Activity

Despite strong evidence that it is efficacious, chemoprevention has been underused in eligible women. Reasons offered not to adopt and initiate strategies to reduce the risk of breast cancer include the fear of adverse effects, medication costs, lack of reasonably accurate and feasible methods for assessing an individual’s personal risk, and lack of established risk thresholds that maximize benefit and minimize harms. The article by Macdonald and colleagues remind us that the problem of lack of uptake of risk-reducing medications for breast cancer remains a worldwide clinical challenge despite endorsements from national and international organizations that recommend the use of risk-reducing medications for breast cancer with level I evidence. Several strategies are suggested to improve uptake and utilization of safe and effective chemoprevention medications with high therapeutic indices.See related article by Macdonald et al., p. xxx.

To assess the accuracy of the AbC-19 Rapid Test lateral flow immunoassay for the detection of previous severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection.

Test accuracy study.

Laboratory based evaluation.

2847 key workers (healthcare staff, fire and rescue officers, and police officers) in England in June 2020 (268 with a previous polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive result (median 63 days previously), 2579 with unknown previous infection status); and 1995 pre-pandemic blood donors.

AbC-19 sensitivity and specificity, estimated using known negative (pre-pandemic) and known positive (PCR confirmed) samples as reference standards and secondly using the Roche Elecsys anti-nucleoprotein assay, a highly sensitive laboratory immunoassay, as a reference standard in samples from key workers.

Test result bands were often weak, with positive/negative discordance by three trained laboratory staff for 3.9% of devices. Using consensus readings, for known positive and negative samples sef the tested population have had SARS-CoV-2 infection, around one in five key workers testing positive with AbC-19 would be false positives.

ISRCTN 56609224.

ISRCTN 56609224.

To evaluate the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) for screening to detect major depression in pregnant and postpartum women.

Individual participant data meta-analysis.

Medline, Medline In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citations, PsycINFO, and Web of Science (from inception to 3 October 2018).

Eligible datasets included EPDS scores and major depression classification based on validated diagnostic interviews. Bivariate random effects meta-analysis was used to estimate EPDS sensitivity and specificity compared with semi-structured, fully structured (Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) excluded), and MINI diagnostic interviews separately using individual participant data. One stage meta-regression was used to examine accuracy by reference standard categories and participant characteristics.

Individual participant data were obtained from 58 of 83 eligible studies (70%; 15 557 of 22 788 eligible participants (68%), 2069 with major depression). Combined sensitivity and specificitSPERO (CRD42015024785).

PROSPERO (CRD42015024785).The capacity for sensory systems to encode relevant information that is invariant to many stimulus changes is central to normal, real-world, cognitive function. This invariance is thought to be reflected in the complex spatiotemporal activity patterns of neural populations, but our understanding of population-level representational invariance remains coarse. Applied topology is a promising tool to discover invariant structure in large datasets. Here, we use topological techniques to characterize and compare the spatiotemporal pattern of coactive spiking within populations of simultaneously recorded neurons in the secondary auditory region caudal medial neostriatum of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). We show that the pattern of population spike train coactivity carries stimulus-specific structure that is not reducible to that of individual neurons. We then introduce a topology-based similarity measure for population coactivity that is sensitive to invariant stimulus structure and show that this measure captures invariant neural representations tied to the learned relationships between natural vocalizations. This demonstrates one mechanism whereby emergent stimulus properties can be encoded in population activity, and shows the potential of applied topology for understanding invariant representations in neural populations.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Information in neural populations is carried by the temporal patterns of spikes. We applied novel mathematical tools from the field of algebraic topology to quantify the structure of these temporal patterns. We found that, in a secondary auditory region of a songbird, these patterns reflected invariant information about a learned stimulus relationship. find more These results demonstrate that topology provides a novel approach for characterizing neural responses that is sensitive to invariant relationships that are critical for the perception of natural stimuli.Loss of auditory-nerve (AN) afferent cochlear innervation is a prevalent human condition that does not affect audiometric thresholds and therefore remains largely undetectable with standard clinical tests. AN loss is widely expected to cause hearing difficulties in noise, known as “hidden hearing loss,” but support for this hypothesis is controversial. Here, we used operant conditioning procedures to examine the perceptual impact of AN loss on behavioral tone-in-noise (TIN) sensitivity in the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus; of either sex), an avian animal model with complex hearing abilities similar to humans. Bilateral kainic acid (KA) infusions depressed compound AN responses by 40-70% without impacting otoacoustic emissions or behavioral tone sensitivity in quiet. Surprisingly, animals with AN damage showed normal thresholds for tone detection in noise (0.1 ± 1.0 dB compared to control animals; mean difference ± SE), even under a challenging roving-level condition with random stimulus variation across trials.