Serieys et al. 2015). They also tend to be non-migratory and occupy habitats within, or in close proximity to landscapes that are heavily influenced by human activities such as intensive agriculture or urban areas (Birks 1998, Way et al. 2006, Elmeros et al. 2011, Christensen et al. 2012, Cypher et al. 2014, Nogeire et al. 2015, Poessel et al. 2015, Serieys et al. 2015, Hindmarch et al. 2017). Predators that consume rats in urban environments are disproportionately affected by ARs (Lambert et al. 1981, Hindmarch and Elliott 2014, 2015). As our understanding of how ARs are transferred up the food-chain is still limited, there is a need to further comprehend the extent to which non-target prey are being exposed to ARs in different landscapes, as we are frequently documenting AR residues in predators that do not typically prey on rodents (Dowding et al. 2010, Ruiz-Suárez et al. 2014, López-Perea et al. 2015). We recommend a focus on urban landscapes, where to date no exposure data has been collected on non-target prey. We also have a very limited understanding of non-target prey exposure in the urban-wildland/agricultural interface where opportunistic predators are known to hunt both habitat types interchangeably. Finally, we need to decipher whether the mounting evidence of exposure in predators translates into any sub-lethal and population levels effects. For a more in-depth review of this topic, we refer to the chapter “Ecological Factors Driving Uptake of Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Wildlife" (Hindmarch and Elliott 2018) in the book Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife (van den Brink et al. 2018).