LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy and safety of Shenyankangfu tablets for primary glomerulonephritis: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND
Chronic kidney disease is a common disease. Most chronic kidney diseases evolve from primary glomerulonephritis. Proteinuria is an independent risk factor for the progression of chronic kidney disease. The general consensus is that therapy administered to decrease proteinuria should include steroids and/or immunosuppressants, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, and angiotensin II receptor blockers. However, the side effects of, and adverse reactions to, these agents reduce the benefits to patients. In addition, the cost of these drugs is relatively high. Therefore, identification of inexpensive and effective drugs to decrease proteinuria is urgently needed. Shenyankangfu tablets have been a widely applied Chinese patent medicine for many years to decrease proteinuria. However, there is a lack of research-derived data regarding the clinical use. Therefore, we designed the present randomized controlled clinical trial to compare the efficacy and safety of Shenyankangfu tablets versus losartan potassium for control of proteinuria in patients with primary glomerulonephritis.


METHODS/DESIGN
This study will be a multicenter, prospective, double-blind, double-dummy, randomized controlled clinical trial. We will enroll 720 patients diagnosed with primary glomerulonephritis. The eligible patients will be randomly divided into the following groups at a 1:1:1:1:1 ratio: Shenyankangfu tablets group, losartan potassium 50 mg group, losartan potassium 100 mg group, Shenyankangfu tablets + losartan potassium 50 mg group, and Shenyankangfu tablets + losartan potassium 100 mg group. All groups will be followed up for 48 weeks; follow-up visits will be performed, at weeks 0, 4, 8, 12, 24, 36, and 48. The primary efficacy outcome will be the post-treatment change in the 24-hour proteinuria level, and the secondary efficacy outcomes will be the post-treatment changes in the serum creatinine level, estimated glomerular filtration rate, traditional Chinese medicine syndrome score, and serum albumin level.


DISCUSSION
The results of this trial will provide solid data for use in evidence-based medicine with respect to the efficacy and safety of Shenyankangfu tablets for control of proteinuria in patients with primary glomerulonephritis compared to those of losartan potassium. Moreover, we infer that therapy comprising Shenyankangfu tablets + losartan potassium can decrease proteinuria to a larger extent than Shenyankangfu tablets or losartan potassium can alone.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
This trial was registered on 12 February 2014 at ClinicalTrials.gov (ID number NCT02063100).
Chapter 6: Ecological Effects of Hydrology

SUMMARY The studies and findings discussed in this chapter are presented within four main fields: wildlife ecology, plant ecology, ecosystem ecology, and landscape ecology. Programs of study were based on the short-term and long-term needs of South Florida Water Management District operations, regulations, permitting, environmental monitoring, Everglades Forever Act mandates, and the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP).
Predicting the Popularity of News Articles

Consuming news articles is an integral part of our daily lives and news agencies such as The Washington Post (WP) expend tremendous effort in providing high quality reading experiences for their readers. Journalists and editors are faced with the task of determining which articles will become popular so that they can efficiently allocate resources to support a better reading experience. The reasons behind the popularity of news articles are typically varied, and might involve contemporariness, writing quality, and other latent factors. In this paper, we cast the problem of popularity prediction problem as regression, engineer several classes of features (metadata, contextual or content-based, temporal, and social), and build models for forecasting popularity. The system presented here is deployed in a real setting at The Washington Post; we demonstrate that it is able to accurately predict article popularity with an R ≈ 0.8 using features harvested within 30 minutes of publication time.
Marketplace and technology standards for B2B e-commerce: progress, challenges, and the state of the art

We have examined standards required for successful e-commerce (EC) architectures and evaluated the strengths and limitations of current systems that have been developed to support EC. We find that there is an unfilled need for systems that can reliably locate buyers and sellers in electronic marketplaces and also facilitate automated transactions. The notion of a ubiquitous network where loosely coupled buyers and sellers can reliably find each other in real time, evaluate products, negotiate prices, and conduct transactions is not adequately supported by current systems. These findings were based on an analysis of mainline EC architectures: EDI, company Websites, B2B hubs, e-Procurement systems, and Web Services. Limitations of each architecture were identified. Particular attention was given to the strengths and weaknesses of the Web Services architecture, since it may overcome some limitations of the other approaches. # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Modeling and Design of CMOS UHF Voltage Multiplier for RFID in an EEPROM Compatible Process

Modeling and design of CMOS ultra-high-frequency (UHF) voltage multipliers are presented. These circuits recover power from incident radio frequency (RF) signal and supply battery less UHF RF identification (RFID) transponders. An analytical model of CMOS UHF voltage multipliers is developed. It permits to determine the main design parameters in order to improve multiplier performance. The design of this kind of circuits is then greatly simplified and simulation time is reduced. Thanks to this model, a voltage multiplier is designed and implemented in a low-cost electrically erasable programmable read-only memory compatible CMOS process without Schottky diodes layers. Measurements results show communication ranges up to 5 m in the U.S. standard.
Treatment of patellar tendinopathy—a systematic review of randomized controlled trials

Patellar tendinopathy is a common, painful, overuse disorder. Although many different treatment methods have been described, there is no consensus regarding the optimal treatment for this condition. The purpose of this study was to systematically review, summarize, and compare treatments for patellar tendinopathy from published randomized controlled trials. Database searches were performed for randomized prospective controlled trials comparing treatment methods for patellar tendinopathy. The thirteen articles considered relevant were scrutinized according to quality assessment guidelines and levels of evidence. Strong evidence was found for the use of eccentric training to treat patellar tendinopathy. Moderate evidence was found for conservative treatment (heavy slow resistance training) as an alternative to eccentric training. Moderate evidence suggests that low-intensity pulsed ultrasound treatment did not influence treatment outcomes. Limited evidence was found for surgery, sclerosing injections, and shockwave therapy. Physical training, and particularly eccentric training, appears to be the treatment of choice for patients suffering from patellar tendinopathy. However, type of exercise, frequency, load, and dosage must also be analyzed. Other treatment methods, such as surgical treatment, sclerosing injections, and shockwave therapy, must be investigated further before recommendations can be made regarding their use. Ultrasound can likely be excluded as a treatment for patellar tendinopathy. There is a persistent lack of well-designed studies with sufficiently long-term follow-up and number of patients to draw strong conclusions regarding therapy. II.
Eric Kennington and Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Reassessment

The relationship and artistic alliance between T. E. Lawrence and Eric Kennington has been grossly underestimated in the years since Seven Pillars of Wisdom's 1926 publication. Using hitherto unpublished letters from Lawrence to Kennington, their collaboration is re-assessed in order to better understand the genesis of this monumental work.
[Influence of patient's sex in the form of presentation and the management of acute heart failure in Spanish emergency rooms].

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the differences by sex in clinic presentation, diagnostic approach and initial treatment in patients with acute heart failure who are attended in emergency rooms.


PATIENTS AND METHODS
Prospective, evaluated, descriptive, transverse and multicentric study, which includes all patients attended by acute heart failure in emergency rooms of 10 Spanish centers between April 15th and May 15th, 2007 (n=944). Data were recorded regarding socio-demographic, comorbidity, previous heart disease, complementary explorations, previous home treatment, and therapeutic measurements in emergency.


RESULTS
Regarding men, women (n=501; 53%) were older (79+/-9 and 75+/-10, P<.001), and had more hypertension (83,4% vs 74,9%, P<.01), valvular heart disease (23,1% vs 17,8%, P<.05) and obesity (21,9% vs 15,6%, P<.05); however, they also had less prevalence of coronary heart disease (26,5% vs 43,3%, P=.001) and smoking (4,4 % vs 18,7%, P<.001). According to outpatient treatment, women were less likely to be treated with beta blockers (19,6% vs 30,2%, P<.001) and antithrombotics (34,1% vs 41,3%, P<.05). Treatment administered in the emergency was similar in both groups, yet women received more frequently digoxin (25,7% vs 17,4%, P<.01). Moreover, women were admitted to the cardiology department less often (8,0% vs 13,8%, P<.01).


CONCLUSIONS
In emergency, the diagnostic and therapeutic approach is very similar in both sexes and the most cases, differences can be justified due to the different patients' profile and the ambulatory handling before their consultation to emergency.
Detecting Newsworthy Topics in Twitter

The task of the SNOW 2014 Data Challenge is to mine Twitter streams to provide journalists a set of headlines and complementary information that summarize the most newsworthy topics for a number of given time intervals. We propose a 4-step approach to solve this. First, a classifier is trained to determine whether a Twitter user is likely to post tweets about newsworthy stories. Second, tweets posted by these users during the time interval of interest are clustered into topics. For this clustering, the cosine similarity between a boosted tf-idf representation of the tweets is used. Third, we use a classifier to estimate the confidence that the obtained topics are newsworthy. Finally, for each obtained newsworthy topic, a descriptive headline is generated together with relevant keywords, tweets and pictures. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Copyright c © by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. In: S. Papadopoulos, D. Corney, L. Aiello (eds.): Proceedings of the SNOW 2014 Data Challenge, Seoul, Korea, 08-04-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org
Business process management: a maturity assessment of Saudi Arabian organizations

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Detailed analysis of periprocedural strokes in patients undergoing intracranial stenting in Stenting and Aggressive Medical Management for Preventing Recurrent Stroke in Intracranial Stenosis (SAMMPRIS).

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Enrollment in the Stenting and Aggressive Medical Management for Preventing Recurrent stroke in Intracranial Stenosis (SAMMPRIS) trial was halted due to the high risk of stroke or death within 30 days of enrollment in the percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting arm relative to the medical arm. This analysis focuses on the patient and procedural factors that may have been associated with periprocedural cerebrovascular events in the trial.


METHODS
Bivariate and multivariate analyses were performed to evaluate whether patient and procedural variables were associated with cerebral ischemic or hemorrhagic events occurring within 30 days of enrollment (termed periprocedural) in the percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting arm.


RESULTS
Of 224 patients randomized to percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting, 213 underwent angioplasty alone (n=5) or with stenting (n=208). Of these, 13 had hemorrhagic strokes (7 parenchymal, 6 subarachnoid), 19 had ischemic stroke, and 2 had cerebral infarcts with temporary signs within the periprocedural period. Ischemic events were categorized as perforator occlusions (13), embolic (4), mixed perforator and embolic (2), and delayed stent occlusion (2). Multivariate analyses showed that higher percent stenosis, lower modified Rankin score, and clopidogrel load associated with an activated clotting time above the target range were associated (P ≤ 0.05) with hemorrhagic stroke. Nonsmoking, basilar artery stenosis, diabetes, and older age were associated (P ≤ 0.05) with ischemic events.


CONCLUSIONS
Periprocedural strokes in SAMMPRIS had multiple causes with the most common being perforator occlusion. Although risk factors for periprocedural strokes could be identified, excluding patients with these features from undergoing percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting to lower the procedural risk would limit percutaneous transluminal angioplasty and stenting to a small subset of patients. Moreover, given the small number of events, the present data should be used for hypothesis generation rather than to guide patient selection in clinical practice. Clinical Trial Registration Information- URL: http://clinicaltrials.gov. Unique Identifier: NCT00576693.
Linear parameter varying modeling and identification for real-time control of open-flow irrigation canals

Irrigation canals are open-flow water hydraulic systems, whose objective is mainly to convey water from its source down to its final users. They are large distributed systems characterized by non-linearity and dynamic behavior that depends on the operating point. Moreover, in canals with multiple reaches dynamic behavior is highly affected by the coupling among them. The physical model for those systems leads to a distributed-parameter model whose description usually requires partial differential equations (PDEs). However, the solution and parameter estimation of those PDE equations can only be obtained numerically and imply quite time-consuming computations that make them not suitable for real-time control purposes. Alternatively, in this paper, it will be shown that open-flow canal systems can be suitably represented for control purposes by using linear parameter-varying (LPV) models. The advantage of this approach compared to the use of PDE equation is that allows simpler models which are suitable for control design and whose parameters can be easily identified from input-output data by means of classical identification techniques. In this paper, the well known control-oriented, model named integral delay zero (IDZ), that is able to represent the canal dynamics around a given operating point by means of a linear time-invariant (LTI) model is extended to multiple operating points by means of an LPV model. The derivation of this LPV model for single-reach open-flow canal systems as well as its extension to multiple-reach open-flow canals is proposed. In particular, the proposed methodology allows deriving the model structure and estimating model parameters using data by means of identification techniques. Thus, a gray-box control model is obtained whose validation is carried out using single-pool and two-pool test canals obtaining satisfactory results.
Smart Coordination of Energy Storage Units (ESUs) for Voltage and Loading Management in Distribution Networks

This paper proposes a distributed control approach to coordinate multiple energy storage units (ESUs) to avoid violation of voltage and thermal constraints, which are some of the main power quality challenges for future distribution networks. ESUs usually are connected to a network through voltage source converters. In this paper, both ESU converters active and reactive power are used to deal with the above mentioned power quality issues. ESUs' reactive power is proposed to be used for voltage support, while the active power is to be utilized in managing network loading. Two typical distribution networks are used to apply the proposed method, and the simulated results are illustrated in this paper to show the effectiveness of this approach.
Sex hormone associations with breast cancer risk and the mediation of randomized trial postmenopausal hormone therapy effects

Paradoxically, a breast cancer risk reduction with conjugated equine estrogens (CEE) and a risk elevation with CEE plus medroxyprogesterone acetate (CEE + MPA) were observed in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) randomized controlled trials. The effects of hormone therapy on serum sex hormone levels, and on the association between baseline sex hormones and disease risk, may help explain these divergent breast cancer findings. Serum sex hormone concentrations were measured for 348 breast cancer cases in the CEE + MPA trial and for 235 cases in the CEE trial along with corresponding pair-matched controls, nested within the WHI trials of healthy postmenopausal women. Association and mediation analyses, to examine the extent to which sex hormone levels and changes can explain the breast cancer findings, were conducted using logistic regression. Following CEE treatment, breast cancer risk was associated with higher concentrations of baseline serum estrogens, and with lower concentrations of sex hormone binding globulin. However, following CEE + MPA, there was no association of breast cancer risk with baseline sex hormone levels. The sex hormone changes from baseline to year 1 provided an explanation for much of the reduced breast cancer risk with CEE. Specifically, the treatment odds ratio (95% confidence interval) increased from 0.71 (0.43, 1.15) to 0.92 (0.41, 2.09) when the year 1 measures were included in the logistic regression analysis. In comparison, the CEE + MPA odds ratio was essentially unchanged when these year 1 measures were included. Breast cancer risk remains low following CEE use among women having favorable baseline sex hormone profiles, but CEE + MPA evidently produces a breast cancer risk for all women similar to that for women having an unfavorable baseline sex hormone profile. These patterns could reflect breast ductal epithelial cell stimulation by CEE + MPA that is substantially avoided with CEE, in conjunction with relatively more favorable effects of either regimen following a sustained period of estrogen deprivation. These findings may have implications for other hormone therapy formulations and routes of delivery. clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT00000611 .
Quality of life on randomized treatment for isolated systolic hypertension: results from the Syst-Eur Trial.

OBJECTIVE
To compare quality of life in elderly patients with isolated systolic hypertension allocated randomly to groups to receive placebo or active treatment in the Systolic Hypertension in the Elderly Trial.


DESIGN
Double-blind randomized controlled trial.


METHODS
Patients aged 60 years were allocated randomly to groups to receive first-line treatment with nitrendipine (with second- and third-line enalapril and hydrochlorothiazide) or placebo. Trained interviewers administered trail-making tests (Trail A and B), Brief Assessment Index (a measure of depressed mood) and four subscales from the Sickness Impact Profile (Ambulation, Social Interaction, Sleep and Rest, and Home work).


RESULTS
Six hundred and ten patients completed a baseline and at least one follow-up questionnaire. Trail-making scores were slower in actively treated patients, especially in the first 6 months of follow-up when the between-group effect sizes were 0.25 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.07 to 0.43] for Trail-making A and 0.13 (95% CI -0.05 to 0.31) for Trail-making B. Across the 4 years of follow-up, patients receiving active treatment were more likely to report problems on the Social Interaction scale than were placebo-treated patients (odds ratio 1.32, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.69), equivalent to a 7% difference. There were no significant differences between active and placebo treatment in the other Sickness Impact Profile dimensions or in the measure of depression.


CONCLUSIONS
Active treatment in the Systolic Hypertension in Europe trial was associated with some small adverse impacts on quality of life.
Patent Claim Processing For Readability - Structure Analysis And Term Explanation

Patent corpus processing should be centered around patent claim processing because claims are the most important part in patent specifications. It is common that claims written in Japanese are described in one sentence with peculiar style and wording and are difficult to understand for ordinary people. The peculiarity is caused by structural complexity of the sentences and many difficult terms used in the description. We have already proposed a framework to represent the structure of patent claims and a method to automatically analyze it. We are currently investigating a method to clarify terms in patent claims and to find the explanatory portions from the detailed description part of the patent specifications. Through both approaches, we believe we can improve readability of patent claims.
The Student ’ s Guide to Social Neuroscience

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ward, Jamie. The student's guide to social neuroscience / Jamie Ward. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.