Ehlers-Danlos (EDS) is a hereditary connective tissue disorder marked by joint hypermobility, fragile skin, and connective tissue dysfunction in multiple systems. Clinical studies reveal elevated rates of migraine in EDS patients (75% versus 25% in controls), earlier onset, and increased severity. Col5a1+/- heterozygous mutants (HET) and wildtype littermate controls (WT) were utilized to examine if physiological responses to chronic nitroglycerin (cNTG), one of the most used pre-clinical migraine models, differed between genotypes. Mice had a micro-electronic system surgically attached, capturing animal head movement, cerebral blood volume (CBV), and sleep architecture, including NREM and REM sleep. Physiological parameters of HET and WT mice continuously captured during a baseline period and cNTG exposure (every other day 10mg/kg intraperitoneal injection) were compared. Both cohorts demonstrated acute reductions in movement and CBV following nitroglycerin. However, HET mice showed acute and prolonged reductions compared to WT controls. HET mice also demonstrated shifts in movement onset over the 24-hour light cycle. There is ongoing work to determine whether these altered kinetics play a role in the increased prevalence of migraine in those with EDS. Updated findings including comparison of sleep architecture in response to cNTG will be presented. Because pre-clinical data is limited to nonexistent, this work will significantly advance our understanding of the interaction between migraine, sleep, and hypermobile conditions

This study investigates changes in cardiac function following induced myocardial infarction (MI) in porcine models. By comparing myocardial strain in healthy baseline, stress testing, and post-MI conditions using DENSE MRI, we can evaluate how myocardial mechanics evolve from normal function to injury. Previous studies have reported conflicting findings regarding changes in cardiac function in remote areas post-MI. DENSE is an imaging technique that accurately captures high-spatial-resolution tissue displacement, enabling precise quantification of myocardial strain and mechanics. DENSE’s increased sensitivity for tissue displacement could provide more insights into this question. Porcine models were first imaged under baseline conditions and after pharmacologic stress induced by agents such as adenosine, which increases coronary blood flow and simulates the physiological effects of exercise. MI was then induced to model acute cardiac injury, and follow-up imaging was performed to capture the changes. Myocardial displacement was quantified to calculate regional strain and torsion for cardiac function assessment. We observed reduced strain and impaired contraction in infarcted regions, alongside potential compensatory changes in surrounding tissue. These findings demonstrate that regional cardiac functional changes can be detected reliably by DENSE MRI following MI. By providing deeper insight into cardiac function after injury, this approach may improve early detection and inform clinical management of cardiovascular disease.

Objective. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects 0.6%-1% of population. Many patients with RA die prematurely of disease or drug complications. Impact of socioeconomic status on RA mortality is not well studied. We utilized educational attainment as a socioeconomic measure to conduct a population-based analysis of RA mortality. Methods. We used CDC’s mortality database and IPUMS population estimates to calculate mortality rate per 100,000, and years of potential life lost (YPLL-75) rate for RA by 8 education levels (≤8 th grade, 9-12/no diploma, high school, some college, associates, bachelors, masters, and doctorate). Results. RA mortality rate per 100,000 ranged from 4.115 in high school graduates to 0.981 in those with a doctorate, a 4-fold difference. Mortality rates were >3 in those with high school or less, 1.75-2.4 in those with some college or Associates, and 1.3-1.4 in those with bachelors and masters. Relative to those with a doctorate degree, the odds of premature death (<75-years) were significantly higher at all education levels except masters and ≤8 th grade. The annualized YPLL rate per 100,000 was 0.53 (doctorate), 0.71 (masters), 0.83 (bachelors), 1.84 (associates), 1.35 (some college), 2.66 (high school), 2.45 (9-12/no diploma, and 1.51 (≤8 th grade). Conclusion. We report a strong association between educational attainment and RA mortality. These results argue for studies to identify and attempt to mitigate modifiable socioeconomic factors associated with education

Diabetic foot ulcers affect millions worldwide, and clinicians need both accurate tissue assessment and reliable healing forecasts to guide treatment decisions. Current clinical tools rely on color based thresholding with manual correction for tissue classification and offer no predictive capability for wound trajectory. Our approach fine-tunes Medical SAM3, a pre-trained medical image foundation model, using lightweight LoRA adapters to segment for tissue types (granulation, fibrin, callus, and background) from wound photographs. The segmentation module achieves competitive performance on limited labeled data. From predicted segmentation masks, we extract differentiable wound features including total area, tissue proportions, and geometric descriptors across longitudinal patient visits. These features are fed into a parameter network that estimates patient-specific coefficients for an ordinary differential equation governing wound area dynamics. The ODE encodes established a basic clinical knowledge which granulation tissue promotes healing while non-healthy tissue impedes recovery. Also, the entire pipeline is end to end differentiable, allowing the ODE prediction loss to back propagate through feature extraction into the segmentation network which enable physics guided refinement of tissue boundaries. Our method demonstrates that incorporating physical wound healing constraints not only produces clinically interpretable trajectory forecasts but also improves segmentation quality compared to segmentation-only training.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) represent a promising liquid biopsy platform in multiple myeloma (MM). We developed an MM EV Surface Protein Assay to quantify and dynamically monitor four MM EV subpopulations defined by targetable MM surface proteins (BCMA, CD38, GPRC5D, and CD319) across 336 serial blood samples from 45 relapsed/refractory MM (RRMM) patients treated with anti-BCMA chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. All four MM EV subpopulations significantly decreased in 43 patients with initial response, while BCMA⁺, GPRC5D⁺, and CD319⁺ MM EVs increased in 19 patients with progression, and antigen escape was detected by BCMA⁺ MM EVs. MM EV subpopulations differentiated minimal residual disease (MRD) status and complemented MRD for detecting early relapse before clinical progression. Notably, CD319⁺ MM EVs were early predictors of progression-free and overall survival in MRD-negative patients. This assay enables noninvasive monitoring of deep response, progression, and antigen escape, and stratifies survival in MRD-negative patients with RRMM.