BACKGROUND: Recruitment to residency programs in hospitals located in other than major hubs (\"remotely located\") is a challenge in many countries. In 2011, the Israeli Ministry of Health launched a 10-year financial incentive to encourage physicians to enroll in residency programs in such hospitals. Nearly 1 billion New Israeli Shekels (260 million US$) were invested in that program which had only limited success. As a new physician association\'s collective agreement is impending, we aimed to measure the effectiveness of selected incentives in attracting medical school graduates to residencies in remotely located hospitals.
METHODS: This study included Israeli medical students in their final year of medical school. We used an online questionnaire with multiple-choice demographic questions and a 5-point Likert scale to gauge the effect of various incentives on their preference for residency location.
RESULTS: Between July and November 2022, 522 students responded (405 studied in Israeli medical schools [out of 705 students] and 117 in foreign medical schools [out of 1936 students]). Forty-two percent had at least one clerkship in a remotely located hospital, and 24% had included at least one remotely located hospital among their top five choices for internship. Only 13% reported that they prefer a residency program in those institutions. The incentive selected by students as most persuasive was government assistance in acceptance to and financial support for a fellowship abroad, followed by a financial grant and fewer on-call hours. Only 7% of the students indicated that no incentive would influence them to choose a remotely located hospital for their residency training. Medical education in a remotely located university and the choice of at least one remotely located hospital among the top five choices for internship were significantly associated with positive incentive receptivity, whereas male sex and older age were associated with negative receptivity.
CONCLUSIONS: This study on the attitudes of Israeli medical school graduates toward incentives aimed at attracting them to residencies in remotely located institutions revealed that career development opportunities and assistance in obtaining fellowships might influence their choice.

Alzheimer\'s disease (AD) is a degenerative brain disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is caused by abnormalities in cholinergic neurons, oxidative stress, and inflammatory cascades. The illness is accompanied by personality changes, memory issues, and dementia. Metabolic signaling pathways help with fundamental processes like DNA replication and RNA transcription. Being adaptable is essential for both surviving and treating illness. The body\'s metabolic signaling depends on adipokines, including adiponectin (APN) and other adipokines secreted by adipose tissues. Energy homeostasis is balanced by adipokines, and nutrients. Overconsumption of nutrients messes with irregular signaling of adipokines, such as APN in both peripheral and brain which leads to neurodegeneration, such as AD. Despite the failure of traditional treatments like memantine and cholinesterase inhibitors, natural plant bioactive substances like Osmotin (OSM) have been given a focus as potential therapeutics due to their antioxidant properties, better blood brain barrier (BBB) permeability, excellent cell viability, and especially nanoparticle approaches. The review highlights the published preclinical literature regarding the role of OSM in AD pathology while there is a need for more research to investigate the hidden therapeutic potential of OSM which may open a new gateway and further strengthen its healing role in the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration, especially AD.

Reading requires the transformation of a complex array of visual features into sounds and meaning. For deaf signers who experience changes in visual attention and have little or no access to the sounds of the language they read, understanding the visual constraints underlying reading is crucial. This study aims to explore a fundamental aspect of visual perception intertwined with reading: the crowding effect. This effect manifests as the struggle to distinguish a target letter when surrounded by flanker letters. Through a two-alternative forced choice task, we assessed the recognition of letters and symbols presented in isolation or flanked by two or four characters, positioned either to the left or right of fixation. Our findings reveal that while deaf individuals exhibit higher accuracy in processing letters compared to symbols, their performance falls short of that of their hearing counterparts. Interestingly, despite their proficiency with letters, deaf individuals didn\'t demonstrate quicker letter identification, particularly in the most challenging scenario where letters were flanked by four characters. These outcomes imply the development of a specialized letter processing system among deaf individuals, albeit one that may subtly diverge from that of their hearing counterparts.

This review critically assesses the applicability of retinal periphery imaging technology, scrutinizing its practical limitations and potential advancements within ophthalmology. It underscores the significant costs and the need to evaluate the clinical utility of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography devices. It emphasizes how clinicians should consider their practice-specific use-cases while investing in devices with capabilities like ultra-widefield OCT, autofluorescence imaging, and angiography. The paper also highlights the challenges associated with image acquisition, such as artifact management and patient cooperation for extended fixation periods. This review outlines the utility of these modalities in various retinal pathologies, as well as their contribution to telemedicine and personalized care, facilitated by artificial intelligence for improved image processing, quantification, and interpretation. These techniques potentially offer a more comprehensive understanding of peripheral retinal conditions and associated pathologies, thus influencing clinical decision-making, particularly in remote regions with limited specialist access.

While perceiving the emotional state of others may be crucial for our behavior even when this information is present outside of central vision, emotion perception studies typically focus on central visual field. We have recently investigated emotional valence (pleasantness) perception across the parafovea (≤ 4°) and found that for briefly presented (200 ms) emotional face images (from the established KDEF image-set), positive (happy) valence was the least affected by eccentricity (distance from the central visual field) and negative (fearful) valence the most. Furthermore, we found that performance at 2° predicted performance at 4°. Here we tested (n = 37) whether these effects replicate with face stimuli of different identities from a different well-established image-set (NimStim). All our prior findings replicated and eccentricity-based modulation magnitude was smaller with NimStim (~ 16.6% accuracy reduction at 4°) than with KDEF stimuli (~ 27.3% reduction). Our current investigations support our earlier findings that for briefly presented parafoveal stimuli, positive and negative valence perception are differently affected by eccentricity and may be dissociated. Furthermore, our results highlight the importance of investigating emotions beyond central vision and demonstrate commonalities and differences across different image sets in the parafovea, emphasizing the contribution of replication studies to substantiate our knowledge about perceptual mechanisms.

Based on ethnographic work conducted between 2015 and 2022 at the periphery of Fortaleza, in Northeast Brazil, this article analyzes the work of community activists as a form of subversive care. Women activists, many of whom work for the local public clinics, as social workers with local NGOs, or as schoolteachers, challenge dominant narratives presented in the media and political discourses about their neighborhood as being poor and therefore violent. By establishing relationships of mutual trust with gang members and humanizing them, women activists \"challenge the logic of fear\" and maintain presence in areas controlled by the gangs to direct the economically vulnerable toward existing public resources. Activists\' understanding of urban violence is informed by participation in collective action and living together with gang members and their families. These experiences lead activists to see urban violence as the symptom of systemic inequalities that require systemic changes.
A partir de uma pesquisa etnográfica realizada entre 2015 e 2022 na periferia de Fortaleza, no Nordeste do Brasil, este artigo analisa o trabalho dos ativistas comunitários como cuidado subversivo. Mulheres ativistas, muitas das quais trabalham como agentes de saude, assistentes sociais em ONGs locais ou professoras, desafiam as narrativas dominantes apresentadas na mídia e os discursos políticos sobre seu bairro como sendo pobre e, portanto, violento. Ao estabelecer relações de confiança mútua com os membros das gangues e humanizá‐los, as mulheres ativistas “desafiam a lógica do medo” e mantêm presença em áreas controladas pelas gangues para direcionar moradores economicamente vulneráveis aos recursos públicos existentes. O entendimendo dos ativistas da violência urbana é resultado da participação em ações coletivas e da convivência com membros de gangues e suas famílias. Essas experiências levam os ativistas a ver a violência urbana como sintoma de desigualdades sistêmicas que exigem mudanças sistêmicas.

We seem to have rich experience across our visual field. Yet we are surprisingly poor at tasks involving the periphery and low spatial attention. Recently, Lau and collaborators have argued that a phenomenon known as \"subjective inflation\" allows us to reconcile these phenomena. I show inflation is consistent with multiple interpretations, with starkly different consequences for richness and for theories of consciousness more broadly. What\'s more, we have only weak reasons favouring any of these interpretations over the others. I provisionally argue for an interpretation on which subjective experience is genuinely rich, but (in peripheral/unattended areas) unreliable as a guide to the external world. The main challenge for this view is that it appears to imply that experience in the periphery is not just unreliable but unstable. However, I argue that this consequence, while initially appearing unintuitive, is in fact plausible.

Exosomes, membrane-enclosed vesicles, are secreted by all types of cells. Exosomes can transport various molecules, including proteins, lipids, functional mRNAs, and microRNAs, and can be circulated to various recipient cells, leading to the production of local paracrine or distal systemic effects. Numerous studies have proved that exosomes can pass through the blood-brain barrier, thus, enabling the transfer of peripheral substances into the central nervous system (CNS). Consequently, exosomes may be a vital factor in the exchange of information between the periphery and CNS. This review will discuss the structure, biogenesis, and functional characterization of exosomes and summarize the role of peripheral exosomes deriving from tissues like the lung, gut, skeletal muscle, and various stem cell types in communicating with the CNS and influencing the brain\'s function. Then, we further discuss the potential therapeutic effects of exosomes in brain diseases and the clinical opportunities and challenges. Gaining a clearer insight into the communication between the CNS and the external areas of the body will help us to ascertain the role of the peripheral elements in the maintenance of brain health and illness and will facilitate the design of minimally invasive techniques for diagnosing and treating brain diseases.

Macrophages are exceptionally flexible cells. The presence of inflammatory cytokines such as IFN-γ and TNF-α results in an M1 (CD68) activation, while cytokines such as IL-10 or TGF-β induce the M2 (CD163) activation. Our aim was to study the behavior of peripheral cytokines involved in macrophage polarization and relate them with tissue findings to further comprehend the role of macrophages in EBV pediatric infection. We studied cytokine expression in tonsils and peripheral blood samples of children in different stages of infection. Peripheral cytokines were compared with macrophage polarization markers and viral protein expression in tonsils. Only IL-10 showed a negative correlation between compartments, exclusively in patients undergoing viral reactivation (R). Higher expressions of peripheral IL-1β, IL-23, and IL-12p40 in R children were observed. Lower expressions of local and peripheral TNF-α in patients with broader expressions of latent and lytic viral proteins were demonstrated. In healthy carrier (HC) patients, IL-23 positively correlated with CD163, and IP-10 positively correlated with CD68. Our results indicated that EBV might modulate antigen expression in the presence of TNF-α and influence peripheral cytokine expression differently in each stage of infection. Moreover, peripheral cytokines might have a particular role in macrophage polarization in HC.

The temporal dynamics of visual information processing varies with the stimulus being processed and with the retinal location that initiates the processing. Here, we present psychophysical data with sub-millisecond precision showing that increasing eccentricity decreases the delay with which stimuli are processed. We show that, even within the central +/-6° of the visual field, processing delays change by a factor of up to three times. A simple model, grounded in retinal physiology, provides a good account of the data. The relative delays are on the order of only milliseconds. But if later processing leaves the delays unresolved, they can cause dramatic misperceptions of motion and 3D layout. We discuss the implications for how the human visual system solves the temporal binding problem across eccentricity. The results highlight the severe computational challenge of obtaining accurate, temporally-unified percepts of the environment with spatiotemporally-staggered processing across the visual field.