Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Impairment among Elderly Coronary Heart Disease Patients

Background: Coronary heart disease (CHD) and decline in cognitive functioning and dementia are common problems in the elderly. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are connected with vascular dementia, but less is known about cognitive functioning among elderly patients with CHD based on population studies. Objective: To describe the associations between CHD and cognitive impairment among the elderly. Population and Methods: Of the total population of the Lieto study (488 community-dwelling men and 708 women, ≥64 years old), the ambulatory patients with CHD (89 men and 73 women) and sex- and age-matched controls without any sign of CHD (178 men and 146 women) were selected to make up the study population. CHD was defined as the presence of angina pectoris or a past myocardial infarction. Cognitive assessment was based on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Results: The total MMSE scores, the MMSE subtest scores and the overall test-based cognitive functioning did not differ between patients and controls. Among men, higher MMSE subscores in orientation and language were related to more severe chest pain. According to logistic regression analyses, the cognitive impairment of men was associated with high age, the use of cardiac glycosides and physical disability. Among women, cognitive impairment was associated with high age and the use of antipsychotics. Conclusion: In general, CHD has no independent association with cognitive impairment among the non-institutionalized community-living elderly. Among men, however, a complicated CHD may negatively affect cognitive functioning.
Vertebral pain syndrome and physical performance assessing in older women with vertebral fractures

The purpose of this study was to assess the peculiarities of vertebral pain syndrome, parameters of physical performance and quality of life indices in women of older age depending on the presence of vertebral fractures (VF). This study was performed with participation of 215 women aged 50-89 years old which were divided into two groups: fi rst one-women without any previous osteoporotic fractures (n=143), second group patients with VF in thoracic and/or lumbar spine (n=72). The presence and intensity of pain in the thoracic and lumbar spine were evaluated using the 11-component visual analog scale (VAS), physical performance-with following functional tests: 3-, 4and 15-meter tests (gait speed), static balance (a side-by-side position, a semi-tandem position and a full-tandem position), 8-feet test and «fi ve timed chair stands» (coordination and strength), hand grip strength (by dynamometer), measurement of arterial pressure (systolic and diastolic), heart and respiratory rates, breath holding, chest excursion (mean and on the inhalation and the exhalation), lateral trunk lean, Schober and Thomayer tests. It was demonstrated that the intensity of vertebral pain (pain at the time of investigation, the most common level of pain, pain in the best periods of the disease) and some physical performance tests (lateral trunk lean and chest excursion (mean index, during the inhalation and exhalation), hand grip strength, 15-meter gait speed test and fi ve-repetition sit-to-stand test) are signifi cantly worse in women with VF than corresponding parameters in persons without fractures. It should be taken into account during the assessment of physical performance and development of rehabilitation programs for older age women with vertebral fractures. Research Article Vertebral pain syndrome and physical performance assessing in older women with vertebral fractures Grygorieva Nataliia*, Povorozyuk Vladyslav and Rybina Olena Institute of Gerontology named after D. F. Chebotarev NAMS of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine *Address for Correspondence: Grygorieva Nataliia, Institute of Gerontology named after D. F. Chebotarev NAMS of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tel: +38(044) 430-41-74, Email: crystal_ng@ukr.net Submitted: 06 October 2017 Approved: 16 October 2017 Published: 17 October 2017 Copyright: 2017 Grygorieva N, et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Atmospheric summer teleconnections and Greenland Ice Sheet surface mass variations: insights from MERRA-2

The relationship between leading atmospheric teleconnection patterns and Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) temperature, precipitation, and surface mass balance (SMB) are investigated for the last 36 summers (1979–2014) based on Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 reanalyses. The results indicate that the negative phase of both the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation, associated with warm and dry conditions for the GrIS, lead to SMB decreases within 0–1 months. Furthermore, the positive phase of the East Atlantic (EA) pattern often lags the negative NAO, reflecting a dynamical linkage between these modes that acts to further enhance the warm and dry conditions over the GrIS, leading to a favorable environment for enhanced surface mass loss. The development of a strong negative NAO in combination with a strong positive EA in recent years leads to significantly larger GrIS warming compared to when the negative NAO occurs in combination with a negative or weak positive EA (0.69 K versus 0.13 K anomaly). During 2009 and 2011, weakened (as compared to conditions during the severe surface melt cases of 2010 and 2012) local high pressure blocking produced colder northerly flow over the GrIS inhibiting warming despite the occurrence of a strong negative NAO, reflecting an important role for the EA during those years. In particular, the EA acts with the NAO to enhance warming in 2010 and 2012, and weaken high pressure blocking in 2009 and 2011. In general, high pressure blocking primarily impacts the western areas of the GrIS via advective temperature increases, while changes in net surface radiative fluxes account for both western and eastern GrIS temperature changes.
Acute ovarian failure in the childhood cancer survivor study.

CONTEXT Defined as the loss of ovarian function within 5 yr of diagnosis, acute ovarian failure (AOF) is known to develop in a subset of survivors of pediatric and adolescent cancers. Its precise incidence is unknown, and data concerning its risk factors are limited. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to determine the incidence of and patient/treatment factors associated with AOF in a large cohort of pediatric cancer survivors. DESIGN AND SETTING We conducted a retrospective cohort, multicenter study. PATIENTS Female participants from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study who were greater than 18 yr of age were considered for inclusion. We excluded survivors who received cranial irradiation at doses of more than 3000 cGy, those with hypothalamic/pituitary tumors, and survivors who underwent bilateral oophorectomy. Survivors who reported never menstruating or who had ceased having menses within 5 yr after their cancer diagnosis were considered to have AOF. MAIN OUTCOME We assessed incidence and risk factors for AOF. RESULTS Of a total of 3390 eligible survivors, 215 cases (6.3%) developed AOF. Survivors with AOF were older at diagnosis and more likely to have been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma or to have received abdominal or pelvic radiotherapy than survivors without AOF. Among survivors with AOF, 116 (54%) had received at least 1000-cGy ovarian irradiation. In a multivariable logistic regression model, increasing doses of ovarian irradiation, exposure to procarbazine, and exposure to cyclophosphamide at ages 13-20 yr were independent risk factors for AOF. CONCLUSIONS AOF develops in a small subset of survivors, especially those treated with at least 1000-cGy ovarian radiation. These results will facilitate patient counseling and selection of candidates for newer fertility preservation techniques.
Questioning the Relevance of Miranda in the Twenty-First Century

Is the Miranda v. Arizona decision a significant influence on the American criminal justice system in the twenty-first century? This article assesses two generations of legal research on Miranda in order to evaluate Miranda's effect on police interrogations, confessions and convictions, and the American public at large. The conclusion is that Miranda marginally limits interrogators from eliciting confessions, its influence on the criminal institution is overstated, and the decision provides few benefits to criminal suspects. The article also suggests that legal scholars devote more energy to the empirical study of police interrogations and confessions. Finally, this article argues for mandating video or audio recording of police interrogations in order to promote interrogation reform. Such electronic recordings would create an objective, comprehensive, and reviewable record of the interrogation for all parties. Additionally, recording interrogations would furnish scholars with valuable empirical data.
Childhood adversities as a predictor of disability retirement

Background: There is a large body of research on adulthood risk factors for retirement due to disability, but studies on the effect of adverse childhood experiences are scarce. Aim: To examine whether adverse childhood experiences predict disability retirement. Methods: Data were derived from the Health and Social Support Study. The information was gathered from postal surveys in 1998 (baseline) and in 2003 (follow-up questionnaire). The analysed data consisted of 8817 non-retired respondents aged 40–54 years (5149 women, 3668 men). Negative childhood experiences, such as financial difficulties, serious conflicts and alcohol-related problems, were assessed at baseline and disability retirement at follow-up. Results: The risk of disability retirement increased in a dose–response manner with increasing number of childhood adversities. Respondents who had experienced multiple childhood adversities had a 3.46-fold increased risk (95% CI 2.09 to 5.71) of disability retirement compared with those who reported no such adversities. Low socioeconomic status, depression (Beck Depression Inventory-21), use of drugs for somatic diseases as well as health-related risk behaviour, such as smoking, heavy alcohol consumption and obesity, were also predictors of disability retirement. After simultaneous adjustments for all these risk factors, the association between childhood adversities and the risk of disability retirement attenuated, but remained significant (OR 1.90, 95% CI 1.07 to 3.37). Conclusions: Information on childhood conditions may increase our understanding of the determinants of early retirement, especially due to mental disorders. Childhood adversities should be taken into account when considering determinants of disability retirement and identifying groups at risk.
The Effects of Stress and Smoking on Catecholaminergic and Cardiovascular Response

In this study, the authors evaluated the combined impact of smoking and stress on catecholaminergic and cardiovascular reactivity in disease-free adult smokers. Smokers participated in 2 laboratory sessions, including a baseline and a mental-stressor phase (reaction time and mental math), once while smoking-deprived overnight and once while nondeprived. Nonsmoking controls also participated in an identical laboratory session, without the smoking manipulation. The authors obtained cardiovascular measures during each phase and measured catecholamine levels immediately after each phase. For nondeprived smokers, measures of norepinephrine, epinephrine, heart rate, and systolic blood pressure (SBP) were larger for the mental-stressor phase than for the baseline phase. The authors found no such increases for deprived smokers, and only SBP increased for controls from the baseline phase to the mental-stressor phase. The results suggest that ad lib smoking increases catecholamine and cardiovascular response to stress in smokers.
Fecal transplantation: any real hope for inflammatory bowel disease?

Purpose of review Fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) has emerged as an important treatment for antibiotic resistant or recurrent Clostridium difficile infection. There has been a great deal of media coverage of the efficacy of FMT, and patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) understandably wonder if this approach would also work for them. There are also instructions on ‘do it yourself’ FMT therapy on the web. It is important to understand whether there is evidence that this approach is effective in IBD so that we can advise our patients appropriately. Recent findings Systematic reviews have identified four case series involving 27 ulcerative colitis patients with a pooled remission rate of 24% (95% confidence interval (CI) = 11–45%). Two randomized controlled trials evaluating a total of 123 active ulcerative colitis patients have given conflicting results but the pooled data do suggest benefit with a number needed to treat of 6 (95% CI = 3–33). There are four case series involving 38 patients with Crohn's disease with a clinical response in 60.5% (95% CI = 28–86%). There are no randomized trials in Crohn's disease. Summary At present there are insufficient data to recommend FMT in IBD, and patients certainly should not be administering this themselves. This remains an interesting approach to treating IBD and more studies are needed to establish the optimal method of delivery as well as randomized, placebo controlled trials to establish the efficacy of FMT.
Molecular Characteristics of Infectious Bursal Disease Viruses from Asymptomatic Broiler Flocks in Europe

Abstract Infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) exists in several different antigenic and pathogenic forms. The immune suppression caused by this virus in young chickens is not always associated with clinical signs of disease. The antigenic variant viruses originally described in the United States typically do not cause clinical signs of disease but can cause a marked immune suppression via the destruction of B lymphocytes. Using a reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay we conducted a survey of asymptomatic broiler chicken flocks in Europe for IBDV. Restriction fragment length polymorphisms in the viral protein 2 (VP2) gene of four isolates from Spain and four isolates from France indicated they may be different from the classic and very virulent (vv) IBDV strains found throughout Europe. Nucleotide sequence and phylogenetic analysis of the hypervariable region of the VP2 gene indicated that all eight viruses were more similar to U.S. variant viruses than classic viruses. In two viruses, one from France and one from Spain, threonine was observed at amino acid position 222 and serine was found at position 254. These two substitution mutations are characteristic of Delaware variant viruses. In addition, all eight viruses had mutated amino acid position 318 from glycine to aspartic acid, another substitution mutation commonly found in U.S. variant viruses. Although importation restrictions prevented us from directly testing the antigenicity of these viruses, their nucleotide and predicted amino acid sequences suggest they could be antigenically distinctive compared to classic and vvIBDV commonly found in Europe. Confirmation of the presence of antigenic variant IBDV strains in Europe requires additional immunologic studies to elucidate the exact nature of the viral epitopes. Our data support the need for these immunologic studies.
Image Retrieval and Pattern Spotting using Siamese Neural Network

This paper presents a novel approach for image retrieval and pattern spotting in document image collections. The manual feature engineering is avoided by learning a similarity-based representation using a Siamese Neural Network trained on a previously prepared subset of image pairs from the ImageNet dataset. The learned representation is used to provide the similarity-based feature maps used to find relevant image candidates in the data collection given an image query. A robust experimental protocol based on the public Tobacco800 document image collection shows that the proposed method compares favor-ably against state-of-the-art document image retrieval methods, reaching 0.94 and 0.83 of mean average precision (mAP) for retrieval and pattern spotting (IoU=0.7), respectively. Besides, we have evaluated the proposed method considering feature maps of different sizes, showing the impact of reducing the number of features in the retrieval performance and time-consuming.
Half-squat or jump squat training under optimum power load conditions to counteract power and speed decrements in Brazilian elite soccer players during the preseason

Abstract The purpose of this study was to test which specific type of exercise (i.e., jump squat (JS) or half-squat (HS)) is more effective at maintaining speed and power abilities throughout a preseason in soccer players. Twenty-three male soccer players were randomly allocated into two groups: JS and HS. The mean propulsive power, vertical jumping ability, and sprinting performance were evaluated before and after 4 weeks of a preseason period. The optimum power loads for the JS and HS exercises were assessed and were used as load-references. The soccer players performed 10 power oriented training sessions in total. Both JS and HS maintained power in JS and speed abilities (P > 0.05, for main effects and interaction effect) as indicated by ANCOVA. Both groups demonstrated reduced power during HS (ES = −0.76 vs. −0.78, for JS and HS, respectively); both groups improved acceleration (ACC) from 5 to 10 m (ES = 0.52). JS was more effective at reducing the ACC decrements over 0–5 m (ES = −0.38 vs. −0.58, for JS and HS, respectively). The HS group increased squat jump height (ES = 0.76 vs. 0.11, for HS and JS, respectively). In summary, JS is more effective in reducing the ACC capacity over very short sprints while HS is more effective in improving squat jump performance. Both strategies improve ACC over longer distances. New training strategies should be implemented/developed to avoid concurrent training effects between power and endurance adaptations during professional soccer preseasons.
Health care utilization by preterm infants with respiratory complications in Quebec.

INTRODUCTION Despite notable advances in prenatal and neonatal care, respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) remain important complications of preterm births, and their long-term sequelae are poorly understood. OBJECTIVE To describe health care utilization and costs over a 16- to 25-year follow-up period in a cohort of preterm infants with respiratory complications. METHODS Using provincial health administrative databases from Quebec, a cohort of individuals who were born prematurely with complications of RDS and⁄or BPD between 1983 and 1992 were identified. From these databases, which cover all Quebec residents, health services use, medication prescriptions, associated diagnoses and costs were tabulated. RESULTS A total of 3442 subjects with respiratory complications following preterm birth were identified, of whom 773 had been diagnosed with BPD and 2669 had RDS without BPD. Asthma was diagnosed twice as frequently (1.7 to 2.4 times) in the BPD group compared with the RDS group, with more frequent hospital readmission, and outpatient and emergency room visits. Although respiratory causes remained the main reason for consultation in both groups, 3.7% and 3.4% of the outpatient visits were for mental or psychological ailments, such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or dysthymia for the BPD and RDS groups, respectively. CONCLUSION BPD patients experienced more hospital admissions, outpatient and emergency rooms visits, and were more likely to suffer from respiratory illnesses and to use respiratory drugs than RDS patients. Neurological and psychiatric complications occurred at a high frequency in both RDS and BPD subjects, and were associated with significant use of antipsychotic and antidepressant medications.
The value relevance of earnings, operating cash flow and accruals: A study on UK data

The purpose of the work reported in this paper is to establish the value relevance of earnings, operating cash flows and accruals for UK companies. Innovations in this paper are threefold: the use of a valuation rather than a returns model to test value relevance; the prior that earnings and cash flow measure are complementary rather than competing measures of company performance; and the introduction of various economic contingencies or contextual factors, which are hypothesised to influence the valuation multipliers applied to earnings and their component variables. The results confirm the complementarity of earnings and cash flow for valuation purposes and that the valuation multipliers applied to the components of earnings do vary with specific company characteristics.
How flatbed scanners upset accurate film dosimetry

Film is an excellent dosimeter for verification of dose distributions due to its high spatial resolution. Irradiated film can be digitized with low-cost, transmission, flatbed scanners. However, a disadvantage is their lateral scan effect (LSE): a scanner readout change over its lateral scan axis. Although anisotropic light scattering was presented as the origin of the LSE, this paper presents an alternative cause. Hereto, LSE for two flatbed scanners (Epson 1680 Expression Pro and Epson 10000XL), and Gafchromic film (EBT, EBT2, EBT3) was investigated, focused on three effects: cross talk, optical path length and polarization. Cross talk was examined using triangular sheets of various optical densities. The optical path length effect was studied using absorptive and reflective neutral density filters with well-defined optical characteristics (OD range 0.2–2.0). Linear polarizer sheets were used to investigate light polarization on the CCD signal in absence and presence of (un)irradiated Gafchromic film. Film dose values ranged between 0.2 to 9 Gy, i.e. an optical density range between 0.25 to 1.1. Measurements were performed in the scanner’s transmission mode, with red–green–blue channels. LSE was found to depend on scanner construction and film type. Its magnitude depends on dose: for 9 Gy increasing up to 14% at maximum lateral position. Cross talk was only significant in high contrast regions, up to 2% for very small fields. The optical path length effect introduced by film on the scanner causes 3% for pixels in the extreme lateral position. Light polarization due to film and the scanner’s optical mirror system is the main contributor, different in magnitude for the red, green and blue channel. We concluded that any Gafchromic EBT type film scanned with a flatbed scanner will face these optical effects. Accurate dosimetry requires correction of LSE, therefore, determination of the LSE per color channel and dose delivered to the film.
Similarities and dissimilarities of branching and septation during lung development

The lungs of small premature babies are at a developmental stage of finalizing their airway tree by a process called branching morphogenesis, and of creating terminal gas exchange units by a mechanism called septation. If the branching process is disturbed, the lung has a propensity to be hypoplastic. If septation is impaired, the terminal gas exchange units, the alveoli, tend to be enlarged and reduced in number, an entity known as bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Here, we review current knowledge of key molecules influencing branching and septation. In particular, we discuss the molecular similarities and dissimilarities between the two processes of airspace enlargement. Understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating branching and septation may provide perinatologists with targets for improving lung growth and maturation. Pediatr Pulmonol. 2005; 40:113–134. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.