Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of residual kidney function and convective volume on change in beta2-microglobulin levels in hemodiafiltration patients.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Removal of beta2-microglobulin (beta2M) can be increased by adding convective transport to hemodialysis (HD). The aim of this study was to investigate the change in beta2M levels after 6-mo treatment with hemodiafiltration (HDF) and to evaluate the role of residual kidney function (RKF) and the amount of convective volume with this change. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Predialysis serum beta2M levels were evaluated in 230 patients with and 176 patients without RKF from the CONvective TRAnsport STudy (CONTRAST) at baseline and 6 mo after randomization for online HDF or low-flux HD. In HDF patients, potential determinants of change in beta2M were analyzed using multivariable linear regression models. RESULTS Mean serum beta2M levels decreased from 29.5 +/- 0.8 (+/-SEM) at baseline to 24.3 +/- 0.6 mg/L after 6 mo in HDF patients and increased from 31.9 +/- 0.9 to 34.4 +/- 1.0 mg/L in HD patients, with the difference of change between treatment groups being statistically significant (regression coefficient -7.7 mg/L, 95% confidence interval -9.5 to -5.6, P < 0.001). This difference was more pronounced in patients without RKF as compared with patients with RKF. In HDF patients, beta2M levels remained unchanged in patients with GFR >4.2 ml/min/1.73 m2. The beta2M decrease was not related to convective volume. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrated effective lowering of beta2M levels by HDF, especially in patients without RKF. The role of the amount of convective volume on beta2M decrease appears limited, possibly because of resistance to beta2M transfer between body compartments.
Human birthweight evolution across contrasting environments

We explore from both theoretical and empirical perspectives the hypothesis that a significant part of the worldwide variability in human birthweight results from adaptive responses to local selective pressures. We first developed an agent‐based model to simulate the process of evolutionary selection on life history strategy, and then we performed a comparative analysis across 89 countries worldwide. The model illustrates that optimal birthweight depends on which fitness‐reducing risk locally predominates (somatic diseases, parasitic diseases or adverse environmental conditions). When fitness variations between individuals mainly result from somatic diseases (e.g. industrialized countries), or conversely from infectious and parasitic diseases (e.g. developing countries), selection is expected to favour individuals producing larger children. Conversely, when environmental risks increase in relative importance, selective pressures for producing children with high birthweight are reduced. The comparative analysis supports these theoretical expectations, in particular the finding that birthweight is higher than predicted in highly parasitized countries.
Assessment of Allergenic Activity of a Heat-Coagulated Ovalbumin after in Vivo Digestion

We often eat heat-coagulated (H-C) food proteins, but there have been few studies on the allergenic activity of H-C proteins after digestion and absorption in vivo. To show that H-C protein is not an allergen after digestion, mice were used to investigate the digestion and absorption of the protein through the intestinal epithelium into portal blood employing immunoblotting and competitive inhibition ELISA. Ovalbumin (OVA) was used as the model protein, and H-C OVA was prepared by heating a 5% OVA solution for 15 min in boiling water. Antigenic OVA was not detected in the soluble fraction of gastrointestinal contents or the portal blood of mice administered H-C OVA. Also, voluntary physical activities, as an assessment of anaphylaxis, were monitored for 15 h using OVA sensitized mice. Compared to the voluntary physical activities of sensitized mice without any load, no decrease in activity was observed in the group administered H-C OVA, but a significant decrease in activity was found in the mice administered unheated OVA. These results strongly indicate that H-C OVA does not retain allergenic properties.
Viewers' Sensitivity to Abstract Event Structure

Bounded and unbounded events differ in whether they include an inherent endpoint (Bach, 1986). Even though this distinction can be important for the way events are identified and processed, the literature on event cognition has not focused on such abstract aspects of event structure. In the present study, we asked whether viewers are sensitive to the distinction between bounded and unbounded events in a category learning task. Our results show that people were more successful in forming the category of bounded events than that of unbounded events. We discuss implications of this finding for event cognition.
Biological Limits of Gender Construction

A biosocial theory of gender is constructed on both the macro and micro levels. A micro-model of within-sex differences among females integrates the biological model current in primatology with the prevailing social science model. It shows how sex differences in hormone experience from gestation to adulthood shape gendered behavior (that is, behavior that differs by sex). On the macro level, this model also illustrates how socialization and environment shape gendered behavior. It then demonstrates how hormone experiences can facilitate or dampen the effects of socialization and environment on gendered behavior. Data are from a sample of women who were studied from before they were born to the end of their third decade. I speculate about the constraints placed by biology on the social reconstruction of gender.
Block-Level Unitary Query: Enabling Orthogonal-Like Space-Time Code With Query Diversity for MIMO Backscatter RFID

Future backscatter RFID systems are required to be more reliable and data intensive for emerging fields such as Internet of Things (IoT). Motivated by this, orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC), which is very successful in mobile communications for its low complexity and high performance, has already been investigated for MIMO backscatter RFID. Also a recently proposed scheme called unitary query was shown to be able to considerably improve the reliability of MIMO backscatter RFID by exploiting query diversity. Therefore, incorporating the classical OSTBC (at the tag end) with the unitary query (at the query end) seems promising. However, in this paper, we first show that simple direct employment of OSTBC together with unitary query incurs a linear decoding problem and eventually leads to severe performance degradation. As a redesign of the unitary query idea and the classical OSTBC specifically for MIMO backscatter RFID, we present a BUTQ-mOSTBC design pair idea by proposing the block-level unitary query (BUTQ) at the query end and the corresponding modified OSTBC (mOSTBC) at the tag end. The proposed BUTQ-mOSTBC can resolve the linear decoding problem, keep the simplicity and high performance properties of the classical OSTBC, and achieve the query diversity for the MIMO backscatter RFID.
Early Cortical Distinction between Memories that Pertain to Ongoing Reality and Memories that Don't

Patients with anterior limbic lesions, in particular of the posterior orbitofrontal cortex, often act on the basis of memories that do not relate to ongoing reality and justify their behavior with invented stories that can mostly be traced back to real events (spontaneous confabulation). Recent studies demonstrated that the patients fail to suppress activated memory traces that do not pertain to ongoing reality. In the present study, we used a similar paradigm and high-resolution event-related potentials to explore when this suppression happens. Healthy subjects made two runs of a continuous recognition task, composed of the same set of pictures, and were requested to indicate picture recurrences only within the ongoing run. Thus, performance in the first run depends on new learning, whereas the second run requires the ability to realize whether a picture is solely familiar from its occurrence in the previous run ('distracter') or whether it has already appeared in the ongoing second run ('target'). We find that correct rejection (suppression) of currently irrelevant pictures (distracters of run 2) is associated with absent negative deflection of a frontal potential and absence of a specific cortical potential map configuration after 220-300 ms. By contrast, learning and recognition of repeatedly presented information is associated with cortical amplitude modulation after 400-480 ms. These findings indicate that by the time the content of a mental association is recognized and consolidated, its cortical representation has already been adjusted according to whether it relates to ongoing reality or not. This sequence may also explain the ability to distinguish between the memory of a true event and the memory of a thought.
Prehypertension and Chronic Kidney Disease in Chinese Population: Four-Year Follow-Up Study

Hypertension is a well established cause of chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, the effect of prehypertension on risk of CKD is controversial. The aim of this study is to determine whether prehypertension increases the risk of CKD events in the Chinese population. We enrolled 20,034 with prehypertension and 12,351 with ideal blood pressure in this prospective study. CKD was defined as an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) <60 ml/min 1.73m2. The new occurrences of CKD events were collected during follow-up. Cumulative survival and freedom for the occurrence of new CKD events was analyzed using the Kaplan-Meier approach. Multivariate Cox Regression was used to analyze the effect of prehypertension on CKD. The median follow-up time was 47 (interquartile range 44–51) months. 601 new onset CKD events occurred during the follow-up period. The cumulative incidence of new CKD events was higher in the prehypertensive population than that in the ideal blood pressure population (2.10% vs 1.46%, P = 0.0001). Multivariate Cox Regression showed that relative risks (RRs) for the new onset CKD events in the prehypertensive population were 1.69 (95% confidence intervals (CI): 1.41~2.04, P = 0.001) higher than those in the ideal blood pressure population. Similarly, the risks were 1.68 (95% CI: 1.33~2.13 P = 0.001) times higher in females and 2.14 (95% CI: 1.58~2.91 P = 0.001) times higher in males by adjustment for traditional CV risk factors. Our findings demonstrated prehypertension is an independent risk factor for the occurrence of new CKD events in the Chinese population.
Endomicroscopy Will Track Injected Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Rat Colitis Models

Background:Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have demonstrated significant potentials for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. Clinical feasible methods to individually document the MSC recruitment to intestinal mucosa is lacking. Here, we proposed that endomicroscopy could noninvasively track MSCs in vivo at cellular resolution. Method:Isolated Sprague Dawley rat MSC was characterized, fluorescently labeled, and imaged ex vivo using an endomicroscope. Then enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP)-labeled MSC was tracked in vivo, and acquired images were compared with immunofluorescence, immunohistology, and fluorescent in situ hybridization results. Results:Endomicroscopy visualized clearly the eGFP-labeled or carboxyfluorescein succinimidyl ester–stained MSC ex vivo. Endomicroscopy using the FIVE1 system could track eGFP-labeled MSC with distinct in vivo features. Immunofluorescence, immunohistochemistry, and fluorescent in situ hybridization confirmed the presence of eGFP-positive cells. In vivo endomicroscopy could quantify the transplanted MSCs that homed to colonic mucosa of the recipient rat in multiple models, including the rat-to-rat allograft, human-to-rat xenograft, hypoxia-induced MSC, and busulfan immunosuppressed recipient rat models. After hypoxia induction, there was a trend of enhanced rat MSC homing to the inflamed mucosa as visualized by endomicroscopy (114.1 in hypoxia group versus 34.3 in other 3 groups combined, t = 2.14, P = 0.0644). Conclusions:Endomicroscopy is a novel and promising tool to track transplanted MSCs to the colonic mucosa. This clinical available noninvasive cellular tracking method may provide new insight to individualize each recipient's regimen in the future.
Coupled Group Lasso for Web-Scale CTR Prediction in Display Advertising

In display advertising, click through rate (CTR) prediction is the problem of estimating the probability that an advertisement (ad) is clicked when displayed to a user in a specific context. Due to its easy implementation and promising performance, logistic regression (LR) model has been widely used for CTR prediction, especially in industrial systems. However, it is not easy for LR to capture the nonlinear information, such as the conjunction information, from user features and ad features. In this paper, we propose a novel model, called coupled group lasso (CGL), for CTR prediction in display advertising. CGL can seamlessly integrate the conjunction information from user features and ad features for modeling. Furthermore, CGL can automatically eliminate useless features for both users and ads, which may facilitate fast online prediction. Scalability of CGL is ensured through feature hashing and distributed implementation. Experimental results on real-world data sets show that our CGL model can achieve state-of-the-art performance on webscale CTR prediction tasks.
Recurrent abdominal pain and Helicobacter pylori infection in children.

UNLABELLED Recurrent chronic upper abdominal pain is a common problem in children and it has been associated with Helicobacter Pylori gastritis. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES We under took this study, to find out the prevalence of Helicobacter pylori gastritis in children with recurrent chronic upper abdominal pain, in our set up. MATERIAL AND METHODS This was prospective study carried out at KRL Hospital, Islamabad. Forty three children with chronic recurrent upper abdominal pain (age 3 to 14 years), underwent diagnostic gastroscopy and antral biopsies with histopathology, over a period of one year. Another 42 children of the same age group were taken as control group. Fifteen patients, who tested positive for H. pylori were tested for IgG antibodies in whole blood and compared with 15 patients having negative histology for H. pylori. RESULTS Thirty two (75%) children tested positive for H. pylori, in the test group, as compared to 17 (40%) histological positives in the control group (P = < 0.1). The patients who were tested for IgG antibodies showed that this test has 93% sensitivity, 60% specificity and a negative predictive value of 90% as compared to histological identification. CONCLUSION Recurrent chronic upper abdominal pain in children, in our population has a significant association with Helicobacter pylori gastritis. Testing of IgG antibodies for H. pylori in whole blood can be used as initial, non invasive screening test for this organism.
FUNCTIONAL NEUROIMAGING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

The search for a biological basis of schizophrenia includes a long chapter in which alterations in the characteristics and localization of neural activity are the focus. It is in this arena that functional neuroimaging has had the broadest application and greatest impact in psychiatry. This now extensive body of work has left no doubt that schizophrenia is associated with measurable, objective signs of altered brain function, and clinical and pathophysiologic correlations have begun to emerge. Certain cerebral concomitants of this illness have been consistently demonstrated, although no single pathognomonic neurofunctional abnormality has been delineated yet. Increasingly, it appears that dysfunction of a system of functionally and/or structurally interconnected cortical and limbic brain regions is present to lesser or greater degrees, producing more or less psychopathology in individual patients, and that certain brain regions, such as frontal cortex, may play a special role in this larger picture. Abnormal neurotransmission within these neural circuits appears to be related to core features of schizophrenia, particularly cognitive impairment. Although it is likely that at least some of the functional abnormalities are generative of these features and not simply a response to them, clarification of this ‘‘chicken versus egg’’ issue must be a crucial component of any research program in this area, and the elucidation of the underlying mechanisms is the most important quest of this research at present. Current functional neuroimaging has much to offer in guiding this quest, particularly when combined with new information now available from other fields such as genetics and cognitive science. In this light, the following sections review existing findings, delineate their relationship to other neurobiological and clinical properties of the illness, discuss conceptual issues and controversies, examine methodologic considerations (including technical constraints), summarize new tech-
Unpacking “Sexting”: A Systematic Review of Nonconsensual Sexting in Legal, Educational, and Psychological Literatures

Concerns about sexting are increasingly prevalent in mainstream and academic media despite limited and inconsistent research findings about the practice. Much of this discourse centers around harm and sexting is commonly considered to be a risky behavior. A driving factor in these discussions is the apparent conflation of consensual and nonconsensual acts or sexting behaviors. A systematic review was conducted to determine the extent to which consensual and nonconsensual acts were conflated in the legal, educational, and psychological literatures on sexting, and how nonconsensual sexting was conceptualized within these disciplines. Definitions of sexting varied widely with regard to the inclusion or exclusion of nonconsensual acts. Nonconsensual acts were conceptualized in the following ways: as a risk of sexing, as being the fault of the victim, as bullying, or as a form of violence against women. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE FAMILIARITY ON ARAB EFL STUDENT RESPONSES TO ARAB LITERATURE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Reading research has continuously asserted that "texts containing familiar cultural content are easier to read and recall than, say, linguistically equivalent texts that contain unfamiliar information about a distant culture" (Al-Mahrooqi, 2011a, p. 1561). The objective of this study is to find out if this claim holds true when EFL learners read familiar texts but translated into a foreign language. To do so, it examines the responses of Arab EFL students to a story written about the Arab Gulf in English translation, by measuring the effect of both culture and language on students' comprehension and response. The results show that familiarity with culture facilitates comprehension and allows for deep involvement in the story and reduces misinterpretations.
Interorganizational System Standards Development in Vertical Industries

Interorganizational information system (IOS) standards development in industrial groups is proving to be an extremely productive and effective endeavour. With countless stakeholders, varying opinions and firms that are more accustomed to competition than cooperation, many industrial groups have leveraged the use of a non‐profit, voluntary‐consensus, standards development consortium to act as a separate entity and lead agent towards industry‐wide standardization initiatives. We employ common empirical data collection techniques (management interviews, observations in consortia work groups, meeting minutes, consortia charters and others) and provide a comparative analysis of the consortia and the IOS standards development process across nine such industries. The results are summarized and a formal IOS Standards Development Cycle is introduced based on a synthesized understanding from across the industries. The IOS Standards Development Cycle in industrial groups is found to include the following steps: (1) .
Favourable outcome of long-term combined psychotherapy for patients with borderline personality disorder: Six-year follow-up of a randomized study

Abstract Objective: This study reports the six-year follow-up data of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) who participated in the Ullevål Personality Project (UPP), a randomized clinical study comparing outpatient individual psychotherapy (OIP) with a long-term combination programme (CP) comprising short-term day-hospital treatment followed by outpatient combined group and individual psychotherapy. Methods: For 52 patients, outcomes were evaluated after 8 months, 18 months, 3 years, and 6 years based on a wide range of clinical measures, such as symptom severity, psychosocial functioning, personality functioning, and Axis-I and II diagnoses. Results: At the six-year follow-up, patients in the CP condition reported significantly greater reduction of symptom distress and improvements in the personality functioning domains Identity Integration and Self-control compared with patients allocated to OIP. Patients in the CP also had a more favourable long-term course of psychosocial functioning. There were no differences between treatment conditions in outcomes of interpersonal functioning and self-esteem. Conclusions: Long-term psychotherapy in a combination programme seems favourable for BPD patients. In this study, patients who received combined treatment fared better on crucial parameters than patients who received individual therapy. Of particular importance are the positive effects on fundamental borderline problem areas like Identity Integration and Self-control.
Macrophages of the bovine heifer mammary gland: Morphological features during initiation and resolution of the inflammatory response

This work characterizes macrophage morphological features during initiation and resolution of an inflammatory response by the bovine mammary gland. The study has been carried out in 20 mammary glands of five virgin heifers by using light microscopy of natural and stained cells and by using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The inflammatory reaction was induced by an intramammary administration of phosphate‐buffered saline (PBS). It has been found that both the initial as well as the resolution phases of the inflammatory reaction are characteristic of the presence of various morphologically different macrophage forms. During the initial phase of the inflammatory response, the major proportion of the macrophage population consisted of monocyte‐like macrophages, which represented newly migrated cells. These macrophages were 12–15 μm in size, with spherical or ovoidal shapes, and contained homogenous, fine‐granular cytoplasm rich in Golgi complexes, numerous mitochondria, and no lysosomes. The nuclei of the macrophages were kidney‐shaped, and surrounded by dark chromatin along the peripheries. Macrophages with phagocytosed apoptotic neutrophils in the cytoplasm were detected already during the initial phase. These macrophages reached the highest proportion 48–72 h after the influx induction and participated in the resolution of the inflammatory reaction. Other cells, also detected during the resolution of the inflammatory reaction, were vacuolized macrophages that formed the largest cells in the lavages of the mammary glands and that were structurally characteristic for the presence of vacuoles in the cytoplasm. In TEM the macrophage vacuoles formed both phagolysosomes with residues of pre‐digested material of phagocytosed apoptotic neutrophils and vacuoles that were less electon‐dense. Morphologically different forms of macrophages reflected their real‐time functions in the inflammation process.