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The Brain Health Registry and Biospecimen Repository will create a research framework aiming to help us understand the causes of memory loss in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. We would like to recruit research participants 45+ years and up without any memory complaints, participants subjectively reporting memory complaints, and participants suffering from mild cognitive impairment or dementia symptoms due to neurodegenerative diseases. We will ask study participants about their medical history, their demographics, their social determinants of health, do a sleep quality assessment, and do neuropsychometric assessments. We will also create a biospecimen repository of blood, tissue and cerebral spinal fluid samples from the above participants.

We will enroll healthy pregnant women (following enrollment, all subsequent study procedures will be completed postpartum) or postpartum women on hormonal birth control or no hormonal birth control with either a recent history of smoking and a desire to remain abstinent after childbirth, or who are currently smoking and motivated to quit smoking. Participants will be recruited throughout the continental United States (US). Participants living in Minnesota (our clinical site) will receive a 12-week course of exogenous progesterone. Participants will be followed for six months with remote visits, self-administered surveys, and self-collection of dried blood spots to measure hormones and smoking-related biomarkers.

This study will compare the effectiveness and durability of intensive behavioral counseling vs. medical management plus low-intensity behavioral counseling on BMI, body fat, cardiometabolic risk factors, and quality of life in adolescents with severe obesity. We hypothesize that Wegovy (semaglutide) plus low-intensity behavioral counseling will elicit superior reductions in BMI and body fat and greater improvement in cardiometabolic factors and quality of life compared to intensive behavioral counseling at 56 weeks.

This study is being done to learn more about the influence of the menopausal transition on autonomic and vascular function in midlife females. Participants will have their vitals taken and height, weight and waist-to-hip ratio measurements done, complete questionnaires, have blood draws, electrical activity of a nerve in leg measured (optional), have blood vessel function measured, breathing exercises, and a cold pressor test (putting a hand in ice-cold water).

This research study is for creating a registry of all ages with conditions in endocrine and both health. Registries are used very often these days by doctors and scientists to collect information and use to perform research into rare conditions. This registry will be part of a global registry, called "GloBE-Reg" with the University of Glasgow (Scotland) and with the University of MInnesota.

No current studies have examined in vivo glenohumeral kinematics during the overhead volleyball spike despite the high prevalence of spike-related shoulder pain. The extreme shoulder positions achieved by volleyball players during the spike motion may contribute to unique deformations that could result in structural change or pathology of the rotator cuff and long head biceps tendons. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which GH kinematics differ between SAB and a simulated volleyball spike at a self-selected position of ball contact.

The goal of this study is to learn more about how children (ages 5-8 years) describe their gender identities. We are also interested in learning more about the ways children think and develop. We will be giving children several tasks designed as games to assess flexibility in thinking, creativity, and the ability to take another person’s perspective.

The purpose of this research is to understand the effort needed to understand speech if hearing is impaired. Listening effort is higher in people with hearing impairment and has wide-ranging negative consequences across many aspects of a person’s life. The goal of this project is to explore factors that make listening effortful, with special focus on the need to repair perceptual mistakes by relying on context.

The way our bodies react to stress when we’re very young can affect our health for the rest of our lives – and this can vary from person to person. The goal of this research project is to learn more about how different children respond to stress and how to best measure stress in children. We are collecting a measure of attention skills and small samples of hair, cheek swabs, and saliva from children in all kinds of communities across the country. Scientists will look at these samples to learn more about how children respond to stress. This study session will last approximately 25-30 minutes.

This study it to test an investigational vaccine called mRNA-1647 that is being developed for preventing cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection in people. CMV is a common virus that can spread easily through an infected person’s saliva or other body fluids such as blood, urine, and breast milk. We want see if the trial vaccine can prevent CMV infection in participants who have not been previously infected, to understand the safety (how many side effects you may have) of the trial vaccine, and to see if the trial vaccine results in participants making antibodies to CMV.

The purpose of this study is to learn more about the origin of tinnitus (phantom sound) and how age and hearing loss affect the ability to hear simple and complex sounds, such as tones and speech, presented in isolation and in the presence of other competing sounds. Possible participants may have normal hearing or mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Participants will be seated in a sound-treated room and listen to sounds over headphones, insert earphones (earbuds), or via loudspeakers. The tasks involve making judgments about the sounds, such as discriminating which of two sounds appeared to fluctuate in intensity or reporting the words in a sentence.

This study will examine the brain activation associated with the transition between movements in Parkinson’s disease, and if these changes are related to the development of problems with moving (like freezing of gait) and thinking. We will look at brain activity associated with the vestibular (inner ear) and cortical (surface of the brain) systems. People with Parkinson’s disease (especially people with freezing of gait) sometimes have difficulty initiating changes in movement types, such as going from standing to walking, turning, or switching between slow and fast repetitive movements. The difficulty in movement transitions may be associated with an overactive vestibular system (inner ear) or cortical system. In each experiment in this study, we expect about 20-25 participants with Parkinson’s disease and freezing of gait, 20-25 participants with Parkinson’s without freezing of gait, and 20-25 control participants

The purpose of this study to examine the effects of cigarette smoking and drinking alcohol on the formation of DNA damage in the mouth. The overall goal is to identify DNA damage that may be important to the development of head and neck cancers.

The purpose of this study is to study the evolution of early life risk factors that may lead to cancer and other conditions. This is a prospective cohort study of families who reside in Minnesota.

This research will use neuroimaging to study the brain systems involved in prioritizing goals effectively, as well as testing whether variation in those systems is associated with the personality trait conscientiousness, which reflects organization, self-discipline, and industriousness and predicts important health and other life outcomes.

Respiratory illnesses, including ear and sinus infections, colds, and pneumonias, are among the most common infectious diseases affecting Minnesotans across their lifespan. These diseases can be caused by many different types of microbes—bacteria, viruses and fungi—and different types of microbes may require different kinds of treatment. This research is being done to learn more about the specific types of microbes that cause respiratory infections in children and adults across the state of Minnesota over time. Antimicrobial resistance happens when microbes develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. Through this study, we will learn which types of genes are carried by microbes living in the respiratory tract by collecting and analyzing nasal and oral specimen.

This study explores how engaging in creative activities may be helpful for mental health and wellbeing in adolescents. Study participants will attend eight sessions (over two weeks) of Creativity Camp which involves a range of different kinds of arts activities. Participants will also complete a series of questionnaires, interviews, and other assessments to assess the potential benefits of the camp. We have previously shown that Creativity Camp is effective for reducing depression symptoms and improving well-being in adolescents with depression.

Participants play games designed to train visual attention towards natural, non-drug-related scenarios. A biofeedback loop between gameplay and an electroencephalogram (EEG) system monitors game performance and guides game difficulty.

The purpose of this study is to understand how relighting cigarettes affects the level of toxicants inhaled during smoking, compared to smoking non-relit cigarettes.

This keystone study will invite adolescents into a 2-semester creative arts / science program, with arts activities taking place at the Masonic Institute of the Developing Brain (MIDB).

The purpose of this pilot research study is to test whether a tool called “High-Resolution Manometry” can diagnose laryngeal dystonia (also known as spasmodic dysphonia) and measure how well treatment works. High-Resolution Manometry measures pressures from a small catheter that is passed from your nose into your throat. We believe that pressures in the throat might be different for people with laryngeal dystonia than for people without laryngeal dystonia, or with other types of voice disorders. If we can diagnose laryngeal dystonia shortly after symptoms start, we can get patients the treatment they need sooner.

Study to examine the physiological responses that occur during a hot flush in postmenopausal women

The purpose of this research is to learn more about the immune function of patients who are critically ill and may or may not have sepsis through assessment of blood samples at the time of their illness. We will use the blood to determine whether the immune system is suppressed (slowed or stunted) and measure the amount of suppression. Our research team will compare blood from healthy participants to people who are critically ill to better understand immune system suppression.

The purpose of this trial is to investigate a full-mouth electronic toothbrush (FMET) and foam system compared to a conventional electronic toothbrush (ETB) and dentifrice during a 30-day period to evaluate the impact on clinical indicators of gingivitis, plaque, safety, and patient perceptions.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota are looking for adult volunteers to participate in a lung cancer screening online educational intervention study.

The aim of this study is to obtain newborn blood spots (NBS) and tumor specimens for children and adolescents diagnosed with malignant neoplasms.

The purpose of our research study is to increase our understanding on the human lung immune response to infection. We aim to use this knowledge to develop novel approaches on the prevention and treatment of lung infections. To accomplish this, we plan to obtain cells from the airways and blood of healthy volunteers to perform immune experiments.

We are investigating how paired non-invasive electrical stimulation of surface body regions and sound changes sound perception and tinnitus. Body stimulation regions include: external ear/behind the ear, shoulder, neck, forearm, hand, and upper arm. We aim to better understand the optimal conditions of this paired stimulation, which opens opportunities for applying this method to improving hearing loss or tinnitus. We are studying three groups of people: those with normal hearing, those with mild to moderate hearing loss, and those with tinnitus.

This research is being performed to examine how the spleen moves during breathing in various body positions and breathing conditions. Physical measurements of the participant's body will be recorded (weight, height, and body dimensions) and then noninvasive recordings of the spleen and breathing patterns will be recorded. The spleen motion will be measured using standard abdominal ultrasound imaging, and breathing will be measured with accelerometers (small devices about the size of a quarter that measure the movement of the chest during breathing).

This is a study of persons who do and do not stutter between ages 7 and 65 years. This study is trying to figure out how attention skills influence memory, language, and speech fluency skills.