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MSTPublications: April 2022

Posted by on Thursday, April 28, 2022 in New Publications .

Temporal lobe epilepsy lateralisation and surgical outcome prediction using diffusion imaging.
Johnson GW, Cai LY, Narasimhan S, González HFJ, Wills KE, Morgan VL, Englot DJ.
J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2022 Mar 28:jnnp-2021-328185. doi: 10.1136/jnnp-2021-328185. Online ahead of print.

Objective: We sought to augment the presurgical workup of medically refractory temporal lobe epilepsy by creating a supervised machine learning technique that uses diffusion-weighted imaging to classify patient-specific seizure onset laterality and surgical outcome.
Methods: 151 subjects were included in this analysis: 62 patients (aged 18-68 years, 36 women) and 89 healthy controls (aged 18-71 years, 47 women). We created a supervised machine learning technique that uses diffusion-weighted metrics to classify subject groups. Specifically, we sought to classify patients versus healthy controls, unilateral versus bilateral temporal lobe epilepsy, left versus right temporal lobe epilepsy and seizure-free versus not seizure-free surgical outcome. We then reduced the dimensionality of derived features with community detection for ease of interpretation.
Results: We classified the subject groups in withheld testing data sets with a cross-fold average testing areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.745 for patients versus healthy controls, 1.000 for unilateral versus bilateral seizure onset, 0.662 for left versus right seizure onset, 0.800 for left-sided seizure-free vsersu not seizure-free surgical outcome and 0.775 for right-sided seizure-free versus not seizure-free surgical outcome.
Conclusions: This technique classifies important clinical decisions in the presurgical workup of temporal lobe epilepsy by generating discerning white-matter features. We believe that this work augments existing network connectivity findings in the field by further elucidating important white-matter pathology in temporal lobe epilepsy. We hope that this work contributes to recent efforts aimed at using diffusion imaging as an augmentation to the presurgical workup of this devastating neurological disorder.

 

Probing the segregation of evoked and spontaneous neurotransmission via photobleaching and recovery of a fluorescent glutamate sensor.
Wang CS, Chanaday NL, Monteggia LM, Kavalali ET.
Elife. 2022 Apr 14;11:e76008. doi: 10.7554/eLife.76008. Online ahead of print.

Synapses maintain both action potential-evoked and spontaneous neurotransmitter release, however, organization of these two forms of release within an individual synapse remains unclear. Here, we used photobleaching properties of iGluSnFR, a fluorescent probe that detects glutamate, to investigate the subsynaptic organization of evoked and spontaneous release in primary hippocampal cultures. In non-neuronal cells and neuronal dendrites, iGluSnFR fluorescence is intensely photobleached and recovers via diffusion of non-photobleached probes with a time constant of 10 seconds. After photobleaching, while evoked iGluSnFR events could be rapidly suppressed, their recovery required several hours. In contrast, iGluSnFR responses to spontaneous release were comparatively resilient to photobleaching, unless the complete pool of iGluSnFR was activated by glutamate perfusion. This differential effect of photobleaching on different modes of neurotransmission is consistent with a subsynaptic organization where sites of evoked glutamate release are clustered and corresponding iGluSnFR probes are diffusion restricted, while spontaneous release sites are broadly spread across a synapse with readily diffusible iGluSnFR probes.

 

Measuring subjective quality of life in autistic adults with the PROMIS global-10: Psychometric study and development of an autism-specific scoring method.
Williams ZJ, Cascio CJ, Woynaroski TG.
Autism. 2022 Apr 11:13623613221085364. doi: 10.1177/13623613221085364. Online ahead of print.

Quality of Life an outcome that both researchers and autistic advocates agree is extremely important to consider when implementing services, interventions, and supports for autistic people. However, there has been little research on the topic of how quality of life can best be measured in autistic people or whether existing quality of life questionnaires are appropriate for use in the autistic population. This study aimed to validate an established quality of life measure, the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Global-10, in a large sample of autistic adults recruited online. We created a new way to score the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Global-10 scale and generate a “General quality of life” score specific to autistic adults. This new score performed very well in this sample, showing very little measurement error and relating in expected ways to similar constructs, such as physical health and emotional distress. Exploratory analyses found that lower quality of life was associated with female sex and self-identification as a sexual or gender minority (i.e. LGBTQ + identity). These findings suggest that the new Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Global-10 quality of life score is a reliable and valid measure of quality of life in autistic adults, although additional studies are necessary to further explore its measurement properties in other subsets of the autistic population, such as individuals with intellectual disabilities. This measure is freely available for use as an outcome in both research and clinical practice, and an online score calculator is available to support the use of this measure in real-world applications.

Reactive oxygen species-degradable polythioketal urethane foam dressings to promote porcine skin wound repair.
Patil P, Russo KA, McCune JT, Pollins AC, Cottam MA, Dollinger BR, DeJulius CR, Gupta MK, D’Arcy R, Colazo JM, Yu F, Bezold MG, Martin JR, Cardwell NL, Davidson JM, Thompson CM, Barbul A, Hasty AH, Guelcher SA, Duvall CL.
Sci Transl Med. 2022 Apr 20;14(641):eabm6586. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abm6586. Epub 2022 Apr 20.

A genome-wide association study of suicide attempts in the million veterans program identifies evidence of pan-ancestry and ancestry-specific risk loci.
Kimbrel NA, Ashley-Koch AE, Qin XJ, Lindquist JH, Garrett ME, Dennis MF, Hair LP, Huffman JE, Jacobson DA, Madduri RK, Trafton JA, Coon H, Docherty AR, Kang J, Mullins N, Ruderfer DM; VA Million Veteran Program (MVP); MVP Suicide Exemplar Workgroup; International Suicide Genetics Consortium, Harvey PD, McMahon BH, Oslin DW, Hauser ER, Hauser MA, Beckham JC.
Mol Psychiatry. 2022 Mar 28. doi: 10.1038/s41380-022-01472-3. Online ahead of print.

Patient-specific comorbidities as prognostic variables for survival in myelofibrosis.
Sochacki AL, Bejan CA, Zhao S, Patel A, Kishtagari A, Spaulding TP, Silver AJ, Stockton SS, Pugh K, Dorand RD, Bhatta MR, Strayer N, Zhang S, Snider CA, Stricker TP, Nazha A, Bick AG, Xu Y, Savona MR.
Blood Adv. 2022 Apr 14:bloodadvances.2021006318. doi: 10.1182/bloodadvances.2021006318. Online ahead of print.

Natural Killer T Lymphocytes Integrate Innate Sensory Information and Relay Context to Effector Immune Responses.
Joyce S, Okoye GD, Van Kaer L.
Crit Rev Immunol. 2021;41(4):55-88. doi: 10.1615/CritRevImmunol.2021040076.
PMID: 35381143 Review.

First Do No Harm: Suggestions Regarding Respectful Autism Language.
Dwyer P, Ryan JG, Williams ZJ, Gassner DL.
Pediatrics. 2022 Apr 1;149(Suppl 4):e2020049437N. doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-049437N.

The Autism Intervention Research Network on Physical Health Autistic Researcher Review Board.
Brown HM, Dwyer PSR, Gassner DL, Kapp SK, Ne’eman A, Ryan JG, Waisman TC, Williams ZJ.
Pediatrics. 2022 Apr 1;149(Suppl 4):e2020049437F. doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-049437F.

The Autism Intervention Research Network on Physical Health (AIR-P) Charter.
Kuo AA, Hotez E, Rosenau KA, Gragnani C, Fernandes P, Haley M; AIR-P NATIONAL COORDINATING CENTER, Rudolph D, Croen LA, Massolo ML, Graham Holmes L, Shattuck P, Shea L, Wilson R, Martinez-Agosto JA; AIR-P STEERING COMMITTEE, Brown HM, Dwyer PSR, Gassner DL, Kapp SK, Ne’eman A, Ryan JG, Waisman TC, Williams ZJ; AUTISTIC RESEARCHER REVIEW BOARD, DiBari JN, Foney DM, Ramos LR, Kogan MD
Pediatrics. 2022 Apr 1;149(Suppl 4):e2020049437C. doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-049437C.