Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Racial Differences in Nitric Oxide—Dependent Vasorelaxation

Along with the growing heterogeneity of the American population, ethnic/racial disparity is becoming a clear health issue in the United States. The awareness of ethnic/racial disparities has been growing because of considerable data gathered from recent clinical and epidemiological studies. These studies have highlighted the importance of addressing these differences in the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases potentially according to race. It is becoming particularly clear that there is a 2- to 3-fold racial difference in certain cardiovascular diseases (eg, preeclampsia) associated with dysfunctional nitric oxide—mediated vasodilation. In this review, the authors summarize the current literature on racial disparities in nitric oxide—mediated vasodilation in relation to cardiovascular health with an emphasis on vascular nitric oxide bioavailability as a balance between production via endothelial nitric oxide synthase and degradation through reactive oxygen species. The major hypotheses postulated on the biological basis of these differences are also highlighted.
Comprehensive transcriptome of proteases and protease inhibitors in vascular cells.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Smooth muscle cells, endothelial cells, and macrophages are essential components of the vasculature, of which the homeostatic gene expression participate importantly in the maintenance of vascular wall integrity. The pathogenesis of vascular diseases, such as cerebral ischemia, atherosclerosis, and abdominal aortic aneurysms, often associates with inflammation and altered gene expression, including proteolytic enzymes that play multiple and important roles in extracellular matrix degradation, cell proliferation and migration, and latent enzyme or growth factor activation. METHODS Human saphenous vein smooth muscle cells, endothelial cells, and monocyte-derived macrophages from 3 independent donors were stimulated with interleukin 1beta, interferon gamma, tumor necrosis factor alpha, basic fibroblast growth factor, and vascular endothelial growth factor, 5 common proinflammatory mediators often found in diseased human microvessels and macrovessels. Quantitative real-time PCR was used to examine the mRNA levels of 49 proteolytic enzymes and their inhibitors, selected from 4 protease families, in these vascular cells. CONCLUSIONS Although primary cultured cells from different donors may behave differently in response to these proinflammatory cytokines, data from this study revealed a broad view of vascular cell protease expression profiles under inflammatory conditions, critical to studies of inflammation-associated vascular tissue remodeling.
A re-examination of choking in sport

Abstract The purpose of this study was to re-examine choking in sport. Using a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), qualitative data were gathered from four “experts” of applied sport psychology, who had published within the stress and anxiety literature, and worked extensively with athletes who had performed in highly stressful situations. The experts perceived that the contemporary definitions of choking in sport fail to reflect fully the experiences of “chokers”, and created a more detailed definition in response. They considered the choking process to consist of a stress response that culminates in a significant drop in performance – a choke, which psychologically damages the performer. It was also suggested that the choking process and its consequences were moderated by individual differences and type of sport. Accordingly, they recommended interventions that may alleviate choking and, importantly, generated characteristics that can be used to identify a choker. Such findings offer an extended understanding of choking in sport and provide a framework for future ecologically valid research.
The Romanian employee motivation system : an empirical analysis

of employee motivation system in the Romanian companies using data collected from 402 individual employees. The results of the study reveal the fact that, in the present situation of economic crisis, a lot of Romanian people search for a job who offers them an income and job security. Therefore, the job stability occupies the first place in employee preferences followed by job type and wage offer. The vocational development and the job enrichment are also important for the Romanian employees. The results of the study do confirm the assumption that money is not everything in terms of work motivation, suggesting that managers need to focus more on non-financial incentives to better motivate employees. The Romanian employee looks both measly motivated and demotivated. The role of non-financial motivation is not yet wholly understood by the Romanian employers, stipulating a term of 5 years, in which the non-financial motivation will become a current practice in Romania.
MuSIC report III: tumour microcirculation patterns and development of metastasis in long‐term follow‐up of melanocytic uveal tumours

To statistically determine differences in microcirculation patterns between nevi and uveal melanomas and the influence of these patterns on metastatic potential in the long‐term follow‐up of 112 patients with melanocytic uveal tumours. In vivo markers indicating malignancy and metastatic potential have implications for treatment decision.
A Young Man with Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis following Guillain-Barré Syndrome

A 19-year-old man developed rapidly progressive muscle weakness and dysesthesia in the extremities, and dyspnea after a flu-like episode. Nerve conduction studies showed reduced motor nerve conduction velocities with conduction block, and sensory nerve action potentials could not be evoked. The patient was diagnosed as having Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), and was treated with 2 cycles of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) therapy and was assisted by mechanical ventilation. During the recovery course of the illness, he experienced several attacks of psychomotor agitation from the 37th hospital day, and generalized tonic convulsive seizures suddenly developed on the 42nd hospital day. Brain MRI showed high-intensity lesions in the bilateral thalamus and medial temporal lobes. The convulsions were controlled by continuous thiopental infusion (until the 50th hospital day) and mechanical ventilation (until the 84th hospital day). Intravenous methylprednisolone pulse therapy (1,000 mg/day) for 3 days followed by dexamethasone (16 mg/day) was added. After relief of convulsive seizures, prominent orolingual dyskinesia appeared, and on MRI marked atrophy of the bilateral medial temporal lobes was seen. Anti-N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antibodies in serum and cerebrospinal fluid were positive on the 92nd hospital day. Anti-NMDAR encephalitis usually affects young females but a small number of male cases with this disease have been reported. Our male patient was unique in having GBS, a post-infectious autoimmune disease, as a preceding disease, suggesting that anti-NMDAR encephalitis itself is caused by a parainfectious autoimmune mechanism.
Pharmacokinetic and Clinical Phase II Trial of Imatinib in Patients with Impaired Liver Function and Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Objectives: No effective chemotherapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) exists. Expression of the platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR) has been demonstrated in HCC, which may derive from hepatic stem cells that express c-kit. The aim of this trial was to evaluate imatinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor of PDGFR and c-kit, in patients with advanced HCC and impaired liver function. Patients and Methods: Patients were treated with 400–600 mg imatinib daily. Immunohistochemical staining was performed for PDGFR and c-kit. Response was assessed by CT scans every 8 weeks. For pharmacokinetics studies, 74 plasma samples were assessed. Results: Of the 17 patients enrolled in the study, 15 were evaluable for response. Only 1 tumor was positive for PDGFR and none was positive for c-kit. Grade 3/4 neutropenia occurred in 2 patients (1 had neutropenic fever). There was no objective response, and 5 (33%) patients had stable disease. Median time to treatment failure was 1.8 months in the whole study cohort and 3.7 months in the patients with stable disease. Patients treated with 400 mg imatinib did not significantly differ in pharmacokinetics from patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Conclusion: In this small group of patients with advanced, mostly PDGFR- and c-kit-negative HCC, imatinib showed no therapeutic effect. In contrast to CML patients, the pharmacokinetics of imatinib were not significantly affected by impaired liver function.
Conversion of the Vibrio fischeriTranscriptional Activator, LuxR, to a Repressor

ABSTRACT The Vibrio fischeri luminescence (lux) operon is regulated by a quorum-sensing system that involves the transcriptional activator (LuxR) and an acyl-homoserine lactone signal. Transcriptional activation requires the presence of a 20-base inverted repeat termed the lux box at a position centered 42.5 bases upstream of the transcriptional start of the lux operon. LuxR has proven difficult to study in vitro. A truncated form of LuxR has been purified, and together with ς70 RNA polymerase it can activate transcription of the lux operon. Both the truncated LuxR and RNA polymerase are required for binding tolux regulatory DNA in vitro. We have constructed an artificial lacZ promoter with the lux box positioned between and partially overlapping the consensus −35 and −10 hexamers of an RNA polymerase binding site. LuxR functioned as an acyl-homoserine lactone-dependent repressor at this promoter in recombinant Escherichia coli. Furthermore, multiplelux boxes on an independent replicon reduced the repressor activity of LuxR. Thus, it appears that LuxR can bind tolux boxes independently of RNA polymerase binding to the promoter region. A variety of LuxR mutant proteins were studied, and with one exception there was a correlation between function as a repressor of the artificial promoter and activation of a nativelux operon. The exception was the truncated protein that had been purified and studied in vitro. This protein functioned as an activator but not as a repressor in E. coli. The data indicate that the mutual dependence of purified, truncated LuxR and RNA polymerase on each other for binding to the lux promoter is a feature specific to the truncated LuxR and that full-length LuxR by itself can bind to lux box-containing DNA.
Education and Subjective Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis

What is the relation between formal educational attainment and adults' subjective well-being? What factors account for variation in the estimates of this relation? Does education contribute to adult subjective well-being by increasing income or occupational status? To address these questions, we performed a metaanalytic research synthesis. Dependent variables were zeroand first-order correlations between educational attainment and subjective well-being, and independent variables were sample, measure, and study quality characteristics. We found that education is significantly positively related to adult subjective well-being, accounting for 1 to 3% of the variance. The relation is stronger in samples of women than men and in older than younger adults, but no differences were found between whites and blacks. The strength of the relation has not changed significantly over a span of nearly five decades. When occupational status, but not income, was the control variable the education/subjective well-being relation was reduced. Overall, education is a small but positive contributor to adult subjective wellbeing.
Predictors of Mortality in Chronic Chagas Disease: A Systematic Review of Observational Studies

Background— Chagas disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in Latin America. Knowledge of the predictors of prognosis can help clinical decision making by identifying patients' level of risk. Methods and Results— We reviewed the published literature on prognostic factors in patients with Chagas disease by performing a PubMed search for articles published in any language between 1985 and February 2006 and hand searches of the reference lists of retrieved articles. Studies were selected if they included patients in the chronic phase of Chagas disease, analyzed a clearly defined outcome (all-cause mortality, sudden cardiac deaths, and/or cardiovascular deaths), and used multivariable regression models of prognosis. From 606 potentially relevant studies, 12 met the inclusion criteria: 8 clinic-based studies including 3928 patients and 4 hospital-based studies including 349 patients. Impaired left ventricular function by echocardiogram or cineventriculogram was found to be the most common and consistent independent predictor of death. New York Heart Association functional class III/IV and cardiomegaly on the chest radiography also were independently associated with higher mortality. More recently, strong evidence was found that nonsustained ventricular tachycardia on 24-hour Holter monitoring indicated an adverse prognosis. The typical ECG abnormalities showed limited additional prognostic value. Other often-mentioned risk factors, advanced age and male sex, showed inconsistent results. A formal meta-analysis was not feasible because of the heterogeneity of published studies and the lack of minimal standards in reporting results. Conclusions— A systematic review of published studies indicates that impaired left ventricular function, New York Heart Association class III/IV, cardiomegaly, and nonsustained ventricular tachycardia indicate a poor prognosis in patients with chronic Chagas disease.
Reasoning Errors and Belief in the Paranormal

Abstract The hypothesis that belief in the paranormal is related to reasoning errors was tested. College students were administered the Belief in the Paranormal Scale (Jones, Russell, & Nickel, 1977) and a syllogistic reasoning test. A slight but statistically significant correlation was observed between BPS scores and the number of errors made on the reasoning test. This relationship was larger but not significantly so for reasoning items with paranormal content than for symbolic content. An a priori comparison indicated that the relationship between BPS scores and reasoning errors was significantly greater for problems that required subjects to determine the validity of hypotheses given statements of evidence than for problems that required subjects to determine the validity of deduced empirical predictions given hypotheses. Thus, belief in the paranormal among college students was very moderately correlated with reasoning ability and was observed most clearly when the reasoning problems contained paran.
The Interdependent Self-Construal and Social Support: The Case of Persistence in Engineering

This prospective study examined student self-esteem and persistence during the first 2 years of an undergraduate program in engineering. The authors hypothesized that individuals who define the self in terms of close relationships, termed the interdependent self-construal, will experience a sense of misfit in the competitive engineering environment but that high levels of social support will mitigate this effect. As expected, for students with a very interdependent self-construal, levels of social support were positively related to changes in self-esteem during the 1st year and predicted continued enrollment in engineering at the end of the 2nd year, controlling for previous academic performance and self-efficacy. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of the self-construal in behavior and for increasing the supply of well-trained engineers are discussed.
The roles of AtxA orthologs in virulence of anthrax‐like Bacillus cereus G9241

AtxA is a critical transcriptional regulator of plasmid‐encoded virulence genes in Bacillus anthracis. Bacillus cereus G9241, which caused an anthrax‐like infection, has two virulence plasmids, pBCXO1 and pBC210, that each harbor toxin genes and a capsule locus. G9241 also produces two orthologs of AtxA: AtxA1, encoded on pBCXO1, and AtxA2, encoded on pBC210. The amino acid sequence of AtxA1 is identical to that of AtxA from B. anthracis, while the sequences of AtxA1 and AtxA2 are 79% identical and 91% similar to one another. We found by qRT‐PCR that AtxA1 and AtxA2 function as positive regulators of toxin (AtxA1) and capsule operon (both) transcription in G9241 and that a ΔatxA1 mutant produced lower levels of the anthrax toxins and no hyaluronic acid capsule. Deletion of atxA1 or atxA2 decreased the virulence of spores administered intranasally or subcutaneously to C57BL/6 mice but not to A/J mice, and deletion of both genes rendered spores avirulent in A/J mice. In addition, unlike AtxA1, AtxA2 did not form stable homomultimers in vitro, although AtxA1 and AtxA2 formed heterodimers. Our data show that AtxA1 is the primary regulator of G9241 virulence factor expression and that AtxA1 and AtxA2 are both required for full virulence.
A new benchmark dataset with production methodology for short text semantic similarity algorithms

This research presents a new benchmark dataset for evaluating Short Text Semantic Similarity (STSS) measurement algorithms and the methodology used for its creation. The power of the dataset is evaluated by using it to compare two established algorithms, STASIS and Latent Semantic Analysis. This dataset focuses on measures for use in Conversational Agents; other potential applications include email processing and data mining of social networks. Such applications involve integrating the STSS algorithm in a complex system, but STSS algorithms must be evaluated in their own right and compared with others for their effectiveness before systems integration. Semantic similarity is an artifact of human perception; therefore its evaluation is inherently empirical and requires benchmark datasets derived from human similarity ratings. The new dataset of 64 sentence pairs, STSS-131, has been designed to meet these requirements drawing on a range of resources from traditional grammar to cognitive neuroscience. The human ratings are obtained from a set of trials using new and improved experimental methods, with validated measures and statistics. The results illustrate the increased challenge and the potential longevity of the STSS-131 dataset as the Gold Standard for future STSS algorithm evaluation.
Valores personales, creencias ambientales y comportamiento ecológico de trabajadores brasileños

Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabla normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:. 0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} This study investigated the relationships between personal values, environmental beliefs and ecological behavior of employees in a public organization of Brasilia. A sample of 295 employees of Public Ministry of the Federal District and Territories (52.5% women) with mean age of 39 years (SD = 8.3) answered three scales. The first one measured the ecological behavior, the second one assessed environmental beliefs, both in the context of work, while the last one measured personal values. Standard multiple regression analyses showed that the ecocentric beliefs, the values of universalism and stimulation and age were positive predictors of ecological behavior, while power and education level were negative predictors of such behavior. This results suggests that the institution should emphasize the strengthening of self-transcendence goals, the development of most dynamic, challenging and allow servers to receive personal benefits that show the population as subjects in tune with the social aspirations of a world better compatible with the image of the institution they represent.
Do Value Thresholds for Oncology Drugs Differ from Nononcology Drugs?

BACKGROUND: In the past decade, many oncologic drugs have been approved that extend life and/or improve patients’ quality of life. However, new cancer drugs are often associated with high price and increased medical spending. For example, in 2010, the average annual cost of care for breast cancer in the final stage of disease was reported to be $94,284, and the total estimated cost in the United States was $16.50 billion. OBJECTIVES: To determine whether value threshold, as defined by the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER), differed between oncology and other therapeutic areas. METHODS: The PubMed database was searched for articles published between January 2003 and December 2013 with calculated ICER for therapeutic drug entities in a specific therapeutic area. The search term used was “ICER” and “United States. ” From 275 results, only those articles that reported ICERs using quality-adjusted life-years (QALY) were included. In addition, only those articles that used a U.S. payer perspective were retained. Among those, nondrug therapy articles and review articles were excluded. The mean ICER and value threshold for oncologic drugs and nononcologic drugs were evaluated for the analysis. RESULTS: From 54 articles selected for analysis, 13 pertained to drugs in oncology therapeutics, and the remaining 41 articles addressed ICER for drugs in other therapeutic areas. The mean and median of ICERs calculated for cancer-specific drug intervention was $138,582/QALY and $55,500/QALY, respectively, compared with $49,913/QALY and $31,000/QALY, respectively, for noncancer drugs. Among the cancer drugs, 45.0% had ICERs below $50,000/QALY and 70.0% below $100,000/QALY. In comparison, 72.0% of noncancer drugs showed ICERs below $50,000/QALY, and 90.0% had ICERs below $100,000/QALY. When a specific threshold was mentioned, it was in the range of $100,000-$150,000 in cancer drugs, whereas drugs in other therapeutic areas used traditional threshold value within the range of $50,000-$100,000. CONCLUSIONS: The average ICER reported for cancer drugs was more than 2-fold greater than the average ICER for noncancer drugs. In general, articles that addressed the relative value of oncologic pharmaceuticals used higher value thresholds and reported higher ICERs than articles evaluating noncancer drugs.
A COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION OF WHITE MATTER TRACTS AND CONNECTOMETRY IN MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating disorder characterized by widespread brain abnormalities. The literature is mixed as to whether or not white matter abnormalities are associated with MDD. This study sought to examine fractional anisotropy (FA) in white matter tracts in individuals with MDD using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).