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Frontiers in Immunology 2022Over the past few decades, tremendous advances in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer have taken place. However for head and neck cancers, including oral... (Review)
Review
Over the past few decades, tremendous advances in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer have taken place. However for head and neck cancers, including oral cancer, the overall survival rate is below 50% and they remain the seventh most common malignancy worldwide. These cancers are, commonly, aggressive, genetically complex, and difficult to treat and the delay, which often occurs between early recognition of symptoms and diagnosis, and the start of treatment of these cancers, is associated with poor prognosis. Cancer development and progression occurs in concert with alterations in the surrounding stroma, with the immune system being an essential element in this process. Despite neutrophils having major roles in the pathology of many diseases, they were thought to have little impact on cancer development and progression. Recent studies are now challenging this notion and placing neutrophils as central interactive players with other immune and tumor cells in affecting cancer pathology. This review focuses on how neutrophils and their sub-phenotypes, N1, N2, and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, both directly and indirectly affect the anti-tumor and pro-tumor immune responses. Emphasis is placed on what is currently known about the interaction of neutrophils with myeloid innate immune cells (such as dendritic cells and macrophages), innate lymphoid cells, natural killer cells, and fibroblasts to affect the tumor microenvironment and progression of oral cancer. A better understanding of this dialog will allow for improved therapeutics that concurrently target several components of the tumor microenvironment, increasing the possibility of constructive and positive outcomes for oral cancer patients. For this review, PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched for manuscripts using keywords and combinations thereof of "oral cancer, OSCC, neutrophils, TANs, MDSC, immune cells, head and neck cancer, and tumor microenvironment" with a focus on publications from 2018 to 2021.
Topics: Humans; Immunity, Innate; Killer Cells, Natural; Mouth Neoplasms; Neutrophils; Tumor Microenvironment
PubMed: 35784290
DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.894021 -
Indian Journal of Dermatology 2022The term toponym means any name that is derived from a place name. Numerous dermatological conditions have their names derived from geographic places. Although most...
The term toponym means any name that is derived from a place name. Numerous dermatological conditions have their names derived from geographic places. Although most conditions may have some association to the place they have been derived from, some of them are fortuitous.
PubMed: 36386102
DOI: 10.4103/ijd.ijd_71_22 -
Australian and New Zealand Journal of... Aug 2022This study aims to understand the context of place associated with smoking in urban Hamilton parks from a Te Ao Māori perspective (the worldview of Māori, the...
OBJECTIVE
This study aims to understand the context of place associated with smoking in urban Hamilton parks from a Te Ao Māori perspective (the worldview of Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand).
METHODS
Our study approached smokefree environments in Hamilton through a Māori lens, undertaking interviews with family groups and people from organisations involved in the local Smokefree environments policy.
RESULTS
The majority of the 26 adult participants identified as Māori, with 30% being current smokers. Parks had a place in the sporting memories of participants. Smoking was merged with these memories. Important features of places that influenced smoking behaviours were raised, with signage a key talking point.
CONCLUSIONS
The colonial construct of parks do not make visible Māori values and historical associations with the land, nor do they set a framework that would promote Māori ways of being and doing, including enacting smokefree spaces and places.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH
This study provides the incentive to address change in parks and reserve management that would support Māori aspirations for their health and wellbeing associated with ancestral land, and give meaning to smokefree environments.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; New Zealand; Smoke-Free Policy; Smoking
PubMed: 35678963
DOI: 10.1111/1753-6405.13228 -
Leveraging the metacoupling framework for sustainability science and global sustainable development.National Science Review Jul 2023Sustainability science seeks to understand human-nature interactions behind sustainability challenges, but has largely been place-based. Traditional sustainability... (Review)
Review
Sustainability science seeks to understand human-nature interactions behind sustainability challenges, but has largely been place-based. Traditional sustainability efforts often solved problems in one place at the cost of other places, compromising global sustainability. The metacoupling framework offers a conceptual foundation and a holistic approach to integrating human-nature interactions within a place, as well as between adjacent places and between distant places worldwide. Its applications show broad utilities for advancing sustainability science with profound implications for global sustainable development. They have revealed effects of metacoupling on the performance, synergies, and trade-offs of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across borders and across local to global scales; untangled complex interactions; identified new network attributes; unveiled spatio-temporal dynamics and effects of metacoupling; uncovered invisible feedbacks across metacoupled systems; expanded the nexus approach; detected and integrated hidden phenomena and overlooked issues; re-examined theories such as Tobler's First Law of Geography; and unfolded transformations among noncoupling, coupling, decoupling, and recoupling. Results from the applications are also helpful to achieve SDGs across space, amplify benefits of ecosystem restoration across boundaries and across scales, augment transboundary management, broaden spatial planning, boost supply chains, empower small agents in the large world, and shift from place-based to flow-based governance. Key topics for future research include cascading effects of an event in one place on other places both nearby and far away. Operationalizing the framework can benefit from further tracing flows across scales and space, uplifting the rigor of causal attribution, enlarging toolboxes, and elevating financial and human resources. Unleashing the full potential of the framework will generate more important scientific discoveries and more effective solutions for global justice and sustainable development.
PubMed: 37305165
DOI: 10.1093/nsr/nwad090 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2023In the mobile era, place attachment among rural migrants and returnees has become dynamic and diversified. However, research on place attachment to native place among...
In the mobile era, place attachment among rural migrants and returnees has become dynamic and diversified. However, research on place attachment to native place among rural migrants and returnees is limited. The focus of previous research has primarily been on the destination place attachment of rural migrants, which makes it difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of the place attachment among both rural migrants and returnees. This study aims to investigate the state of place attachment to both native and destination places among rural migrants and returnees originating from the same birthplace. It explores their place attachment after migrating from rural areas to cities. A quantitative research approach was adopted, garnering questionnaire responses from 274 rural migrants and returnees, all born in Shuangfeng County, Hunan Province. The questionnaire encompassed a Likert scale for measuring place attachment, as well as sociodemographic statistical information. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to ascertain the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. Based on the factor scores of place attachment to both places from migrants and returnees, a two-step cluster analysis identified three types of migrants and two types of returnees. Chi-square tests revealed significant differences among migrants in terms of property ownership, educational level, marital status, presence of children, age at departure, and time away from hometown. The study discovered that, regardless of being a migrant or returnee, the overall attachment to hometown was stronger than that to the current or previously inhabited city. In the context of existing literature primarily concerned with the integration of rural migrants into urban areas, this paper offers a fresh research perspective, highlighting the significance of emotional ties to one's hometown for rural migrants. The findings of this paper provide direction and a theoretical basis for rural areas to attract return migration and for urban regions to facilitate the integration of migrants.
PubMed: 38090189
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1279679 -
The Pan African Medical Journal 2022Medical research in the United States remains a global reference, endowed with unrivalled financing, a source of endless advancements, and recognized with many...
Medical research in the United States remains a global reference, endowed with unrivalled financing, a source of endless advancements, and recognized with many accolades; with 45 per cent of the winners, the United States outrageously dominates the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The volume of health spending in the United States is far more than any other country; however, the health outcomes are far below expectation. An American child Born in 2016 will live on average 78.6 years, which places the country around the thirty-fifth place in the world, somewhere between Cuba and Qatar; the United States has other modest results, as evidenced by the ranking of countries in terms of infant mortality in 2015, which placed the country 33 out of 35 member countries, ahead of only Turkey and Mexico. Although the United States ranks 35th out of 190 countries based on infant mortality in 2015, it is still far behind Cuba, which was 30 and the first "non-high" income country. In 2016, US health expenditures/gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded 16%, with an average of 10,000 USD/inhabitants, while Cuban health expenditures/GDP did not exceed 11% during the same period. We aim through the present work to show that the state of health doesn't improve by spending more. However, it improves by spending more on programs that we know from the evidence can improve health outcomes.
Topics: Delivery of Health Care; Gross Domestic Product; Health Expenditures; Health Facilities; Humans; Income; United States
PubMed: 36034037
DOI: 10.11604/pamj.2022.42.95.35133 -
Placemaking and infrastructure through the lens of levelling up for health equity: A scoping review.Health & Place Mar 2023The planning and delivery of infrastructure influences how places create health equity. The scholarship on place and health has recently been developed into 'levelling... (Review)
Review
The planning and delivery of infrastructure influences how places create health equity. The scholarship on place and health has recently been developed into 'levelling up' principles for equity focussed policy and planning. We conducted a scoping review of the literature on infrastructure through urban regeneration and placemaking interventions. We interrogated the 15 final selected articles for their use of one or more of the five 'levelling' up principles. No article encompassed all five principles. It was most common to find two or three principles in action. Reviewing the articles against the principles allows a deeper explanation of how infrastructure planning practice can positively impact on health equity. We conclude that applying all the principles in standard infrastructure planning practice has great potential for creating places that are positive for health equity.
Topics: Humans; Health Equity; Environment
PubMed: 36774810
DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2023.102975 -
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience... 2021Animals navigate within their surrounding environment to find food, shelter, and mates; this behavior forms one of the most basic means of survival. The vertebrate...
Animals navigate within their surrounding environment to find food, shelter, and mates; this behavior forms one of the most basic means of survival. The vertebrate hippocampus acts as an integration hub for varied dynamic processes such as attention, memory, perception, and decision-making. This ultimately allows an animal to move efficiently in its surroundings in search of food or to escape from predators. Place cells are neurons located within the hippocampus which are triggered in response to an animal entering specific places in its local environment. John O' Keefe first described the firing patterns of these cells in 1976 in a paper published in Experimental Neurology. This was a pioneering effort in combining the efficacy of electrophysiological recordings with the value of behavioral approaches in freely moving animals. The author also presented testable hypotheses of plausible mechanisms governing place cell activation which in turn provided a conceptual scaffold for a diverse range of subsequent work in the field. This is an excellent paper for undergraduate education because it provides the historical context to an important research avenue while simultaneously showing how clear and concise hypotheses can emerge from studying how neural activity correlates with animal behaviour.
PubMed: 34552444
DOI: No ID Found -
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science... Jan 2021The treatment of malaria is a global health challenge that stands to benefit from the widespread introduction of a vaccine for the disease. A method has been developed...
UNLABELLED
The treatment of malaria is a global health challenge that stands to benefit from the widespread introduction of a vaccine for the disease. A method has been developed to create a live organism vaccine using the sporozoites (SPZ) of the parasite (Pf), which are concentrated in the salivary glands of infected mosquitoes. Current manual dissection methods to obtain these PfSPZ are not optimally efficient for large-scale vaccine production. We propose an improved dissection procedure and a mechanical fixture that increases the rate of mosquito dissection and helps to deskill this stage of the production process. We further demonstrate the automation of a key step in this production process, the picking and placing of mosquitoes from a staging apparatus into a dissection assembly. This unit test of a robotic mosquito pick-and-place system is performed using a custom-designed micro-gripper attached to a four degree of freedom (4-DOF) robot under the guidance of a computer vision system. Mosquitoes are autonomously grasped and pulled to a pair of notched dissection blades to remove the head of the mosquito, allowing access to the salivary glands. Placement into these blades is adapted based on output from computer vision to accommodate for the unique anatomy and orientation of each grasped mosquito. In this pilot test of the system on 50 mosquitoes, we demonstrate a 100% grasping accuracy and a 90% accuracy in placing the mosquito with its neck within the blade notches such that the head can be removed. This is a promising result for this difficult and non-standard pick-and-place task.
NOTE TO PRACTITIONERS—
Automated processes could help increase malaria vaccine production to global scale. Currently, production requires technicians to manually dissect mosquitoes, a process that is slow, tedious, and requires a lengthy training regimen. This paper presents an an improved manual fixture and procedure that reduces technician training time. Further, an approach to automate this dissection process is proposed and the critical step of robotic manipulation of the mosquito with the aid of computer vision is demonstrated. Our approach may serve as a useful example of system design and integration for practitioners that seek to perform new and challenging pick-and-place tasks with small, non-uniform, and highly deformable objects.
PubMed: 33746641
DOI: 10.1109/tase.2020.2992131 -
Social Science & Medicine (1982) Dec 2021Over the last decade, policies in both the UK and many other countries have promoted the opportunity for patients at the end of life to be able to choose where to die....
Over the last decade, policies in both the UK and many other countries have promoted the opportunity for patients at the end of life to be able to choose where to die. Central to this is the expectation that in most instances people would prefer to die at home, where they are more likely to feel most comfortable and less medicalised. In so doing, recording the preferred place of death and reducing the number of hospital deaths have become common measures of the overall quality of end of life care. We argue that as a consequence, what constitutes a desired or appropriate place is routinely defined in a very simple and static 'geographical' way, that is linked to conceptualising death as an unambiguous and discrete event that happens at a precise moment in time in a specific location. In contrast, we draw on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with two inner-London palliative care teams to describe the continual work staff do to make places suitable and appropriate for the processes of dying, rather than for a singular event. In this way, instead of 'place of death' merely defined in geographic terms, the palliative care staff attend to the much more dynamic relation between a patient and their location as they approach the end of their life. Central to this is an emphasis on dying as an open-ended process, and correspondingly place as a social space that reflects, and interacts with, living persons. We propose the term 'placing work' to capture these ongoing efforts as a patient's surroundings are continually altered and adjusted over time, and as a way to acknowledge this as a significant feature of the care given.
Topics: Death; Home Care Services; Hospice Care; Humans; Palliative Care; Terminal Care
PubMed: 33994221
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113974