Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serum VEGF as a tumor marker in patients with HCV-related liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma.

AIM Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a primary driving force for both physiological and pathological angiogenesis, and its overexpression has been found in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The aim of this study was to retrospectively clarify the usefulness of serum VEGF levels as a tumor marker in patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV)-related liver cirrhosis (CLC) and HCC. MATERIALS AND METHODS The patients with CLC were divided into three groups: 28 patients without HCC (CLC group), 11 patients with HCC (HCC group), and 48 patients with advanced HCC (aHCC group). The control group consisted of 37 patients with chronic HCV. RESULTS When the relation of serum VEGF to liver function was assessed, there was no significant difference of VEGF levels between the control group and the CLC group. When serum VEGF levels were assessed in relation to the presence of HCC, the VEGF levels of the HCC group and aHCC group were found to be significantly higher than that of the control group, while there was no significant difference between the control group and the CLC group. For the detection of cancer, serum VEGF had the largest area under the curve (AUC) and the highest accuracy when we employed the cut-off value obtained by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis using the Youden index. Evaluation of various tumor markers in the aHCC group showed that the serum levels of α-fetoprotein (AFP) were higher in patients with infiltrating tumors than in patients with multiple discrete nodules or confluent multinodular tumors, while there were no significant differences in the serum levels of VEGF, Lens culinaris agglutinin-reactive fraction of AFP (AFP-L3), and des-γ-carboxy prothrombin. There were no significant differences on the serum levels of all four markers between tumor stages, but serum VEGF was higher in patients with vascular invasion than in those without vascular invasion. CONCLUSION The present findings suggest that the serum levels of VEGF might be a useful predictor of the presence of HCC in patients with CLC, while serum levels of AFP and VEGF can predict the tumor type and vascular invasion, respectively.
Studying factors influencing repeat visitation of cultural tourists

This study identifies factors determining repeat visitation of cultural tourists, a market particularly motivated by novelty and thus theoretically less loyal to positively experienced destinations. After a conceptual discussion of the potential role of repeat visitation in the cultural tourism context, binary regression analysis, applied to the data collected in a European research project, identifies factors explaining repeat visitation. Differences between domestic and international tourists are also discussed. Results should contribute to a better understanding of the cultural tourist market and to the development of differentiated marketing strategies enhancing repeat visitation within this market.
The Demand for Beer, Wine and Spirits: A Survey of the Literature

The demand for alcohol literature is vast and much conflicting information about the nature of the demand for alcoholic beverages has been published. This paper presents a survey of the literature, and then uses the technique of meta-regression analysis to establish insights into the nature of the demand for beer, wine and spirits. Unlike previous meta-studies of the demand for alcoholic beverages this study adjusts for the precision of each elasticity estimate. The analysis presented suggests reported elasticity estimates will be influenced by such factors as estimation technique, data frequency and time period under consideration. With respect to time, the findings suggest that the demand for alcoholic beverages has become less inelastic since the mid-1950s and that the income elasticity has been falling since the mid-1960s. The analysis also found support for the idea that alcohol as a commodity group is a necessity, and that consumers respond to price discounting with inventory behaviour rather than true substitution behaviour. Little support is found for the idea that the demand for alcoholic beverages varies fundamentally across most countries, although wine may be an exception. Copyright © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Corporate leverage, financial efficiency, and the decision of Indian firms about the amount of dividends

This study investigates the relationships between changes in corporate leverage, changes in financial efficiency, and changes in decision of Indian firms about the amount of dividends. A sample of all top 500 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange for the period 2009–2012 was selected. The findings indicate that the changes in the corporate leverage cause changes in the financial efficiency and the changes in corporate leverage and financial efficiency cause changes in the decision about the amount of dividends in the Indian firms. The findings also indicate that the corporate leverage and the financial efficiency play some role in the decision to pay the amount of dividends. This study contributes to the literature on the factors that cause changes in the financial efficiency of the firm and the decision to pay the amount of dividends. The findings may be useful for financial managers, investors, financial management consultants and other stakeholders.
Hypothetical Surveys and Experimental Studies of Insurance Demand: A Review

We offer a structured literature survey of experimental studies involving insurance demand choices and their experimental methodology. With this, we aim to fulfill two goals. First, we want to give an overview of the status of the literature as is. Second, the overview of the methodology provides researchers with an idea of how insurance demand experiments can be designed and what the advantages and disadvantages of the different design aspects are. We thus offer a resource for the design of future experiments.
Who cares? assessing generosity and gender equality in parental leave policy designs in 21 countries

Parental leave laws can support new parents in two complementary ways: by offering job-protected leave and by offering financial support during that leave. This study assesses the design of parental leave policies operating in 21 high-income countries. Specifically, the study analyzes how these countries vary with respect to the generosity of their parental leave policies; the extent to which their policy designs are gender egalitarian; and the ways in which these two crucial dimensions are inter-related. The study finds that public policies in all 21 study countries protect at least one parent’s job for a period of weeks, months, or years following the birth or adoption of a child. The availability and generosity of wage replacement varies widely, as does the gendered nature of policy designs. Four countries stand out as having policies that are both generous and gender egalitarian: Finland, Norway, Sweden and — unexpectedly — Greece.
Bridge the Gaps: From Deficiency to Superior Service

In the face of ever intense competition and limited resources, it is management's primary concern to seek out accurate and effective ways for uncovering deficient service quality attributes and the real causes behind them. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to develop a two-phased service quality strategy model to identify defective service attributes and uncover their root causes by integrating the importance-performance gap analysis model, service triangle and gap analysis. A survey conducted on the guests, front-line servers and managers from nine different restaurant outlets of three similar international hotels in Taiwan is presented to empirically substantiate the suitability and practicality of this proposed model. The findings demonstrated that the model was fitted for the hotel in question to identify its defective service quality attributes, prioritize their order of improvement and consequently reveal the causes behind by analyzing the existence of the gaps among customers, managers and front-line servers. The managerial implication for restaurant managers is to reallocate resources and efforts in service areas that require immediate improvement. With this particular model, management now can serve their customers well even with limited resources.
Trade creation and diversion effects in the Mediterranean area: Econometric analysis by gravity model

Since the early 1990s, the world has seen a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). A major goal of free trade is to develop trade between its signatories. The gravity model is used to analyze the bilateral trade data against the variables of the relative size of the pair of countries involved in trade, distance, common border and language and dummies for each of the FTAs. This article focuses on the studying of the influence of the FTAs in the Mediterranean countries in which we integrate the role of the regional dummy EU-15, Economic and Monetary Union (eurozone), the Arab Maghreb Union and AGADIR Agreement (FTA between Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco) in trade flows. In addition, this work aims to detect the impact of the global financial crisis on export flows between the FTAs in the Mediterranean region. The use of regional variables in gravity models designed to determine whether the FTAs contribute to the creation or trade diversion. This study examines a cross section and panel (static and dynamic) of 27 countries for 1980–2011. The results show the existence of a strong relationship between the factors of FTAs and trade flows.
Microdata evidence on rent-sharing

We examine the effect of firm profits on wages for individual workers while focusing on the empirical complications associated with estimating the extent of rent-sharing. Controlling for worker and firm fixed-effects and using several instruments to deal with the endogeneity of profits, we report results indicating that Ordinary Least Square (OLS)-estimates strongly underestimate the effects of profits on wages. Moreover, the effect of profits on wages are estimated separately for firms with increasing and decreasing profits within a given time period. We find a positive and stable effect only in firms with increasing profits. This is in line with the idea that falling profits do not lead to wage cuts while increasing profits imply higher wages.
Endovascular Therapy as the Primary Approach for Limb Salvage in Patients with Critical Limb Ischemia: Experience with 443 Infrapopliteal Procedures

Endovascular strategies for the treatment of critical infrageniculate peripheral arterial occlusive disease exist and are becoming the primary methodology for such lesions at many centers. Although technically feasible for experienced operators, the evidence to support this strategy for below the knee (BTK) interventions is still evolving. We studied the 6-month and 1-year outcomes of percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) alone, PTA with stenting, and excimer laser recanalization for BTK lesions in patients with critical limb ischemia. Between September 2002 and June 2005, 443 patients (355 Rutherford category 4, 82 category 5, 6 category 6) underwent intervention for 681 BTK lesions. Follow-up was performed at 6-month intervals after index intervention: limb salvage data were recorded and duplex ultrasonography was performed to measure the patency of treated areas. The primary patency and limb salvage rates of the entire population were 85.2% and 97.0% and 74.2% and 96.6% at 6 months and 1 year, respectively. Stratified for the treatment strategy (PTA alone in 79, PTA with stenting in 300 patients, and excimer laser in 64), 1-year primary patency rates were 68.6%, 75.5%, and 75.4%, whereas the limb salvage rates were 96.7%, 98.6%, and 87.9% for each modality, respectively. Endovascular intervention will become the primary treatment for BTK lesions in patients with critical limb ischemia, with 1-year primary patency and limb salvage rates that compare favorably with published surgical data. Prospective, randomized, multicenter trials will be needed to further establish the role of endovascular intervention in this challenging patient group.
Entrepreneurial orientation, access to financial resources, and product performance in the Greek commercial TV industry

In this research article, the authors draw on the theoretical insights of the strategic entrepreneurship literature and examine the relationships among entrepreneurial orientation, access to financial resources, and broadcasted product performance using survey data from Greek television enterprises. Data were based on companies' chief executive officers. Results of Bayesian path analysis indicate that access to financial resources fully mediates the effect of entrepreneurial orientation on product performance. Recommendations for further research are discussed.
Strategic Interactions in Competition Policy: Dutch Experiences: European Competition Law Review

In this article we will discuss the strategic interactions between the institutions (competition law), competition authorities and companies. We do this by using anecdotal evidence of the Dutch context to illustrate these strategic interactions. We describe three types of strategic interactions, i.e. the reaction of market parties to the introduction of the competition law in the Netherlands in 1998, expectations in behaviour of different actors in the competition context, changes in their expectations and the consequences thereof on enforcement and the strategic use of lawsuits and private enforcement
Effects of image fusion algorithms on classification accuracy

As many sensors are available to acquire higher spatial resolution panchromatic images and lower spatial resolution multispectral images at the same time, image fusion methods have been developed to combine these two types of images multispectral images with higher spatial resolution in order to achieve better interpretation results. Image classification is one type of automated interpretation. As the fusion process alters the pixel value of the original images, it is important to study whether or not the classification accuracy can be improved with the fused images, compared to original images. This paper attempts to analyze the effects of different image fusion algorithms on the classification of fused images and to relate the quality of the fused image to the classification results. Experiments are carried on Quickbird-02 panchromatic and multispectral images over the city of Wuhan (China). From these experiments, it is found that for the unsupervised ISODATA (iterative self-organizing data analysis) classification, classification accuracy has been improved due to the good contrast of fused image; on the other hand, the bad injection of high spatial information into fused image will cause some undesirable classification results.
Kidney Transplantation Decreases the Level and Procoagulant Activity of Circulating Microparticles

Microparticles (MP) are important players in cardiovascular disorders. Renal transplantation significantly improves the survival of hemodialyzed patients, in part because cardiovascular disease (CVD) progression is lessened. We hypothesized that the beneficial effect of renal transplantation on cardiovascular outcome might involve decreased levels of circulating MP. We evaluated the kinetics of MP subpopulations and their procoagulant activity (MP‐PCA) in 52 patients before and 3, 6, 9 and 12 months after graft with reference to 50 healthy controls and we evaluated the impact of cardiovascular complications. During the follow‐up, the increased levels of MP observed before graft were significantly decreased and reached normal values with different kinetics according to their cellular origin whereas MP‐PCA remained significantly higher than in controls. From multivariate analysis, the levels of MP were negatively correlated with renal function. At 12 months, the decrease in MP and MP‐PCA was more pronounced in patients without history of CVD than those with. In conclusion, we demonstrated that renal graft is associated with decreased levels of MP levels and MP‐PCA, even more pronounced so in patients without history of CVD. Therefore, we suggest that MP lowering could be involved in the vascular dysfunction improvements reported after transplantation.
Effects of growth hormone (GH) replacement on bone metabolism and mineral density in adult onset of GH deficiency: results of a double-blind placebo-controlled study with open follow-up.

It is known that GH stimulates bone turnover and that GH-deficient adults have a lower bone mass than healthy controls. In order to evaluate the influences of GH replacement therapy on markers of bone turnover and on bone mineral density (BMD) in patients with adult onset GH deficiency, a double-blind placebo-controlled study of treatment with recombinant human GH (rhGH; mean dose 2.4 IU daily) in 20 patients for 6 months and an extended open study of 6 to 12 months were conducted. Eighteen patients, fourteen men and four women, with a mean age of 44 years with adult onset GH deficiency were evaluated in the study. Compared with placebo, after 6 months serum calcium (2.39 +/- 0.02 vs 2.32 +/- 0.02 mmol/l, P = 0.037) and phosphate (0.97 +/- 0.06 vs 0.75 +/- 0.05 mmol/l, P = 0.011) increased and the index of phosphate excretion (0.03 +/- 0.03 vs 0.19 +/- 0.02, P < 0.001) decreased significantly, and there was a significant increase in the markers of bone formation (osteocalcin, 64.8 +/- 11.8 vs 17.4 +/- 1.8 ng/ml, P < 0.001; procollagen type I carboxyterminal propeptide (PICP), 195.3 +/- 26.4 vs 124.0 +/- 15.5 ng/ml, P = 0.026) as well as those of bone resorption (type I collagen carboxyterminal telopeptide (ICTP), 8.9 +/- 1.2 vs 3.3 +/- 0.5 ng/ml, P < 0.001; urinary hydroxyproline, 0.035 +/- 0.006 vs 0.018 +/- 0.002 mg/100 ml glomerular filtration rate, P = 0.009). BMD did not change during this period of time. IGF-I was significantly higher in treated patients (306 +/- 45.3 vs 88.7 +/- 22.5 ng/ml, P < 0.001). An analysis of the data compiled from 18 patients treated with rhGH for 12 months revealed similar significant increases in serum calcium and phosphate, and the markers of bone turnover (osteocalcin, PICP, ICTP, urinary hydroxyproline). Dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA)-measured BMD in the lumbar spine (1.194 +/- 0.058 vs 1.133 +/- 0.046 g/cm2, P = 0.015), femoral neck (1.009 +/- 0.051 vs 0.936 +/- 0.034 g/cm2, P = 0.004), Ward's triangle (0.881 +/- 0.055 vs 0.816 +/- 0.04 g/cm2, P = 0.019) and the trochanteric region (0.869 +/- 0.046 vs 0.801 +/- 0.033 g/cm2, P = 0.005) increased significantly linearly (compared with the individual baseline values). At 12 months, BMD in patients with low bone mass (T-score < -1.0 S.D.) increased more than in those with normal bone mass (lumbar spine 11.5 vs 2.1%, P = 0.030, and femoral neck 9.7 vs 4.2%, P = 0.055). IGF-I increased significantly in all treated patients. In conclusion, treatment of GH-deficient adults with rhGH increases bone turnover for at least 12 months. BMD in the lumbar spine and the proximal femur increases continuously in this time (open study) and the benefit is greater in patients with low bone mass. Therefore, GH-deficient patients exhibiting osteopenia or osteoporosis should be considered candidates for GH supplementation. However, long-term studies are needed to establish that the positive effects on BMD are persistent and are associated with a reduction in fracture risk.
Comparative study of adherence of oral Candida albicans isolates from HIV sero-positive individuals and HIV sero-negative individuals to human buccal epithelial cells.

AIM Candida albicans occurs as a commensal of the gastrointestinal tract. Under predisposing conditions, candida can produce a broad array of infections. HIV seropositive individuals show increased oral colonization compared to the HIV seronegative healthy individuals. C. albicans shows a variety of pathogenic factors. We have studied one such factor here; the adherence property of C. albicans isolated from HIV seropositive individuals and HIV seronegative to Human Buccal Epithelial Cells (HBEC) of normal healthy individuals. MATERIALS AND METHODS Concentrated oral rinse specimen were collected from 50 healthy volunteers (control group) and 25 HIV positive individuals (test group) and used for isolation of C. albicans. Adherence assay was done using C. albicans isolates from both groups on HBEC collected from HIV sero-negative, normal individuals. The adherence assay method described by Kimura and Pearsall was used with minor modification. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS USED The results of Adhesion assay were subjected to statistical analysis using student "t" test. RESULTS C. albicans isolated from both the groups were tested for their adherence property to normal HBEC. The isolates from test group showed more adherence to HBEC compared to those of the control group, with average rate of adherence being 56.6%. The control group showed average adherence rate of 29.1%. This was statistically significant with p value equal to 0.05. CONCLUSION C. albicans from HIV infected individuals showed significant rise in degree of adhesion to the buccal epithelial cells than the isolates from healthy controls, suggesting the enhancement of virulence factors such as adherence in the presence of predisposing condition.
Restaurant Discounts for Seniors

An online survey of 685 persons over age fifty found that discounts aimed at persons over a certain age are not the driving force in where they decide to eat. Nevertheless, most believe that restaurants should offer discounts to older diners. Findings also show that high users of age-based discounts are more supportive of the practice than are low users, who are less driven to seek such discounts. The chief implication of these findings is that restaurateurs must consider carefully whether and how to offer discounts for Americans over a particular age. Rather than rely on discounts, restaurant operators must consider the overall price-value position that they are offering.
Suicide Reattempters: A Systematic Review

Learning ObjectivesAfter participating in this educational activity, the psychiatrist should be better able to1. Identify the characteristic features of suicide reattempters.2. Evaluate the limitations of the literature.3. Compare the characteristic features of single attempters and suicide reattempters.The aim of this study is to identify the characteristic features of suicide reattempters. The recognition of the suicide reattempters population as a distinct clinical population may encourage future preventive and clinical work with this high-risk subgroup and thus reduce deaths. A systematic literature review was carried out in order to identify the key demographic, psychological, and clinical variables associated with the repetition of suicide attempts. In addition, we wished to analyze the operational definitions of the repetition of suicide attempts proposed in the scientific literature. Studies published from 2000 to 2012 were identified in PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science databases and were selected according to predetermined criteria. We examined a total of 1480 articles and selected 86 that matched our search criteria. The literature is heterogeneous, with no consensus regarding the operational definitions of suicide reattempters. Comparison groups in the literature have also been inconsistent and include subjects making a single lifetime attempt and subjects who did not reattempt during a defined study period. Suicide reattempters were associated with higher rates of the following characteristics: unemployment, unmarried status, diagnosis of mental disorders, suicidal ideation, stressful life events, and family history of suicidal behavior. Additional research is needed to establish adequate differentiation and effective treatment plans for this population.