Uncategorized – Page 86 – Relatix Health

July 3, 2026

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Related to AI in Learning and Research Among Medical Students in Vietnam: Cross-Sectional Study

Background: In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a promising era in medicine, particularly in medical education. However, studies assessing the knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to AI among medical students in Vietnam remain limited. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate AI knowledge, attitudes, and practices among Vietnamese medical students in learning and research, and to identify factors associated with their AI practices. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among medical students at Thai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy from November to December 2025. Data were collected using an online structured questionnaire covering demographic characteristics and AI knowledge, attitudes, and practices. The main outcome of interest was AI practices in learning and research. Descriptive statistics and multivariable linear regression were used to examine associated factors. Regression coefficients (β), 95% CIs, and values are reported. Results: A total of 1002 medical students (mean age 21.00, IQR 19.00-23.00 years; n=596, 59.5% female) were included. The median percentage of maximum possible (POMP) score of AI knowledge was 66.67 (IQR 33.33‐83.33), with a high level of familiarity with common tools (n=798, 79.6%). AI attitudes were generally positive (median POMP score 70.00, IQR 53.33‐76.67). AI-related practices were lower (median POMP score 50.00, IQR 46.88-71.88), with AI being used primarily for information retrieval and literature research support. In the multivariable analysis, knowledge POMP score (β=0.12, 95% CI 0.08-0.16) and attitudes POMP score (β=0.42, 95% CI 0.34-0.51) were significantly associated with AI practices POMP score (<.001). Age, gender, major, grade point average classification, and having participated in an AI seminar or training were not associated with AI practices. Conclusions: Medical students showed favorable knowledge and positive attitudes, but their AI practices remained limited. Integrating AI into medical curricula, including fundamentals, applications, and ethical aspects, is essential to prepare future physicians for AI-driven health care.

July 3, 2026

<![CDATA[Explore psychiatry’s roots, breakthroughs, and ethical issues—from Rush to DSM debates—and why AI and psychedelics could reshape care.]]>

July 3, 2026

<![CDATA[ASCP panel offers deprescribing guidance to curb psychiatric overprescribing, simplify polypharmacy, and improve outcomes with tapering and]]>

July 3, 2026

Pathology transformation could unlock £450m a year for the NHS

Completing the NHS’s pathology transformation programme could unlock around £450m a year for the health service, a review has found.

July 3, 2026

High-altitude hypoxic cues and cerebral ischemic tolerance: an evidence-graded translational framework for stroke research

High altitude exposes the brain to heterogeneous hypoxic, hemodynamic, rheological, inflammatory, and healthcare-access conditions. This heterogeneity makes altitude biologically informative for stroke research, but it does not justify treating natural altitude exposure as a single protective or harmful state. In this structured narrative review, we searched and organized the literature to ask which altitude-associated hypoxic cues resemble or reveal mechanisms compatible with cerebral ischemic tolerance, and what level of evidence supports that claim. We separate long-term adaptation, short-term acclimatization, chronic or excessive environmental hypoxia, and experimental hypoxic conditioning; define direct, supportive, and indirect evidence tiers; and integrate neurovascular-unit biology with multi-omics and stroke pathophysiology. Experimental hypoxic preconditioning remains the clearest direct evidence that a defined sublethal hypoxic stimulus can induce a time-limited tolerant state. In contrast, human high-altitude epidemiology, physiology, and genetics mainly constrain the clinical context and nominate candidate pathways rather than prove stroke-specific protection. We also emphasize that chronic hypoxia can be maladaptive through endothelial dysfunction, oxidative stress, erythrocytosis, thrombogenicity, blood–brain barrier impairment, and microvascular injury. Across neurovascular-unit cell types, a transparent evidence-weighting framework prioritizes endothelial biology because of its direct connection to BBB stability, effective reperfusion, hemorrhagic transformation risk, and no-reflow, while neurons, astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, and pericytes require different degrees of causal and human validation. We argue that the most productive path forward is not to label altitude as protective, but to use altitude-related biology to prioritize testable, stroke-facing hypotheses regarding BBB stability, microvascular patency, metabolic support, inflammatory thresholds, white-matter resilience, and biomarker-defined conditioning windows.

July 3, 2026

Oscillatory dynamics as the coordination layer of the organism: waves, Markov blankets, and the virtual space of cognition

Neural oscillations are not a mechanism that implements cognition. We present a new theoretical framework through a synthesis of relevant literature that has emerged in recent years: metabolic activity in the body, including but not limited to neural tissue, gives rise to an oscillatory pattern that contains information accessible to individual cells. The resulting dynamical structure allows cognitive activity to map the body in fine detail, to perceive its surroundings, or to extend into representations of objects and possibilities never encountered in the world. This array of possibilities is enabled by the coordination of the body’s components, which imposes invariant structural regularities among them, in turn creating a moment-to-moment series of states shared across a distributed network of cells. Metabolic success involves ensuring adequate access to nutrition and waste removal for every cell and, when achieved, can give rise to a series of leaps manifested as increased access to complex higher-order affordances. The body’s metabolic activity yields observable coordination; however, the mental actions themselves are inscrutable, existing only within a virtual space that unfolds in the interplay of the constituents of a particular body. Access to advanced functions is categorical; this virtual space expands during development and contracts in response to reduced metabolic sufficiency. Markov blankets formalize this asymmetry: brain-scanning technology clarifies the substrate, but no amount of information about the substrate provides direct access to cognitive activity. Frequency bands of oscillation correspond to spatial scales of inter-blanket communication, with cross-frequency coupling carrying information up and down the nested hierarchy. Several clinical conditions—ME/CFS, Long Coronavirus Disease (COVID), cancer-related cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, and age-related decline—share a common upstream mechanism within this framework: cellular damage degrades the substrate, which contracts the space of accessible cognitive operations and produces the categorical incapacity patients report. The framework generates a testable prediction: aperiodic spectral flattening should temporally precede the loss of specific oscillatory peaks as the substrate degrades.

July 3, 2026

Synaptic output from suprachiasmatic nucleus cholecystokinin neurons regulates locomotor rhythmicity

BackgroundThe mammalian suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) serves as the master circadian pacemaker, which coordinates daily behavioral and physiological rhythms through functionally diverse neuronal subtypes. Cholecystokinin (CCK) is expressed in a subset of SCN neurons; however, its role in locomotor activity rhythms remains poorly understood.MethodsTo study the functional contribution of SCN CCK-expressing (SCNCCK) neurons, we selectively blocked synaptic transmission by injecting a Cre-dependent tetanus toxin (TeNT) viral vector into the SCN of CCK-IRES-Cre mice. Before and after the virus injection, spontaneous locomotor activity was continuously recorded under a 12:12 h light–dark (LD) cycle. Subsequently, we used Cre-dependent fluorescent reporter (mYongHong) to label SCNCCK neurons and performed whole-brain projection mapping to characterize their downstream connectivity.ResultsSynaptic inhibition of SCNCCK neurons significantly attenuated the strength of locomotor rhythmicity, resulting in reduced rhythm organization and a more uniform distribution of activity. This disruption was mainly driven by a significant decrease in dark-phase locomotor activity, while light-phase activity remained unchanged. Anatomically, SCNCCK neurons are widely projected along the anterior and posterior axes to multiple hypothalamic, thalamic, and limbic regions, including the medial preoptic area (MPA), paraventricular thalamic nucleus (PVT), paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus (PVH), anterior hypothalamic area (AHC), dorsomedial hypothalamic nucleus (DMH), ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus (VMH), and medial amygdala nucleus (MeA). Quantitative analysis revealed projections to these downstream regions, with moderate variation in projection density across targets.ConclusionTogether, these findings identify SCNCCK neurons as an important neuronal subpopulation, which contributes to the robustness and consolidation of spontaneous locomotor rhythms, likely through a wide range of downstream circuits.

July 3, 2026

Focal volume, steering, and aberration correction in transcranial focused ultrasound: reconsidering the tradeoffs between single-element transducers, phased arrays, and acoustic holograms

Transducer architecture is an increasingly important design consideration in transcranial focused ultrasound, where focal precision, electronic steering, skull-aberration correction, workflow complexity, and cost must be balanced. Under matched aperture, transmit frequency, focal depth, effective source geometry, and equivalent aberration correction, subdividing an aperture into multiple independently driven elements does not by itself reduce the diffraction-limited focal volume. Phased arrays provide important capabilities that single-element transducers generally lack, including electronic steering, dynamic phase correction, and flexible control of energy deposition. These capabilities can improve the realized intracranial field, particularly when skull-induced aberrations would otherwise broaden, shift, or split the focus. Single-element systems may also be extended through patient-specific acoustic holograms or lenses, which impose spatially varying phase delays to compensate for aberrations, steer the focus, or shape the pressure field. These approaches may reduce system complexity but are typically static and less adaptable than phased arrays. We therefore frame transducer selection as an application-driven design-matching problem: the relevant question is not which architecture is inherently “more focused” under matched conditions, but which best meets a study’s requirements for steering, skull-aberration correction, temporal reconfigurability, spatial degrees of freedom, workflow burden, cost, positioning robustness, and safety.

July 3, 2026

From sympathetic storm to systemic inflammation: spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain-lung axis in neurogenic pulmonary edema

Neurogenic pulmonary edema (NPE) is a life-threatening complication of acute central nervous system (CNS) injury, characterized by the rapid onset of hypoxemia and pulmonary fluid accumulation in the absence of underlying cardiopulmonary disease. In recent years, emerging integrative frameworks such as the “neuroimmunoaxis” and “brain-lung axis” have provided new perspectives on how CNS injury leads to systemic immune dysregulation and pulmonary dysfunction. However, critical questions remain regarding the interplay between excessive sympathetic activation, immune homeostasis disruption, and lung tissue injury. This narrative review proposes a neurotransmitter-immune-inflammatory model that integrates mechanical, adrenergic, and inflammatory pathways across the spatiotemporal evolution of NPE. We identify four progressive stages involving sympathetic storm initiation due to central autonomic network disinhibition, pulmonary vascular barrier disruption through Piezo channel activation and angiotensin II-norepinephrine synergy, inflammatory amplification from loss of the cholinergic anti-inflammatory reflex, and systemic progression involving gut-lung axis dysregulation. The model generates three testable predictions. Lesions disrupting the nucleus tractus solitarius-ventromedial hypothalamus-intermediolateral column projection should produce more severe NPE. And selective activation of TRPA1+ dorsal root ganglion neurons should attenuate sympathetic outflow and pulmonary edema. Enhancing α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor signaling should mitigate systemic inflammation. These predictions offer experimental avenues for validating the hijacking hypothesis. Translational implications include stage-specific interventions, early sympathetic blockade, mid-phase anti-inflammatory and neuro-modulatory strategies, and late-stage lung-protective ventilation. This study aims to offer a comprehensive analysis of NPE by exploring its pathological mechanisms—from central sympathetic signaling to peripheral lung damage. Emphasis is placed on examining the interactions between neural signals, neurotransmitters, and immune responses to uncover the spatiotemporal dynamics of NPE. By identifying potential pathways for early diagnosis and targeted therapies, the research seeks to improve disease management and contribute to better clinical outcomes for affected patients.