Article
Medicine, General & Internal
Mark Kieh, Laura Richert, Abdoul H. Beavogui, Birgit Grund, Bailah Leigh, Eric D'Ortenzio, Seydou Doumbia, Edouard Lhomme, Samba Sow, Renaud Vatrinet, Celine Roy, Stephen B. Kennedy, Sylvain Faye, Shelley Lees, Niouma P. Millimouno, Alseny M. Camara, Mohamed Samai, Gibrilla F. Deen, Moussa Doumbia, Helene Esperou, Jerome Pierson, Deborah Watson-Jones, Alpha Diallo, Deborah Wentworth, Chelsea McLean, Jakub Simon, Aurelie Wiedemann, Bonnie Dighero-Kemp, Lisa Hensley, H. Clifford Lane, Yves Levy, Peter Piot, Brian Greenwood, Genevieve Chene, James Neaton, Yazdan Yazdanpanah
Summary: In the study of vaccines for preventing Zaire Ebola virus disease, the Ad26-MVA regimen showed good immune responses in both adults and children, and the other two regimens also provided protection. The trial results demonstrated the safety of these vaccines, and immune responses were observed from day 14 after vaccination until month 12.
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE
(2022)
Article
Immunology
Andrea Haekyung Haselbeck, Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse, Juyeon Park, Malick M. Gibani, Ligia Maria Cruz Espinoza, Ariane Abreu, Craig Van Rensburg, Michael Owusu-Ansah, Sampson Twuamsi-Ankrah, Michael Owusu, Isaac Aguna, Valentina Picot, Hyonjin Jeon, Ellen Higginson, Sunju Park, Zenaida R. Mojares, Justin Im, Megan E. Carey, Farhana Khanam, Susan Tonks, Gordon Dougan, Deokryun Kim, Jonathan Sugimoto, Vittal Mogasale, Kathleen M. Neuzil, Firdausi Qadri, Yaw Adu-Sarkodie, Ellis Owusu-Dabo, John Clemens, Florian Marks
Summary: Typhoid fever remains a significant health issue in sub-Saharan Africa, and a cluster-randomized trial is being conducted to investigate the population-level protection of Vi-TT against typhoid. Real-life effectiveness data and health economic evidence synthesis can help improve the uptake of prequalified/licensed safe and effective typhoid vaccines in high burden settings.
Article
Immunology
Sarah Tubiana, Jose Labarere, Jacques Levraut, Pierre Michelet, Fleur Jourda de Vaux, Benoit Doumenc, Pierre Hausfater, Christophe Choquet, Patrick Plaisance, Jeannot Schmidt, Veronique Mattei, Olivier Gacia, Didier Storme, Patrick Ray, Guillaume Der Sahakian, Marie-Clement Kouka, Laure Jainsky, Jocelyn Raude, Xavier Duval, Yann-Erick Claessens
Summary: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of a multifaceted intervention in improving pneumococcal and influenza vaccinations among patients aged 65 years and older after an emergency department visit. The results showed that the intervention increased influenza vaccination rates, but did not affect pneumococcal vaccination rates. At 12 months, there was no difference in mortality between the intervention and control groups.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
T. R. W. Tipton, Y. Hall, J. A. Bore, A. White, L. S. Sibley, C. Sarfas, Y. Yuki, M. Martin, S. Longet, J. Mellors, K. Ewer, S. Guenther, M. Carrington, M. K. Konde, M. W. Carroll
Summary: This study identified and described T cell epitopes in survivors, showing T cell responses to the EBOV glycoprotein. The research revealed potential epitopes able to elicit a T cell response and demonstrate important immunodominant properties in EBOV survivors.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Immunology
Fahima Chowdhury, Asma Binte Aziz, Faisal Ahmmed, Tasnuva Ahmed, Sophie S. Y. Kang, Justin Im, Juyeon Park, Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse, Md. Taufiqul Islam, Deok Ryun Kim, Masuma Hoque, Gideok Pak, Farhana Khanam, Nigel A. J. McMillan, Xinxue Liu, Khalequ Zaman, Ashraful Islam Khan, Jerome H. Kim, Florian Marks, Firdausi Qadri, John D. Clemens
Summary: The current global initiative aims to end Cholera by 2030 through the use of oral cholera vaccine (OCV) and improved household water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices. This study reanalyzed a cluster-randomized trial in urban Bangladesh and found that improved WASH practices and OCV interaction may provide greater protection against cholera. However, further research is needed to understand the differences between intent to vaccinate and actual receipt of OCV.
Article
Immunology
Barbara E. Mahon, Jakub Simon, Marc-Alain Widdowson, Mohamed Samai, Eric Rogier, Jennifer Legardy-Williams, Kenneth Liu, Jarad Schiffer, James Lange, Carolynn DeByle, Robert Pinner, Anne Schuchat, Laurence Slutsker, Susan Goldstein
Summary: Asymptomatic adults, with or without malaria infection, showed robust immune responses to the rVSV Delta G-ZEBOV-GP vaccine lasting for 9-12 months, although those with malaria infection had slightly lower responses.
JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES
(2021)
Article
Mathematics, Interdisciplinary Applications
Faical Ndairou, Moein Khalighi, Leo Lahti
Summary: The paper discusses the development of mathematical models to simulate the dynamics of Ebola transmission. It focuses on models with a variable population. A compartmental model consisting of 8-dimensional nonlinear differential equations with a dynamic population is presented, and its basic reproduction number is investigated. Additionally, a dimensionless model is introduced for numerical analysis, demonstrating the stability of the disease-free equilibrium when the basic reproduction number is less than one. The fractional differential form of the model is used to fit long time-series data from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, showing the model's performance.
CHAOS SOLITONS & FRACTALS
(2023)
Article
Immunology
Yapin Li, Jianxing Yu, Qingfeng Li, Dan Yu, Wenjing Song, Qi Liu, Dongqi Gao, Qiulan Chen, Haiyang Zhang, Liqun Huo, Jian Wang, Jiayi Wang, Huisuo Yang, Gang Zeng
Summary: This study investigated the effectiveness of a trivalent influenza vaccine in Chinese military personnel, and found that it showed moderate effectiveness against laboratory-confirmed influenza, with better efficacy against influenza B viruses compared to influenza A viruses.
Article
Immunology
Mbayame Nd Niang, Jonathan D. Sugimoto, Aldiouma Diallo, Bou Diarra, Justin R. Ortiz, Kristen D. C. Lewis, Kathryn E. Lafond, M. Elizabeth Halloran, Marc-Alain Widdowson, Kathleen M. Neuzil, John C. Victor
Summary: This study in Senegal found variable effectiveness of the trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine against influenza illness in children, with total and indirect vaccine effectiveness present when all circulating strains matched the vaccine formulation.
CLINICAL INFECTIOUS DISEASES
(2021)
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Karla Hemming, Monica Taljaard
Summary: Cluster randomized trials require larger sample size and face additional complexities. The potential for contamination justifies the use of cluster randomization, but the risk of contamination should be weighed against the problem of questionable scientific validity in settings with post-randomization identification or recruitment of unblinded participants. Guidelines are provided to minimize bias and maximize statistical efficiency in conducting cluster trials, emphasizing that methods for individually randomized trials rarely apply. Cluster randomization should be used when necessary, balancing its benefits, risks, and sample size. Clustering, restricted randomization, and adjustment for covariates should be considered, and recruitment should preferably be done before randomizing clusters.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY
(2023)
Review
Virology
Toufik Abdul-Rahman, Lukman Lawal, Emily Meale, Oyinbolaji A. Ajetunmobi, Soyemi Toluwalashe, Uthman Hassan Alao, Shankhaneel Ghosh, Neil Garg, Abdullahi Tunde Aborode, Andrew Awuah Wireko, Aashna Mehta, Kateryna Sikora
Summary: The Ebola virus has caused multiple outbreaks in Africa with high fatality rates. Social factors such as human mobility, behavior, and cultural norms contribute to the transmission risk. However, challenges including lagging vaccine production pose a risk of another outbreak.
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL VIROLOGY
(2023)
Article
Environmental Studies
Monique Mitchell Turner, Skylar Lisse, Rajiv Rimal, Tamah Kamlem, Hina Shaikh, Nilakshi Biswas
Summary: During the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, there was a widespread misunderstanding of the virus and proliferation of rumors among citizens. To reduce public's fears about the disease, a tracking system was developed to detect and control rumors through SMS text messaging. The study found that more rumors appeared in newspapers, but they were more likely to be identified as such on the radio. The tracking system accurately predicted rumors before they appeared in newspapers or on the radio, demonstrating its usefulness in future health epidemics.
Article
Physiology
Mahmoud T. T. Elzayat, Melissa M. M. Markofski, RichardJ J. Simpson, Mitzi Laughlin, Emily C. C. LaVoy
Summary: The study found that acute arm eccentric exercise did not influence antibody titers or cell mediated immune responses to the influenza vaccine delivered post-exercise in older adults. More strenuous exercise may be required for exercise to act as an adjuvant.
FRONTIERS IN PHYSIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Medicine, General & Internal
Supriya Ravichandran, Surender Khurana
Summary: A serodiagnostic test has been developed to differentiate between individuals with EBOV infection-induced antibodies and those with EBOV vaccine-induced antibodies. This test can accurately detect Ebola virus infections and could be implemented as a robust diagnostic tool for epidemiology and surveillance during and after outbreaks, especially in countries with mass Ebola vaccinations.
Article
Medicine, Research & Experimental
Moses Badio, Edouard Lhomme, Mark Kieh, Abdoul Habib Beavogui, Stephen B. Kennedy, Seydou Doumbia, Bailah Leigh, Samba O. Sow, Alpha Diallo, Daniela Fusco, Matthew Kirchoff, Monique Termote, Renaud Vatrinet, Deborah Wentworth, Helene Esperou, H. Clifford Lane, Jerome Pierson, Deborah Watson-Jones, Celine Roy, Eric D'Ortenzio, Brian Greenwood, Genevieve Chene, Laura Richert, James D. Neaton, Yazdan Yazdanpanah
Summary: The PREVAC trial is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 clinical trial evaluating two promising Ebola candidate vaccines. The trial aims to address unanswered questions related to the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccines in adults and children, with multiple amendments made to the protocol based on challenges encountered during the study.
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Dongdong Li, Wenbin Lu, Di Shu, Sengwee Toh, Rui Wang
Summary: This article proposes a distributed methodology for fitting Cox proportional hazards models in multi-site studies without sharing individual-level data. The method uses summary-level statistics and can accommodate different types of models and adjust for multiple covariates. Through simulation studies and real-world data application, the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method are verified.
Article
Statistics & Probability
Dongdong Li, X. Joan Hu, Rui Wang
Summary: This article focuses on evaluating the association between two event times without specifying the joint distribution parametrically. The presence of informative censoring due to a terminating event, such as death, makes this task particularly challenging. The authors propose a method that links the joint distribution of the two event times and the informative censoring time using a nested copula function. They also use flexible functional forms to specify the covariate effects on both the marginal and joint distributions. The proposed approach estimates the association parameters, marginal survival functions, and covariate effects in a semiparametric model for the bivariate event time.
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
(2023)
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Fan Li, Xinyuan Chen, Zizhong Tian, Denise Esserman, Patrick J. Heagerty, Rui Wang
Summary: This article explores the heterogeneity of treatment effects in different patient subpopulations in cluster randomized trials and presents a novel analytical design formula that can be widely applied to evaluate effect modifiers at different levels. The effectiveness of this new method is validated through simulation studies and real-world trial examples.
Article
Biology
Kaitlyn Cook, Wenbin Lu, Rui Wang
Summary: The Botswana Combination Prevention Project aimed to study the impact of policy changes on the effectiveness of HIV prevention interventions. By using a stratified proportional hazards model for clustered interval-censored data, the study developed a composite expectation maximization algorithm to estimate model parameters without assuming any specific hazard functions or within-cluster dependence structure. The study also proposed a robust sandwich estimator for the variance and evaluated the performance of these estimators through simulation studies.
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Dongdong Li, Jenna Wong, Xiaojuan Li, Sengwee Toh, Rui Wang
Summary: This study compared four imputation methods for missing data in distributed research networks (DRNs). The results showed that all imputation methods produced unbiased and more efficient estimates under small effect sizes and homogeneous missingness mechanisms. Random forest (RF) method had higher efficiency under heterogeneous missingness mechanisms. Estimates from distributed imputation combined by meta-analysis were similar to those from imputation using pooled data. Substantive model compatible imputation (SMC) performed best when effect sizes were large.
PHARMACOEPIDEMIOLOGY AND DRUG SAFETY
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Katarzyna M. Tyc, Aslamuzzaman Kazi, Alok Ranjan, Rui Wang, Said M. Sebti
Summary: KRAS mutations are common in pancreatic and lung cancers, but not all mutant tumors are addicted to mutated KRAS. A 30-gene transcriptome signature called KDS30 has been discovered, which encodes a novel EGFR/ERBB2-driven signaling network and predicts KRAS oncogene addiction. High KDS30 tumors from KRAS-mutant patients are enriched in genes upregulated by EGFR, ERBB2, KRAS, or MEK. Combination therapy with EGFR/ERBB2 and MEK inhibitors inhibits tumor growth and prolongs survival in high KDS30 KRAS-mutant lung and pancreatic xenografts, suggesting its potential clinical application.
Article
Psychology, Clinical
Caron A. C. Clark, Kaitlyn Cook, Rui Wang, Michael Rueschman, Jerilynn Radcliffe, Susan Redline, H. Gerry Taylor
Summary: Despite the importance of attention for children's self-regulation and mental health, there are limited task-based measures suitable for a wide range of ages. This study created three versions of a combined go/no-go and continuous performance task and found that they assessed response inhibition and sustained attention in children aged 3-12 years. The task scores showed promise as valid and sensitive indicators of inhibition and sustained attention across different age groups.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT
(2023)
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Angela Y. Y. Zhu, Nandita Mitra, Karla Hemming, Michael O. O. Harhay, Fan Li
Summary: Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) involve randomizing entire groups of participants-called clusters-to treatment arms but are often comprised of a limited or fixed number of available clusters. Analytical methods for individual-level covariate adjustment in small CRTs have received little attention to date. In this paper, we systematically investigate the operating characteristics of two individual-level covariate adjustment strategies and the uncertainty in estimating the participant-average treatment effect.
BIOMETRICAL JOURNAL
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Shangyuan Ye, Daniel Li, Tingting Yu, Daniel A. Caroff, Jeffrey Guy, Russell E. Poland, Kenneth E. Sands, Edward J. Septimus, Susan S. Huang, Richard Platt, Rui Wang
Summary: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services require hospitals to report on quality metrics and financially penalize those in the lowest performance quartile. Surgical site infections (SSIs) are a critical component of these metrics, but accurate profiling is hindered by small surgical volumes. The exclusion of hospitals with less than one expected SSI from rankings is currently used, but its effectiveness is uncertain. Therefore, reliable evaluation criteria based on surgical volumes and predicted events are needed.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Review
Health Care Sciences & Services
Merlin Greuel, Frithjof Sy, Till Baernighausen, Maya Adam, Alain Vandormael, Jennifer Gates, Guy Harling
Summary: This scoping review examines the potential of smart mobile devices in enhancing the delivery of public health messages in community health worker (CHW)-client interactions. Smart devices can mitigate challenges faced by CHWs and improve their knowledge, motivation, and credibility. However, the impact of smart devices on the quality of CHW-client interactions is inconclusive, and technical difficulties can pose challenges, especially for older and less educated CHWs.
JMIR MHEALTH AND UHEALTH
(2023)
Article
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Can Meng, Mary Ryan, Paul J. Rathouz, Elizabeth L. Turner, John S. Preisser, Fan Li
Summary: This article introduces a newly developed R package ORTH.Ord for analyzing correlated ordinal outcomes using GEE models with finite-sample bias corrections. The package implements a modified version of alternating logistic regressions with estimation based on orthogonalized residuals. The simulation study shows that the ORTH method with bias-correction provides less biased estimates and closer coverage to the nominal level.
COMPUTER METHODS AND PROGRAMS IN BIOMEDICINE
(2023)
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Chia-Rui Chang, Yue Song, Fan Li, Rui Wang
Summary: Covariate adjustment is important in analyzing data from randomized clinical trials, but missing data can be a barrier. This study reviews different covariate adjustment methods with incomplete covariate data. The researchers propose a weighting approach that combines inverse probability weighting and overlap weighting to adjust for missing outcomes and covariates, and conduct comprehensive simulation studies to evaluate the performance of the methods.
STATISTICS IN MEDICINE
(2023)
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Lara Maleyeff, Rui Wang, Sebastien Haneuse, Fan Li
Summary: This study proposes a method for testing treatment effect heterogeneity in cluster randomized trials. Through a generalized linear mixed model, we derive sample size expressions for binary effect modifiers and develop a computationally efficient Monte Carlo approach for continuous effect modifiers. Our findings contribute to filling the methodological gap in existing research.
STATISTICS IN MEDICINE
(2023)
Review
Medicine, General & Internal
Nondumiso Mthiyane, Antony M. Rapulana, Guy Harling, Andrew Copas, Maryam Shahmanesh
Summary: In sub-Saharan Africa, multi-level interventions can reduce mental health disorders among adolescents. Most interventions targeting community groups showed positive changes in mental health outcomes.
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Di Shu, Xiaojuan Li, Qoua Her, Jenna Wong, Dongdong Li, Rui Wang, Sengwee Toh
Summary: Missing data in multi-site studies pose challenges for statistical analyses. We proposed a one-step estimation method that combines meta-analysis and within-site multiple imputation to estimate the average causal effect of a target population without sharing individual-level data. We evaluated six different approaches and found that combining results across sites using sample-standardization weights or Rubin's rules yielded the best performance. Applying inverse-variance weighted meta-analysis without accounting for treatment effect heterogeneity can lead to biased results.
RESEARCH SYNTHESIS METHODS
(2023)