Lund University

Background: Symptom reduction occurring early in depression treatment is associated with favourable post-treatment outcome, but it is not known how early reduction in specific depression symptoms affect treatment outcome. We aimed to determine the impact of symptom-specific change from pre-treatment to week four during internet-delivered CBT (ICBT) on overall and symptom-specific depression severity at post-treatment. We hypothesized that change in mood and emotional involvement would be most strongly associated with later overall depression severity. Methods: 1300 participants with Major Depressive Disorder were followed over 12 weeks of ICBT using the self-report Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale gauging nine symptoms. Linear models, informed by causal inference and cross-lagged network analysis methods, were used to estimate associations between early symptom-specific change and post-treatment depression severity, controlling for register-based and self-reported pre-treatment confounders. Results: Early reduction in all symptoms was associated with lower overall and symptom-specific depression severity post-ICBT. Seven symptoms showed similar associations between early change and overall depression severity post-treatment: mood (standardized beta [β] = 0.44), feelings of unease (β = 0.39), ability to concentrate (β = 0.46), initiative (β = 0.43), emotional involvement (β = 0.42), pessimism (β = 0.44), and zest for life (β = 0.42). Change in sleep (β = 0.27) and appetite (β = 0.27) had weaker associations with overall depression severity at post-treatment and were the only symptoms showing the hypothesized difference compared with mood and emotional involvement. Conclusions: The impact of early symptom-specific reduction on post-treatment depression severity in ICBT for MDD may be similar across most symptoms, but less for the sleep and appetite symptoms, although causal interpretations rests on several assumptions.

Nanowire (NW) optoelectronic and electrical devices offer unique advantages over bulk materials but are generally made by contacting entire NW arrays in parallel. In contrast, ultra-high-resolution displays and photodetectors require electrical connections to individual NWs inside an array. Here, we demonstrate a scheme for fabricating such single NW vertical devices by contacting individual NWs within a dense NW array. We contrast benzocyclobutene and SiO2 planarization methods for these devices and find that the latter leads to dramatically improved processing yield as well as higher-quality diodes. Further, we find that replacing the metal top contact with transparent indium tin oxide does not decrease electrical performance, allowing for transparent top contacts. We improve the ideality factor of the devices from a previous n = 14 to n = 1.8, with the best devices as low as n = 1.5. The devices are characterized as both photodetectors with detectivities up to 2.45 AW⁻¹ and photocurrent densities of up to 185 mAcm⁻² under 0.76 suns illumination. Despite poor performance as light emitting diodes, the devices show great resilience to current densities up to 4 × 10⁸ mAcm⁻². In combination with growth optimization, the flexibility of the processing allows for use of these devices as ultra-high-resolution photodetectors and displays.

The complex dynamics of protein expression in plasma during hyperacute HIV-1 infection and its relation to acute retroviral syndrome, viral control, and disease progression are largely unknown. Here, we quantify 1293 blood plasma proteins from 157 longitudinally linked plasma samples collected before, during, and after hyperacute HIV-1 infection of 54 participants from four sub-Saharan African countries. Six distinct longitudinal expression profiles are identified, of which four demonstrate a consistent decrease in protein levels following HIV-1 infection. Proteins involved in inflammatory responses, immune regulation, and cell motility are significantly altered during the transition from pre-infection to one month post-infection. Specifically, decreased ZYX and SCGB1A1 levels, and increased LILRA3 levels are associated with increased risk of acute retroviral syndrome; increased NAPA and RAN levels, and decreased ITIH4 levels with viral control; and increased HPN, PRKCB, and ITGB3 levels with increased risk of disease progression. Overall, this study provides insight into early host responses in hyperacute HIV-1 infection, and present potential biomarkers and mechanisms linked to HIV-1 disease progression and viral load.

The proliferation of misinformation poses a significant challenge to societies, and fact-checking emerges as a critical tool to combat this issue. In this work, we conduct an innovation impact assessment to question the use of technology to combat misinformation, specifically examining the ethical implications of this choice. To address this, we organized a workshop using the value sensitive design (VSD) methodology to explore questions in this context. The workshop introduced participants to the VSD framework, enabling them to critically assess whether specific scenarios align with human values, norms, and requirements. Real-world scenarios were discussed, including approaches implemented by legitimate news outlets and using 3D virtual characters by a Brazilian television employing deep learning. Participants analyzed how technology impacts journalism values, norms, and practices, focusing on aligning synthetic media technologies with automated fact-checking dissemination. In conclusion, the authors prepared recommendations from valuable insights into the complex ethical considerations surrounding synthetic media technologies for automatic fact-checking dissemination. It also facilitated cross-border discussions, with 11 participants from seven countries engaging in fruitful dialogue on this vital topic. The study proposed evaluation criteria for AI-generated content in this diversity, including privacy protection, inclusiveness, transparency, beauty standards conformity, engagement, meaningfulness, and effortlessness.

PURPOSE The ESPAC4 trial showed that adjuvant chemotherapy with gemcitabine plus capecitabine (GemCap) produced longer overall survival (OS) than gemcitabine monotherapy. Subsequently, the PRODIGE24-CCTG PA.6 trial showed even longer survival for modified fluorouracil, folinic acid, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin (mFOLFIRINOX) than gemcitabine but had more restrictive eligibility criteria. Our aim was to analyze the ESPAC4 survival on long-term follow-up. METHODS The OS of 732 ESPAC4 patients comparing 367 randomly assigned to gemcitabine and 365 to GemCap was previously reported after a median follow-up time of 43.2 months (95% CI, 39.7 to 45.5) and 458 deaths. Analysis was now carried out after a median follow-up of 104 months (101-108) and 566 deaths. RESULTS The median OS was 29.5 months (27.5-32.1) for all patients, 28.4 months (25.2-32.0) in the gemcitabine group and 31.6 months (26.5-38.0) in the GemCap group (hazard ratio [HR], 0.83 [0.71 to 0.98]; P = .031). R0 patients given gemcitabine had a median survival of 32.2 months (27.9-41.6) compared with 49.9 months (39.0-82.3) for those given GemCap (HR, 0.63 [0.47 to 0.84]; P = .002). Lymph node-negative patients had significantly higher 5 year OS rates on GemCap (59% [49%-71%]) than gemcitabine (53% [42%-66%]; HR, 0.63 [0.41 to 0.98]; P = .04) but not those with positive lymph nodes ( P = .225). The OS advantage for GemCap was retained in the PRODIGE24 subgroup of 193 (26.4%) ESPAC4 patients not eligible for PRODIGE24 with a median survival of 20.7 (16.2-27.3) months in patients allocated to gemcitabine compared with 25.9 (22.3-30.2) months for ineligible patients allocated to GemCap (HR, 0.71 [95% CI, 0.52 to 0.98]; χ ² log-rank-1df = 4.31; P = .038). CONCLUSION GemCap is a standard option for patients not eligible for mFOLFIRINOX. Exploratory evidence suggests that GemCap may be particularly efficacious in R0 patients and also in lymph node-negative patients.

In this paper, we examine the role of trust in the international climate negotiations. We (1) identify forms of trust inferred from institutional designs, (2) analyse effects of institutional design on social and political trust and (3) describe the relationship between social and political trust in international climate change negotiations. We do this by combining document analysis, literature review and interviews. We find that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement imply different forms of trust and thereby produce different levels of trust. Social trust is generally medium to high, political trust rather low. Our analysis illustrates tensions and contradictions between human agency and intention, on the one hand, and political agency and process, on the other. These tensions and contradictions are such that, although delegates at the international climate conferences do at least partly trust each other, they meet in an institutional context that is marked by lack of political trust. Moving forward, we discuss whether this lack of trust is well‐founded or not given the current institutional and organisational structures of the UNFCCC and its subsequent agreements and what it is highlighting in terms of specific flaws or omissions in the UNFCCC's design.

Opportunistic mobile predators can adapt their behaviour to specific foraging scenarios, allowing them to target diverse prey resources. An interesting example is the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena), a marine mammal with a huge energy demand feeding on a large variety of fish, squid and shrimps. Little is known about the foraging behaviour of harbour porpoises, as observations of wild specimens are notoriously difficult to obtain. In this study, foraging was identified in almost 60% of videos from UAV recordings in Danish coastal waters during daylight hours. Observations reveal them to be flexible predators, foraging on both single fish and schools of fish, as well as individually and in groups of varying sizes. We argue that some of the observed behavioural adaptations and context‐dependent strategies for prey capture are based on information transfer and social learning. Our results provide unprecedented insights into the foraging behaviour of an opportunistic mammalian predator. Furthermore, this study highlights the importance of porpoises having access to coastal areas for energy acquisition, where they are in conflict with anthropogenic disturbances such as fisheries with the risk of bycatch.

Information encountered in different events, such as people and objects, can be interlinked in memory. Such memory integration supports novel inferences about the world. This study investigates the role of episodic context on memory integration in two experiments using an associative inference task. Participants encoded events with overlapping (AB and BC) and non-overlapping associations (XY) presented in the same or different episodic contexts. Inference performance across events (AC) was tested in the absence (Experiment 1) and in the presence (Experiment 2) of the encoding context. Our data show that inferences across events encoded in the same context were more accurate, faster, and made with greater confidence compared to those encoded in different contexts. However, this effect was observed only when the context was presented during testing, suggesting that context enhances associative inferences by facilitating retrieval of events associated with that context. These findings demonstrate that revisiting the encoding context promotes memory integration by providing privileged access to contextually associated memory traces and facilitating their flexible recombination to form novel inferences. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-024-82004-7.

Increasing the number of binding sites on particles, while keeping the same surface affinity, enhances particle diffusion along surfaces.

High‐order interactions associated with non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) survival may elucidate underlying molecular mechanisms and identify potential therapeutic targets. Our previous work has identified a three‐way interaction among pack‐year of smoking (the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day multiplied by the number of years the person has smoked) and two DNA methylation probes (cg05293407TRIM27 and cg00060500KIAA0226). However, whether a four‐way interaction exists remains unclear. Therefore, we adopted a two‐phase design to identify the four‐way gene–smoking interactions by a hill‐climbing strategy on the basis of the previously detected three‐way interaction. One CpG probe, cg16658473SHISA9, was identified with FDR‐q ≤ 0.05 in the discovery phase and P ≤ 0.05 in the validation phase. Meanwhile, the four‐way interaction improved the discrimination ability for the prognostic prediction model, as indicated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for both 3‐ and 5‐year survival. In summary, we identified a four‐way interaction associated with NSCLC survival among pack‐year of smoking, cg05293407TRIM27, cg00060500KIAA0226 and g16658473SHISA9, providing novel insights into the complex mechanisms underlying NSCLC progression.

In unconventional superconductors, coupled charge and lattice degrees of freedom can manifest in ordered phases of matter that are intertwined. In the cuprate family, fluctuating short-range charge correlations can coalesce into a longer-range charge density wave (CDW) order which is thought to intertwine with superconductivity, yet the nature of the interaction is still poorly understood. Here, by measuring subtle lattice fluctuations in underdoped YBa 2 Cu 3 O 6+ y on quasi-static timescales (thousands of seconds) through X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, we report sensitivity to both superconductivity and CDW. The atomic lattice shows remarkably faster relaxational dynamics upon approaching the superconducting transition at T c ≈ 65 K. By tracking the momentum dependence, we show that the intermediate scattering function almost monotonically scales with the relaxation distance of atoms away from their average positions above T c and in the presence of the CDW state, while this peculiar trend is reversed for other temperatures. These observations are consistent with an incipient CDW stabilized by local strain. This work provides insights into the crucial role of relaxational atomic fluctuations for understanding the electronic physics cuprates, which are inherently disordered due to carrier doping.

Sound is a valuable cue in the marine environment that can inform animals about habitat location and community composition. Indeed, sound is often used for orientation and navigation by larval reef fishes during settlement. However, despite sound’s role in the early life of reef fishes, whether post-settlement reef fishes use ambient soundscapes to inform their movement decisions remains less clear. In an in-situ playback experiment in Curaçao, the Dutch Caribbean, settled individuals of an invasive predator, the Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans), showed no preference to move towards the playbacks of two different habitat types during daylight hours. In particular, lionfish did not prefer to move towards the sounds of sandy or reef habitat playbacks when tested against a silent control. Moreover, when given a choice between simultaneous sandy and reef habitat playbacks, lionfish showed no preference for the soundscape of either habitat type. While the activity of lionfish was strongly correlated with their body size, with larger fish being more active, activity was not affected by habitat playback, nor did body size affect their preference for the soundscapes of either habitat type. While acoustic lures have been speculated to be a promising addition to existing lionfish trap designs, daytime playbacks of ambient soundscapes are unlikely to be successful in attracting lionfish post-settlement, ultimately affecting their efficacy.

This article seeks to explain the growth of identification and support for the Palestinian cause over the last decades from a regional concern to a global movement. What are the mechanisms that made this possible? This problematic is addressed within a cultural sociological framework, focusing on the cultural work of intellectuals and the collective actions of social movements in articulating and dispersing the idea of a distinctive Palestinian identity and cause. This is a form of cultural nationalism, where claims to nationhood are rooted in the idea of a distinctive, ancient culture. Focus is on the role of intellectuals in the articulation of collective identification and the cultural representations through which it is dispersed. The prime data supported this argument consists of aesthetic representations like novels, films, and photography.

Background Levodopa–entacapone–carbidopa intestinal gel (LECIG) was introduced on the Swedish market in 2019. The therapy is aimed at patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with fluctuations and dyskinesias. Long‐term efficacy and safety data are lacking. Objective To investigate the efficacy, tolerability, and safety of LECIG in regular clinical practice for Parkinson's disease in Sweden. Methods Real‐world data were collected from the Swedish registry for Parkinson's disease (ParkReg) for all patients reported to receive LECIG during the period from 2019 until 31 August 2022. Results A total of 150 patients were identified. Sixty‐one (41%) of 150 patients were females. At the start of treatment, the median age was 73 years (range: 43–86). The median duration since motor symptoms onset was 17 years (IQR: 9). Fifty (33%) of 150 patients switched from another device‐assisted therapy, mostly LCIG (39 patients). Reported complications were mainly related to PEG‐J tube and stoma (30%). Twenty (13.3%) of 150 patients discontinued LECIG and 11 (7.3%) patients died while on LECIG. The Parkinson KinetiGraph scores for bradykinesia, dyskinesia, fluctuations, tremor, and immobility for 53 patients during LECIG showed good therapy control. The median (IQR) p‐Hcy during LECIG was 12 (4.6) μmol/L (n = 44). The median (IQR) PDQ‐8 summary index during LECIG was 31 (17) (n = 52). The median (IQR) EQ5D during LECIG was 0.62 (0.32) (n = 41). Conclusions Data from ParkReg covering 150 patients over 3 years show LECIG to be an effective and safe device‐aided therapy for advanced PD. However, the long‐term efficacy and tolerability of LECIG need to be further investigated.

We investigate the link between the internal microstructure of Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-Poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate (PNIPAM-PEGMA) microgels, their bulk moduli and the rheological response and structural arrangement in dense suspensions. The...

Objective: This study examined the prevalence and long-term survival of atrial fibrillation (AF) in the older population. Methods: Data was recruited from the longitudinal SNAC study from baseline (2001–2004) for up to 10 years. Results: The population comprised 6,904 persons (59% women) (mean age 73.9 years). The prevalence of AF was 4.9% and increased with age. The hazard ratio (HR) for death in those with AF at baseline was 1.29 during the 10-year observation period. Cox regression analysis in persons with AF (n = 341) showed that men had a higher HR for death (1.57). CHA2DS2-VASc scores were significantly associated with death within 10 years (HR 1.29/score). Any form of anticoagulant use was reported in 146 (42.8%) and was significantly associated with survival (p = .031). Conclusions: The prevalence of AF in the general population was almost 5%, and it shortened life expectancy by nearly 2.4 years over a 10-year period. Despite the proven efficacy of OAC therapies, our results demonstrate that AF continues to be associated with increased mortality, especially among men, and that many older people are at high risk of developing a stroke because they do not receive appropriate anticoagulant therapy. These results emphasize the need for improved preventive and therapeutic modalities.