COVID-19's impact on a community-based physical activity program for adults with moderate-to-severe TBI.

PURPOSE: Physical activity (PA) is proposed for long-term problems after traumatic brain injury (TBI) with mood, quality of life, and participation. However, COVID-19 mitigation strategies resulted in widespread closures of community-based fitness centres, including one housing a peer-assisted PA program (TBI-Health). The purpose of this study was to provide an in-depth exploration of COVID-19's impact on the TBI-Health program for adults with moderate-to-severe TBI and determine how their PA behaviours could be supported in the pandemic. METHODS: Interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to collect and analyze data from semi-structured Zoom-facilitated interviews with seven female and nine male adults with moderate-to-severe TBI (including program participants and mentors). RESULTS: Three major themes were identified. Need for PA after TBI included specific benefits of PA after TBI and desire for an adapted PA program. Lasting Impacts of the TBI-Health Program identified belonging to the TBI-Health community, benefits, and knowledge transfer from the program. Resilience and Loss through the Pandemic comprised the repercussions of COVID-19, loss of the PA program, adapting PA to the pandemic, and resilience after TBI. CONCLUSION: This study provides insights about impacts of participating in community-based peer-assisted PA programs after moderate-to-severe TBI and ways to support PA in unforeseen circumstances.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONOur community-based peer-assisted physical activity program for adults with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) promoted a range of daily and social activities.Outdoor group-based physical activity programs provide physical activity and social opportunities for adults with moderate-to-severe TBI when indoor physical activity is restricted.Community-based peer-assisted physical activity programs can assist with posttraumatic growth after moderate-to-severe TBI.

Antimicrobial activity of ceftobiprole and comparator agents when tested against contemporary Gram-positive and -negative organisms collected from Europe (2015).

Susceptibility testing of ceftobiprole and comparators against 12,240 isolates was performed following CLSI/EUCAST guidelines. The percentage of susceptible MRSA isolates was higher for ceftobiprole (96.5% susceptible) than for ceftaroline (86.2% susceptible). Both ceftobiprole (MIC50/90, 0.5/2 mg/L) and ceftaroline (MIC50/90, 0.25/1 mg/L) demonstrated potent activity against coagulase-negative staphylococci. Ceftobiprole demonstrated good potency against Enterococcus faecalis (MIC50/90 values of 0.5/2 mg/L); ceftaroline (MIC50/90, 2/8 mg/L) was 4-fold less active against these strains. Ceftobiprole activity was comparable to that of the other ß-lactam agents tested against S. pneumoniae (MIC90, 0.5 mg/L vs 0.12-2 mg/L [other ß-lactams]), viridans-group streptococci (MIC90,0.25 mg/L vs 0.006-1 mg/L [other ß-lactams]), and ß-hemolytic streptococci (MIC90,0.03 mg/L vs 0.015-0.06 mg/L [other ß-lactams]). Overall, 73.8% of Enterobacteriaceae isolates tested were susceptible to ceftobiprole. Ceftobiprole inhibited 70.4% of P. aeruginosa at ≤4 mg/L and all isolates of Haemophilus influenzae and Moraxella catarrhalis at ≤ 0.5 mg/L. Ceftobiprole was active in vitro against a broad range of clinically-relevant contemporary Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial isolates.

Healthy Eating for Life English as a second language curriculum: applying the RE-AIM framework to evaluate a nutrition education intervention targeting cancer risk reduction.

Medically underserved US immigrants are at an increased risk for death from preventable or curable cancers due to economic, cultural, and/or linguistic barriers to medical care. The purpose of this study was to describe the evaluation of the pilot study of the Healthy Eating for Life (HE4L) English as a second language curriculum. The Reach, Effectiveness Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (RE-AIM) model was used to design a mixed-methods approach to the evaluation of the HE4L curriculum. Successful implementation was dependent upon enthusiastic teacher and manager support of the curriculum, teachers' ability to flexibly apply the curriculum to meet student needs, and researcher provision of curriculum workbooks. HE4L can be implemented successfully in various adult education settings to teach healthy eating behaviors and English language principles. Scale-up of HE4L may depend on the development of an online version of the curriculum to avoid the costs associated with printing and distributing curriculum materials.

Antimicrobial activity of tigecycline and cefoperazone/sulbactam tested against 18,386 Gram-negative organisms from Europe and the Asia-Pacific region (2013-2014).

A total of 18,386 organisms, including 13,224 Enterobacteriaceae, 3536 Pseudomonas aeruginosa, 1254 Acinetobacter spp., and 372Stenotrophomonas maltophilia were collected from Western Europe (WEU; n=10,021), Eastern Europe (EEU; n=4957), and the Asia-Pacific region (APAC; n=3408 [1052 from China]) in 2013-2014 as part of the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program and tested by a reference broth microdilution method for susceptibility against tigecycline, cefoperazone/sulbactam, and comparator agents. Overall, 95.3% of Enterobacteriaceae were susceptible (≤1µg/mL; EUCAST) to tigecycline (MIC50/90, 0.12/1µg/mL) with regional EUCAST susceptibility rates of 94.8-97.8% (98.9-99.6% inhibited at ≤2µg/mL [US FDA]). Among Acinetobacter spp., 66.1% (EEU) and 79.5% (WEU) were inhibited at ≤1µg/mL of tigecycline (94.9% and 97.3% inhibited at ≤2µg/mL; pan-European MIC50/90, 1/2µg/mL). For S. maltophilia, 65.4% (China) to 88.9% (EEU) of the isolates were inhibited at ≤1µg/mL of tigecycline. Cefoperazone/sulbactam inhibited 94.6/83.5/91.5% of Enterobacteriaceae at ≤16µg/mL in WEU/EEU/APAC, respectively.

African trypanosomes express an immunogenic protein with a repeating epitope of 24 amino acids.

Infection with intracellular protozoan parasites such as Plasmodium, Leishmania and Trypanosoma cruzi induces a strong antibody response against proteins containing tandem repeats, suggesting that these repetitive epitopes may camouflage vulnerable parasite antigens from a 'protective' immune response. We tested this theory by immunoscreening a cDNA expression library of African trypanosomes, extracellular parasites that evade their hosts' immune response by antigenic variation, and found that the most frequently detected trypanosome protein contains more than 40 tandem copies of a 24-amino acid repeat with a consensus sequence of A-M-E-D-E-L-D-S-L-R-A-L-N-E-Q-Y-E-A-L-Q-R-T-N-A (net charge = -4). This protein is encoded on an mRNA of more than 20 kb and has slight sequence similarities with cytoskeletal, intermediate filament proteins in other organisms. Thus, protozoan proteins with tandemly repeating epitopes do not exist solely to divert the humoral immune response; they have other specific physiological functions for the parasites and affect the overall parasite-host interaction in unknown and perhaps different ways.