LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Hearing loss in Fabry disease: The effect of agalsidase alfa replacement therapy

Summary: The aim of this study was to describe the nature and prevalence of hearing loss in Fabry disease (McKusick 301500), a rare X-linked lysosomal storage disorder, and its response to enzyme replacement therapy with agalsidase alfa. Fifteen hemizygous male Fabry patients (aged 25–49 years) were randomized to receive placebo or enzyme replacement therapy for 6 months; all have received open-label enzyme replacement therapy for an additional 24 months thus far. Pure-tone audiometry, impedance audiometry and otoacoustic emission testing were performed at 0 (baseline), 6, 18 and 30 months. Four patients (27%) had bilateral and 7 (47%) had unilateral high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). Two (13%) had unilateral middle ear effusions with conductive losses persisting beyond 6 months. Only 3 (20%) had normal hearing. High-frequency SNHL deteriorated over the first 6 months in both placebo and active treatment groups by a median 4.3 dB (p=0.002, Wilcoxon matched pairs). This hearing loss subsequently improved above baseline by 2.1 dB at 18 months (p=0.02) and by 4.9 dB at 30 months (p=0.004). In conclusion, significant hearing loss, usually high-frequency SNHL, is a common manifestation of Fabry disease in adults. α-Galactosidase A replacement therapy with agalsidase alfa appears to reverse the hearing deterioration in these patients. This improvement is gradual, however, suggesting the need for long-term enzyme replacement therapy.
Functional p53 is required for triptolide-induced apoptosis and AP-1 and nuclear factor-κB activation in gastric cancer cells

Triptolide, a major component in the extract of Chinese herbal plant Tripterygium wilfordii Hook f (TWHf), has potential anti-neoplastic effect. In the present study we investigated the potential therapeutic effects and mechanisms of triptolide against human gastric cancer cells. Four gastric cancer cell lines with different p53 status, AGS and MKN-45 (wild type p53); MKN-28 and SGC-7901 (mutant p53) were observed as to cell growth inhibition and induction of apoptosis in response to triptolide treatment. We showed that triptolide inhibited cell growth, induced apoptosis and suppressed NK-κB and AP-1 transactivation in AGS cells with wild-type p53. Triptolide induced apoptosis by stimulating the expressions of p53, p21waf1/cip1, bax protein, and increased the activity of caspases. In addition, it caused cell cycle arrest in the G0/G1 phase. To examine the role of p53 in these functions, we showed that suppression of p53 level with antisense oligonucleotide abrogated triptolide-induced apoptosis and over-expression of dominant negative p53 abolished the inhibitory effect on NF-κB activation. Furthermore, we demonstrated that triptolide had differential effects on gastric cancer cells with different p53 status. We showed that triptolide also inhibited cell growth and induced apoptosis in MKN-45 with wild-type p53, whereas it had no significant growth-inhibition and apoptosis induction effects on the MKN-28 and SGC-7901 cells with mutant p53. Our data suggest that triptolide exhibits anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory effects by inhibiting cell proliferation, inducing apoptosis and inhibiting NF-κB and AP-1 transcriptional activity. However, a functional p53 is required for these proapoptotic, anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor effects.
Thermal metamorphism and assimilation of schists by a dioritic magma, Ligar Bay (S8), North-West Nelson

Abstract The crystalline rocks exposed on a peninsula jutting out into Ligar Bay are made up of diorite enclosing a great number of schist xenoliths in varying states of thermal metamorphism, mobilisation, and assimilation. Tourmaline-bearing granitic pegmatites, considered to be associated with the emplacement of the Separation Point Granite, cut these rocks. It is suggested that the schists and the diorite represent a pre-granite metamorphic and igneous terrain.
Sequential, cycling maintenance therapy for post transplant multiple myeloma

Summary:High-dose chemotherapy with autologous stem cell transplantation in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma can prolong survival but is not curative. Maintenance therapy post transplant may prolong the disease-free interval and impact overall survival. We have conducted a phase II pilot study of 28 post transplant myeloma patients treated with a sequential, cycling maintenance regimen. The regimen was designed to include a variety of active myeloma agents chosen for ease of administration to enhance patient compliance and scheduled sequentially to minimize toxicity. The 12-month cycling schedule included dexamethasone (months 1–3); melphalan and prednisone (months 4, 5); cyclophosphamide and prednisone (months 6, 7); α-interferon (months 8–10); followed by a drug holiday (months 11, 12). The regimen was generally well tolerated with five patients developing reversible grade III–IV toxicity (diabetes-induced hyperglycemia in four, neutropenia in one). There was one toxic death on study due to non-neutropenic pneumonia and sepsis. Median event-free survival from transplant was 36.9 months (95% CI 23.6 – upper limit not yet reached) with median overall survival not yet reached at a median follow-up of 44 months. This concept of cycling, sequential maintenance with various agents, perhaps including newer biological, targeted agents, warrants further investigation in multiple myeloma.
One-Year Follow-up of Family versus Child CBT for Anxiety Disorders: Exploring the Roles
of Child Age and Parental Intrusiveness

OBJECTIVE
To compare the relative long-term benefit of family-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (FCBT) and child-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CCBT) for child anxiety disorders at a 1-year follow-up.


METHOD
Thirty-five children (6-13 years old) randomly assigned to 12-16 sessions of family-focused CBT (FCBT) or child-focused CBT (CCBT) participated in a 1-year follow-up assessment. Independent evaluators, parents, and children rated anxiety and parental intrusiveness. All were blind to treatment condition and study hypotheses.


RESULTS
Children assigned to FCBT had lower anxiety scores than children assigned to CCBT on follow-up diagnostician- and parent-report scores, but not child-report scores. Exploratory analyses suggested the advantage of FCBT over CCBT may have been evident more for early adolescents than for younger children and that reductions in parental intrusiveness may have mediated the treatment effect.


CONCLUSION
FCBT may yield a stronger treatment effect than CCBT that lasts for at least 1 year, although the lack of consistency across informants necessitates a circumspect view of the findings. The potential moderating and mediating effects considered in this study offer interesting avenues for further study.
Accuracy of Assessment of Gonial Angle by Both Hemispheres of Panoramic Images and Its Comparison with Lateral Cephalometric Radiographic Measurements

Professor Yrjo Paatero, in 1961, first introduced the Orthopantomography (OPG) [1]. It has been extensively used in dentistry for analysing the number and type of teeth present, caries, impacted teeth, root resorption, ankylosis, shape of the condyles [2], temporomandibular joints, sinuses, fractures, cysts, tumours and alveolar bone level [3,4]. Panoramic radiography is advised to all patients seeking orthodontic treatment; including Class I malocclusions [5].
Peptic ulcer disease in liver cirrhosis and chronic hepatitis: impact of portal hypertension.

OBJECTIVE
The pathophysiology of peptic ulcer disease (PUD) in liver cirrhosis (LC) and chronic hepatitis has not been established. The aim of this study was to assess the role of portal hypertension from PUD in patients with LC and chronic hepatitis.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
We analyzed the medical records of 455 hepatic vein pressure gradient (HVPG) and esophagogastroduodenoscopy patients who had LC or chronic hepatitis in a single tertiary hospital. The association of PUD with LC and chronic hepatitis was assessed by univariate and multivariate analysis.


RESULTS
A total of 72 PUD cases were detected. PUD was associated with LC more than with chronic hepatitis (odds ratio [OR]: 4.13, p = 0.03). In the univariate analysis, taking an ulcerogenic medication was associated with PUD in patients with LC (OR: 4.34, p = 0.04) and smoking was associated with PUD in patients with chronic hepatitis (OR: 3.61, p = 0.04). In the multivariate analysis, taking an ulcerogenic medication was associated with PUD in patients with LC (OR: 2.93, p = 0.04). However, HVPG was not related to PUD in patients with LC or chronic hepatitis.


CONCLUSION
According to the present study, patients with LC have a higher risk of PUD than those with chronic hepatitis. The risk factor was taking ulcerogenic medication. However, HVPG reflecting portal hypertension was not associated with PUD in LC or chronic hepatitis (Clinicaltrial number NCT01944878).
Intelligence and socioeconomic success : A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research ☆

The relationship between intelligence and socioeconomic success has been the source of numerous controversies. The present paper conducted a meta-analysis of the longitudinal studies that have investigated intelligence as a predictor of success (as measured by education, occupation, and income). In order to better evaluate the predictive power of intelligence, the paper also includes metaanalyses of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and academic performance (school grades) as predictors of success. The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on thewhole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades. Moderator analyses showed that the relationship between intelligence and success is dependent on the age of the sample but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Optical characterization of transparent Cr:Al 2 O 3 ceramics prepared by sol-gel method

The laser medium made of a single crystal is generally limited by several factors. For the improvement of these factors, the use of ceramics materials for the laser has been proposed. In this study, we fabricated a transparent ruby using sol -gel method and characterized lattice structure, transmission and PL spectra.
A Mobility Based Metric for Clustering in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents a novel mobility metric for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) that is based on the ratio between the received power levels of successive transmissions measured at any node from all its neighboring nodes. This mobility metric is subsequently used as a basis for cluster formation which can be used for improving the scalability of services such as routing in such networks. We propose a distributed clustering algorithm, MOBIC, based on the use of this mobility metric for selection of clusterheads, and demonstrate that it leads to more stable cluster formation than the Lowest-ID clustering algorithm ( “least clusterhead change” [3]) which is a well known clustering algorithms for MANETs. We show reduction of as much as 33% in the number of clusterhead changes owing to the use of the proposed technique. In a MANET that uses scalable cluster-based services, the network performance metrics such as throughput and delay are tightly coupled with the frequency of cluster reorganization. Therefore, we believe that since using MOBIC results in a more stable configuration, it will directly lead to improvement of performance.
Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?

Although the subject is controversial, identifying the specific genes that contribute to general cognitive ability (GCA) has seemed to have good prospects, at least among psychological traits. GCA is reliably and validly measured and strongly heritable, and it shows genetically mediated physiological associations and developmental stability. To date, however, results have been disappointing. Human height shows these measurement characteristics even more strongly than GCA, yet data have indicated that no individual gene has more than trivial effects and this is also true for corn oil. The potential for environmental trigger of genetic expression, long recognized in evolutionary and developmental genetics, as applied to these seemingly disparate traits, can help us to understand the apparent contradiction between the heritability of intelligence and other psychological traits and the difficulty of identifying specific genetic effects.
Ontological query language for content based image retrieval

This paper discusses the design and implementation of the oquel query language for content based image retrieval. The retrieval process takes place entirely within the ontological domain defined by the syntax and semantics of the user query. Since the system does not rely on the pre-annotation of images with sentences in the language, the format of text queries is highly flexible. The language is also extensible to allow for the definition of higher level terms such as ”cars”, ”people”, ”buildings”, etc. on the basis of existing language constructs. Images are retrieved by deriving an abstract syntax tree from of a textual user query and probabilistically evaluating it by analysing the composition and perceptual properties of salient image regions in light of the query. The matching process utilises automatically extracted image segmentation and classification information and can incorporate any other feature extraction mechanisms or contextual knowledge available at processing time.
A Farewell to Deweyan Democracy: Towards a New Pragmatist Politics

The revival of pragmatism has brought renewed enthusiasm for John Dewey's conception of democracy. Drawing upon Rawlsian concerns regarding the fact of reasonable pluralism, the author argues that Deweyan democracy is unworthy of resurrection. A modified version of Deweyan democracy recently proposed by Elizabeth Anderson is then taken up and also found to be lacking. Then the author proposes a model of democracy that draws upon Peirce's social epistemology. The result is a non-Deweyan but nonetheless pragmatist option in democratic theory.
Face-to-face or Facebook: Can social connectedness be derived online?

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.11.017 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, 1100 Nudgee Rd., Banyo, QLD 4014, Australia. Tel.: +61 7 3623 7346; fax: +61 7 3623 7277. E-mail address: rachel.grieve@acu.edu.au (R. Grieve). Rachel Grieve ⇑, Michaelle Indian, Kate Witteveen, G. Anne Tolan, Jessica Marrington
Facial affect decoding in schizophrenic disorders: A study using event-related potentials

Deficits in emotional processing are evident in schizophrenia, but the underlying processes are still under debate. In this study we tried to replicate findings of diminished prefrontal electroencephalographic response during facial affect recognition in healthy controls and subsequently in schizophrenic patients. As a first step, we analysed the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 36 healthy subjects during emotional expression decoding compared with neutral face viewing. Subsequently, the ERPs of 22 patients with schizophrenia were compared with the ERPs of 22 healthy subjects matched for age and sex. The hypothesised increase in the negative component at 200 ms over frontal brain regions during facial affect decoding was not found in this study. Instead we found increased positive amplitudes at 300 ms over parietal brain areas for the active affect-decoding task compared with the passive neutral face-viewing task. Interestingly, schizophrenic patients had higher amplitudes in the neutral condition than did healthy controls. This effect was more pronounced in the paranoid subgroup of patients.
Adaptive UKF for target tracking with unknown process noise statistics

With an application to target tracking with unknown process noise, adaptive UKF is presented. In this new algorithm, modified Sage-Husa noise statistics estimator is introduced to estimate the system process noise variance adaptively. By estimating the noise covariance online, the proposed method is able to compensate the errors resulting from the change of the noise statistics. Such a mechanism can improve the state estimation accuracy and enlarges its application scope. The simulations show that adaptive UKF can provide better performance in tracking accuracy than the standard UKF, especially in the case of unknown prior system noise statistics.
Image Steganography with Cryptography using Multiple Key Patterns

Image Steganography is the art of hiding information into an innocent image. In this paper a new Steganography method is presented. First, the message is converted into ciphertext using a strong encryption algorithm with the help of secret key. In this proposed Steganography system, sender and receiver share multiple stego keys. Among the multiple stego keys, any one of the stego key is used for steganography. The information about the stego key (key number) is embedded in the first pixels of the original image. Based on the pattern given in the stego key, ciphertext is embedded in the pixels of original image. The receiver first extracts the key number and then obtains the stego key from the database. Using the pattern given in the stego key, ciphertext is retrieved from the pixels of Stego image. The ciphertext is decrypted using the secret key. Thus, it is difficult to recognize that some information is embedded in the cover image, called Stego image, which is same as original image. The proposed system is simple and robust against the attacks.
Phenolic-Compound-Extraction Systems for Fruit and Vegetable Samples

This paper reviews the phenolic-compound-extraction systems used to analyse fruit and vegetable samples over the last 10 years. Phenolic compounds are naturally occurring antioxidants, usually found in fruits and vegetables. Sample preparation for analytical studies is necessary to determine the polyphenolic composition in these matrices. The most widely used extraction system is liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), which is an inexpensive method since it involves the use of organic solvents, but it requires long extraction times, giving rise to possible extract degradation. Likewise, solid-phase extraction (SPE) can be used in liquid samples. Modern techniques, which have been replacing conventional ones, include: supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), pressurized liquid extraction (PLE), microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) and ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE). These alternative techniques reduce considerably the use of solvents and accelerate the extraction process.
Serum albumin and kidney function decline in HIV-infected women.

BACKGROUND
Serum albumin concentrations are a strong predictor of mortality and cardiovascular disease in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected individuals. We studied the longitudinal associations between serum albumin levels and kidney function decline in a population of HIV-infected women.


STUDY DESIGN
Retrospective cohort analysis.


SETTING & PARTICIPANTS
Study participants were recruited from the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), a large observational study designed to understand risk factors for the progression of HIV infection in women living in urban communities. 908 participants had baseline assessment of kidney function and 2 follow-up measurements over an average of 8 years.


PREDICTOR
The primary predictor was serum albumin concentration.


OUTCOMES
We examined annual change in kidney function. Secondary outcomes included rapid kidney function decline and incident reduced estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR).


MEASUREMENTS
Kidney function decline was determined by cystatin C-based (eGFR(cys)) and creatinine-based eGFR (eGFR(cr)) at baseline and follow-up. Each model was adjusted for kidney disease and HIV-related risk factors using linear and relative risk regression.


RESULTS
After multivariate adjustment, each 0.5-g/dL decrement in baseline serum albumin concentration was associated with a 0.56-mL/min faster annual decline in eGFR(cys) (P < 0.001), which was attenuated only slightly to 0.55 mL/min/1.73 m(2) after adjustment for albuminuria. Results were similar whether using eGFR(cys) or eGFR(cr). In adjusted analyses, each 0.5-g/dL lower baseline serum albumin level was associated with a 1.71-fold greater risk of rapid kidney function decline (P < 0.001) and a 1.72-fold greater risk of incident reduced eGFR (P < 0.001).


LIMITATIONS
The cohort is composed of only female participants from urban communities within the United States.


CONCLUSIONS
Lower serum albumin levels were associated strongly with kidney function decline and incident reduced eGFRs in HIV-infected women independent of HIV disease status, body mass index, and albuminuria.
THE CONSUMER LOAN ’ S PAYMENT DEFAULT PREDICTIVE MODEL : AN APPLICATION IN A TUNISIAN COMMERCIAL BANK

For the alarming growth in consumer credit in recent years, consumer credit scoring is the term used to describe methods of classifying credits’ applicants as `good' and `bad' risk classes.. In the current paper, we use the logistic regression as well as the discriminant analysis in order to develop predictive models allowing to distinguish between “good” and “bad” borrowers. The data have been collected from a commercial Tunisian bank over a 3-year period, from 2010 to 2012. These data consist of four selected and ordered variables. By comparing the respective performances of the Logistic Regression (LR) and the Discriminant Analysis (DA), we notice that the LR model yields a 89% good classification rate in predicting customer types and then, a significantly low error rate (11%), as compared with the DA approach (where the good classification rate is only equal to 68.49%, leading to a significantly high error rate, i.e. 31.51%). © 2016 AESS Publications. All Rights Reserved.
Constructing a reassigning credit scoring model

Credit scoring model development became a very important issue as the credit industry has many competitions and bad debt problems. Therefore, most credit scoring models have been widely studied in the areas of statistics to improve the accuracy of credit scoring models during the past few years. In order to solve the classification and decrease the Type I error of credit scoring model, this paper presents a reassigning credit scoring model (RCSM) involving two stages. The classification stage is constructing an ANN-based credit scoring model, which classifies applicants with accepted (good) or rejected (bad) credits. The reassign stage is trying to reduce the Type I error by reassigning the rejected good credit applicants to the conditional accepted class by using the CBR-based classification technique. To demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed model, RCSM is performed on a credit card dataset obtained from UCI repository. As the results indicated, the proposed model not only proved more accurate credit scoring than other four common used approaches, but also contributes to increase business revenue by decreasing the Type I and Type II error of scoring system. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.