Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards an equitable digital public health era: promoting equity through a health literacy perspective

Abstract Digital technologies shape the way in which individuals and health systems interact to promote health and treat illness. Their propensity to exacerbate inequalities is increasingly being highlighted as a concern for public health. Personal, contextual and technological factors all interact and determine uptake and consequent use of digital technologies for health. This article reviews evidence on the impact of digital technologies on health equity. Health literacy is presented as a lens through which to approach research and policy on access, uptake and use of digital technologies. In the short term, based on our review of published literature, we conclude that it is likely that digital technologies will increase health inequities associated with increased age, lower level of educational attainment and lower socio-economic status. Geographical inequity may increase as a result of poor infrastructure but may decrease if digital technologies can be effectively widely deployed to compensate for health workforce and health system deficiencies. Programmes to enhance health and digital literacy and monitoring of access, utilization and impact across all groups in society can help to ensure that digital technologies act to reduce rather than reproduce or exacerbate existent health inequalities.
Total body irradiation and allogeneic bone marrow transplantation – Sofia University Hospital experience

term outcome in patients with leukaemias, who had conditioning regimens including total body irradiation (TBI) prior to bone marrow transplantation (BMT), and to establish independent factors correlated with treatment outcome. Material and methods: Between January 2002 and December 2007, 18 patients, 11 males and 7 females with median age of 12 years (range 8-50), received TBI. Initial diagnoses were acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) 11 (61%), acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) 4 (22%), and chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) 3 (17%). Pre-transplantation disease status was defined as remission 11 (61%), progression 4 (22%), and chronic phase 3 (17%). All the patients were conditioned with a high-dose chemoradiotherapy regimen including fractionated TBI delivering 10 to 12 Gy in 15 (73%) and a single fraction of 2 Gy in 3 (17%) of the cases. TBI was performed in alternate prone and supine positions with a 60 Co machine. In 13 (72%) patients transplantation was carried out from an HLA-identical related donor and in 5 (28%) from an unrelated donor. Seventeen allogeneic transplantations were of peripheral blood stem cells and 1 was of bone marrow stem cells. Post-transplantation clinical, biological, and functional evaluations were performed on days 30, 100, 180, at 1 year, and annually thereafter. Each evaluation included an assessment of the study end points: marrow chimerism, disease status (complete remission or relapse), survival status (alive or dead), treatment-related toxicity (TRT), treatment-related mortality (TRM) and graft-versus-hostdisease (GvHD). Results: Median follow-up from BMT was 27 months (range 3-52). Sixteen patients achieved engraftment, 2 patients had primary graft failure. Seven of 18 (39%) evaluable patients developed acute GvHD, 6 (35%) patients developed chronic GvHD. At the time of reporting 9 of 18 patients remain alive and in remission. Nine patients died, 4 (22%) because of relapse and 5 (28%) because of TRM. The cause of TRM was acute GvHD (2) and fatal – hepatic toxicity (1), neurological toxicity (1) and idiopathic pneumonia syndrome (1). The Kaplan-Meier estimates of 1and 3-year overall survival (OS) for patients were 58%:31%, respectively. In univariate analysis, no differences were observed regarding age, gender, initial diagnosis, status of the disease, total dose of TBI, HLA-identity, and effect of acute GvHD. Chronic GvHD was associated with increased OS (p = 0.05). Wspolczesna Onkologia (2009) vol. 13; 5 (227–232)
TRK inhibitors in TRK fusion-positive cancers

Abstract TRK fusions are oncogenic drivers of various adult and paediatric cancers. The first-generation TRK inhibitors, larotrectinib and entrectinib, were granted landmark, tumour-agnostic regulatory approvals for the treatment of these cancers in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Brisk and durable responses are achieved with these drugs in patients, including those with locally advanced or metastatic disease. In addition, intracranial activity has been observed with both agents in TRK fusion-positive solid tumours with brain metastases and primary brain tumours. While resistance to first-generation TRK inhibition can eventually occur, next-generation agents such as selitrectinib (BAY 2731954, LOXO-195) and repotrectinib were designed to address on-target resistance, which is mediated by emergent kinase domain mutations, such as those that result in substitutions at solvent front or gatekeeper residues. These next-generation drugs are currently available in the clinic and proof-of-concept responses have been reported. This underscores the utility of sequential TRK inhibitor use in select patients, a paradigm that parallels the use of targeted therapies in other oncogenic driver-positive cancers, such as ALK fusion-positive lung cancers. While TRK inhibitors have a favourable overall safety profile, select on-target adverse events, including weight gain, dizziness/ataxia and paraesthesias, are occasionally observed and should be monitored in the clinic. These side-effects are likely consequences of the inhibition of the TRK pathway that is involved in the development and maintenance of the nervous system.
Psychosocial Factors Affecting Parental Report of Symptoms in Children: A Systematic Review

Supplemental digital content is available in the text. ABSTRACT Objective Parents make important treatment decisions for their children based on symptoms they perceive their child to be experiencing. Multiple psychological factors are associated with subjective symptom perception, but factors affecting perception of symptoms in others have been explored less. We systematically reviewed the literature to identify parent and child psychological factors associated with parental report of physical symptoms in their child. Methods We searched Embase, Ovid, PsycINFO, and Scopus for studies that investigated associations between psychological factors and parental report of symptoms in their child. Results Thirty-six citations reporting on 34 studies that assessed the association between parent or child psychological factors and parental report of physical symptoms in the child were included in the review. Three main factors were identified as being associated with parental symptom report. First, there was evidence for an association between parental symptom report and affect, in particular parent and child anxiety. Second, child behavioral and conduct problems, and temperament-related challenges (problems with feeding and sleeping) were associated with parental symptom report. Third, parental expectations and beliefs that symptoms would occur were associated with parental symptom report, although few studies investigated these associations. Conclusions Parent and child affect, and parental expectations and beliefs may influence parents’ cognition, causing them to pay more attention to their child, interpret their child’s behavior as symptomatic, and recall symptoms in the child. Given the importance of parental perception of symptoms in driving decisions around care, additional research in this field is needed.
The Relationship between Aid and Economic Growth: What Aid Strategy Should the Government of Uganda Promote?

Attempts to correlate increases in aid with economic growth have persisted in research and policy circles for over five decades to justify foreign assistance from rich to poor countries. While the vast majority of studies find no causal connection between them, some argue that there is a correlation between aid and growth for certain countries having strong policies and institutions. It is this argument that has the greatest significance for Uganda’s aid infrastructure in today’s socio-economic climate. Uganda has come a long way from the aiddependent post-civil war economy of the late 1980s, where aid levels once reached 30 percent of GDP (Roberts & Fagernas, 2004). Pertinent questions have to be raised that take into account the improved level of economic development and institutional capacity of Uganda. Now that Uganda is on a sustained economic growth path with sound fiscal, monetary, and trade policies, will increasing aid flows have an important impact on growth? Or, is there a point of diminishing returns? Should different types of aid be mobilised to respond to the changing climate in Uganda? These are the kinds of questions that the government of Uganda should be considering in its aid negotiations with development partners.
Clinicopathological Features, Treatment, and Prognosis in Primary Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma of the Breast: A Retrospective Study of 46 Patients

Background Primary lymphoma of the breast is rare, and primary diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) of the breast is very rare. This study aimed to identify the clinicopathological characteristics and treatment associated with prognosis in patients with primary DLBCL of the breast. Material/Methods A retrospective study included the clinical and treatment data from 46 women with a histological diagnosis of primary DLBCL. Patients were staged using Ann Arbor staging criteria, overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), and the international prognostic index (IPI) scores were obtained. Laboratory finding included serum lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), and the immunohistochemistry findings were recorded. Results Patients (n=46), included stage I (n=18), stage II (n=18), stage III (n=3), and stage IV DLBCL (n=9). Treatment included chemotherapy with rituximab (n=16), and radiotherapy (n=12). The median follow-up time was 40.5 months, the 5-year OS rate was 36.2%, and the 5-year PFS rate was 29.1%. Univariate analysis showed that clinical stage, serum LDH, the IPI score, chemotherapy cycles >3, and Bcl-2 and Bcl-6 expression were correlated with the 5-year OS and PFS. Multivariate risk regression analysis showed that the number of chemotherapy cycles (>3) and Bcl-6 expression were independent prognostic factors in primary DLBCL of the breast (P<0.05). Conclusions A retrospective study of 46 patients with primary DLBCL of the breast showed that >3 cycles of chemotherapy and expression of Bcl-6 resulted in improved OS and PFS. Radiotherapy controlled local tumor recurrence but did not improve the OS and PFS. Rituximab did not improve patient survival.
Post‐ejaculatory modifications to sperm (PEMS)

Mammalian sperm must spend a minimum period of time within a female reproductive tract to achieve the capacity to fertilize oocytes. This phenomenon, termed sperm ‘capacitation’, was discovered nearly seven decades ago and opened a window into the complexities of sperm–female interaction. Capacitation is most commonly used to refer to a specific combination of processes that are believed to be widespread in mammals and includes modifications to the sperm plasma membrane, elevation of intracellular cyclic AMP levels, induction of protein tyrosine phosphorylation, increased intracellular Ca2+ levels, hyperactivation of motility, and, eventually, the acrosome reaction. Capacitation is only one example of post‐ejaculatory modifications to sperm (PEMS) that are widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Although PEMS are less well studied in non‐mammalian taxa, they likely represent the rule rather than the exception in species with internal fertilization. These PEMS are diverse in form and collectively represent the outcome of selection fashioning complex maturational trajectories of sperm that include multiple, sequential phenotypes that are specialized for stage‐specific functionality within the female. In many cases, PEMS are critical for sperm to migrate successfully through the female reproductive tract, survive a protracted period of storage, reach the site of fertilization and/or achieve the capacity to fertilize eggs. We predict that PEMS will exhibit widespread phenotypic plasticity mediated by sperm–female interactions. The successful execution of PEMS thus has important implications for variation in fitness and the operation of post‐copulatory sexual selection. Furthermore, it may provide a widespread mechanism of reproductive isolation and the maintenance of species boundaries. Despite their possible ubiquity and importance, the investigation of PEMS has been largely descriptive, lacking any phylogenetic consideration with regard to divergence, and there have been no theoretical or empirical investigations of their evolutionary significance. Here, we (i) clarify PEMS‐related nomenclature; (ii) address the evolutionary origin, maintenance and divergence in PEMS in the context of the protracted life history of sperm and the complex, selective environment of the female reproductive tract; (iii) describe taxonomically widespread types of PEMS: sperm activation, chemotaxis and the dissociation of sperm conjugates; (iv) review the occurence of PEMS throughout the animal kingdom; (v) consider alternative hypotheses for the adaptive value of PEMS; (vi) speculate on the evolutionary implications of PEMS for genomic architecture, sexual selection, and reproductive isolation; and (vii) suggest fruitful directions for future functional and evolutionary analyses of PEMS.
Adjuvant Taxane Therapy for Women with Early-stage, Invasive Breast Cancer: A Clinical Practice Guideline

Evidence-based Series 1-7 Version 2 was put in the Education and Information Section in March 2015. The Breast Disease Site Group (DSG) made the decision that EBS 1-7 Version 2 will not be updated as it has been replaced by EBS 1-21Optimal Systematic Therapy for Early Female Breast Cancer that include the more recent literature. The recommendations in EBS 1-7 Version 2 will no longer be maintained but may still be useful for academic or other information purposes. The PEBC has a formal and standardize process to ensure the currency of each document (PEBC Assessment & Review Protocol)
Recurrent Positional Embedding for Neural Machine Translation

In the Transformer network architecture, positional embeddings are used to encode order dependencies into the input representation. However, this input representation only involves static order dependencies based on discrete numerical information, that is, are independent of word content. To address this issue, this work proposes a recurrent positional embedding approach based on word vector. In this approach, these recurrent positional embeddings are learned by a recurrent neural network, encoding word content-based order dependencies into the input representation. They are then integrated into the existing multi-head self-attention model as independent heads or part of each head. The experimental results revealed that the proposed approach improved translation performance over that of the state-of-the-art Transformer baseline in WMT’14 English-to-German and NIST Chinese-to-English translation tasks.
Interactive Relations Across Dimensions of Interpersonal-Level Discrimination and Depressive Symptoms to Carotid Intimal-Medial Thickening in African Americans

Supplemental digital content is available in the text. ABSTRACT Objective This study aimed to examine within-race interactions of multiple dimensions of self-reported discrimination with depressive symptoms in relation to carotid intimal-medial thickness (IMT), a subclinical marker of atherosclerosis prospectively implicated in stroke incidence, in middle-aged to older African American and white adults. Methods Participants were a socioeconomically diverse group of 1941 African Americans (56.5%) and whites from the Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity across the Life Span study (30–64 years old, 47% men, 45.2% with household income <125% federal poverty threshold) who underwent carotid IMT measurement. Discrimination was assessed across four dimensions (everyday, frequency across various social statuses, racial, and lifetime burden). The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale was used to assess depressive symptoms. Results In cross-sectional hierarchical regression analyses, two interactions were observed in African Americans: more frequent discrimination across various social statuses (b < 0.001, p = .006) and a higher lifetime discrimination burden (b < 0.001, p = .02) were each related to thicker carotid IMT in those with greater depressive symptoms. No significant findings were observed within whites. Conclusions Among African Americans, those reporting high levels of discrimination and depressive symptoms have increased carotid atherosclerosis and may be at greater risk for clinical end points compared with those reporting one or neither of these risk factors. Findings suggest that assessment of interactive relationships among social and psychological factors may elucidate novel pathways for cardiovascular disease, including stroke, among African Americans.
WHEN IS FOULING TOO FAST TO MEASURE THERMALLY?

Many fouling tests employ an analysis of the change in heat transfer and thermal resistance to monitor fouling quantitatively. This approach is based on the assumption of momentary steady state. A mathematical analysis considering the validity of this steady state approach is described for three sets of boundary conditions commonly employed in fouling tests, and criteria for when the results are reliable are presented. An example of how ageing can affect the validity of the steady state approach is also presented. A short survey of experimental studies of fouling presented in the literature shows that gas-side particulate fouling is likely to contravene the reliability criteria, indicating that non-thermal methods should be used to study this phenomenon. INTRODUCTION Accurate measurement of fouling layer growth with time is important for both academic studies, such as investigating fouling mechanisms, and for industrial practice, such as determining the extent of fouling and elucidating process problems. One experimental methodology in common use is to monitor heat transfer performance and relate the change in overall heat transfer coefficient, U, to the thermal resistance of the fouling layer, Rf, via
Deficiency in the DNA repair protein ERCC1 triggers a link between senescence and apoptosis in human fibroblasts and mouse skin

ERCC1 (excision repair cross complementing‐group 1) is a mammalian endonuclease that incises the damaged strand of DNA during nucleotide excision repair and interstrand cross‐link repair. Ercc1−/Δ mice, carrying one null and one hypomorphic Ercc1 allele, have been widely used to study aging due to accelerated aging phenotypes in numerous organs and their shortened lifespan. Ercc1−/Δ mice display combined features of human progeroid and cancer‐prone syndromes. Although several studies report cellular senescence and apoptosis associated with the premature aging of Ercc1−/Δ mice, the link between these two processes and their physiological relevance in the phenotypes of Ercc1−/Δ mice are incompletely understood. Here, we show that ERCC1 depletion, both in cultured human fibroblasts and the skin of Ercc1−/Δ mice, initially induces cellular senescence and, importantly, increased expression of several SASP (senescence‐associated secretory phenotype) factors. Cellular senescence induced by ERCC1 deficiency was dependent on activity of the p53 tumor‐suppressor protein. In turn, TNFα secreted by senescent cells induced apoptosis, not only in neighboring ERCC1‐deficient nonsenescent cells, but also cell autonomously in the senescent cells themselves. In addition, expression of the stem cell markers p63 and Lgr6 was significantly decreased in Ercc1−/Δ mouse skin, where the apoptotic cells are localized, compared to age‐matched wild‐type skin, possibly due to the apoptosis of stem cells. These data suggest that ERCC1‐depleted cells become susceptible to apoptosis via TNFα secreted from neighboring senescent cells. We speculate that parts of the premature aging phenotypes and shortened health‐ or lifespan may be due to stem cell depletion through apoptosis promoted by senescent cells.
Study of correlation impact on credit default swap margin using a GARCH–DCC-copula framework

We establish generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity–dynamic conditional correlation (GARCH–DCC) and constant conditional correlation (CCC) copula model frameworks to study time-varying correlation among credit default swap (CDS) single names (SNs) and its impact on certain risk measures of CDS portfolios that consist of names from different sectors within the eurozone (EU) and North America (NA). Our purpose is to better understand the direction and magnitude of impacts on such risk measures due to correlation changes. This study covers 188 NA SNs and 145 EU SNs from January 2008 to August 2017. We find that correlations between CDS SNs go through different correlation regimes during this period. As a result, CDS portfolio risk measures in the form of value-at-risk or expected shortfall show sizable variation due to correlation regime shifts from historical means. Depending on the correlation level (high or low) and the portfolio type, risk measures could be either underestimated or overestimated. Both directional and balanced portfolios could experience a sizable underestimation of the margin depending on the direction in which the correlation deviates from historical means. Corresponding author: D. Li
Towards Graph Pooling by Edge Contraction

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) research has concentrated on improving convolutional layers, with little attention paid to developing graph pooling layers. Yet pooling layers can enable GNNs to reason over abstracted groups of nodes instead of single nodes, thus increasing their generalization potential. To close this gap, we propose a graph pooling layer relying on the notion of edge contraction: EdgePool learns a localized and sparse pooling transform. We evaluate it on four datasets, finding that it increases performance on the three largest. We also show that EdgePool can be integrated in existing GNN architectures without adding any additional losses or regularization.
Morphologic and Immunohistochemical Characterization of Spontaneous Lymphoma/Leukemia in NSG Mice

The NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ strain (NOD scid gamma, NSG) is a severely immunodeficient inbred laboratory mouse used for preclinical studies because it is amenable to engraftment with human cells. Combining scid and Il2rgnull mutations results in severe immunodeficiency by impairing the maturation, survival, and functionality of interleukin 2–dependent immune cells, including T, B, and natural killer lymphocytes. While NSG mice are reportedly resistant to developing spontaneous lymphomas/leukemias, there are reports of hematopoietic cancers developing. In this study, we characterized the immunophenotype of spontaneous lymphoma/leukemia in 12 NSG mice (20 to 38 weeks old). The mice had a combination of grossly enlarged thymus, spleen, or lymph nodes and variable histologic involvement of the bone marrow and other tissues. All 12 lymphomas were diffusely CD3, TDT, and CD4 positive, and 11 of 12 were also positive for CD8, which together was consistent with precursor T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma/leukemia (pre-T-LBL). A subset of NSG tissues from all mice and neoplastic lymphocytes from 8 of 12 cases had strong immunoreactivity for retroviral p30 core protein, suggesting an association with a viral infection. These data highlight that NSG mice may develop T-cell lymphoma at low frequency, necessitating the recognition of this spontaneously arising disease when interpreting studies.