Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pramipexole Increases Go Timeouts but Not No-go Errors in Healthy Volunteers

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by motor symptoms, such as resting tremor, bradykinesia and rigidity, but also features non-motor complications. PD patients taking dopaminergic therapy, such as levodopa but especially dopamine agonists (DAs), evidence an increase in impulse control disorders (ICDs), suggesting a link between dopaminergic therapy and impulsive pursuit of pleasurable activities. However, impulsivity is a multifaceted construct. Motor impulsivity refers to the inability to overcome automatic responses or cancel pre-potent responses. Previous research has suggested that PD patients, on dopaminergic medications, have decreased motor impulsivity. Whether effects on impulsivity are main effects of dopaminergic therapies or are specific to PD is unclear. Using a Go No-go task, we investigated the effect of a single dose of the DA pramipexole on motor impulsivity in healthy participants. The Go No-go task consisted of Go trials, for which keystroke responses were made as quickly as possible, and lesser frequency No-go trials, on which motor responses were to be inhibited. We hypothesized that pramipexole would decrease motor impulsivity. This would manifest as: (a) fewer No-go errors (i.e., fewer responses on trials in which a response ought to have been inhibited); and (b) more timed-out Go trials (i.e., more trials on which the deadline elapsed before a decision to make a keystroke occurred). Healthy volunteers were treated with either 0.5 mg of pramipexole or a standard placebo (randomly determined). During the 2-h wait period, they completed demographic, cognitive, physiological and affective measures. The pramipexole group had significantly more Go timeouts (p < 0.05) compared to the placebo group though they did not differ in percent of No-go errors. In contrast to its effect on pursuit of pleasurable activities, pramipexole did not increase motor impulsivity. In fact, in line with findings in PD and addiction, dopaminergic therapy might increase motor impulse control. In these patient groups, by enhancing function of the dorsal striatum (DS) of the basal ganglia in contrast to its effect on impulsive pursuit of pleasurable activities. These findings have implications for use and effects of pramipexole in PD as well as in other conditions (e.g., restless leg, dystonia, depression, addiction-related problems).
Acupuncture modulates the limbic system and subcortical gray structures of the human brain: Evidence from fMRI studies in normal subjects

Acupuncture, an ancient therapeutic technique, is emerging as an important modality of complementary medicine in the United States. The use and efficacy of acupuncture treatment are not yet widely accepted in Western scientific and medical communities. Demonstration of regionally specific, quantifiable acupuncture effects on relevant structures of the human brain would facilitate acceptance and integration of this therapeutic modality into the practice of modern medicine. Research with animal models of acupuncture indicates that many of the beneficial effects may be mediated at the subcortical level in the brain. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the effects of acupuncture in normal subjects and to provide a foundation for future studies on mechanisms of acupuncture action in therapeutic interventions. Acupuncture needle manipulation was performed at Large Intestine 4 (LI 4, Hegu) on the hand in 13 subjects [Stux, 1997]. Needle manipulation on either hand produced prominent decreases of fMRI signals in the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampus, hypothalamus, ventral tegmental area, anterior cingulate gyrus (BA 24), caudate, putamen, temporal pole, and insula in all 11 subjects who experienced acupuncture sensation. In marked contrast, signal increases were observed primarily in the somatosensory cortex. The two subjects who experienced pain instead of acupuncture sensation exhibited signal increases instead of decreases in the anterior cingulate gyrus (BA 24), caudate, putamen, anterior thalamus, and posterior insula. Superficial tactile stimulation to the same area elicited signal increases in the somatosensory cortex as expected, but no signal decreases in the deep structures. These preliminary results suggest that acupuncture needle manipulation modulates the activity of the limbic system and subcortical structures. We hypothesize that modulation of subcortical structures may be an important mechanism by which acupuncture exerts its complex multisystem effects. Hum Brain Mapp 9:13–25, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Postoperative radiotherapy is effective for thymic carcinoma but not for thymoma in stage II and III thymic epithelial tumors: The Japanese Association for Research on the Thymus Database Study

The efficacy of postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) for thymic epithelial tumors is still controversial. Using the Japanese Association for Research on the Thymus (JART) database, this study was aimed at clarifying the efficacy of PORT for Masaoka stage II and III thymic carcinoma and thymoma.
Individuals, Universals, Collections: On the Foundational Relations of Ontology

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations - in partic- ular their behavior with respect to time - is critical for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine.
Water flow and salt transport in bare saline‐sodic soils subjected to evaporation and intermittent irrigation with saline/distilled water

Sustainable development of coastal reclamation areas is severely restricted by the high soil salt content and irrigation water salinity. We investigated the water flow and salt transport in open soil columns subjected to evaporation and intermittent irrigation with saline/distilled water by long‐term wetting–drying cycles. The study included two different soil materials (silt loam and silty clay) with four to five soil sodicity levels. Three groups of experiments with three replicates were imposed: silt loam × 5 sodicity level, silty clay × 5 sodicity level, and 2 soil textures × 5 irrigation water qualities. Three irrigations were conducted in Spring to early Autumn (March 2, June 30, and September 8), whereas the soil columns were subjected to the natural evaporation without rainfall throughout the period September 9 to March 1. The average daily soil evaporation rate significantly decreased with the soil clay content (pr = −0.55; P < 0.001), soil exchangeable sodium percentage (pr = −0.54; P < 0.001), and irrigation water salinity (pr = −0.32; P < 0.001). The soil properties were the major factors responsible for controlling evaporation, whereas the irrigation water salinity was the less important factor. Soil salt distribution was significantly affected by the soil clay content (pr = 0.82; P < 0.001), soil depth (pr = 0.68; P < 0.05), soil exchangeable sodium percentage (pr = 0.85; P < 0.001), and irrigation water salinity (pr = 0.37; P < 0.001). The magnitudes of the steady‐state infiltration rate ic and soil saturated hydraulic conductivity Ks were largely reduced by wetting–drying cycles, especially for the silty clay. Understanding water flow and salt transport in saline‐sodic soils subjected to evaporation and intermittent irrigation with saline/distilled water is important for improving the soil desalination project and strategy.
Fair throughput assignment in multi-cell WLANs with hidden terminals

In this paper we study the problem of client association, jointly with airtime sharing and contention resolution in a multi-cell WLAN with hidden terminals with the objective of achieving proportional fair download bandwidth allocation to the clients. We first formulate the problem as a utility maximization problem, which, due to the integral nature of association turns out to be a 0-1 (NP-hard) programming problem, then by studying its structure, we decompose it into two subproblems: the client association problem on one hand, and the joint airtime sharing and contention resolution problem on the other. We show that, for each fixed association pattern, the corresponding joint airtime sharing and contention resolution problem can be solved in polynomial time, then focus on solving the client association problem, via a greedy algorithm designed based on our observations from our previous work. In this algorithm, each AP associates with all the non-associated clients in its neighbourhood, based on a priority ordering of the APs determined so as to enable each AP to either be associated with as many clients as it can, or as few clients as it can, which will have the effect of reducing hidden nodes collisions. The simulation results show that, the proposed algorithm achieves a near-optimal performance.
Three-dimensional microfluidic model for tumor cell intravasation and endothelial barrier function

Entry of tumor cells into the blood stream is a critical step in cancer metastasis. Although significant progress has been made in visualizing tumor cell motility in vivo, the underlying mechanism of cancer cell intravasation remains largely unknown. We developed a microfluidic-based assay to recreate the tumor-vascular interface in three-dimensions, allowing for high resolution, real-time imaging, and precise quantification of endothelial barrier function. Studies are aimed at testing the hypothesis that carcinoma cell intravasation is regulated by biochemical factors from the interacting cells and cellular interactions with macrophages. We developed a method to measure spatially resolved endothelial permeability and show that signaling with macrophages via secretion of tumor necrosis factor alpha results in endothelial barrier impairment. Under these conditions intravasation rates were increased as validated with live imaging. To further investigate tumor-endothelial (TC-EC) signaling, we used highly invasive fibrosarcoma cells and quantified tumor cell migration dynamics and TC-EC interactions under control and perturbed (with tumor necrosis factor alpha) barrier conditions. We found that endothelial barrier impairment was associated with a higher number and faster dynamics of TC-EC interactions, in agreement with our carcinoma intravasation results. Taken together our results provide evidence that the endothelium poses a barrier to tumor cell intravasation that can be regulated by factors present in the tumor microenvironment.
Soft-In Soft-Out Detection Using Partial Gaussian Approximation

This paper concerns the soft-in soft-out detection in a coded communication system, where the transmitted symbols are discrete valued, and the exact a posteriori probability (APP) detection often involves prohibitive complexity. By using the properties of Gaussian functions, an approximate approach to the APP detection is devised with the idea that, in the computation of the APP of each symbol, the remaining symbols are distinguished based on their contributions to the APP of the concerned symbol, and the symbols with less contributions are approximated as (continuous) Gaussian variables [hence the name partial Gaussian approximation (PGA)] to reduce the computational complexity. The connection between the PGA detector and the reduced dimension maximum a posteriori detector (RDMAP) is investigated. It is shown that, PGA is equivalent to RDMAP, but it has a complexity much lower than that of RDMAP, i.e., PGA can be regarded as an efficient implementation of RDMAP. In addition, the application of PGA in intersymbol interference (ISI) channel equalization is also investigated. We show that PGA allows further significant complexity reduction by exploiting the circulant structure of the system transfer matrix, which makes PGA very attractive in handling severe ISI channels with large memory length.
Impairment of NO-Dependent Relaxation in Intralobar Pulmonary Arteries: Comparison of Urban Particulate Matter and Manufactured Nanoparticles

Background and Objectives Because pulmonary circulation is the primary vascular target of inhaled particulate matter (PM), and nitric oxide is a major vasculoprotective agent, in this study we investigated the effect of various particles on the NO–cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) pathway in pulmonary arteries. Methods We used intrapulmonary arteries and/or endothelial cells, either exposed in vitro to particles or removed from PM-instilled animals for assessment of vasomotricity, cGMP and reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, and cytokine/chemokine release. Results Endothelial NO-dependent relaxation and cGMP accumulation induced by acetylcholine (ACh) were both decreased after 24 hr exposure of rat intrapulmonary arteries to standard reference material 1648 (SRM1648; urban PM). Relaxation due to NO donors was also decreased by SRM1648, whereas responsiveness to cGMP analogue remained unaffected. Unlike SRM1648, ultrafine carbon black and ultrafine and fine titanium dioxide (TiO2) manufactured particles did not impair NO-mediated relaxation. SRM1648-induced decrease in relaxation response to ACh was prevented by dexamethasone (an anti-inflammatory agent) but not by antioxidants. Accordingly, SRM1648 increased the release of proinflammatory mediators (tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-8) from intrapulmonary arteries or pulmonary artery endothelial cells, but did not elevate ROS levels within intrapulmonary arteries. Decreased relaxation in response to ACh was also evidenced in intrapulmonary arteries removed from rats intratracheally instilled with SRM1648, but not with fine TiO2. Conclusion In contrast to manufactured particles (including nanoparticles), urban PM impairs NO but not cGMP responsiveness in intrapulmonary arteries. We attribute this effect to oxidative-stress–independent inflammatory response, resulting in decreased guanylyl cyclase activation by NO. Such impairment of the NO pathway may contribute to urban-PM–induced cardiovascular dysfunction.
Replication Routing in DTNs: A Resource Allocation Approach

Routing protocols for disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs) use a variety of mechanisms, including discovering the meeting probabilities among nodes, packet replication, and network coding. The primary focus of these mechanisms is to increase the likelihood of finding a path with limited information, and so these approaches have only an incidental effect on such routing metrics as maximum or average delivery delay. In this paper, we present rapid, an intentional DTN routing protocol that can optimize a specific routing metric such as the worst-case delivery delay or the fraction of packets that are delivered within a deadline. The key insight is to treat DTN routing as a resource allocation problem that translates the routing metric into per-packet utilities that determine how packets should be replicated in the system. We evaluate rapid rigorously through a prototype deployed over a vehicular DTN testbed of 40 buses and simulations based on real traces. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to report on a routing protocol deployed on a real outdoor DTN. Our results suggest that rapid significantly outperforms existing routing protocols for several metrics. We also show empirically that for small loads, RAPID is within 10% of the optimal performance.
Evidence that prostate gonadotropin‐releasing hormone receptors mediate an anti‐tumourigenic response to analogue therapy in hormone refractory prostate cancer

Gonadotropin‐releasing hormone analogue (GnRHa) therapy is an established method of androgen withdrawal in the treatment of prostate cancer. The present study investigated if the expression of prostate GnRH receptors (GnRHRs) might influence the response to GnRHa. GnRHR protein expression was first studied in a panel of prostate cancer cell lines. In androgen‐dependent cells, GnRHR expression was unchanged following acute or chronic androgen withdrawal. In these cells, GnRHa significantly inhibited androgen‐induced cell proliferation (p = 0.01). In contrast, GnRHa was unable to further suppress basal levels of cell proliferation induced by androgen withdrawal. In androgen‐independent prostate cancer cells, variable levels of GnRHR expression were observed. In these cells, GnRHa treatment blocked cell proliferation (p = 0.001) and invasion (up to 70%) induced by fibroblast growth factor stimulation. Crucially, this effect was only evident in cells that expressed high levels of the GnRHR. GnRHa treatment also significantly inhibited the ability of these cells to recover from a cytotoxic insult (50% inhibition). The clinical significance of prostate GnRHR was tested by immunohistochemistry in a preliminary cohort of patients treated with GnRHa or surgical castration. There was no association between GnRHR expression and pathological grade, clinical stage, time to PSA nadir (p = 0.82) (n = 35) or progression to hormone refractory disease (p = 0.22) (n = 21), irrespective of the treatment method. GnRHa therapy in the presence of high GnRHR expression however, was found to be associated with longer disease‐specific survival (mean survival 85 months, p = 0.002). In contrast, high GnRHR expression was not associated with survival among surgically castrated patients (mean survival 50 months, p = 0.7). Taken together, these data support the notion of a functional interaction between GnRHa and the GnRHR, which results in an anti‐tumourigenic effect on prostate cancer cells. Findings from this report have direct implications for the use of GnRHR as a novel therapeutic target in hormone refractory prostate cancer. Copyright © 2005 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ODE and Random Boolean networks in application to modelling of 6-mercaptopurine metabolism

We consider two approaches to modelling of cell metabolism of 6-mercaptopurine, which is one of the important chemotherapy drugs used for treating of acute lymphocytic leukemia: kinetic ordinary differential equations and random Boolean networks, and analyse their interplay with respect to taking into account ATP concentration as a key parameter of switching between different pathways. It is shown that Boolean networks, which allow for avoiding complexity of general kinetic modelling, preserve an opportunity to the reproduction of the principal switching mechanism. To keep a detailed quantitative measure of the control parameter, a combined Boolean-ODE method is proposed.
Effect of the Postural Challenge on the Dependence of the Cardiovascular Control Complexity on Age

Short-term complexity of heart period (HP) and systolic arterial pressure (SAP) was computed to detect age and gender influences over cardiovascular control in resting supine condition (REST) and during standing (STAND). Healthy subjects (n = 110, men = 55) were equally divided into five groups (21–30; 31–40; 41–50; 51–60; and 61–70 years of age). HP and SAP series were recorded for 15 min at REST and during STAND. A normalized complexity index (NCI) based on conditional entropy was assessed. At REST we found that both NCIHP and NCISAP decreased with age in the overall population, but only women were responsible for this trend. During STAND we observed that both NCIHP and NCISAP were unrelated to age in the overall population, even when divided by gender. When the variation of NCI in response to STAND (ΔNCI = NCI at REST-NCI during STAND) was computed individually, we found that ΔNCIHP progressively decreased with age in the overall population, and women were again responsible for this trend. Conversely, ΔNCISAP was unrelated to age and gender. This study stresses that the complexity of cardiovascular control and its ability to respond to stressors are more importantly lost with age in women than in men.
On Multi-level K-ranges for Range Search

We investigate an implementation of the multi-level or l-level k-range data structure. The l-level k-range is compared to naive and R*tree search over N randomly generated k-dimensional points. Results indicate that multi-level k-ranges are not competitive due to their (previously unreported) complexity. We show that storage is S(N,k,l) = O(N1+2(k-1)/l) and S(N,k) = Θ(N1+2(k-1)/log2N). Our results also indicate that the l-level k-range requires Q(N,k,l) = O((2l)k(log N + A)) time for range search, for A = number of points reported in range.
Deconstructing phonetic transcription: Covert contrast, perceptual bias, and an extraterrestrial view of Vox Humana

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast (covert contrast). This study presents evidence from a new series of perception studies that covert contrast may be far more prevalent in children's speech than existing studies would suggest. The second section presents the results of a new study designed to examine whether naïve listeners' perception of children's /s/ and /θ/ productions can be changed experimentally when they are led to believe that the children who produced the sounds were older or younger. Here, it is shown that, under the right circumstances, adults report more tokens of /θ/ to be accurate productions of /s/ when they believe a talker to be an older child than when they believe the talker to be younger. This finding suggests that auditory information alone cannot be the sole basis for judging the accuracy of a sound. The final section presents recommendations for supplementing phonetic transcription with other measures, to gain a fuller picture of children's production abilities.
Consensus on media violence effects: comment on Bushman, Gollwitzer, and Cruz (2015)

Craig A. Anderson, Department of Psychology, Iowa State University; Luca Andrighetto, Dip. di Scienze della Formazione, University of Genova; Bruce D. Bartholow, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri; Laurent Begue, Laboratoire Interuniversitaire de Psychologie, University of Grenoble; Paul Boxer, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University; Jeanne Funk Brockmyer, Department of Psychology, University of Toledo; Melinda C. R. Burgess, Department of Psychology, Southwestern Oklahoma State University; Esther Calvete, Deusto International Research School, Universidad de Deusto; Joanne Cantor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin; Sarah M. Coyne, School of Family Life, Brigham Young University; Karen Dill-Shackleford, Fielding Graduate University; Ed Donnerstein, Department of Communication, University of Arizona; Alessandro Gabbiadini, University of Milano Bicocca; Bryan Gibson, Department of Psychology, Central Michigan University; Youssef Hasan, Qatar University; Adam K. Lueke, Department of Psychology, Central Michigan University; Izaskun Orue, Dpto. de Personalidad, Evaluacion y Tratamiento psicologico, Universidad de Deusto; Paolo Riva, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca; Victor C. Strasburger, School of Medicine, University of New Mexico; Chiara Volpato, Department of Psychology, University of MilanoBicocca; Wayne Warburton, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Craig A. Anderson, Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3180. E-mail: caa@iastate.edu T hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e A m er ic an Ps yc ho lo gi ca l A ss oc ia tio n or on e of its al lie d pu bl is he rs .