Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Cerebrovascular Model of Depression in Late Life

ABSTRACT Depression in older people, especially depression with an older age of onset, may be a manifestation of acquired brain disease. The cerebrovascular model of depression, often referred to as “vascular depression,” hypothesizes that otherwise clinically occult small vessel brain disease contribute to the pathogeneses of some late-life depressive conditions. This paper reviews several lines of evidence supporting the cerebrovascular model and addresses the limitations of the existing literature. Several directions for future research are noted, including empirical testing of the notion that cerebrovascular disease might underlie the pathogeneses of depression with prominent executive dysfunction or other cognitive impairments. At this time, there are no specific therapeutic options for patients with suspected vascular depression beyond standard approaches to depression treatments, although education about the possibly greater risks of chronicity should be included in treatment planning. Therapy of cerebrovascular risk factors and stroke-risk reduction are important as consistent with general practice guidelines, although it is not known whether this will reduce the incidence or improve the outcome of late-life depression.
The Influence of Diabetes Mellitus and Insulin Therapy on Biomechanical Retention Around Dental Implants: A Study in Rabbits

The oral rehabilitation by dental implants in patients with diabetes remains a controversial issue. The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of diabetes mellitus and insulin therapy on the bone healing around dental implants using torque removal. Twenty-seven rabbits were randomly divided into 3 groups with 9 animals each: control (C) group, induced diabetic (D) group, and insulin-treated diabetic (ITD) group (10 U/day). After 1 week, one implant was inserted at the tibial metaphysis of the animals. The glucose levels were periodically evaluated through the glucose–oxidase enzymatic method. The animals were killed at 4, 8, and 12 weeks after surgery and the biomechanical test was performed using a torque manometer. Statistically significant differences regarding the removal torque of the implant could not be found at 4 weeks (P = 0.2) among groups. Group C showed statistically higher values than groups D and ITD at the experimental periods of 8 (P = 0.0001 and P = 0.0002, respectively) and 12 weeks (P = 0.0053 and P = 0.001, respectively). There were no statistical differences between D and ITD groups in any of the experimental periods. Diabetes mellitus has negatively influenced the mechanical retention of implants placed at the tibial metaphysis of rabbits. Therapy with insulin did not induce any changes.
Development of a Fluorogenic 5′ Nuclease PCR Assay for Detection of the ail Gene of PathogenicYersinia enterocolitica

ABSTRACT In this report we describe the development and evaluation of a fluorogenic PCR assay for the detection of pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica. The assay targets the chromosomally encoded attachment and invasion gene, ail. Three primer-probe sets (TM1, TM2, and TM3) amplifying different, yet overlapping, regions ofail were examined for their specificity and sensitivity. All three primer-probe sets were able to detect between 0.25 and 0.5 pg of purified Y. enterocolitica DNA. TM1 identified all 26Y. enterocolitica strains examined. TM3 was able to detect all strains except one, whereas TM2 was unable to detect 10 of theY. enterocolitica strains tested. None of the primer-probe sets cross-reacted with any of the 21 non-Y. enterocoliticastrains examined. When the TM1 set was utilized, the fluorogenic PCR assay was able to detect ≤4 Y. enterocolitica CFU/ml in pure culture and 10 Y. enterocolitica CFU/ml independent of the presence of 108 CFU of contaminating bacteria per ml. This set was also capable of detecting ≤1 CFU of Y. enterocolitica per g of ground pork or feces after a 24-h enrichment in a Yersinia selective broth.
Health indicators of workers of the hospital area.

OBJECTIVE to analyze the health indicators of workers of hospital area for exposure to workloads, wear processes and its consequences. METHOD a retrospective, descriptive and exploratory study performed in a hospital in southern Brazil. The population consisted of 1,050 workers notifications of registered in the Monitoring System of Nursing Workers Health, in 2011. RESULTS 80.8% of the records were female workers, with 34.2% aged between 31 to 40 years old, corresponding to 2478 working lost days. The results subsidized the implementation of nine indicators that showed the prevalence of respiratory and osteoarticular problems. CONCLUSION the results allow the reflection and redirection of actions for workers' health, as the processes of becoming ill are compounded by exposure to psychic burdens. These indicators, when monitored, can contribute to the transformation of the profile of morbidity of these workers.
The Metalloprotease of Listeria monocytogenes Is Regulated by pH

ABSTRACT Listeria monocytogenes is an intracytosolic bacterial pathogen. Among the factors contributing to escape from vacuoles are a phosphatidylcholine phospholipase C (PC-PLC) and a metalloprotease (Mpl). Both enzymes are translocated across the bacterial membrane as inactive proproteins, whose propeptides serve in part to maintain them in association with the bacterium. We have shown that PC-PLC maturation is regulated by Mpl and pH and that Mpl maturation occurs by autocatalysis. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that Mpl activity is pH regulated. To synchronize the effect of pH on bacteria, the cytosolic pH of infected cells was manipulated immediately after radiolabeling de novo-synthesized bacterial proteins. Immunoprecipitation of secreted Mpl from host cell lysates revealed the presence of the propeptide and catalytic domain in samples treated at pH 6.5 but not at pH 7.3. The zymogen was present in small amounts under all conditions. Since proteases often remain associated with their respective propeptide following autocatalysis, we aimed at determining whether pH regulates autocatalysis or secretion of the processed enzyme. For this purpose, we used an Mpl construct that contains a Flag tag at the N terminus of its catalytic domain and antibodies that can distinguish N-terminal and non-N-terminal Flag. By fluorescence microscopy, we observed the Mpl zymogen associated with the bacterium at physiological pH but not following acidification. Mature Mpl was not detected in association with the bacterium at either pH. Using purified proteins, we determined that processing of the PC-PLC propeptide by mature Mpl is also pH sensitive. These results indicate that pH regulates the activity of Mpl on itself and on PC-PLC.
TRAMADOL/ACETAMINOPHEN COMBINATION TABLETS FOR THE TREATMENT OF PAIN ASSOCIATED WITH OSTEOARTHRITIS

To the Editor: We were pleased to see an article by Rosenthal et al. about tramadol/acetaminophen use specifically in older persons. As the authors discuss, there are few studies on osteoarthritis in this age group. We also agree with the study’s endpoints that follow the Osteoarthritis Society’s research guidelines for evaluating pain, function, and the patient’s global assessment, although we have some concerns regarding the methodology of this study as well as the generalizability of the results outlined by the authors. First, a primary eligibility criterion for enrollment was the current use of a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory agent, which several expert consensus panels generally consider to be second-line therapy for osteoarthritis. These consensus panels all agree that acetaminophen alone is considered to be first-line therapy. The study’s intervention was to add tramadol/acetaminophen. By using an intervention that combines tramadol with acetaminophen, it is impossible to differentiate the effect of tramadol from acetaminophen. A multiarm study including acetaminophen only and tramadol only would have been more clinically useful. In addition, we suspect that this study is not generalizable to the typical geriatric osteoarthritis population. The exclusion criteria outlined by the authors essentially limit participants in the study to a functional, physically fit, and mentally intact patient population. These criteria do not come close to representing the often cognitively impaired, frail, and medically complex patient base that geriatricians see. Although the authors need to be commended for studying the elderly, their exclusion criteria make the study group more representative of a typical younger patient population. Additionally, the exclusion criteria are so extensive that we suspect that many people needed to be screened to find the rare older person who met their eligibility criteria, but the authors failed to include this information in the manuscript. We are anxiously awaiting effectiveness and safety studies in a frail geriatric population. Given these concerns, we find that this article provides little insight or guidance for geriatricians in managing pain in a typical population. We urge researchers to continue to study older persons and to perform effectiveness studies more consistently.
Co morbidity of Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorders and Substance Use Disorder

Background: The phenomenon of substance use, abuse and dependence is a serious problem with psychological, social, physical and economic impact. The co existence of two disorders, known as co morbidity or dual diagnosis and the relationship between a psychiatric disorder and substance dependence is complicated and many scientists support that psychopathology often forms the ground for the development of dependence. The aim of the study was to explore substance use in individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and investigate whether the severity of PTSD is related to Substance Use Disorder (SUD) as well as the severity of drug addiction. Method and material: A cross sectional, correlational study with the use of 3 research instruments: The Treatment Demand Indicator (T.D.I.), the Addiction Severity Index (ASI) for measuring the severity of substance dependence and the Post Traumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale P.D. S. for the diagnosis of PTSD. The sample consists of 33 individuals, chosen by the members of a therapeutic program for drug dependence which combines inpatient and outpatient therapeutic interventions. The statistical analyses was performed by using the statistical program SPSS. Results: The results showed that a percentage of 40.6% of drug depended people reported symptoms of PTSD and were diagnosed with PTSD. From those, the level of impaired functioning showed that (23%) had a medium problem and the other (77%) had a serious impaired functioning level. A significant positive relationship between PTSD and severity of drug problems was found. The results showed that there was a statistically positive significant correlation between the PTSD symptom severity and the level of dependency from drugs (r=0.678, p-value=0.011). This finding shows that the higher the level of dependency, the higher the PTSD symptom severity index. Also the results showed that there was a significant correlation suggesting that those suffering from PTSD presented a bigger problem with drugs (Χ2=18.945, p-value
Caracterisation des systemes d’elevage cunicole dans le district D’abidjan (Cote D’ivoire)

La presente etude a pour objectif d’identifier et de caracteriser les systemes d’elevage du lapin (Oryctolagus cuniculus) pratiques dans le District d’Abidjan en Cote d’Ivoire. Une enquete formelle sur un echantillonnage empirique a ete effectuee. A travers des prospections et des entretiens, 198 elevages ont ete enquetes. Les resultats ont montre que la cuniculture est un elevage en developpement. Cependant, dans 95 % de cas, la cuniculture est consideree comme une activite secondaire et est exercee en majorite par le genre masculin a 84,76 %. Ces elevages sont majoritairement situes en zone urbaine. Le mode de reproduction le plus pratique est le mode extensif, avec quatre (4) mise-bas par an et six (6) lapereaux en moyenne par mise-bas. Nous avons etabli une typologie des systemes d’elevages qui se compose d’un systeme artisanal ou familial dans 42,96 % des cas, d’un systeme artisanal ameliore dans 38,86 % des cas et d’un systeme moderne dans 18,18 % des cas. Mots cles : District d’Abidjan, cuniculture, caracterisation, lapin, elevage English Abstract Characterization of rabbit farming systems in district of Abidjan (Cote D’ivoire) This study aims to identify and characterize the rabbit farming systems practiced in the District of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. A formal investigation of an empirical sampling was performed through surveys and interviews,198 farms were investigated. The results showed that the rabbit breeding is a developing animal husbandry. However, for 95 % of farms, the breeding is considering like a second activity and is exercised by the male gender to 84.76 %. These farms are mostly located in urban areas. The rhythm of reproduction is an extensive rhythm with 4 birthings per year. Reproduction by artificial insemination is not practiced. Green forage associated with pellet is used by 28.3 % of farmer for rabbit alimentation. The typology of farms identified three systems: traditional or artisanal system with 42.96 %, traditional or artisanal system improved with 38.86 % and modern system with 18.18 %. Key words : Abidjan District, cuniculture, characterization, rabbit, breeding
Effects of toothbrushing with fluoride abrasive and whitening dentifrices on both unbleached and bleached human enamel surface in terms of roughness and hardness: an in vitro study.

AIM The aim of this in vitro study was to evaluate the surface roughness and hardness of both unbleached and bleached (opalescence; 10% carbamide peroxide) human enamel brushed with water (without dentifrice), fluoride abrasive dentifrice (Colgate Total) and whitening dentifrice (Natural White). MATERIALS AND METHODS Human enamel samples were obtained from third molars and randomly divided into five groups (n = 8): G1 - Control (brushed with water without dentifrice), G2 - Colgate Total (fluoride abrasive dentifrice), G3 - Natural White (whitening dentifrice), G4 - Opalescence (10% carbamide peroxide) and then brushed with Colgate Total, G5 - Opalescence (10% carbamide peroxide) and then brushed with Natural White. Bleaching regimen was applied according to manufacturers' instructions. The brushing process was performed with a modified Nyffenegger's brushing machine. Surface roughness was analyzed with a profilometer. Microhardness testing was performed with a Brinell hardness tester. RESULTS Results were statistically analyzed by Kruskal-Wallis, one-way ANOVA analysis and Mann-Whitney U, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks tests. There were significant differences in surface roughness values for all groups, which showed an increase in roughness (p < 0.05). When the bleaching treatment combined with brushing with whitening dentifrice was performed (G5), there was a significant decrease in hardness values (p < 0.05). The other groups (G1, G2, G3, G4) showed no significant hardness differences (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION It was concluded that toothbrushing procedures increased the enamel surface roughness, and that bleaching regimen performed with cleaning treatment, through brushing with whitening dentifrice decreased hardness values. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE When applied together, bleaching and cleaning treatments may alter the enamel surface roughness and hardness values.
Comprehensive study of features for subject-independent emotion recognition

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study to identify the most discriminative features that address the interpersonal variability to perform efficient human emotion recognition task. We consider three commonly used feature extraction techniques, namely, the Local Binary Patterns (LBP), the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and the curvelet transforms to extract features from the images on the JAFFE data set. A subset of these features is then selected using the Double Input Symmetrical Relevance (DISR), the Conditional Mutual Information Maximization (CMIM) and the minimum Redundancy maximum Relevance (mRMR) methods. The original feature sets and the subsets are then used to train a PBL-McRBFN classifier. We conduct a subject independent study with 10 cross validations on the JAFFE data set. The average performance of the PBL-McRBFN classifier with the different feature sets and subsets are compared. In general, feature selection methods used along with the feature extraction techniques help to perform emotion recognition more efficiently. It is also observed that the subset of features selected using the mRMR on the features extracted from the SIFT technique (SIFT+mRMR+PBL-McRBFN) is the most discriminative feature subset. A statistical paired t-test also ascertains this observation. We also compare the performance of the SIFT+mRMR+PBL-McRBFN with the other results in the literature for this problem. Performance comparison shows that the SIFT+mRMR+PBL-McRBFN outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the literature for this problem.
Nephroblastic elements in a retroperitoneal immature teratoma with elevated serum alpha-fetoprotein

Introduction: Teratoma and Wilms’ tumor are among the most frequent tumors of childhood. The occurrence of nephroblastic elements in a teratoma is extremely rare. Only eight cases that occurred in the retroperitoneum have been reported in English literature. Such occurrence complicates the differential diagnosis because of the overlapping histopathological findings between teratoma with nephroblastic elements and teratoid Wilms’ tumor. Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is a recognized marker of immature teratomas. The source of AFP is believed to be from gastrointestinal epithelium and neuroepithelium. To our knowledge, this is the first case of elevated serum AFP level observed in a retroperitoneal immature teratoma with nephroblastic elements. Case Report: A three and a half-month-old Taiwanese female infant presented with an abdominal distension. A retroperitoneal neoplasm was detected by the abdominal computed tomography scans. Chiu-Hsuan Cheng1, Shang-Hsien Yang2, Borcherng Su3 Affiliations: 1MBBS, Resident pathologist, Department of Pathology, Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital, Hualien city, Hualien county, Taiwan; 2MD, Attending pediatrician and pediatric hemato-oncologist, Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital, Hualien city, Hualien county, Taiwan, School of Medicine, Tzu Chi University, Hualien city, Hualien county, Taiwan; 3DDS, PhD, Attending pathologist, Department of Pathology, Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital, Hualien city, Hualien county, Taiwan, School of Medicine, Tzu Chi University, Hualien city, Hualien county, Taiwan. Corresponding Author: Borcherng Su, Complete Mailing Address No. 701, Section 3, Zhongyang road Hualien City, Hualien County, Taiwan, 970; Email: pathology@email.com Received: 09 May 2016 Accepted: 07 June 2016 Published: 05 July 2016 Histologically, nephroblastic elements in lobular contour were noted comprising about 15% per slide along with mixed elements of grade 3 teratoma in organoid arrangement. Her preoperative serum AFP level (1182 ng/ml) was above the physiologic level for her age. It decreased to 312.5 ng/ml at one week after tumor excision. She was well with no evidence of tumor recurrence at the age of one and a half years with unremarkable AFP blood level. Conclusion: We made the diagnosis of retroperitoneal immature teratoma with nephroblastic elements due to their preservation of lobular shape and organoid arrangement of mixed elements from different germ layers. A significant AFP level elevation may be noted in immature teratomas regardless of the presence of nephroblastic elements.
Optimal Design of Gamified Incentive Hierarchies in Online Fitness Communities

The decline in user engagement has become a common concern for online communities. Gamified design elements that represent goals have been widely utilized by online platforms to stimulate and retain users. Despite their popularity, empirical evidence indicated that the motivating effects of gamified incentive schemes are transient and only work before attaining goals. Motivated by this observation, we attempt to understand how to optimally design gamified incentive hierarchies in engaging users by appropriately choosing the ranking dispersion. We propose a time varying Markov-modulated regime-switching model to capture the impact of incentive hierarchies and past performance on users’ performance in the context of online fitness communities. Preliminary results suggest that the high-performing state of a user tends to occur around a goal and to be retained till the next goal when it is not too far away. Our findings can contribute to the goal-setting and gamification literature and provide significant guidelines on the design of status-based goals.
Modeling long temporal contexts for robust DNN-based speech recognition

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been shown to outperform traditional Gaussian Mixture Models in many Automatic Speech Recognition tasks. In this work, we investigate the potential of modeling long temporal acoustic contexts using DNNs. The complete temporal context is split into several sub-contexts. Multiple sub-context DNNs initialized with the same set of Restricted Boltzmann Machines are ﬁne-tuned independently and their last hidden layer activations are combined to jointly predict the desired state posteriors through a single soft-max output layer. From preliminary experiments on the Au-rora2 multi-style training task, our proposed system models a 65-frame temporal window of speech signals and yields a 4.4% WER, outperforming the best single DNN by 12.0% relatively. With the local independence assumption, both training and testing of the sub-context DNNs can be done in parallel. Moreover, our system has a relative 48.2% parameter reduction compared to a single DNN with the same amount of hidden units.
Acquisition and Transfer of Zero-Delay Matching

Six birds were trained to match-to-sample with red, green, and blue stimuli on a zero-delay procedure in which the sample stimulus is presented and then removed at the same time the choice stimuli are presented. The acquisition functions for zero-celay matching show it to be a more difficult task for pigeons than simultaneous matching where the choice response can be made with the sample present. After 42 sessions with red, green, and blue stimuli, yellow stimuli were substituted wherever the blue stimuli had appeared to test the transfer of the matching performance. The results from the transfer tests are considered in terms of a “coding hypothesis. ”
H∞ Model Reference Control for Networked Feedback Systems

This paper is concerned with the problem of H∞ model reference control for networked feedback systems. The physical plant and the controller are, respectively, in continuous time and discrete time. By using a sampled-data approach, a new model based on the updating instants of the zeroth-order hold (ZOH) is formulated, and a linear matrix inequality (LMI) based procedure is proposed for designing state-feedback controllers, which guarantee the output of the closed-loop networked control system tracks the output of a given reference model well in the H∞ sense. An illustrative example is presented to show the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed H∞ output tracking design