Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
National quality campaigns: who benefits?

Background The use of national quality campaigns to foster evidence-based hospital practices is increasing. Because campaigns typically do not limit access to their resources, they may influence non-enrolled hospitals as well. Objective To examine the relative impact of a national campaign, the Door-to-Balloon (D2B) Alliance, on enrolled and non-enrolled hospitals. Methods In this prospective cohort study, we compared the use of D2B Alliance resources (eg, webinars, online community, mentor network), changes in the use of strategies recommended by the D2B Alliance, and perceived impact of the D2B Alliance between hospitals that enrolled in the D2B Alliance (n=264) and hospitals that declined enrolment (n=101). Results More than half (53.2%) of non-enrolled hospitals reported using at least some of the resources made available by the D2B Alliance to improve door-to-balloon times. This compared with 83.5% of enrolled hospitals reporting that they used D2B Alliance resources (p<0.01). Both enrolled and non-enrolled hospitals significantly increased their use of recommended hospital strategies between 2005 and 2008, although the use of strategies remained incomplete (35.5–91.5% use). There was no significant difference between the use of these strategies between enrolled and non-enrolled hospitals at follow-up (p≥0.51), adjusted for baseline use. About half of all hospitals reported that door-to-balloon times would have been worse at their hospital without the existence of the D2B Alliance. Conclusions This research suggests that national quality campaigns with open access to campaign resources may have substantial spillover effects on non-enrolled hospitals.
Maize Stover Biochar Accelerated Urea Hydrolysis and Short-term Nitrogen Turnover in Soil

The study was carried to determine the labile carbon contents in biochar pyrolyzed under different temperatures and its effect on urea hydrolysis rate. Corn stovers were pyrolyzed at highest temperature of 300°C, 500°C and 700 °C to produce fresh biochar. Soil incubation experiment was conducted with biochar application rate of 0% and 2% with presence of urea. The results showed that biochars accelerated urea hydrolysis, and high temperature pyrolyzed biochar have more significant effect on soil pH enhances and acceleration of urea hydrolysis than biochar pyrolyzed at low temperature. Moreover, biochar produced at 300°C contains relative high concentration of labile carbon, and 43-64% of labile carbons were oxidized within 40 days incubation. The labile carbon in biochars also leaded microbes thrives and resulted in accelerate short-term N turnover. i.e. at early stage of incubation, fresh biochar increased mineralization of soil N by 79-449 mg•kg−1, and matured biochar by 30-61 mg•kg−1, but microbial immobilization effect was observed in fresh biochar-amended soil at the end of incubation. We concluded that aged biochar is suitable for simultaneous soil amendment with urea rather than newly produced biochar as it can promote available N accumulation in short time thus increase the risk of inorganic nitrogen leaching loss.
The effect of intrauterine levonorgestrel use on the expression of c-JUN, oestrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and Ki-67 in human endometrium.

The major regulators of endometrial function are oestrogen and progesterone, which act through binding their nuclear receptors and by activating transcription of their target genes. Interactions between steroid receptors and transcription proteins, e.g. c-JUN/AP-1, can modulate steroid action at the transcriptional level. The 19-nortestosterone-derived progestin, levonorgestrel, is used for contraception, treatment of menorrhagia and for endometrial protection during hormone replacement therapy, but the signalling pathways of its action are totally undefined. We examined the effect of an intrauterine system, releasing 20 microg of levonorgestrel per 24 h (LNG-IUS), on immunoreactive oestrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, c-JUN and Ki-67 expression in 29 endometrial specimens, obtained from fertile women using the LNG-IUS for contraception. Moderate to strong immunostaining for oestrogen receptors was observed in the stromal cells in all specimens, in glandular epithelial cells in 26 cases and in flattened luminal epithelial cells in 17 specimens. Decidualized stromal cells showed no progesterone receptor immunoreactivity in 19 of the 29 specimens, and weak to moderate immunostaining in 10 cases. Luminal epithelial cells were negative for progesterone receptor in all samples. Intense nuclear staining for C-JUN was observed in epithelial cells in 26 and in decidualized stromal cells in all 29 of the samples. In 16 samples, Ki-67 immunoreactivity was evaluated as weak to moderate in decidualized stroma, and in 13 samples absent. Our data demonstrate that intrauterine release of LNG maintains constant expression of C-JUN and exerts progestational effects in the endometrium in the absence of progesterone receptors. In contrast, LNG-IUS inhibits several cellular responses to oestrogen despite the presence of endogenous oestrogen and oestrogen receptors. These data suggest that the progestational effects induced by progesterone and levonorgestrel are mediated through different signalling pathways.
A Comparison between the Anti-microbial Activity of Native Propolis and the Anti-microbial Activity of Imported Ones against Different Health Microbes

Propolis is a gum-like product gathered by bees from various plants. It is known that the propolis has anti-bacterial, anticarcinogenic, and immune-stimulating biological activities. In the present study, we have investigated the anti-microbial activity of propolis against certain important human microbes. The paper disc diffusion method was used to investigate the propolis activity and the inhibition zones were measured. Results revealed that the ethanolic and water extracts of propolis have a strong inhibitory potential against Aspergillus brasiliensis Varga and Escherichia coli Migula strain (ATCC 0157:H7) regardless of the time of propolis harvesting. The propolis ethanolic and water extracts were ineffective against Escherichia coli strain (ATCC 29522) and Proteus mirabilis Hauser. Jordan propolis was the most effective in inhibiting the Enterobacter aerogenes 35029 Hormaeche and Edwards than the Chinese, Turkish and Tablet propolis samples. Furthermore, the Jordan propolis and the Chinese crude 2 propolis were the most effective against the Candida albicans mold. The Chinese propolis was the most effective against A. brasiliensis mold.
The Epidemiology of Prescriptions Abandoned at the Pharmacy

BACKGROUND Picking up prescriptions is an essential but previously unstudied component of adherence for patients who use retail pharmacies. Understanding the epidemiology and correlates of prescription abandonment may have an important effect on health care quality. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the rates and correlates of prescription abandonment. DESIGN Cross-sectional cohort study. SETTING One large retail pharmacy chain and one large pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) in the United States. MEASUREMENTS Prescriptions bottled at the retail pharmacy chain between 1 July 2008 and 30 September 2008 by patients insured by the PBM were identified. Pharmacy data were used to identify medications that were bottled and either dispensed or returned to stock (RTS) or abandoned. Data from the PBM were used to identify previous or subsequent dispensing at any pharmacy. The first (index) prescription in a class for each patient was assigned to 1 of 3 mutually exclusive outcomes: filled, RTS, or RTS with fill (in the 30 days after abandonment, the patient purchased a prescription for a medication in the same medication class at any pharmacy). Outcome rates were assessed by drug class, and generalized estimating equations were used to assess patient, neighborhood, insurance, and prescription characteristics associated with abandonment. RESULTS 10 349 139 index prescriptions were filled by 5 249 380 patients. Overall, 3.27% of index prescriptions were abandoned; 1.77% were RTS and 1.50% were RTS with fill. Patients were least likely to abandon opiate prescriptions. Prescriptions with copayments of $40 to $50 and prescriptions costing more than $50 were 3.40 times and 4.68 times more likely, respectively, to be abandoned than prescriptions with no copayment (P < 0.001 for both comparisons). New users of medications had a 2.74 times greater probability of abandonment than prevalent users (P < 0.001), and prescriptions delivered electronically were 1.64 times more likely to be abandoned than those that were not electronic (P < 0.001). LIMITATION The study included mainly insured patients and analyzed data collected during the summer months only. CONCLUSION Although prescription abandonment represents a small component of medication nonadherence, the correlates to abandonment highlight important opportunities to intervene and thereby improve medication taking. PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE CVS Caremark.
Control of FimY translation and type 1 fimbrial production by the arginine tRNA encoded by fimU in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium

Expression of type 1 fimbriae in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium undergoes phase variation or alteration between a fimbriate and a non‐fimbriate phenotype. This variation is known to be dependent upon environmental conditions in vitro and is thought to be a complex process involving regulation by a number of proteins. The regulatory genes located within the fim cluster include fimZ, fimY and fimW. A fourth gene of the cluster, fimU, encodes a tRNA molecule specific for rare arginine codons. We have shown previously that fimU affects the expression of S. typhimurium type 1 fimbriae, and that fimU is functionally related to the Escherichia coli gene argU. A high frequency of rare arginine codons was found within the three fim regulatory genes, and five of these codons were clustered within fimY alone. To investigate the affects of fimU on FimY production, a FimY fusion with the E. coli maltose‐binding protein was constructed and expressed in an E. coli argU background. Western blots of extracts from the argU mutant and parental strain indicated that production of FimY was significantly reduced in the absence of a functional tRNAArg(UCU). FimY production in this mutant could be restored to high levels when fimU was introduced on a plasmid, and also when three rare arginine codons, located within the first 14 positions within fimY, were exchanged for major arginine codons. A Tn10 insertion from a Salmonella enteritidis fimU mutant was transduced into S. typhimurium, and this strain was analysed for the expression of type 1 fimbriae. The resulting S. typhimurium fimU mutant was found to be non‐fimbriate under all conditions tested and could be complemented by the introduction of fimU alone on a plasmid. In addition, this mutant could be complemented by transformation with fimY altered in the first three rare arginine codons. Reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction confirmed that the fimY transcript was present at similar levels in the fimU mutant and parental strain. These results indicated that the observed inhibition of protein expression was not occurring at the transcriptional level. Analysis of expression of the malEfimY fusion in the S. typhimurium fimU mutant and parental strain confirmed the data observed in E. coli. In contrast, a FimW fusion was found to be produced at similar levels in both the fimU mutant and the parental strain. Together, these data indicate that the absence of a functional fimU results in the inhibition of efficient FimY translation, and thus type 1 fimbrial production in S. typhimurium.
HLA-A*0201-Restricted CD8+ Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Epitopes Identified from Herpes Simplex Virus Glycoprotein D1

Evidence obtained from both animal models and humans suggests that T cells specific for HSV-1 and HSV-2 glycoprotein D (gD) contribute to protective immunity against herpes infection. However, knowledge of gD-specific human T cell responses is limited to CD4+ T cell epitopes, with no CD8+ T cell epitopes identified to date. In this study, we screened the HSV-1 gD amino acid sequence for HLA-A*0201-restricted epitopes using several predictive computational algorithms and identified 10 high probability CD8+ T cell epitopes. Synthetic peptides corresponding to four of these epitopes, each nine to 10 amino acids in length, exhibited high-affinity binding in vitro to purified human HLA-A*0201 molecules. Three of these four peptide epitopes, gD53–61, gD70–78, and gD278–286, significantly stabilized HLA-A*0201 molecules on T2 cell lines and are highly conserved among and between HSV-1 and HSV-2 strains. Consistent with this, in 33 sequentially studied HLA-A*0201-positive, HSV-1-seropositive, and/or HSV-2-seropositive healthy individuals, the most frequent and robust CD8+ T cell responses, assessed by IFN-γ ELISPOT, CD107a/b cytotoxic degranulation, and tetramer assays, were directed mainly against gD53–61, gD70–78, and gD278–286 epitopes. In addition, CD8+ T cell lines generated by gD53–61, gD70–78, and gD278–286 peptides recognized infected target cells expressing native gD. Lastly, CD8+ T cell responses specific to gD53–61, gD70–78, and gD278–286 epitopes were induced in HLA-A*0201 transgenic mice following ocular or genital infection with either HSV-1 or HSV-2. The functional gD CD8+ T cell epitopes described herein are potentially important components of clinical immunotherapeutic and immunoprophylactic herpes vaccines.
GK-Tail+ An Efficient Approach to Learn Software Models

Inferring models of program behavior from execution samples can provide useful information about a system, also in the increasingly common case of systems that evolve and adapt in their lifetime, and without requiring large developers’ effort. Techniques for learning models of program behavior from execution traces shall address conflicting challenges of recall, specificity and performance: They shall generate models that comprehensively represent the system behavior (recall) while limiting the amount of illegal behaviors that may be erroneously accepted by the model (specificity), and should infer the models within a reasonable time budget to process industrial scale systems (performance). In our early work, we designed GK-tail, an approach that can infer guarded finite state machines that model the behavior of object-oriented programs in terms of sequences of method calls and constraints on the parameter values. GK-tail addresses well two of the three main challenges, since it infers guarded finite state machines with a high level of recall and specificity, but presents severe limitations in terms of performance that reduce its scalability. In this paper, we present GK-tail+, a new approach to infer guarded finite state machines from execution traces of object-oriented programs. GK-tail+ proposes a new set of inference criteria that represent the core element of the inference process: It largely reduces the inference time of GK-tail while producing guarded finite state machines with a comparable level of recall and specificity. Thus, GK-tail+ advances the preliminary results of GK-tail by addressing all the three main challenges of learning models of program behavior from execution traces.
Control of the shunt Active Power Filter under non-ideal grid voltage and unbalanced load conditions

In this study a new method is proposed in order to improve the harmonic suppression efficiency of Active Power Filter for the problems caused by the distorted and unbalanced voltages with unbalanced load currents in control strategy. The proposed control method gives an adequate compensating current reference even for non ideal voltage and unbalanced current conditions. The results of simulation study are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control technique in this study.
Variability of infectious aerosols produced during coughing by patients with pulmonary tuberculosis.

RATIONALE Mycobacterium tuberculosis is transmitted by infectious aerosols, but assessing infectiousness currently relies on sputum microscopy that does not accurately predict the variability in transmission. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the feasibility of collecting cough aerosols and the risk factors for infectious aerosol production from patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in a resource-limited setting. METHODS We enrolled subjects with suspected TB in Kampala, Uganda and collected clinical, radiographic, and microbiological data in addition to cough aerosol cultures. A subset of 38 subjects was studied on 2 or 3 consecutive days to assess reproducibility. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS M. tuberculosis was cultured from cough aerosols of 28 of 101 (27.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 19.9-37.1%) subjects with culture-confirmed TB, with a median 16 aerosol cfu (range, 1-701) in 10 minutes of coughing. Nearly all (96.4%) cultivable particles were 0.65 to 4.7 μm in size. Positive aerosol cultures were associated with higher Karnofsky performance scores (P = 0.016), higher sputum acid-fast bacilli smear microscopy grades (P = 0.007), lower days to positive in liquid culture (P = 0.004), stronger cough (P = 0.016), and fewer days on TB treatment (P = 0.047). In multivariable analyses, cough aerosol cultures were associated with a salivary/mucosalivary (compared with purulent/mucopurulent) appearance of sputum (odds ratio, 4.42; 95% CI, 1.23-21.43) and low days to positive (per 1-d decrease; odds ratio, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.07-1.33). The within-test (kappa, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.68-0.94) and interday test (kappa, 0.62; 95% CI, 0.43-0.82) reproducibility were high. CONCLUSIONS A minority of patients with TB (28%) produced culturable cough aerosols. Collection of cough aerosol cultures is feasible and reproducible in a resource-limited setting.
The ageing gastrointestinal tract

Purpose of reviewThis article reviews the impact of ageing on the gastrointestinal tract, including effects on the absorption of nutrients and drugs and the gastrointestinal tract defence system against ingested pathogens. Recent findingsRecent publications support earlier observations of an age-related selective decline in gut function including changes in taste, oesophageal sphincter motility, gastric emptying, and neurons of the myenteric plexus related to gut transit which may impact the nutritional status. Ageing is also associated with structural and functional mucosal defence defects, diminished abilities to generate protective immunity, and increased incidence of inflammation and oxidative stress. A number of gastrointestinal disorders occur more frequently in the elderly population. SummaryAlterations in gut function with ageing have particular implications for oesophageal, gastric, and colonic motility. Older individuals are particularly susceptible to malnutrition, postprandial hypotension, dysphagia, constipation, and faecal incontinence. Decrease in the number of nerve cells of the myenteric plexus that impact digestive absorption and the surface area of the small intestine because of degeneration of villi may lead to blunted absorption of nutrients. Impairment of the intestinal immune system as a result of ageing, including the mucosal layer of the gastrointestinal tract, appears to be a significant contributor to the age-related increase in the incidence and severity of infections.
Walking speed over 10 metres overestimates locomotor capacity after stroke

Objective: To examine 10-m comfortable walking speed and 6-minute distance in healthy individuals and individuals after stroke and to assess the level of disability associated with poor walking endurance after stroke. Design: Descriptive study in which comfortable walking speed over 10 m and distance covered in 6 minutes (6-minute walk test) were compared between healthy subjects and subjects after stroke. Subjects: Twelve healthy subjects and 14 subjects after stroke. Main outcome measures: Walking speed and 6-minute distances were compared between groups. In addition, for each group, actual distance walked in 6 minutes was compared with the distance predicted by the 10-m walking speed test and the distance predicted by normative reference equations. Results: Subjects after stroke had significant reductions in 10-m speed and 6-minute distance compared with healthy subjects (p < 0.05). Subjects after stroke were not able to maintain their comfortable walking speed for 6 minutes, whereas healthy subjects walked in excess of their comfortable speed for 6 minutes. The average distance walked in 6 minutes by individuals after stroke was only 49.8 ± 23.9% of the distance predicted for healthy individuals with similar physical characteristics. Conclusion: In our subjects after stroke, walking speed over a short distance overestimated the distance walked in 6 minutes. Both walking speed and endurance need to be measured and trained during rehabilitation.
Telomere length and psychological well-being in patients with chronic heart failure.

BACKGROUND psychological stress and depressive symptoms have been implicated with accelerated ageing and increased progression of diseases. Shorter telomere length indicates a more advanced biological age. It is unknown whether psychological well-being is associated with telomere length in patients with the somatic condition of chronic heart failure (CHF). DESIGN a cross-sectional analysis was used. SETTING patients were admitted to the hospital with signs and symptoms of CHF. OBJECTIVE the study aimed to assess the association between telomere length and psychological well-being in patients with CHF. METHODS telomere length was determined by quantitative polymerase chain reaction in 890 patients with New York Heart Association functional class II to IV CHF. We evaluated the perceived mental health by the validated RAND-36 questionnaire. Depressive symptoms were assessed by the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES-D), and the presence of type D personality was evaluated by the DS14. RESULTS a lower perceived mental health on the RAND-36 score was associated with shorter telomere length. Adjustment for age and gender did not change our findings (standardised beta, 0.11; P-value, 0.002). Telomere length was not associated with the CES-D or DS14 score. CONCLUSION decreased perceived mental health is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length in patients with CHF. Future work should determine whether psychological stress accelerates biological ageing.
Eliciting Survey Cooperation

Given the weaker ties to community as noted by scholars such as Robert Putnam, survey researchers should not be surprised by a decline in survey participation over the past 10 years. This research analyzes the use of incentives coupled with introductory themes emphasizing cooperation and helpfulness—cooperative norms in American society—to understand their effects on survey response. This article analyzes two separate experiments (one phone and one mail) that provide evidence that norms of cooperation matter in the decision to participate in a survey, suggesting that this is particularly true at the refusal conversion stage. These results indicate that survey researchers may use such themes to their advantage, especially when conducting a nonresponse follow-up in a mail survey.