Prescription opioid use for chronic pain has increased significantly in the past several decades, and an understanding of the risks associated with long term opioid use is important for the health of the patients. Past research has suggested a link between chronic opioid use and sleep apnea, which could have a significant effect on the morbidity and mortality of the chronic pain population. The goal of this study was to determine the prevalence of sleep apnea in the chronic pain population at the UCSD Center for Pain Medicine and Palliative Care Clinic, and to determine whether treatment of sleep apnea in patients with chronic pain has an positive effect on their pain levels.

Porous silicon rugate photonic crystals are an attractive optical sensor material due to their high surface area, naked eye response, and controllable optical, morphological, and chemical characteristics. This thesis presents new ways to improve the selectivity, reversibility, and stability against interferents of remotely interrogated porous silicon sensors. After a brief introduction to rugate porous silicon, Chapters 2-5 present methods of directly sensing the interaction of organic vapors with the porous layer by chemical and physical sensor modulation. A 0.3 mm² fiber optic-coupled porous silicon sensor is constructed in Chapter 2 and implanted in a bed of activated carbon, demonstrating carbon bed end-of-service-life sensing. Chapter 3 furthers this concept by incorporating chemically modified sensor surfaces, with selectivity between water vapor, isopropanol, and heptane vapors demonstrated using acetylated and oxidized sensor chemistries. Chapter 4 introduces physical modulation of the porous silicon sensor, with thermal modulation of the photonic crystal to 160°C employed to rapidly and repeatedly desorb methyl salicylate and octanol vapors that foul the sensor response. Thermal modulation is applied to discrimination of pure heptane, cyclohexane, and isopropanol vapors in Chapter 5 by rapidly cycling a rugate sensor between 25- 80°C while exposed to partial pressures of organic vapors up to 7.5 Torr. Sensor responses to the thermally modulated sorption equilibrium allow discrimination of these pure analyte vapors. The final three chapters describe using porous silicon as tailored interference filters that increase the specificity of standoff optical detection. In Chapter 6, the stop bands of rugate filters are tuned to match mid-infrared molecular absorbance bands, including the 1250 cm⁻¹ P=O bond stretch. Standoff gas sensing is demonstrated with filters matched to the 2350cm⁻¹ stretch of CO₂. In Chapter 7, selective 2-D imaging of target compounds is demonstrated by matching filters to visible emission peaks of photoluminescent dyes that bind to dipicolinic acid, found in anthrax spores. Finally, wavelength separated, ratiometric referencing is demonstrated in Chapter 8, where a pH-responsive NH₃(g) sensor based on a dye-infused rugate filter with two stop bands encoded into the porous layer is shown to compensate for large fluctuations in probe light intensity and increase signal to noise

OBJECTIVE:Cigarette smoking and smoking-related diseases disproportionately affect low-income populations. Health insurance coverage of smoking cessation treatments is increasingly used to encourage quitting. We assess the relationship between state Medicaid coverage of smoking cessation treatments and past-year quitting in adult Medicaid beneficiaries. DATA SOURCES:2009-2014 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS); 2008-2013 indicators of state Medicaid coverage of smoking cessation treatments. STUDY DESIGN:A triple-differencing specification based on differences in Medicaid cessation coverage policies across states as well as within-state differences between Medicaid beneficiaries and a counterfactual group of low-income adults not covered by Medicaid. DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS:Individual-level NHIS data with restricted geographical identifiers were merged with state-year Medicaid coverage indicators. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:Combined coverage of both cessation counseling and medications in state Medicaid programs was associated with increased quitting, with an estimated mean increase in past-year quitting of 3.0 percentage points in covered Medicaid beneficiaries relative to persons without coverage. CONCLUSIONS:Combined coverage of both smoking cessation counseling and medication by state Medicaid programs could help reduce cigarette smoking among Medicaid beneficiaries.

Embedding microfluidic architectures with microneedles enables fluid management capabilities that present new degrees of freedom for transdermal drug delivery. To this end, fabrication schemes that can simultaneously create and integrate complex millimeter/centimeter-long microfluidic structures and micrometer-scale microneedle features are necessary. Accordingly, three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques are suitable candidates because they allow the rapid realization of customizable yet intricate microfluidic and microneedle features. However, previously reported 3D-printing approaches utilized costly instrumentation that lacked the desired versatility to print both features in a single step and the throughput to render components within distinct length-scales. Here, for the first time in literature, we devise a fabrication scheme to create hollow microneedles interfaced with microfluidic structures in a single step. Our method utilizes stereolithography 3D-printing and pushes its boundaries (achieving print resolutions below the full width half maximum laser spot size resolution) to create complex architectures with lower cost and higher print speed and throughput than previously reported methods. To demonstrate a potential application, a microfluidic-enabled microneedle architecture was printed to render hydrodynamic mixing and transdermal drug delivery within a single device. The presented architectures can be adopted in future biomedical devices to facilitate new modes of operations for transdermal drug delivery applications such as combinational therapy for preclinical testing of biologic treatments.

Heterogeneous and multidisciplinary data generated by research on sustainable global agriculture and agrifood systems requires quality data labeling or annotation in order to be interoperable. As recommended by the FAIR principles, data, labels, and metadata must use controlled vocabularies and ontologies that are popular in the knowledge domain and commonly used by the community. Despite the existence of robust ontologies in the Life Sciences, there is currently no comprehensive full set of ontologies recommended for data annotation across agricultural research disciplines. In this paper, we discuss the added value of the Ontologies Community of Practice (CoP) of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture for harnessing relevant expertise in ontology development and identifying innovative solutions that support quality data annotation. The Ontologies CoP stimulates knowledge sharing among stakeholders, such as researchers, data managers, domain experts, experts in ontology design, and platform development teams.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2021/22 is the fifth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of nearly 1900 human drug targets with an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide constitutes over 500 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/bph.15539. Ion channels are one of the six major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, nuclear hormone receptors, catalytic receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2021, and supersedes data presented in the 2019/20, 2017/18, 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2019/20 is the fourth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews of the key properties of nearly 1800 human drug targets with an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide represents approximately 400 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.14749. Ion channels are one of the six major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, nuclear hormone receptors, catalytic receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2019, and supersedes data presented in the 2017/18, 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology Committee on Receptor Nomenclature and Drug Classification (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24 is the sixth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of approximately 1800 drug targets, and over 6000 interactions with about 3900 ligands. There is an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide constitutes almost 500 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.16178. Ion channels are one of the six major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, nuclear hormone receptors, catalytic receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2023, and supersedes data presented in the 2021/22, 2019/20, 2017/18, 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate.