Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of blood pressure lowering on outcome incidence in hypertension: 3. Effects in patients at different levels of cardiovascular risk – overview and meta-analyses of randomized trials

Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of blood pressure (BP) lowering lend themselves to be meta-analyzed to help providing evidence-based recommendations for hypertension treatment. Objectives: To investigate whether relative or absolute risk reductions increase at increasing levels of baseline cardiovascular risk and whether BP-lowering treatment should be addressed to patients in risk categories promising larger absolute treatment benefits. Methods: Sixty-eight RCTs of intentional and nonintentional BP lowering were classified in four strata of increasing average 10-year incidence of cardiovascular death in the placebo or less active treatment group: low-to-moderate risk (<5%; 23 RCTs, 81 675 individuals), high risk (5% to <10%; 11 RCTs, 46 162 individuals), very high risk (10% to <20%; 19 RCTs, 91 152 individuals), and very very high risk (≥20%; 16 RCTs, 26 881 individuals). Risk ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CIs; random-effects model) standardized to 10/5 mmHg SBP/DBP reduction, absolute risk reduction, and residual risk of seven major fatal/nonfatal outcomes were calculated. Relative and absolute risk reductions in the cardiovascular risk strata were compared by the trend analysis, residual risk by calculating odds ratio (OR) relative to low-to-moderate risk. Results: Relative reductions of all outcomes did not differ in the risk strata, but absolute reductions significantly increased with increasing cardiovascular risk (P for trend <0.001 except for CHD): a 10/5 mmHg SBP/DBP reduction reduced the incidence of major cardiovascular events by 7 (95% CI 3–10), 30 (9–50), 56 (35–76), and 87 (62–112) events every 1000 patients treated 5 years, with increasing cardiovascular risk. However, also residual risk significantly (P < 0.001) increased with increasing cardiovascular risk [up to an OR 9.43 (8.60–10.35) for cardiovascular death]. The increase in residual risk with increasing level of cardiovascular risk persisted when RCTs with average initial age at least 65 years were excluded, and mean ages at the different cardiovascular risk levels were comparable. Conclusion: BP-lowering treatment induces greater absolute risk reductions the higher the cardiovascular risk level, but a higher risk level is also associated with higher absolute residual risk, independent of age. Whereas reserving antihypertensive treatment to high-risk hypertensive patients maximizes the cost–benefit ratio, only treatment of low-to-moderate risk hypertensive patients may prevent the increasing number of treatment failures when treatment is initiated at higher risk.
Stuttering includes both within-word and between-word disfluencies.

A growing practice divides stuttered disfluencies from normal disfluencies by defining the former as "within-word" and the latter as "between-word. " After reviewing the available logical and empirical evidence, this note concludes that the unstated implications of a strong form of this definition (that no between-word disfluencies are stuttering and that all within-word disfluencies are stuttering) cannot currently be supported. A weaker form of this definition might prove useful for the definition and measurement of stuttering, but only if such a definition can be both internally consistent and consistent with available clinical and empirical information.
Infective endocarditis following Melody valve implantation: comparison with a surgical cohort

Abstract Background Infective endocarditis has been reported post Melody percutaneous pulmonary valve implant; the incidence and risk factors, however, remain poorly defined. We identified four cases of endocarditis from our first 25 Melody implants. Our aim was to examine these cases in the context of postulated risk factors and directly compare endocarditis rates with local surgical valves. Methods We conducted a retrospective review of patients post Melody percutaneous pulmonary valve implant in New Zealand (October, 2009–May, 2015) and also reviewed the incidence of endocarditis in New Zealand among patients who have undergone surgical pulmonary valve implants. Results In total, 25 patients underwent Melody implantation at a median age of 18 years. At a median follow-up of 2.9 years, most were well with low valve gradient (median 27 mmHg) and only mild regurgitation. Two patients presented with life-threatening endocarditis and obstructive vegetations at 14 and 26 months post implant, respectively. Two additional patients presented with subacute endocarditis at 5.5 years post implant. From 2009 to May, 2015, 178 surgical pulmonic bioprostheses, largely Hancock valves and homografts, were used at our institution. At a median follow-up of 2.9 years, four patients (2%) had developed endocarditis in this group compared with 4/25 (16%) in the Melody group (p=0.0089). Three surgical valves have been replaced. Conclusions The Melody valve offers a good alternative to surgical conduit replacement in selected patients. Many patients have excellent outcomes in the medium term. Endocarditis, however, can occur and if associated with obstruction can be life threatening. The risk for endocarditis in the Melody group was higher in comparison with that in a contemporaneous surgical pulmonary implant cohort.
Resource allocation for uplink OFDMA C-RANs with limited computation and fronthaul capacity

This paper considers the joint fronthaul resource and rate allocation for the OFDMA uplink cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). This amounts to determine users' transmission rates and quantization bit allocation for I/Q baseband signals, which must be transferred from remote radio heads (RRHs) to the cloud over the capacity-limited fronthaul network. Our design aims at maximizing the system sum rate through optimal allocation of fronthaul capacity and cloud computation resources. Toward this end, we propose a novel two-stage approach to solve the underlying non-linear integer problem. In the first stage, we relax the integer variables to attain a relaxed problem, which is solved by employing a pricing-based method. Interestingly, we show that the pricing-based problem is convex with respect to each optimization variable, which can be, therefore, solved efficiently. In addition, we develop a novel mechanism to iteratively update the pricing parameter which is proved to converge. In the second stage, we propose two different rounding strategies, which are applied to the obtained continuous solution of the relaxed problem to achieve a feasible solution for the original problem. Finally, we present numerical results to demonstrate the significant sum-rate gains of our proposed design with respect to a standard greedy algorithm.
Cutting Edge: Central Nervous System Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells Regulate the Severity of Relapsing Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis1

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) have both stimulatory and regulatory effects on T cells. pDCs are a major CNS-infiltrating dendritic cell population during experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis but, unlike myeloid dendritic cells, have a minor role in T cell activation and epitope spreading. We show that depletion of pDCs during either the acute or relapse phases of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis resulted in exacerbation of disease severity. pDC depletion significantly enhanced CNS but not peripheral CD4+ T cell activation, as well as IL-17 and IFN-γ production. Moreover, CNS pDCs suppressed CNS myeloid dendritic cell-driven production of IL-17, IFN-γ, and IL-10 in an IDO-independent manner. The data demonstrate that pDCs play a critical regulatory role in negatively regulating pathogenic CNS CD4+ T cell responses, highlighting a new role for pDCs in inflammatory autoimmune disease.
Cycloheximide: Aspects of Inhibition of Protein Synthesis in Mammalian Cells

Cycloheximide and acetoxy-cycloheximide specifically inhibit protein synthesis in L-cells growing in suspension culture. In extracts of rat liver, the drugs inhibit transfer of amino acid from soluble RNA to polypeptide. Unlike puromycin, these drugs do not accelerate release of nascent polypeptide chains. The drugs have no effect on protein synthesis in extracts of Escherichia coli.
Investigation of the Role of Two Bacterial Species in the Removal of Sulphate from Wastewater

The aim of this study was to investigate the optimal conditions for sulphate from wastewater by Escherichia coli and Psendomonas aeruginosa under shake flask conditions. Before inoculating with the respective isolates, the wastewater was first filtered in 200 mL quantity into 250 mL capacity and then sterilized in an autoclave. After inoculation with the test isolates, aliquot wastewater samples was aseptically removed from each flask, every 24 h, for 96 h, for the estimation of sulphate concentration, using procedures. The results revealed sulphate removal at 35 oC and 45 oC while at 25 oC, an increase in sulphate level in the wastewater was observed at the end of the 96 h incubation period. This trend was irrespective of the test bacterial species. At the different pH, sulphate decreases of 50.31 %, 26.67 % and 18.14 % at pH 6, 8 and 10 were observed in the presence of the Escherichia coli while in the presence of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa, sulphate decreases of 31.53 % and 21.52 % were observed at pH 6 and 8, respectively. With the different concentrations of sodium acetate that were used for investigation, maximum sulphate removal was observed at 10 g/L. This trend was also irrespective of the test isolates. In presence of the different external carbon sources, sulphate concentrations in the wastewater after the 96 h incubation period were observed to increases at the expiration of incubation. Yeast and meat extracts were observed to enhance sulphate removal in the presence of the Escherichia coli while in presence of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa, remarkable sulphate removal was only observed when yeast extract was used as the nitrogen source. There was no decrease in sulphate level at the different concentrations of peptone that were investigated. This trend was common in presence of both isolates. The study was able to reveal the roles of temperature, pH, carbon and nitrogen concentrations and carbon/nitrogen sources on sulphate removal from wastewater by the test is bacterial species under the experimental conditions used for investigation.
Weakly Supervised Saliency Detection with A Category-Driven Map Generator

Top-down saliency detection aims to highlight the regions of a specific object category, and typically relies on pixel-wise annotated training data. In this paper, we address the high cost of collecting such training data by presenting a weakly supervised approach to object saliency detection, where only image-level labels, indicating the presence or absence of a target object in an image, are available. The proposed framework is composed of two deep modules, an image-level classifier and a pixel-level map generator. While the former distinguishes images with objects of interest from the rest, the latter is learned to generate saliency maps so that the training images masked by the maps can be better predicted by the former. In addition to the top-down guidance from class labels, the map generator is derived by also referring to other image information, including the background prior, area balance and spatial consensus. This information greatly regularizes the training process and reduces the risk of overfitting, especially when learning deep models with few training data. In the experiments, we show that our method gets superior results, and even outperforms many strongly supervised methods.
Business advice and lending in small firms

The literature on lending to small firms has primarily focused on the mechanisms and methods used to evaluate entrepreneurs and businesses and on the types of firms that are more likely to experience unfavourable application outcomes. That is, the focus of most empirical research is on supply-side decisions. The current research attempts to shed some light on demand-side considerations. Drawing upon data collected as the UK SME Finance Monitor (2011–2014), we identify links between entrepreneurs' diligence, business risk and finance-related advice-seeking prior to initiating loan and overdraft applications. The results show evidence of the usefulness of advice in ameliorating, both structural and strategic, business risk and improving the prospects of successful debt applications to banks.
How Do Mobile Information Services Improve Quality of Life? The Case of Japanese Students

Every technology should be geared to improve the quality of users’ lives. Our study aims to understand how mobile information services (MIS) contribute to quality of life (QoL) for young mobile users. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of relationship between two variables: the contribution of MIS in 15 specific life domains and the contribution of MIS to overall quality of life (QoL). We examined bottom-up spillover theory with original and our additional life domains. Eleven life domains derived from previous research include: leisure life, family life, friend life, cultural life, work life, community life, consumer life, financial life, health life, safety life, and self-life. Our proposed four life domains are: home-healthcare life, informational life, educational life and trustworthy life. Questionnaire surveys were conducted in Japan among young mobile users. We analyzed the data of 189 effective respondents. Results from this study clearly indicate that two variables (individual contribution and overall contribution) are valid and reliable to analyze. Contribution to the informational life has the highest influence on the overall contribution for Japanese young, followed by culture life, friend life, leisure life, educational life and work life.
Effects of resistance training periodization on performance and salivary immune-endocrine responses of elite female basketball players.

AIM The aim of this paper was to examine the effects of resistance training periodization on the performance and salivary hormone-immune responses of elite female basketball players. METHODS Twelve female athletes were monitored across a 50 day period of resistance training that emphasized strength, endurance and power. One repetition maximum (1RM) strength, maximal repetitions at 50% 1RM and vertical jump performance was assessed pre- and post-training. Saliva samples were also collected at 0700, 0930, 1100 and 1730 hours and analyzed for testosterone (T), cortisol (C) and immunoglobulin A (IgA). RESULTS Improvements in 1RM strength, maximal repetitions and vertical jump performance were identified post-training (P<0.05). Training had no effect on salivary T and C concentrations, but the T:C ratio increased at 0730 hours (P<0.05) and IgA concentrations were lowered at 0930 and 1100 hours (P<0.05). The changes (∆ Pre-Post training) in strength and T concentrations were positively correlated at 0730 hours (P<0.05). CONCLUSION A periodized approach to resistance training increased muscle performance in elite female basketball players, but only minor changes in the salivary T:C ratio and IgA were noted. Correlational analysis identified a possible role for early morning changes in T as a regulator of individual strength changes.
Transforming Growth Factor-β Induces Collagenase-3 Expression by Human Gingival Fibroblasts via p38 Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase*

Human collagenase-3 (matrix metalloproteinase 13 (MMP-13)) is characterized by exceptionally wide substrate specificity and restricted tissue specific expression. Human skin fibroblasts in culture express MMP-13 only when they are in three-dimensional collagen (Ravanti, L., Heino, J., López-Otı́n, C., and Kähäri. V.-M. (1999)J. Biol. Chem. 274, 2446–2455). Here we show that MMP-13 is expressed by fibroblasts during normal human gingival wound repair. Expression of MMP-13 by human gingival fibroblasts cultured in monolayer or in collagen gel was induced by transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1). Treatment of gingival fibroblasts with TGF-β1 activated two distinct mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs): extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2) in 15 min and p38 MAPK in 1 and 2 h. Induction of MMP-13 expression by TGF-β1 was blocked by SB203580, a specific inhibitor of p38 MAPK, but not by PD98059, a selective inhibitor of ERK1/2 activation. Adenovirus-mediated expression of dominant negative p38α and c-Jun potently inhibited induction of MMP-13 expression in gingival fibroblasts by TGF-β1. Infection of gingival fibroblasts with adenovirus for constitutively active MEK1 resulted in activation of ERK1/2 and JNK1 and up-regulation of collagenase-1 (MMP-1) and stromelysin-1 (MMP-3) production but did not induce MMP-13 expression. In addition, activation of p38 MAPK by constitutively active MKK6b or MKK3b was not sufficient to induce MMP-13 expression. These results show that TGF-β-elicited induction of MMP-13 expression by gingival fibroblasts is dependent on the activity of p38 MAPK and the presence of functional AP-1 dimers. These observations demonstrate a fundamental difference in the regulation of collagenolytic capacity between gingival and dermal fibroblasts and suggest a role for MMP-13 in rapid turnover of collagenous matrix during repair of gingival wounds, which heal with minimal scarring.
The Spectrum of Ocular Involvement in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus in a Tertiary Eye Care Center in Nepal

PURPOSE Manifestations of Systemic lupus erythematosus are protean and the eye can get affected in more than a third of the cases. This study was conducted to evaluate the spectrum of ocular manifestation among Nepalese patients diagnosed with Systemic lupus erythematosus. METHODS In this hospital based cross-sectional study, 91 established cases of Systemic lupus erythematosus were enrolled from January 2008 to June 2009 AD. Patient particulars including age, sex, duration, systemic involvement, laboratory findings and treatment history were noted. Detailed ophthalmological examination was carried. RESULTS Out of 91 patients, 94.5% were females and 5.5% were males. Female/Male ratio was 17:1. Mean age of the patients was 26.59 ± 10.33 years. Ocular involvement was present in 47.3% (43) of the patients, the commonest manifestation being dry eye (39.5%) followed by lupus retinopathy (21%) and drug induced ocular complications (21%). CONCLUSIONS Ocular manifestations in Systemic lupus erythematosus are not uncommon.
Linguistically Motivated Vocabulary Reduction for Neural Machine Translation from Turkish to English

Abstract The necessity of using a fixed-size word vocabulary in order to control the model complexity in state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) systems is an important bottleneck on performance, especially for morphologically rich languages. Conventional methods that aim to overcome this problem by using sub-word or character-level representations solely rely on statistics and disregard the linguistic properties of words, which leads to interruptions in the word structure and causes semantic and syntactic losses. In this paper, we propose a new vocabulary reduction method for NMT, which can reduce the vocabulary of a given input corpus at any rate while also considering the morphological properties of the language. Our method is based on unsupervised morphology learning and can be, in principle, used for pre-processing any language pair. We also present an alternative word segmentation method based on supervised morphological analysis, which aids us in measuring the accuracy of our model. We evaluate our method in Turkish-to-English NMT task where the input language is morphologically rich and agglutinative. We analyze different representation methods in terms of translation accuracy as well as the semantic and syntactic properties of the generated output. Our method obtains a significant improvement of 2.3 BLEU points over the conventional vocabulary reduction technique, showing that it can provide better accuracy in open vocabulary translation of morphologically rich languages.
Diffusion-weighted MR neurography of extremity nerves with unidirectional motion-probing gradients at 3 T: feasibility study.

OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to show the feasibility and performance of diffusion-weighted MR neurography (MRN) of extremity nerves with unidirectional motion-probing gradients at 3 T. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Forty-seven healthy volunteers and 10 patients underwent diffusion-weighted MRN of extremity nerves with unidirectional motion-probing gradients (anterior-posterior direction only) on a 3-T unit. Images were displayed using a maximum-intensity-projection technique. Two radiologists blindly and independently evaluated the imaging quality of extremity nerves on diffusion-weighted MRN images using a 4-point grading scale, with 4 indicating excellent quality and 1 indicating poor quality, and evaluated the relation of the lesion to adjacent nerves in patients. RESULTS In volunteers, the long trajectories of major extremity nerves, including the radial, median, ulnar, sciatic, tibial, and common peroneal nerves, could be visualized 3D on diffusion-weighted MRN images. The mean imaging quality scores of all nerves for observers 1 and 2 were 3.68 ± 0.70 (SD) and 3.70 ± 0.66, respectively. Interobserver agreement was good (κ = 0.774). In patients, there was no discrepancy in imaging quality scores between observers. Scores of all nerves were 2-4 except in two patients with neurofibromatosis and one patient who underwent imaging soon after surgery. The extent of the lesions and the relationship of the lesions to the adjacent nerves were clearly depicted on diffusion-weighted MRN images of all patients. CONCLUSION This preliminary study shows that 3-T diffusion-weighted MRN with unidirectional motion-probing gradients is feasible for 3D visualization of major extremity nerves. Diffusion-weighted MRN may enable nerve depiction and allow assessment of the anatomic relationship between lesions with diffusion restriction and adjacent nerves.
A population-based assessment of live births in women with systemic lupus erythematosus

Objectives The authors aim to calculate the number of live births, before and after systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) diagnosis, in women diagnosed during their reproductive years and to compare this with general population rates. Methods The authors identified women with SLE using Quebec administrative databases (1 January 1994 to 31 December 2003). The authors determined the number of live births, and calculated the standardised incidence ratio (SIR) of observed to expected live births. Results 1334 women with SLE were identified. Overall, the number of live births over the interval (559) was below that which would be expected (708) (SIR 0.79; 95% CI 0.73 to 0.86). Compared with the general population, live births were substantially lower after SLE diagnosis (SIR 0.62; 95% CI 0.55 to 0.70) than before diagnosis (SIR 1.01; 95% CI 0.90 to 1.13). Conclusion After diagnosis, women with SLE have substantially fewer live births than the general population.