Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Letter: The Relationship between Lung Function and Metabolic Syndrome in Obese and Non-Obese Korean Adult Males (Korean Diabetes J 2010;34:253-60)

We appreciate the comments on our study "The Relationship between Lung Function and Metabolic Syndrome in Obese and Non-Obese Korean Adult Males," which was published in Korean Diabetes J 2010;34:253-260. We reported that insulin resistance, and other metabolic risk factors appear to be related to forced vital capacity (FVC), irrespective of obesity in Korean males. The age, height, and disease were the major determinants of ventilatory function [1]. In our study, there was a significant difference of age between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and non-MetS. So, we studied the relationship between MetS and FVC after adjusting for age. After adjusting age, there was still a significant difference in FVC between MetS and non-MetS groups (93.1 ± 12.1 vs. 97.0 ± 11.5, P < 0.05). Furthermore, insulin resistance and other metabolic components such as waist circumference were independently associated with FVC in a multi-linear regression analysis after adjusting for age and height, the major determinants of ventilatory function, and this was consistent with previous studies [2-5]. It has been reported that lung function is affected by several factors such as body composition and fat distribution, physical activity level, handgrip strength and respiratory muscle power [6-9]. Our study was performed on a limited cross-section of the population, so we could not control the potential biases due to differences in physical activity or respiratory muscle power. However, several studies have reported that insulin resistance is independently associated with lung function [3,10]. These studies reported that the lung function is still inversely associated with insulin resistance after adjusting for compounding factors such as age, height, smoking, and physical activity. Furthermore, Lazarus et al. [11,12] reported that skeletal muscle weakness served as a marker for future risk of insulin resistance, and that impaired lung function can aid in the prediction of development of insulin resistance. They suggested that some metabolic change that eventually leads to insulin resistance may initially induce diminished muscle strength and diminished ventilatory function [12]. So diminished muscle strength may be not confounding factor, but an early marker of insulin resistance. Several reports have suggested that impaired lung function is associated with glucose intolerance, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, and that lung function is a reliable long-term predictor of mortality in the general population. We suggested that decreased FVC is associated with increased metabolic risk and insulin resistance in Korean males. Further prospective study to elucidate the relationship between lung function and metabolic risk is needed.
Prevalence of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus in India

Prevalence of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) was studied in the northern Indian population by means of a two-pronged approach: (a) antinuclear antibody (ANA) screening of the general population by a new well-standardized finger-prick 'filter paper' technique (sensitivity and specificity: 95.4% and 86.2%, respectively); and (b) a questionnaire survey carried out primarily by trained personnel in the community (sensitivity and specificity: 100% and 68.6% respectively). The low specificity of the two methods was improved by the introduction of a step of secondary screening by the authors, thus excluding false positives. ANA screening of 52 062 individuals yielded 13 positive results, of which only two were found to be true cases of SLE after secondary screening. Questionnaire survey of 39 826 individuals similarly yielded 3393 positive results. On secondary screening, only one of these persons was found to be a case of SLE. Thus, three cases of SLE were detected in a population survey of 91 888, giving a point prevalence of 3.2 per 100 000 (95% CI = 0-6.86 per 100 000). The reported prevalence of SLE ranges from 14 to 60 per 100 000. Thus, the prevalence of SLE in India is comparatively low. Although the reasons for low prevalence are not clear, the study used highly sensitive methodology and it is therefore unlikely that SLE cases were missed. It is hypothesized that SLE is a disease of modernization and therefore its prevalence in a predominantly rural population like that of India is low.
The sinuvertebral nerves at the craniovertebral junction: A microdissection study

Bogduk et al. ( 1988 , Spine 13:2–8) noted that the joints and ligaments at the cervico‐occipital region are susceptible to whiplash injury. The upper three cervical sinuvertebral nerves (SVNs) at the craniovertebral junction (CVJ) are thought to be responsible for mediating pain from the ligaments, dura mater, and soft tissues of the posterior cranial fossa and upper cervical column. The purpose of this study was to describe in detail the origin and course of the SVNs at C0–C1, C1–C2, and C2–C3 intervertebral levels and their anterior intraspinal distribution. A sample comprising 10 adult, 12 fetal (crown rump length = 155–250 mm), and three stillborn neonatal (n = 50 sides) embalmed cadaveric cervical spines was microdissected (Carl Zeiss, Jena, Germany, 8–40× magnification). A laminectomy of the cervical spine with an occipital craniectomy (seven adult and all fetal specimens) or a horizontal section of the intervertebral levels was performed (three adult specimens) to expose the craniocervical canal. In both adult and fetal specimens, all three cervical SVNs arose from two roots, a somatic root (from the spinal nerve or ventral ramus or both) and a sympathetic root (from the vertebral artery plexus or superior cervical ganglion). The C1 and C2 SVNs were variable in number. The C2 and C3 SVN innervated most of the structures at the CVJ as well as the basiocciput region. The C1 SVN supplied a very small part of the atlanto‐occipital joint area. The intraspinal courses of all three SVNs consisted of ascending and descending branches closely adherent to the arteries of the CVJ. They supplied the dura mater, the ligaments, adjacent joints, and soft tissues by tiny branches from the main branches. The detailed origins and course are described. Clin. Anat. 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Current World Status of Balantidium coli

SUMMARY Balantidium coli is a cosmopolitan parasitic-opportunistic pathogen that can be found throughout the world. Pigs are its reservoir hosts, and humans become infected through direct or indirect contact with pigs. In rural areas and in some developing countries where pig and human fecal matter contaminates the water supply, there is a greater likelihood that balantidiosis may develop in humans. The infection may be subclinical in humans, as it mostly is in pigs, or may develop as a fulminant infection with bloody and mucus-containing diarrhea; this can lead to perforation of the colon. The disease responds to treatment with tetracycline or metronidazole. Balantidiosis is a disease that need never exist given access to clean water and a public health infrastructure that monitors the water supply and tracks infections. Its spread can be limited by sanitary measures and personal hygiene, but it is a disease that will be around as long as there are pigs. Immunocompromised individuals have developed balantidiosis without any direct contact with pigs, perhaps with rats or contaminated produce as a possible source of infection. For the clinician, balanatidiosis should be included in the differential diagnosis for persistent diarrhea in travelers to or from Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific islands, rural South America, or communities where close contact with domestic swine occurs. Warming of the earth's surface may provide a more favorable environment, even in the now-temperate areas of the world, for survival of trophic and cystic stages of Balantidium, and its prevalence may increase. Effective sanitation and uncontaminated water are the most useful weapons against infection. Fortunately, balantidiosis responds to antimicrobial therapy, and there have been no reports of resistance to the drugs of choice.
Capital Deepening and Nonbalanced Economic Growth

We present a model of nonbalanced growth based on differences in factor proportions and capital deepening. Capital deepening increases the relative output of the more capital‐intensive sector but simultaneously induces a reallocation of capital and labor away from that sector. Using a two‐sector general equilibrium model, we show that nonbalanced growth is consistent with an asymptotic equilibrium with a constant interest rate and capital share in national income. For plausible parameter values, the model generates dynamics consistent with U.S. data, in particular, faster growth of employment and slower growth of output in less capital‐intensive sectors, and aggregate behavior consistent with the Kaldor facts.
Long‐term effects of methylprednisolone following transection of adult rat spinal cord

Clinically, high‐dose treatment with the glucocorticosteroid, methylprednisolone (MP), within 8 h after spinal cord injury, has been shown to improve neurological recovery. The current standard of care is to administer MP as a bolus of 30 mg/kg followed by a 23‐h infusion of 5.4 mg/kg/h to spinal cord injured patients. To better understand the role of MP in neuroprotection, we have studied how MP administration affects macrophage accumulation, tissue loss, and axonal dieback at 1, 2, 4 and 8 weeks after a complete transection of the eighth thoracic spinal cord in the adult rat. A 30 mg/kg dose of MP was administered intravenously at 5 min, and 2 and 4 h after injury. The number of ED1 (antibody against microglia/macrophages) ‐positive cells was quantified in a 500‐μm‐wide strip of tissue directly adjacent and parallel to the transection. At all time points, MP treatment led to a significant decrease in the number of ED1‐positive cells in both rostral and caudal stumps. Over the 2‐month post‐transection period, the average MP‐induced reduction in the number of ED1‐positive cells was 82% in the rostral cord stump and 66% in the caudal stump. Using a computerized image analysis system, it was observed that MP treatment resulted in a significant reduction in tissue loss in both cord stumps at 2, 4 and 8 week post‐injury. Over the 2‐month post‐lesion period, the average MP‐induced reduction in tissue loss in the caudal cord stump was higher than that in the rostral stump; 48 versus 37%, respectively. Immunostaining for neurofilaments and growth‐associated protein‐43 (GAP‐43) revealed the presence of numerous axons near and in the lesion site. Anterograde neuronal tracing with biotinylated dextran amine showed that, in MP‐treated animals, dieback of vestibulospinal fibres, but not of corticospinal fibres, was significantly diminished at all time points studied. In addition, with MP administration, 1 and 2 weeks after injury, an increase in the number of vestibulospinal fibres was found at 1 and 2 mm from the transection, suggesting transient regenerative sprouting of these fibres. The results demonstrate that treatment with MP shortly after spinal cord transection in the adult rat led to a long‐term reduction of ED1‐positive cells and spinal tissue loss, reduced dieback of vestibulospinal fibres, and a transient sprouting of vestibulospinal fibres near the lesion at 1 and 2 weeks post‐lesion. The possible relationships between the inflammatory changes, spinal tissue sparing, and axonal survival and sprouting are complex and need to be further explored.
Stealing lately: a case of late‐onset kleptomania

The case of a 77‐year‐old woman first diagnosed with kleptomania is presented to indicate a possible late‐onset course of this disorder. Particularly striking about this patient's history of shoplifting behaviors was the absence of an onset prior to the age of 73. Her pattern of stealing did not begin at an early age, and was not sporadic or episodic over the course of several years. The treatment course and patient outcome are discussed in light of DSM‐IV diagnostic criteria. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Conceptual modelling of the flow of frail elderly through acute-care hospitals

Purpose The ageing of the world’s population is causing an increase in the number of frail patients admitted to hospitals. In the absence of appropriate management and organisation, these patients risk an excessive length of stay and poor outcomes. To deal with this problem, the purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model to facilitate the pathway of frail elderly patients across acute care hospitals, focussed on avoiding improper wait times and treatment during the process. Design/methodology/approach The conceptual model is developed to enrich the standard flowchart of a clinical pathway in the hospital. The modified flowchart encompasses new organisational units and activities carried out by new dedicated professional roles. The proposed variant aims to provide a correct assessment of frailty at the entrance, a better management of the patient’s stay during different clinical stages and an early discharge, sending the patient home or to other facilities, avoiding a delayed discharge. The model is completed by a set of indicators aimed at measuring performance improvements and creating a strong database of evidence on the managing of frail elderly’s pathways, providing proper information that can validate the model when applied in current practice. Findings The paper proposes a design of the clinical path of frail patients in acute care hospitals, combining elements that, according to an evidence-based management approach, have proved to be effective in terms of outcomes, costs and organisational issues. The authors can, therefore, expect an improvement in the treatment of frail patients in hospital, avoiding their functional decline and worsening frailty conditions, as often happens in current practice following the standard path of other patients. Research limitations/implications The framework proposed is a conceptual model to manage frail elderly patients in acute care wards. The research approach lacks application to real data and proof of effectiveness. Further work will be devoted to implementing a simulation model for a specific case study and verifying the impact of the conceptual model in real care settings. Practical implications The paper includes suggestions for re-engineering the management of frail elderly patients in hospitals, when a reduction of lengths of stay and the improvement of clinical outcomes is required. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to study and provide solutions for the management of frail elderly patients in acute care hospitals, and generally to produce value in a patient-centred model.
Culture-Negative Endocarditis Due to Houston Complex Bartonella henselae Acquired in Noumea, New Caledonia

ABSTRACT A 44-year-old man with a bioprosthetic aortic valve suffered destructive endocarditis with severe embolic disease due to Bartonella henselae infection. Multilocus sequence typing was successfully performed with crude preparations of operative tissue as templates, and the infecting organism was determined to be typical of the Houston clonal group, although it was never cultured from blood or tissue. This is the first report of B. henselae infection in the South Pacific, and it reminds one that B. henselae is a cause of potentially lethal culture-negative endocarditis which may respond poorly to conventional empirical therapy. Nothing is known of the epidemiology of the infection in this region, but it is likely to be common and to contain representatives of both major clonal complexes. This study emphasizes the ease with which multilocus sequence typing can be used directly with tissue, which is important because of suggestions of strain-dependent clinical outcomes.
A Supervised Learning Approach for Authorship Attribution of Bengali Literary Texts

Authorship Attribution is a long-standing problem in Natural Language Processing. Several statistical and computational methods have been used to find a solution to this problem. In this article, we have proposed methods to deal with the authorship attribution problem in Bengali. More specifically, we proposed a supervised framework consisting of lexical and shallow features and investigated the possibility of using topic-modeling-inspired features, to classify documents according to their authors. We have created a corpus from nearly all the literary works of three eminent Bengali authors, consisting of 3,000 disjoint samples. Our models showed better performance than the state-of-the-art, with more than 98% test accuracy for the shallow features and 100% test accuracy for the topic-based features. Further experiments with GloVe vectors [Pennington et al. 2014] showed comparable results, but flexible patterns based on content words and high-frequency words [Schwartz et al. 2013] failed to perform as well as expected.
Nystatin prophylaxis of fungal colonization and infection in granulocytopenic patients: correlation of colonization and clinical outcome.

Nystatin, one million units every four hours, was prospectively studied as a prophylactic antifungal agent in 164 neutropenic patients who were not initially colonized by fungi: 104 received nystatin and 60 served as controls. Fungal colonization occurred in 68/104 (65%) nystatin recipients and in 43/60 (71%) controls. However, nystatin significantly reduced multiple body site colonization and persistent oropharyngeal colonization. Despite these alterations in colonization profile, 16/104 (15%) nystatin recipients developed disseminated fungal infections, as compared to 5/60 (8%) control patients (0.5 greater than p greater than 0.1, N.S). Differences in the clinical course of colonized and non-colonized patients were observed. Eighteen of 111 (16%) colonized patients had afebrile clinical courses as compared to 16/53 (30%) non-colonized patients (p less than 0.05). Twenty-nine of 93 (31%) febrile episodes in colonized patients failed to respond to empiric antibiotic therapy as compared to 3/37 (8%) episodes in non-colonized patients (p less than 0.01). Disseminated fungal infections were diagnosed in 19/111 (17%) of colonized patients, as compared to 1/53 (2%) non-colonized patients (p less than 0.02). We conclude that colonized patients are more likely to develop febrile clinical courses, to fail to respond to empiric antibiotic therapy, and to develop disseminated fungal infection. Nystatin altered colonization patterns but did not prevent disseminated fungal infection.
Impact of a Company’s Dividend Policy on the Liquidity of Shares Listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange

Abstract This study investigates the informational effect of stock liquidity on dividend payouts. Using a sample of Polish listed companies during 2000 - 2012, I do not find a relation between stock liquidity and dividend payouts. This result is robust to the use of alternative measures of liquidity, and holds after we control for endogeneity concerns. In accord with my hypothesis that stock liquidity provides information and increases insiders’ incentive to pay out dividends, I do not find that the relation between stock liquidity and dividend payouts is more pronounced when the information environment is opaque, and when conflict between controlling shareholders and minority investors is severe. The aim of this study is to show the dependencies occurring between dividend policy and the liquidity of shares of a company. The basic thesis of this study is that decisions on dividend payments positively affect the liquidity of the shares of a company.
Sealants for Preventing and Arresting Pit-and-fissure Occlusal Caries in Primary and Permanent Molars.

BACKGROUND National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2011-2012 data indicated that, in the United States, nearly onefourth of children and over one-half of adolescents experienced dental caries in their permanent teeth. The purpose of this review was to summarize the available clinical evidence regarding the effect of dental sealants for the prevention and management of pit-and-fissure occlusal carious lesions in primary and permanent molars, compared with a control without sealants, with fluoride varnishes, or with other head-to head comparisons. TYPE OF STUDIES REVIEWED The authors included parallel and split-mouth randomized controlled trials that included at least 2 years of follow-up, which they identified using MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase, LILACS, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and registers of ongoing trials. Pairs of reviewers independently conducted the selection of studies, data extraction, risk of bias assessments, and quality of the evidence assessments by using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach. RESULTS Of 2,869 records screened, the authors determined that 24 articles (representing 23 studies) proved eligible. Moderate-quality evidence suggested that participants who received sealants had a reduced risk of developing carious lesions in occlusal surfaces of permanent molars compared with those who did not receive sealants (odds ratio [OR], 0.15; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.08-0.27) after 7 or more years of follow-up. When the authors compared studies whose investigators had compared sealants with fluoride varnishes, they found that sealants reduced the incidence of carious lesions after 7 or more years of follow-up (OR, 0.19; 95% CI, 0.07-0.51); however, this finding was supported by low-quality evidence. On the basis of the evidence, the authors could not provide a hierarchy of effectiveness among the studies whose investigators had conducted head-to-head comparisons. The investigators of 2 trials provided information about adverse events, but they did not report any adverse events. CONCLUSIONS AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS Available evidence suggests that sealants are effective and safe to prevent or arrest the progression of noncavitated carious lesions compared with a control without sealants or fluoride varnishes. Further research is needed to provide information about the relative merits of the different types of sealant materials.
Effective antibacterial protection induced by a Listeria monocytogenes-specific T cell clone and its lymphokines

The capacity of the murine Listeria monocytogenes-specific T cell clone 9-36-1 and of lymphokines derived therefrom to induce antibacterial protection in vivo was studied. Clone 9-36-1 was stimulated to proliferate and to produce lymphokines by in vitro culture with syngeneic accessory cells and heat-killed L. monocytogenes. Although 9-36-1 cells were highly active in vitro, intravenous transfer of the cells resulted in marginal protection against a systemic infection with L. monocytogenes. In contrast, 9-36-1 cells injected subcutaneously together with L. monocytogenes into the footpad induced marked protection in syngeneic, but not in allogeneic, mice. Multiplication of Salmonella typhimurium was not reduced by the T cell clone. Studies with 51Cr-labeled T cells indicated that the low activity of intravenously transferred cells was due to an altered migration pattern. Lymphokines produced by 9-36-1 cells in vitro induced protection against L. monocytogenes in syngeneic recipient mice. Lymphokine-induced protection was also demonstrable in allogeneic recipients and against S. typhimurium. These findings suggest that the L. monocytogenes-specific T cell clone 9-36-1, although unable to immigrate into sites of bacterial deposition, had retained its ability to mobilize antibacterial defense mechanisms once present at the site of reaction.