Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Associations of Blood Pressure with Body Composition among Afro-Caribbean Children in Barbados

Despite complex presentation of adult hypertension and a concomitant obesity epidemic, little is known about overweight in relation to blood pressure among Caribbean children. We examined blood pressure in relation to body size in a cross-sectional study of 573 Barbadian children aged 9–10 years (2010-2011). The United States normative blood pressure percentiles were used to identify children with high (≥ 95th percentile) or high normal blood pressure (90th – 95th percentile). The World Health Organization body mass index cut-off points were used to assess weight status. Major findings Thirty percent of children were overweight/obese. Percentage fat mass differed between girls (20.4%) and boys (17.72%) (p< 0.05). Mean systolic blood pressure among girls was 106.11 (95% CI 105.05, 107.17) mmHg and 105.23 (104.09, 106.38) for boys. The percentages with high or high-normal mean systolic blood pressurewere14.38% (10.47, 18.29) for girls and 8.08% (4.74, 11.41) for boys. Height and body mass index were independent correlates of systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Mean systolic blood pressure was related to lean mass but not fat mass, while diastolic blood pressure was associated with fat mass index and overweight. Principal conclusion One third of 9-10 year old children in Barbados were overweight/obese and 12% had elevated mean systolic blood pressure. BP was related to body size. These findings signal potential adverse trends in weight gain and BP trends for children growing up in the context of a country that has recently undergone rapid economic transition.
Beliefs about causes of weight gain, effective weight gain prevention strategies, and barriers to weight management in the Australian population

Purpose: To identify beliefs held by the general public regarding causes of weight gain, weight prevention strategies, and barriers to weight management; and to examine whether such beliefs predict the actual body mass of participants. Methods: A questionnaire-based survey was administered to participants recruited from regional and metropolitan areas of Australia. This questionnaire obtained demographic information, height, weight; as well as beliefs about causes of weight gain, weight prevention strategies, and barriers to weight management. Results: The sample consisted of 376 participants (94 males, 282 females) between the ages of 18 years and 88 years (mean age = 43.25, SD = 13.64). The range and nature of the belief dimensions identified suggest that the Australian public have an understanding of the interaction between internal and external factors that impact on weight gain but also prevent successful weight management. Beliefs about prevention strategies and barriers to effective weight management were found to predict the participants’ actual body mass, even after controlling for demographic characteristics. Conclusions: The general public have a good understanding of the multiple contributing factors to weight gain and successful weight management. However, this understanding may not necessarily lead to individuals adopting the required lifestyle changes that result in achievement or maintenance of healthy weight levels.
Prevalence of increases in functional connectivity in visual, somatosensory and language areas in congenital blindness

There is ample evidence that congenitally blind individuals rely more strongly on non-visual information compared to sighted controls when interacting with the outside world. Although brain imaging studies indicate that congenitally blind individuals recruit occipital areas when performing various non-visual and cognitive tasks, it remains unclear through which pathways this is accomplished. To address this question, we compared resting state functional connectivity in a group of congenital blind and matched sighted control subjects. We used a seed-based analysis with a priori specified regions-of-interest (ROIs) within visual, somato-sensory, auditory and language areas. Between-group comparisons revealed increased functional connectivity within both the ventral and the dorsal visual streams in blind participants, whereas connectivity between the two streams was reduced. In addition, our data revealed stronger functional connectivity in blind participants between the visual ROIs and areas implicated in language and tactile (Braille) processing such as the inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's area), thalamus, supramarginal gyrus and cerebellum. The observed group differences underscore the extent of the cross-modal reorganization in the brain and the supra-modal function of the occipital cortex in congenitally blind individuals.
Interaction between MAO-A genotype and maltreatment in the risk for conduct disorder: failure to confirm in adolescent patients.

OBJECTIVE Childhood maltreatment is a potent risk factor for subsequent aggressive and criminal behavior. A recent study suggested that the relationship between maltreatment and antisocial behavior may be moderated by a genetic vulnerability conferred by a functional polymorphism in the MAO-A gene. The authors investigated whether these findings would generalize to a clinical cohort of adolescents, examining whether there was a stronger association between maltreatment and conduct disorder severity in patients carrying the low MAO-A activity allele. METHOD Male adolescent patients (N=247) entering residential or intensive day treatment for persistent conduct and substance use problems were examined. Conduct disorder severity was indexed by a lifetime count of DSM-IV criteria obtained through structured psychiatric interviews. Maltreatment scores were derived from summing neglect and abuse events reported to have occurred before age 11. RESULTS Neglect, verbal/psychological abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse were prevalent among patients. Although level of maltreatment and lifetime conduct disorder symptoms were significantly correlated, no genetic-environmental interaction with genotype for maltreatment was found. CONCLUSION The results of the current study do not support the hypothesis that a polymorphism in the gene encoding MAO-A contributes to the genetic risk for conduct disorder.
Intersecting disciplinary frameworks: the architecture and ecology of the city

ABSTRACT Introduction: While many studies have explored the link between ecology and urban design, this paper examines two major conceptions that can promote deeper connections between architecture and ecological science. Outcomes: Rather than providing a comprehensive review, the paper explores in detail two frameworks that have not yet been exploited as foundations for a bridge between these fields. One is the seminal work of Aldo Rossi on the architecture of the city, as opposed to a more traditional architectural focus on specific buildings, lots, or specific clients. The complementary framework for ecological science is the ecology of the city, developed to support and explain a new era of more integrated social-ecological study of urban systems than had existed previously. Discussion: This paper draws heretofore unexamined parallels between architecture as represented by the work of Rossi and the ecology of the city as represented by the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology. The ecology of the city has become a widely used framing in the science of urban ecology, while the architecture of the city continues to influence a deeper understanding of the built environment as a whole. The parallels provided by the architecture of the city and the ecology of the city help to understand the historical interrelations between nature and culture. Conclusion: Intersecting the two conceptual frameworks of the architecture and ecology of the city can help satisfy the call for an actionable ecology for the city. This call demands both disciplines integrate their conceptual frameworks with communities in the collective enterprise of creating urban ecosystem health, justice, and sustainability.
TOM 40 Mediates Mitochondrial Dysfunction Induced by a-Synuclein Accumulation in Parkinson ’ s Disease

Alpha-synuclein (a-Syn) accumulation/aggregation and mitochondrial dysfunction play prominent roles in the pathology of Parkinson’s disease. We have previously shown that postmortem human dopaminergic neurons from PD brains accumulate high levels of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions. We now addressed the question, whether alterations in a component of the mitochondrial import machinery -TOM40might contribute to the mitochondrial dysfunction and damage in PD. For this purpose, we studied levels of TOM40, mtDNA deletions, oxidative damage, energy production, and complexes of the respiratory chain in brain homogenates as well as in single neurons, using laser-capture-microdissection in transgenic mice overexpressing human wildtype a-Syn. Additionally, we used lentivirus-mediated stereotactic delivery of a component of this import machinery into mouse brain as a novel therapeutic strategy. We report here that TOM40 is significantly reduced in the brain of PD patients and in a-Syn transgenic mice. TOM40 deficits were associated with increased mtDNA deletions and oxidative DNA damage, and with decreased energy production and altered levels of complex I proteins in a-Syn transgenic mice. Lentiviral-mediated overexpression of Tom40 in a-Syn-transgenic mice brains ameliorated energy deficits as well as oxidative burden. Our results suggest that alterations in the mitochondrial protein transport machinery might contribute to mitochondrial impairment in a-Synucleinopathies. Citation: Bender A, Desplats P, Spencer B, Rockenstein E, Adame A, et al. (2013) TOM40 Mediates Mitochondrial Dysfunction Induced by a-Synuclein Accumulation in Parkinson’s Disease. PLoS ONE 8(4): e62277. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0062277 Editor: Philipp J. Kahle, Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research and German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Germany Received October 29, 2012; Accepted March 19, 2013; Published April 23, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Bender et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by a stipend of the Else-Kroener-Fresenius Foundation (to A.B.; #EKFS P65/06//EKMS06/13; www.ekfs.de), the German Research Foundation (DFG, #BE 4185/1-1 to A.B. and T.K.; www.dfg.de), and NIH grants AG022072, AG18440, AG010435, NS057096 (to E.M.; www.nih.gov). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interest exist. * E-mail: emasliah@ucsd.edu . These authors contributed equally to this work.
Evaluation strategies for top-k queries over memory-resident inverted indexes

Top-k retrieval over main-memory inverted indexes is at the core of many modern applications: from large scale web search and advertising platforms, to text extenders and content management systems. In these systems, queries are evaluated using two major families of algorithms: document-at-a-time (DAAT) and term-at-a-time (TAAT). DAAT and TAAT algorithms have been studied extensively in the research literature, but mostly in disk-based settings. In this paper, we present an analysis and comparison of several DAAT and TAAT algorithms used in Yahoo! 's production platform for online advertising. The low-latency requirements of online advertising systems mandate memory-resident indexes. We compare the performance of several query evaluation algorithms using two real-world ad selection datasets and query workloads. We show how some adaptations of the original algorithms for main memory setting have yielded significant performance improvement, reducing running time and cost of serving by 60% in some cases. In these results both the original and the adapted algorithms have been evaluated over memory-resident indexes, so the improvements are algorithmic and not due to the fact that the experiments used main memory indexes.
Pertuzumab for the treatment of patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer in Japan

Pertuzumab, a novel anti-human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) agent, is effective for metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer when used in combination with taxane and trastuzumab. The aim of the present study was to describe the use of pertuzumab in Japan. A phase I clinical trial of pertuzumab for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer was first conducted in the United States in 2001 (study ID no. TOC2297g) and for HER2-positive solid cancers in Japan in 2004 (study ID no. JO17076). However, Japanese patients were not enrolled in a global phase II trial for metastatic breast cancer (study ID no. BO17929) and no phase II trial of pertuzumab for Japanese patients has yet been conducted. A phase III trial on pertuzumab for metastatic breast cancer (CLEOPATRA study), which included 53 Japanese patients, revealed that pertuzumab significantly prolonged progression-free and overall survival. However, the superiority of the pertuzumab group was not verified in the subgroup analysis of Japanese patients, which was not a preplanned analysis. Therefore, a postmarketing clinical trial for Japanese patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer (COMACHI study) was initiated in November, 2013, to investigate the clinical effectiveness of pertuzumab in Japanese patients. As of December, 2014, global trials on pertuzumab in the metastatic and adjuvant settings are currently ongoing. These trials included Japanese patients with HER2-positive breast cancer. Pertuzumab was approved in Japan in August, 2013 due to the positive findings of the CLEOPATRA study. Unlike the United States and Europe, the Japanes Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency approved the administration of pertuzumab as second- or later-line treatment for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, as well as first-line treatment. Furthermore, pertuzumab may be used in combination with other chemotherapeutic agents, with the exception of docetaxel. The approval of the expanded use of pertuzumab is likely to accelerate the market penetration of pertuzumab in Japan more quickly compared with other countries.
Neumann and Neumann-Rosochatius integrable systems from membranes on AdS_4xS^7

It is known that large class of classical string solutions in the type IIB AdS_5xS^5 background is related to the Neumann and Neumann-Rosochatius integrable systems, including spiky strings and giant magnons. It is also interesting if these integrable systems can be associated with some membrane configurations in M-theory. We show here that this is indeed the case by presenting explicitly several types of membrane embedding in AdS_4xS^7 with the searched properties.
No Differential Regulation of Dopamine Transporter (DAT) and Vesicular Monoamine Transporter 2 (VMAT2) Binding in a Primate Model of Parkinson Disease

Radioligands for DAT and VMAT2 are widely used presynaptic markers for assessing dopamine (DA) nerve terminals in Parkinson disease (PD). Previous in vivo imaging and postmortem studies suggest that these transporter sites may be regulated as the numbers of nigrostriatal neurons change in pathologic conditions. To investigate this issue, we used in vitro quantitative autoradioradiography to measure striatal DAT and VMAT2 specific binding in postmortem brain from 14 monkeys after unilateral internal carotid artery infusion of 1-Methyl-4-Phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) with doses varying from 0 to 0.31 mg/kg. Quantitative estimates of the number of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH)-immunoreactive (ir) neurons in substantia nigra (SN) were determined with unbiased stereology, and quantitative autoradiography was used to measure DAT and VMAT2 striatal specific binding. Striatal VMAT2 and DAT binding correlated with striatal DA (rs = 0.83, rs = 0.80, respectively, both with n = 14, p<0.001) but only with nigra TH-ir cells when nigral cell loss was 50% or less (r = 0.93, n = 8, p = 0.001 and r = 0.91, n = 8, p = 0.002 respectively). Reduction of VMAT2 and DAT striatal specific binding sites strongly correlated with each other (r = 0.93, n = 14, p<0.0005). These similar changes in DAT and VMAT2 binding sites in the striatal terminal fields of the surviving nigrostriatal neurons demonstrate that there is no differential regulation of these two sites at 2 months after MPTP infusion.
Oral Amoxicillin-Clavulanic Acid Treatment in Urinary Tract Infections Caused by Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamase–Producing Organisms

Background: Extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs) are increasing problems. The involvement of ESBL-producing organisms is associated with higher rates of carbapenem usage in urinary tract infections (UTIs). Though some strains are susceptible to amoxicillin-clavulanic acid (AMC) in vitro, there is very less data about the consequences of AMC usage for such infections. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the clinical and microbiological outcomes of AMC treatment in UTIs caused by AMC-susceptible ESBL-producing organisms. Patients and Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted in a tertiary care hospital. Forty-six out of 652 patients (F/M ratio: 32/14; mean age: 43.9 years) with ESBL-positive UTIs were eligible for this study. These patients had cystitis (n = 23), vesicoureteral reflux (n = 7), hyperactive bladder (n = 6), and prostatitis (n = 10). Data was collected via chart review and was statistically analyzed. Results: AMC-susceptible ESBL-producing Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and K. oxytoca were identified as the causative agents in 31, 14, and 1 patients, respectively. Thirty-nine (84.7%) out of 46 patients were successfully treated with oral AMC. Additionally, 2 (4.3%) patients’ urine cultures turned to be negative, though their clinical complaints and leukocyturia had continued. In the remaining 5 (10.8%) patients, no positive clinical and microbiological response was obtained. Increased minimum inhibitory concentration levels of AMC (from 4 to > 256 µg/mL) were detected in these patients and the treatment failures were attributed to this developing resistance. We found that therapeutic failure was significantly more frequent in Klebsiella spp. than in E. coli (33.3% vs 6.5%, P = 0.029). Furthermore, no treatment failure was observed in pathogens with minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ≤ 2 mg/mL, and the high AMC MIC (8 mg/mL) was associated with resistance development and therapeutic failure (71.4% vs. 5.1%, P = 0.0001). Conclusions: Our results suggested that amoxicillin-clavulanic acid may be a good oral antimicrobial which can be used for treatment of ESBL-positive UTIs, if the causative agent is susceptible to this antibiotic. However, some strains may develop resistance during therapy, especially in those exhibiting high AMC MICs.
Experience, cortisol reactivity, and the coordination of emotional responses to skydiving

Physiological habituation to laboratory stressors has previously been demonstrated, although the literature remains equivocal. Previous studies have found skydiving to be a salient naturalistic stressor that elicits a robust subjective and physiological stress response. However, it is uncertain whether (or how) stress reactivity habituates to this stressor given that skydiving remains a risky, life-threatening challenge with every jump despite experience. While multiple components of the stress response have been documented, it is unclear whether an individual’s subjective emotions are related to their physiological responses. Documenting coordinated responsivity would lend insight into shared underlying mechanisms for the nature of habituation of both subjective (emotion) and objective (cortisol) stress responses. Therefore, we examined subjective emotion and cortisol responses in first-time compared to experienced skydivers in a predominantly male sample (total n = 44; males = 32, females = 12). Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) revealed that experienced skydivers showed less reactivity and faster recovery compared to first-time skydivers. Subjective emotions were coordinated with physiological responses primarily within first-time skydivers. Pre-jump anxiety predicted cortisol reactivity within first-time, but not experienced, skydivers. Higher post-jump happiness predicted faster cortisol recovery after jumping although this effect overlapped somewhat with the effect of experience. Results suggest that experience may modulate the coordination of emotional response with cortisol reactivity to skydiving. Prior experience does not appear to extinguish the stress response but rather alters the individual’s engagement of the HPA axis.
The metaDESK: models and prototypes for tangible user interfaces

The metaDESK is a user interface platform demonstrating new interaction techniques we call "tangible user inter- faces. " We explore the physical instantiation of interface elements from the graphical user interface paradigm, giving physical form to windows, icons, handles, menus, and controls. The design and implementation of the metaDESK display, sensor, and software architectures is discussed. A prototype application driving an interaction with geographi- cal space, Tangible Geospace, is presented to demonstrate these concepts.
The Sphericity Deviation Score: A Quantitative Radiologic Outcome Measure of Legg-Calvé Perthes Disease Applicable at the Stage of Healing and at Skeletal Maturity

Aim: This study aimed to determine if a new measure of sphericity of the femoral head, the Sphericity Deviation Score (SDS), could be estimated reliably at the stage of healing of Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease (LCPD) and to determine if the SDS at the healing stage reflects the outcome at skeletal maturity. Methods: The SDS was measured with image analysis software on radiographs of 120 children with unilateral LCPD at healing of the disease and at skeletal maturity. The reproducibility of measurement was assessed. SDS values for hips in different Stulberg classes were calculated. On the basis of SDS values at healing of 82 children, a logistic regression model was developed to determine the probability of a good outcome at skeletal maturity. The validity of the model was tested on another 38 children. Results: The SDS values at the stage of healing and at skeletal maturity were comparable. The SDS values were lowest for Stulberg Class I hips and highest for Class IV and V hips. The validated regression model showed a very high probability of a good outcome (Stulberg Class I or II) at skeletal maturity if the SDS at the stage of healing was below 10. Conclusions: A reliable estimate of the outcome of LCPD at skeletal maturity can be made by computing the SDS as soon as the disease heals.