Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling the Association between 43 Different Clinical and Pathological Variables and the Severity of Cognitive Impairment in a Large Autopsy Cohort of Elderly Persons

We evaluated the association between mini‐mental status examination (MMSE) scores proximal to death and the values of 43 different clinical and pathological parameters. Studies were performed using data from 334 elderly, longitudinally evaluated research subjects who had undergone autopsy and satisfied inclusion criteria from an initial study group of 501. Interindividual variance in MMSE scores was used as a surrogate for the severity of cognitive impairment linked to aging (CILA). A statistical linear regression‐based model provided a framework for assessing the parameters with significant, direct impact on CILA severity. Strong association between CILA and Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology, especially isocortical neurofibrillary tangles, was evident. The pattern of association between AD lesion densities with cognitive impairment severity was biologically informative, with neuritic plaques having more impact in relatively high‐functioning individuals. Abundant isocortical Lewy bodies tended to be an additive pathology correlating with final MMSE scores approximately 10 points lower. In a subset of cases we found evidence for association between TDP‐43‐related pathology and CILA severity, independent of AD or hippocampal sclerosis. There was no support for independent association between CILA severity and most evaluated indices including diffuse plaques, argyrophilic grains, heart disease, education level, apolipoprotein E alleles or diabetes.
The Role of Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) Complex in IBD: Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis

The human leukocyte antigen complex on chromosome 6 is the most extensively studied genetic region in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Consistent evidence of linkage to IBD3 (6p21.1-23), an area which encompasses the HLA complex, has been demonstrated for both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. However, despite these efforts the HLA susceptibility genes for IBD remain elusive and unclear, a possible consequence of strong linkage disequilibrium, extensive polymorphism, high gene density across this region and different allele frequencies in several populations around the world. This article confirms the role of HLA complex genes in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis susceptibility, and principally the HLA-DRB1 locus.
Smoking and alcohol drinking during pregnancy. The reliability of retrospective maternal self-reported information.

BACKGROUND The reliability of retrospective maternal self-reported information regarding smoking and alcohol drinking during pregnancy seemed necessary to be checked. METHODS Two groups of congenital abnormalities were selected for the study from the population based Hungarian Congenital Abnormality Registry. The prevalence of smoking and drinking during the study pregnancy was measured in the mothers of 81 cases affected with isolated orofacial cleft and 537 cases with congenital limb deficiencies, and in their matched control pairs without any defect by maternal self-reported retrospective information through a mailed structured questionnaire. In the second step the latter data were checked by an independent personal interview of fathers and other family members at the home visit or in our department using the same structured questionnaire. RESULTS The family consensus indicated the low reliability of retrospective maternal self-reported information concerning smoking in the mothers of cases but not in mothers of controls. However, the comparison of retrospective maternal self-reported data and information of close relatives indicated a reported bias concerning the drinking of alcohol beverages during pregnancy in both controls and cases. CONCLUSIONS Since retrospective maternal self-reported data had low reliability, therefore, data of smoking and alcohol drinking were not collected for the data set of the Hungarian Case-Control Surveillance of Congenital Abnormalities between 1980 and 1996.
ADHD: Does Parenting Style Matter?

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition typically arising in childhood, which untreated, can have consequences reaching into adolescence and beyond. Effective pharmacological treatment is available and has become widespread in the West. Outcomes for both the child with ADHD and the parent may be influenced by the nature of interaction between them. The authors of this article aim to review published research examining the interaction between parents and their children with ADHD. A PubMed search was conducted of studies written in English between 2000 and 2007 with the keywords ADHD and parenting. Child ADHD elicits high levels of parental stress and maladaptive parenting. The presence of parental psychopathology is common and influences the parent's response to the child's ADHD symptoms. Optimizing parent—child interaction and parental psychiatric status may improve outcomes for both parent and child.
The effects of systemic insulin, insulin-like growth factor-I and growth hormone on bone growth and turnover in spontaneously diabetic BB rats.

Spontaneously diabetic BB rats have a markedly depressed longitudinal bone growth and bone formation/turnover. In this study, male diabetic BB rats were infused intraperitoneally or subcutaneously for 2 weeks with hormones that are believed to stimulate skeletal growth and/or trabecular bone formation: insulin (3 or 4 U/day), human GH (hGH; 400 mU/day), recombinant human insulin-like growth factor-I (rhIGF-I; 300 or 600 micrograms/day) and testosterone (80 micrograms/100 g body weight per day). Saline-treated diabetic BB rats had decreased plasma concentrations of IGF-I and osteocalcin (OC) (OC, 3.7 +/- 0.3 vs 13.1 +/- 0.8 (S.E.M.) nmol/l in controls); bone histomorphometry showed decreased epiphyseal width, osteoblast surface (0.04 +/- 0.04 vs 1.5 +/- 0.3%) and osteoid surface, and mineral apposition rate (MAR) (1.8 +/- 0.5 vs 7.9 +/- 0.6 microns/day). Testosterone and hGH infusions had no effect on weight loss or on decreased skeletal growth and bone formation of diabetic rats, nor did they increase plasma IGF-I concentrations. Insulin infusions into diabetic rats resulted in hyperinsulinaemia and accelerated weight gain. The epiphyseal width, osteoblast/osteoid surfaces and OC levels of insulin-treated rats were normalized or stimulated well above control values (osteoblast surface, 4.3 +/- 0.8%; plasma OC, 16.1 +/- 1.4 nmol/l); the MAR (4.0 +/- 0.9 microns/day) was only partly corrected after the 2-week infusion. Infusions of rhIGF-I into diabetic rats doubled but did not restore plasma IGF-I levels to normal; weight gain, however, was similar to that in control rats. IGF-I treatment had no effect on epiphyseal width, osteoblast/osteoid surfaces and OC concentrations, but improved the decreased MAR (4.6 +/- 1.2 microns/day). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Significance of mean platelet volume on prognosis of patients with and without aspirin resistance in settings of non-ST-segment elevated acute coronary syndromes

Platelet volume is a marker of platelet function and activation. An elevated mean platelet volume (MPV) is associated with acute coronary syndromes (ACS). Recurrent cardiovascular events were found to be higher in patients with aspirin resistance. In this study, we investigated the effect of MPV on prognosis of patients with and without aspirin resistance by PFA-100 in settings of non-ST-segment elevated ACS. Two hundred and twenty patients with ACS were followed for an average of 14.86 ± 5.93 months for the occurrence of death, myocardial infarction (MI) and revascularization. Aspirin effect on platelet function was assessed by PFA-100. According to MPV value and aspirin resistance status, patients were divided into four groups. Group 4 (with an elevated MPV and aspirin resistance) was significantly associated with worse prognosis for composite endpoint (death, MI and revascularization), death and MI (for all, log–rank P < 0.0001). Multivariate analysis showed that presence of an elevated MPV and aspirin resistance was an independent predictor of composite endpoint [hazard ratio 8.21, 95% confidence interval (CI) 3.48–19.35, P < 0.0001], death (hazard ratio 5.48, 95% CI 1.62–18.53, P = 0.006) and MI (hazard ratio 4.44, 95% CI 1.57–12.58, P = 0.005). Presence of an elevated MPV and aspirin resistance was significantly associated with death, MI and the composite endpoint, due to the lack of beneficial effect of aspirin on activated platelets. Patients with ACS, especially in the presence of an elevated MPV may benefit from the evaluation of aspirin resistance for risk stratification.
Variation in policies for the management of febrile neutropenia in United Kingdom Children’s Cancer Study Group centres

Objective: To assess the variation in the current UK management strategies for the treatment of febrile neutropenia in childhood. Design and setting: A postal survey of all 21 United Kingdom Children’s Cancer Study Group (UKCCSG) centres assessing and collating local policies, protocols or guidelines relating to the management of febrile neutropenia. Further direct contact was undertaken to clarify any uncertainties. Results: All 21 centres provided information. The policies used to manage febrile neutropenia in the centres around the UK vary in almost every aspect of management. Definitions of fever ranged from a persistent temperature of >37.5°C to a single reading of >39°C. Neutropenia was inconsistently defined as an absolute neutrophil count of <1×109, <0.75×109 or <0.5×109. Choices of antibiotic approaches, empirical modifications and antistaphylococcal treatment were different in each protocol. The use of risk stratification was undertaken in 11 centres, with six using a policy of reduced intensity therapy in low risk cases. Empirical antifungal treatment was very poorly described and varied even more widely. Conclusions: There was a great deal of variation in definitions and treatment of febrile neutropenia in the UKCCSG children’s cancer treatment centres. A degree of variation as a result of local microbiological differences is to be expected, but beyond this we should seek to standardise the core of our approach to defining fever and neutropenia, risk stratification and duration of empirical therapy in a way that maintains safety, minimises resource utilisation and maximises quality of life.
Spill code minimization by spill code motion

We aim at minimizing the spill costs. Spill cost minimization heuristics that have been researched sometimes work in unexpected ways due to the lack of precise knowledge of registers availability, which can be obtained only after register allocation is all finished. Different from previous techniques, our approach, called spill code motion, tries to eliminate redundancy among spill code. This works as a variation of commonly used code motion techniques. After Chaitin-style graph coloring with naive live range splitting, spill-in instructions are first hoisted as long as registers are available and until they reach spill-out instructions. Unnecessarily hoisted spill-in instructions are then sunk. The experimental results show our approach yields up to a 10% performance increase compared to the latest spill code minimization technique in the case of using small number of registers.
Intrathecal amphotericin in the management of coccidioidal meningitis.

Coccidioidal meningitis is lethal in the absence of treatment. The advent of the azoles has not led to cure, causing many clinicians to revert to intra-cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) amphotericin as part of the treatment regimen, desiring the influence of the latter regimen's ability to clear infection more completely and rapidly. Intra-CSF amphotericin therapy is, however, far more toxic than oral azoles and requires much more clinical management to achieve success and avoid toxicity. This management task increasingly, for insurance reasons or geographic reasons, falls on clinicians unfamiliar with the disease. We delineate our experience in the medical and surgical management of this form of therapy, including procedural details that we have found useful, for the benefit of our colleagues who may wish to use them. As ours is a teaching institution, we have found this material also useful for physicians in training, who are learning about the treatment of these patients.
Neural network classification of autoregressive features from electroencephalogram signals for brain–computer interface design

In this paper, we have designed a two-state brain–computer interface (BCI) using neural network (NN) classification of autoregressive (AR) features from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals extracted during mental tasks. The main purpose of the study is to use Keirn and Aunon's data to investigate the performance of different mental task combinations and different AR features for BCI design for individual subjects. In the experimental study, EEG signals from five mental tasks were recorded from four subjects. Different combinations of two mental tasks were studied for each subject. Six different feature extraction methods were used to extract the features from the EEG signals: AR coefficients computed with Burg's algorithm, AR coefficients computed with a least-squares (LS) algorithm and adaptive autoregressive (AAR) coefficients computed with a least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm. All the methods used order six applied to 125 data points and these three methods were repeated with the same data but with segmentation into five segments in increments of 25 data points. The multilayer perceptron NN trained by the back-propagation algorithm (MLP-BP) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were used to classify the computed features into different categories that represent the mental tasks. We compared the classification performances among the six different feature extraction methods. The results showed that sixth-order AR coefficients with the LS algorithm without segmentation gave the best performance (93.10%) using MLP-BP and (97.00%) using LDA. The results also showed that the segmentation and AAR methods are not suitable for this set of EEG signals. We conclude that, for different subjects, the best mental task combinations are different and proper selection of mental tasks and feature extraction methods are essential for the BCI design.
SN 1993J VLBI. IV. A Geometric Distance to M81 with the Expanding Shock Front Method

We compare the angular expansion velocities, determined with VLBI, with the linear expansion velocities measured from optical spectra for supernova 1993J in the galaxy M81, over the period from 7 days to ~9 yr after shock breakout, and estimate the distance to SN 1993J using the expanding shock front method (ESM). We find that the best distance estimate is obtained by fitting the angular velocity of a point halfway between the contact surface and outer shock front to the maximum observed hydrogen gas velocity. We obtain a direct, geometric, distance estimate for M81 of D = 3.96 ± 0.05 ± 0.29 Mpc with statistical and systematic error contributions, respectively, which combine to a total standard error of ±0.29 Mpc. The upper limit of 4.25 Mpc corresponds to the hydrogen gas with the highest observed velocity just reaching out to the contact surface a few days after shock breakout. The lower limit of 3.67 Mpc corresponds to this gas reaching as far out as the forward shock for the whole observing period, which would mean that Rayleigh-Taylor fingers have grown to the forward shock already a few days after shock breakout. Our distance estimate is 9% ± 13% larger than that of 3.63 ± 0.34 Mpc from the HST Key Project. The radio shell and the Hα absorbing and emitting gas are similarly decelerated on average, but the latter slightly less so than the former several years after shock breakout. This may indicate developing Rayleigh-Taylor fingers, extending progressively further into the shocked circumstellar medium.
Language proficiency, gender and self-reported health: an analysis of the first two waves of the longitudinal survey of immigrants to Canada.

BACKGROUND Most immigrants to Canada now come from Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Africa, where cultures and languages often differ significantly from the Canadian context. Subgroups of immigrants experience disparities in health. Inability to communicate in an official language in Canada may be a marker of risk for poor health due to both pre- and post-migration factors. We aimed to study the relationship between language proficiency and self-reported health. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the first two surveys of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (2001, 2003), a population-based cohort study of new immigrants to Canada. Specifically, we used logistic regression analyses to examine the relationship between self-reported health and language proficiency by sex, controlling for a range of health determinants at 6 months (wave 1) and 2 years (wave 2) after arrival. RESULTS After controlling for covariates (age, sex, education, region of birth, immigrant class, job satisfaction, access to health care), analysis of the wave 1 survey showed that poor proficiency in English or French is significantly related to the self-reported poor health (OR=2.0, p<0.01). And this relationship was consistent in the wave 2 survey (OR=1.9, p<0.01). We also found that this statistically significant association between poor language proficiency and self-reported health holds only for women (wave 1 survey OR=2.6, p <0.01, wave 2 survey OR=2.2, p<0.01), not for men. CONCLUSION The association between poor language proficiency and poor self-reported health, and particularly its significantly greater impact on women, has implications for language training, health care and social services, and health information.
Role of the A2B receptor–adenosine deaminase complex in colonic dysmotility associated with bowel inflammation in rats

Adenosine A2B receptors regulate several physiological enteric functions. However, their role in the pathophysiology of intestinal dysmotility associated with inflammation has not been elucidated. Hence, we investigated the expression of A2B receptors in rat colon and their role in the control of cholinergic motility in the presence of bowel inflammation.
[Lupus nephritis: 211 cases].

PURPOSE Renal involvement is one of the most severe and frequent manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus. Prognosis factors are variable in the different studies. We analyze in 211 patients clinical, biological and histologic characteristics of lupus nephritis and the different prognosis factors. METHODS It's a retrospective study in 211 with lupus nephritis followed-up between 1975 and 2003. RESULTS There were 195 women and 16 men aged meanly of 28,8 years. At first presentation, we noted hypertension in 32,3% of cases, nephrotic syndrome in 47,7% of cases and renal failure in 51,6% of cases. histologic examination of kidney revealed class III in 59 cases, class IV in 97 cases and class V in 33 cases. Two hundred and five patients were treated by corticosteriods associated with immunosupressive agents in 95 cases. After a mean follow-up of 103 months (2-289 months), we obtained remission in 55,3% deterioration of renal function in 34,8% with end stage renal failure in 14,7% and relapses occurred in 51% of cases. Thirty-three patients died. Age <24 years, hypertension, nephrotic syndrome and initial renal failure were statistically associated with deterioration of renal function. CONCLUSION Lupus nephritis is severe in our patients with predominance of proliferative forms. Age <24 years, hypertension, nephrotic syndrome and initial renal failure were statistically associated with deterioration of renal function.
Identification of a Plasmid Encoding SHV-12, TEM-1, and a Variant of IMP-2 Metallo-β-Lactamase, IMP-8, from a Clinical Isolate of Klebsiella pneumoniae

ABSTRACT A multidrug-resistant plasmid encoding TEM-1, SHV-12, and a variant of IMP-2 metallo-β-lactamase, designated IMP-8, was identified from a clinical isolate of Klebsiella pneumoniae. There are four nucleotide differences between blaIMP-2 andblaIMP-8, resulting in two amino acid differences. blaIMP-8 was also found to be carried by an integron-borne gene cassette similar to theblaIMP-2 cassette.
The development and use of a standardized assessment of abnormal personality

Synopsis A standardized assessment of personality (SAP) based on interview with an informant has been developed to classify a patient's premorbid personality in clinical terms for use for research purposes in or out of a hospital setting. Three preliminary investigations of its use are reported. These indicate that an informant's account of personality can be rated reliably by psychiatrists and is consistent over time. The addition of two extra descriptive types to the schema of ICD Section 301, the anxious and the self-conscious personalities, is found to contribute usefully to a taxonomy of personality in two series of patients investigated with the SAP. Further investigations are indicated to determine the accuracy of an informant's account before epidemiological studies with this instrument can be considered.
Community Structure, Cellular rRNA Content, and Activity of Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria in Marine Arctic Sediments

ABSTRACT The community structure of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) of a marine Arctic sediment (Smeerenburgfjorden, Svalbard) was characterized by both fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and rRNA slot blot hybridization by using group- and genus-specific 16S rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes. The SRB community was dominated by members of the Desulfosarcina-Desulfococcus group. This group accounted for up to 73% of the SRB detected and up to 70% of the SRB rRNA detected. The predominance was shown to be a common feature for different stations along the coast of Svalbard. In a top-to-bottom approach we aimed to further resolve the composition of this large group of SRB by using probes for cultivated genera. While this approach failed, directed cloning of probe-targeted genes encoding 16S rRNA was successful and resulted in sequences which were all affiliated with the Desulfosarcina-Desulfococcus group. A group of clone sequences (group SVAL1) most closely related toDesulfosarcina variabilis (91.2% sequence similarity) was dominant and was shown to be most abundant in situ, accounting for up to 54.8% of the total SRB detected. A comparison of the two methods used for quantification showed that FISH and rRNA slot blot hybridization gave comparable results. Furthermore, a combination of the two methods allowed us to calculate specific cellular rRNA contents with respect to localization in the sediment profile. The rRNA contents of Desulfosarcina-Desulfococcus cells were highest in the first 5 mm of the sediment (0.9 and 1.4 fg, respectively) and decreased steeply with depth, indicating that maximal metabolic activity occurred close to the surface. Based on SRB cell numbers, cellular sulfate reduction rates were calculated. The rates were highest in the surface layer (0.14 fmol cell−1day−1), decreased by a factor of 3 within the first 2 cm, and were relatively constant in deeper layers.