Encouraging people to get vaccinated is often seen as a public health success story. Particularly in a post COVID-19 world, where attitudes about infection control have may influence conflict. The findings suggest that common justifications used to promote COVID-19 vaccination can unintentionally worsen hostility between people who are for and against vaccination.The team conducted four repeated online surveys between July 2023 and April 2024, after the COVID-19 emergency phase had officially ended. More than 13,000 adults from eight countries: Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and South Africa took part. The participants were asked about their reasons for supporting vaccination, their intention to be vaccinated in the future, and their feelings toward people who held opposing views.The results show a striking trade-off: higher vaccination intent and support for vaccine promotion was linked to ideas of self-protection, preventing harm to others, protecting society as a whole, and following social norms. However, these same ideas were also associated with stronger negative attitudes toward people who disagreed with vaccination, particularly among those who already supported it. "Public health communication often assumes that stronger moral or social arguments are always better," says lead author, Tomoyuki Kobayashi. "Our findings show that these messages can be double-edged swords. "Senior author Asako Miura explains further, "When people see vaccination as a moral duty or a collective responsibility, those who opt out can come to be viewed as irresponsible or threatening. That perception can fuel social conflict, even after the immediate health crisis has passed. The possibility of penalties for not being vaccinated did not influence vaccination intent, but having consequences did appear to reduce hostility towards those with opposing views on vaccinations. "While penalties are controversial, they may reduce interpersonal resentment by addressing fairness concerns, rather than placing moral blame on individuals. The researchers observed that while general approval of vaccination remained relatively stable, willingness to get vaccinated in the future declined steadily over time.The results suggest that public health messaging needs to do more than just encourage vaccination compliance. Long-term consequences, such as social fragmentation, must also be considered to prepare the public to respond appropriately for future infectious disease outbreaks. GLP-1 agonists are pivotal in obesity care, promoting weight loss and addressing related health issues, with a focus on personalized, holistic treatment. Guillaume Bentzinger, Luis Carrillo, Philippe Robin, and Alejandro Bara-Estaún News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing across modern healthcare, yet its role in pediatric surgery remains limited and ethically complex. This study reveals that although surgeons recognize AI's potential to enhance diagnostic precision, streamline planning, and support clinical decision-making, its practical use is still rare and mostly academic. By examining pediatric surgeons' experiences and perceptions, this study highlights the critical barriers that must be addressed before AI can be safely and responsibly integrated into pediatric surgical care. Yet pediatric surgery faces unique ethical challenges due to children's limited autonomy, the need for parental decision-making, and the heightened sensitivity of surgical risks. In low-resource settings, concerns about infrastructure, data representativeness, and regulatory preparedness further complicate adoption. Pediatric surgeons must balance innovation with the obligation to protect vulnerable patients and maintain trust. These pressures intensify debates around transparency, fairness, and responsibility in the use of AI tools. It was with these challenges that a deeper research is needed to guide the ethical and practical integration of AI in pediatric surgical care.A national team of pediatric surgeons from the Federal Medical Centre in Umuahia, Nigeria, has released the first comprehensive survey examining how clinicians perceive the ethical and practical implications of integrating AI into pediatric surgical care. Published (DOI: 10.1136/wjps-2025-001089) on 20 October 2025 in the World Journal of Pediatric Surgery (WJPS), the study gathered responses from surgeons across all six geopolitical zones to assess levels of AI awareness, patterns of use, and key ethical concerns. The findings reveal a profession cautiously weighing AI's potential benefits against unresolved questions regarding accountability, informed consent, data privacy, and regulatory readiness.The study analyzed responses from 88 pediatric surgeons, most of whom were experienced consultants actively practicing across diverse clinical settings. Despite global momentum in AI-enabled surgical innovation, only one-third of respondents had ever used AI, and their use was largely restricted to tasks such as literature searches and documentation rather than clinical applications. Very few reported using AI for diagnostic support, imaging interpretation, or surgical simulation, highlighting a substantial gap between emerging technological capabilities and everyday pediatric surgical practice.Ethical concerns were nearly universal. Concerns also extended to algorithmic bias, reduced human oversight, and unclear legal responsibilities in the event of harm. While many supported informing parents about AI involvement, others felt disclosure was unnecessary when AI did not directly influence clinical decisions.Most respondents expressed low confidence in existing legal frameworks governing AI use in healthcare. Collectively, the findings underscore an urgent need for structured governance and capacity building. "The results show that pediatric surgeons are not opposed to AI-they simply want to ensure it is safe, fair, and well regulated," the research team explained. "Ethical challenges such as accountability, informed consent, and data protection must be addressed before clinicians can confidently rely on AI in settings involving vulnerable children. Clear national guidelines, practical training programs, and transparent standards are essential to ensure that AI becomes a supportive tool rather than a source of uncertainty in pediatric surgical care. Strengthening data governance, improving digital infrastructure, and expanding AI literacy among clinicians and families will be essential for building trust. As AI continues to enter surgical practice, these measures offer a practical roadmap for integrating innovation while safeguarding child safety and public confidence. Ethical considerations and challenges in the use of artificial intelligence in pediatric surgical practice: a national survey of Nigerian pediatric surgeons. GLP-1 agonists are pivotal in obesity care, promoting weight loss and addressing related health issues, with a focus on personalized, holistic treatment. Guillaume Bentzinger, Luis Carrillo, Philippe Robin, and Alejandro Bara-Estaún News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

Large language models (LLMs) have become crucial tools in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, as the user base expands and the frequency of usage increases, deploying these models incurs significant computational and memory costs, limiting their potential to serve as foundational infrastructure for human society. In contrast, the human brain performs complex tasks with less than 20 watts of power while exhibiting remarkable transparency in its cognitive processes. This stark contrast underscores the gap between LLMs and human cognition and presents a dual challenge: on one hand, improving the computational efficiency of LLMs is essential to enhance energy efficiency and conserve resources; on the other hand, enhancing their interpretability is crucial to better understand the interactions and functions of components in large-scale systems. To overcome the interdisciplinary bottleneck, this study proposes a unified framework that transforms conventional LLMs into NSLLMs by performing integer spike counting and binary spike conversion, while incorporating a spike-based linear attention mechanism. By introducing integer training with binary inference, the outputs of standard LLMs are converted into spike representations, allowing neuroscience tools to analyze the information processing. Specifically, a layer-wise quantization strategy and hierarchical sensitivity metrics are used to assess the impact of each layer on quantization loss, enabling the configuration of an optimal mixed-timestep spike model that achieves competitive performance under low-bit quantization. In addition, a quantization-assisted sparsification strategy is introduced to reshape the membrane potential distribution and shift the quantization mapping probability toward lower integer values, significantly reducing the spike firing rate and further improving model efficiency. On the VCK190 FPGA, a MatMul-free hardware core is designed that completely eliminates matrix multiplication operations in the NSLLM, reducing dynamic power consumption to 13.849 W and increasing throughput to 161.8 tokens/s. By transforming the behavior of LLMs into neural dynamical representations-such as spike trains-through the NSLLM framework, we can analyze both the dynamic properties of their neurons (e.g., randomness quantified by Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy) and their information-processing characteristics (e.g., Shannon entropy and mutual information). This enables a clearer interpretation of the computational roles played by NSLLMs. Experimental results show that the model encodes information more effectively when processing unambiguous text, allowing it to distinguish between ambiguous and unambiguous inputs (for example, the middle layers exhibit higher normalized mutual information for ambiguous sentences; the AS layer shows distinct dynamical signatures that reflect its role in sparse information processing; and the FS layer has higher Shannon entropy, indicating stronger information transmission capacity. Moreover, the positive correlation between mutual information and Shannon entropy suggests that layers with higher information capacity are better at preserving key input features) . By integrating neural dynamics with information-theoretic measures, this framework provides biologically inspired interpretability for LLM mechanisms while significantly reducing data requirements. Neuroscience research has shown that the human brain achieves energy-efficient information processing through sparse and event-driven computation, enhancing both communication efficiency and system interpretability. Building on this principle, the team developed an interdisciplinary unified framework that introduces a neuromorphic alternative to traditional LLMs, while delivering performance on par with mainstream models of similar scale across common-sense reasoning and a range of more complex large-model tasks-including reading comprehension, world knowledge question answering, and mathematics. This framework not only advances the frontier of energy-efficient AI, but also offers new perspectives on the interpretability of large language models and provides valuable insights for the design of future neuromorphic chips. GLP-1 agonists are pivotal in obesity care, promoting weight loss and addressing related health issues, with a focus on personalized, holistic treatment. Guillaume Bentzinger, Luis Carrillo, Philippe Robin, and Alejandro Bara-Estaún Discover how AI, flow chemistry, and NMR come together in the PiPAC project to revolutionize scalable and autonomous API production. News-Medical.Net provides this medical information service in accordance with these terms and conditions. Please note that medical information found on this website is designed to support, not to replace the relationship between patient and physician/doctor and the medical advice they may provide. Hi, I'm Azthena, you can trust me to find commercial scientific answers from News-Medical.net. Registered members can chat with Azthena, request quotations, download pdf's, brochures and subscribe to our related newsletter content. A few things you need to know before we start. While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles. Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

High induction doses of risankizumab — at double and quadruple the approved 150 mg dose — produced rapid and durable skin clearance in patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis while significantly reducing tissue resident memory T cells (TRM) in the just-published phase 2 KNOCKOUT study led by Andrew Blauvelt, MD, MBA. Moreover, while only a minority of patients completed the entire follow-up period of 100 weeks' duration, it is “intriguing to note,” they reported, that four patients maintained PASI 90 and two patients remained completely clear at 100 weeks — 84 weeks after their last dose of risankizumab (Skyrizi), which is approved for treating plaque psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. “This treatment strategy leads to higher short-term efficacy than what has been documented with any other psoriasis treatment, with no worrisome safety issues,” Blauvelt, of Blauvelt Consulting in Annapolis, Maryland, told Medscape Medical News in an e-mail interview. “And complete clearance lasts for a very long time due to knockout of resident memory T cells within the skin.” Single-cell RNA-sequencing of full-thickness skin biopsies performed at weeks 0 and 52 showed a marked reduction of TRM cells in lesional skin at week 52, with numbers that were similar to the number of nonlesional TRM cells at week 0, the authors reported in the study. “A remarkable aspect of IL-23 inhibition,” he said, “is that there does not appear to be safety issues with increasing doses.” Patients with ulcerative colitis “receive seven times the dose of risankizumab in the first year compared to the dose psoriasis patients receive,” he noted. In six of eight patients who entered an optional follow-up extension study, PASI 100 responses were sustained for up to 66 weeks, Blauvelt said during a grand rounds lecture titled “Curing Psoriasis” held at the Department of Dermatology, George Washington University (GWU) School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Washington, D.C, in August 2025. The new findings also build upon a study published in 2020 by Blauvelt and colleagues — the IMMhance study — which randomized patients to continuous risankizumab therapy vs treatment withdrawal at week 28. Still, approximately 10% of patients who were completely clear after three doses (weeks 0, 4 and 16) maintained their PASI 100 status at week 76 — over a year after the last dose. Other research published in recent years has shown that patients with a short disease duration (< 1-2 years) respond better to risankizumab and other IL-23 inhibitors than patients with a long duration of disease. But in the KNOCKOUT study, where the mean length of disease course upon entry was over 20 years, “we had only two short-disease duration patients and neither of them were super responders,” he said. “I do believe, however, that treating short-disease duration patients with knockout therapy will lead to long-term remissions and potential cures in a subset of patients,” said Blauvelt, formerly the president of the Oregon Medical Research Center, who coined the term “KNOCKOUT.” “To me, ‘hit-hard, hit early' means treating patients with < 1 year disease duration and hitting with a higher-than-approved dose,” he said in the GWU presentation. Future answers may lie in research being conducted by the biotechnology company Oruka Therapeutics on a new YTE-modified monoclonal antibody targeting IL-23p19, ORKA-001, Blauvelt said in the presentation. YTE-modified antibodies have specific mutations that “allow increased binding affinity to FcRN (the neonatal Fc receptor) and allow for antibodies to be taken up by macrophages and spit back out and recycled back into the bloodstream, extending half-life,” he explained. Several YTE-modified antibodies have been approved, including one for respiratory syncytial virus prophylaxis (nirsevimab-alip). One phase 2 trial (EVERLAST-A) is underway, and another (EVERLAST-B) is scheduled to begin soon, with “knockout” dosing of 600 mg, with hopes of achieving once-yearly dosing. Patients with short disease duration are not being specifically recruited into either of these studies, Blauvelt said in the interview, and plans for phase 3 enrollment are under discussion now. According to Griffiths, the KNOCKOUT study data “in part confirm our hypothesis that psoriasis may be curable using a combinatorial approach, one strand of which is high-dose biologics used early in the disease course.” Griffiths described this combination, personalized approach, which includes early intervention with biologics, cell-based or advanced therapeutics, and lifestyle modification, in a 2024 perspective piece in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, titled “Curing Psoriasis” — a paper that Blauvelt has called “fascinating.” Cure is defined in the paper as clearance of psoriasis for at least 5 years following withdrawal of treatment. Studies of their “efficacy and ability to effect immune reset are now underway for severe psoriasis.” Blauvelt sees early intervention with high-dose biologics as the most “accessible” strategy for now. All tissue data — including “what happens to cell types other than tissue resident memory T cells, such as keratinocytes, dendritic cells, endothelial cells, and fibroblasts” — have been submitted for publication in another journal, Blauvelt told Medscape Medical News. Blauvelt disclosed that he is a scientific adviser/received honoraria from AbbVie and Oruka, among other companies, and he is a stockholder for Oruka. Gelfand disclosed he has served as a consultant for AbbVie, Oruka, and other companies. Griffiths disclosed receiving honoraria and/or research support from AbbVie, Amgen, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bristol Meyers Squibb, and other companies.