When cardiac arrest occurs outside the home, men are more likely than women to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) from a bystander—and are more likely to survive, found a study team led by Audrey Blewer, MPH, who is assistant director for Educational Programs at Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science and is pursuing a PhD in Epidemiology at Penn.

Type-2 diabetes is a significant risk factor for coronary heart disease, and these two common conditions are leading causes of disease and death globally. But the biological pathways that explain the connection between them have remained somewhat murky, as have the causes of T2D. In a large analysis of genetic data, an international team led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine sought answers about what causes T2D and clarified how the two diseases are linked.

Can loss-of-function genetic mutations—"human knockouts" that can disrupt both copies of a given gene—give us valuable information about the basic biology and possible therapeutics for major medical disorders? An international collaborative team sequenced the protein-coding regions of 10,503 adults in Pakistan, looking first for insights about cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

We have long known that asthma occurs more frequently in adult women than in adult men; the reasons for this contrast are not completely understood. The authors sought to find out whether different demographic factors are associated with women's asthma than with men's.

Prediction models have been widely adopted in clinical research and medical practice, yet there are often major concerns about whether such models can be used across different populations, in different clinical settings. Relatively little research has been done to develop general approaches that can improve model performance in these situations. The authors set out to fill this gap.

The authors sought to improve the accuracy of magnetic resonance imaging for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease—a condition that is notoriously difficult to pin down.

The investigators sought to reveal shared mechanisms by which certain genetic variants contribute downstream to a specific disease—and to reveal possible drug targets.