LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Association of Proton Pump Inhibitors With Risk of Dementia: A Pharmacoepidemiological Claims Data Analysis.

IMPORTANCE
Medications that influence the risk of dementia in the elderly can be relevant for dementia prevention. Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are widely used for the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases but have also been shown to be potentially involved in cognitive decline.


OBJECTIVE
To examine the association between the use of PPIs and the risk of incident dementia in the elderly.


DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
We conducted a prospective cohort study using observational data from 2004 to 2011, derived from the largest German statutory health insurer, Allgemeine Ortskrankenkassen (AOK). Data on inpatient and outpatient diagnoses (coded by the German modification of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision) and drug prescriptions (categorized according to the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System) were available on a quarterly basis. Data analysis was performed from August to November 2015.


EXPOSURES
Prescription of omeprazole, pantoprazole, lansoprazole, esomeprazole, or rabeprazole.


MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES
The main outcome was a diagnosis of incident dementia coded by the German modification of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision. The association between PPI use and dementia was analyzed using time-dependent Cox regression. The model was adjusted for potential confounding factors, including age, sex, comorbidities, and polypharmacy.


RESULTS
A total of 73,679 participants 75 years of age or older and free of dementia at baseline were analyzed. The patients receiving regular PPI medication (n = 2950; mean [SD] age, 83.8 [5.4] years; 77.9% female) had a significantly increased risk of incident dementia compared with the patients not receiving PPI medication (n = 70,729; mean [SD] age, 83.0 [5.6] years; 73.6% female) (hazard ratio, 1.44 [95% CI, 1.36-1.52]; P < .001).


CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
The avoidance of PPI medication may prevent the development of dementia. This finding is supported by recent pharmacoepidemiological analyses on primary data and is in line with mouse models in which the use of PPIs increased the levels of β-amyloid in the brains of mice. Randomized, prospective clinical trials are needed to examine this connection in more detail.
Demographic, clinical, and genetic characteristics of patients with medullary thyroid cancer in the past 16 years in Castilla-La Mancha.

OBJECTIVE
Medullary thyroid cancer is a rare tumor that is more aggressive and has a worse prognosis than differentiated thyroid cancer. The purpose of this study was to report the demographic, clinical, and genetic characteristics of patients seen in the health care system of the community of Castilla-La Mancha over a 16-year period.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
Data were collected through a review of patients' medical records.


RESULTS
The medical records of 58 patients (mean age at diagnosis, 51 years; range, 6-82 years; 63.8% women) were reviewed. Prevalence rate was 2.84 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, with a high variability between areas (range, 0-5.4 cases per 100,000 inhabitants). Familial cases accounted for 34.5% of all medullary thyroid cancers, and the most common mutation was C634Y. The condition was most commonly diagnosed following palpation of a cervical lump (70.6%). At diagnosis, 56 of 58 patients underwent ultrasound and 8 of 58 patients were tested for serum calcitonin. Tumor multicentricity was reported in 59 and 50% of patients with multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2A and 2B, respectively, and in no sporadic cases. Fifty-two percent of patients had an advanced stage (iii or iv) at diagnosis. Median follow-up was 36 months (interquartile range, 14-210); 11 patients were lost to follow-up.


CONCLUSIONS
In Castilla-La Mancha, medullary thyroid cancer is diagnosed by cervical ultrasound, rather than calcitonin assay. There is a high prevalence of both familial and sporadic medullary thyroid cancer, and a significant variability in the type of proto-oncogen rearranged during transfection mutation as compared to the rest of the Spanish population.
The therapeutic value of laughter in medicine.

OBJECTIVE
The aim of this review is to identify, critically evaluate, and summarize the laughter literature across a number of fields related to medicine and health care to assess to what extent laughter health-related benefits are currently supported by empirical evidence.


DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SELECTION
A comprehensive laughter literature search was performed. A thorough search of the gray literature was also undertaken. A list of inclusion and exclusion criteria was identified.


DATA EXTRACTION
It was necessary to distinguish between humor and laughter to assess health-related outcomes elicited by laughter only.


DATA SYNTHESIS
Thematic analysis was applied to summarize laughter health-related outcomes, relationships, and general robustness.


CONCLUSIONS
Laughter has shown physiological, psychological, social, spiritual, and quality-of-life benefits. Adverse effects are very limited, and laughter is practically lacking in contraindications. Therapeutic efficacy of laughter is mainly derived from spontaneous laughter (triggered by external stimuli or positive emotions) and self-induced laughter (triggered by oneself at will), both occurring with or without humor. The brain is not able to distinguish between these types; therefore, it is assumed that similar benefits may be achieved with one or the other. Although there is not enough data to demonstrate that laughter is an all-around healing agent, this review concludes that there exists sufficient evidence to suggest that laughter has some positive, quantifiable effects on certain aspects of health. In this era of evidence-based medicine, it would be appropriate for laughter to be used as a complementary/alternative medicine in the prevention and treatment of illnesses, although further well-designed research is warranted.
Prevalence of intimate partner violence: findings from the WHO multi-country study on women's health and domestic violence

BACKGROUND
Violence against women is a serious human rights abuse and public health issue. Despite growing evidence of the size of the problem, current evidence comes largely from industrialised settings, and methodological differences limit the extent to which comparisons can be made between studies. We aimed to estimate the extent of physical and sexual intimate partner violence against women in 15 sites in ten countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and the United Republic of Tanzania.


METHODS
Standardised population-based household surveys were done between 2000 and 2003. Women aged 15-49 years were interviewed and those who had ever had a male partner were asked in private about their experiences of physically and sexually violent and emotionally abusive acts.


FINDINGS
24,097 women completed interviews, with around 1500 interviews per site. The reported lifetime prevalence of physical or sexual partner violence, or both, varied from 15% to 71%, with two sites having a prevalence of less than 25%, seven between 25% and 50%, and six between 50% and 75%. Between 4% and 54% of respondents reported physical or sexual partner violence, or both, in the past year. Men who were more controlling were more likely to be violent against their partners. In all but one setting women were at far greater risk of physical or sexual violence by a partner than from violence by other people.


INTERPRETATION
The findings confirm that physical and sexual partner violence against women is widespread. The variation in prevalence within and between settings highlights that this violence in not inevitable, and must be addressed.
Low power data-dependent transform video and still image coding

This work introduces the idea of data dependent video coding for low power. Algorithms for the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and its inverse are introduced which exploit statistical properties of the input data in both the space and spatial frequency domains in order to minimize the total number of arithmetic operations. Two VLSI chips have been built as a proof-of-concept of data dependent processing implementing the DCT and its inverse (IDCT). The IDCT core processor exploits the presence of a large number of zerovalued spectral coefficients in the input stream when stimulated with MPEG-compressed video sequences. A data-driven IDCT computation algorithm along with clock gating techniques are used to reduce the number of arithmetic operations for video inputs. The second chip is a DCT core processor that exhibits two innovative techniques for arithmetic operation reduction in the DCT computation context along with standard voltage scaling techniques such as pipelining and parallelism. The first method reduces the bitwidth of arithmetic operations in the presence of data spatial correlation. The second method trades off power dissipation and image compression quality (arithmetic precision.) Both chips are fully functional and exhibit the lowest switched capacitance per sample among past DCT/IDCT chips reported in the literature. Their power dissipation profile shows a strong dependence with certain statistical properties of the data that they operate on, according to the design goal. Thesis Supervisor: Anantha Chandrakasan Title: Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering
Characteristics and Prognostic Implications of High-Risk HPV-Associated Hypopharyngeal Cancers

BACKGROUND
High-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) is an oncogenic virus that causes oropharyngeal cancers, and it has a favorable outcome after the treatment. Unlike in oropharyngeal cancer, the prevalence and role of high-risk HPV in the etiology of hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (HPSCC) is uncertain.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect and prognostic significance of high-risk HPV in patients with HPSCC.


METHODS
The study included 64 subjects with HPSCC who underwent radical surgery with or without radiation-based adjuvant therapy. Primary tumor sites were the pyriform sinus in 42 patients, posterior pharyngeal wall in 19 patients, and postcricoid area in 3 patients. High-risk HPV in situ hybridization was performed to detect HPV infection.


RESULTS
The positive rate of high-risk HPV in situ hybridization was 10.9% (7/64). There was a significant difference in the fraction of positive high-risk HPV among pyriform sinus cancer (16.7%), posterior pharyngeal wall cancer (0%), and postcricoid area cancer (0%) (p = 0.042). The laryngoscopic examination revealed a granulomatous and exophytic appearance in 85.7% (6/7) of patients with high-risk HPV-positive pyriform sinus cancer, but in only 31.4% (11/35) of patients with high-risk HPV-negative pyriform sinus cancer (p = 0.012). Significant correlations were found between positive high-risk HPV and younger age (p = 0.050) and non-smoking status (p = 0.017). HPV-positive patients had a significantly better disease-free survival (p = 0.026) and disease-specific survival (p = 0.047) than HPV-negative patients.


CONCLUSIONS
High-risk HPV infection is significantly related to pyriform sinus cancer in patients with HPSCC.
New Automotive Electronics Technologies [Automotive Electronics]

New smaller-size, higher-reliability, and lower-cost automotive sensors are currently widely available. These sensors include the following: front-facing and rear backup imaging cameras; front-facing and rear blind-spot scanning radars; front-facing scanning laser sensors; radar plus camera vision combined via sensor fusion. Enabled by these new sensor technologies and advances in automotive electronics, newly available control systems enhance vehicle safety and ease the driver's workload. The following safety control systems are described in this article: forward collision warning or braking; backup collision intervention (BCI); lane-departure warning (LDW) or prevention; pedestrian detection with full automatic braking; blind-zone alert; vehicle convoy or platooning; autonomous, automated-driving vehicles; rainstorm or snowstorm high visibility smart headlights.
Conhecimento popular sobre plantas medicinais em comunidades rurais de mata atlântica - Itacaré, BA, Brasil

(Folk knowledge about medicinal plants within rural communities in Atlantic Forest, Itacaré, Bahia State, Brazil). This study’s goal was to caryy out an ethnobotanical survey focusing on the knowledge and use of medicinal plants within two rural communities (Marambaia and Camboinha), which are situated in an Environmental Protection Area in Atlantic Forest of Southern Bahia, Brazil. These communities use medicinal plants as an important therapeutic activity, which permits the rural inhabitants to be selfsufficient regarding health care. Data were collected through interviews with 26 families (24% of the total). The medicinal plants collected (98 species) were catalogued, identified and deposited at the Herbarium Rio Clarense (HRCB). They belong to 40 families so that Lamiaceae was the most cited. The majority of these species (78%) are cultivated, usually in backyards by local inhabitants. The leaf is the most common part of the plant used in medicinal preparations. The species with the greatest number of citations were Chenopodium ambrosioides L. and Lippia alba (Mill) N.E. Br. These species are also associated with the highest number of therapeutic uses. Use agreement and diversity index from this survey were compared to other surveys conducted in Brazilian Tropical Forests.
Game Theory and Decision Theory in Multi-Agent Systems

In the last few years, there has been increasing interest from the agent community in the use of techniques from decision theory and game theory. Our aims in this article are firstly to briefly summarize the key concepts of decision theory and game theory, secondly to discuss how these tools are being applied in agent systems research, and finally to introduce this special issue of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems by reviewing the papers that appear.
Protective effect of curcumin against heavy metals-induced liver damage.

Occupational or environmental exposures to heavy metals produce several adverse health effects. The common mechanism determining their toxicity and carcinogenicity is the generation of oxidative stress that leads to hepatic damage. In addition, oxidative stress induced by metal exposure leads to the activation of the nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2/Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1/antioxidant response elements (Nrf2/Keap1/ARE) pathway. Since antioxidant and chelating agents are generally used for the treatment of heavy metals poisoning, this review is focused on the protective role of curcumin against liver injury induced by heavy metals. Curcumin has shown, in clinical and preclinical studies, numerous biological activities including therapeutic efficacy against various human diseases and anti-hepatotoxic effects against environmental or occupational toxins. Curcumin reduces the hepatotoxicity induced by arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead and mercury, prevents histological injury, lipid peroxidation and glutathione (GSH) depletion, maintains the liver antioxidant enzyme status and protects against mitochondrial dysfunction. The preventive effect of curcumin on the noxious effects induced by heavy metals has been attributed to its scavenging and chelating properties, and/or to the ability to induce the Nrf2/Keap1/ARE pathway. However, additional research is needed in order to propose curcumin as a potential protective agent against liver damage induced by heavy metals.
A generic model of tactical plan recognition for threat assessment

Plan recognition has to be performed in a statistically robust manner concerning a possibly infinite number of tactical situations and different types of units. We need a generic model for tactical plan recognition where we combine observations and a priori knowledge in a flexible manner by using suitable methodologies and by having a large hypothesis space taken into account. Threat and therefore observed agent’s plans should be put into a context. Here, we propose Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN), introduced in [2], which enable the composition of Bayesian Networks from the network pieces, as the key methodology when designing flexible plan recognition models. However, Bayesian network pieces (fragments) must be compatible and therefore we propose ontology for generic plan recognition using Bayesian network fragments. Additionally, we claim that by using multi-entity network fragments we expand the hypothesis space and using this approach various multi-agents structures can be expressed. Our final contribution is that we incorporate the use of explicit utilities in our plan recognition model.
Patients Prefer Boarding in Inpatient Hallways: Correlation with the National Emergency Department Overcrowding Score

Objective. The boarding of patients in Emergency Department (ED) hallways when no inpatient beds are available is a major cause of ED crowding. One solution is to board admitted patients in an inpatient rather than ED hallway. We surveyed patients to determine their preference and correlated their responses to real-time National Emergency Department Overcrowding Score (NEDOCS). Methods. This was a survey of admitted patients in the ED of an urban university level I trauma center serving a community of 5 million about their personal preferences regarding boarding. Real-time NEDOCS was calculated at the time each survey was conducted. Results. 99 total surveys were completed during October 2010, 42 (42%) patients preferred to be boarded in an inpatient hallway, 33 (33%) preferred the ED hallway, and 24 (24%) had no preference. Mean (±SD) NEDOCS (range 0-200) was 136 ± 46 for patients preferring inpatient boarding, 112 ± 39 for ED boarding, and 119 ± 43 without preference. Male patients preferred inpatient hallway boarding significantly more than females. Preference for inpatient boarding was associated with a significantly higher NEDOCS. Conclusions. In this survey study, patients prefer inpatient hallway boarding when the hospital is at or above capacity. Males prefer inpatient hallway boarding more than females. The preference for inpatient hallway boarding increases as the ED becomes more crowded.
The crystallization of amorphous Fe2MnGe powder prepared by ball milling

Abstract We synthesized for the first time the intermetallic compound Fe 2 MnGe. To avoid preferential evaporation of volatile components we exploited mechanical alloying. Amorphous Fe 2 MnGe alloy powder was prepared by planetary ball milling elemental starting materials. The amorphous-to-crystalline transition was studied by means of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). A cubic D0 3 phase is formed at low temperature and transforms to a high-temperature hexagonal D0 19 phase. The apparent activation energy was determined by means of the Kissinger method.
Does Fiscal Monitoring Make Better Governments ? Evidence from US Municipalities ∗

I study the effect of state fiscal monitoring on municipal governance. I focus on governance outcomes related to financial reporting quality, local corruption, political entrenchment, and the financial soundness of municipalities. I exploit the staggered adoption of fiscal monitoring policies, which entail a regular review of municipal financial reporting for signs of fiscal distress. I find that the introduction of monitoring policies is associated with an increase in proxies for reporting quality, a decrease in corruption convictions, and a reduced likelihood of reelection of incumbent politicians. Consistent with the intended purpose of state monitoring, I find evidence consistent with the financial health of municipalities improving following the initiation of state monitoring, as measured with financial statement-based ratios. Collectively, my results are consistent with state fiscal monitoring improving several important aspects of municipal governance. ∗I am grateful for the thoughtful guidance of the members of my committee: Hans Christensen, Mark Maffett, Douglas Skinner and Abbie Smith (chair). I benefited from helpful comments and suggestions by Eliot Abrams, Phillip Berger, Matthias Breuer, Jung Ho Choi, Christine Cuny, Pingyang Gao, Anya Kleymenova, Oleg Kiriukhin, Alexey Khazanov, Sehwa Kim, Christian Leuz, Michael Minnis, Maximillian Muhn, Valeri Nikolaev, Rimmy Tomy, and Anastasia Zakolyukina, as well as the workshop participants at the University of Chicago and the New Economic School. I also thank Matthew Cook (Pew Charitable Trusts), Vincent Reitano (Government Finance Officers Association), Rachel Leven (Better Government Association), Crystal Dorsey (Colorado Office of the State Auditor), Andy Nielsen (Deputy Auditor of State, Financial Audit Division, Iowa), Steven Kraemer and Ernie Summerville (both at the Office of Lousiana Legislative Auditor), Ed Burgess and Rick Chasney (both at the Office of the New York State Comptroller) for helpful discussions about institutional details. I thank Jung Sakong for sharing data from ourcampaigns.com. Access to the local corruption data used in this research was secured as a result of my appointment as TRAC Fellow at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. I gratefully acknowledge support from the Bradley Fellowship awarded for this paper by the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, and from the Fama-Miller Center for Research in Finance, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The online appendix is available here. All errors are my own. †Booth School of Business, the University of Chicago. Email: anakhmurina@chicagobooth.edu
Causal Inference in Conjoint Analysis: Understanding Multidimensional Choices via Stated Preference Experiments

Survey experiments are a core tool for causal inference. Yet, the design of classical survey experiments prevents them from identifying which components of a multidimensional treatment are influential. Here, we show how conjoint analysis, an experimental design yet to be widely applied in political science, enables researchers to estimate the causal effects of multiple treatment components and assess several causal hypotheses simultaneously. In conjoint analysis, respondents score a set of alternatives, where each has randomly varied attributes. Here, we undertake a formal identification analysis to integrate conjoint analysis with the potential outcomes framework for causal inference. We propose a new causal estimand and show that it can be nonparametrically identified and easily estimated from conjoint data using a fully randomized design. The analysis enables us to propose diagnostic checks for the identification assumptions. We then demonstrate the value of these techniques through empirical applications to voter decision-making and attitudes toward immigrants. Forthcoming in Political Analysis 2013