Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Opportunities for Identifying and Addressing Unhealthy Substance Use in Rural Communities: A Commentary on Cucciare et al (2017)

Unhealthy substance use is a public health problem facing rural communities across the United States. Unfortunately, numerous challenges including stigma, perceived need for care, and perceived accessibility of substance use treatment serve as barriers to many rural adults using substances in obtaining the care they need. It is therefore important to examine whether accessing health care options other than substance use treatment is associated with improved substance use. In a recent study published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, we explored whether use of outpatient medical care (OMC) was associated with reductions in substance use among rural stimulant users over a 3-year period. Overall, the results showed that, among rural adults using stimulants, those with at least one OMC visit had fewer days of alcohol, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine use over time. However, most participants reported not having any use of an OMC over the 3-year period, suggesting the need for identifying innovative opportunities to provide substance use help for persons living in rural settings. In this commentary, we discuss opportunities for detecting and addressing unhealthy substance use in retail clinics, via clergy and pharmacists.
Studies on the complementary relationship of surface ornamentations between megaspores and microspores of Selaginella P. Beauv. (Selaginellaceae)

In the present study, the surface ornamentations of both megaspores and microspores of 20 species of Selaginella were studied using scanning electron microscopy. The results of the present study showed that the megaspore surface ornamentations are complementary to the corresponding microspore surface ornamentations. In detail, reticulate surface ornamentation of megaspores is complementary to granulate and baculate ornamentations of microspores; verrucate ornamentation of megaspores is complementary to scabrate ornamentation of microspores; granulate ornamentation of megaspores is complementary to verrucate–rugulate or verrucate ornamentations of microspores; verrucate–rugulate ornamentation of megaspores is complementary to spinulate, verrucate, or verrucate–rugulate ornamentations of microspores; tuberculate ornamentation of megaspores is complementary to lamellate, tuberculate or verrucate ornamentations of microspores. Complementary ornamentation between megaspores and microspores allows microspores to adhere to megaspores. Our observations support the “synaptospory” hypothesis, that is, spore surface ornamentation plays a part in keeping or bringing spores together during their dispersal in the pteridophytes.
Emerging Needs for Minimizing Negative Effects of Technology Overuse among Children

In the current era of digitization and multi-media communication, Romania is the land of technological contrast: we have almost the highest connectivity in Europe, but we are the last at digital competencies, use of the Internet and digitization of the economy. Through smart phones Internet data consumption is growing exponentially, especially among children and younger, but is lacking the education for a healthy and responsible consumption. The studies about the effects of technology overuse on children prove negative effects on their development: decrease of cognitive, learning and communication capacities, of their self-control, emotional intelligence and empathy, or even worth, psychiatric problems may occur, such as anxiety, depression, social phobia and addiction. Within the Romanian educational system the school counselor teachers are in the forefront, being the first professionals who can promote within schools relevant information for preventing such negative effects among children, parents and teachers. This paper will address the issue of increased and uncontrolled use of technology among Romanian children and younger through the lentils of data gathered from European and Romanian sociological research studies, but also from the Bucharest school counselors’ teachers’ activity reports. The aim is to prove the vicious link between the pupils increased technology consumption and the lack of information regarding the healthy use of it between all the responsible adults, parents and teachers alike. The negative effects of Internet and digital technology are real and are already affecting children development and school counseling could and should be the first solution for minimizing them.
Influenza Vaccine-Induced Antibody Responses Are Not Impaired by Frailty in the Community-Dwelling Elderly With Natural Influenza Exposure

Background: Elderly adults over 65 years of age are recommended to receive seasonal influenza vaccination as they are at a higher risk of infection and its complications than the younger community. The elderly are often stratified according to frailty status where frail individuals are more susceptible to adverse health outcomes than their non-frail counterparts, however, it is not known whether immunity induced by influenza vaccination is impaired in the frail elderly. Study Design: Two hundred and five elderly subjects of Chinese ethnicity in Singapore (mean age 73.3 ± 5.3 years, 128 females and 77 males) were administered the recommended trivalent inactivated 2013–14 seasonal influenza vaccine (Vaxigrip™) containing A/H1N1, A/H3N2, and B strains. The elderly subjects were stratified into three groups according to Fried's frailty criteria (59 frail, 85 pre-frail, 61 robust) and were also ranked by Rockwood's frailty index (RFI). Statistical associations were evaluated between frailty status and pre- and post-vaccination antibody titres in sera measured by Hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) and microneutralization (MN) assays. Immunological responses across frailty strata were also studied in terms of leukocyte cellular distribution, cytokine levels and gene expression. Results: Post-vaccination, 83.4% of the subjects seroconverted for A/H1N1, 80.5% for A/H3N2, and 81% for the B strain. The seroconversion rates were comparable across frailty groups (A/H1N1, ANOVA, p = 0.7910; A/H3N2, ANOVA, p = 0.8356, B, ANOVA, p = 0.9741). Geometric mean titres of HAI and MN as well as seroprotection rates were also similar in all three frailty groups and uncorrelated with RFI (Spearman, r = 0.023, p = 0.738). No statistically significant differences were observed between the frailty groups in vaccine-induced modulation of leukocyte populations, cytokine responses, and gene expression profiles of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). Whereas, post- and pre-vaccination HAI titres were positively correlated after adjusting for age and gender (A/H1N1, R2 = 0.216, p = 9.1e−11; A/H3N2, R2 = 0.166, p = 3.4e−8; B, R2 = 0.104, p = 3.1e−5). With most subjects lacking previous history of influenza vaccination, the pre-vaccination titres were likely due to natural exposure and seen to match the pattern of influenza subtype prevalence in the time period of vaccination. Conclusion: The majority of the elderly subjects seroconverted for seasonal influenza upon vaccination, and importantly, influenza vaccination-induced humoral immune responses and seroprotection were similar across the frailty strata, indicating that frail individuals may also benefit from influenza vaccination. Pre-existing antibodies due to natural exposure appeared to positively influence vaccine-induced antibody responses.
Brain structure in childhood maltreatment-related PTSD across the lifespan: A systematic review

Abstract Numerous deleterious outcomes are associated with child maltreatment, and PTSD secondary to maltreatment is one of the most commonly cited diagnoses that may follow individuals throughout their lives. Recent neuroimaging research has observed significant structural abnormalities in individuals with maltreatment-related PTSD (m-PTSD) compared to maltreated individuals without PTSD and healthy controls. Therefore, the aims of this systematic review were to summarize the literature on brain structure in m-PTSD, identify methodological challenges and limitations, and provide directions for future research. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines were followed to conduct a systematic search across three databases, and 18 studies were identified for inclusion, including 10 pediatric, 1 adolescent, and 7 adult studies. Across the studies, 19 primary brain structures were examined; 15 of the 18 studies identified a significant association between brain structure and m-PTSD. Although studies varied in the structures investigated, the most notable differences appeared in the corpus callosum, total cerebral volume, cerebellum, hippocampus, and amygdala, which appeared significantly smaller in m-PTSD participants. Future research concerning this topic may contribute to the understanding of this association by using longitudinal designs, controlling for psychiatric comorbidities and maltreatment severity, and ensuring that studies are adequately powered.
Leaky gut biomarkers in depression and suicidal behavior

Inflammation is associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) and suicidal behavior. According to the ‘leaky gut hypothesis’, increased intestinal permeability may contribute to this relationship via bacterial translocation across enterocytes. We measured plasma levels of gut permeability markers, in patients with a recent suicide attempt (rSA), MDD subjects with no history of a suicide attempt (nsMDD), and healthy controls (HC), and related these markers to symptom severity and inflammation.
Reincarnating the Identity Theory

The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has allegedly been swept away by functionalism. After clarifying why and how the notion of identity implies that there is no genuine problem of explaining how the mental derives from something else, we point out that the identity theory is not necessarily a mind/brain identity theory. In fact, we propose an updated form of identity theory, or embodied identity theory, in which the identities concern not experiences and brain phenomena, but experiences and organism-environment interactions. Such an embodied identity theory retains the main ontological insight of its parent theory, and by invoking organism-environment interactions, it has powerful resources to motivate why the relevant identities hold, without posing further unsolvable problems. We argue that the classical multiple realization argument against identity theory is built on not recognizing that the main claim of the identity theory concerns the relation between experience and descriptions of experience, instead of being about relations between different descriptions of experience and we show how an embodied identity theory provides an appropriate platform for making this argument. We emphasize that the embodied identity theory we propose is not ontologically reductive, and does not disregard experience.
Connectionist Temporal Fusion for Sign Language Translation

Continuous sign language translation (CSLT) is a weakly supervised problem aiming at translating vision-based videos into natural languages under complicated sign linguistics, where the ordered words in a sentence label have no exact boundary of each sign action in the video. This paper proposes a hybrid deep architecture which consists of a temporal convolution module (TCOV), a bidirectional gated recurrent unit module (BGRU), and a fusion layer module (FL) to address the CSLT problem. TCOV captures short-term temporal transition on adjacent clip features (local pattern), while BGRU keeps the long-term context transition across temporal dimension (global pattern). FL concatenates the feature embedding of TCOV and BGRU to learn their complementary relationship (mutual pattern). Thus we propose a joint connectionist temporal fusion (CTF) mechanism to utilize the merit of each module. The proposed joint CTC loss optimization and deep classification score-based decoding fusion strategy are designed to boost performance. With only once training, our model under the CTC constraints achieves comparable performance to other existing methods with multiple EM iterations. Experiments are tested and verified on a benchmark, i.e. the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather dataset, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Capture the vertebral fracture: Risk factors as a prediction.

OBJECTIVE Vertebral fractures are the most common osteoporotic fractures occurring due to low bone mineral density, as well as other risk factors. The aim of the paper is to investigate risk factors for vertebral osteoporotic fracture occurrence in postmenopausal women. METHODS Retrospective analysis of data pertaining to 651 postmenopausal women obtained from the National Osteoporosis Registry of Serbia was conducted. Further analyses were performed on 217 osteoporotic women identified from those records, whereby those in the experimental group (n= 110) had a vertebral fracture, while those assigned to the control group (n= 107) did not. The two groups were comparable in terms of age (t= 0.450; p> 0.01). Risk factors that could serve as the best predictors of vertebral fracture occurrence were investigated. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used for testing effect of several factors on vertebral fracture occurrence as the dependent variable. RESULTS Patients that have never suffered a vertebral fracture had a significantly higher bone mineral density (t= 8.161; p< 0.01) in comparison to those with a verified vertebral fracture. Factors that significantly contributed to the risk of vertebral fracture were presence of kyphosis (OR 708.338; 95% CI 19.238-26.081.950), use of glucocorticoids (OR 87.618; 95% CI 9.175-836.707), and presence of comorbidities (OR 7.327; 95% CI 1.500-35.793). Moreover, a unit increase in body mass index (BMI) was found to lower the probability of vertebral fracture by a factor of 0.846. Women that entered menopause later have lower chance of suffering a vertebral fracture (OR = 0.539; 95% CI 0.400-0.726). CONCLUSION Lower body mass index, presence of kyphosis, use of glucocorticoids, early menopause onset, and presence of comorbidities are the factors that contribute the most to vertebral osteoporotic fracture occurrence.
Prevalence of risk factors for non-communicable diseases in a rural tribal population of Mokokchung, Nagaland, India

Background Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of mortality in India. The northeastern part of India has a high burden of NCDs. However, data on the prevalence of risk factors for NCDs in the rural tribal population of Nagaland are limited. We estimated the prevalence and awareness level of risk factors for NCDs in the rural population of Mokokchung district, Nagaland. Methods In a cross-sectional survey, we selected 472 subjects aged 25–64 years, stratified by age and sex, in 20 villages, using a cluster sampling technique. The WHO STEPS tools were used to collect data on behavioural risk factors, and anthropometric, blood pressure and capillary glucose measurements. The proportion of subjects with each NCD risk factor was determined overall and in various age and sex subgroups. Results The 472 subjects had a median age of 44.5 years, 92 (19.5%) reported current smoking and 75 (15.9%) reported current alcohol use. Among 236 males, 90 (38.1 %) were current smokers and 65 (27.5%) were current alcohol users, whereas of the 236 females, only 2 (0.8%) and 10 (4.2%) were current smokers and current alcohol users, respectively. The use of smokeless tobacco was common among both males (139/236; 58.9%) and females (117/ 236; 49.6%). Inadequate intake of fruits and vegetables was reported by 189 (80.1%) males and 221 (93.6%) females. Insufficient physical activity was observed only among 16 (3.4%) participants. Prevalence of hypertension and a body mass index of 23.0–27.49 kg/m2 was 43.2% and 32.4%, respectively. Conclusions We observed a high prevalence of behavioural risk factors for NCDs and of hypertension in rural tribal people in Nagaland. The primary healthcare system needs to be strengthened in this area to improve detection and management of hypertension. Mass and print media campaigns and provision of cessation services may also be helpful.
Cross-Species Learning: A Low-Cost Approach to Learning Human Fight from Animal Fight

Detecting human fight behavior from videos is important in social signal processing, especially in the context of surveillance. However, the uncommon occurrence of real human fight events generally restricts the data collection for fight detection in machine learning, and thus hampers the performance of contemporary data-driven approaches. To address this challenge, we present a novel cross-species learning method with a set of low-computational cost motion features for fight detection. It effectively circumvents the problem of limited human fight data for data-demaining approaches. Our method exploits the intrinsic commonality between human and animal fights, such as the physical acceleration of moving body parts. It also leverages an ensemble learning mechanism to adapt useful knowledge from similar source subsets across species. Our evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed feature representation for cross-species adaptation. We believe that cross-species learning is not only a promising solution to the data constraint issue, but it also sheds lights on the studies of other human mental and social behaviors in cross-disciplinary research.
Factors Affecting Early and 1-Year Motor Recovery Following Lumbar Microdiscectomy in Patients with Lumbar Disc Herniation: A Prospective Cohort Review

Study Design Prospective cohort study. Purpose The study was aimed at evaluating clinicoradiological factors affecting recovery of neurological deficits in cases of lumbar disc herniation (LDH) treated by lumbar microdiscectomy. Overview of Literature The majority of the available literature on neurological recovery following neurodeficit is limited to retrospective series. The literature is currently limited regarding variables that can help predict the recovery of neurodeficits following LDH. Methods A prospective analysis was performed on 70 consecutive patients who underwent lumbar microdiscectomy (L1–2 to L5–S1) owing to neurological deficits due to LDH. Patients with motor power ≤3/5 in L2–S1 myotomes were considered for analysis. Follow-up was performed at 2, 6, and 12 months to note recovery of motor deficits. Clinicoradiological parameters were compared between the recovered and nonrecovered groups. Results A total of 65 patients were available at the final follow-up: 41 (63%) had completely recovered by 2 months; four showed delayed recovery at the 6-month follow-up; and 20 (30.7%) showed no recovery at 1 year. Clinicoradiological factors, including diabetes, complete initial deficit, areflexia, multilevel disc prolapse, longer duration since initial symptoms, and ≥2 previous symptomatic episodes were associated with a significant risk of poorer recovery (p<0.05 for all). Age, sex, occupation, smoking, level/type or location of disc herniation, primary canal stenosis, disc fragment dimensions, precipitating factors, bladder involvement, bilaterality of symptoms, and the presence or absence of anal reflex did not affect neurological recovery (p>0.05 for all). Diabetes mellitus (p=0.033) and complete initial motor deficit (p=0.028) were significantly associated with delayed recovery in the multivariate analysis. Conclusions The overall neurological recovery rate in our study was 69%. Diabetes mellitus (p=0.033) and complete initial motor deficit were associated with delayed motor recovery.
A Study of Aetiopathology of Ulcers and Membranous Lesions of Oral Cavity and Oropharynx

Ulcers and membranous lesions of oral cavity and oropharynx is a common complaint encountered in E.N. T OPD. Proper knowledge of aetiopathology of these lesions is necessary to treat the underlying pathology. Objective was to study etiology, incidence, duration, episodes, number, sex predilection and histopathological presentation of these lesions. Method: The prospective study was carried out in 100 patients presented in department of ENT & Dermatology from February 2015 to August 2016 with complaints of ulcers/membranous lesions of oral cavity/oropharynx. After taking the detailed history of patients complete examination of ear, nose and throat was done. Investigations like biopsy and histopathological examination, and swab test for culture and sensitivity were also carried out for chronic lesions. Result: out of 100 patients 80 patients had ulcers and 20 patients had membranous lesions. 56 patients had acute ulcers and 44 had chronic ulcers. Overall sex incidence ratio was 1:1. 52 cases had solitary lesions whereas 48 cases had multiple lesions. 65 cases out of 100 had first episode of lesions while 35 cases reported as recurrence. Out of 44 cases of chronic ulcers histopathological studies reported 13 cases were that of squamous cell carcinoma and 13 cases were of leukoplakia, 4 were lichen planus and candidiais each and 3 were of pemphigus vulgaris. Conclusion: ulcers and membranous lesions may be present due to various underlying pathologies. So proper diagnosis, through detailed history, clinical examination and investigations are warranted to find out cause and initiating treatment. INTRODUCTION An ulcer (Latin ulcus) is the breach of continuity of epithelium. Ulceration of oral mucosa is frequent occurrence producing The oral mucosa is fragile membrane and susceptible to erosions.The word membrane is derived from the latin word “membrum” which is defined as a pliable sheet like structure acting as a boundary, lining, or partition in an organism. The membranous lesions of oral cavity and oropharynx are consequences of www.jmscr. igmpublication.org Impact Factor (SJIF): 6.379 Index Copernicus Value: 79.54 ISSN (e)-2347-176x ISSN (p) 2455-0450 DOI: https://dx.doi. org/10.18535/jmscr/v6i8.165
The effect of different frequencies of electroacupuncture on BDNF and NGF expression in the hippocampal CA3 area of the ischemic hemisphere in cerebral ischemic rats

Objective The aim of this study was to observe the effects of different frequencies of electroacupuncture (EA) on expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and nerve growth factor (NGF) in the hippocampal CA3 region of cerebral ischemic rats. Methods Middle cerebral artery occlusion was successfully introduced to simulate cerebral infarction in 48 healthy male Sprague–Dawley rats. Totally, 48 rats were randomly divided into three groups: the control group, the EA 5-Hz group, and the EA 50-Hz group, 16 in each group. The rats in the control group were placed in an ordinary cage and fed normally without any treatment. EA treatment was given at a certain frequency 24 hours after surgery in the EA 5-Hz group and EA 50-Hz group. Morris water maze test was used to measure the learning and memory abilities of rats in each group after 14-day treatment with EA. Immunohistochemical staining was used to detect the expression of BDNF- and NGF-positive cells in the ischemic hippocampal CA3 area of the rats. Results The EA 5-Hz group and EA 50-Hz group had significantly improved learning and memory ability compared with the control group according to Morris water maze findings (P<0.05). The number of BDNF- and NGF-positive cells in the hippocampal CA3 region of the ischemic hemisphere in the 5-Hz group and 50-Hz EA group was significantly more than that in the control group after EA treatment (P<0.05), and the difference in the 50-Hz group was more obvious than that in the 5-Hz group. The difference was statistically significant (P<0.05). Conclusion EA stimulation of “Baihui” and “Dazhui” can promote the expression of BDNF and NGF in the hippocampal CA3 region of cerebral ischemic rats, and the 50-Hz EA stimulation effect is more obvious.