Search

IntroductionBoth appraisal emotion approaches and self-regulation theory emphasize that appraising an event as conducive or detrimental to one’s current goals may trigger an affective response that can be observed nonverbally. Because there may be a female advantage in the inhibition and self-regulation of emotions, we hypothesized that female but not male athletes regulate emotions during sports through explicit nonverbal behaviors.MethodsAll nonverbal hand movement behavior of right-handed female and male tennis athletes was recorded during competitive matches. All immediate nonverbal expressions after point losses and wins were coded by two independent blind raters applying the NEUROpsychological GESture (NEUROGES®) system.ResultsNo gender differences were found for overall hand movement activity. Female athletes executed more fall gestures than males as well as in space and both-handed act as a unit hand movements. In contrast to males, female athletes spent significantly more time with both-handed pantomime gestures (e.g., performing an imaginary backhand), particularly when losing points.DiscussionIncreased expressions of pantomime gestures in female athletes after losing indicate that women regulate negative emotions nonverbally through explicit hand movements. Thus, female athletes seem to nonverbally cope with their negative emotional arousal through explicit nonverbal behaviors in order to control performance.

Background: This study aims to evaluate the current rates and outcomes of minimally invasive versus open surgery for colonic diverticular disease in Germany, using a nationwide dataset. Methods: We analyzed data from 36 hospitals, encompassing approximately 1.25 million hospitalizations from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2023. Patients aged 18 years and older with colonic diverticular disease (International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10): K57.2 and K57.3) who underwent surgical treatment were included. Surgeries were classified as open or minimally invasive (laparoscopic or robotic). Outcomes such as in-hospital mortality, complications, and length of stay were assessed using multivariable logistic and linear regression models. Results: Out of 1670 patients who underwent surgery for colonic diverticular disease, 63.2% had perforation and abscess. The rate of minimally invasive surgery increased from 34.6% in 2019 to 52.9% in 2023 for complicated cases and from 67.8% to 86.2% for uncomplicated cases. Open surgery was associated with higher in-hospital mortality (odds ratio (OR): 7.41; 95% CI: 2.86–19.21) and complications compared with minimally invasive surgery. The length of hospital stay was significantly longer for open surgery patients, with an increase of 4.6 days for those with perforation and abscess and 5.0 days for those without. Conclusions: Minimally invasive surgery for colonic diverticular disease is increasingly preferred in Germany, especially for uncomplicated cases. However, open surgery remains common for complicated cases, but is associated with higher mortality, more complications, and longer hospital stays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Discharge against medical advice (DAMA) is a complex phenomenon with the potential to disrupt care in hospitalized patients, particularly in oncology, where continuous treatment is crucial for managing disease progression and improving outcomes. This study aimed to explore the prevalence of DAMA among cancer patients in Germany and identify factors associated with its occurrence. Analysis of data from over 51,000 patients hospitalized across 36 facilities revealed a DAMA rate of 0.9%. Younger age (especially under 60 years) and male sex were associated with higher DAMA rates. Patients with cancers of the lip, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and liver had the highest DAMA prevalence, while distant metastases showed no significant association. These findings highlight the multifaceted nature of DAMA and suggest that non-clinical factors, such as psychological, social, and economic pressures, may play a critical role in patients' decisions. This study provides a foundation for further research into strategies to better understand and address DAMA in vulnerable groups, improving care and outcomes for hospitalized cancer patients. Background: Discharge against medical advice (DAMA) disrupts continuity of care and is associated with increased readmission rates, morbidity, and mortality. While extensively studied in general hospital populations, its prevalence and associated factors in cancer patients, where treatment adherence is critical for outcomes, remain underexplored. Methods: This multicenter, cross-sectional study analyzed anonymized data from the IQVIA hospital database, including cancer patients hospitalized in 36 German hospitals between January 2019 and December 2023. Multivariate logistic regression assessed associations between DAMA and factors such as age, sex, cancer type, metastases, and comorbidities. Results: Among 51,505 cancer patients, DAMA occurred in 0.9% of hospitalizations. The highest rates were observed in cancers of the lip, oral cavity, and pharynx (2.1%), larynx (2.0%), and liver (1.8%). DAMA was more frequent in younger patients (≤50 years) (OR: 1.73; 95% CI: 1.30–2.14) and males (OR: 1.46; 95% CI: 1.23–1.72). Distant metastases showed no significant association (OR: 0.96; 95% CI: 0.81–1.13). Conclusions: The findings suggest that DAMA in cancer patients is more strongly associated with demographic and social factors than with disease severity. These results provide a basis for exploring strategies that address underlying psychosocial and economic challenges during hospitalization, particularly in younger and male patients. Further research is needed to better understand these associations and their implications for clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrated that workers' compensation claims data can provide insights into federal employees' workplace injuries and illnesses. Employing agencies, safety staff, and occupational clinicians can use these data to direct efforts to improve conditions to prevent injuries/illnesses, optimize programs for injured worker treatment, rehabilitation, accommodation, and stay-at-work or return-to-work programs. Objective: The purpose of this study was to understand federal workplace injury/illness trends. Methods: Over 1.5 million federal and Postal Service employee workers' compensation (WC) claims from 2007 to 2022 were linked to employment data and analyzed. Results: From 2007 to 2019, falls, slips, trips represented the highest proportion of claims (30.7%), followed by overexertion and bodily reaction (24.4%), unclassified (16.4%), contact with objects and equipment (13.1%), violence and other injuries by persons or animals (8.8%), transportation incidents (4.0%), exposure to harmful substances or environments (2.5%), and fires and explosions (0.24%). From 2020 to 2022, COVID-19 drove a major shift to exposure to harmful substances or environments representing the highest proportion of claims (44.3%). Conclusions: Claims data represent a potentially rich data source that employing agencies can use to focus prevention and treatment of injury/illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Both appraisal emotion approaches and self-regulation theory emphasize that appraising an event as conducive or detrimental to one's current goals may trigger an affective response that can be observed nonverbally. Because there may be a female advantage in the inhibition and self-regulation of emotions, we hypothesized that female but not male athletes regulate emotions during sports through explicit nonverbal behaviors. Methods: All nonverbal hand movement behavior of right-handed female and male tennis athletes was recorded during competitive matches. All immediate nonverbal expressions after point losses and wins were coded by two independent blind raters applying the NEUROpsychological GESture (NEUROGES®) system. Results: No gender differences were found for overall hand movement activity. Female athletes executed more fall gestures than males as well as in space and both-handed act as a unit hand movements. In contrast to males, female athletes spent significantly more time with both-handed pantomime gestures (e.g., performing an imaginary backhand), particularly when losing points. Discussion: Increased expressions of pantomime gestures in female athletes after losing indicate that women regulate negative emotions nonverbally through explicit hand movements. Thus, female athletes seem to nonverbally cope with their negative emotional arousal through explicit nonverbal behaviors in order to control performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postoperative fever following neuroendoscopic procedures has been well-documented, yet specific differentiation based on the nature and site of the procedure remains lacking. Given the anatomical involvement of the hypothalamus in temperature regulation, we propose that endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV) may have a distinct impact on postoperative fever. This study aims to investigate this phenomenon. This retrospective comparative analysis includes all patients who underwent neuroendoscopic procedures between January 2017 and September 2023. Patients were divided into ETV and non-ETV groups, and comparisons were made regarding postoperative body temperature during the initial 7 days after surgery. Comprehensive data were collected on case numbers, surgical duration, symptoms, treatments, and outcomes. Body temperature was measured postoperatively in the morning and evening for 7 days, with elevated temperature categorized as sub-fever (37.5 to 38.2 °C) and fever (≥ 38.3 °C). 207 patients underwent neuroendoscopic procedures in our neurosurgical centers (median age19.1 ± 21.7 years, 50.7% male), primarily for aqueduct stenosis (25.6%) and intra- and periventricular tumors (25.1%). Among them, 104 (50.2%) patients underwent ETV, while 103 (49.8%) underwent other neuroendoscopic procedures (43.7% intracranial cysts fenestrations, 39.8% placement of intraventricular catheters, 3.9% intraventricular lavage, 4.9% septostomy, and 5.8% tumor biopsy). All postoperative infections were excluded. No significant differences were observed in preoperative symptoms, laboratory findings, or postoperative antibiotic usage between the two groups. The ETV group exhibited significantly more postoperative fever (37.5% vs. 19.4%, p = 0.005), particularly from the first night to the third night after the operation. This study substantiates the hypothesis that manipulation of the floor of third ventricle through endoscopic ventriculostomy may contribute to postoperative fever, rather than the neuroendoscopic procedure. Elevated temperatures were observable from the first night post-surgery and typically normalized by third day without necessitating specific treatment. Further prospective studies are warranted to elucidate the precise mechanisms underlying intraoperative manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) and tumour-derived extracellular vesicles (tdEVs) have great potential for monitoring therapy response and early detection of tumour relapse, facilitating personalized adjuvant therapeutic strategies. However, their low abundance in peripheral blood limits their informative value. In this study, we explored the presence of CTCs and tdEVs collected intraoperatively from a tumour-draining vein (DV) and via a central venous catheter (CVC) prior to tumour resection. Methods: CellSearch analyses of 395 blood samples from 306 patients with gastrointestinal tumours and 93 blood samples from healthy donors were used to establish and validate gates for the automated detection of CTCs and tdEVs with ACCEPT software and R scripts. The selected gate settings were applied to 227 samples of 142 patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) from two independent collectives. Phenotypic features were obtained via numeric analysis of their fluorescence signals (e.g. size, shape, and intensity) and were used for calculating diversity using Shannon index (SI) of clusters generated via the k-means algorithm after Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) pre-processing, and standard deviation (SD). Results: CTCs and tdEVs were more abundant in the DV samples compared to CVC samples (p < 0.05). tdEVs were detected in higher numbers than CTCs in both compartments. Importantly, tdEVs in CVCs were associated with tumor spread, whereas CTCs in DVs were linked to tumor size. In both compartments, the prognostic value of tdEVs for overall survival (OS) surpassed that of CTCs, as demonstrated by univariate, multivariate, and Kaplan-Meier analyses. CTCs and tdEVs in DVs were phenotypically distinct, being larger, more eccentric, and displaying stronger cytokeratin intensities (p < 0.05) compared to those in CVC samples. Furthermore, increased diversity in CTC and tdEV phenotypes was significantly associated with shorter survival, validating the prognostic relevance of the SD-diversity metric. Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that DV sampling significantly enhances the detection of prognostically relevant CTCs and tdEVs in CRC patients, underscoring the superior prognostic significance of tdEVs compared to CTCs. Importantly, the combined phenotypic diversity of both markers emerges as a more powerful biomarker than their enumeration alone. These findings suggest that comprehensive, automated analysis of CTCs and tdEVs in DVs may open new avenues for tailoring individualized therapies in CRC patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each solar cell is characterized at the end‐of‐line using current‐voltage (IV) measurements, except shingle cells, due to multiplied measurement efforts. Therefore, the respective host cell quality is adopted for all resulting shingles, which is sufficient for samples with laterally homogeneous quality. Yet, for heterogeneous defect distributions, this procedure leads to (i) loss of high‐quality shingles due to defects on neighboring host cell parts, (ii) increased mismatch losses due to inaccurate binning, and (iii) lack of shingle‐precise characterization. In spatially resolved host measurements, such as electroluminescence images, all shingles are visible along with their properties. Within a comprehensive experiment, 840 hosts and their resulting shingles are measured. Thereafter, a deep learning model has been designed and optimized which processes host images and determines IV parameters like efficiency or fill factor, IV curves, and binning classes for each shingle cell. The efficiency can be determined with an error of 0.06 %abs enabling a 13 %abs improvement in correct assignment of shingles to bin classes compared with industry standard. This results in lower mismatch losses and higher output power on module level as demonstrated within simulations. Also, IV curves of defective and defect‐free shingle cells can be derived with good agreement to actual shingle measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dendrites are crucial for receiving information into neurons. Sensory experience affects the structure of these tree-like neurites, which, it is assumed, modifies neuronal function, yet the evidence is scarce, and the mechanisms are unknown. To study whether sensory experience affects dendritic morphology, we use the Caenorhabditis elegans’ arborized nociceptor PVD neurons, under natural mechanical stimulation induced by physical contacts between individuals. We found that mechanosensory signals induced by conspecifics and by glass beads affect the dendritic structure of the PVD. Moreover, developmentally isolated animals show a decrease in their ability to respond to harsh touch. The structural and behavioral plasticity following sensory deprivation are functionally independent of each other and are mediated by an array of evolutionarily conserved mechanosensory amiloride-sensitive epithelial sodium channels (degenerins). Calcium imaging of the PVD neurons in a micromechanical device revealed that controlled mechanical stimulation of the body wall produces similar calcium dynamics in both isolated and crowded animals. Our genetic results, supported by optogenetic, behavioral, and pharmacological evidence, suggest an activity-dependent homeostatic mechanism for dendritic structural plasticity, that in parallel controls escape response to noxious mechanosensory stimuli.

Minimizing carrier recombination in silicon solar cells is key to increase the conversion efficiency, as recombination affects both the fill factor and the open circuit voltage. Recombination at metal-semiconductor interfaces plays a crucial part in this, however, processing conditions which lead to low recombination, such as e.g., a low firing set temperature or the use of thick dielectrics, typically result in increased contact resistivities. Also, a too low firing set temperature leads to an incomplete hydrogenation of the interfaces. Recently, laser-enhanced contact optimization has been introduced to decouple recombination and contact properties to some extent, which allows for high fill factors and high open circuit voltages, and which explains the growing interest from manufacturers in that technology. We elucidate on the need for improved hydrogenation of interfaces, which contradicts the wish to decrease firing temperatures for reduced carrier recombination at metal-semiconductor interfaces. The implementation of an additional annealing step, e.g. in a tube furnace, after dielectric surface passivation is shown to lead to improved passivation properties so that the thermal budget during contact firing can be optimized to minimize contact resistivities. Overall, contact optimization allows for solar cell efficiencies of 24.1%, measured at an industrial cell tester, for a traditional approach without additional annealing step, and applying an AgAl front side metallization paste. A comparison of Ag and AgAl front side metallization pastes reveals a higher open circuit voltage for the Ag paste, at the drawback of an increased contact resistivity.

Aims: The aim of this study was to assess the incidence of reinfection in patients after two-stage revision of an infected megaprosthesis (MPR) implanted after resection of a bone tumour., Methods: A retrospective study was carried out of 186 patients from 16 bone sarcoma centres treated between January 2010 and December 2020. The median age at the time of tumour diagnosis was 26 years (IQR 17 to 33); 69 (37.1%) patients were female, and 117 (62.9%) were male., Results: A total of 186 patients with chronic MPR infections were included. Median follow-up was 68 months (IQR 31 to 105). The most represented sites of MPR were distal femur in 93 cases (50.0%) and proximal tibia in 53 cases (28.5%). Polymicrobial infections were seen in 34 cases (18.3%). The most frequent isolated pathogens were staphylococci. Difficult-to-treat (DTT) pathogens were isolated in 50 cases (26.9%). The estimated infection recurrence (IR) rate was 39.1% at five years and 50.0% at ten years. A higher IR rate was found in DTT PJI compared to non-DTT infections (p = 0.019). Polymicrobial infections also showed a higher rate of infection recurrence (p = 0.046)., Conclusion: This study suggests that an infected MPR treated by two-stage revision and ultimately reimplantation with a MPR can be successful, but the surgeon must be aware of a high recurrence rate compared to those seen with infected conventional implants., Competing Interests: L. Jeys reports consulting fees from Implantcast, unrelated to this study. A. Leithner reports institutional educational grants from Johnson & Johnson, Alphamed, and Medacta, unrelated to this study. P. Ruggieri reports royalties or licenses from Exactech and Stryker, unrelated to this study, and holds unpaid positions as Vice President of EFORT, Secretary General of ISOLS, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the University of Padova. M. A. Smolle reports travel grants from Alphamed Fischer, Implantcast, ImplanTec, and Pharmamar, unrelated to this study. M. A. J. van de Sande reports a department research grant from Implantcast, unrelated to this study, and is also Vice President of EMSOS., (© 2025 The British Editorial Society of Bone & Joint Surgery.)