Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effective allergen avoidance for reducing exposure to house dust mite allergens and improving disease management in adult atopic asthmatics

Abstract Objective: We investigated the best strategy for adult asthmatics to avoid exposure to Dermatophagoides group (Der-1) allergens. Methods: Adult atopic asthmatics (n = 111) followed a 32-item checklist for avoiding Der-1 allergen exposure. Twenty-five patients were excluded through incomplete sampling; 50 remaining patients encased their pillows/futons/mattresses in microfine-fiber covers, 13 used vacuum cleaners with dust-mite-collection nozzles, and 23 acted as non-intervention controls. During August–October 2010 and August–October 2011, dust samples were collected in Petri dishes placed in bedrooms for 2 weeks and from mattresses/futons by using adhesive tape on one morning. A Der-1 level decrease was defined as a mean 2011 Der-1 level of <1 as a ratio of the 2010 level on tape or Petri dish samples. We analyzed the associations between Der-1 level change (by ELISA) and % weekly variability in peak expiratory flow (PEF) or fraction of exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) after intervention. Results: Der-1 levels decreased significantly in the covers group but not the vacuuming group. FeNO levels and PEF variability were unchanged in both groups. In patients whose Petri dish or tape samples showed decreased Der-1 levels, the % PEF variability was lower in 2011 than in 2010, but FeNO levels were unchanged. Three interventions (vacuuming all family members' mattress/futon surfaces at least weekly or after exposure of the futons to sunlight, and floor wiping before vacuuming), plus using covers, were the most effective management strategy in reducing Der-1 levels. Conclusions: This environmental and bedding maintenance program may help manage adult atopic asthma.
Paraben Levels in an Urban Community of Western Canada

With effective antibacterial and antifungal properties, commercially used parabens are synthetic compounds widely utilized as preservatives in cosmetics, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, and as an additive in some foodstuffs. While long regarded as relatively safe and nontoxic, recent research has demonstrated xenoestrogenic properties of anthropogenic parabens with early evidence that paraben exposure may be linked to breast cancer, thyroid dysfunction, allergy, and obesity. In an attempt to determine the prevalence of paraben exposure in a Canadian urban community, a sample of convenience was done by measuring urinary levels of methyl, ethyl, propyl, butyl, and isobutyl parabens (MP, EP, PP, BP, and IP) in 39 consecutive patients in an Alberta primary care clinic. In 28 female patients including 9 pregnant women, the median urinary levels (in μg/L) were 25.45 for MP, 10.17 for EP, 2.80 for PP, 0.30 for BP, and 0.24 for IP. In 11 male patients, the median urinary levels (in μg/L) were 25.95 for MP, 10.37 for EP, 3.09 for PP, 0.35 for BP, and 0.22 for IP. Especially high urinary paraben levels were reported in a few patients, with the highest urinary concentrations (in μg/L) reported as 966.46 for MP, 220.6 as EP, and 612.73 for PP. It is evident that exposure to assorted parabens is a routine event for many if not most individuals, including pregnant women, in urban Alberta, Canada.
Cell death and lumen formation in spheroids of MCF‐7 cells

3D (three‐dimensional) cell culture permits a more integrated analysis of the relationship between cells, inserting them into a structure more closely resembling the cellular microenvironment in vivo. The development of in vitro parameters to approximate in vivo 3D cellular environments makes a less reductionist interpretation of cell biology possible. For breast cells, in vitro 3D culture has proven to be an important tool for the analysis of luminal morphogenesis. A greater understanding of this process is necessary because alterations in the lumen arrangement are associated with carcinogenesis. Following lumen formation in 3D cell culture using laser scanning confocal microscopy, we observed alterations in the arrangement of cytoskeletal components (F‐actin and microtubules) and increasing levels of cell death associated with lumen formation. The formation of a polarized monolayer facing the lumen was characterized through 3D reconstructions and the use of TEM (transmission electron microscopy), and this process was found to occur through the gradual clearing of cells from the medullary region of the spheroids. This process was associated with different types of cell death, such as apoptosis, autophagy and entosis. The present study showed that changes in the extracellular matrix associated with long periods of time in 3D cell culture lead to the formation of a lumen in MCF‐7 cell spheroids and that features of differentiation such as lumen and budding formation occur after long periods in 3D culture, even in the absence of exogenous extracellular compounds.
Neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome: A case report and review of the literature

Neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome (NTOS) is an oft-overlooked and obscure cause of shoulder pain, which regularly presents to the office of shoulder surgeons and pain specialist. With this paper we present an otherwise healthy young female patient with typical NTOS. She first received repeated conservative treatments with 60 units of botulinium toxin injected into the anterior scalene muscle at three-month intervals, which providing excellent results of symptom-free periods. Later a trans-axillary first rib resection provided semi-permanent relief. The patient was followed for 10 years after which time the symptoms reappeared. We review the literature and elaborate on the anatomy, sonoanatomy, etiology and characteristics, symptoms, diagnostic criteria and treatment modalities of NTOS. Patients with NTOS often get operated upon – even if just a diagnostic arthroscopy, and an interscalene or other brachial plexus block may be performed. This might put the patient in jeopardy of permanent nerve injury, and the purpose of this review is to minimize or prevent this.
Neural correlates of processing valence and arousal in affective words.

Psychological frameworks conceptualize emotion along 2 dimensions, "valence" and "arousal. " Arousal invokes a single axis of intensity increasing from neutral to maximally arousing. Valence can be described variously as a bipolar continuum, as independent positive and negative dimensions, or as hedonic value (distance from neutral). In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize neural activity correlating with arousal and with distinct models of valence during presentation of affective word stimuli. Our results extend observations in the chemosensory domain suggesting a double dissociation in which subregions of orbitofrontal cortex process valence, whereas amygdala preferentially processes arousal. In addition, our data support the physiological validity of descriptions of valence along independent axes or as absolute distance from neutral but fail to support the validity of descriptions of valence along a bipolar continuum.
Automated Pre-processing Method for Dermoscopic Images and its Application to Pigmented Skin Lesion Segmentation

In this paper, we put forward a new pre–processing scheme for automatic analysis of dermoscopic images. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we present a procedure, an extension of previous approaches, which succeeds in removing confounding factors from dermoscopic images: these include shading induced by imaging non-flat skin surfaces and the effect of light-intensity falloff toward the edges of the dermoscopic image. This procedure is shown to facilitate the detection and removal of artifacts such as hairs as well. Second, we present a novel simple yet effective greyscale conversion approach that is based on physics and biology of human skin. Our proposed greyscale image provides high separability between a pigmented lesion and normal skin surrounding it. Finally, using our pre–processing scheme, we perform segmentation based on simple grey-level thresholding, with results outperforming the state of the art.
Melanoma of the hand and foot: epidemiological, prognostic and genetic features. A systematic review

Background While early recognition and prognosis of melanoma as a whole have improved, particular forms of rarer, under‐recognized or more severe tumours require increasing attention. Among them, melanomas located on the hand and/or foot (hand and foot melanoma, HFM) have been the subject of few and heterogeneous studies, with variable and sometimes confusing results, and have not been targeted to date by comprehensive literature reviews.
Pharmacodynamics of Cidofovir for Vaccinia Virus Infection in an In Vitro Hollow-Fiber Infection Model System

ABSTRACT Variola major virus remains a potent weapon of bioterror. There is currently an investigational-new-drug application for cidofovir for the therapy of variola major virus infections. Stittelaar and colleagues compared the levels of effectiveness of postexposure smallpox vaccination (Elstree-RIVM) and antiviral treatment with cidofovir or an acyclic nucleoside phosphonate analogue {6-[2-(phosphonomethoxy)alkoxy]-2,4-diaminopyrimidine (HPMPO-DAPy)} after lethal intratracheal infection of cynomolgus monkeys with monkeypox virus, a variola virus surrogate. Their results demonstrated that either compound was more effective than vaccination with the Ellstree vaccine (K. J. Stittelaar et al., Nature 439:745-748, 2006). An unanswered question is how to translate this information into therapy for poxvirus infections in people. In a proof-of-principle study, we used a novel in vitro hollow-fiber infection model system to determine the pharmacodynamics of vaccinia virus infection of HeLa-S3 cells treated with cidofovir. Our results demonstrate that the currently licensed dose of cidofovir of 5 mg/kg of body weight weekly with probenecid (which ameliorates nephrotoxicity) is unlikely to provide protection for patients intentionally exposed to Variola major virus. We further demonstrate that the antiviral effect is independent of the schedule of drug administration. Exposures (area under the concentration-time curve) to cidofovir that will have a robust protective effect will require doses that are 5 to 10 times that currently administered to humans. Such doses may cause nephrotoxicity, and therefore, approaches that include probenecid administration as well as schedules of administration that will help ameliorate the uptake of cidofovir into renal tubular epithelial cells need to be considered when addressing such treatment for people.
General Morbidity Prevalence in the Delhi Slums

Research Question: What is the sickness prevalence in the slums of a metropolitan city? Objectives: To estimate the morbidity prevalence with reference to a socio-economic and demographic perspective of the slum population of Delhi. Study Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted and data were collected by a two-stage random sampling method. In the first stage, slum locations were selected and in the second stage households were selected. Participants: Data were collected from 1049 households consisting of 5358 individuals' information. Results: The overall morbidity prevalence is 15.4%. It is 14.7 and 16.3% for males and females, respectively but the differences are not statistically significant. The reported higher morbidity prevalence and the illiteracy status are significantly associated. Diseases of the respiratory system appear to be very high among slum dwellers. Conclusion: From this study, it can be concluded that the number of years of staying in the slum area, presence of a separate kitchen, type of house, it being Pucca or Kuccha, types of toilet pits or open defecation are the important environmental factors for the reports of higher morbidity patterns from the slum area.
Learning Process and Rational Expectations: An Analysis Using a Small Macroeconomic Model for New Zealand

The nature of expectations matters when conducting monetary policy. Models with a learning process can exhibit very different properties from models with other types of expectations rules. This paper draws on the work of Orphanides and Williams (2002), extending it to allow for the possibility that the learning process may not be perpetual, but rather might be converging towards a rational expectations equilibrium. By modelling expectations using a learning process, we obtain evidence suggesting that inflation expectations in New Zealand are moving towards rational expectations. Theory suggests this will make it easier to control inflation after a temporary disturbance.
High Fasting Plasma Glucose, Diabetes, and Its Risk Factors in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, 1990–2013: Findings From the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013

OBJECTIVE The prevalence of diabetes in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) is among the highest in the world. We used findings from the Global Burden of Disease 2013 study to calculate the burden of diabetes in the EMR. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The burden of diabetes and burden attributable to high fasting plasma glucose (HFPG) were calculated for each of the 22 countries in the EMR between 1990 and 2013. A systematic analysis was performed on mortality and morbidity data to estimate prevalence, deaths, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). RESULTS The diabetes death rate increased by 60.7%, from 12.1 per 100,000 population (95% uncertainty interval [UI]: 11.2–13.2) in 1990 to 19.5 per 100,000 population (95% UI: 17.4–21.5) in 2013. The diabetes DALY rate increased from 589.9 per 100,000 (95% UI: 498.0–698.0) in 1990 to 883.5 per 100,000 population (95% UI: 732.2–1,051.5) in 2013. In 2013, HFPG accounted for 4.9% (95% UI: 4.4–5.3) of DALYs from all causes. Total DALYs from diabetes increased by 148.6% during 1990–2013; population growth accounted for a 62.9% increase, and aging and increase in age-specific DALY rates accounted for 31.8% and 53.9%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Our findings show that diabetes causes a major burden in the EMR, which is increasing. Aging and population growth do not fully explain this increase in the diabetes burden. Programs and policies are urgently needed to reduce risk factors for diabetes, increase awareness of the disease, and improve diagnosis and control of diabetes to reduce its burden.
Resveratrol Protects Vascular Endothelial Cells from High Glucose–Induced Apoptosis through Inhibition of NADPH Oxidase Activation–Driven Oxidative Stress

Hyperglycemia‐induced oxidative stress has been implicated in diabetic vascular complications in which NADPH oxidase is a major source of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation. Resveratrol is a naturally occurring polyphenol, which has vasoprotective effects in diabetic animal models and inhibits high glucose (HG)–induced oxidative stress in endothelial cells.
Creatine phosphokinase measurements in febrile children.

To the Editor. — The presence of creatine phosphokinase (CPK) in high concentration in serum indicates muscle damage from a variety of causes, 1.2 including anoxia, exercise, 3 parenteral injections, 4 surgery, 5 trauma, and acute myositis. 6 To our knowledge, there is no published information on the question of whether fever itself causes elevated levels of CPK in serum. Forty-eight febrile children presenting as outpatients were studied for this condition. The CPK level was measured with a kit (CPK Activated UV-System), with normal values being up to 50 units/L. Consecutively appearing children admitted to the casualty ward between March and June 1977 with an axillary temperature greater than 38 °C were studied. In addition to CPK, throat swabs for bacterial culture, pernasal swabs for viral cultures, ESR, hemoglobin level, and WBC and differential cell counts were investigated. The average age of the 39 of the 48 children whose ages were
Acquisition of expanding targets

There exist several user interface widgets that dynamically grow in size in response to the user's focus of attention. Some of these, such as icons in toolbars, expand to facilitate their selection - allowing for a reduced initial size in an attempt to optimize screen space use. However, selection performance may be degraded by this decreased initial widget size. We describe an experiment which explores the effects of varying parameters of expansion techniques in a selection task. Our results suggest that Fitts' law can model and predict performance in such tasks. They also indicate that performance is governed by the target's final size, not its initial one. Further, performance is dependent on the target's final size even when the target only begins expanding as late as after 90% of the movement towards the target has already been completed. These results indicate that expanding widgets can be used without sacrificing performance
World-class product certification using Erlang

It is now ten years ago since the decision was made to apply the functional programming language Erlang to real production projects at Ericsson. In late 1995, development on the Open Telecom Platform (OTP) started, and in mid 1996 the AXD 301 project became the first user of OTP. The AXD 301 Multi-service Switch was released in October 1998, and later became "the heart of ENGINE", Ericsson's leading Voice over Packet solution.In those early days of Erlang programming, high-level tools for development and testing were not really available, and programmers used mainly the Emacs editor and the Erlang shell. Still, anecdotal evidence suggested a 4-10x productivity increase compared to mainstream programming techniques.Through the years, significant progress has been made, especially in the area of automated testing of Erlang programs. The OTP team designed an Erlang-based test suite execution environment, were developers can easily write their own automated test suites, and now performs nightly builds where more than one thousand test cases are executed on ten different platforms. OTP designers can view the outcome in web-based test reports as they come to work the next day. Each corrected bug results in a new test case that is incorporated into the ever-growing test suite. Thus, this world-class middleware is certified to telecom-class quality without a dedicated test team! The AXD 301 project uses OTP's test environment, and executes more than 10,000 automated test cases before each major release. Designers and testers compose their own test suites, and the designers carry out function tests with little or no help from the Integration and Certification team. Each test case can be run both in a simulated environment on the designer's workstation and in the test lab on real hardware. In order to provide stimuli to the system, the testers often design their own traffic generators in Erlang.To analyze the faults that occur, Erlang offers an increasing wealth of debugging options. Beyond the symbolic error messages, which are often sufficient to locate the fault, Erlang developers are able to dynamically turn on tracing on message passing, scheduling events, garbage collections, selected function calls, etc.This paper demonstrates how Erlang's declarative syntax and pattern matching provide an outstanding environment for test suite development.
Dental Caries, Prevalence and Risk Factors in Patients with Crohn’s Disease

Objective The present study tested the hypothesis that patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) have a higher prevalence and risk for caries compared to people without CD. Material and Methods Patients with CD were divided into groups; 71 patients (50.7±13.9 years) who had gone through resective intestinal surgery and 79 patients (42.0±14.4 years) who had not. The patients were compared to 75 controls (48.6±13.4 years) regarding DMF-T and DMF-S, Lactobacilli (LB), Streptococcus mutans (SM), salivary flow and dental plaque. Statistical methods including ANOVA or Chi-square test for calculation of demographic differences between groups, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to compare the clinical variable and Post hoc analyses were done with Fischers Least Significant Difference test or Chi-square. Non-parametric Spearman’s correlation matrix coefficient was estimated between clinical variables and disease duration. Results CD patients who had been subjected to resective surgery had a higher DMF-S score (50.7 versus 36.5; p = 0.01) compared to the control group after adjusting for age, gender and smoking. These patients had higher counts of SM (1.5 versus 0.9; p = 0.04) and LB (10000.0 versus 1000.0; p = 0.01), and more dental plaque (53.7 versus 22.6; p = 0.001). CD patients reported a more frequent consumption of sweetened drinks between meals compared to controls (p = 0.001). Conclusions The present study shows that patients with CD who had undergone resective surgery had a higher DMFs score, and higher salivary counts of Lactobacilli and Streptococcus mutans compared to the control group.
DIAMUND: Direct Comparison of Genomes to Detect Mutations

DNA sequencing has become a powerful method to discover the genetic basis of disease. Standard, widely used protocols for analysis usually begin by comparing each individual to the human reference genome. When applied to a set of related individuals, this approach reveals millions of differences, most of which are shared among the individuals and unrelated to the disease being investigated. We have developed a novel algorithm for variant detection, one that compares DNA sequences directly to one another, without aligning them to the reference genome. When used to find de novo mutations in exome sequences from family trios, or to compare normal and diseased samples from the same individual, the new method, direct alignment for mutation discovery (DIAMUND), produces a dramatically smaller list of candidate mutations than previous methods, without losing sensitivity to detect the true cause of a genetic disease. We demonstrate our results on several example cases, including two family trios in which it correctly found the disease‐causing variant while excluding thousands of harmless variants that standard methods had identified.
PPARγ disease gene network and identification of therapeutic targets for prostate cancer

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) belongs to the nuclear hormone receptor superfamily. Recently published reports demonstrate the importance of a direct repeat 2 (DR2) as a PPARγ-responsive element in addition to the canonical direct repeat 1 (DR1) Peroxisome proliferator response elements (PPREs). However, a comprehensive and systematic approach to constructing de novo disease-specific gene networks for PPARγ is lacking, especially one that includes PPARγ target genes containing either DR1 or DR2 site within their promoter region. Here, we computationally identified 1154 PPARγ direct target genes and constructed the PPARγ disease gene network, which revealed 138 PPARγ target genes that are associated with 65 unique diseases. The network shows that PPARγ target genes are highly associated with cancer and neurological diseases. Thirty-eight PPARγ direct target genes were found to be involved in prostate cancer and two key (hub) PPARγ direct target genes, PRKCZ and PGK1, were experimentally validated to be repressed upon PPARγ activation by its natural ligand, 15d-PGJ2 in three prostrate cancer cell lines. We proposed that PRKCZ and PGK1 could be novel therapeutic targets for prostate cancer. These investigations would not only aid in understanding the molecular mechanisms by which PPARγ regulates disease targets but would also lead to the identification of novel PPARγ gene targets.