Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetics of acute myeloid leukemia in the elderly: mutation spectrum and clinical impact in intensively treated patients aged 75 years or older

A cute myeloid leukemia is a disease of the elderly (median age at diagnosis, 65–70 years). The prognosis of older acute myeloid leukemia patients is generally poor. While genetic markers have become important tools for risk stratification and treatment selection in young and middle-aged patients, their applicability in very old patients is less clear. We sought to validate existing genetic risk classification systems and identify additional factors associated with outcomes in intensively treated patients aged ≥75 years. In 151 patients who received induction chemotherapy in the AMLCG-1999 trial, we investigated recurrently mutated genes using a targeted sequencing assay covering 64 genes. The median number of mutated genes per patient was four. The most commonly mutated genes were TET2 (42%), DNMT3A (35%), NPM1 (32%), SRSF2 (25%) and ASXL1 (21%). The complete remission rate was 44% and the 3-year survival was 21% for the entire cohort. While adverse-risk cytogenetics (MRC classification) were associated with shorter overall survival (P=0.001), NPM1 and FLT3-ITD mutations (present in 18%) did not have a significant impact on overall survival. Notably, none of the 13 IDH1-mutated patients (9%) reached complete remission. Consequently, the overall survival of this subgroup was significantly shorter than that of IDH1-wildtype patients (P<0.001). In summary, even among very old, intensively treated, acute myeloid leukemia patients, adverse-risk cytogenetics predict inferior survival. The spectrum and relevance of driver gene mutations in elderly patients differs from that in younger patients. Our data implicate IDH1 mutations as a novel marker for chemorefractory disease and inferior prognosis. (AMLCG-1999 trial: clinicaltrials.gov identifier, NCT00266136)
[Cumulative risk assessment of phthalates exposure among infants and their mothers in Shanghai].

OBJECTIVE To estimate the levels of phthalates exposure and cumulative risk assessment among infants and their mothers in Shanghai by phthalate monoesters inurine specimens. METHODS To collect urine specimens and questionnaires from 152 pairs of infants and mothers in Shanghai and conduct a cross-sectional study. Ten phthalate monoesters were determined by ultra performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectroscopy. To estimate the internal exposure of 6 phthalates by creatininemodel and performe cumulative risk assessment by hazard index( HI). RESULTS The top five of the concentration level of phthalate monoesters in mothers' urine specimens were mono-isobutyl phthalate( Mi BP), mono-n-butyl phthalate( Mn BP), mono-ethyl phthalate( MEP), mono-methyl phthalate( MMP) and mono-2-ethylhexyl phthalate( MEHP), while in infants ', they were Mi BP, Mn BP, MEP, MEHP and mono-2-ethyl-5-carboxypentyl phthalate( MECPP). The estimated daily intake( EDI) was calculated according to the concentration of urinary phthalates monoesters. And the DEHP was at the highest level both in mothers and infants, the geometric means( GMs) reached to 6. 64 and 14. 02 μg/(kg·d). While others from high to low were Di BP, Dn BP, DEP, DMP and BBP respectively. HI was used to perform cumulative risk assessment. The proportion of HI over 1 among mothers was 5. 92%, and among infants was 32. 24%. CONCLUSION There are some health risks of the phthalates exposure among mothers and infants in communities in Shanghai, and the cumulative risks of infants are higher than mothers.
Taking Constructivism One Step Further: Post Hoc Analysis of a Student-Created Wiki

Background Wiki platform use has potential to improve student learning by improving engagement with course material. A student-created wiki was established to serve as a repository of study tools for students in a medical school curriculum. There is a scarcity of information describing student-led creation of wikis in medical education. Objective The aim is to characterize website traffic of a student-created wiki and evaluate student perceptions of usage via a short anonymous online survey. Methods Website analytics were used to track visitation statistics to the wiki and a survey was distributed to assess ease of use, interest in contributing to the wiki, and suggestions for improvement. Results Site traffic data indicated high usage, with a mean of 315 (SD 241) pageviews per day from July 2011 to March 2013 and 74,317 total user sessions. The mean session duration was 1.94 (SD 1.39) minutes. Comparing Fall 2011 to Fall 2012 sessions revealed a large increase in returning visitors (from 12,397 to 20,544, 65.7%) and sessions via mobile devices (831 to 1560, 87.7%). The survey received 164 responses; 88.0% (162/184) were aware of the wiki at the time of the survey. On average, respondents felt that the wiki was more useful in the preclinical years (mean 2.73, SD 1.25) than in the clinical years (mean 1.88, SD 1.12; P<.001). Perceived usefulness correlated with the percent of studying for which the respondent used electronic resources (Spearman ρ=.414, P<.001). Conclusions Overall, the wiki was a highly utilized, although informal, part of the curriculum with much room for improvement and future exploration.
Quality of life in patients with proton‐treated pediatric medulloblastoma: Results of a prospective assessment with 5‐year follow‐up

To the authors' knowledge, health‐related quality of life (HRQOL) outcomes are not well described in patients with medulloblastoma. The use of proton radiotherapy (RT) may translate into an improved HRQOL. In the current study, the authors report long‐term HRQOL in patients with proton‐treated pediatric medulloblastoma.
[Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages among 18 years old and over adults in 2010-2012 in China].

OBJECTIVE To investigate consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages among Chinese adults in 2010-2012. METHODS Data was collected from Chinese Nutrition and Health Surveillance: 2010-2012. Multi-stage stratified random cluster and probability proportionate sampling method was used, and 45 203 respondents aged 18 and over from 150 sites of 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities were involved in the analysis. The consumption rate of sugar-sweetened beverages, distribution of the classification of the consumption frequency and percentage of variety beverages consumption frequency were calculated. RESULTS There were 50. 1% of Chinese adults in2010-2012 consuming sugar-sweetened beverages, men and women were 49. 2% and 50. 8%, for age groups of 18-44, 45-59 and 60 and over, the consumption rates were65. 4% %, 47. 0% % 36. 3%, respectively. The prevalence in cities was 49. 0% and in counties was 51. 3%. The rate of consuming 1 time/week and over was 15. 3% and consuming 1 time/day was 1. 3%. As the economical level decreased, the two rates decreased. Carbonated beverages had the highest consumption frequency( 39. 8%), and the lactic acid beverages had the lowest( 10. 8%). Consumption of carbonated beverages in men( 44. 8%) was higher than that in women( 35. 3%), while for the fruit and vegetable juice, lactic acid beverages, disposable milk beverages and coffee, the consumption in women were higher than that in men. As the economical level decreased, consumption of carbonated and disposable milk beverages were increasing, and lactic acid beverages and coffee were decreasing significantly. CONCLUSION The consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages among adults in 2010-2012 was relatively high. The targeted nutrition health education and intervention was needed and implemented to decrease the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.
Dramatic response to cyclin D–dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitor in refractory poorly differentiated neuroendocrine carcinoma of the breast

ABSTRACT Neuroendocrine tumors are a rare subset of breast carcinomas. Commonly, platinum-based doublet is used as a systemic treatment option for high-grade neuroendocrine carcinomas from lung, gastrointestinal, and genitourinary origins. In comparison to other breast cancers, neuroendocrine carcinomas have unique genomic features and different treatment strategies. We present a patient with high-grade neuroendocrine carcinoma of the breast who had a successful and durable response to the cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitor palbociclib in conjunction with endocrine therapy. This patient was refractory to commonly used platinum-based chemotherapy as well as hormone-based treatment. To date, this is the first published case of use of CDK 4/6 inhibitor in primary neuroendocrine carcinoma of the breast.
Leaf wound induced ultraweak photon emission is suppressed under anoxic stress: Observations of Spathiphyllum under aerobic and anaerobic conditions using novel in vivo methodology

Plants have evolved a variety of means to energetically sense and respond to abiotic and biotic environmental stress. Two typical photochemical signaling responses involve the emission of volatile organic compounds and light. The emission of certain leaf wound volatiles and light are mutually dependent upon oxygen which is subsequently required for the wound-induced lipoxygenase reactions that trigger the formation of fatty acids and hydroperoxides; ultimately leading to photon emission by chlorophyll molecules. A low noise photomultiplier with sensitivity in the visible spectrum (300–720 nm) is used to continuously measure long duration ultraweak photon emission of dark-adapting whole Spathiphyllum leaves (in vivo). Leaves were mechanically wounded after two hours of dark adaptation in aerobic and anaerobic conditions. It was found that (1) nitrogen incubation did not affect the pre-wound basal photocounts; (2) wound induced leaf biophoton emission was significantly suppressed when under anoxic stress; and (3) the aerobic wound induced emission spectra observed was > 650 nm, implicating chlorophyll as the likely emitter. Limitations of the PMT photocathode’s radiant sensitivity, however, prevented accurate analysis from 700–720 nm. Further examination of leaf wounding profile photon counts revealed that the pre-wounding basal state (aerobic and anoxic), the anoxic wounding state, and the post-wounding aerobic state statistics all approximate a Poisson distribution. It is additionally observed that aerobic wounding induces two distinct exponential decay events. These observations contribute to the body of plant wound-induced luminescence research and provide a novel methodology to measure this phenomenon in vivo.
Manifold Mixup: Encouraging Meaningful On-Manifold Interpolation as a Regularizer

Deep networks often perform well on the data manifold on which they are trained, yet give incorrect (and often very confident) answers when evaluated on points from off of the training distribution. This is exemplified by the adversarial examples phenomenon but can also be seen in terms of model generalization and domain shift. We propose Manifold Mixup which encourages the network to produce more reasonable and less confident predictions at points with combinations of attributes not seen in the training set. This is accomplished by training on convex combinations of the hidden state representations of data samples. Using this method, we demonstrate improved semi-supervised learning, learning with limited labeled data, and robustness to adversarial examples. Manifold Mixup requires no (significant) additional computation. Analytical experiments on both real data and synthetic data directly support our hypothesis for why the Manifold Mixup method improves results.
An Evaluation of Neural Machine Translation Models on Historical Spelling Normalization

In this paper, we apply different NMT models to the problem of historical spelling normalization for five languages: English, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Swedish. The NMT models are at different levels, have different attention mechanisms, and different neural network architectures. Our results show that NMT models are much better than SMT models in terms of character error rate. The vanilla RNNs are competitive to GRUs/LSTMs in historical spelling normalization. Transformer models perform better only when provided with more training data. We also find that subword-level models with a small subword vocabulary are better than character-level models. In addition, we propose a hybrid method which further improves the performance of historical spelling normalization.
Support for Evolution in the Knowledge-Based Economy: Demand for PhDs in Estonia

Abstract The doctoral workforce globally constitutes a rather small segment of the labour market. However, PhDs provide crucial input for educational and R&D activities, traditionally through employment in academia, and nowadays increasingly in the public and private sectors. This paper aims to estimate the need for new PhDs in the Estonian academic, public, and private sectors for the period 2007–2012. Need in the academic and public sectors is estimated by a survey of employers (e.g. universities, research institutes, ministries); private sector need is derived from forecasted R&D expenditure in the business sector. Results show that expected demand for PhDs is significantly lower in the public and private sectors than in academia. Total demand over all three sectors is rather high, annually more than 10% of the number of PhDs, caused both by high replacement demand from upcoming retirements and by growth demand. The policy implication of our results is that planned increase in PhDs should correspond with other developments in educational and R&D policy.
Revisiting the Effect of Food Aid on Conflict: A Methodological Caution

A popular identification strategy in non-experimental panel data uses instrumental variables constructed by interacting exogenous but potentially spurious time series or spatial variables with endogenous exposure variables to generate identifying variation through assumptions like those of differences-in-differences estimators. Revisiting a celebrated study linking food aid and conflict shows that this strategy is susceptible to bias arising from spurious trends. Re-randomization and Monte Carlo simulations show that the strategy identifies a spurious relationship even when the true effect could be non-causal or causal in the opposite direction, invalidating the claim that aid causes conflict and providing a caution for similar strategies.
Women’s recall of maternal and newborn interventions received in the postnatal period: a validity study in Kenya and Swaziland

Background Despite the concentration of maternal and infant deaths in the early postnatal period, information on the content and quality of postnatal care interventions is not routinely collected in most low and middle-income countries. At present, data on the coverage of postnatal care interventions mostly rely on women’s reports collected in household surveys, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), which collect limited information. We assessed the validity of a set of postnatal care indicators that reflect a range of recommended interventions for both mother and newborn and have potential to be included in household surveys for monitoring of population-level coverage. Methods We compared women’s reports in exit interviews on the content of postnatal care received in health facilities located in Kenya and Swaziland against a gold standard of direct observation by a trained third party. We calculated sensitivity, specificity and the area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) to assess individual-level reporting accuracy and the inflation factor (IF) to assess population-level accuracy. We also examined whether women’s reporting accuracy varied significantly by her sociodemographic characteristics. Results 18 indicators in Kenya and 19 in Swaziland had sufficient sample size for analysis. Of these, 12 indicators in Kenya and five in Swaziland met criteria for acceptable individual and population-level reporting accuracy. Two indicators met acceptability criteria in both Kenya and Swaziland: whether the provider performed a breast exam or an abdominal exam. There was no significant association between women’s characteristics and reporting accuracy, across indicators. Conclusion Women are able to accurately report on multiple aspects of care received during a postnatal visit. Findings inform the recommendation of indicators for tracking progress of critical postnatal care interventions for mothers and newborns. Improved measurement of the coverage of maternal and newborn postnatal care is warranted to monitor progress in maternal and newborn care globally.
Tipos Efectivos de Gravamen y Convergencia Fiscal en la OCDE: 1965-2001 *

Resumen En este trabajo se elabora una base de datos para veintiun paises de la OCDE en el periodo muestral 1965-2001. Seincluyen tipos impositivos medios efectivos sobre el consumo, el capital y el trabajo adecuados para analizar losefectos macroeconomicos de la politica fiscal. Adicionalmente, se lleva a cabo una descripcion de los principalesrasgos de las estructuras impositivas de los paises de la OCDE durante las ultimas decadas. Asi, se observa que la re-caudacion impositiva sobre el PIB ha aumentado ininterrumpidamente en estos desde 1965 debido, fundamental-mente, al incremento de la fiscalidad del trabajo. Este aumento de la fiscalidad ha ido acompanado de convergenciaentre paises tanto en el nivel de imposicion, como en los tipos impositivos sobre el trabajo y el capital. Sin embargo,los tipos impositivos sobre el consumo, que en el conjunto de la OCDE no han mostrado convergencia alguna, si lohan hecho en los paises de la UE desde comienzos de los ochenta. Palabras clave: Tipos impositivos, Tipo consumo, Tipo trabajo, Tipo capital.
Automated Quantification of Nonperfusion Areas in 3 Vascular Plexuses With Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography in Eyes of Patients With Diabetes

Importance Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss that is managed primarily through qualitative clinical examination of the retina. Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) may offer an objective and quantitative method of evaluating DR. Objective To quantify capillary nonperfusion in 3 vascular plexuses in the macula of eyes patients with diabetes of various retinopathy severity using projection-resolved OCTA (PR-OCTA). Design, Setting, and Participants Cross-sectional study at a tertiary academic center comprising 1 eye each from healthy control individuals and patients with diabetes at different severity stages of retinopathy. Data were acquired and analyzed between January 2015 and December 2017. Main Outcomes and Measures Foveal avascular zone area, extrafoveal avascular area (EAA), and the sensitivity of detecting levels of retinopathy. Results The study included 39 control individuals (20 women [51%]; mean [SD] age, 43.41 [19.37] years); 16 patients with diabetes without retinopathy (8 women [50%]; mean [SD] age, 56.50 [12.43] years); 23 patients with mild to moderate nonproliferative DR (18 women [78%] ; mean [SD] age, 62.48 [10.55] years); and 32 patients with severe nonproliferative DR or proliferative DR (12 women [38%]; mean age, 53.41 [14.05] years). Mean (SD) foveal avascular zone area was 0.203 (0.103) mm2 for control individuals, 0.192 (0.084) mm2 for patients with diabetes without retinopathy, 0.243 [0.079] mm2 for mild to moderate nonproliferative DR, and 0.359 (0.275) mm2 for severe nonproliferative DR or proliferative DR. Mean (SD) EAA in whole inner retinal slab in these groups, respectively, were 0.020 (0.031) mm2, 0.034 (0.047) mm2, 0.038 (0.040) mm2, and 0.237 (0.235) mm2. The mean (SD) sum of EAA from 3 segmented plexuses in each of the respective groups were 0.103 (0.169) mm2, 0.213 (0.242) mm2, 0.451 (0.243) mm2, and 1.325 (1.140) mm2. With specificity fixed at 95%, using EAA in inner retinal slab, the sensitivity of detecting patients with diabetes from healthy control individuals was 28% (95% CI, 18%-40%), 31% for patients with DR (95% CI, 19%-45%), and 47% for patients with severe DR (95% CI, 29%-65%) from whole inner retinal EAA. With the sum of EAA from 3 individual plexuses, the sensitivities were 69% (95% CI, 57%-80%), 82% (95% CI, 70%-91%), and 97% (95% CI, 85%-100%), respectively. Avascular areas were not associated with signal strength index. The commercial vessel density from the 2-plexus scheme distinguished the groups with lower sensitivity and were dependent on SSI. Conclusions and Relevance Automatically quantified avascular areas from a 3-layer segmentation scheme using PR-OCTA distinguished levels of retinopathy with a greater sensitivity than avascular areas from unsegmented inner retinal slab or measurements from a commercially available vessel density in 2-layer scheme. Additional studies are needed to investigate the applicability of nonperfusion parameters in clinical settings.
TEACHING THE PRESENT PERFECT TENSES.

THE SIMPLE PRESENT PERFECT and the PRESENT PERFECT CONTINUOUS are for the non-native speaker of English two of the most troublesome tenses in the English verb system. They are sometimes confused with a present tense and sometimes with a past. One often hears a nonnative speaker of English use a simple present where he should use a simple present perfect (* I AM HERE FOR THREE DAYS instead of I HAVE BEEN HERE FOR THREE DAYS), a present continuous where he should use a present perfect continuous (* I AM STUDYING ENGLISH FOR THREE YEARS instead of I HAVE BEEN STUDYING ENGLISH FOR THREE YEARS), or a simple present perfect where he should use a simple past (*I HAVE ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES AGO instead of I ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES AGO). Sometimes this is just a careless mistake, but more often it is a substitution which the speaker regularly makes. In making this substitution, he is in all likelihood transferring a structure from his native language into English, and he is making this transference because he lacks an understanding of the nature of the English present perfect tenses. He is not aware that these two tenses are neither wholly present
EMU: AN EVALUATION OF THE ASYMMETRIC SHOCK PROBLEM

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has a unique set up: while the monetary policy is centralised at the Union-level, the fiscal policies are left to the member states within the limitations of the Stability and Growth Pact. The Commission argues that within time EMU would constitute an optimum currency area, and further centralisation of fiscal policies, thus, is not needed. Fiscal federalism literature, on the other hand argues that stabilisation functions should be centralised, since no individual would be able to deal with an asymmetric shock without harming another member. Therefore the fiscal policy centralisation should accompany the monetary centralisation. This study tries to assess whether the EMU has become more symmetric over time. By proposing a centralised insurance against asymmetric shock, and linking the trend of the stabilisation provided by the insurance scheme to the ability of EMU to absorb asymmetric shocks, the results of the study suggests that EMU has become more symmetric over time. Keywords: EMU, OCA, Asymmetric Shock, Fiscal Federalism, Jel Codes: C23, E63, H77