Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tolerance of mycophenolate mofetil in end-stage renal disease patients with ANCA-associated vasculitis.

BACKGROUND Mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) has been used successfully in patients with ANCA-associated vasculitis as maintenance therapy. Only transient and moderate side effects have been reported with a daily dose of 2 g. Since all the treated patients who have been reported so far had no or only moderate renal insufficiency when MMF was initiated, no data are available regarding side effects in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). METHODS Five ESRD patients with ANCA-associated vasculitis and a relapsing course of their disease were treated. All patients had pretreatment with cyclophosphamide for at least 17 months. MMF was initiated as a remission maintenance therapy, and started with a dose of 1 g/d. The aim was to increase the MMF dose to 2 g/d. Blood counts, liver enzymes and gastrointestinal side effects were monitored. RESULTS Four patients developed severe anemia, 2 requiring blood transfusion with permanent or temporary cessation of MMF treatment. One patient developed leukopenia. Gastrointestinal symptoms led to a dose reduction to 1 g/d (n = 2) or cessation of treatment (n = 1). Three patients remained on longer MMF treatment; however, their daily dose did not exceed 1 g. CONCLUSION MMF, a promising drug regarding maintenance therapy in ANCA-associated vasculitis, seems to have more side effects in ESRD patients, leading to dose reduction or even cessation of treatment. Therefore, in this patient group a lower dose and closer monitoring for side effects seems to be required compared to patients with no or moderate renal insufficiency.
Investigating the Primate Prefrontal Cortex Correlates of Cognitive Deficits In the Ketamine Model of Schizophrenia

The World Health Organization has classified schizophrenia as one of the five leading causes of disability worldwide. Afflicting almost 1% of the world’s population, the disease’s greatest impact stems from its reduction in patients’ cognitive faculties. In order to better study these impairments, a pharmacological model has been developed using the NMDA antagonist, ketamine. This disease model successfully recreates the cognitive dysfunction of schizophrenia, allowing researchers to search for associated electrophysiological changes. In this project I examined the behavioural and neurophysiological effects of ketamine on non-human primates performing the anti-saccade task. Success in this task requires a degree of cognitive control over behaviour and previous studies have described poor performance in both patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls administered ketamine. Our intracranial recordings are localized in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region associated with many of the cognitive functions impaired in schizophrenia. The first study shows that neurons in the PFC exhibit selectivity for the task rule. This rule selectivity is lost after ketamine administration due to an indiscriminate increase in the neuronal firing rate. These changes were also associated with an increased error rate and longer reaction times. The second study shows that neurons in the PFC are also sensitive to the outcome of the trial, firing more for either correct or erroneous responses. Once again, selectivity is lost following ketamine administration and the neurons show increased, nonspecific activity. Lastly, we recorded the local field potential of the PFC and found changes in the oscillatory patterns during the anti-saccade task. Prior to ketamine there was a significantly stronger beta-band activity after correct trials compared to error trials, but this selective activity was lost due to an overall decrease in the outcome selective oscillatory events. These findings show that ketamine’s effect on the PFC is one of selectivity reduction. Patients with schizophrenia have been shown to require increased PFC activity but only reach moderate performance levels in cognitive challenges. It is possible that their brains suffer the same changes highlighted in this research. Although the signals are still present in their PFC, they are being lost amongst the noise.
Reach out to enhance wellness home-based diet-exercise intervention promotes reproducible and sustainable long-term improvements in health behaviors, body weight, and physical functioning in older, overweight/obese cancer survivors.

PURPOSE Diet and exercise interventions have been tested in cancer survivors as a means to reduce late effects and comorbidity, but few have assessed adherence and health outcomes long term. METHODS Between July 2005 and May 2007, the Reach Out to Enhance Wellness (RENEW) trial accrued 641 locoregionally staged, long-term (≥ 5 years from diagnosis) colorectal, breast, and prostate cancer survivors in the United States (21 states), Canada, and the United Kingdom. All participants were sedentary (< 150 minutes of physical activity [PA] a week), overweight or obese (body mass index, 25 to 40 kg/m(2)), and over age 65 years. The trial tested a diet-exercise intervention delivered via mailed print materials and telephone counseling. RENEW used a wait-list control, cross-over design (ie, participants received the year-long intervention immediately or after a 1-year delay), which allowed the opportunity to assess program efficacy (previously reported primary outcome), durability, and reproducibility (reported herein). Measures included diet quality (DQ), PA, BMI, and physical function (PF). RESULTS No significant relapse was observed in the immediate-intervention arm for DQ, PA, and BMI; however, rates of functional decline increased when the intervention ceased. From year 1 to year 2, significant improvements were observed in the delayed-intervention arm; mean change scores in behaviors and BMI and PF slopes were as follows: DQ score, 5.2 (95% CI, 3.4 to 7.0); PA, 45.8 min/wk (95% CI, 26.9 to 64.6 min/wk); BMI, -0.56 (95% CI, -0.75 to -0.36); and Short Form-36 PF, -1.02 versus -5.52 (P < .001 for all measures). Overall, both arms experienced significant improvements in DQ, PA, and BMI from baseline to 2-year follow-up (P < .001). CONCLUSION Older cancer survivors respond favorably to lifestyle interventions and make durable changes in DQ and PA that contribute to sustained weight loss. These changes positively reorient functional decline trajectories during intervention delivery.
Computability and Evolutionary Complexity: Markets as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)

A method and apparatus for simultaneously developing and transferring a liquid toner image. The method includes the steps of moving a photoreceptor including a charge bearing surface having a first electrical potential, applying a uniform layer of charge having a second electrical potential onto the charge bearing surface, and imagewise dissipating charge from selected portions on the charge bearing surface to form a latent image electrostatically, such that the charge-dissipated portions of the charge bearing surface have the first electrical potential of the charge bearing surface. The method also includes the steps of moving an intermediate transfer member biased to a third electrical potential that lies between said first and said second potentials, into a nip forming relationship with the moving imaging member to form a process nip. The method further includes the step of introducing charged liquid toner, having a fourth electrical potential, into the process nip, such that liquid toner sandwiched within the nip simultaneously develops image portions of the latent image onto the intermediate transfer member, and background portions of the latent image onto the charge bearing surface of the photoreceptor.
Mapping burned areas from Landsat TM imags: A comparative study

Remote sensing is a major source of mapping the burned area caused by forest fire. The focus in this application is to map a single class of interest, i.e. burned area. In this study, three different data combinations were classified using different classifiers and quantitatively compared. The adopted classifiers are the Support Vector Data Descriptor (SVDD), a one-class classifier, the Binary Support Vector Machines (SVMs) classifier and the traditional Maximum Likelihood classifier (ML). At first, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to extract the best possible features form the original multispectral image (OMI) and calculated spectral indices (SI). Then the resulting subset of features was applied in the classification process. The comparative study has undertaken to find firstly, the best possible set of features (data combination) and secondly, an effective classifier to map the burned areas. Experimental results indicate that the best possible set of features was attained by data combination-III (i.e., combining SI and OMI information) in the study area. Furthermore, the results of the SVM showed the higher classification accuracies than the ML, but approximately equivalent to the SVDD, which only requires training samples from the class of interest. Experimental results also demonstrate that even though the SVDD for mapping the burned areas doesn't showed the higher classification accuracy than the SVM, but it shows the suitability for the cases with few or poorly represented labeled samples available. The parameters should be further optimized through the use of intelligent training for improving the accuracy of the SVDD.
Improving Physical Layer Security of AF Relay Networks via Beam-Forming and Jamming

In this paper the cooperation of beam-forming and artificial noise (AN) in two-hop amplify-and- forward (AF) relaying system is proposed to enhance the security. we consider a half duplex AF relaying network with a multi-antenna source node and a destination in the presence of a passive eavesdropper.Since channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper is unknown, the AN transmitted by the source in the first phase and by the relays in the second phase is in all directions except the legitimate node one. As such two scenarios are considered here,: i) when all the relays amplify and forward the information source signal ii) when only the best relay is selected to amplify and forward the information source signal. The beam-former weights and the power allocation are obtained by solving an optimization problem. Results reveal that the proposed system can provide considerable improvements in terms of secrecy rate. It is also found that increasing the AN power, relative to the information signal power, will further improve the secrecy rate.
Depression, anxiety and stress among patients with diabetes in primary care: A cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND The incidence of diabetes mellitus is ever increasing. Individuals with diabetes mellitus may have concurrent mental health disorders and are shown to have poorer disease outcomes. The objectives of this study were to determine the prevalence of depression, anxiety and stress (DAS) in diabetes patients aged 20 years or more in the primary care setting. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study involving the use of self-administered questionnaire conducted in eight primary care private and government clinics in Pulau Pinang and Melaka, Malaysia. The validated DASS-21 questionnaire was used as a screening tool for the symptoms of DAS. Prior permission was obtained from the patients and, clearance from ethical committee was obtained before the start of the study. Data analysis was done using SPSS statistical software. RESULTS A total of 320 patients with diabetes from eight centres were enrolled via convenience sampling. Sample size was calculated using the Kish's formula. The prevalence of DAS among patients with diabetes from our study was 26.6%, 40% and 19.4%, respectively. Depression was found to be significantly associated with marital status and family history of DAS; anxiety was significantly associated with monthly household income, presence of co-morbidities and family history of DAS; and stress was significantly associated with occupation and family history of DAS. CONCLUSION The prevalence of DAS was higher in patients with diabetes compared with the general community. We recommend to routinely screen all patients with diabetes using the DASS-21 questionnaire because it is easy to perform and inexpensive.
Effectiveness of social competence promotion on disruptive behavior: A quantitative review

A meta-analysis was conducted that examined the effects of both incorporating parents as treatment agents and involving a varying number of treatment agents in social-skills programs with 2,693 children displaying disruptive behavior. Children participated in social-skills training that included different combinations of treatment agents including clinicians, teachers, parents, and peers. Results indicated that programs incorporating a parent component and those not including parents as treatment agents both increased participants' social competence post-treatment. No evidence was found, however, that incorporating a parent component in programs increased treatment benefits. Social-skills training incorporating various combinations of one, two, three, and four treatment agents were all effective in improving participants' social competence, but there was no evidence that increasing the number of treatment agents had any effect on treatment outcome. Various follow-up analyses were conducted. No relationship was found between duration for which children participated in the social-skills program and treatment efficacy. Additionally, results showed that participant characteristics such as age, gender and ethnicity were not predictive of post-treatment social competence levels. Also, analogue, observation, and sociometric outcome measures revealed increases in participants' social competence after social-skills training whereas rating scales did not show increases in individuals' social competence after treatment. Overall, participants, teachers, clinicians, and peers all indicated increases in social competence post-treatment. In contrast, parents did not perceive reliable increases in their children's social competence after social-skills training. Strengths and limitations of the current study and directions for future research are addressed. Acknowledgements I thank Dr. W. Grant Willis, chairman of my dissertation committee , for his guidance and instruction throughout this research. His insight and patient mentoring were instrumental in helping me conduct this study. Moreover , his expertise , encouragement , flexibility and support from the conception to completion of this project were notable. I feel fortunate to have been edified by Dr. Joseph Rossi's feedback and wisdom, and so I thank him for sharing his years of experience with statistical analyses of data. I am greatly indebted to him for ensuring that my research is "cutting edge. " In particular , his input regarding partitioning outcome measures according to type of outcome measure used to collect preand post-treatment data was insightful . In addition , I thank my committee member Dr. Karen McCurdy for her professional interest in my research . She played an important role in shaping this research into a far more interesting project than initially presented to her. Her ability to understand the heart of this study and to guide the development of the initial hypothesis was . 1mpress1ve.
Regressions and transgressions of the Baltic basin reflected by a new high‐resolution deglacial and postglacial lithostratigraphy for Arkona Basin sediments (western Baltic Sea)

Seismoacoustic profiles from the Arkona Basin show a late Pleistocene and Holocene succession of several distinct reflectors. The physical, sedimentological, mineralogical and geochemical properties of more than 30 sediment cores were analysed in order to assign these reflectors to specific sedimentary discontinuity layers. Additionally, AMS 14C data and biostratigraphic information were gathered. Based on this multi‐proxy approach, seven lithostratigraphic units (AI, AII, B to F) were distinguished. These consist of fine‐grained clay, silt and mud, and are separated from each other by thin basin‐wide traceable sandy layers (Sab‐Sef). The most sensitive parameter to mark the lithostratigraphic boundaries is the weight percentage of the grain‐size fraction >63μm. In addition, some of the quartz‐grain‐dominated sandy layers cause the strong reflection lines recorded in seismoacoustic profiles. The sandy layers are interpreted to reflect enhanced hydrodynamic energy induced by episodes of basin‐wide water‐level low‐stand conditions. These low stands resulted from water‐level drops that occurred frequently during the Baltic Sea's history and presumably affected the entire Baltic basin. The thick fine‐grained units AI, AII to F, in which coarser material is absent, represent water‐level high‐stands. We conclude that the units AI and AII are Baltic Ice Lake sediments deposited before and after the Billingen‐1 regression, respectively. We assign the most prominent sandy layer Sab to the final drainage of the Baltic Ice Lake (Billingen‐2), whereas the sandy layers between units B, C. , D and E are related to the Yoldia Sea and Ancylus Lake regressions of the Baltic Sea's history. The uppermost fine‐grained unit F with its high organic carbon content contains marine sediments deposited after the Littorina Transgression. The macroscopically well‐visible sediment colour change from reddish/brown‐to‐grey, previously interpreted as a regional stratigraphic boundary, varies from core to core. It has been shown by our new data that this colour change has a diagenetic origin, and thus does not represent a stratigraphic boundary. Previous subdivisions therefore have to be revised.
The Investigation of Fatal Falls and Jumps from Heights in Maryland (1987–1992)

This study is a retrospective analysis of 139 cases of falls and/or jumps from heights, examined at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland during the 6-year period from 1987 through 1992. A total of 56 individuals (40%) committed suicide by jumping from heights and 72 (52%) fell accidentally. Of the 72 accidental falls, 36 (50%) were work related. Two cases involved victims of homicide and the causes in nine cases remain undetermined. Of the 139 cases examined, 89 individuals (64%) fell or jumped from buildings, 29 (21%) from bridges, 15 (11%) from ladders, and 6 (4%) from trees or electric poles. Of the 29 individuals who fell or jumped from bridges, 14 went into water. Falls and jumps most often involved whites (78%) and males (82%). Their ages ranged from 4 to 83 years, with the majority in their 20s and 30s. Of the 124 people who fell or jumped from heights and landed on the ground, the head was the most frequently injured body region (70%), followed by the chest (66%), the abdomen (48%), extremities (28%), and the neck (19%). Of the 124 victims who landed on the ground, 63 sustained lethal injuries involving multiple organs. In contrast with ground impacts, water impact injuries were much less severe. Five of the 14 victims who jumped from bridges into water were relatively uninjured and died from drowning even though they jumped from heights of 100–200 feet (30–60 m). Specific issues related to the investigation of those work-related falls and falls from heights and impact with water, together with epidemiologic considerations of all of the deaths from falls and jumps, are presented.
Sequential Belief Revision in Auditing

Five experiments that examined sequential belief revision in simplified auditing contexts are reported. The results suggest that auditors' belief revisions depend on both the order in which evidence is received and the manner in which it is presented, and they provide preliminary insights into auditors' "attitudes" toward evidence. The results also suggest that audit judgment may differ from judgment in general in two ways. First, the subjects were "prone" to revise their beliefs when new evidence was received, while the behavioral decision theory literature suggests that persons in general tend to "avoid" new evidence. Second, the subjects revised their beliefs to a greater extent when they received evidence that tended to disconfirm their current beliefs, whereas the literature suggests that persons in general are more strongly influenced by confirming evidence. T HIS paper reports the initial tests of a new descriptive model of belief revision that may have important implications for auditing research and practice. The model-proposed recently by Einhorn and Hogarth [1985]-has three features which make it particularly useful in audit settings: (1) it posits a sequential belief revision process, which is consistent with existing characterizations of audit judgment by auditing researchers and practitioners; (2) it predicts that belief revision is influenced by both the order in which evidence is received and the manner in which it is presented, which may have implications for the conduct of an audit; and (3) it offers insights into auditors' "attitudes" toward evidence and the effects of such attitudes on belief revision, which may have implications for audit training and for understanding the nature of audit expertise. Thus, the insights provided by applying the model to sequential belief revisions by auditors may have implications for audit efficiency and effectiveness. The sequential nature of audit judgment is emphasized by both researchers and practitioners. For example, Kinney's [1975] normative treatment of decisions involving control system reliance, audit testing, and choice of opinion relies on the sequential nature of those activities, as does the Tomassini et al. [1982] deSupport provided by the Accounting Center Fund and the Arthur Andersen Fund at Duke University is gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful to participants in workshops at the University of Alberta, the University of Michigan, Duke University, Cornell University, and Ohio State University, as well as to Robin Keller for many useful comments. We are especially grateful to Mike Gibbins who, in addition to providing substantive comments, administered the experiments to the auditors. Alison Hubbard Ashton is an Associate Professor, and Robert H. Ashton is a Professor, both at Duke University. Manuscript received November 1987. Revision received May 1988. Accepted May 1988.
Bordetella trematum bacteremia in an infant: A cause to look for

Bordetella trematum spp. nov. has been isolated from wounds, ear infections and diabetic ulcers. We report a case of a 7-month-old infant with fever, vomiting and abnormal body movements with bacteremia caused by this novel species. The infant responded to fluoroquinolone and macrolide combination therapy.