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Background: The prevalence and impact of obesity on outcomes of atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have not been well studied. Objective: To examine the proportion of participants with obesity enrolled in RCTs of AF ablation and outcomes of ablation when subgroup analysis of participants with obesity were available. Methods: We systematically searched PubMed and EMBASE for AF ablation RCTs published between January 1, 2015 to May 31, 2022. When body mass index (BMI) data were available, normal distribution was assumed and a z score was used to estimate the proportion of obesity. Results categorized by BMI or body weight status were reviewed. Authors were contacted for additional information. Results: Of 148 eligible RCTs with 30174 participants, 144 (97.30%) RCTs did not report the proportion of participants with obesity, while published information regarding BMI was available in 63.51%. Three trials excluded patients based on BMI. Using reported BMI, we estimated the proportion of participants with obesity varied greatly across these trials, ranging from 5.82%–71.9% (median 38.02%, interquartile 29.64%, 49.10%). Patients with obesity were represented in a greater proportion among trials conducted in North America (50.23%) and Asia (44.72%), compared to others (32.16%), p <.001. Subgroup analysis or analysis adjusting for BMI was reported in only 13 (8.78%) RCTs; four (30.77%) of these suggested that BMI or body weight might negatively affect primary outcomes. Conclusion: Obesity is a common comorbidity among AF patients. However, most AF ablation RCTs underreported the proportion of participants with obesity and its impact on the primary outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text examines the engineered ecology and resultant aesthetic implications of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's Dust Mitigation Project at Owens Lake, California with an eye toward its aesthetic implications and potential for understanding large-scale landscape design in the Anthropocene. Imagined here is a near-future evolution of this infrastructure toward strange new landscapes, turning radically empirical environmental geoengineering techniques toward an emergent, more expansive aesthetic dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simulation has been shown to improve communication and psychometric skills in advanced practice nursing students. Little is known about the impact of a simulation educational intervention with a faculty-facilitated debriefing on the preparation of novice nurse practitioner students for their first clinical practicum. This article describes the development of an educational intervention to accomplish this. The simulation education intervention was implemented with preclinical nurse practitioner students designed to improve their preparation for their first precepted clinical experience. Students were surveyed preintervention and postintervention to explore their self-perception of confidence and preparation for clinicals looking at six domains: health history, physical examination, diagnostics, differentials, final diagnosis, and plan of care. Quantitative results were statistically significant for each domain. Qualitative findings gave deeper insight into the students' perceptions of how the intervention prepared them for clinicals. Advanced practice educators can use educational interventions such as this to prepare students for their first clinical practicums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and aims: Substance use treatment (SUT) has shown to be effective in reducing self-reported offending; however, the association between SUT completion and criminal justice system (CJS) contact has been underexplored, especially in Latin America. This study aimed to estimate the association between SUT completion status and (1) any subsequent CJS contact and (2) CJS contact leading to imprisonment, at 1, 3 and 5 years post-discharge, in Chile. Design: Retrospective cohort study using multivariable survival analysis based on linked administrative data from 2010 to 2019. Setting: This study took place in Chile, where SUT is available at no cost through Chile's publicly funded health-care, and is provided in outpatient and inpatient modalities in public and private centres. Participants: A total of 70 854 individuals received their first SUT from 2010 to 2019. They were mainly males (76.3%), and their main substance used at admission was cocaine paste (39.2%). Measurements: SUT completion status included completion, late dropout (≥ 3 months) and early dropout (< 3 months). Outcomes were (1) any CJS contact and (2) CJS contact leading to imprisonment after baseline treatment. We estimated the association between treatment completion and CJS contact through flexible parametric Royston --Parmar models while adjusting for several covariates. Findings: Those who completed SUT (27.2%) were less likely to have any CJS contact at 5 years post-SUT compared with those who dropped out late [with a gap of -9.5%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = -8.7, -10.3] and early (-11.2%, 95% CI = -10.1, -12.3). Also, those who completed SUT were less likely to have CJS contact leading to imprisonment at 5 years post-SUT compared with those who dropped out late (-2.6%, 95% CI = -2.2, -3.1) and early (-4.0%, 95% CI = -3.3, -4.6). These differences were also observed at 1 and 3 years post-SUT for each outcome. Conclusions: In Chile, completion of substance use treatment appears to be associated with lower probabilities of both any criminal justice system contact and contact leading to imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing need for scalable tools to aid researchers in both retrospective and prospective standardization of discrete entity types—such as disease names, cell types, or chemicals—that are used in metadata associated with biomedical data. When metadata are not well-structured or precise, the associated data are harder to find and are often burdensome to reuse, analyze, or integrate with other datasets due to the upfront curation effort required to make the data usable—typically through retrospective standardization and cleaning of the (meta)data. With the goal of facilitating the task of standardizing metadata—either in bulk or in a one-by-one fashion, e.g. to support autocompletion of biomedical entities in forms—we have developed an open-source tool called text2term that maps free-text descriptions of biomedical entities to controlled terms in ontologies. The tool is highly configurable and can be used in multiple ways that cater to different users and expertise levels—it is available on Python Package Index and can be used programmatically as any Python package; it can also be used via a command-line interface or via our hosted, graphical user interface–based web application or by deploying a local instance of our interactive application using Docker. Database URL : https://pypi.org/project/text2term [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a bewildering array of smartphone applications ("apps") has emerged to support separated parents' communication. Post‐separation parenting apps vary in cost and features; they typically comprise a messaging tool, shared calendar, expense tracker and a means to export records for legal purposes. A key challenge for separated parents and family law practitioners alike is knowing which apps or app feature(s) can work well for different family contexts, needs and budgets. The present study sought to evaluate nine popular post‐separation parenting apps and their features using small‐n Human–Computer Interaction methods. Mediators role‐played high conflict ex‐couples while completing a set of five common post‐separation communication or organizational tasks. A cross‐case analysis of ratings was conducted. We found that (a) many of the mediators changed their apparent enthusiasm for co‐parenting apps once they had used the apps themselves; (b) all nine apps were rated somewhere between "Poor" to Fair'; and (c) features of some of the best‐known apps were not rated as highly as some of the features of more recent, lesser‐known apps. Key points for the family court community: A key challenge for separated parents and family law practitioners alike is knowing which post‐separation parenting apps or app feature(s) can work well for different family contexts, needs and budgets.The efficacy and safety of these apps in everyday settings is yet to be demonstrated. Specifically, little is known about when, how, for whom, and under what circumstances post‐separation parenting apps are likely to be most effective.It is important that family law professionals have a working knowledge of a range of apps, and at least some hands‐on experience with the apps they are recommending.The mandating and recommending of apps by family law professionals raise interesting and complex questions about duty of care and responsibility.What matters is that an app's features match a user's needs (especially safety needs), budget and circumstances.Courts need to be careful about regarding co‐parenting apps as a cheap, quick technological fix for managing highly conflicted and/or complex relationship problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on memory reconsolidation has relied heavily on the use of Pavlovian auditory cued-fear conditioning. Here, an auditory cue (CS) is paired with a footshock (US) and the CS is later able to evoke a freezing response when presented alone. Some treatments, when administered to conditioned subjects immediately following a CS-alone (memory reactivation) trial, can attenuate the freezing they display on subsequent CS-alone (test) trials, in the absence of the treatment. This reduction in conditioned freezing is usually taken as evidence that the treatment disrupts post-reactivation reconsolidation of the memory trace representing the pairing of CS and US. We suggest an alternative interpretation that may account, either in whole or in part, for the attenuated freezing. The standard reconsolidation protocol (SRP) for auditory fear-conditioning has a design feature that results in second-order conditioning of fear to the test context, as this context is paired with the fear-evoking CS on the reactivation trial. Since freezing during the CS on the test will reflect the compound influence of contextual-fear and cued-fear, a post-reactivation treatment might attenuate freezing on the test by disrupting consolidation of second-order contextual-fear conditioning, even if it has little or no effect on the stability of the original cued-fear memory. This experiment confirmed that rats tested according to the SRP, in which the reactivation and test trials occur in the same context, freeze more on the test trial than rats that receive the reactivation and test trials in different contexts. This confound could lead to false-positive evidence of disrupted reconsolidation if it is not avoided or minimized, which can be accomplished with a modified protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inactivation of influenza A virus by radiofrequency (RF) energy exposure at levels near Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) safety thresholds has been reported. The authors hypothesized that this inactivation was through a structure-resonant energy transfer mechanism. If this hypothesis is confirmed, such a technology could be used to prevent transmission of virus in occupied public spaces where RF irradiation of surfaces could be performed at scale. The present study aims to both replicate and expand the previous work by investigating the neutralization of bovine coronavirus (BCoV), a surrogate of SARS-CoV-2, by RF radiation in 6–12 GHz range. Results showed an appreciable reduction in BCoV infectivity (up to 77%) due to RF exposure to certain frequencies, but failed to generate enough reduction to be considered clinically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]