This study investigated the molecular epidemiology of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) among febrile children with acute respiratory tract infection in Ghana, Gabon, Tanzania and Burkina Faso between 2014-2017 as well as the evolution and diversification of RSV strains from other sub-Saharan countries.
 
  Pharyngeal swabs were collected at four study sites (Agogo, Ghana n=490; Lambaréné, Gabon n=182; Mbeya, Tanzania n=293; Nouna, Burkina Faso n=115) and analysed for RSV and other respiratory viruses using rtPCR. For RSV positive samples, sequence analysis of the second hypervariable region of the G-gene was performed. A dataset of RSV strains from sub-Saharan Africa (2011-2017) currently available in GenBank was compiled. Phylogenetic analysis was conducted to identify the diversity of circulating RSV genotypes.
 
  In total, 46 samples tested RSV positive (Ghana n=31 (6.3%), Gabon n=4 (2.2%), Tanzania n=9 (3.1%), Burkina Faso n=2 (1.7%)). The most common RSV co-infection was with rhinovirus. All RSV-A strainn GenBank.
  A small number of national studies have explored the barriers to older people accessing dental care; however, to date none have investigated older people's recommendations for overcoming these barriers.
 
  Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 dentate older people (65years and over) who resided in New Zealand's Otago region and received home-support. A joint inductive thematic analysis was undertaken, based on the constant comparative method.
 
  Recommendations for boosting community-dwelling older people's access to dental care included publicly funding or subsiding the cost of dental care for older people, aligning the pension with the real cost of living, and making the environment at Work and Income less hostile and the emergency dental grant more readily available, making dental clinics more accessible, initiating domiciliary dental care, having mobile dental clinics visit neighbourhoods with high proportions of older people, as well as subsidised transport to the dental clinic. Other suggestions were having GPs, pharmacists and social workers emphasise oral health during appointments, along with dental education campaigns.
 
  In order to boost the rates of dental care access among older New Zealanders who receive home support, multiple structural changes are necessary, but these should primarily focus on reducing the cost and increasing accessibility.
 In order to boost the rates of dental care access among older New Zealanders who receive home support, multiple structural changes are necessary, but these should primarily focus on reducing the cost and increasing accessibility.Marine food webs are structured through a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes. In coral reef ecosystems, fish size is related to life-history characteristics and size-based indicators can represent the distribution and flow of energy through the food web. Thus, size spectra can be a useful tool for investigating the impacts of both fishing and habitat condition on the health and productivity of coral reef fisheries. In addition, coral reef fisheries are often data-limited and size spectra analysis can be a relatively cost-effective and simple method for assessing fish populations. Abundance size spectra are widely used and quantify the relationship between organism size and relative abundance. Previous studies that have investigated the impacts of fishing and habitat condition together on the size distribution of coral reef fishes, however, have aggregated all fishes regardless of taxonomic identity. This leads to a poor understanding of how fishes with different feeding strategies, body size-abunty or functional role overlooks differential impacts of fishing pressure and habitat condition on carnivore and herbivore size distributions.
  Although ophthalmic complaints were mostly mentioned in thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy (TAO), emotional and psychological disturbances are increasingly concerned. We aimed to investigate the brain functional alteration in TAO patients by using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) with the fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF), regional homogeneity (ReHo), and degree centrality (DC) methods.
 
  Twenty-one consecutive TAO patients and 21 healthy controls (HCs) underwent rs-fMRI scans. The fALFF, ReHo, and DC values were compared between groups.
 
  Compared with HCs, TAO group showed decreased fALFF values in bilateral calcarine/left lingual gyrus and left middle occipital gyrus (MOG). Moreover, TAO group had decreased ReHo values in left MOG/inferior occipital gyrus/fusiform gyrus, while increased ReHo values in bilateral middle frontal gyrus (MFG)/superior frontal gyrus (SFG) than HCs. TAO group also showed decreased DC values in bilateral postcentral gyrus (PoCG)/precentral gyrus/superior parietal lobule and supplementary motor area, and increased DC values in left SFG/MFG and MFG. In TAO patients, ReHo value in left MOG was positively correlated with visual acuity (r = 0.524, p = 0.021), while ReHo values in bilateral MFGs were negatively correlated with cognitive scores (left/right r = -0.476/-0.527, p = 0.039/0.020).  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/borussertib.html  DC value in left PoCG was negatively correlated with disease duration (r = -0.492, p = 0.033).
 
  Our findings indicated that TAO patients had brain functional alterations in the visual network, executive control network, sensorimotor network, and attention network, which may reflect potential visual and cognitive dysfunctions.
 Our findings indicated that TAO patients had brain functional alterations in the visual network, executive control network, sensorimotor network, and attention network, which may reflect potential visual and cognitive dysfunctions.
  Assessment of the essential white matter fibers of arcuate fasciculus and corticospinal tract (CST), required for preoperative planning in brain tumor patients, relies on the reliability of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The recent development of multiband DTI (mb-DTI) based on simultaneous multislice excitation could maintain the overall quality of tractography while not exceeding standard clinical care time. To address this potential, we performed quantitative analyses to evaluate tractography results of arcuate fasciculus and CST acquired by mb-DTI in brain tumor patients.
 
  We retrospectively analyzed 44 patients with brain lesions who underwent presurgical single-shot DTI (s-DTI) and mb-DTI. We measured DTI parameters fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD [mm
  s
  ]) in whole brain and tumor regions; and the tractography parameters fiber FA, MD (mm
  s
  ), volume (mm
  ), and length (mm) in the whole brain, arcuate fasciculus, and CST. Additionally, three neuroradiologists performed a blinded visual assessment comparing s-DTI with mb-DTI.