Amidst the widespread proliferation of the COVID-19 virus, brain fog has become one of the most critical issues of public health. Brain fog may lead to sub-health conditions, such as forgetfulness, difficulty thinking, and other related symptoms. Although they are not immediately life-threatening, these sub-health conditions could gradually erode the quality of life. Currently, there is no relevant screening tool for brain fog.

The aim of this study was to develop a reliable screening tool.

A web-based brain fog screening questionnaire was developed in the study. It was based on previous studies, which summarized five parts of the most common clinical symptoms after COVID-19: forgetfulness, difficulty thinking, difficulty concentrating, feeling confused, and difficulty finding words or phrases to speak. Unfortunately, these items were used only in a way of yes or no answers in previous studies. Each of these items was expanded to five anchors to evaluate their severity in the study. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to assess internal consistency. K-means clustering was used as a second method to validate the cutoff points. Furthermore, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was applied to validate the appropriateness of the cutoff point.

There were 534 participants who completely finished the questionnaire. It includes 183 males and 351 females, and all of them aged between 19 and 81 years. The Cronbach’s Alpha value was 0.821. The cutoff point was at a total score of 6 in terms of K-means. Based on the result, the ROC curve revealed that an area under the curve (AUC) was 0.816 with a confidence interval of 0.784 to 0.849.

The study demonstrated the feasibility and reliability of the web-based screening test for brain fog.

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Noonan syndrome is a genetic disorder with high prevalence of congenital heart defects, such as pulmonary stenosis, atrial septal defect and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Scarce data exists regarding the safety of pregnancy in patients with Noonan syndrome, particularly in the context of maternal cardiac disease.

We performed a retrospective chart review of patients at Yale-New Haven Hospital from 2012 to 2020 with diagnoses of Noonan syndrome and pregnancy. We analysed medical records for pregnancy details and cardiac health, including echocardiograms to quantify maternal cardiac dysfunction through measurements of pulmonary valve peak gradient, structural heart defects and interventricular septal thickness.

We identified five women with Noonan syndrome (10 pregnancies). Three of five patients had pulmonary valve stenosis at the time of pregnancy, two of which had undergone cardiac procedures. 50% of pregnancies (5/10) resulted in pre-term birth. 80% (8/10) of all deliveries were converted to caesarean section after a trial of labour. One pregnancy resulted in intra-uterine fetal demise while nine pregnancies resulted in the birth of a living infant. 60% (6/10) of livebirths required care in the neonatal intensive care unit. One infant passed away at 5 weeks of age.

The majority of mothers had pre-existing, though mild, heart disease. We found high rates of prematurity, conversion to caesarean section, and elevated level of care. No maternal complications resulted in long-term morbidity. Our study suggests that women with Noonan syndrome and low-risk cardiac lesions can become pregnant and deliver a healthy infant with counselling and risk evaluation.

The risk of antipsychotic-associated cardiovascular and metabolic events may differ among countries, and limited real-world evidence has been available comparing the corresponding risks among children and young adults. We, therefore, evaluated the risks of cardiovascular and metabolic events in children and young adults receiving antipsychotics.

We conducted a multinational self-controlled case series (SCCS) study and included patients aged 6–30 years old who had both exposure to antipsychotics and study outcomes from four nationwide databases of Taiwan (2004–2012), Korea (2010–2016), Hong Kong (2001–2014) and the UK (1997–2016) that covers a total of approximately 100 million individuals. We investigated three antipsychotics exposure windows (i.e., 90 days pre-exposure, 1–30 days, 30–90 days and 90 + days of exposure). The outcomes were cardiovascular events (stroke, ischaemic heart disease and acute myocardial infarction), or metabolic events (hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus and dyslipidaemia).

We included a total of 48 515 individuals in the SCCS analysis. We found an increased risk of metabolic events only in the risk window with more than 90-day exposure, with a pooled IRR of 1.29 (95% CI 1.20–1.38). The pooled IRR was 0.98 (0.90–1.06) for 1–30 days and 0.88 (0.76–1.02) for 31–90 days. We found no association in any exposure window for cardiovascular events. The pooled IRR was 1.86 (0.74–4.64) for 1–30 days, 1.35 (0.74–2.47) for 31–90 days and 1.29 (0.98–1.70) for 90 + days.

Long-term exposure to antipsychotics was associated with an increased risk of metabolic events but did not trigger cardiovascular events in children and young adults.

We summarize some of the past year's most important findings within climate change-related research. New research has improved our understanding of Earth's sensitivity to carbon dioxide, finds that permafrost thaw could release more carbon emissions than expected and that the uptake of carbon in tropical ecosystems is weakening. Adverse impacts on human society include increasing water shortages and impacts on mental health. Options for solutions emerge from rethinking economic models, rights-based litigation, strengthened governance systems and a new social contract. The disruption caused by COVID-19 could be seized as an opportunity for positive change, directing economic stimulus towards sustainable investments.

A synthesis is made of ten fields within climate science where there have been significant advances since mid-2019, through an expert elicitation process with broad disciplinary scope. Findings include: (1) a better understanding of equilibrium climate sensitivity; (2) abrupt thaw as an accelerator of carbon release from permafrost; (3) changes to global and regional land carbon sinks; (4) impacts of climate change on water crises, including equity perspectives; (5) adverse effects on mental health from climate change; (6) immediate effects on climate of the COVID-19 pandemic and requirements for recovery packages to deliver on the Paris Agreement; (7) suggested long-term changes to governance and a social contract to address climate change, learning from the current pandemic, (8) updated positive cost–benefit ratio and new perspectives on the potential for green growth in the short- and long-term perspective; (9) urban electrification as a strategy to move towards low-carbon energy systems and (10) rights-based litigation as an increasingly important method to address climate change, with recent clarifications on the legal standing and representation of future generations.

Stronger permafrost thaw, COVID-19 effects and growing mental health impacts among highlights of latest climate science.

Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may suffer marked impairment in early adulthood, increasing their risk for serious self-harmful behaviors. Deliberate self-poisoning (DSP) is the most common form of deliberate self-harm. An association may exist between ADHD diagnosis and subsequent DSP events. The purpose of study was to determine whether children and adolescents with ADHD are at a greater risk for DSP than are age-matched controls.

Claims data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Database were used to conduct a retrospective cohort analysis of emergency department visits. The study cohort contained 3685 patients with ADHD (< 8 years old). Each ADHD patient was frequency matched based on sex, age, urbanization, parental occupation, and index year to 10 control patients without ADHD. A Cox proportional-hazards regression model was used to estimate the risk of DSP in the ADHD and comparison cohorts.

The risk of developing DSP was significantly higher in the ADHD cohort than in the comparison cohort (P < .0001 for log-rank test). After adjusting for potential confounders, the regression model showed that the ADHD patients were at a 4.65-fold greater risk of developing DSP than the control patients were (HR = 4.65, 95% CI: 2.41–8.94).

Children with ADHD are at greater risk of developing DSP. Identifying risk factors of DSP is crucial efforts to implement prevention strategies. The identification of the underlying cause of increased DSP among ADHD patients warrants further investigation.

Retinoblastoma is the most common primary intraocular tumor of childhood with >95% survival rates in the US. Traditional therapy for retinoblastoma often included enucleation (removal of the eye). While much is known about the visual, physical, and cognitive ramifications of enucleation, data are lacking about survivors' perception of how this treatment impacts overall quality of life.

Qualitative analysis of an open-ended response describing how much the removal of an eye had affected retinoblastoma survivors' lives and in what ways in free text, narrative form.

Four hundred and four retinoblastoma survivors who had undergone enucleation (bilateral disease = 214; 52% female; mean age = 44, SD = 11) completed the survey. Survivors reported physical problems (n = 205, 50.7%), intrapersonal problems (n = 77, 19.1%), social and relational problems (n = 98, 24.3%), and affective problems (n = 34, 8.4%) at a mean of 42 years after diagnosis. Three key themes emerged from survivors' responses; specifically, they (1) continue to report physical and intrapersonal struggles with appearance and related self-consciousness due to appearance; (2) have multiple social and relational problems, with teasing and bullying being prominent problems; and (3) reported utilization of active coping strategies, including developing more acceptance and learning compensatory skills around activities of daily living.

This study suggests that adult retinoblastoma survivors treated with enucleation continue to struggle with a unique set of psychosocial problems. Future interventions can be designed to teach survivors more active coping skills (e.g., for appearance-related issues, vision-related issues, and teasing/bullying) to optimize survivors' long-term quality of life.

To assess independent and joint effects of pairs of vascular and cardiometabolic risk factors (VCMRFs) in relation to risk of all-cause dementia.

Population-based longitudinal cohort study of cognitive impairment. We used an algorithm to select pairs of VCMRFs and tested their joint effects in time-dependent Cox models. We used attributable proportions (AP) to measure the proportion of risk from interactions beyond any additive effect.

Economically depressed small-town population.

Adults age 65+ years with up to 10 yearly study visits (N=1701, median (Q1, Q3) age, 78 (71.0, 83.0), 62.3% female, 94.9% white).

Among 1701 participants free from prevalent dementia with at least one follow-up visit, 109 developed incident all-cause dementia. In pairings of APOE*4 with hypertension (HTN) and congestive heart failure (CHF), the variables contributed independently and additively to all-cause dementia risk. In pairings of APOE*4 with stroke and stroke with CHF, the variables demonstrated independent contributions to all-cause dementia risk; their joint effects showed excess detriment demonstrating synergistic interactions (joint HR [95% CI]: 28.33 [6.74, 119.01] and 50.30 [14.57, 173.57] respectively, fully adjusted models). Physical activity (PA) was independently associated with lower all-cause dementia risk when paired with APOE*4, stroke, and CHF in unadjusted models; these associations did not survive covariate adjustment. The joint effect of low PA and APOE*4 was associated with additively increased all-cause dementia risk (joint HR [95% CI]: 4.61 [2.07, 10.23], fully adjusted model).

Reduction of VCMRFs, including low PA, could be valuable for dementia prevention, especially among APOE*4 carriers.

Evidence suggests that semantic interference may be a sensitive indicator of early dementia. We examined the utility of the Semantic Interference Test (SIT), a cognitive stress memory paradigm which taps proactive and retroactive semantic interference, for predicting progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia in both a clinical and a population-based sample.

Participants with MCI in the clinical (n = 184) and population-based (n = 435) samples were followed for up to four years. We employed receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methods to establish optimal thresholds for four different SIT indices. Threshold performance was compared in the two samples using logistic and Cox proportional hazard regression models.

Within four years, 42 (22.8%) MCI individuals in the clinical sample and 45 (10.3%) individuals in the population-based sample progressed to dementia. Overall classification accuracy of SIT thresholds ranged from 61.4% to 84.8%. Different subtests of the SIT had slightly different performance characteristics in the two samples. However, regression models showed that thresholds established in the clinical sample performed similarly in the population sample before and after adjusting for demographics and other baseline neuropsychological test scores.

Despite differences in demographic composition and progression rates, baseline SIT scores predicted progression from MCI to dementia similarly in both samples. Thresholds that best predicted progression were slightly below thresholds established for distinguishing between amnestic MCI and cognitively normal subjects in clinical practice. This confirms the utility of the SIT in both clinical and population-based samples and establishes thresholds most predictive of progression of individuals with MCI.