LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of intra-articular sodium hyaluronate in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis

 To assess the efficacy of intra-articular hyaluronic acid in patients with knee osteoarthritis, sixty female patients with knee osteoarthritis were randomised to three weekly intra-articular injections of 30 mg sodium hyaluronate (Na HA) with a high molecular weight (1.0 to 2.9 million Da) or 40 mg 6-methylprednisolone acetate (6-MPA). The clinical assessments included pain at rest, at weight-bearing and on walking, Lequesne Index and active range of knee flexion. Assessments were done at baseline, at week 4, and at months 3 and 6. A significant decrease in VAS scores for pain at rest, at weight-bearing and pain on walking, and in Lequesne index was found in both groups at week 4 when compared to baseline and there was no significant differences between the two groups. However, at 3rd month improvement in all pain scores and Lequesne index was found in favour of hyaluronic acid. At 6th, no significant difference was found between the treatment groups. Improvement in pain was accompanied by an increase in joint flexion at week 4 and at month 3 in both groups. Both treatments were well-tolerated. The results showed that both intra-articular hyaluronic acid and 6-MPA treatments provide clinically significant improvement and demonstrated that Na HA has a long-term beneficial effect in patients with knee osteoarthritis.
A longitudinal study of premorbid IQ Score and risk of developing schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, and other nonaffective psychoses.

CONTEXT
Longitudinal studies indicate that a lower IQ score increases risk of schizophrenia. Preliminary evidence suggests there is no such effect for nonpsychotic bipolar disorder. To our knowledge, there are no prior population-based, longitudinal studies of premorbid IQ score and risk of developing severe depression requiring hospital admission.


OBJECTIVES
To investigate the association between premorbid IQ score and risk of developing schizophrenia, other nonaffective psychoses, bipolar disorder, and severe depression and to investigate effects of confounding and examine possible causal pathways by which IQ may alter these risks.


DESIGN
Historical cohort study, using record linkage for hospital admissions during a 27-year follow-up period.


SETTING
Survey of Swedish conscripts (1969-1970).


PARTICIPANTS
Population-based sample of 50,087 male subjects. Data were available on IQ score at conscription and on other social and psychological characteristics.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
International Classification of Diseases, Eighth Revision or Ninth Revision diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, and other nonaffective psychoses.


RESULTS
There was no association between premorbid IQ score and risk of bipolar disorder. Lower IQ was associated with increased risk of schizophrenia, severe depression, and other nonaffective psychoses. Risk of schizophrenia was increased in subjects with average IQ compared with those with high scores, indicating that risk is spread across the whole IQ range.


CONCLUSIONS
Lower IQ score was associated with increased risk for schizophrenia, severe depression, and other nonaffective psychoses, but not bipolar disorder. This finding indicates that at least some aspects of the neurodevelopmental etiology of bipolar disorder may differ from these other disorders.
Evaluation of tissue blood flow of the gastric tube after vessel anastomosis for esophageal reconstruction.

OBJECTIVES AND METHODS
Impaired blood flow of the upper end of the gastric tube is one of the major causes of anastomotic leak following esophageal reconstruction after esophagectomy for cancer. We applied an additional microvascular anastomosis procedure--the supercharging technique--to improve blood flow. We investigated blood flow improvement in 15 patients who underwent the supercharging technique after total excision of the thoracic esophagus and gastric tube reconstruction through the posterior mediastinal route from August 2003 to March 2005.


RESULTS
Tissue blood flow was measured with laser Doppler flowmetry during surgery and was improved after microvascular anastomosis. Patency and blood flow of anastomosed arteries were evaluated with computed tomography and ultrasonography, respectively. Patency and stable blood flow of anastomosed arteries were confirmed more than 1 month after surgery. Therefore, microvascular anastomosis improved the tissue blood flow of the upper end of the gastric tube. Long-term blood flow improvement was confirmed, which suggests that microvascular anastomosis contributes to reducing the risk of anastomotic leak.
The use of a protein and energy dense eicosapentaenoic acid containing supplement for malignancy-related weight loss in children.

BACKGROUND
The aim of nutritional therapy in cancer patients is to prevent weight loss and to improve functional capacity and quality of life. Clinical studies however, have continued to demonstrate that a reduction in body weight loss is difficult to achieve in cancer cachexia. Several studies have shown that supplementation with eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), an omega-3 fatty acid, has anti-cachectic effects in adult cancer patients. This study evaluated the clinical effects of a protein and energy dense EPA containing nutritional supplement in a group of pediatric cancer patients receiving active chemotherapy treatment.


METHODS
The study was a prospective, randomized, single center, open-label design. Fifty-two patients diagnosed with pediatric malignant disease and receiving intensive chemotherapy were included. Thirty-three patients received a nutritional supplement containing EPA in addition to their regular food intake. Nineteen control patients did not receive supplementation. Patients were examined and their data (body weight, body mass index, and weight percentile) were recorded regularly once a month for 3 months. A subgroup of patients was evaluated for 6 months.


RESULTS
At 3 months, there were significantly fewer patients in the treatment group as compared to controls that showed losses in body weight (P = 0.001), BMI (P = 0.002), and a negative deviation in weight percentile (P = 0.021). In addition, remission rate was significantly (P = 0.036) higher in the treatment group as compared to controls.


CONCLUSIONS
This study demonstrates a decrease in cancer-induced weight loss in pediatric patients fed a protein and energy dense nutrition supplement containing EPA.
A new hybrid Modified Firefly Algorithm and Support Vector Regression model for accurate Short Term Load Forecasting

Precise forecast of the electrical load plays a highly significant role in the electricity industry and market. It provides economic operations and effective future plans for the utilities and power system operators. Due to the intermittent and uncertain characteristic of the electrical load, many research studies have been directed to nonlinear prediction methods. In this paper, a hybrid prediction algorithm comprised of Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Modified Firefly Algorithm (MFA) is proposed to provide the short term electrical load forecast. The SVR models utilize the nonlinear mapping feature to deal with nonlinear regressions. However, such models suffer from a methodical algorithm for obtaining the appropriate model parameters. Therefore, in the proposed method the MFA is employed to obtain the SVR parameters accurately and effectively. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed methodology, it is applied to the electrical load demand in Fars, Iran. The obtained results are compared with those obtained from the ARMA model, ANN, SVR-GA, SVR-HBMO, SVR-PSO and SVR-FA. The experimental results affirm that the proposed algorithm outperforms other techniques. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Short Courses of Intravenous Empirical Antibiotic Treatment in Selected Febrile Neutropenic Children with Cancer

Background: Since the optimal duration of antibiotic therapy in febrile neutropenic patients is not clear, we evaluated the safety and efficacy of short courses of intravenous antibiotic treatment in selected pediatric cancer patients admitted for fever and neutropenia. Patients and Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical course of children with chemotherapy-induced neutropenia and fever. All patients were treated with empirical intravenous antibiotics. In episodes of fever of unknown origin (FUO), treatment regimen allowed discontinuation of antibiotics and early hospital discharge regardless of absolute neutrophil count (ANC) or evidence of bone marrow recovery as long as patients were afebrile for at least 24 h and had been treated for a minimum of 72 h. Results: 106 episodes of febrile neutropenia occurred in 56 patients. 84 episodes were classified as FUO and intravenous antibiotic therapy was discontinued regardless of ANC when patients met the criteria described above. No death or major complication occurred. None of the patients had to be rehospitalized for recurrent fever or infection. Conclusion: Discontinuation of intravenous antibiotics regardless of ANC or evidence of bone marrow recovery seems safe and effective in pediatric cancer patients with FUO when children are afebrile for at least 24 h and are treated for a minimum of 72 h.
Things fall apart? Discourses on agency and change in organizations

A B S T R AC T The history of the concept of ‘agency’ in organizational theory over the last 50 years makes dismal reading. From a position of unbounded optimism that organizational change could be managed as a rational or planned process with a transparent agenda, we now confront restructured workplaces characterized by new forms of flexibility, hypercomplexity and chaos in which the nature, sources and consequences of change interventions have become fundamentally problematic. How did this occur and what implications does it have for our understanding of agency and change in organizations? Should we assume that rationalist concepts of centred agency are no longer viable, or should we welcome the plural and promising new forms of decentred agency emerging within organizations? This article presents a selective interdisciplinary history of competing disciplinary discourses on agency and change in organizations, classified into rationalist, contextualist, dispersalist and constructionist discourses. Although the four discourses clarify the meta-theoretical terrain of agency in relation to organizational change theories, the growing plurality of discourses challenges the social scientific ambitions of the research field to be objective, cumulative or unified. It is concluded that the future for research on agency and change in organizations is characterized by new opportunities for empirical investigation and intervention, but also by mounting threats to the epistemological rationale of objective knowledge and the efficacy of practice.
Spatial resilience: integrating landscape ecology, resilience, and sustainability

Landscape ecology has a high potential to contribute to sustainability in the interactions of people and nature. Landscape ecologists have already made considerable progress towards a more general understanding of the relevance of spatial variation for ecosystems. Incorporating the complexities of societies and economies into landscape ecology analyses will, however, require a broader framework for thinking about spatial elements of complexity. An exciting recent development is to explicitly try to integrate landscape ecology and ideas about resilience in social–ecological systems through the concept of spatial resilience. Spatial resilience focuses on the importance of location, connectivity, and context for resilience, based on the idea that spatial variation in patterns and processes at different scales both impacts and is impacted by local system resilience. I first introduce and define the concepts of resilience and spatial resilience and then discuss some of their potential contributions to the further interdisciplinary integration of landscape ecology, complexity theory, and sustainability science. Complexity theorists have argued that many complex phenomena, such as symmetry-breaking and selection, share common underlying mechanisms regardless of system type (physical, social, ecological, or economic). Similarities in the consequences of social exclusion and habitat fragmentation provide an informative example. There are many strong parallels between pattern–process interactions in social and ecological systems, respectively, and a number of general spatial principles and mechanisms are emerging that have relevance across many different kinds of system. Landscape ecologists, with their background in spatially explicit pattern–process analysis, are well placed to contribute to this emerging research agenda.
CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in wheat

Genome editing has been a long-term challenge for molecular biology research, particularly for plants possess complex genome. The recently discovered Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system is a versatile tool for genome editing which enables editing of multiple genes based on the guidance of small RNAs. Even though the efficiency of CRISPR/Cas9 system has been shown with several studies from diploid plants, its application remains a challenge for plants with polyploid and complex genome. Here, we applied CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system in wheat protoplast to conduct the targeted editing of stress-responsive transcription factor genes, wheat dehydration responsive element binding protein 2 (TaDREB2) and wheat ethylene responsive factor 3 (TaERF3). Targeted genome editing of TaDREB2 and TaERF3 was achieved with transient expression of small guide RNA and Cas9 protein in wheat protoplast.  The effectiveness of mutagenesis in wheat protoplast was confirmed with restriction enzyme digestion assay, T7 endonuclease assay, and sequencing. Furthermore, several off-target regions for designed sgRNAs were analyzed, and the specificity of genome editing was confirmed with amplicon sequencing. Overall results suggested that CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system can easily be established on wheat protoplast and it has a huge potentiality for targeted manipulation of wheat genome for crop improvement purposes.
THE INFLUENCE OF DROUGHT AND RE-ACIDIFICATION ON ZOOPLANKTON EMERGENCE FROM RESTING STAGES

The recovery of biota in lakes damaged by cultural acidification may be influenced by a number of factors, including El Nino-related droughts. Long-term zooplankton records from Swan Lake, Sudbury, Canada, indicated that crustacean species richness temporarily increased from an annual mean of 10 species to 18 species in the year following a two-year drought and subsequent re-acidification of the lake. We hypothesized that this unexpected increase in richness was the result of an emergence of zooplankton from resting stages that were historically deposited in the lake sediments. The drought and re-acidification event resulted in several changes in the lake that may have triggered the emergence of zooplankton, including desiccation of littoral sediments (and the zooplankton resting stages residing there), increased water clarity, increased profundal temperature, and increased oxygen concentration in the bottom waters. Using in situ emergence traps, we investigated the influence of desiccation, light, temperature, and oxygen concentration on the emergence of crustacean zooplankton from resting stages. Responses were speciesspecific; four taxa had higher emergence when sediments were dried over the winter, the emergence of six taxa was influenced by temperature, and the emergence of three taxa was influenced by light. This suggests that climatic events, such as droughts, that alter the physical and chemical properties of lakes may alter zooplankton communities by triggering the emergence of resting stages residing in the lake sediments. This is particularly significant if, as in Swan Lake, emerging zooplankton are faced with inhospitable water quality. Under this scenario, emergence may act to deplete the egg bank, reducing the number of potential colonists available to repopulate the lake when environmental conditions improve.
Sentiment Analysis : A Multi-Faceted Problem

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is the computational study of people’s opinions, appraisals, and emotions toward entities, events and their attributes. In the past few years, it attracted a great deal of attentions from both academia and industry due to many challenging research problems and a wide range of applications [1]. Opinions are important because whenever we need to make a decision we want to hear others’ opinions. This is not only true for individuals but also true for organizations. However, there was almost no computational study on opinions before the Web because there was little opinionated text available. In the past, when an individual needed to make a decision, he/she typically asked for opinions from friends and families. When an organization wanted to find opinions of the general public about its products and services, it conducted surveys and focus groups. However, with the explosive growth of the social media content on the Web in the past few years, the world has been transformed. People can now post reviews of products at merchant sites and express their views on almost anything in discussion forums and blogs, and at social network sites. Now if one wants to buy a product, one is no longer limited to asking one’s friends and families because there are many user reviews on the Web. For a company, it may no longer need to conduct surveys or focus groups in order to gather consumer opinions about its products and those of its competitors because there is a plenty of such information publicly available.
Risk factors associated with ischemic optic neuropathy after spinal fusion surgery.

BACKGROUND
Perioperative visual loss, a rare but dreaded complication of spinal fusion surgery, is most commonly caused by ischemic optic neuropathy (ION). The authors sought to determine risk factors for ION in this setting.


METHODS
Using a multicenter case-control design, the authors compared 80 adult patients with ION from the American Society of Anesthesiologists Postoperative Visual Loss Registry with 315 adult control subjects without ION after spinal fusion surgery, randomly selected from 17 institutions, and matched by year of surgery. Preexisting medical conditions and perioperative factors were compared between patients and control subjects using stepwise multivariate analysis to assess factors that might predict ION.


RESULTS
After multivariate analysis, risk factors for ION after spinal fusion surgery included male sex (odds ratio [OR] 2.53, 95% CI 1.35-4.91, P = 0.005), obesity (OR 2.83, 95% CI 1.52-5.39, P = 0.001), Wilson frame use (OR 4.30, 95% CI 2.13-8.75, P < 0.001), anesthesia duration (OR per 1 h = 1.39, 95% CI 1.22-1.58, P < 0.001), estimated blood loss (OR per 1 l = 1.34, 95% CI 1.13-1.61, P = 0.001), and colloid as percent of nonblood replacement (OR per 5% = 0.67, 95% CI 0.52-0.82, P < 0.001). After cross-validation, area under the curve = 0.85, sensitivity = 0.79, and specificity = 0.82.


CONCLUSIONS
This is the first study to assess ION risk factors in a large, multicenter case-control fashion with detailed perioperative data. Obesity, male sex, Wilson frame use, longer anesthetic duration, greater estimated blood loss, and decreased percent colloid administration were significantly and independently associated with ION after spinal fusion surgery.
MPICH-GQ: Quality-of-Service for Message Passing Programs

Parallel programmers typically assume that all resources required for a program's execution are dedicated to that purpose. However, in local and wide area networks, contention for shared networks, CPUs, and I/O systems can result in significant variations in availability, with consequent adverse effects on overall performance. We describe a new message-passingarchitecture, MPICH-GQ, that uses quality of service (QoS) mechanisms to manage contention and hence improve performance of message passing interface (MPI) applications. MPICH-GQ combines new QoS specification, traffic shaping, QoS reservation, and QoS implementation techniques to deliver QoS capabilities to the high-bandwidth bursty flows, complex structures, and reliable protocols used in high-performance applications-characteristics very different from the low-bandwidth, constant bit-rate media flows and unreliable protocols for which QoS mechanisms were designed. Results obtained on a differentiated services testbed demonstrate our ability to maintain application performance in the face of heavy network contention.
Epidemiology of burns in Lithuania during 1991-2004.

UNLABELLED
The objective of this article is to overview and present the burn incidence and burn care in Lithuania.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
In this study, data from the period of 1991-2004 were collected from the Lithuanian Department of Statistics, Department of Fire and Rescue, Lithuanian Health Information Center, State Patient Fund, health care institutions, burn care facilities.


RESULTS
In the 14-year period, 9459 persons per year (2.6/1000 population) in average sustained burn injuries. The majority of burned patients (74.8%) were adults and 25.2% were children; 21.5% of all burned patients were hospitalized (2013 inpatients per year). The number of hospitalizations per 100 000 individuals has decreased from 65.6 to 39.5, but it is still very high and worrying. Among all the patients admitted to hospitals, 67% were males and 33% females, with a male-to-female ratio of 2:1. The length of hospitalization decreased from 16.2 to 12.7 days. The number of fire-related deaths for the 14-year period was 289 deaths per year (8 per 100 000 persons). The number of deaths among inpatients was 63.6 deaths per year, the age being an important factor in mortality rates. Although the mortality of inpatients has increased in recent years, the mortality in the age group up to 14 years has decreased to 0. Children made up 24.6% of burn patients; among those admitted to hospital, they accounted for 41.1%. Mortality rates for males and females were almost the same.


CONCLUSIONS
The number of burns is decreasing. The hospitalization rate and hospitalization time are becoming shorter. In the last few years, patients suffer from more severe burns, while children sustain more severe burns requiring hospitalization. Children and working-age persons make up 91.9% of hospitalized burn patients. Number of deaths in fire accidents is increasing.