Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contributions of physical and sexual abuse to women's experiences with chronic pelvic pain.

OBJECTIVE To examine the roles of physical and sexual abuse in women with chronic pelvic pain using multi-dimensional pain assessment and to compare the chronic pelvic pain experiences of women with physical abuse to those of women with sexual abuse. STUDY DESIGN Structured questionnaires were used to measure self-reported abuse, pain severity, psychological distress, physical functioning, interpersonalfunctioning, and coping in 63 women attending a tertiary care gynecologic clinic for diagnosis and treatment of chronic pelvic pain. RESULTS Women with chronic pelvic pain who reported abuse demonstrated significantly more psychological distress than did women who reported no abuse, but there were no differences in pain severity, physical functioning, interpersonal functioning or coping. Women with physical abuse reported more overall psychological distress, depression, anxiety and somatization than women who reported no physical abuse. Women who reported sexual abuse showed more overall psychological distress and anxiety than women who reported no sexual abuse. While physical abuse was more consistently associated with psychological distress than was sexual abuse, both types of abuse were risk factors for distress. CONCLUSION These results suggest that both physical and sexual abuse are associated with psychological distress in women with chronic pelvic pain but not with other domains of pain experience. Additional research to improve identification and treatment of women with both chronic pelvic pain and abuse is indicated.
Determinants of vascular dementia in the Cardiovascular Health Cognition Study

Objective: The authors evaluated 3,375 participants without dementia at the time of MRI in 1991 to 1994 over 5.7 years for incident dementia and type of dementia. Methods: Incidence of and risk factors for vascular dementia (VaD) were measured using both pre-MRI and modified State of California Alzheimer's Disease Diagnostic and Treatment Centers (ADDTC) post-MRI review and further classified Alzheimer disease (AD) by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria. Results: Approximately 44% (213) of 480 incident dementia cases were classified as possible or probable VaD by ADDTC. The incidence of VaD increased with age and was greater in blacks than whites. Risk factors for VaD included age, Modified Mini-Mental State Examination, high white matter grade, number of MRI infarcts, ventricular size, and history of stroke. Conclusions: Vascular disease in the brain is prevalent among incident dementia cases. There is a substantial overlap between cases classified as Alzheimer disease by Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association and vascular dementia (VaD) by modified State of California Alzheimer's Disease Diagnostic and Treatment Centers criteria. The substantial contribution of vascular disease would be missed without inclusion of MRI. Treatment of risk factors for VaD could have an important impact on incidence of dementia.
The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty

The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. By Robyn Eckersley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 344p. $62.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Some argue that market democracies do not engage in war with one another, and therefore that if one promotes markets, franchise, and elections, or democratic-capitalist states, this will lead to international peace and cooperation. This idea has informed both the theory of international law (e.g., a right to democratic governance) and the practice of American foreign policy (e.g., Bush Doctrine). A counterargument is built on the suspicion that institutional political/economic process is largely independent of the propensity of a state to cooperate in international relations, and that a focus on democracy and markets as a cure-all for international dispute settlement distracts both theorist and practitioner from the real problems that plague the international system. These skeptics call the focus on the creation of democratic states the “consoling myth. ”
Undergraduate Management Skills Courses And Students’ Emotional Intelligence

In this paper, we draw parallels between teaching undergraduate management skills and the emotional intelligence movement: both address the need for personal and interpersonal skills to help one succeed in work and in life, both identify a comprehensive set of skills which can be learned by adults, and both identify various reflective and self-monitoring techniques to learn and teach these skills. Using a pre-test/post-test experimental design, we provide evidence that current methods of teaching management skills to undergraduates also build emotional intelligence. Results of our study show that 121 students taking an undergraduate management skills course significantly improved their emotional intelligence scores during a 16 week semester, while a control group of 113 students taking other business courses did not. We discuss the implications of our results and call for more research and discussion about undergraduate management skill courses and emotional intelligence.
Is individual educational level related to end-of-life care use? Results from a nationwide retrospective cohort study in Belgium.

BACKGROUND Educational level has repeatedly been identified as an important determinant of access to health care, but little is known about its influence on end-of-life care use. OBJECTIVES To examine the relationship between individual educational attainment and end-of-life care use and to assess the importance of individual educational attainment in explaining differential end-of-life care use. RESEARCH DESIGN A retrospective cohort study via a nationwide sentinel network of general practitioners (GPs; SENTI-MELC Study) provided data on end-of-life care utilization. Multilevel analysis was used to model the association between educational level and health care use, adjusting for individual and contextual confounders based upon Andersen's behavioral model of health services use. SUBJECTS A Belgian nationwide representative sample of people who died not suddenly in 2005-2007. RESULTS In comparison to their less educated counterparts, higher educated people equally often had a palliative treatment goal but more often used multidisciplinary palliative care services (odds ratios [OR] for lower secondary education 1.28 [1.04-1.59] and for higher [secondary] education: 1.31 [1.02-1.68]), moved between care settings more frequently (OR: 1.68 [1.13-2.48] for lower secondary education and 1.51 [0.93-2.48] for higher [secondary] education) and had more contacts with the GP in the final 3 months of life. CONCLUSIONS Less well-educated people appear to be disadvantaged in terms of access to specialist palliative care services, and GP contacts at the end of life, suggesting a need for empowerment of less well-educated terminally ill people regarding specialist palliative and general end-of-life care use.
Prevalence of Self-perceived Auditory Problems and their Relation to Audiometric Thresholds in a Middle-aged to Elderly Population

Objective --Hearing loss has been identified as one of the most frequent conditions affecting the elderly population. The purpose of this study was to provide estimates of the prevalence of self-perceived hearing problems in a middle-aged to elderly general population and to make a comparison among generations and between genders regarding the relationship between audiometric measurements and hearing problems. Material and Methods --The study was conducted using a population-based sample of 2150 adults, aged 40-79 years, who participated in the Longitudinal Study of Aging conducted by the National Institute for Longevity Sciences between 1997 and 2000. A questionnaire on hearing problems was administered and pure-tone audiometry was conducted. Results --A third of subjects in their 40s and half of the subjects aged > 60 years were aware of having difficulty hearing. The audiometric thresholds in both the better and worse ears were associated with self-perceived hearing difficulty in all age groups. Statistically significant age and gender differences were observed in each respondent group. The older group tended to underestimate their hearing difficulty in comparison with the younger group, and males tended to underestimate their hearing difficulty more than females. Conclusion --These results may contribute to the development of an intervention strategy for auditory rehabilitation for the middle-aged and elderly populations.
Pathogens Penetrating the Central Nervous System: Infection Pathways and the Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Invasion

SUMMARY The brain is well protected against microbial invasion by cellular barriers, such as the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (BCSFB). In addition, cells within the central nervous system (CNS) are capable of producing an immune response against invading pathogens. Nonetheless, a range of pathogenic microbes make their way to the CNS, and the resulting infections can cause significant morbidity and mortality. Bacteria, amoebae, fungi, and viruses are capable of CNS invasion, with the latter using axonal transport as a common route of infection. In this review, we compare the mechanisms by which bacterial pathogens reach the CNS and infect the brain. In particular, we focus on recent data regarding mechanisms of bacterial translocation from the nasal mucosa to the brain, which represents a little explored pathway of bacterial invasion but has been proposed as being particularly important in explaining how infection with Burkholderia pseudomallei can result in melioidosis encephalomyelitis.
Ranking with Recursive Neural Networks and Its Application to Multi-Document Summarization

We develop a Ranking framework upon Recursive Neural Networks (R2N2) to rank sentences for multi-document summarization. It formulates the sentence ranking task as a hierarchical regression process, which simultaneously measures the salience of a sentence and its constituents (e.g., phrases) in the parsing tree. This enables us to draw on word-level to sentence-level supervisions derived from reference summaries.In addition, recursive neural networks are used to automatically learn ranking features over the tree, with hand-crafted feature vectors of words as inputs. Hierarchical regressions are then conducted with learned features concatenating raw features.Ranking scores of sentences and words are utilized to effectively select informative and non-redundant sentences to generate summaries.Experiments on the DUC 2001, 2002 and 2004 multi-document summarization datasets show that R2N2 outperforms state-of-the-art extractive summarization approaches.
The Other Medical Causes of Rhabdomyolysis

&NA; Rhabdomyolysis is the clinical and laboratory syndrome resulting from skeletal muscle injury and release of potentially toxic substances into the circulation. The severity of rhabdomyolysis varies widely from asymptomatic elevation of muscle enzymes to the life‐threatening complications of acute renal failure and severe electrolyte abnormalities. The etiology of rhabdomyolysis may be considered under 4 categories: (1) trauma or direct injury, (2) excessive muscle activity, (3) hereditary muscle enzyme defects, and (4) other less obvious medical causes. The latter medical causes may be subdivided into the following: (1) drugs and toxins, (2) muscle hypoxia, (3) metabolic and endocrine disorders, (4) infections, (5) temperature alterations, and (6) miscellaneous causes. The diagnosis of rhabdomyolysis depends on recognizing the symptoms of muscle pain and weakness, detecting the presence of or history of red‐to‐brown urine (myoglobinuria), and finding short‐term elevations of creatine kinase that are not attributable to myocardial infarction or inflammatory myopathies. The major therapeutic goal is to recognize and treat complications as soon as possible, particularly electrolyte abnormalities and acute renal failure. Knowledge of the other medical causes of rhabdomyolysis allows one to identify and treat this potentially serious condition in otherwise occult cases.
A New Approach to Modify Plant Microbiomes and Traits by Introducing Beneficial Bacteria at Flowering into Progeny Seeds

The microbial component of healthy seeds – the seed microbiome – appears to be inherited between plant generations and can dynamically influence germination, plant performance, and survival. As such, methods to optimize the seed microbiomes of major crops could have far-reaching implications for plant breeding and crop improvement to enhance agricultural food, feed, and fiber production. Here, we describe a new approach to modulate seed microbiomes of elite crop seed embryos and concomitantly design the traits to be mediated by seed microbiomes. Specifically, we discovered that by introducing the endophyte Paraburkholderia phytofirmans PsJN to the flowers of parent plants we could drive its inclusion in progeny seed microbiomes, thereby inducing vertical inheritance to the offspring generation. We demonstrated the introduction of PsJN to seeds of monocot and dicot plant species and the consequential modifications to seed microbiome composition and growth traits in wheat, illustrating the potential role of novel seed-based microbiomes in determining plant traits.
Unraveling Religious Worldviews: The Relationship between Images of God and Political Ideology in a Cross-Cultural Analysis

Not only do few studies address the issue of how religious belief relates to political ideology, but little attempt has also been made to analyze this relationship from a comparative perspective. Using data from the International Social Survey Program, we examine how images of God, as measured by God's perceived level of engagement and authority, relate to political ideology in seven Western industrial and postindustrial societies. We find that variation in images of God has no effect on whether individuals are politically liberal or conservative in five of seven countries. Nonetheless, beliefs about God are strongly related to abortion and sexual morality attitudes in every country, but only sporadically related to ideas about social and economic justice. In the end, we argue that theological beliefs tend to be unrelated to a general measure of political ideology, not because religious beliefs are politically unimportant in these societies, but rather because religious perspectives are rarely fully liberal or conservative in their political orientation. In addition, we find that Americans hold unique views of God in comparison to other countries in our sample and that the American tendency to view God as more active and authoritative affects policy attitudes in ways contrary to the effects of church attendance.
Bretazenil, a benzodiazepine receptor partial agonist, as an adjunct in the prophylactic treatment of OP poisoning

Benzodiazepines, mainly diazepam, are commonly used as anticonvulsants in the treatment of organophosphate casualties. Although very effective, diazepam usually is not used in prophylactic treatments because of its adverse effects on task performance and its abuse liability. Benzodiazepine (BZ) partial agonists are unique in that they are able to occupy all the population of a given receptor without eliciting the maximal physiological response. The BZ receptor agonistic occupancy was found to differ among the various physiological responses in the following order: antipanic > anticonvulsion > sedation > muscle relaxation. Thus, partial agonists, by the use of which controlled levels of agonistic activity can be achieved, might serve as effective anticonvulsants, with fewer side‐effects. Bretazenil, a partial agonist, was found to counteract metrazol‐induced convulsions in rats. At the anticonvulsive doses (125–250 µg kg−1, i.p.) bretazenil, in combination with pyridostigmine (100 µg kg−1, i.m.) and aprophen (4 mg kg−1, i.m.), conferred prophylactic protection against sarin and soman poisoning (protective ratios 2.6 and 2.1, respectively). Relevant doses of bretazenil (50–400 µg kg−1, i.p.) also were tested for general behavioural effects in the open field and for its anti‐anxiety properties in the plus maze. The incapacitation was much lower compared with diazepam. Bretazenil should be considered as a candidate for incorporating into a prophylactic mixture as a central nervous system protectant, with significant advantages concerning incapacitation. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The outcome of psychodynamic psychotherapies with individuals diagnosed with personality disorders: a systematic review

This review aimed to explore the evidence base of psychodynamic therapy for personality disorder (PD). A systematic approach was applied to the literature search with the use of a clear inclusion/exclusion criteria and a quality assessment checklist. Nineteen studies investigating the use of psychodynamic therapy for PD were reviewed. Four randomised controlled trials (RCT) demonstrated superior results for psychodynamic therapy compared with another type of therapy, two RCTs found that cognitive-based therapies were superior and one RCT found no difference between therapies for PD. Another seven RCTs found positive results for psychodynamic therapies compared with a treatment as usual condition (n = 3) or another dynamic therapy (n = 4). Five non-RCTs were included with mixed findings for treating PD with psychodynamic therapy. Many of the included studies focusing on psychodynamic-based therapies with borderline personality disorder had positive outcomes, and concentrated on mentalisation-based therapy and transference-focused therapy. There were good outcomes for short- and long-term psychodynamic therapies with individuals with PD. Implications for developing services for treating PD are discussed. Research that addresses methodological issues and increases understanding of the ingredients of change in psychodynamic therapy for PD is also recommended.
The ghosts of Amakusa: localised opposition to centralised control in Higo Province, 1589–1590

Abstract The Amakusa Rebellion of 1589–1590 was the last in a series of disturbances that shook Higo province (modern Kumamoto prefecture) following the pacification of Kyushu by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1587. The rebels, almost all Christians, directed their anger against their fellow-Christian Konishi Yukinaga (1558–1600). Previous accounts of the war have blamed Yukinaga's ‘brutality’ against his co-religionists for the ‘poetic justice’ that brought about his defeat and death at Sekigahara. Using a variety of contemporary sources, this article argues the opposite view: that Yukinaga displayed great leniency in the resolution of the disturbance. As a consequence the Amakusa Islands became a Christian enclave whose inhabitants stayed loyal to their faith through the subsequent persecution and their defeat in the Amakusa/Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638.
Preventing Adolescent Pregnancy: Model Programs and Evaluations

Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Programs - Josefina J Card, James L Peterson and Catherine G Greeno Design, Monitoring, and Evaluation Small Group Sex Education at School - B Helen Thomas et al The McMaster Teen Program Enhancing Social and Cognitive Skills - Richard P Barth et al An Information and Skills Approach for Younger Teens - Marion Howard and Judith A McCabe Postponing Sexual Involvement Program A Comprehensive Age-Phased Approach - Heather Johnston Nicholson and Leticia T Postrado Girls Incorporated Life Options and Community Service - Susan Philliber and Joseph P Allen Teen Outreach Program School-Linked Reproductive Health Services - Laurie Schwab Zabin The Johns Hopkins Program School-Based Clinics - Douglas Kirby and Cindy Waszak A Health Beliefs Field Experiment - Marvin Eisen and Gail L Zellman Teen Talk Comparing Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Programs - Brent C Miller and Roberta L Paikoff Methods and Results
Diagnostic issues in sexual sadism among sexual offenders

This paper provides an integration of our findings on the diagnosis of sexual sadism among sexual offenders. A summary of our review paper is provided followed by a description of two studies that we conducted where we examined both the application of the diagnosis in clinical settings and the inter-diagnostician agreement of the diagnosis based on detailed case descriptions. On the basis of our findings suggestions are offered regarding the future application of the diagnosis.
Adult Colonic Intussusception Caused by Malignant Tumor of the Transverse Colon

Adult colonic intussusception is rare and often originates from neoplasms. In emergency situations it can be difficult to diagnose. Our aim was to show how the integration of readily available diagnostic means in emergency situations can help in making a correct diagnosis of this disease. A 68-year old male patient presented with vomiting and abdominal pain. The abdomen was distended, with pain to palpation in the left quadrants without a mass. Plain radiographs of the abdomen showed a large amount of gas in the small bowel and in the right and transverse colon. A barium enema demonstrated an endoluminal filling defect in the descending colon. Abdominal ultrasonography revealed the presence of intraperitoneal fluid and thickened left colonic wall at the site of the lesion, with an aspect of a “double ring” consistent with intussusception. A solid formation was also revealed at a point distal to the thickened colonic wall. At emergency laparotomy an approximately 8-cm-long mass was palpable through the left colon. A colostomy was fashioned, and subsequently colonoscopy revealed the presence of a left colon tumor. At the subsequent operation an invagination of the left transverse colon into the descending colon was confirmed. The left transverse and descending colon were resected with high ligation of the left colic artery. Macroscopic examination of the invaginating head showed a vegetating transverse colon neoplasm. We conclude that in emergency settings the association of readily available diagnostic means such as plain abdominal radiography, water soluble contrast enema and ultrasonography may yield reliable information for diagnosing colonic intussusception.
Effects of Selected Variables on Musicians’ Ratings of High-Level Piano Performances

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether judgments of solo performances recorded at a well-known international piano competition would be affected by musical characteristics such as style (classic period versus early 20th-century Russian) and tempo (slow versus fast). Evaluators rated performances on six test items: tone quality, note accuracy, rhythmic accuracy, expressiveness, adherence to style and overall impression. The effects of four between-subjects variables were examined: audio versus audiovisual presentation, undergraduate versus graduate/faculty, gender, and pianists versus non-pianists. Results from the 227 evaluators revealed main effects for treatment, style and major: audiovisual presentations were rated higher than audio only presentations, performances of Russian music were rated higher than performances of classic music, and pianists rated performances higher than did non-pianists. The treatment effect was due to a significant treatment by major interaction, and applied only to non-pianists. Gender was involved in a number of three- and four-way interactions that are difficult to interpret. Pearson r correlations were calculated for ratings of the 16 performances on the overall impression test item. The mean correlation for the 120 pairs of ratings was . 33 – low but statistically significant. Intraclass correlations revealed no significant differences between the two levels of all four between-subjects variables.