Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Building mental health workforce capacity through training and retention of psychiatrists in Zimbabwe

Abstract Despite the need to improve the quantity and quality of psychiatry training in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), very little is known about the experiences of psychiatric trainees in the region. This is the first study examining psychiatric trainees in a low-income country in SSA. It was carried out as part of the needs assessment for a unique Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) programme to find African solutions for medical shortages in Africa. We approached all doctors who had trained in post-graduate psychiatry in Zimbabwe in 2010 and conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with all except one (n = 6). We analysed the data using constant comparison and thematic analysis. Trainees described the apprenticeship model as the programme's primary strength, through providing clinical exposure and role models. Programme weaknesses included shortages in information sources, trainee salaries, trainers, public health education, and in the mental health service. Most respondents were, however, eager to continue practising psychiatry in Zimbabwe, motivated by family ties, national commitment and helping vulnerable, stigmatized individuals. Respondents called for sub-speciality training and for infrastructure and training to do research. Resources need to be made available for psychiatric trainees in more SSA settings to develop public health competencies. However, investment in psychiatry training programmes must balance service provision with trainees’ educational needs. Directing investment towards needs identified by trainees may be a cost-effective, context-sensitive way to increase retention and learning outcomes.
Cognitive mechanisms underlying relapse to nicotine

Abstract Much of the addictive power of nicotine in humans may be attributable to learned contextual associations, such that these secondary cues become potent predictive incentives for both maintaining and driving relapse to drug use, even after long periods of abstinence. Here, I review the evidence that chronic nicotine in vivo can induce persistent neuronal changes in excitability within the hippocampal circuitry, with a specific emphasis on the dentate gyrus as an initiator of drug use. The relevance of these early homeostatic (can be fully reversed by acute application of nicotine) neuroadaptations on withdrawal from nicotine is then related to known cognitive deficits also produced following chronic nicotine. I briefly discuss how the hippocampus may influence other parts of the reward circuitry to affect chronic drug use and how periods of drug cessation and/or withdrawal may convert these short-term changes into permanent alterations within the brain that may drive craving and/or relapse many years of abstinence.
A Three-Phase Active Rectifier Topology for Bipolar DC Distribution

A new three-phase active rectifier topology is proposed for bipolar dc distribution, which can achieve the independent dc-pole control, with only one two-level voltage source converter and an ac-side grounding inductor. The averaged large-signal model and linearized small-signal model of the rectifier are derived in the stationary reference frame. Moreover, a control system is proposed with proper controller parameters. Besides, the rectifier is tested on an experiment platform. Comprehensive experiment results are given and analyzed to validate the function of the proposed rectifier under different operation conditions, including the rectifier start-up performance, rectifier dynamics with unbalanced dc loads for two poles, and rectifier dynamics with asymmetrical dc voltages for two poles. Finally, the proposed rectifier is compared with other two existing ac–dc conversion approaches, in terms of required number and rating of components as well as power losses with different load imbalance levels, which further highlight some potential benefits of the proposed topology.
Perturbed Myelination Process of Premyelinating Oligodendrocyte in Niemann‐PickType C Mouse

Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC) is an autosomal recessive neurovisceral lipid storage disease caused by a loss of NPC1 function, which results in perturbation of intracellular cholesterol transport. In BALB/c npcnih mice, the murine ortholog of NPC1 gene is mutated. In NPC mouse, hypomyelination is conspicuous in the cerebral white matter and corpus callosum in addition to neuronal storage. However, the pathogenesis on hypomyelination is not well elucidated. We hypothesized that the hypomyelination in NPC mice resulted from either defective differentiation of oligodendrocyte lineage cells or a failure of proper axon-glial interaction. Myelin basic protein immunohistochemistry disclosed severe hypomyelination of cerebral cortex as well. NG2- or O4-positive progenitor cells and premyelinating oligodendrocytes (OLs) were abundant. However, pi-glutathione-S-transferase-positive mature OLs were considerably reduced. In hypomyelinated white matter, strong immunoreactivity of polysialylated-neural cell adhesion molecule, a negative regulator of myelination, was observed in axons. Given the fact that neuro-axonal degeneration has been observed in NPC mouse as early as 9 days of age prior to the commencement of myelination in the corpus callosum and that axonal signals are essential for the proper myelination, subtle axonal injury might be contributing to the pathogenesis of disturbed myelination in the NPC mouse.
Parameter estimation and use of gamma interferon assay for the diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis in Brazil 1

Lopes L.B. , Alves T.M. , Stynen A.P.R. , Mota P.M. P.C. , Leite R.C. & Lage A.P. 2012. Parameter estimation and use of gamma interferon assay for the diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis in Brazil. Pesquisa Veterinária Brasileira 32(4):279-283. Embrapa Agrossilvipastoril, Rodovia MT 222, km 2,5, Caixa Postal 343, Sinop, MT 78.550-970, Brazil. E-mail: luciano.lopes@embrapa.br This study aimed to evaluate the interference of tuberculin test on the gamma-interferon (INFγ) assay, to estimate the sensitivity and speci icity of the INFγ assay in Brazilian conditions, and to simulate multiple testing using the comparative tuberculin test and the INFγ assay. Three hundredifty cattle from two TB-free and two TB-infected herds were submitted to the comparative tuberculin test and the INFγ assay. The comparative tuberculin test was performed using avian and bovine PPD. The INFγ assay was performed by the BovigamTM kit (CSL Veterinary, Australia), according to the manufacturer’s speci ications. Sensitivity and speci icity of the INFγ assay were assessed by a Bayesian latent class model. These diagnostic parameters were also estimate for multiple testing. The results of INFγ assay on D0 and D3 after the comparative tuberculin test were compared by the McNemar’s test and kappa statistics. Results of mean optical density from INFγ assay on both days were similar. Sensitivity and speci icity of the INFγ assay showed results varying (95% con idence intervals) from 72 to 100% and 74 to 100% respectively. Sensitivity of parallel testing was over 97.5%, while speci icity of serial testing was over 99.7%. The INFγ assay proved to be a very useful diagnostic method.
Development and validation of the pharmaceutical care satisfaction questionnaire.

The development and validation of a survey instrument to assess consumer satisfaction with pharmacy services is discussed. The Pharmaceutical Care Satisfaction Questionnaire (PCSQ) is a 30-item instrument administered by someone other than the pharmacist that uses a Likert scale to score respondents' answers. The PCSQ is written approximately at a seventh grade reading level. Following initial development, the PCSQ was administered to 360 consumers in ambulatory pharmacies and to 311 patients in a multicenter hyperlipidemia outcomes study. The Cronbach coefficient alpha was . 94 for the consumer data, with a 64.8% variance accounted for by the 4-factor solution. A coefficient alpha of . 84 was found on all 30 items in the hyperlipidemia study, with a variance of 63.78% in control patients and 60.16% in treatment patients. The PCSQ is easy to administer and score, with minimal cost. Unlike other satisfaction surveys, the PCSQ contains patient evaluations regarding outcomes of care. A primary limitation of the PCSQ is that it is a newly developed instrument that needs to be used in more studies to strengthen its validity.
Individual and collective determinants of mental health during wartime. A survey of displaced populations amidst the July–August 2006 war in Lebanon

Abstract It is well known that war has negative effects on the mental health of civilian populations. However, different perceptions and reactions to trauma have different impacts on the psychological well-being of affected populations. This study assessed the mental health status of adult internally displaced persons (IDPs) at an early stage of the summer 2006 war in Lebanon, and investigated the relationship between their mental status and socio-demographic determinants, and individual and collective experiences of the war. Two hundred and eighteen IDPs were surveyed for the prevalence and determinants of acute trauma symptoms. The reporting of anxiety symptoms was assessed using a version of the Hamilton Anxiety Rate Scale that was translated into Arabic. The prevalence of self-reported anxiety symptoms was relatively low, at 25.8%. After adjustment, the outcome variable was significantly associated with being female (OR=2.9), experiencing bombing while fleeing (OR=2.8) and being surveyed in days of bad political news (OR=2.7). Factors related to displacement circumstances and coping strategies showed no significance. This result suggests that individual and collective war experience had an equal importance in predicting anxiety. This study recommends the consideration of factors operating at a collective level for better understanding civilians’ mental health in times of war.
Opposite effects of wortmannin and LY294002 on TLR-mediated nitric oxide production: negative regulation of NF-κ B by phosphoinositide 3-kinase

A number of previous studies have suggested the involvement of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) in TLR signaling. However, there have also been a number of conflicting reports. The PI3K inhibitor, wortmannin, greatly enhanced TLR-mediated inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) expression and cytokine production in the mouse macrophage cell line, Raw264.7. The effect of wortmannin was common to TLR2, 3, 4, and 9, and was accompanied by activation of NF-κ B and up-regulation of cytokine mRNA production. Surprisingly, another PI3K inhibitor, LY294002, strongly suppressed the production of iNOS and cytokines. This effect of LY294002 was based on its inhibitory effect on mRNA synthesis. Expression of dominant negative mutants of PI3K in macrophages augmented the LPS-induced expression of iNOS. Introduction of a pH1 vector producing short hairpin RNA (shRNA) that targets a catalytic subunit of PI3K (p110 β) also enhanced the TLR-mediated responses. Thus, the augmentation of TLR signals by wortmannin was mediated through inhibition of PI3K, while the effect of LY294002 was not explained by its effect on PI3K. These discrepancies in the effects of pharmacological inhibitors in TLR-signaling may have caused confusion regarding the role of PI3K in innate immunity.
An iterative searching and ranking algorithm for prioritising pharmacogenomics genes

Pharmacogenomics (PGx) studies are to identify genetic variants that may affect drug efficacy and toxicity. A machine understandable drug-gene relationship knowledge is important for many computational PGx studies and for personalised medicine. A comprehensive and accurate PGx-specific gene lexicon is important for automatic drug-gene relationship extraction from the scientific literature, rich knowledge source for PGx studies. In this study, we present a bootstrapping learning technique to rank 33,310 human genes with respect to their relevance to drug response. The algorithm uses only one seed PGx gene to iteratively extract and rank co-occurred genes using 20 million MEDLINE abstracts. Our ranking method is able to accurately rank PGx-specific genes highly among all human genes. Compared to randomly ranked genes (precision: 0.032, recall: 0.013, F1: 0.018), the algorithm has achieved significantly better performance (precision: 0.861, recall: 0.548, F1: 0.662) in ranking the top 2.5% of genes.
Analysis of 50-, 100-, and 200-m Freestyle Swimmers at the 1992 Olympic Games

The performances of 335 male and female swimmers competing in 50-, 100-, and 200-m freestyle events at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games were videotaped and analyzed to determine stroke length (SL), stroke rate (SR), starting time (ST), turning times (TI = turn in, TO = turn out), finishing (end) time (ET), and average velocity (AV); relationships were then determined among these variables in addition to height, weight, age, and final time (FT). Differences were subsequently assessed within and among the events, and comparisons were made between male and female performances. ST, TI, TO, ET, and SL were identified as principal components of successful swimming performance at each distance. Results revealed statistically significant correlations between factors for all events. The men were older and taller; possessed longer stroke lengths; and started, turned, and swam faster than the women. As the race distance increased from 50 to 200 m, ST, TI, TO, SL, and ET increased for both men and women, while age, S.
Suffrage, Schooling, and Sorting in the Post-Bellum U.S. South

This paper estimates the political and economic effects of the 19th century disenfranchisement of black citizens in the U.S. South. Using adjacent county-pairs that straddle state boundaries, I examine the effect of voting restrictions on political competition, public goods, and factor markets. I find that poll taxes and literacy tests each lowered overall electoral turnout by 8-22% and increased the Democratic vote share in elections by 1-7%. Employing newly collected data on schooling inputs, I show that disenfranchisement reduced the teacher-child ratio in black schools by 10-23%, with no significant effects on white teacher-child ratios. I develop a model of suffrage restriction and redistribution in a 2-factor economy with migration and agricultural production to generate sufficient statistics for welfare analysis of the incidence of black disenfranchisement. Consistent with the model, disenfranchised counties experienced a 3.5% increase in farm values per acre, despite a 4% fall in the black population. The estimated factor market responses suggest that black labor bore a collective loss from disenfranchisement equivalent to at least 15% of annual income, with landowners experiencing a 12% gain.
Lipoprotein X in a patient with cholestasis and hypertriglyceridaemia

Hypertriglyceridaemia is an established cause of acute pancreatitis and responds to insulin therapy in addition to lipid lowering medication. We report a case of severe hypertriglycaeridemia of 149 mmol/L in a 36–year–old man with type 2 diabetes who presented to the surgical ward with abdominal pain due to pancreatitis and developed acute cholestasis, jaundice and eruptive xanthomata. His triglycerides improved to 3.8 mmol/L with sliding scale insulin within two weeks of in-hospital stay. However, his total cholesterol remained raised at 23.7 mmol/L. The lipoprotein electrophoresis confirmed the presence of lipoprotein X associated with bile obstruction, which contributed to an increase in total cholesterol. The total cholesterol normalized on improvement of his cholestasis.
Inner solar system material discovered in the Oort cloud

Fresh inner solar system material preserved in the Oort cloud may hold the key to understanding our solar system formation. We have observed C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS), a recently discovered object on a cometary orbit coming from the Oort cloud that is physically similar to an inner main belt rocky S-type asteroid. Recent dynamical models successfully reproduce the key characteristics of our current solar system; some of these models require significant migration of the giant planets, whereas others do not. These models provide different predictions on the presence of rocky material expelled from the inner solar system in the Oort cloud. C/2014 S3 could be the key to verifying these predictions of the migration-based dynamical models. Furthermore, this object displays a very faint, weak level of comet-like activity, five to six orders of magnitude less than that of typical ice-rich comets on similar Orbits coming from the Oort cloud. For the nearly tailless appearance, we are calling C/2014 S3 a Manx object. Various arguments convince us that this activity is produced by sublimation of volatile ice, that is, normal cometary activity. The activity implies that C/2014 S3 has retained a tiny fraction of the water that is expected to be present at its formation distance in the inner solar system. We may be looking at fresh inner solar system Earth-forming material that was ejected from the inner solar system and preserved for billions of years in the Oort cloud.
Oncotargets and Therapy Dovepress Dovepress Long Noncoding Rna Ccat2 Promotes Breast Tumor Growth by Regulating the Wnt Signaling Pathway

In addition to protein-coding genes, the human genome makes a large amount of noncoding RNAs, including microRNAs and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). Emerging evidence indicates that lncRNAs could have a critical role in the regulation of cellular processes such as cell growth and apoptosis as well as cancer progression and metastasis. The lncRNA CCAT2 is dysregulated in several cancers such as colon cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, gastric cancer, and breast cancer; however, the contributions of CCAT2 to breast cancer remain largely unknown. In the current paper, we first confirmed the high expression level of CCAT2 in breast cancer tissues and breast cancer cell lines by reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) assay, and we further analyzed the relationship between CCAT2 expression and clinical prognostic factors. Also, the biological function of CCAT2 was explored and the results showed silencing of CCAT2 could suppress cell growth in vitro and tumor formation in vivo. Finally, our results revealed that the abnormal expression of CCAT2 could influence the Wnt signaling pathway. In conclusion, lncRNA CCAT2 might be considered as a novel molecule involved in breast cancer development, which provides a potential therapeutic target for breast cancer.
Evaluation of zotarolimus-eluting metal stent in animal ureters.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Drug-eluting stents proved to minimize neointimal hyperplasia in coronary vessels. Hyperplastic reaction is the most common unwelcome event related to the use of metal mesh stents in the ureter. We evaluated the effect of zotarolimus-eluting stent (ZES) Endeavor Resolute in the porcine and rabbit ureter. MATERIALS AND METHODS A ZES and a bare metal stent (BMS) were inserted in each ureter of 10 pigs and 6 rabbits. The insertion was performed by the retrograde approach. CT was used for the evaluation of porcine ureters while intraoperative intravenous urography (IVU) was used for rabbit ureters. The follow-up included CT or IVU every week for the following 4 weeks for pigs and 8 weeks for rabbits. Renal scintigraphies were performed before stent insertion and during the third week in all animals. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been used for the evaluation of the luminal and intraluminal condition of the ureters with stents. Histopathologic examination of the these ureters embedded in glycol-methacrylate was performed. RESULTS Hyperplastic reaction was present in both stent types. BMSs in seven porcine ureters were completely obstructed while porcine ureters with ZES stents had hyperplastic tissue that did not result in obstruction. Two rabbit ureters with BMS stents were occluded while no ZES was associated with ureteral obstruction. The function of the seven porcine renal units and the two rabbit units with obstructed ureters with stents was compromised. The OCT revealed increased hyperplastic reaction in the ureters with BMS stents in comparison with those with ZESs. Although, hyperplastic reaction was present in all cases, pathologic examination revealed significantly more hyperplastic reaction in BMSs. CONCLUSION ZESs in the pig and rabbit ureter were not related to hyperplastic reaction resulting in stent occlusion. These stents were related to significantly lower hyperplastic reaction in comparison with BMSs while inflammation rates were similar for both stent types.
Random vs. systematic sampling from administrative databases involving human subjects.

OBJECTIVE Two sampling techniques, simple random sampling (SRS) and systematic sampling (SS), were compared to determine whether they yield similar and accurate distributions for the following four factors: age, gender, geographic location and years in practice. METHOD Any point estimate within 7 yr or 7 percentage points of its reference standard (SRS or the entire data set, i.e., the target population) was considered "acceptably similar" to the reference standard. The sampling frame was from the entire membership database of the Canadian Chiropractic Association. The two sampling methods were tested using eight different sample sizes of n (50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 500, 800). From the profile/characteristics, summaries of four known factors [gender, average age, number (%) of chiropractors in each province and years in practice], between- and within-methods chi 2 tests and unpaired t tests were performed to determine whether any of the differences [descriptively greater than 7% or 7 yr] were also statistically significant. The strengths of the agreements between the provincial distributions were quantified by calculating the percent agreements for each (provincial pairwise-comparison methods). Any percent agreement less than 70% was judged to be unacceptable. RESULTS Our assessments of the two sampling methods (SRS and SS) for the different sample sizes tested suggest that SRS and SS yielded acceptably similar results. Both methods started to yield "correct" sample profiles at approximately the same sample size (n > 200). CONCLUSION SS is not only convenient, it can be recommended for sampling from large databases in which the data are listed without any inherent order biases other than alphabetical listing by surname.
Genetic Control of the Corticosterone Level at Rest and Under Emotional Stress in ISIAH Rats with Inherited Stress-Induced Arterial Hypertension

The genetic background of the regulatory systems of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in hypertension remains unclear. The inherited stress-induced arterial hypertension (ISIAH) and Wistar Albino Glaxo (WAG) normotensive rats were bred and their F2 progeny were used in a quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis to identify genomic regions for plasma basal and stress-induced corticosterone levels, and for absolute and relative adrenal gland weights. The significant loci were found for stress-induced corticosterone on chromosome 9 and for adrenal weight on chromosome 6. The results may help to identify the genes controlling the trait phenotypes in the ISIAH rats characterized by the enhanced responsiveness to stressful stimulation.