Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Initiation of antidepressant therapy: do patients follow the GP's prescription?

BACKGROUND The question whether patients actually start drug taking after having received a first antidepressant prescription is often overlooked. AIM To determine the incidence of patients who do not fill or fill only a single antidepressant prescription at the pharmacy, and to identify associated patient characteristics. DESIGN OF STUDY Retrospective study linking a general practice to a pharmacy dispensing database. SETTING General practice in the Netherlands. METHOD STUDY POPULATION patients who received a first-time antidepressant prescription from a GP. Three patient groups were identified: patients who did not fill the prescription (non-fillers); patients who filled only a single prescription (single Rx-fillers); and patients who filled at least two consecutive prescriptions. Non-fillers and single Rx-fillers were combined into a group of decliners. RESULTS Of all 965 patients, 41 (4.2%) did not fill the prescription, and 229 (23.7%) filled only a single prescription. Patients who consulted their GP for a non-specific indication, rather than for depression, anxiety, panic, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, were almost three times more likely (odds ratio [OR] = 2.7, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.8 to 3.9) to decline treatment. Further, the risk of declining was almost fivefold higher (OR = 4.8, 95% CI = 2.1 to 11.3) in non-Western immigrants, and almost twofold higher (OR = 1.8, 95% CI = 1.2 to 2.8) in patients >60 years of age. CONCLUSION Over one in four patients who receive a first-time antidepressant prescription decline treatment; they either do not initiate drug taking or do not persist with antidepressant use for longer than 2 weeks.
Seahawk: Stack Overflow in the IDE

Services, such as Stack Overflow, offer a web platform to programmers for discussing technical issues, in form of Question and Answers (Q&A). Since Q&A services store the discussions, the generated “crowd knowledge” can be accessed and consumed by a large audience for a long time. Nevertheless, Q&A services are detached from the development environments used by programmers: Developers have to tap into this crowd knowledge through web browsers and cannot smoothly integrate it into their workflow. This situation hinders part of the benefits of Q&A services. To better leverage the crowd knowledge of Q&A services, we created Seahawk, an Eclipse plugin that supports an integrated and largely automated approach to assist programmers using Stack Overflow. Seahawk formulates queries automatically from the active context in the IDE, presents a ranked and interactive list of results, lets users import code samples in discussions through drag & drop and link Stack Overflow discussions and source code persistently as a support for team work. Video Demo URL: http://youtu.be/DkqhiU9FYPI.
Cognitive effects with rivastigmine augmentation of risperidone: A 12-month, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in schizophrenia

Objective: An important challenge in schizophrenia therapeutics is to develop an efficacious treatment for cognitive impairment. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, such as rivastigmine, have been studied for improving cognitive performance in these patients. Materials and Methods: Rivastigmine (uptitrated to 6 mg/day) was given as an add-on therapy to risperidone-treated stable schizophrenia patients in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design. Of 67 patients who met eligibility criteria, 55 were recruited into the study. Twenty-eight were assigned to rivastigmine and 27 to placebo. These patients completed tests of attention, executive functioning, verbal skills, verbal and visuospatial working memory, and psychomotor speed on five occasions: at baseline, and at the end of the 1st, 3rd, 6th, and 12th months. Results: The groups were similar in terms of sociodemographic profile and baseline clinical characteristics (Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and Clinical Global Impression-Severity). Contrary to expectations, rivastigmine patients showed poorer outcomes on several cognitive measures. Rivastigmine patients experienced also more psychological as well as neurological side effects. Core psychopathology ratings, however, did not differ between rivastigmine and placebo groups. Conclusions: Our study does not support the long-term use of rivastigmine as an augmentation agent in schizophrenia. Rivastigmine may be associated with higher incidence of psychological and neurological side effects in patients with schizophrenia.
The White-Nose Syndrome Transcriptome: Activation of Anti-fungal Host Responses in Wing Tissue of Hibernating Little Brown Myotis

White-nose syndrome (WNS) in North American bats is caused by an invasive cutaneous infection by the psychrophilic fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd). We compared transcriptome-wide changes in gene expression using RNA-Seq on wing skin tissue from hibernating little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus) with WNS to bats without Pd exposure. We found that WNS caused significant changes in gene expression in hibernating bats including pathways involved in inflammation, wound healing, and metabolism. Local acute inflammatory responses were initiated by fungal invasion. Gene expression was increased for inflammatory cytokines, including interleukins (IL) IL-1β, IL-6, IL-17C, IL-20, IL-23A, IL-24, and G-CSF and chemokines, such as Ccl2 and Ccl20. This pattern of gene expression changes demonstrates that WNS is accompanied by an innate anti-fungal host response similar to that caused by cutaneous Candida albicans infections. However, despite the apparent production of appropriate chemokines, immune cells such as neutrophils and T cells do not appear to be recruited. We observed upregulation of acute inflammatory genes, including prostaglandin G/H synthase 2 (cyclooxygenase-2), that generate eicosanoids and other nociception mediators. We also observed differences in Pd gene expression that suggest host-pathogen interactions that might determine WNS progression. We identified several classes of potential virulence factors that are expressed in Pd during WNS, including secreted proteases that may mediate tissue invasion. These results demonstrate that hibernation does not prevent a local inflammatory response to Pd infection but that recruitment of leukocytes to the site of infection does not occur. The putative virulence factors may provide novel targets for treatment or prevention of WNS. These observations support a dual role for inflammation during WNS; inflammatory responses provide protection but excessive inflammation may contribute to mortality, either by affecting torpor behavior or causing damage upon emergence in the spring.
Throughput Analysis of Opportunistic Scheduling under Rayleigh Fading Environment

We investigate the proportional fair scheduling (PFS) algorithm, with the objective of obtaining an analytic expression for it. In this paper, we derive a closed-form expression for the throughput of PFS in wireless networks. The theoretical results from analysis are compared with those from simulations. The analytic model is shown to provide a high accuracy in evaluating the throughput of the PFS algorithm in Rayleigh fading environment.
Group Psychosocial Program for Enhancing Psychological Well-Being of People with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Abstract Emotional ups and downs are common among people with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) as they live with fears about treatment, pain from the illness and unexpected “flare-ups. ” The side effects of medications have a severe impact on their self-esteem and lead to psychological distress. This paper reports a study on the impact of a psychosocial group program on the self-esteem and psychosocial functioning of people with SLE. A total of 56 people with SLE were recruited to participate in a 6-week, 2.5-hour weekly session psychosocial group. The group served to equip members with knowledge and skills to cope with SLE and stress arising from the illness, to enhance their self-confidence and develop a positive attitude toward the illness, and to enhance their social support network. The members were assessed before the commencement and during the last session of the groups with Rosenberg's Self-esteem Inventory and General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30). Results showed that members obtained better scores in self-esteem (p < 0.001) and GHQ (p < 0.001) after the group. The study revealed significant positive changes in self-esteem and psychosocial functioning of people with SLE after the psychosocial group program. The implications for psychosocial programs for people with SLE are discussed.
Endothelial Surface N-Glycans Mediate Monocyte Adhesion and Are Targets for Anti-inflammatory Effects of Peroxisome Proliferator-activated Receptor γ Ligands*

Background: Activation of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) γ in endothelial cells inhibits tumor necrosis factor (TNF) α-dependent monocyte adhesion. Results: TNFα and PPARγ target endothelial high mannose/hybrid N-glycan expression to regulate monocyte rolling adhesion. Conclusion: High mannose/hybrid N-glycoforms on the endothelial surface mediate monocyte interactions during inflammation. Significance: N-Glycan processing enzymes may be novel targets to control vascular inflammatory processes. Endothelial-monocyte interactions are regulated by adhesion molecules and key in the development of vascular inflammatory disease. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) γ activation in endothelial cells is recognized to mediate anti-inflammatory effects that inhibit monocyte rolling and adhesion. Herein, evidence is provided for a novel mechanism for the anti-inflammatory effects of PPARγ ligand action that involves inhibition of proinflammatory cytokine-dependent up-regulation of endothelial N-glycans. TNFα treatment of human umbilical vein endothelial cells increased surface expression of high mannose/hybrid N-glycans. A role for these sugars in mediating THP-1 or primary human monocyte rolling and adhesion was indicated by competition studies in which addition of α-methylmannose, but not α-methylglucose, inhibited monocyte rolling and adhesion during flow, but not under static conditions. This result supports the notion that adhesion molecules provide scaffolds for sugar epitopes to mediate adhesion with cognate receptors. A panel of structurally distinct PPARγ agonists all decreased TNFα-dependent expression of endothelial high mannose/hybrid N-glycans. Using rosiglitazone as a model PPARγ agonist, which decreased TNFα-induced high mannose N-glycan expression, we demonstrate a role for these carbohydrate residues in THP-1 rolling and adhesion that is independent of endothelial surface adhesion molecule expression (ICAM-1 and E-selectin). Data from N-glycan processing gene arrays identified α-mannosidases (MAN1A2 and MAN1C1) as targets for down-regulation by TNFα, which was reversed by rosiglitazone, a result consistent with altered high mannose/hybrid N-glycan epitopes. Taken together we propose a novel anti-inflammatory mechanism of endothelial PPARγ activation that involves targeting protein post-translational modification of adhesion molecules, specifically N-glycosylation.
A Subspace Minimization Method for the Trust-Region Step

We consider methods for large-scale unconstrained minimization based on finding an approximate minimizer of a quadratic function subject to a two-norm trust-region constraint. The Steihaug-Toint method uses the conjugate-gradient method to minimize the quadratic over a sequence of expanding subspaces until the iterates either converge to an interior point or cross the constraint boundary. However, if the conjugate-gradient method is used with a preconditioner, the Steihaug-Toint method requires that the trust-region norm be defined in terms of the preconditioning matrix. If a different preconditioner is used for each subproblem, the shape of the trust-region can change substantially from one subproblem to the next, which invalidates many of the assumptions on which standard methods for adjusting the trust-region radius are based. In this paper we propose a method that allows the trust-region norm to be defined independently of the preconditioner. The method solves the inequality constrained trust-region subproblem over a sequence of evolving low-dimensional subspaces. Each subspace includes an accelerator direction defined by a regularized Newton method for satisfying the optimality conditions of a primal-dual interior method. A crucial property of this direction is that it can be computed by applying the preconditioned conjugate-gradient method to a positive-definite system in both the primal and dual variables of the trust-region subproblem. Numerical experiments on problems from the CUTEr test collection indicate that the method can require significantly fewer function evaluations than other methods. In addition, experiments with general-purpose preconditioners show that it is possible to significantly reduce the number of matrix-vector products relative to those required without preconditioning.
Klotski: Reprioritizing Web Content to Improve User Experience on Mobile Devices

Despite web access on mobile devices becoming commonplace, users continue to experience poor web performance on these devices. Traditional approaches for improving web performance (e.g., compression, SPDY, faster browsers) face an uphill battle due to the fundamentally conflicting trends in user expectations of lower load times and richer web content. Embracing the reality that page load times will continue to be higher than user tolerance limits for the foreseeable future, we ask: How can we deliver the best possible user experience? To this end, we present KLOTSKI, a system that prioritizes the content most relevant to a user's preferences. In designing KLOTSKI, we address several challenges in: (1) accounting for inter-resource dependencies on a page; (2) enabling fast selection and load time estimation for the subset of resources to be prioritized; and (3) developing a practical implementation that requires no changes to websites. Across a range of user preference criteria, KLOTSKI can significantly improve the user experience relative to native websites.
From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates

Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps because it allows expression and regulation of emotion and evokes pleasure. In this review, we present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. First, we identify some of the auditory cortical circuits that are responsible for encoding and storing tonal patterns and discuss evidence that cortical loops between auditory and frontal cortices are important for maintaining musical information in working memory and for the recognition of structural regularities in musical patterns, which then lead to expectancies. Second, we review evidence concerning the mesolimbic striatal system and its involvement in reward, motivation, and pleasure in other domains. Recent data indicate that this dopaminergic system mediates pleasure associated with music; specifically, reward value for music can be coded by activity levels in the nucleus accumbens, whose functional connectivity with auditory and frontal areas increases as a function of increasing musical reward. We propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable predictions and expectancies to emerge from sound patterns and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation.
TMEM16A overexpression contributes to tumor invasion and poor prognosis of human gastric cancer through TGF-β signaling

TMEM16A is a newly identified calcium activated chloride channel, and has been reported to be overexpressed by various solid malignant cancers to promote proliferation and invasion, yet little is known about its role in gastric cancer(GC). Therefore, we investigated the role of TMEM16A in GC and its clinical significance by a retrospective analysis of 367 GC patients, and in vitro study was performed for validation and underlying molecular mechanism. TMEM16A was significantly upregulated and amplified in GC tissues, and its overexpression was positively correlated with disease stage, negatively with patient survival and identified as an independent prognostic factor for patient outcome. A negative correlation between TMEM16A and E-cadherin was found in 367 GC specimens. TMEM16A silencing significantly decreased calcium activated chloride currents, impaired TGF-β secretion, reduced E-cadherin expression, and inhibited the migration and invasion without affecting proliferation of GC cells (AGS and BGC-823). Supplement of TGF-β reverted the effects of TMEM16A silencing on E-cadherin expression, cell migration and invasion. In conclusion, TMEM16A promotes invasion and metastasis in GC, and might be a novel prognostic biomarker and potential therapeutic target in the treatment of GC.
Identifying and Characterizing a Functional HIV-1 Reverse Transcriptase-binding Site on Integrase*

Integrase (IN) from human immunodeficiency virus, type 1 (HIV-1) exerts pleiotropic effects in the viral replication cycle. Besides integration, IN mutations can impact nuclear import, viral maturation, and reverse transcription. IN and reverse transcriptase (RT) interact in vitro, and the IN C-terminal domain (CTD) is both necessary and sufficient for binding RT. We used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to identify a putative RT-binding surface on the IN CTD, and surface plasmon resonance to obtain kinetic parameters and the binding affinity for the IN-RT interaction. An IN K258A substitution that disrupts reverse transcription in infected cells is located at the putative RT-binding surface, and we found that this substitution substantially weakens IN CTD-RT interactions. We also identified two additional IN amino acid substitutions located at the putative RT-binding surface (W243E and V250E) that significantly impair viral replication in tissue culture. These results strengthen the notion that IN-RT interactions are biologically relevant during HIV-1 replication and also provide insights into this interaction at the molecular level.
Effects of Operating Parameters on Measurements of Biochemical Oxygen Demand Using a Mediatorless Microbial Fuel Cell Biosensor

The conventional Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) method takes five days to analyze samples. A microbial fuel cell (MFC) may be an alternate tool for rapid BOD determination in water. However, a MFC biosensor for continuous BOD measurements of water samples is still unavailable. In this study, a MFC biosensor inoculated with known mixed cultures was used to determine the BOD concentration. Effects of important parameters on establishing a calibration curve between the BOD concentration and output signal from the MFC were evaluated. The results indicate monosaccharides were good fuel, and methionine, phenylalanine, and ethanol were poor fuels for electricity generation by the MFC. Ions in the influent did not significantly affect the MFC performance. CN− in the influent could alleviate the effect of antagonistic electron acceptors on the MFC performance. The regression equation for BOD concentration and current density of the biosensor was y = 0.0145x + 0.3317. It was adopted to measure accurately and continuously the BOD concentration in actual water samples at an acceptable error margin. These results clearly show the developed MFC biosensor has great potential as an alternative BOD sensing device for online measurements of wastewater BOD.
Epidemiology of precancerous gastric lesions

Research over the past several decades has revealed that the major subtype of gastric cancer (intestinal gastric cancer) is an end result of a multistage transformation of the gastric mucosa over many years and that this process is mainly determined by environmental factors. Epidemiologic studies on precancerous gastric lesions, including a large population‐based study of the natural history and aetiology of precancerous gastric lesions conducted in Shandong, China, are reviewed.
Microencapsulation of fragrant oil via in situ polymerization: effects of pH and melamine-formaldehyde molar ratio

Microcapsules containing fragrant oil (Foral oil) were synthesized via the in situ polymerization method using melamine-formaldehyde (M-F) as a wall material. The encapsulation efficiency and other physical properties were analysed with varying formaldehyde/melamine (F/M) mole ratio and pH of emulsion medium. The pH of the reaction medium was varied from 5.0-6.0 and the F/M molar ratio, 2.3 ~ 5.5. Microcapsules containing fragrant oil were synthesized successfully and their particle sizes ranged from 12-15 #181;m. Encapsulation efficiency of fragrant oil varied from 67-81%. It was found that both pH and F/M molar ratio have an effect on the separation of M-F prepolymer, consequently the morphology of the surface of the microcapsule was changed as well as encapsulation efficiency. The encapsulation mechanism, focusing on the liquid-liquid phase separation of methylolmelamines and formation of M-F precursor particle, was described to explain the surface morphology and encapsulation efficiency.
Ongoing measures to enhance the efficiency of prescribing of proton pump inhibitors and statins in The Netherlands: influence and future implications.

BACKGROUND Multiple reforms have recently been introduced in The Netherlands to improve prescribing efficiency. These include preference pricing policies for multiple sourced products, guidelines, and quality and efficiency targets, as well as regular pharmacotherapy meetings. OBJECTIVES Assess the influence of these multiple measures on prescribing efficiency. METHODS Retrospective observational study of all reimbursed prescriptions for proton pump inhibitors and statins between 2000 and 2010 using the Genees-en hulpmiddelen Informatie Project (Health Insurance) database. Utilization measured in defined daily doses. Narrative review of reforms. RESULTS Reimbursed expenditure for the proton pump inhibitors fell by 58% in 2010 versus 2000 despite a threefold increase in utilization, helped by increasing utilization of generic omeprazole at only 2% of the prepatent loss price in 2010. Similarly, reimbursed expenditure for the statins fell by 14% in 2010 versus 2000 despite a 3.8-fold increase in utilization. Again, this was helped by increasing utilization of generic simvastatin at only 2% of the prepatent loss originator price. CONCLUSION Multiple supply and demand measures, including the preference pricing policy, appear to have appreciably enhanced proton pump inhibitor and statin prescribing efficiency, providing examples to other countries.
Which Is Essential for Chinese Word Segmentation: Character versus Word

This paper proposes an empirical comparison between word-based method and character-based method for Chinese word segmentation. In three Chinese word segmentation Bakeoffs, character-based method quickly rose as a mainstream technique in this field. We disclose the linguistic background and statistical feature behind this observation. Also, an empirical study between wordbased method and character-based method are performed. Our results show that character-based method alone can work well for Chinese word segmentation without additional explicit word information from training corpus.