Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Food poverty and health among schoolchildren in Ireland: findings from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study

Abstract Objectives To investigate the relationships between food poverty and food consumption, health and life satisfaction among schoolchildren. Design Analysis of the 2002 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, a cross-sectional survey that employs a self-completion questionnaire in a nationally representative random sample of school classrooms in the Republic of Ireland. Subjects A total of 8424 schoolchildren (aged 10–17 years) from 176 schools, with an 83% response rate from children. Results Food poverty was found to be similarly distributed among the three social classes (15.3% in the lower social classes, 15.9% in the middle social classes and 14.8% in the higher social classes). It was also found that schoolchildren reporting food poverty are less likely to eat fruits, vegetables and brown bread, odds ratio (OR) from 0.66 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.45–0.87) to 0.81 (95% CI 0.63–0.99); more likely to eat crisps, fried potatoes and hamburgers, OR from 1.20 (95% CI 1.00–1.40) to 1.62 (95% CI 1.39–1.85); and more likely to miss breakfast on weekdays, OR from 1.29 (95% CI 0.33–1.59) to 1.72 (95% CI 1.50–1.95). The risk of somatic and mental symptoms is also increased, OR from 1.48 (95% CI 1.18–1.78) to 2.57 (95% CI 2.33–2.81); as are negative health perceptions, OR from 0.63 (95% CI 0.43–0.83) to 0.52 (95% CI 0.28–0.76) and measures of life dissatisfaction, OR from 1.88 (95% CI 1.64–2.12) to 2.25 (95% CI 2.05–2.45). Similar results were found for life dissatisfaction in an international comparison of 32 countries. All analyses were adjusted for age and social class. Conclusions Food poverty in schoolchildren is not restricted to those from lower social class families, is associated with a substantial risk to physical and mental health and well-being, and requires the increased attention of policy makers and practitioners.
Mode of Action of the Antimicrobial Peptide Indolicidin*

Indolicidin is a cationic antimicrobial peptide isolated from bovine neutrophils. It consists of only 13 amino acids, has the highest tryptophan content of any known protein, and is amidated at the carboxyl terminus in nature. By circular dichroism spectroscopy a weak poly-L-proline II extended helix structure was observed that became substantially more pronounced upon interaction with liposomes. Indolicidin bound purified surface lipopolysaccharide with high affinity and permeabilized the outer membrane of Escherichia coli to the small hydrophobic molecule 1-N-phenylnapthylamine (Mr 200), results consistent with indolicidin crossing the outer membrane via the self-promoted uptake pathway. The methyl esterification of indolicidin's carboxyl terminus increased its activity for Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. In Gram-negative bacteria this was associated with an increased binding to lipopolysaccharide and increased permeabilization of the outer membrane. The cytoplasmic membrane was the site of action of indolicidin as assayed in E. coli by the unmasking of cytoplasmic β-galactosidase due to membrane permeabilization. The mechanism for this activity was shown to be the ability of the peptide to cause an increase in the transmembrane current of planar lipid bilayers. This current increase was activated by transmembrane potentials in excess of −70 to −80 mV. Consistent with this, there was a substantial decrease in indolicidin-mediated bacterial killing and permeabilization of the cytoplasmic membrane of E. coli that had been pretreated with the uncoupler carbonyl cyanide-m-chlorophenyl hydrazone. In planar bilayers, indolicidin induced the formation of discrete channels, which ranged in conductance from 0.05-0.15 nS. Thus despite the small size and unique composition of indolicidin, it was capable of killing Gram-negative bacteria by crossing the outer membrane and causing disruption of the cytoplasmic membrane by channel formation.
Comparison of α-tocopherol microparticles produced with different wall materials: pea protein a new interesting alternative

α-Tocopherol is a radical chain breaking antioxidant that can protect the integrity of tissues and play an important role in life process. Microparticles containing α-tocopherol were produced by spray drying technique using pea protein (PP), carboxymethylcellulose(CMC) and mixtures of these materials with maltodextrin (PP-M and CMC-M) as wall materials. The microparticles produced were characterised as regards the core retention (high performance liquid chromatography), the morphology (scanning electron microscopy) and size distribution (laser diffraction). The retention of α-tocopherol within all microparticles was above 77%. They showed a spherical shape and roughness at varied degrees. Their mean particles size remained below 7 µm, and the smallest sizes were found in PP and CMC-M microparticles. The results obtained in this work show that the pea protein use for α-tocopherol microencapsulation is a promising system for further application in food.
Malignant pleural mesothelioma: single-institution experience of 101 patients over a 15-year period

Abstract Background: Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a rare but aggressive neoplasm that typically originates from the mesothelial surfaces of the pleural cavity. Exposure to asbestos is the principal etiological agent of MPM. The disease is characterized by difficult stage classification and limited consensus on therapeutic approach. We have evaluated the experience with MPM in the Antwerp University Hospital over the past 15 years. Methods: A database was created with all patients diagnosed with or treated for a MPM between 2001 and 2015. A total of 101 patients were included on which different survival analyses were performed combined with a reproduction of demographic, clinical, histologic and therapeutic data, and these were compared to literature data. Results: Vast majority of our 101 patients were male (80%) with a median age of 66 years at diagnosis with predominantly epitheloid histology (81%). Overall median survival was 18.3 months and overall 1-, 2- and 5-year survival rates were 68%, 37% and 7%, respectively. Kaplan–Meier analysis showed a non-significant difference in survival between the several best (b) TNM-stages (p = .356). A significant difference in survival was observed in patients undergoing surgery versus no surgery (p = .008), between the different histological types (p < .0001) and treatment with chemotherapy alone versus chemotherapy with surgery (p < .0001). Smoking at diagnosis and epitheloid histology have been identified as significant prognostic factors in the multivariate Cox regression model (HR 3.13 and 0.53, respectively). Conclusion: Descriptive and survival analysis of our patient database confirmed the limitations of the current staging system and were concordant with literature regarding MPM.
Integrated Supertagging and Parsing

Parsing is the task of assigning syntactic or semantic structure to a natural language sentence. This thesis focuses on syntactic parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG; Steedman 2000). CCG allows incremental processing, which is essential for speech recognition and some machine translation models, and it can build semantic structure in tandem with syntactic parsing. Supertagging solves a subset of the parsing task by assigning lexical types to words in a sentence using a sequence model. It has emerged as a way to improve the efficiency of full CCG parsing (Clark and Curran, 2007) by reducing the parser’s search space. This has been very successful and it is the central theme of this thesis. We begin by an analysis of how efficiency is being traded for accuracy in supertagging. Pruning the search space by supertagging is inherently approximate and to contrast this we include A* in our analysis, a classic exact search technique. Interestingly, we find that combining the two methods improves efficiency but we also demonstrate that excessive pruning by a supertagger significantly lowers the upper bound on accuracy of a CCG parser. Inspired by this analysis, we design a single integrated model with both supertagging and parsing features, rather than separating them into distinct models chained together in a pipeline. To overcome the resulting complexity, we experiment with both loopy belief propagation and dual decomposition approaches to inference, the first empirical comparison of these algorithms that we are aware of on a structured natural language processing problem. Finally, we address training the integrated model. We adopt the idea of optimising directly for a task-specific metric such as is common in other areas like statistical machine translation. We demonstrate how a novel dynamic programming algorithm enables us to optimise for F-measure, our task-specific evaluation metric, and experiment with approximations, which prove to be excellent substitutions. Each of the presented methods improves over the state-of-the-art in CCG parsing. Moreover, the improvements are additive, achieving a labelled/unlabelled dependency F-measure on CCGbank of 89.3%/94.0% with gold part-of-speech tags, and 87.2%/92.8% with automatic part-of-speech tags, the best reported results for this task to date. Our techniques are general and we expect them to apply to other parsing problems, including lexicalised tree adjoining grammar and context-free grammar parsing.
Dietary adequacy of rural school children among bambara groundnut growing farmers in Ntchisi district of Malawi

In Malawi, malnutrition among school-aged children as indicated by 30% stunting, 18% underweight and 3% wasting levels is a problem that is being addressed through school feeding programs. The nutritional status of school going children is dependent on household food security, education level of the parents, food preference of the parents and food preparation constraints. These factors affect food consumption patterns of children which is one of the determining factors of nutritional status. A study was, therefore, conducted to explore the food consumption patterns and diet adequacy for school going children aged 7-9 years in Kalira EPA of Ntchisi district in Malawi. Seventy eight school children whose parents were involved in bambara groundnut (Vigna unguiculata) farming were recruited for the study. Demographic information and data on food consumption pattern and intake during postharvest and pre-planting periods was collected using a structured questionnaire. The questionnaire included an interactive 24-hour dietary recall and dietary diversity score (DDS) tools. The children came from mainly male-headed households (91%) with 6 ± 2 members. The household heads had attained upper primary education and their main (89.7%) occupation was farming. The school-age children were consuming two carbohydrate based meals per day accompanied with leafy vegetables (34.1%) or stewed pulses (46.6%). Nsima (a stiff porridge made from maize flour) and thin maize flour porridge were the dominant carbohydrate sources in the diet. Only 12% of the children reported consuming animal source foods. Most of the school children were eating three times or less in a day with lunch and supper as the major meals. The diet of the school children did not meet the recommended dietary allowance for energy (69%), fat (21%), vitamin A (24%), iron (65%) and calcium (28%). However, the diet was providing adequate protein intake for the children. Snacks in the form of roasted sweet potatoes or maize and bananas were provided to 26.1% of the school children when going to school, while only 28.4% were provided with breakfast before going to school. Breakfast consisted of black tea or porridge made from whole maize flour. Diets of the majority (68%) of the school going had minimum diversity according to the diversity score. The dietary pattern for the school children was the same during the postharvest and pre-planting period.
Vertical Structure of Tropical Cyclone Rainbands as Seen by the TRMM Precipitation Radar

AbstractTen years of data from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission satellite’s Precipitation Radar (TRMM PR) show the vertical structure of tropical cyclone rainbands. Radar-echo statistics show that rainbands have a two-layered structure, with distinct modes separated by the melting layer. The ice layer is a combination of particles imported from the eyewall and ice left aloft as convective cells collapse. This layering is most pronounced in the inner region of the storm, and the layering is enhanced by storm strength. The inner-region rainbands are vertically confined by outflow from the eyewall but nevertheless are a combination of strong embedded convective cells and robust stratiform precipitation, both of which become more pronounced in stronger cyclones.Changes in rainband coverage, vertical structure, and the amount of active convection indicate a change in the nature of rainbands between the regions inward and outward of a radius of approximately 200 km. Beyond this radius, rainbands consis.
Orangutan population biology, life history, and conservation: Perspectives from population viability analysis models

Orangutan populations are particularly susceptible to local extinction due to hunting, habitat loss, and fragmentation because they live at low population densities, grow slowly, and reproduce rarely. This chapter uses Population Viability Analysis (PVA) to consider the conservation implications of orangutan life history and population biology. First, a baseline model that incorporates the best available orangutan life-history data is presented. This model is then used to examine how plausible variation in model parameters, changes in the intensity of human-induced threats, and different conservation and management interventions would affect the probability of orangutan population persistence. The effects of existing threats on the extinction risk of specific orangutan populations on Borneo and Sumatra are also modelled. Finally, the conservation and management implications of this modeling exercise are considered.
Qigong Improving Physical Status in Middle-Aged Women

Regular exercise has been shown to benefit its practitioners and prevent and control diseases. Muscle/Tendon Change Classic (MTCC) qigong, characterized by simple, slow, and full-body exercise, is appropriate for the middle-age population. This study aims to evaluate the effect of the MTCC qigong program in improving physical status for middle-aged women. A quasi-experimental design was used. The experimental group (n = 37) received an 8-week MTCC qigong program, whereas the control group (n = 34) received none. Physiological parameters of muscular performance, body composition, and bone strength were measured before and after the program. The average age was 49 ± 4.13 years for the experimental group and 50 ± 4.74 years for the control group. The demographic characteristics were homogeneous between the two groups. There were statistically significant differences between the two groups in muscular endurance, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index at the completion of 8-week MTCC qigong program. The MTCC qigong could improve muscle endurance and body composition but not bone strength for middle-aged women, thereby demonstrating the qigong practice has certain health-preserving effects on women in this stage of life.
Title : HIF 2 α targeted RNAi therapeutic inhibits clear cell renal cell carcinoma

Title: HIF2α targeted RNAi therapeutic inhibits clear cell renal cell carcinoma Authors and affiliations: So C. Wong, Weijun Cheng, Holly Hamilton, Anthony L. Nicholas, Darren H. Wakefield, Aaron Almeida, Andrei V. Blokhin, Jeffrey Carlson, Zane C. Neal, Vladimir Subbotin, Guofeng Zhang, Julia Hegge, Stephanie Bertin, Vladimir S. Trubetskoy, David B. Rozema, David L. Lewis, Steven B. Kanner 1. Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals Inc., Madison, WI
Benign melanocytic proliferative nodule within a congenital naevus

A neonate presented with a deeply pigmented papule within a medium‐sized congenital naevus. Histologically, this proved to be a benign proliferative nodule in a congenital naevus. This case is presented to highlight the occurrence of this lesion, the main differential of which is the rare entity of true congenital melanoma.
Treatment of Vulvovaginal Candidiasis in Patients With Diabetes

Vulvovaginal candidiasis is a common infection worldwide, and its incidence has increased dramatically in the past decade (1). Approximately 75% of all women will have the infection at least once (2), and 40-50% of them will have recurrences (3). Diabetes is a proven predisposing factor for vulvovaginal candidiasis, along with pregnancy, use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, high-estrogen-dose oral contraceptives, obesity, and drug addiction (4,5). Symptomatic vulvovaginal candidal infections have been shown to be more prevalent in patients with diabetes than in the general population (4,5) and are usually attributed to "yeast infection" by the women themselves (6). For example, in a survey of women aged 18-40 years with type 1 diabetes, 60% thought that they had had candidiasis within the last year (7). In other surveys, occurrences of vulvovaginitis among diabetic women ranged from ~7 to >50% (8,9). Vulvovaginitis is most problematic in women with poorly controlled diabetes. Proper control of glucose is therefore paramount in management of these infections. Limited data suggest that the primary causative organism of vulvovaginal candidiasis in diabetic women often differs from and may be more difficult to treat than that usually found in nondiabetic patients. Diabetic patients themselves are responsible for day-to-day management of their diabetes, which requires considerable time and effort. Therefore, any therapy for vulvovaginal candidiasis, in addition to being safe and free of drug interactions that might compromise glucose control, should fit into the context of everyday life and not further complicate daily routines. This article examines current information regarding vulvovaginitis in diabetic women and therapeutic options for its management.
Patient‐provider discussion of physical activity among early stage lung cancer survivors

Lung cancer accounts for approximately 14% of all new cancer cases and 28% of cancer deaths in the United States each year [1], with 52% of those diagnosed with localized disease now expected to live beyond five-years [1]. Lung cancer survivors can experience significant ongoing symptom burden, including impairments in quality of life and high rates of dyspnea and fatigue. Evidence suggests that physical activity can enhance cardiorespiratory fitness, improve quality of life and reduce symptom burden [2]; however the majority of cancer survivors do not engage in sufficient physical activity to meet national guidelines (≥150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise)[3]. Participation in physical activity may be particularly crucial for lung cancer survivors who tend to be older, often have a history of smoking, and commonly suffer from comorbid conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Cancer survivors remain at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, secondary cancers and diabetes [4]. The importance of health promotion has become increasingly recognized, with the role of providers in encouraging participation in physical activity noted, along with a recommendation to include physical activity in survivorship care plans [5, 6]. The majority of Americans identify their physician as their primary source of advice concerning health information [7] and The American College of Preventive Medicine recommends physical activity counseling as part of all routine patient visits. Importantly, the discussion of physical activity with an oncologist has been associated with greater patient participation in physical activity [8]; however exercise may not be discussed as frequently as needed. A nationwide survey found that few survivors received recommendations regarding physical activity, diet and smoking guidelines, and that survivors were less likely than those without a history of cancer to receive a physical activity recommendation [9]. The goals of the current study were to (1) describe early-stage lung cancer survivors’ self-reported discussion of physical activity with health-care providers, and (2) examine the association between sociodemographic, disease and health behavior variables and discussion characteristics.
Mad1 expression in the absence of differentiation: Effect of cAMP on the B‐lymphoid cell line Reh

The protein Mad1 heterodimerizes with Max to form an E‐box binding complex able to interfere with the transcriptional and transforming activities of c‐Myc. Downregulation of c‐Myc accompanied by induction of Mad1 upon differentiation has fueled the notion that Mad1 may play a role in the cessation of proliferation associated with the differentiation process. Since studies on Mad1 expression have so far been limited to cells undergoing differentiation, it was of interest to examine Mad1 expression in a cell system unable to differentiate. To do so, we utilized the leukemia‐derived B‐precursor cell line, Reh, and studied the expressions of Mad1, c‐Myc, Mxi1, and Max during cAMP‐mediated growth inhibition of these cells. Thus, the adenylate cyclase activator forskolin induced growth inhibition of the cells in the G1 phase of the cell cycle. This growth inhibition was associated with transient increased expression of Mad1 concomitant with transient downregulation of c‐Myc. The Mad1 protein levels essentially paralleled those of mRNA, with peak levels at 4 h of forskolin treatment. By coimmunoprecipitation we detected increased binding of Mad1 to Max in forskolin‐treated cells, indicating that the changes in Mad1 protein levels had functional implications. By continually treating Reh cells with forskolin for 72 h, we observed a sustained elevated expression of Mad1 concomitant with downregulated c‐Myc expression, still without changing the differentiation profile of the Reh cells. Interestingly, we showed that other known cell cycle regulatory proteins also were transiently regulated by forskolin. To this extent, following forskolin treatment of Reh cells, cyclin E–cdk2 activity was transiently reduced concomitant with dephosphorylation of pRB. We suggest that the early changes in Mad1 and the cell cycle regulatory proteins initiate a chain of events resulting in permanent growth arrest. Thus, the increased expression of Mad1 in the absence of differentiation indicates that Mad1 expression in Reh cells is linked to growth arrest per se. J Cell Physiol 178:76–84, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Boosting Sensitivity of a Retinal Vessel Segmentation Algorithm with Convolutional Neural Network

Accurate vessel segmentation is a tough task for various medical images applications especially the segmentation of retinal images vessels. A computerised algorithm is required for analysing the progress of eye diseases. A variety of computerised retinal segmentation methods have been proposed but almost all methods to date show low sensitivity for narrowly low contrast vessels. We propose a new retinal vessel segmentation algorithm to address the issue of low sensitivity. The proposed method introduces a deep learning model along with pre-processing and post-processing. The pre-processing is used to handle the issue of uneven illuminations. We design a fully Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and train it to get fine vessels observation.The post-processing step is used to remove the background noise pixels to achieve well-segmented vessels. The proposed segmentation method gives good segmented images especially for detecting tiny vessels. We evaluate our method on the commonly used publicly available databases: DRIVE and STARE databases. The higher sensitivity of 75% leads to proper detection of tiny vessels with an accuracy of 94.7%.