Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Different patient-reported outcomes in immigrants and patients born in Sweden

Background and purpose — Some patients have persistent symptoms after total hip arthroplsty (THA). We investigated whether the proportions of inferior clinical results after total hip arthroplasty—according to the 5 dimensions in the EQ-5D form, and pain and satisfaction according to a visual analog scale (VAS)—are the same in immigrants to Sweden as observed in those born in Sweden. Methods — Records of total hip arthroplasties performed between 1992 and 2007 were retrieved from the Swedish Hip Arthroplasty Register (SHAR) and cross-matched with data from the National Board of Health and Welfare and also Statistics, Sweden. 18,791 operations (1,451 in immigrants, 7.7%) were eligible for analysis. Logistic and linear regression models including age, sex, diagnosis, type of fixation, comorbidity, surgical approach, marital status, and education level were analyzed. Outcomes were the 5 dimensions in EQ-5D, EQ-VAS, VAS pain, and VAS satisfaction. Preoperative data and data from 1 year postoperatively were studied. Results — Preoperatively (and after inclusion of covariates in the regression models), all immigrant groups had more negative interference concerning self-care. Immigrants from the Nordic countries outside Sweden and Europe tended to have more problems with their usual activities and patients from Europe and outside Europe more often reported problems with anxiety/depression. Patients born abroad showed an overall tendency to report more pain on the VAS than patients born in Sweden. After the operation, the immigrant groups reported more problems in all the EQ-5D dimensions. After adjustment for covariates including the preoperative baseline value, most of these differences remained except for pain/discomfort and—concerning immigrants from the Nordic countries—also anxiety/depression. After the operation, pain according to VAS had decreased substantially in all groups. The immigrant groups indicated more pain than those born in Sweden, both before and after adjustment for covariates. Conclusion — The frequency of patients who reported moderate to severe problems, both before and 1 year after the operation, differed for most of the dimensions in EQ-5D between patients born in Sweden and those born outside Sweden.
Radiation cataracts: mechanisms involved in their long delayed occurrence but then rapid progression

Purpose This study was directed to assess the DNA damage and DNA repair response to X-ray inflicted lens oxidative damage and to investigate the subsequent changes in lens epithelial cell (LEC) behavior in vivo that led to long delayed but then rapidly developing cataracts. Methods Two-month-old C57Bl/6 female mice received 11 Grays (Gy) of soft x-irradiation to the head only. The animals’ eyes were examined for cataract status in 30 day intervals by slit lamp over an 11 month period post-irradiation. LEC migration, DNA fragment, free DNA retention, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) presence were established in the living lenses with fluorescent dyes using laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM). The extent and removal of initial LEC DNA damage were determined by comet assay. Immunohistochemistry was used to determine the presence of oxidized DNA and the response of a DNA repair protein in the lenses. Results This treatment resulted in advanced cortical cataracts that developed 5–11 months post-irradiation but then appeared suddenly within a 30 day period. The initially incurred DNA strand breaks were repaired within 30 min, but DNA damage remained as shown 72 h post-irradiation by the presence of the DNA adduct, 8-hydroxyguanosine (8-OHG), and a DNA repair protein, XRCC1. This was followed months later by abnormal behavior by LEC descendant cells with abnormal differentiation and migration patterns as seen with LSCM and fluorescent dyes. Conclusions The sudden development of cortical cataracts several months post-irradiation coupled with the above findings suggests an accumulation of damaged descendants from the initially x-irradiated LECs. As these cells migrate abnormally and leave acellular lens surface sites, eventually a crisis point may arrive for lens entry of environmental O2 with resultant ROS formation that overwhelms protection by resident antioxidant enzymes and results in the coagulation of lens proteins. The events seen in this study indicate the retention and transmission of progenitor cell DNA damage in descendant LEC. The cellular and molecular events parallel those previously reported for LSCM observations in age-related cataracts.
DNA replication by a DNA-membrane complex extracted from Bacillus subtilis: site of initiation in vitro and initiation potential of subcomplexes

A DNA-membrane complex extracted from Bacillus subtilis was studied further as a model system for initiation of bacterial DNA replication in vitro. Of three subcomplexes purified from the crude complex by a combination of CsCl and sucrose gradient centrifugation, the synthetic capability of only one was inhibited significantly by streptovaricin, a known inhibitor of RNA primer formation. A selective enrichment in the level of this subcomplex was obtained by manipulating a thymine-requiring mutant. The synthetic capabilities of an enriched and nonenriched DNA-membrane complex were compared in the presence and absence of streptovaricin. Although the rate and extent of DNA synthesis per unit of protein were approximately the same in the absence of the antibiotic, there was a much greater inhibition of synthesis shown by the enriched complex in the presence of streptovaricin. Although the amount of DNA present in the putative initiation subcomplex was less than 0.3 to 0.4% of the total DNA present in the crude complex, such DNA, except for a few quantitative differences, was still representative of genomic DNA. Newly synthesized DNA hybridized to specific origin- and non-origin-derived restriction fragments of the B. subtilis genome. However, when an elongation inhibitor (ddCTP) was added, hybridization of such DNA to almost all of the nonorigin fragments disappeared or was reduced drastically, whereas origin region hybridization patterns remained strong. The highest level of hybridization in the origin region occurred with a BamHI (B7) restriction fragment of 5.6 kilobases that has been implicated by others as one site initiation in vivo (N. Ogasawara, M. Seiki, and H. Yoshikawa, Nature (London) 281:702-704, 1979; S. J. Seror-Laurent and G. Henckes, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 82:3586-3590, 1985).
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation the Value of Computed Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Diagnose Rhabdomyolysis in Acute Renal Failure

Key words: acute renal failure; antipsychotic agents; history of depression and had been treated with sulpir-computed tomography; magnetic resonance imaging; ide, thioridazine, and biperiden for about 37 years. On neuroleptic malignant syndrome; rhabdomyolysis 13 June 1998 he complained of progressive weakness and fever. On 4 July his sister found him lying on the floor at home with extreme fatigue and inability to move. There was nobody who witnessed him having
Chlorpyrifos Affects Testis and Vas Deferens in the Mangrove Crab, Episesarma tetragonum (Fabricius)

____ Abstract: Accumulation of pesticides in the aquatic system has a high impact on the reproductive physiology of crustaceans. The objective of the present study was to assess the possible ultrastructural effects of chlorpyrifos exposure on testis and Vas deferens in Mangrove crab, Episesarma tetragonum using electron microscopy. The testis of experimental crabs showed atrophied seminiferous epithelia, germinal layer in the seminiferous tubules exhibited severe necrosis, associated with impaired spermatogenesis as well as edema in the interstitial space, and there were less number of spermatozoids in the lumen of the many tubules. The treated vas deferens exhibited destruction in the seminal plasma. Large number of spermatophores got splitted and spermatozoa are scattered, vassal epithelium nucleus got distorted. These clinical manifestations expressed in crabs following the exposure of chlorpyrifos significantly reduce the testicular activity and substantially inhibits the seminal secretions, which ultimately lead to impairment of reproduction.
Trade, skill-biased technical change and wages in Mexican manufacturing

This article looks at the relative importance of competing stories, particularly trade liberalization and skill-biased technical change, to explain changes in the skill premium and the real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in Mexican manufacturing using plant-level data. The channel through which technical change is observed is changes in the domestic price of machinery and equipment due to the availability of new and cheaper machines. The analysis also looks at trade-induced skill-biased technical change by taking into account changes in the price of machinery and equipment caused by changes in the tariff rate specific to machinery and equipment. Instrumental variables, including the price of machinery and equipment in the United States, are used to determine causality between the above effects and wages. Thus, the article provides evidence for some recent findings in the literature that link trade liberalization, skill-biased technical change occurring through technology embodied in machines and increases in the skill premium.
Recommending Social Events from Mobile Phone Location Data

A city offers thousands of social events a day, and it is difficult for dwellers to make choices. The combination of mobile phones and recommender systems can change the way one deals with such abundance. Mobile phones with positioning technology are now widely available, making it easy for people to broadcast their whereabouts, recommender systems can now identify patterns in people’s movements in order to, for example, recommend events. To do so, the system relies on having mobile users who share their attendance at a large number of social events: cold-start users, who have no location history, cannot receive recommendations. We set out to address the mobile cold-start problem by answering the following research question: how can social events be recommended to a cold-start user based only on his home location? To answer this question, we carry out a study of the relationship between preferences for social events and geography, the first of its kind in a large metropolitan area. We sample location estimations of one million mobile phone users in Greater Boston, combine the sample with social events in the same area, and infer the social events attended by 2,519 residents. Upon this data, we test a variety of algorithms for recommending social events. We find that the most effective algorithm recommends events that are popular among residents of an area. The least effective, instead, recommends events that are geographically close to the area. This last result has interesting implications for location-based services that emphasize recommending nearby events.
Consolidating the Effects of Waking and Sleep on Motor-Sequence Learning

Sleep is widely believed to play a critical role in memory consolidation. Sleep-dependent consolidation has been studied extensively in humans using an explicit motor-sequence learning paradigm. In this task, performance has been reported to remain stable across wakefulness and improve significantly after sleep, making motor-sequence learning the definitive example of sleep-dependent enhancement. Recent work, however, has shown that enhancement disappears when the task is modified to reduce task-related inhibition that develops over a training session, thus questioning whether sleep actively consolidates motor learning. Here we use the same motor-sequence task to demonstrate sleep-dependent consolidation for motor-sequence learning and explain the discrepancies in results across studies. We show that when training begins in the morning, motor-sequence performance deteriorates across wakefulness and recovers after sleep, whereas performance remains stable across both sleep and subsequent waking with evening training. This pattern of results challenges an influential model of memory consolidation defined by a time-dependent stabilization phase and a sleep-dependent enhancement phase. Moreover, the present results support a new account of the behavioral effects of waking and sleep on explicit motor-sequence learning that is consistent across a wide range of tasks. These observations indicate that current theories of memory consolidation that have been formulated to explain sleep-dependent performance enhancements are insufficient to explain the range of behavioral changes associated with sleep.
Contraction Properties of VLSI Cooperative Competitive Neural Networks of Spiking Neurons

A non-linear dynamic system is called contracting if initial conditions are forgotten exponentially fast, so that all trajectories converge to a single trajectory. We use contraction theory to derive an upper bound for the strength of recurrent connections that guarantees contraction for complex neural networks. Specifically, we apply this theory to a special class of recurrent networks, often called Cooperative Competitive Networks (CCNs), which are an abstract representation of the cooperative-competitive connectivity observed in cortex. This specific type of network is believed to play a major role in shaping cortical responses and selecting the relevant signal among distractors and noise. In this paper, we analyze contraction of combined CCNs of linear threshold units and verify the results of our analysis in a hybrid analog/digital VLSI CCN comprising spiking neurons and dynamic synapses.
Psychotic symptoms in young people without psychotic illness: mechanisms and meaning

Summary Psychotic symptoms are common in the general population. There is evidence for common mechanisms underlying such symptoms in health and illness (such as the functional role of mesocorticostriatal circuitry in error-dependent learning) and differentiating factors (relating to non-psychotic features of psychotic illness and to social and emotional aspects of psychotic symptoms). Clinicians should be aware that psychotic symptoms in young people are more often associated with common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety than with severe psychotic illness.
Evolution of Mitochondria Reconstructed from the Energy Metabolism of Living Bacteria

The ancestors of mitochondria, or proto-mitochondria, played a crucial role in the evolution of eukaryotic cells and derived from symbiotic α-proteobacteria which merged with other microorganisms - the basis of the widely accepted endosymbiotic theory. However, the identity and relatives of proto-mitochondria remain elusive. Here we show that methylotrophic α-proteobacteria could be the closest living models for mitochondrial ancestors. We reached this conclusion after reconstructing the possible evolutionary pathways of the bioenergy systems of proto-mitochondria with a genomic survey of extant α-proteobacteria. Results obtained with complementary molecular and genetic analyses of diverse bioenergetic proteins converge in indicating the pathway stemming from methylotrophic bacteria as the most probable route of mitochondrial evolution. Contrary to other α-proteobacteria, methylotrophs show transition forms for the bioenergetic systems analysed. Our approach of focusing on these bioenergetic systems overcomes the phylogenetic impasse that has previously complicated the search for mitochondrial ancestors. Moreover, our results provide a new perspective for experimentally re-evolving mitochondria from extant bacteria and in the future produce synthetic mitochondria.
Asymmetry of the El Nino-Spring Rainfall Relationship in Taiwan

Spring rainfall in Taiwan can be either enhanced or suppressed by an El Nino event, revealing an asymmetric relationship. This observational study aims at examining this asymmetric relationship and associated large-scale dynamic processes. Analysis results disclose four major El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-spring rainfall relationship types during 1950-2003: El Nino-anomalous wet (EN-w) type, La Nina-anomalous dry (LN-d) type, El Nino-anomalous dry (EN-d) type, and La Nina-anomalous wet (LN-w) type. The EN-w and LN-d (EN-d and LN-w) types exhibit a positive (negative) correlation between the spring rainfall anomaly and the ENSO-related sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA). The overall ENSO-spring rainfall relationship is dominated by the positive correlation. The cause of the asymmetric ENSO impacts between the positive- and negative-correlation groups is attributed to a connection between ENSO and the Indian Ocean (IO) SSTA and associated large-scale atmospheric circulation. The positive-correlation types tend to concur with an evident ENSO-IO connection, featuring significant in-phase SSTA centers in the tropical eastern Pacific and eastern IO. During the El Nino (La Nina) event, these SST anomalies force a descending (ascending) branch over the western Pacific and help initiate and maintain a lower-level anticyclone (cyclone) anomaly in the Philippine Sea (southeast of Taiwan). Flows west of this anomalous anticyclone (cyclone) enhance (suppress) moisture transport from the South China Sea into Taiwan, resulting in increased (decreased) spring rainfall. For the negative-correlation types, the ENSO-IO connection tends to be weak or broken. The significant SSTA appears only in the tropical eastern Pacific, which induces a major vertical motion branch over the maritime continent. As a result, an anomalous lower-level anticyclone (cyclone) occurs over the Asian continent (west of Taiwan) during the El Nino (La Nina) event. Flows east of this anomalous anticyclone (cyclone) weaken (strengthen) moisture transport from the South China Sea into Taiwan, leading to suppressed (enhanced) spring rainfall. It is also noted that the variability of the Pacific subtropical high (PSH) over the western Pacific is closely linked to these four relationship types. The EN-d (LN-w) type concurs with a moderate westward expansion (eastward retreat) in the western-Pacific sector, while the EN-w (LN-d) type is concurrent with a southward (great eastward) displacement.
OPERATIONAL METHOD FOR THE SOLUTION OF FRACTIONAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS WITH GENERALIZED RIEMANN-LIOUVILLE FRACTIONAL DERIVATIVES

The operational calculus is an algorithmic approach for the solution of initial-value problems for difierential, integral, and integro-difierential equations. In this paper, an operational calculus of the Mikusinski type for a generalized Riemann-Liouville fractional difierential operator with types introduced by one of the authors is developed. The traditional Riemann- Liouville and Liouville-Caputo fractional derivatives correspond to particu- lar types of the general one-parameter family of fractional derivatives with the same order. The operational calculus constructed in this paper is used to solve the corresponding initial value problem for the general n-term lin- ear equation with these generalized fractional derivatives of arbitrary orders and types with constant coe-cients. Special cases of the obtained solutions are presented.
Targeting the Epigenome with Bioactive Food Components for Cancer Prevention

Epigenetic processes participate in cancer development and likely influence cancer prevention. Global DNA hypomethylation, gene promoter hypermethylation and aberrant histone post-translational modifications are hallmarks of neoplastic cells which have been associated with genomic instability and altered gene expression. Because epigenetic deregulation occurs early in carcinogenesis and is potentially reversible, intervention strategies targeting the epigenome have been proposed for cancer prevention. Bioactive food components (BFCs) with anticancer potential, including folate, polyphenols, selenium, retinoids, fatty acids, isothiocyanates and allyl compounds, influence DNA methylation and histone modification processes. Such activities have been shown to affect the expression of genes involved in cell proliferation, death and differentiation that are frequently altered in cancer. Although the epigenome represents a promising target for cancer prevention with BFCs, few studies have addressed the influence of dietary components on these mechanisms in vivo, particularly on the phenotype of humans, and thus the exact mechanisms whereby diet mediates an effect on cancer prevention remains unclear. Primary factors that should be elucidated include the effective doses and dose timing of BFCs to attain epigenetic effects. Because diet-epigenome interactions are likely to occur in utero, the impact of early-life nutrition on cancer risk programming should be further investigated.
Effects of hypercapnia on T cells in lung ischemia/reperfusion injury after lung transplantation

T cells play a key role in lung ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI). Hypercapnia has been indicated to decrease IRI and inhibit immunity. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of hypercapnia on T cells during lung IRI and to identify the underlying mechanism of these effects. In the in vivo study, rat recipients of lung transplants were randomized into a control group M and a hypercapnia group H. Peripheral blood T cells and cytokines were analyzed during reperfusion. In the in vitro study, we analyzed the T cells and cytokine levels in culture media from phytohemagglutinin-stimulated T cells from normal rats, stimulated under the normal (group C), hypercapnic (group H), or buffer hypercapnic (group BH) condition. In the in vivo study, the CD3+/CD4+ T-cell ratio and interleukin (IL)-2, IL-8, interferon (IFN)-γ, intracellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1, and P-selectin levels were decreased, but the IL-4 and IL-10 levels were increased, after reperfusion in group H compared to group M. In the in vitro study, groups H and BH exhibited a decreased CD2+/CD28+ ratio and IL-2 and IFN-γ levels, but elevated IL-4 and IL-10 levels, compared to group C. The CD2+/CD28+ ratio was not different between groups BH and H; however, group H evidenced a lower IL-2 level and higher IL-4 and IL-10 levels compared to group BH. Hypercapnia decreased the CD3+/CD4+ T-cell ratio and pro-inflammatory cytokine levels, but promoted anti-inflammatory factors in lung IRI. Hypercapnia inhibits CD2 and CD28 in T cells by CO2 and modulates T-cell cytokines via acidosis.
DEPRIVATION OF PARADOXICAL SLEEP AND BRAIN GLYCOGEN

Abstract— Rats deprived of paradoxical sleep (PS) for 72 hr showed a considerable fall of total glycogen in the subcortex and caudal brain stem. No important changes were discovered in the parts of the cerebral cortex which were examined. The stress of the experimental technique of PS deprivation did not lead to significant changes in glycogen content in any of the structures examined. It was concluded that changes in glycogen content corresponded specifically to PS deprivation stress.
Survival of microvascular free flaps in mandibular reconstruction: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

Free tissue transfer is commonly used in the reconstruction of post‐ablative defects of the mandible. Due to lack of statistical power, comparing the survival of various free flaps, even in large studies, is challenging. The purpose of this study was to perform a meta‐analysis comparing the survival of the most commonly used free flaps for mandibular reconstruction.