Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fish oil and indomethacin in combination potently reduce dyslipidemia and hepatic steatosis in LDLR −/− mice[S]

Fish oil (FO) is a potent anti-inflammatory and lipid-lowering agent. Because inflammation can modulate lipid metabolism and vice versa, we hypothesized that combining FO with cyclooxygenase inhibitors (COXIBs), well-known anti-inflammatory drugs, can enhance the anti-inflammatory and lipid-lowering effect of FO. LDLR −/− mice were fed a high-fat diet supplemented with 6% olive oil or FO for 12 wk in the presence or absence of indomethacin (Indo, 6 mg/l drinking water). FO reduced plasma total cholesterol by 30% but, in combination with Indo, exerted a greater decrease (44%). The reduction of liver cholesterol ester (CE) and triglycerides (TG) by FO (63% and 41%, respectively) was enhanced by Indo (80% in CE and 64% in TG). FO + Indo greatly increased the expression of genes modulating lipid metabolism and reduced the expression of inflammatory genes compared with control. The mRNA and/or protein expression of pregnane X receptor (PXR) and cytochrome P450 isoforms that alter inflammation and/or lipid metabolism are increased to a greater extent in mice that received FO + Indo. Moroever, the nuclear level of PXR is significantly increased in FO + Indo group. Combining FO with COXIBs may exert their beneficial effects on inflammation and lipid metabolism via PXR and cytochrome P450.
Event-related potentials and changes of brain rhythm oscillations during working memory activation in patients with first-episode psychosis.

BACKGROUND Earlier contributions have documented significant changes in sensory, attention-related endogenous event-related potential (ERP) components and θ band oscillatory responses during working memory activation in patients with schizophrenia. In patients with first-episode psychosis, such studies are still scarce and mostly focused on auditory sensory processing. The present study aimed to explore whether subtle deficits of cortical activation are present in these patients before the decline of working memory performance. METHODS We assessed exogenous and endogenous ERPs and frontal θ event-related synchronization (ERS) in patients with first-episode psychosis and healthy controls who successfully performed an adapted 2-back working memory task, including 2 visual n-backworking memory tasks as well as oddball detection and passive fixation tasks. RESULTS We included 15 patients with first-episode psychosis and 18 controls in this study. Compared with controls, patients with first-episode psychosis displayed increased latencies of early visual ERPs and phasic θ ERS culmination peak in all conditions. However, they also showed a rapid recruitment of working memory-related neural generators, even in pure attention tasks, as indicated by the decreased N200 latency and increased amplitude of sustained θ ERS in detection compared with controls. LIMITATIONS Owing to the limited sample size, no distinction was made between patients with first-episode psychosis with positive and negative symptoms. Although we controlled for the global load of neuroleptics, medication effect cannot be totally ruled out. CONCLUSION The present findings support the concept of a blunted electroencephalographic response in patients with first-episode psychosis who recruit the maximum neural generators in simple attention conditions without being able to modulate their brain activation with increased complexity of working memory tasks.
Metabolic Reprogramming During Multidrug Resistance in Leukemias

Cancer outcome has improved since introduction of target therapy. However, treatment success is still impaired by the same drug resistance mechanism of classical chemotherapy, known as multidrug resistance (MDR) phenotype. This phenotype promotes resistance to drugs with different structures and mechanism of action. Recent reports have shown that resistance acquisition is coupled to metabolic reprogramming. High-gene expression, increase of active transport, and conservation of redox status are one of the few examples that increase energy and substrate demands. It is not clear if the role of this metabolic shift in the MDR phenotype is related to its maintenance or to its induction. Apart from the nature of this relation, the metabolism may represent a new target to avoid or to block the mechanism that has been impairing treatment success. In this mini-review, we discuss the relation between metabolism and MDR resistance focusing on the multiple non-metabolic functions that enzymes of the glycolytic pathway are known to display, with emphasis with the diverse activities of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase.
A modified non-stationary MIMO channel model under 3D scattering scenarios

Due to rapid movements of the transmitter and receiver, propagation channels of mobile communication systems show non-stationarity characteristics. A modified non-stationary multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel model between the base station and mobile station under three dimensional (3D) scenarios is proposed. The new model takes the continuity of fading phase into account and guarantees more realistic Doppler frequencies. Meanwhile, extended 3D time evolving algorithms of channel parameters, including the path number based on birth-death processes of clusters, path delays, path powers, and angles of arrival and departure, are given and analyzed. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that our channel model can characterize the properties of non-stationarity, and simulated results of time-variant autocorrelation function (ACF) and spatial cross-correlation function (CCF) are well consistent with the corresponding theoretical ones. The proposed channel model can be applied to performance evaluation and validation of the fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems under time-variant scattering scenarios.
Active nano/microbilayer hemostatic agents for diabetic rat bleeding model.

Patients with diabetes mellitus have an increased cardiovascular risk due to the abnormality of hemostatic system components. Therefore, hemostasis is an important concept when considering that diabetics are under risk due to potential bleeding complications during surgical operation. The aim of our study was to examine the efficiency of a fabricated nano/microbilayer hemostatic dressing for bleeding control in diabetic patients. For this purpose, we prepared a nano/microbilayer hemostatic dressing that has a porous sublayer, including chitosan (CTS), bacterial cellulose (BC) as basement and active agents in coagulation cascade, such as vitamin K (Vit K), protamine sulfate (PS), and kaolin (Kao) as a filler and an upper layer consisting of silk fibroin (SF) or SF/phosphatidylcholine (PC) blend to achieve complete hemostasis in diabetic rats. Coagulative performances of the prepared hemostatic dressings were examined by the determination of bleeding time, blood loss, and mortality rate through diabetic rat femoral artery injury model. The percent of diabetic rat blood absorption was found to be 247 ± 5% for gauze as opposed to 2214 ± 56% for SF-coated PS/BC/CTS. Vit K-reinforced within 138 s and SF-coated BC/CTS hemostatic dressings within 144 s showed a rapid coagulation time. In vivo coagulation studies demonstrated that hemostatic agent-reinforced BC/CTS hemostatic dressing, especially PS/BC/CTS showed a significant hemostatic plug formation. This study suggests that the high positive charge and porosity give to these hemostatic agents reinforced hemostatic dressings the ability to rapidly swell and to promote the accumulation of red blood cells and platelets through electrostatic interactions. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part B: Appl Biomater, 105B: 1573-1585, 2017.
Improving the Measurement of Maternal Mortality: The Sisterhood Method Revisited

Background Over the past several decades the efforts to improve maternal survival and the consequent demand for accurate estimates of maternal mortality have increased. However, measuring maternal mortality remains a difficult task especially in developing countries with weak information systems. Sibling histories included in household surveys (most notably the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS)) have emerged as an important source of maternal mortality data. Data have been mainly collected from women and have not been widely collected from men due to concerns about data quality. We assess data quality of histories obtained from men and the potential to improve the efficiency of surveys measuring maternal mortality by collecting such data. Methods and Findings We used data from 10 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) that have included a full sibling history in both their women’s and men’s questionnaires. We estimated adult and maternal mortality indicators from histories obtained from men and women. We assessed the completeness and accuracy of these histories using several indicators of data quality. Our study finds that mortality estimates based on sibling histories obtained from men do not systematically or significantly differ from those obtained from women. Quality indicators were similar when comparing data from men and women. Pooling data obtained from men and women produced narrower confidence intervals. Conclusion From experience across nine developing countries, sibling history data obtained from men appear to be a reliable source of information on adult and maternal mortality. Given that there are no significant differences between mortality estimates based on data obtained from men and women, data can be pooled to increase efficiency. This finding improves the feasibility for countries to generate robust empirical estimates of adult and maternal mortality from surveys. Further we recommend that male sibling histories be collected from all sample households rather than from a subsample.
Experimentally altered rainfall regimes and host root traits affect grassland arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities

Future climate scenarios predict changes in rainfall regimes. These changes are expected to affect plants via effects on the expression of root traits associated with water and nutrient uptake. Associated microorganisms may also respond to these new precipitation regimes, either directly in response to changes in the soil environment or indirectly in response to altered root trait expression. We characterized arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal communities in an Australian grassland exposed to experimentally altered rainfall regimes. We used Illumina sequencing to assess the responses of AM fungal communities associated with four plant species sampled in different watering treatments and evaluated the extent to which shifts were associated with changes in root traits. We observed that altered rainfall regimes affected the composition but not the richness of the AM fungal communities, and we found distinctive communities in the increased rainfall treatment. We found no evidence of altered rainfall regime effects via changes in host physiology because none of the studied traits were affected by changes in rainfall. However, specific root length was observed to correlate with AM fungal richness, while concentrations of phosphorus and calcium in root tissue and the proportion of root length allocated to fine roots were correlated to community composition. Our study provides evidence that climate change and its effects on rainfall may influence AM fungal community assembly, as do plant traits related to plant nutrition and water uptake. We did not find evidence that host responses to altered rainfall drive AM fungal community assembly in this grassland ecosystem.
Structural signature of classical versus late‐onset friedreich's ataxia by Multimodality brain MRI

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) is the most common autosomal‐recessive ataxia worldwide. It is characterized by early onset, sensory abnormalities, and slowly progressive ataxia. However, some individuals manifest the disease after the age of 25 years and are classified as late‐onset FRDA (LOFA). Therefore, we propose a transversal multimodal MRI‐based study to investigate which anatomical substrates are involved in classical (cFRDA) and LOFA.
Replaceable Substructures for Efficient Part‐Based Modeling

A popular mode of shape synthesis involves mixing and matching parts from different objects to form a coherent whole. The key challenge is to efficiently synthesize shape variations that are plausible, both locally and globally. A major obstacle is to assemble the objects with local consistency, i.e., all the connections between parts are valid with no dangling open connections. The combinatorial complexity of this problem limits existing methods in geometric and/or topological variations of the synthesized models. In this work, we introduce replaceable substructures as arrangements of parts that can be interchanged while ensuring boundary consistency. The consistency information is extracted from part labels and connections in the original source models. We present a polynomial time algorithm that discovers such substructures by working on a dual of the original shape graph that encodes inter‐part connectivity. We demonstrate the algorithm on a range of test examples producing plausible shape variations, both from a geometric and from a topological viewpoint.
The Cellular Prion Protein Negatively Regulates Phagocytosis and Cytokine Expression in Murine Bone Marrow-Derived Macrophages

The cellular prion protein (PrPC) is a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored glycoprotein on the cell surface. Previous studies have demonstrated contradictory roles for PrPC in connection with the phagocytic ability of macrophages. In the present work, we investigated the function of PrPC in phagocytosis and cytokine expression in bone marrow-derived macrophages infected with Escherichia coli. E. coli infection induced an increase in the PRNP mRNA level. Knockout of PrPC promoted bacterial uptake; upregulated Rab5, Rab7, and Eea1 mRNA expression; and increased the recruitment of lysosomal-associated membrane protein-2 to phagosomes, suggesting enhanced microbicidal activity. Remarkably, knockout of PrPC suppressed the proliferation of internalized bacteria and increased the expression of cytokines such as interleukin-1β. Collectively, our data reveal an important role of PrPC as a negative regulator for phagocytosis, phagosome maturation, cytokine expression, and macrophage microbicidal activity.
Unexpected impacts of climate change on alpine vegetation

The vegetation in a high alpine site of the European Alps experienced changes in area between 1953 and 2003 as a result of climate change. Shrubs showed rapid expansion rates of 5.6% per decade at altitudes between 2400 m and 2500 m. Above 2500 m, vegetation coverage exhibited unexpected patterns of regression associated with increased precipitation and permafrost degradation. As these changes follow a sharp increase in both summer and annual temperatures after 1980, we suggest that vegetation of the alpine (2400–2800 m) and nival (above 2800 m) belts respond in a fast and flexible way, contradicting previous hypotheses that alpine and nival species appear to have a natural inertia and are able to tolerate an increase of 1–2°C in mean air temperature.
The Role of C-Reactive Protein in the Early Prediction of Serious Pancreatic Fistula Development after Pancreaticoduodenectomy

Introduction Despite recent advances in surgical techniques, pancreatic fistulas are common. We aimed to determine the role of C-reactive protein in the prediction of clinically relevant fistula development. Materials and Methods Data from patients who underwent pancreaticoduodenectomy between 2012 and 2015 is collected. Postoperative 1st, 3rd, and 5th day (POD1, POD3, and POD5) C-reactive protein (CRP) levels, postoperative pancreatic fistula (POPF) development, other complications, length of hospital stay, and mortality were recorded. Results Of 117 patients, 43 patients (36.8%) developed complications (including fistulas). Of the patients developing fistulas, 21 (17.9%) had POPF A, 2 (1.7%) had POPF B, and 7 (6.0%) had POPF C. POD5 CRP and POD3 CRP were shown to be significantly correlated with mortality and development of clinically relevant POPF (p = 0.001 and p = 0.0001, resp.) and with mortality (p = 0.017), respectively. The development of clinically relevant POPFs (B and C) could be predicted with 90% sensitivity and 82.2% specificity by POD5 CRP cut-off level of 19 mg/dL and with 100% sensitivity and 63.6% specificity by the difference between POD5 and POD1 CRP cut-off level of >2.5 mg/dL. Conclusion CRP levels can effectively predict the development of clinically relevant pancreatic fistulas.
Triplet Pregnancy: Is the Mode of Conception Related to Perinatal Outcomes?

Many triplets are conceived as a consequence of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Concerns have been raised that triplet pregnancies conceived by ART are more complicated than those conceived spontaneously. The purpose of this study was to evaluate all triplet pregnancies managed over a 12-year period to determine if there were any differences in outcome based on the mode of conception. All triplet pregnancies between 1999 and 2011 that reached at least 20 weeks’ gestation and that were managed at the Royal Women's Hospital (RWH), Melbourne, Victoria were identified. Maternal and neonatal outcomes were compared between ART conceived and spontaneously conceived triplets. In the study period, 53 sets of triplets managed in our institution met the eligibility criteria. Twenty-five triplet sets were conceived by ART and 28 were conceived spontaneously. More ART conceptions resulted in trichorionic triamniotic (TCTA) triplets than did spontaneous conceptions (p = .015). There were no differences between ART and spontaneously conceived triplets for any of the maternal or neonatal complications studied. Trichorionic (TC) triplets delivered at a later gestation than other triplets: 32.1 (SD 2.9) versus 30.4 (SD 3.9) weeks (p = .08). TC triplets were significantly less likely to die than monochorionic (MC) or dichorionic (DC) triplets: 3/93 (3%) versus 13/66 (20%) (p = .025). In conclusion, triplets conceived by ART are more likely to have TCTA placentation and TCTA triplet sets had lower mortality rates than other triplet combinations. Outcomes for triplets conceived by ART were similar to those of triplets conceived spontaneously.
Controllable Identifier Measurements for Private Authentication With Secret Keys

The problem of secret-key based authentication under a privacy constraint on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurements during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained “action” sequence. Single-letter characterizations of the optimal trade-off among the secret-key rate, storage rate, privacy-leakage rate, and action cost are given for the four problems where noisy or noiseless measurements of the source are enrolled to generate or embed secret keys. The results are relevant for several user-authentication scenarios, including physical and biometric authentications with multiple measurements. Our results include, as special cases, new results for secret-key generation and embedding with action-dependent side information without any privacy constraint on the enrolled source sequence.
Iris Recognition After Death

This paper presents a comprehensive study of post-mortem human iris recognition carried out for 1200 near-infrared and 1787 visible-light samples collected from 37 deceased individuals kept in mortuary conditions. We used four independent iris recognition methods (three commercial and one academic) to analyze genuine and impostor comparison scores and check the dynamics of iris quality decay over a period of up to 814 h after death. This study shows that post-mortem iris recognition may be close-to-perfect approximately 5–7 h after death and occasionally is still viable even 21 days after death. These conclusions contradict the statements present in the past literature that the iris is unusable as a biometrics shortly after death, and show that the dynamics of post-mortem changes to the iris that are important for biometric identification are more moderate than previously hypothesized. This paper contains a thorough medical commentary that helps to understand which post-mortem metamorphoses of the eye may impact the performance of automatic iris recognition. An important finding is that false-match probability is higher when live iris images are compared with post-mortem samples than when only live samples are used in comparisons. This paper conforms to reproducible research and the database used in this study is made publicly available to facilitate research on post-mortem iris recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this paper offers the most comprehensive evaluation of post-mortem iris recognition and the largest database of post-mortem iris images.
BACKWARD DISCOUNTING

We study a model in which lifetime individual utility is derived from both present and past consumption streams. Each of these streams is discounted, the former forward in the usual way, the latter backward. We presume that an individual at date t evaluates consumption programs according to some weighted average of her own felicity (as perceived at date t) and that of “future selves” at dates greater than t. This simple formulation allows agents to partially anticipate future regret in current decisions, and generates a set of novel testable implications in line with empirical evidence. The model is used to capture the notion of parental influence and investigate its impact on equilibrium savings. The paper also examines other applications of “backward discounting. ”
Echocardiographic predictors of atrial fibrillation after mitral valve replacement

http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.ehj. 2017.07. 002 1110-2608/ 2017 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Egyptian Society of Cardiology. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer review under responsibility of Egyptian Society of Cardiology. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: dr.shimaasabry@yahoo.com (A.-S.M Sabry). Al-Shimaa Mohamed Sabry ⇑, Heba Abd El-Kader Mansour, Tarek Helmy Abo El-Azm, Shimaa Ahmed Mostafa, Basant Samy Zahid
A state-of-art review of low intensity extracorporeal shock wave therapy and lithotripter machines for the treatment of erectile dysfunction

ABSTRACT Introduction: Current treatment for erectile dysfunction (ED) mostly attempts to improve erectile function with limited impact on altering the underlying pathophysiology of ED. Recent animal experiments have supported the notion that low intensity extracorporeal shockwave therapy (LIESWT) significantly improves penile hemodynamics and might induce structural changes that regenerate penile tissue. Areas covered: This review article provides an overview of the basic mechanics and clinical studies pertaining to LIESWT and its use in the field of ED. We identify several key aspects of LIESWT and compare contemporary LIESWT machines and their clinical outcomes. Expert commentary: There is emerging and strong literature to support the use of LIESWT in men with ED, with many clinical studies reported encouraging results in the use of LIESWT with improved erectile function, good safety records, and short-term durability. However, there is a need to define which subgroup of ED population is best suited and the LIESWT treatment protocol including LIESWT template, modality of shock waves energy, emission frequency, and total energy delivery. More stringent randomised controlled trials are warranted before there is widespread acceptance of this LIESWT technology as the standard of care in ED.