Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dietary Dunaliella bardawil, a &bgr;-Carotene–Rich Alga, Protects Against Acetic Acid–Induced Small Bowel Inflammation in Rats

BackgroundReactive oxygen species mediate tissue injury in inflammatory bowel disease. &bgr;-Carotene is known as a potent free radical quencher and antioxidant. AimThe authors evaluated the efficacy of prefeeding Dunaliella bardawil, rich in &bgr;-carotene, to ameliorate acid-induced enteritis in a rat model. MethodsEnteritis was induced in female Sprague-Dawley rats by injection of 2 mL acetic acid (0.67 mol/L) to a ligated duodenal loop following 10 weeks of feeding diets containing &bgr;-carotene and compared with various controls. The effects of &bgr;-carotene were evaluated by changes in myeloperoxidase activity, histology, and histomorphometry. ResultsFeeding &bgr;-carotene resulted in suppressed mucosal myeloperoxidase activity, both basal and that induced by acetic acid injection. Acetic acid treatment induced major histopathologic changes in the duodenal mucosa, including small, irregular, and distorted villi; damage to the epithelium; edema of the lamina propria; accumulation of inflammatory cells; and hemorrhage. &bgr;-Carotene treatment prevented these acid-induced histopathologic changes, and this was confirmed by histomorphometry of the villi. ConclusionsThese results demonstrate the effectiveness of &bgr;-carotene in a rat model as a prophylactic dietary measure in reducing the effects of acid-induced enteritis and raise the possibility that patients with Crohn's disease may benefit from the consumption of natural &bgr;-carotene.
Associations of Census-Tract Poverty with Subsite-Specific Colorectal Cancer Incidence Rates and Stage of Disease at Diagnosis in the United States

Background. It remains unclear whether neighborhood poverty contributes to differences in subsite-specific colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence. We examined associations between census-tract poverty and CRC incidence and stage by anatomic subsite and race/ethnicity. Methods. CRC cases diagnosed between 2005 and 2009 from 15 states and Los Angeles County (N = 278,097) were assigned to 1 of 4 groups based on census-tract poverty. Age-adjusted and stage-specific CRC incidence rates (IRs) and incidence rate ratios (IRRs) were calculated. Analyses were stratified by subsite (proximal, distal, and rectum), sex, race/ethnicity, and poverty. Results. Compared to the lowest poverty areas, CRC IRs were significantly higher in the most impoverished areas for men (IRR = 1.14 95% CI 1.12–1.17) and women (IRR = 1.06 95% CI 1.05–1.08). Rate differences between high and low poverty were strongest for distal colon (male IRR = 1.24 95% CI 1.20–1.28; female IRR = 1.14 95% CI 1.10–1.18) and weakest for proximal colon. These rate differences were significant for non-Hispanic whites and blacks and for Asian/Pacific Islander men. Inverse associations between poverty and IRs of all CRC and proximal colon were found for Hispanics. Late-to-early stage CRC IRRs increased monotonically with increasing poverty for all race/ethnicity groups. Conclusion. There are differences in subsite-specific CRC incidence by poverty, but associations were moderated by race/ethnicity.
Detection of C polysaccharide in Streptococcus pneumoniae in the sputa of pneumonia patients by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay

The pneumococcal C polysaccharide (PnC) is species specific and believed to be a cell wall component of all pneumococcal types. A sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for detection of PnC in sputa has been developed by using a monoclonal antiphosphorylcholine antibody and a polyclonal rabbit anti-PnC antiserum in the test system. A 1-year study of adult hospitalized patients with community-acquired pneumonia was performed. A total of 147 patients with clinical and radiological evidence for pneumonia were accepted for the study. Of these, 105 patients provided a sputum sample upon admission to the ward. The sputa were cultured semiquantitatively as well as tested for the presence of antigen. Of the sputum samples from patients with Streptococcus pneumoniae, 27 of 33 (accounting for a sensitivity of 82%) were positive in the ELISA test. Of the sputum samples from patients with pneumonia of some other known or suspected etiology, 32 of 34 (accounting for a specificity of 94%) were negative. In addition, 7 sputum samples from 31 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology were positive. The ELISA test described here is in our opinion a sensitive and specific test for detecting PnC from S. pneumoniae in sputa from patients with untreated pneumonia.
Effects of chronic heavy alcohol consumption and endurance exercise on cancellous and cortical bone microarchitecture in adult male rats.

BACKGROUND Bone health is influenced by numerous lifestyle factors, including diet and exercise. Alcohol is a major nonessential constituent of diet and has dose- and context-dependent effects on bone. Endurance exercise is associated with increased risk of stress fractures. The purpose of this study was to determine the long-term independent and combined effects of chronic heavy alcohol consumption and endurance exercise (treadmill running) on bone mass and microarchitecture in young adult male Sprague-Dawley rats. METHODS Six-month-old male rats were randomized into 4 groups (9 to 13 rats/group): sedentary + control diet, sedentary + ethanol (EtOH) diet, exercise + control diet, or exercise + EtOH diet. EtOH-fed rats consumed a liquid diet (EtOH comprised 35% of caloric intake) ad libitum. Control rats were pair-fed the same diet with isocaloric substitution of EtOH with maltose-dextran. Exercise was conducted on a motorized treadmill (15% grade for 30 minutes) 5 d/wk for 16 weeks. Femur and 12th thoracic vertebra were analyzed for bone mineral content (BMC) and density (BMD) using densitometry and cortical and cancellous bone architecture using microcomputed tomography. RESULTS EtOH consumption resulted in lower femur length, BMC, and BMD, and lower midshaft femur cortical volume, cortical thickness, and polar moment of inertia. In addition, trabecular thickness was lower in vertebra of EtOH-fed rats. Endurance exercise had no independent effect on any end point evaluated. A significant interaction between endurance exercise and EtOH was detected for several cancellous end points in the distal femur metaphysis. EtOH-consuming rats that exercised had lower distal femur metaphysis bone volume/tissue volume, trabecular connectivity density, and trabecular thickness compared to exercising rats that consumed control diet. CONCLUSIONS The results obtained in this model suggest that chronic heavy alcohol consumption may reduce skeletal integrity by reducing bone size, mass, and density, and by negatively altering bone microarchitecture and may increase fracture risk associated with endurance exercise at weight-bearing skeletal sites.
Effect of propylthiouracil on adenosine deaminase activity and thyroid function in patients with psoriasis

Background T‐cell activation has been implicated in the pathogenesis of psoriasis; adenosine deaminase (ADA) activity has been considered as a marker of T‐cell activation. The antithyroid drug propylthiouracil (PTU) has recently been shown to have beneficial effects on psoriatic lesions, probably by acting on the immune system.
Eating Disorders on the Web: Risks and Resources

Our work is aimed at exploring the recent literature data on web sites, forums, and blogs, which promote eating disorders as normal life styles and their implication in the changes of the psychopatology of such disorders. We also want to understand whether new technologies have an impact in the course of the disorders or, on the other hand, whether they can also represent an instrument for searching help or information about them. The search strategy included a search of PsycINFO, Medline, and Ovid databases to identify research reports about pro-ana sites and their implication on the course of anorexia using the following key words: pro-ana, thinspiration, anorexia-web, online help eating disorders, anorexia nation.
Clinical effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy in the management of TMD.

PURPOSE This study aimed to investigate whether cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) was effective as a standard intervention for temporomandibular disorders (TMD). MATERIALS AND METHODS The subjects were 134 TMD outpatients with no history of treatment for TMD. They had pain persisting for 1 month or more and/or limited jaw movement. All patients underwent CBT. Symptom fluctuation was evaluated by a self-administered questionnaire. RESULTS Symptoms had disappeared and improved in 112 patients within 2 months. CONCLUSION It was suggested that most TMD symptoms can be relieved only by CBT in less than 2 months without further intervention.
Correlation Between Birth Weight and Maternal Body Composition

OBJECTIVE: To estimate which maternal body composition parameters measured using multifrequency segmental bioelectric impedance analysis in the first trimester of pregnancy are predictors of increased birth weight. METHODS: Nondiabetic women were recruited after ultrasonographic confirmation of an ongoing singleton pregnancy in the first trimester. Maternal body composition was measured using bioelectric impedance analysis. Multivariable linear regression analysis was performed to identify the strongest predictors of birth weight, with multiple logistic regression analysis performed to assess predictors of birth weight greater than 4 kg. RESULTS: Data were analyzed for 2,618 women, of whom 49.6% (n=1,075) were primigravid and 16.5% (n=432) were obese based on a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher. In univariable analysis, maternal age, BMI, parity, gestational age at delivery, smoking, fat mass, and fat-free mass all correlated significantly with birth weight. In multivariable regression analysis, fat-free mass remained a significant predictor of birth weight (model R2=0.254, standardized &bgr;=0.237; P<.001), but no relationship was found between maternal fat mass and birth weight. After adjustment for confounding variables, women in the highest fat-free mass quartile had an adjusted odds ratio of 3.64 (95% confidence interval 2.34–5.68) for a birth weight more than 4 kg compared with those in the lowest quartile. CONCLUSIONS: Based on direct measurements of body composition, birth weight correlated positively with maternal fat-free mass and not adiposity. These findings suggest that, in nondiabetic women, interventions intended to reduce fat mass during pregnancy may not prevent large-for-gestational-age neonates and revised guidelines for gestational weight gain in obese women may not prevent large-for-gestational-age neonates. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: III
Child Abduction Murder: An Analysis of the Effect of Time and Distance Separation Between Murder Incident Sites on Solvability

ABSTRACT: Empirical studies of child abduction murder investigations are lacking. Accordingly, an empirical analysis of the effect of time and distance relationships on case solvability in child abduction murders (N=735) was conducted. The murders occurred across the United States from 1968 to 2002. Murder incident components examined were: victim last seen site, initial contact site, murder site, and body recovery site. Time and distance intervals between component pairings were also examined. Descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate analyses were performed to determine if information relating to time and distance intervals between components were critical solvability factors. Results show that information about time and distance increases case solvability. Results also demonstrate that time and distance relationships contribute uniquely to case solvability in murders of abducted children. Findings also indicate that additional factors such as type of forensic evidence, investigative resources, or actions by first responders, may be critical to case solvability.
Perception of English stress by Mandarin Chinese learners of English: An acoustic study

Supervisory Committee Dr Hua Lin (Department of Linguistics) Supervisor Dr John Esling (Department of Linguistics) Departmental Member Dr Sonya Bird (Department of Linguistics) Additional Member Dr Richard King (Department of Pacific and Asian Studies) Outside Member Second language learners of English often experience difficulties in English lexical stress perception. This has traditionally been attributed to transfer of prosodic unit or settings from their first language (L1). Similarly, the problem of Chinese learners with English stress perception was assumed to arise from tonal transfer. However, little research has been devoted to the investigation of the phonetic details of second language (L2) stress perception. The present research focuses on the perception of English lexical stress by Chinese learners of English. The purpose of this study is to reveal the use of acoustic cues in stress perception by Chinese learners of English. In the experiment, F0, duration and intensity were manipulated, each with five steps, on three disyllabic nonsense words to result in a total of 375 nonsense tokens. A group of native speakers of English (NE) and a group of Chinese learners of English (CE) participated in the study and judged whether the stress
On the Analysis of Poems and Paintings

Let us not confuse inscriptions with arabesques. Let us not make any inscription that is impossible to decipher. And let us be grateful to the formalists: it is through their efforts that we know that it is impossible to read an arabesque. We have need for inscriptions. Then, let art mark out its arabesques, and let us give some thought on how to compose our inscription so that it may be read easily and with profit by the reader.
Leukocyte-Endothelial Cell Interactions – Lessons from Knockout Mice

The advent of gene targeting has led to the generation of several mouse strains deficient in select leukocyte adhesion receptors. These strains of mice have been very informative about the roles of cell adhesion molecules in leukocyte-endothelium interaction and have produced some surprises: roles for leukocyte adhesion receptors have been demonstrated in development as well as pathologies like obesity, and evidence for functional synergies between adhesion receptors have been provided. We attempt in this review to first outline the technique of gene targeting and give an overview of leukocyte adhesion receptors and mice deficient in these receptors. Second, we discuss models of experimental glomerulonephritis and what we have learned about leukocyte adhesion receptors in the pathogenesis of glomerulonephritis through studies in knockout mice.
Altered Connectivity of the Balance Processing Network After Tongue Stimulation in Balance-Impaired Individuals

Some individuals with balance impairment have hypersensitivity of the motion-sensitive visual cortices (hMT+) compared to healthy controls. Previous work showed that electrical tongue stimulation can reduce the exaggerated postural sway induced by optic flow in this subject population and decrease the hypersensitive response of hMT+. Additionally, a region within the brainstem (BS), likely containing the vestibular and trigeminal nuclei, showed increased optic flow-induced activity after tongue stimulation. The aim of this study was to understand how the modulation induced by tongue stimulation affects the balance-processing network as a whole and how modulation of BS structures can influence cortical activity. Four volumes of interest, discovered in a general linear model analysis, constitute major contributors to the balance-processing network. These regions were entered into a dynamic causal modeling analysis to map the network and measure any connection or topology changes due to the stimulation. Balance-impaired individuals had downregulated response of the primary visual cortex (V1) to visual stimuli but upregulated modulation of the connection between V1 and hMT+ by visual motion compared to healthy controls (p ≤ 1E-5). This upregulation was decreased to near-normal levels after stimulation. Additionally, the region within the BS showed increased response to visual motion after stimulation compared to both prestimulation and controls. Stimulation to the tongue enters the central nervous system at the BS but likely propagates to the cortex through supramodal information transfer. We present a model to explain these brain responses that utilizes an anatomically present, but functionally dormant pathway of information flow within the processing network.
Spatial Aspects of Social Area Analysis

best carried out on three levels: first, a further extension of the empirical investigation of other correlates of situs; second, the further conceptualization and operationalizing of other aspects of occupation in addition to situs and stratum; and third, the enlargement and codification of imaginative insights into the nature of occupational effects through increasing use of intensive case studies of particular occupations, an area of research which has grown consistently in the past few years.
Applying taxonomic knowledge to Bayesian belief network for personalized search

Keyword-based search returns its results without concern for the information needs of users at a particular time. In general, search queries are too short to represent what users want, and thus it is necessary to more exactly represent the users' intended semantics. Hence, our goal is to enrich the semantics of user-specific information (e.g., users' queries and preferences) with a set of concepts for personalized search. To achieve this goal, we adopt a Bayesian belief network (BBN) as a strategy for personalized search since the Bayesian belief network provides a clear formalism for mapping user-specific information to its corresponding concepts. Nevertheless, as the concept layer of the Bayesian belief network consists of only index terms extracted from documents, it does not use domain knowledge which is required for computers to understand the intended semantics of queries. Thus, we extend the Bayesian belief network to represent the semantics of user-specific information as concepts (not index terms). The concepts are extracted from a taxonomic knowledge base such as the Open Directory Project Web directory. In our experiments, we have shown that the extended Bayesian belief network using taxonomic knowledge significantly outperforms the conventional methods for personalized search.
Navigating the threshold of student–staff partnerships: a case study from an Ontario teaching and learning institute

Abstract This article presents the results of research that examined the experiences of staff and students engaged in a novel ‘student scholars’ program established through a university teaching and learning institute in Ontario, Canada. Drawing from participant reflections and focus group data, we describe the benefits and challenges perceived by individuals partnering through this initiative, using the theoretical framework of threshold concepts to understand these experiences. We describe ways in which participants experienced partnering as both troublesome and – in some cases – transformative, and consider the implications of these findings for academic developers engaging in and/or supporting faculty with the process of partnering with students.
Molecular analysis of ovine prion protein identifies similarities between BSE and an experimental isolate of natural scrapie, CH1641

New variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) are caused by the same strain of pathogen and, as sheep can develop experimental BSE, this has raised concern that humans may be at risk from eating mutton if BSE has naturally transmitted to sheep. Biochemical typing of abnormal prion proteins (PrPsc) has been suggested to detect BSE in sheep. Although this approach is ingenuous, we can now report biochemical evidence of strain variation in contemporary and archival brain tissue from cases of experimental BSE or experimental and natural scrapie in sheep. Interestingly, we found at least one isolate of natural scrapie (CH 1641) with a very similar, but not identical, PrPsc profile to BSE but which differs from BSE in its transmission characteristics to mice.
A Social Cognitive Perspective on Coping With Cancer

With increases in the number of cancer survivors, many persons now experience cancer as a chronic disease followed by adaptation to a new reality of what is normal in their lives. In response, cancer survivorship researchers have begun attending to the multidimensional needs of survivors, including the need to promote optimal psychological adaptation and health. Theoretical models of well-being that account for the complexity of survivorship issues are needed. We present a social cognitive model of restorative well-being as a framework for reviewing recent research on coping with early stage adult cancer (i.e., stages I and II) and optimizing post-treatment adjustment. We focus on research on cancer-related coping strategies, efficacy beliefs, personality traits, and environmental supports, which have been linked to adjustment outcomes and which may inform psychosocial interventions. By grounding this research in a theoretical base, we highlight the potential for counseling psychologists’ contributions to cancer survivorship research.
HRTF phase synthesis via sparse representation of anthropometric features

We propose a method for the synthesis of the phases of Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) using a sparse representation of anthropometric features. Our approach treats the HRTF synthesis problem as finding a sparse representation of the subjects anthropometric features w.r. t. the anthropometric features in the training set. The fundamental assumption is that the group delay of a given HRTF set can be described by thWe propose a method for the synthesis of the phases of Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) using a sparse representation of anthropometric features. Our approach treats the HRTF synthesis problem as finding a sparse representation of the subjects anthropometric features w.r. t. the anthropometric features in the training set. The fundamental assumption is that the group delay of a given HRTF set can be described by the same sparse combination as the anthropometric data. Thus, we learn a sparse vector that represents the subjects anthropometric features as a linear superposition of the anthropometric features of a small subset of subjects from the training data. Then, we apply the same sparse vector directly on the HRTF group delay data. For evaluation purpose we use a new dataset, containing both anthropometric features and HRTFs. We compare the proposed sparse representation based approach with ridge regression and with the data of a manikin (which was designed based on average anthropometric data), and we simulate the best and the worst possible classifiers to select one of the HRTFs from the dataset. For objective evaluation we use the mean square error of the group delay scaling factor. Experiments show that our sparse representation outperforms all other evaluated techniques, and that the synthesized HRTFs are almost as good as the best possible HRTF classifier.e same sparse combination as the anthropometric data. Thus, we learn a sparse vector that represents the subjects anthropometric features as a linear superposition of the anthropometric features of a small subset of subjects from the training data. Then, we apply the same sparse vector directly on the HRTF group delay data. For evaluation purpose we use a new dataset, containing both anthropometric features and HRTFs. We compare the proposed sparse representation based approach with ridge regression and with the data of a manikin (which was designed based on average anthropometric data), and we simulate the best and the worst possible classifiers to select one of the HRTFs from the dataset. For objective evaluation we use the mean square error of the group delay scaling factor. Experiments show that our sparse representation outperforms all other evaluated techniques, and that the synthesized HRTFs are almost as good as the best possible HRTF classifier.