Disease Modeling Commons^™

Modeling The Effects Of Fentanyl And Narcan On The Opioid Epidemic In Allegheny County Using Mathematics, Lindsay Moskal, Lauren Sines, Rachael Neilan Ph.D.

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

Starting in the 1990s, physicians across the United States have increasingly prescribed opioid pain relievers, which has given rise to the current opioid epidemic. As a result, there has been a drastic increase in the number of overdose fatalities. In 2017, the number of opioid overdose deaths peaked and the U.S. declared the crisis as a public health emergency. One state that has contributed significantly to this epidemic is Pennsylvania, which ranks first for the greatest number of overdose deaths and third for the highest death rate. In fact, Allegheny County has witnessed an overdose death rate that is ...

Modeling The Effects Of Fentanyl And Narcan On The Opioid Epidemic In Allegheny County Using Mathematics, Lindsay Moskal, Lauren Sines, Rachael Neilan Ph.D.

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

Starting in the 1990s, physicians across the United States have increasingly prescribed opioid pain relievers, which has given rise to the current opioid epidemic. As a result, there has been a drastic increase in the number of overdose fatalities. In 2017, the number of opioid overdose deaths peaked and the U.S. declared the crisis as a public health emergency. One state that has contributed significantly to this epidemic is Pennsylvania, which ranks first for the greatest number of overdose deaths and third for the highest death rate. In fact, Allegheny County has witnessed an overdose death rate that is ...

Network Modeling The Impact Of Community-Based Male-Screening On The Chlamydia Trachomatis Prevalence In Women, Zhuolin Qu

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Dogs With Deltamethrin-Impregnated Collars On Prevalence Of Visceral Leishmaniasis, Mondal H. Zahid

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Using Network Modeling To Understand The Relationship Between Sars-Cov-1 And Sars-Cov-2, Elizabeth Brooke Haywood, Nicole A. Bruce

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Same-Day Discharge And Quality Of Life For Primary Laparoscopic Rectopexy For Rectal Prolapse In Children- A 10-Year Experience, Obiyo O. Osuchukwu

Research Days

No abstract provided.

Applying Modern Immunology To The Plague Of Ancient Athens, Juhi C. Patel

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee

During the 5^th century BCE, ancient Athens and Sparta were involved in a major war during which an epidemic disease broke out in Athens, claiming the lives of a substantial part of the population. Although the ancient Greek historian Thucydides provides a first-hand account of the symptoms of the plague, modern historians have not been able to definitively identify the pathogen that caused the deadly epidemic. In 1994, a burial tomb of Athens was unearthed that unveiled the likely remains of plague victims. In 2005, scientists conducted molecular testing on the dental remains and used suicide PCR to compare ...

The Current Neuroscientific Understanding Of Alzheimer's Disease, Rachel A. Brandes

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee

Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative neurological illness characterized by the deterioration of brain regions implicated in memory and cognitive function. While researchers have yet to find a cure or effective treatment, they have gained a better understanding of its pathology and development. Through years of neuroscience research, scientists have discovered much of what happens in the brain during Alzheimer’s disease onset and how this causes its symptoms; many hypotheses regarding this aspect of the illness involve temporal lobe atrophy, neurofibrillary tangles, and amyloid plaques. Although Alzheimer’s disease affects millions of people every day, it seems that most ...

Functional Analysis Of A Critical Glycine (Glycine 12) In Beta-Type Connexins Of Human Skin, Rasheed Bailey

Biology Theses

At least five beta-type connexins are expressed in various layers of the skin (Cx26, Cx30, Cx30.3, Cx31, and Cx32) and all include a glycine residue at position 12. Glycine12 (G12) is located about halfway through the cytoplasmic amino terminus and has been the focus of several studies related to connexin diseases and gap junction channel structure. The importance of this residue is evident in the severity and diversity of diseases associated with amino acid substitutions at G12 including hereditary forms of skin disease, deafness and neuropathy. This study uses bioinformatic analysis in combination with mutational analysis and electrophysiology to ...

Mathematic Modeling Of Covid-19 In The United States, Yuanji Tang, Shixia Wang

Coronavirus COVID-19 Publications by UMMS Authors

Since the early reports of COVID-19 cases in China in late January 2020 (1-2), the worst pandemic in 100 years has spread to the entire globe with approximately 2.4 million diagnosed cases and over 165,000 deaths up to April 20, 2020.

While scientists from various public and private groups use math and computer to simulate the course of this pandemic to try to predict how this outbreak might evolve (3), most of such analyses are either quite complicated or not publicly available.

Here a simple mathematic modeling approach is taken to track the outbreaks of COVID-19 in the ...

A Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases In A Region, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

In understanding the dynamics of the spread of an infectious disease, it is important to understand how a town’s place in a network of towns within a region will impact how the disease spreads to that town and from that town. In this article, we take a model for the spread of an infectious disease in a single town and scale it up to simulate a region containing multiple towns. The model is validated by looking at how adding additional towns and commuters influences the outbreak in a single town. We then look at how the centrality of a ...

484— Modeling Social Distancing Methods And Their Effectiveness In Combating The Spread Of Ebola, Rachel Fair

GREAT Day

Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a rare but severe disease that is transmitted among humans through direct-contact with, and close proximity to, infected bodily fluids. From 2014-16, West Africa experienced the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, infecting over 28,000 people, and killing over 11,000. Although the symptoms of EVD are treatable, the disease can be extremely deadly, with an average of 50% EVD cases resulting in fatality. In areas where healthcare is scarce and vaccinations are not readily available, the practices of social distancing and self-quarantining have been shown to be highly effective in combating the spread of ...

469— Life Or Death: Decision Making In Sexual Disease Treatment Matters, Jason Ipolito

GREAT Day

Syphilis is an STI that has recently made a resurgence in homosexual populations. When infected, a patient has two options: seek treatment immediately or do not seek treatment. I used a system of differential equations that includes susceptible, exposed, treatment receptive, treatment non-receptive, cured, and dead state variables in order to determine the relationships among transmission rate, treatment options, and death rate. My model suggests that an individual’s treatment option has a larger effect on death rate than the transmission rate inherent to the disease. The model also contains two sets of equilibria: an unstable trivial disease free condition ...

A Study Of Cholera Transmission, Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar

Open Educational Resources

A recent cholera outbreak in Haiti brought public attention to this disease. Cholera, a diarrheal disease, is caused by an intestinal bacterium, and if not addressed in a timely manner may become fatal. During the project described here, the students will learn how to solve and address a practical problem such as cholera transmission using various mathematical tools. Students will learn to develop a differential equation model based on practical scenarios, analyze the model using mathematics as well as numerical simulation, and finally describe the results in words that are understandable by the people who are not specialists in this ...

Malaria Risk On Ancient Roman Roads: A Study And Application To Assessing Travel Decisions In Asia Minor By The Apostle Paul, Daniel C. Browning Jr

Master's Theses

This study models malaria risks for travelers on ancient Roman roads with the goal of providing a tool for historical assessment of travel accounts from antiquity. The project includes: identification of malaria risk factors and associated spatial datasets, malaria risk model construction, verification and validation against available pre-eradication data, overlay of ancient Roman road data, and an initial case-study application to the journeys of the Apostle Paul, as narrated in the New Testament book, Acts of the Apostles (Acts). The project is intentionally cross-disciplinary in bringing the technical capabilities of GIS to the task of evaluating nuanced textual sources for ...

On The Inadequacy Of Species Distribution Models For Modelling The Spread Of Sars-Cov-2: Response To Araújo And Naimi, Joseph D. Chipperfield, Blas M. Benito, Robert B. O'Hara, Richard J. Telford, Colin J. Carlson

Public Health Resources

The ongoing pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is causing significant damage to public health and economic livelihoods, and is putting significant strains on healthcare services globally. This unfolding emergency has prompted the preparation and dissemination of the article “Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus likely to be constrained by climate” by Araújo and Naimi (2020). The authors present the results of an ensemble forecast made from a suite of species distribution models (SDMs), where they attempt to predict the suitability of the climate for the spread of SARS-CoV-2 over the coming months. They argue that climate is ...

Disease Mongering: How Sickness Sells, Vanessa C. Iroegbulem

Augustana Center for the Study of Ethics Essay Contest

“Disease mongering” is the practice of widening diagnostic boundaries of an illness and promoting their public awareness to expand the markets for treatment and to increase profits. This tactic typically used by pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, insurance companies, and even some doctors and patient groups, has become a great concern. Disease mongering has since increased in parallel with “medicalization,” which attempts to label normal human conditions as medical problems, thus becoming the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. This paper first seeks to examine how an increasing amount of life’s natural conditions and ailments are being ...

Role Of Ciliary Proteins Adp Ribosylation Factor Like Gtpase 13b (Arl13b) And Bardet-Biedl Syndrome-8 (Bbs8) In Photoreceptor Outer Segment Morphogenesis, Maintenance, And Viability, Tanya L. Dilan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Photoreceptor neurons are modified primary cilia with an extended ciliary compartment known as the outer segment (OS). The mechanisms behind the elaboration of photoreceptor cilia, OS morphogenesis, and maintenance remain poorly understood. In this work, we focused on dissecting the role of two ciliary proteins, the small GTPase ADP-ribosylation factor-like GTPase 13B (ARL13B) and Bardet-Biedl Syndrome-8 (BBS8) in the context of photoreceptor biology. Both BBS8 and ARL13B are linked to defects in ciliogenesis (cilia development) and Retinitis Pigmentosa (vision loss). ARL13B is implicated in regulating ciliary length, and BBS8 is part of the Bardet-Biedl Syndrome complex (BBSome); the BBSome is ...

The Impact Of Aging And Mechanical Injury On Alveolar Epithelial And Macrophage Responses In Acute Lung Injury And Inflammation, Michael S. Valentine

Theses and Dissertations

Patients with severe lung pathologies, such as Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), often require mechanical ventilation as a clinical intervention; however, this procedure frequently exacerbates the original pulmonary issue and produces an exaggerated inflammatory response that potentially leads to sepsis, multisystem organ failure, and mortality. This acute lung injury (ALI) condition has been termed Ventilator-Induced Lung Injury (VILI). Alveolar overdistension, cyclic atelectasis, and biotrauma are the primary injury mechanisms in VILI that lead to the loss of alveolar barrier integrity and pulmonary inflammation. Stress and strains during mechanical ventilation are believed to initiate alveolar epithelial mechanotransduction signaling mechanisms that contribute ...

Predictive Modeling Of Influenza In New England Using A Recurrent Deep Neural Network, Alfred Amendolara

Theses

Predicting seasonal variation in influenza epidemics is an ongoing challenge. To better predict seasonal influenza and provide early warning of pandemics, a novel approach to Influenza-Like-Illness (ILI) prediction was developed. This approach combined a deep neural network with ILI, climate, and population data. A predictive model was created using a deep neural network based on TensorFlow 2.0 Beta. The model used Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) nodes. Data was collected from the Center for Disease Control, the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the United States Census Bureau. These parameters were temperature, precipitation, wind speed, population size, vaccination rate ...