Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of Mortality in Elder Patients With Proximal Humeral Fracture

Background: Known possible consequences of proximal humerus fractures include impaired shoulder function, decreased independence, and increased risk for mortality. The purpose of this report is to describe the survival and independence of elderly patients with fractures of the proximal humerus, treated in our institution, relative to patient characteristics and treatment method. Methods: Retrospective cohort study from 2006 to 2012. Setting: Community-based hospital with level 1 designation. Patients/Participants: Three hundred nineteen patients ≥60 years who presented to the emergency department with an isolated fracture of the proximal humerus were either admitted to the inpatient ward for the organization and provision of immediate definitive care or discharged with the expectation of coordination of their care as an outpatient. Treatment was nonoperative or operative. Outcome Measures: One- and 2-year mortality. Results: Significant predictors of mortality at 1 year included Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI; continuous, hazard ratio [HR] = 1.40; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.06-1.86), body mass index (BMI; <25 vs ≥25; HR = 3.43; 95% CI: 1.45-8.14), and American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) disease severity score (3-4 vs 1-2; HR = 4.48; 95% CI: 1.21-16.55). In addition to CCI and BMI, reliance on a cane/walker/wheelchair at the time of fracture predicted mortality at 2 years (vs unassisted ambulation; HR = 3.13; 95% CI: 1.59-5.88). Although the Neer classification of fracture severity significantly correlated with inpatient admission (P < .001), it was not significantly associated with mortality or with loss of living or ambulatory independence. Among admitted patients, 64% were discharged to a facility with a higher level of care than their prefracture living facility. Twenty percent of study patients experienced a loss in ambulatory status by at least 1 level at 1 year postfracture. Conclusion: In a cohort of elderly patients with fractures of the proximal humerus, patient characteristics including comorbidities, ASA classification, and lower BMI were associated with increased mortality. Specifically, those admitted at the time of fracture and treated nonoperatively had the highest mortality rate and, likely, represent the frailest cohort. Those initially treated as outpatients and later treated operatively had the lowest mortality and, likely, represent the healthiest cohort. These data are inherently biased by prefracture comorbidities but help stratify our patients’ mortality risk at the time of injury.
Association between Infancy BMI Peak and Body Composition and Blood Pressure at Age 5–6 Years

Introduction The development of overweight is often measured with the body mass index (BMI). During childhood the BMI curve has two characteristic points: the adiposity rebound at 6 years and the BMI peak at 9 months of age. In this study, the associations between the BMI peak and body composition measures and blood pressure at age 5–6 years were investigated. Methods Measurements from the Amsterdam Born Children and their Development (ABCD) study were available for this study. Blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) and body composition measures (BMI, waist-to-height ratio, fat percentage) were gathered during a health check at about 6 years of age (n = 2822). All children had multiple BMI measurements between the 0–4 years of age. For boys and girls separately, child-specific BMI peaks were extracted from mixed effect models. Associations between the estimated BMI peak and the health check measurements were analysed with linear models. In addition, we investigated the potential use of the BMI at 9 months as a surrogate measure for the magnitude of the BMI peak. Results After correction for the confounding effect of fetal growth, both timing and magnitude of the BMI peak were significantly and positively associated (p<0.001) with all body composition measures at the age of 5–6 years. The BMI peak showed no direct association with blood pressure at the age 5–6 year, but was mediated by the current BMI. The correlation between the magnitude of the BMI peak and BMI at 9 months was approximately 0.93 and similar associations with the measures at 5–6 years were found. Conclusion The magnitude of the BMI peak was associated with body composition measures at 5–6 years of age. Moreover, the BMI at 9 months could be used as surrogate measure for the magnitude of the BMI peak.
Development of the Spark Discharge

SOME time ago, one of us1 photographed the long electric spark with a rotating camera and showed that a preliminary discharge occurred prior to the main spark, just as in the case of the lightning discharge studied by Prof. B. F. J. Schonland and others. The original photographs of the spark between a pointed high-voltage electrode and a plane earthed electrode showed the course of this ‘leader’ discharge for about 20 per cent of the inter-electrode spacing the luminosity diminishing with increasing distance from the high-voltage electrode. The time interval between the leader and the main stroke corresponded to the time-to-sparkover as recorded on the oscillograph. Leader strokes preceded positive and negative discharges.
Complex variable-based analysis for two semi-permeable collinear cracks in a piezoelectromagnetic media

ABSTRACT The problem of two equal collinear cracks weakening a poled transversely isotropic piezo-electro-magnetic plate is addressed under semi-permeable electro-magnetic boundary conditions on the crack faces. The problem is formulated employing Stroh formalism and solved using a complex variable technique. Closed form analytical expressions are derived for various fracture parameters. An illustrative numerical case study is presented for poled BaTiO3 − CoFe2O4 ceramic cracked plate to study the effect of prescribed electric load, magnetic load, and inter-crack distance on fracture parameters. Moreover, a comparative study is done of volume fraction, impermeable, and semi-permeable boundary conditions on fracture parameters.
Effectiveness of Computer Automation for the Diagnosis and Management of Childhood Type 2 Diabetes: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Importance Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is increasingly common in young individuals. Primary prevention and screening among children and adolescents who are at substantial risk for T2D are recommended, but implementation of T2D screening practices in the pediatric primary care setting is uncommon. Objective To determine the feasibility and effectiveness of a computerized clinical decision support system to identify pediatric patients at high risk for T2D and to coordinate screening for and diagnosis of prediabetes and T2D. Design, Setting, and Participants This cluster-randomized clinical trial included patients from 4 primary care pediatric clinics. Two clinics were randomized to the computerized clinical decision support intervention, aimed at physicians, and 2 were randomized to the control condition. Patients of interest included children, adolescents, and young adults 10 years or older. Data were collected from January 1, 2013, through December 1, 2016. Interventions Comparison of physician screening and follow-up practices after adding a T2D module to an existing computer decision support system. Main Outcomes and Measures Electronic medical record (EMR) data from patients 10 years or older were reviewed to determine the rates at which pediatric patients were identified as having a body mass index (BMI) at or above the 85th percentile and 2 or more risk factors for T2D and underwent screening for T2D. Results Medical records were reviewed for 1369 eligible children (712 boys [52.0%] and 657 girls [48.0%]; median [interquartile range] age, 12.9 [11.2-15.3]), of whom 684 were randomized to the control group and 685 to the intervention group. Of these, 663 (48.4%) had a BMI at or above the 85th percentile. Five hundred sixty-five patients (41.3%) met T2D screening criteria, with no difference between control and intervention sites. The T2D module led to a significant increase in the percentage of patients undergoing screening for T2D (89 of 283 [31.4%] vs 26 of 282 [9.2%]; adjusted odds ratio, 4.6; 95% CI, 1.5-14.7) and a greater proportion attending a scheduled follow-up appointment (45 of 153 [29.4%] vs 38 of 201 [18.9%]; adjusted odds ratio, 1.8; 95% CI, 1.5-2.2). Conclusions and Relevance Use of a computerized clinical decision support system to automate the identification and screening of pediatric patients at high risk for T2D can help overcome barriers to the screening process. The support system significantly increased screening among patients who met the American Diabetes Association criteria and adherence to follow-up appointments with primary care clinicians. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01814787
New Spectral Index for Detecting Wheat Yellow Rust Using Sentinel-2 Multispectral Imagery

Yellow rust is one of the most destructive diseases for winter wheat and has led to a significant decrease in winter wheat quality and yield. Identifying and monitoring yellow rust is of great importance for guiding agricultural production over large areas. Compared with traditional crop disease discrimination methods, remote sensing technology has proven to be a useful tool for accomplishing such a task at large scale. This study explores the potential of the Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instrument (MSI), a newly launched satellite with refined spatial resolution and three red-edge bands, for discriminating between yellow rust infection severities (i.e., healthy, slight, and severe) in winter wheat. The corresponding simulative multispectral bands for the Sentinel-2 sensor were calculated by the sensor’s relative spectral response (RSR) function based on the in situ hyperspectral data acquired at the canopy level. Three Sentinel-2 spectral bands, including B4 (Red), B5 (Re1), and B7 (Re3), were found to be sensitive bands using the random forest (RF) method. A new multispectral index, the Red Edge Disease Stress Index (REDSI), which consists of these sensitive bands, was proposed to detect yellow rust infection at different severity levels. The overall identification accuracy for REDSI was 84.1% and the kappa coefficient was 0.76. Moreover, REDSI performed better than other commonly used disease spectral indexes for yellow rust discrimination at the canopy scale. The optimal threshold method was adopted for mapping yellow rust infection at regional scales based on realistic Sentinel-2 multispectral image data to further assess REDSI’s ability for yellow rust detection. The overall accuracy was 85.2% and kappa coefficient was 0.67, which was found through validation against a set of field survey data. This study suggests that the Sentinel-2 MSI has the potential for yellow rust discrimination, and the newly proposed REDSI has great robustness and generalized ability for yellow rust detection at canopy and regional scales. Furthermore, our results suggest that the above remote sensing technology can be used to provide scientific guidance for monitoring and precise management of crop diseases and pests.
Factors influencing the person–carer relationship in people with anxiety and dementia

Objective: The relationship between people with dementia and their carers is complex and has a significant impact on the dementia experience. The aim of this current study was to determine (1) which factors are associated with the quality of the patient–carer relationship and (2) whether these differ between the two perspectives. Method: Participants (people with dementia and their carers) were taken from a randomised controlled trial of cognitive behaviour therapy for anxiety in dementia. The quality of the relationship from both perspectives, anxiety and depression in both parties; and the quality of life, neuropsychiatric symptoms and cognitive functioning in people with dementia was examined at three time points (baseline, 15 weeks and 6 months). Results: There were 127 observations from 50 dyads (100 individuals) across the three time points. Factors significantly related to quality of relationship from the person with dementia's perspective were their own aggression, agitation, irritability, depression, anxiety and quality of life. Factors significantly associated with quality of relationship from the carer's perspective were their own anxiety and depression, and the depression, irritability, behavioural disturbances and quality of life of the person with dementia. People with dementia generally rated the quality of relationship higher, irrespective of level of dementia, depression or anxiety. Conclusion: This study is novel in that it provides a valuable insight into the impact of mental health on relationship quality for both members of the dyad. The findings emphasise the importance of providing interventions which target mood for both parties, and behavioural problems for people with dementia.
New second- and fourth-order accurate numerical schemes for the nonlinear cubic Schrödinger equation

New second- and fourth-order accurate semianalytical methods are introduced for the numerical solution of the one-dimensional nonlinear cubic Schrödinger equation. These methods are based on the combination of the Method of Lines and the Lanczos's Tau Method. The methods are self-starting and proved to be stable, accurate, and energy conservative for long time-integration periods. Approximate solutions are sought, on segmented sets of parallel lines, as finite expansions in terms of a given orthogonal polynomial basis. We have carried out numerical application concerning several cases for the propagation, collision and the bound states of N solitons, 2 ≤ N ≤ 5. Accurate results have been obtained using both shifted Chebyshev and Legendre polynomials. These results compare competitively with some other published results obtained using different methods. Dedicated to the memory of Professor David J. Evans Former Editor of International Journal of Computer Mathematics, October 2005
Special Plant Species Determines Diet Breadth of Phytophagous Insects: A Study on Host Plant Expansion of the Host-Specialized Aphis gossypii Glover

Host specialization is a ubiquitous character of phytophagous insects. The polyphagous population is usually composed of some subpopulations that can use only a few closely related plants. Cotton-melon aphids, Aphis gossypii Glover exhibited strong host specialization, and the cotton- and cucurbits-specialized biotypes had been clearly identified. However, the experimental work that addressed the roles of plant species in determining diet breadth of phytophagous insects is rare. In the present study, we took the artificial host transfer method to assess the role of two special plants, zucchini Cucurbita zucchini L. and cowpea Vigna unguiculata (Linn.) Walp, in regulating diet breadth of cotton- and cucurbits-specialized A. gossypii collected from cotton and cucumber fields and reared separately on the native host plant for ten years. The results showed that the cotton-specialized aphids did not directly use cucumber whereas the cucurbits-specialized did not use cotton regardless of the coexistence or separation of cotton and cucumber plants. Neither of the cotton- and cucurbits-specialized aphids could use capsicum Capsicum annuum, eggplant Solanum melongenahttp://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Carolus_Linnaeus, tomato Solanum lycopersicum, maize Zea mayshttp://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus, and radish Raphanus sativus, however, both of them could use zucchini and cowpea. Moreover, the feeding experience on zucchini led the cotton-specialized aphids to use cucumber well and finally to be transformed into the cucurbits-specialized biotype. The short-term feeding experience on cowpea resulted in the diet breadth expansion of the cucurbits-specialized aphids to use cotton. On the other hand, the diet breadth expansion of the cucurbits- and cotton-specialized aphids was only realized by different species of plant. It concluded that the special host plant did induce the conversion of feeding habits in the cotton- and cucurbits-specialized aphids, and consequently broke the host specialization. The plant species is an underlying factor to determine the diet breadth of phytophagous insects.
Sinus Bradycardia in Carriers of the SCN5A-1795insD Mutation: Unraveling the Mechanism through Computer Simulations

The SCN5A gene encodes the pore-forming α-subunit of the ion channel that carries the cardiac fast sodium current (INa). The 1795insD mutation in SCN5A causes sinus bradycardia, with a mean heart rate of 70 beats/min in mutation carriers vs. 77 beats/min in non-carriers from the same family (lowest heart rate 41 vs. 47 beats/min). To unravel the underlying mechanism, we incorporated the mutation-induced changes in INa into a recently developed comprehensive computational model of a single human sinoatrial node cell (Fabbri–Severi model). The 1795insD mutation reduced the beating rate of the model cell from 74 to 69 beats/min (from 49 to 43 beats/min in the simulated presence of 20 nmol/L acetylcholine). The mutation-induced persistent INa per se resulted in a substantial increase in beating rate. This gain-of-function effect was almost completely counteracted by the loss-of-function effect of the reduction in INa conductance. The further loss-of-function effect of the shifts in steady-state activation and inactivation resulted in an overall loss-of-function effect of the 1795insD mutation. We conclude that the experimentally identified mutation-induced changes in INa can explain the clinically observed sinus bradycardia. Furthermore, we conclude that the Fabbri–Severi model may prove a useful tool in understanding cardiac pacemaker activity in humans.
Fog Massive MIMO: A User-Centric Seamless Hot-Spot Architecture

The decoupling of data and control planes in the forthcoming 5G wireless networks enables the efficient implementation of multitier architectures, where coverage and connectivity are guaranteed by top-tier macro-cells, and at the same time, high throughput and low latency are achieved locally by lower tiers in the hierarchy. This paper considers a new architecture for such lower tiers, dubbed fog massive multi-in multi-out (MIMO), where the user equipment (UE) nodes can connect to a “fog” of the densely deployed remote radio heads (RRHs) in a seamless, user-centric, and opportunistic manner. In the case of dense small cells, traditional cellular architectures inherently give rise to frequent handovers and pilot sequence re-assignments, which typically incur excessive protocol overhead and latency. In the proposed fog massive MIMO architecture, the UEs implicitly associate themselves with the most convenient RRHs in a completely autonomous manner. Each UE makes use of the uplink pilot sequences that contain equal-weight codewords and enable a novel “on-the-fly” pilot contamination control mechanism. We analyze the spectral efficiency and the outage probability of the proposed architecture via stochastic geometry, using some recent results on unique coverage in Boolean models, and provide a detailed comparison with the benchmark represented by massive MIMO cellular system with a genie-aided minimum-distance user-cell association. Our analysis, corroborated by extensive system simulation, reveals that there exists a “sweet spot” of the per pilot user load (number of users per pilot), such that the proposed system achieves a spectral efficiency close to that of the genie-aided cellular system. In these conditions, it is possible to achieve the low protocol overhead and low user RRH association latency promised by the fog massive MIMO at virtually no significant performance cost in terms of system spectral efficiency with respect to the cellular benchmark.
Long-Term Effectiveness of Stress Management at Work: Effects of the Changes in Perceived Stress Reactivity on Mental Health and Sleep Problems Seven Years Later

The reduction of stress reactivity resulting from stress management interventions prevents disorders and improves mental health, however, its long-term sustainability has been little examined. The objective of this study was, therefore, to determine the effectiveness of a stress management intervention, designed to improve stress reactivity, for mental health and sleep problems seven years later, using longitudinal data from 101 male industrial workers. Linear regressions estimated the adjusted effects of the changes in stress reactivity in general as well as in its six subdimensions (work overload, social conflict, social stress, failure at work, and anticipatory and prolonged reactivity) on depression, anxiety, and sleep problems seven years later. The improvement of the prolonged reactivity had positive effects on depression, anxiety, and sleep problems (unstandardized regression coefficients [Bs] ≥ 0.35, all p-values ≤ 0.01). Depression and sleep problems were further improved by a reduction of the reactivity to social conflicts (Bs ≥ 0.29, p-values < 0.05), and an improvement in the overall reactivity score positively influenced sleep problems (B = 0.07, p = 0.017). In conclusion, the improvement of stress reactivity resulting from a work stress intervention was effective and generally long-lasting in preventing mental health and sleep problems. The reduction of the prolonged reactivity seems of particular importance and efficient in inhibiting negative stress manifestations.
Confirmation of ENSO-Southern Ocean Teleconnections Using Satellite-Derived SST

The Southern Ocean is the focus of many physical, chemical, and biological analyses due to its global importance and highly variable climate. This analysis of sea surface temperatures (SST) and global teleconnections shows that SSTs are significantly spatially correlated with both the Antarctic Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation, with spatial correlations between the indices and standardized SST anomalies approaching 1.0. Here, we report that the recent positive patterns in the Antarctic and Southern Oscillations are driving negative (cooling) trends in SST in the high latitude Southern Ocean and positive (warming) trends within the Southern Hemisphere sub-tropics and mid-latitudes. The coefficient of regression over the 35-year period analyzed implies that standardized temperatures have warmed at a rate of 0.0142 per year between 1982 and 2016 with a monthly standard error in the regression of 0.0008. Further regression calculations between the indices and SST indicate strong seasonality in response to changes in atmospheric circulation, with the strongest feedback occurring throughout the austral summer and autumn.