Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Cyclooxygenase-1 and -2 in Sevoflurane-Induced Postconditioning Against Myocardial Infarction

Cyclooxygenase (COX)-2 mediates ischemic pre- and postconditioning as well as anesthetic-induced preconditioning. However, the role of COX-1 and -2 in anesthetic-induced postconditioning has not been investigated. We evaluated the role of COX-1 and -2 in sevoflurane-induced postconditioning in vivo. Pentobarbital-anaesthetized male C57BL/6 mice were subjected to 45 minutes of coronary artery occlusion and 3 hours of reperfusion. Animals received either no intervention, the vehicle dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO, 10 µL/g intraperitoneally), acetylsalicylic acid (ASA, 5 µg/g intraperitoneally), the selective COX-1 inhibitor SC-560 (10 µg/g intraperitoneally), or the selective COX-2 inhibitor NS-398 (5 µg/g intraperitoneally). 1.0 MAC (minimum alveolar concentration) sevoflurane was administered for 18 minutes during early reperfusion either alone or in combination with ASA, SC-560, and NS-398. Infarct size was determined with triphenyltetrazolium chloride. Statistical analysis was performed using 1-way and 2-way analyses of variance with post hoc Duncan testing. The infarct size in the control group was 44% ± 9%. DMSO (42% ± 7%), ASA (36% ± 6%), and NS-398 (44% ± 18%) had no effect on infarct size. Sevoflurane (17% ± 4%; P < .05) and SC-560 (26% ± 10%; P < .05) significantly reduced the infarct size compared with control condition. Sevoflurane-induced postconditioning was not abolished by ASA (16% ± 5%) and SC-560 (22% ± 4%). NS-398 abolished sevoflurane-induced postconditioning (33% ± 14%). It was concluded that sevoflurane induces postconditioning in mice. Inhibition of COX-1 elicits a myocardial infarct size reduction and does not abolish sevoflurane-induced postconditioning. Blockade of COX-2 abolishes sevoflurane-induced postconditioning. These results indicate that sevoflurane-induced postconditioning is mediated by COX-2.
A potter's workshop from Middle Bronze Age Cyprus: new light on production context, scale and variability

When fire swept through a workshop at Ambelikou Aletri on Cyprus in the nineteenth or twentieth century BC it brought a sudden halt to pottery production, leaving the latest batch of recently fired vessels. The remains of the kiln and its immediate surroundings provide a rare opportunity to gain direct insight into the technology and organisation of a Middle Bronze Age pottery workshop in the eastern Mediterranean. Analysis of the batch of cutaway-mouthed jugs adjacent to the kiln reveals a level of standardisation focused more on vessel shape than capacity, and shows that at a detailed level, no two jugs were alike. This pottery production site provides vital background for the study of contemporary pottery assemblages on Cyprus and elsewhere in the broader region.
BRCA1/2‐negative hereditary triple‐negative breast cancers exhibit BRCAness

BRCA1/2‐associated breast cancers are sensitive to poly(ADPribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors and platinum compounds mainly due to their deficiency in DNA repair via homologous recombination (HR). However, approximately only 15% of triple‐negative breast cancers (TNBCs) are BRCA1/2‐associated. TNBCs that exhibit BRCAness (a phenotype reflecting impaired HR in BRCA1/2‐negative tumors) are also regarded sensitive to PARP inhibitors and platinum compounds. Thus, we hypothesized that hereditary BRCA1/2‐negative TNBCs may exhibit BRCAness. To find a subset of hereditary BRCA1/2‐negative TNBCs among 360 TNBCs, we first identified a group of 41 hereditary TNBCs by analyzing the family histories of the patients. Next, we tested this group for the presence of germline BRCA1/2 mutations, and finally, we compared the expression levels of 120 genes involved in HR and five other major mechanisms of DNA damage repair between BRCA1/2‐associated and BRCA1/2‐negative subgroups of hereditary TNBCs using real‐time PCR arrays. Approximately 73% of the hereditary TNBCs were BRCA1/2‐associated and 27% were BRCA1/2‐negative. The expression levels of the analyzed genes showed no significant differences between these two subgroups indicating the BRCAness of the BRCA1/2‐negative hereditary TNBCs and thereby distinguishing a novel subset of TNBCs as a potential target for PARP inhibitors or platinum‐based therapy. The results show the significance of family history in selecting patients with TNBC for therapies directed at incompetent DNA repair (e.g., PARP inhibitors and/or platinum‐based therapies) and indicate that a relatively simple strategy for broadening the target group for these modes of treatment is to identify patients with hereditary TNBCs.
Truncated tyrosine kinase B brain‐derived neurotrophic factor receptor directs cortical neural stem cells to a glial cell fate by a novel signaling mechanism

During development of the mammalian cerebral cortex neural stem cells (NSC) first generate neurons and subsequently produce glial cells. The mechanism(s) responsible for this developmental shift from neurogenesis to gliogenesis is unknown. Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is believed to play important roles in the development of the mammalian cerebral cortex; it enhances neurogenesis and promotes the differentiation and survival of newly generated neurons. Here, we provide evidence that a truncated form of the BDNF receptor tyrosine kinase B (trkB‐t) plays a pivotal role in directing embryonic mouse cortical NSC to a glial cell fate. Expression of trkB‐t promotes differentiation of NSC toward astrocytes while inhibiting neurogenesis both in cell culture and in vivo. The mechanism by which trkB‐t induces astrocyte genesis is not simply the result of inhibition of full‐length receptor with intrinsic tyrosine kinase activity signaling. Instead, binding of BDNF to trkB‐t activates a signaling pathway (involving a G‐protein and protein kinase C) that induced NSC to become glial progenitors and astrocytes. Thus, the increased expression of trkB‐t in the embryonic cerebral cortex that occurs coincident with astrocyte production plays a pivotal role in the developmental transition from neurogenesis to gliogenesis. Our findings suggest a mechanism by which a single factor (BDNF) regulates the production of the two major cell types in the mammalian cerebral cortex.
A prospective study of predictive factors of ovarian response in 'standard' IVF/ICSI patients treated with recombinant FSH. A suggestion for a recombinant FSH dosage normogram.

BACKGROUND The aim was to identify independent predictors of ovarian response to recombinant (r)FSH through a multiple regression analysis. METHODS Prospective study including 145 'standard' patients treated with 150 IU/day of rFSH during their first IVF/ICSI cycle. Down-regulation was achieved with long agonist protocol. The following were examined as possible predictive factors: age, body mass index, cycle length, smoking status and on day 2-5: total ovarian volume, total number of antral follicles (<10 mm), total Doppler score of the ovarian stromal blood flow, serum FSH, LH, estradiol, inhibin B, and testosterone. RESULTS Total number of antral follicles, total Doppler score, serum FSH, LH, estradiol, inhibin B, smoking status and cycle length were independent predictors of the number of aspirated follicles. The number of oocytes was predicted by the total number of antral follicles, total Doppler score, serum testosterone and smoking status. In bivariate linear regression analyses ovarian volume was a highly significant predictor of both the number of follicles (P < 0.001) and the number of oocytes (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Among 12 investigated possible predictive factors in 'standard' patients, the total number of antral follicles and ovarian stromal blood flow assessed by total Power Doppler score are the two most significant predictors of ovarian response. Suggestion for an rFSH dosage normogram is presented.
Soft starter of an induction motor using neural network based feedback estimator

This paper presents the neural network based soft starter which uses two neural networks; one with radial basis function which estimates the electromagnetic torque, and rotor fluxes and angles while the other uses feed forward back propagation algorithms to decide firing angle of thyristors in AC voltage controller. The neural networks were trained with simulation data. ANN models have the ability to learn from input and output samples in defined boundaries off-line as well as on-line. Radial basis function was preferred because of low training time requirement for large number of samples. DSP estimator was also implemented to check the validity of the designed ANN models.
Work-related hand injuries: Case analyses in a Brazilian rehabilitation service

Purpose. Professionals who work with rehabilitation of the hand usually assess performance components as their main outcome measures. Intervention is aimed at normalization of deficits of these components, with the expectation that the integrity of the structures and functions of the body will revert to improvements in the client's functional performance. The objectives of this study were to describe changes in patients who received rehabilitation in a Brazilian public hospital after having suffered hand injuries due to workplace accidents, and to examine the relations between performance components and levels of functioning. Methods. Observational cross-sectional study was used. A convenience sample was selected, including 42 patients assessed at service admission and at discharge. Assessed characteristics included grip strength, wrist and finger range of movement (ROM), sensitivity, and self-perceptions of functional performance (COPM). Statistical procedures included correlations between performance components and COPM scores and differences on selected variables at admission and discharge. Results. Significant improvements in all assessed functional components. COPM values increased more than 100% after intervention (effect size d = 1.996 for performance and d = 1.553 for satisfaction) demonstrating improvements in both domains. Low correlations between grip strength and COPM scores were found only at admission (r = 0.314; p = 0.045). When the relationship between gains in strength and COPM scores at discharge were examined, significant correlations were found with the performance (r = 0.324; p = 0.039) and satisfaction (r = 0.0326; p = 0.038) subscales. Conclusions. Results of this study provide evidence for functional gains in clients treated in a rehabilitation service and supply information about the relation between specific components and functional performance.
Identifying social factors amongst older individuals in linked electronic health records: An assessment in a population based study

Identification and quantification of health inequities amongst specific social groups is a pre-requisite for designing targeted healthcare interventions. This study investigated the recording of social factors in linked electronic health records (EHR) of individuals aged ≥65 years, to assess the potential of these data to identify the social determinants of disease burden and uptake of healthcare interventions. Methodology was developed for ascertaining social factors recorded on or before a pre-specified index date (01/01/2013) using primary care data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) linked to hospitalisation and deprivation data in a cross-sectional study. Social factors included: religion, ethnicity, immigration status, small area-level deprivation, place of residence (including communal establishments such as care homes), marital status and living arrangements (e.g. living alone, cohabitation). Each social factor was examined for: completeness of recording including improvements in completeness by using other linked EHR, timeliness of recording for factors that might change over time and their representativeness (compared with English 2011 Census data when available). Data for 591,037 individuals from 389 practices from England were analysed. The completeness of recording varied from 1.6% for immigration status to ~80% for ethnicity. Linkages provided the deprivation data (available for 82% individuals) and improved completeness of ethnicity recording from 55% to 79% (when hospitalisation data were added). Data for ethnicity, deprivation, living arrangements and care home residence were comparable to the Census data. For time-varying variables such as residence and living alone, ~60% and ~35% respectively of those with available data, had this information recorded within the last 5 years of the index date. This work provides methods to identify social factors in EHR relevant to older individuals and shows that factors such as ethnicity, deprivation, not living alone, cohabitation and care home residence can be ascertained using these data. Applying these methodologies to routinely collected data could improve surveillance programmes and allow assessment of health equity in specific healthcare studies.
Correlation Model of Worm Propagation on Scale-Free Networks

The problem of network worms is worsening despite increasing efforts and expenditure on cyber-security. Worm propagation is a random process that creates a complex system of interacting agents (worm copies) over the propagation medium – a scale-free graph, representing real-world networks. Understanding the propagation of network worms on scale-free graphs is the first step towards devising effective techniques for worm quarantining. After presenting the drawbacks of existing mean-field models, we develop a pair-approximation (correlation) model of worm propagation that employs the salient network characteristics – order, size, degree distribution, and transitivity. Inclusion of the transitivity shows significant improvement over existing pair-approximation models. The validity of the model is confirmed by comparing the numeric solution of the model to results from our individual-based simulation. Our model demonstrates that the network structure has considerable impact on the propagation dynamics when the worm uses local propagation strategies.
Usability of LoRaWAN Technology in a Central Business District

LoRaWAN is a relatively recent Low-Power Wide Area Network specification intended to support wireless battery operated devices for low data rate applications such as infrastructure monitoring, transportation, asset tracking, security, and health care. While it is clear that heavily built- up areas such as the Central Business District (CBD) of typical cities offer the greatest density of potential applications, the operation of its physical RF protocol, LoRa, has not been comprehensively studied in these environments. This paper presents a preliminary set of measurements evaluating the performance of LoRa in a high-density urban area (Melbourne''s CBD). Our results shows that loss-free communication is assured only within a radius of approximately 200 meters from the base station and total loss of transmission occurs at around 600 meters.
Randomised controlled trials in cystic fibrosis: what, when and how?

The major morbidity and mortality from cystic fibrosis (CF) comes from progressive lung disease with bronchiectasis leading to respiratory failure. There is no doubt that survival of CF patients has increased progressively through the latter part of the 20th and the early part of the 21st centuries, and that the quality of life for patients with CF has increased substantially. However, CF still remains a serious life-shortening disease. Indeed, the most recent data from national CF registries show that the slope of survival curves 1 and the rate of loss of lung function have not changed at all, at least beyond childhood. Potential reasons for this are that CF lung disease begins in early life and that while current treatments may increase the health of children, they do little, if anything, to prevent the onset or progression of destructive lung disease, nor the inevitable onset of chronic respiratory failure. Data from a number of sources have demonstrated that CF lung disease begins very early in life 2–6. Arguably, the best data come from the Australian Respiratory Early Surveillance Team for Cystic Fibrosis (AREST CF), where essentially all children diagnosed with CF in a geographically defined region of Victoria and in Western Australia following detection by newborn screening are assessed soon after diagnosis and annually until 6–7 yrs of age 7. These data show that a substantial proportion of infants have evidence of pulmonary inflammation and infection at 3 months of age, even in the absence of clinically apparent lung disease 8. Structural lung disease, including bronchiectasis, is prevalent in infants and young children with CF 8–10; the major risk factors being neutrophilic inflammation, the presence of free neutrophil elastase activity in the lungs and pulmonary infection, especially with Pseudomonas aeruginosa 8, …
Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]

Egalitarian society is "explained" chiefly in terms of ecological or social factors that are self-organizing. However, egalitarian behavior is found in a wide variety of social and ecological settings, and the indications are that such societies are deliberately shaped by their members. This paper looks to egalitarian behavior as an instance of domination of leaders by their own followers, who are guided by an ethos that disapproves of hierarchical behavior in general and of bossiness in leaders in particular. A substantial cross-cultural survey reveals the specific mechanisms by which the political rank and file creates a reverse dominance hierarchy, an anomalous social arrangement which has important implications for cross-phylogenetic comparisons and for the theory of state formation.
Dermatology in the military: an East Timor study

Dermatology plays an important role in primary health care in the defence force. In the recent East Timor deployment, 25% of medical consultations were dermatological related. The spectrum of conditions seen in a military environment will vary between different units and their operational settings. This study is based on a front-line ground combat unit that served for 3 months in East Timor. Although not a significant cause of mortality, dermatological conditions contribute to a large percentage of morbidity which may decrease the combat effectiveness of a unit. “Throughout the history of warfare, the victor in battle has most often been the General with the healthiest troops. Disease has usually decided the battle before it ever began, leaving only the endgame to tactics. ” Parmet. 1
Functional analysis of GS28, an intra‐Golgi SNARE, in Caenorhabditis elegans

Intra‐Golgi retrograde transport is assumed to maintain Golgi function by recycling Golgi‐resident proteins to younger cisternae in the progression of entire Golgi stack from cis to trans. GS28 (Golgi SNARE of 28 kDa, also known as GOS28) is a Golgi‐localized SNARE protein and has been implicated in intra‐Golgi retrograde transport. However, the in vivo functions of GS28, and consequently, the roles of the intra‐Golgi retrograde transport in animal development are largely unknown. In this study, we generated deletion mutants of Caenorhabditis elegans GS28 and performed a synthetic lethal RNAi screen using GS28 mutants. We found that another Golgi‐localized SNARE, Ykt6, functions cooperatively with GS28 in embryonic development. During post‐embryonic development, GS28 mutants exhibited reduced seam cell numbers and a missing ray phenotype under Ykt6 knockdown conditions, suggesting that cell proliferation and/or differentiation of stem cell‐like seam cells are impaired in GS28‐ and Ykt6‐depleted worms. We also demonstrated that GS28 and Ykt6 act redundantly for the proper expression of Golgi‐resident proteins in adult intestinal cells. This study reveals the in vivo importance of the Golgi‐localized SNAREs GS28 and Ykt6.
Association between indicators of livestock farming intensity and hospitalization rate for acute gastroenteritis

SUMMARY To evaluate associations between indicators of livestock farming intensity (manure surplus and livestock density) and acute gastroenteritis hospitalization (AGH) rate, we conducted an ecological study on 306 selected agricultural municipalities of Quebec. We estimated the AGH rate for the period 2000–2004 from the Quebec hospital database. Multivariate Poisson regression was used to estimate the strength of association between the farming indicators and AGH with adjustment for confounders. The modifying effect of age and water source was also evaluated. Association between manure and AGH was observed in children, especially those aged 0–4 years for selected zoonotic infections [adjusted hospitalization rate ratio (aHRR) 1·93, 95% CI 1·21–3·09]. The risk ratio was higher for subjects using ground-water source. An increasing HRR trend with each additional level of poultry density was observed in children aged 0–4 years, especially for Salmonella infections. We conclude that livestock farming intensity may be linked to bacterial acute gastroenteritis in children.
Perceptual and response components in repetition priming of spoken words and pseudowords

Two experiments explored repetition priming effects for spoken words and pseudowords in order to investigate abstractionist and episodic accounts of spoken word recognition and repetition priming. In Experiment 1, lexical decisions were made on spoken words and pseudowords with half of the items presented twice (∼12 intervening items). Half of all repetitions were spoken in a “different voice” from the first presentations. Experiment 2 used the same procedure but with stimuli embedded in noise to slow responses. Results showed greater priming for words than for pseudowords and no effect of voice change in both normal and effortful processing conditions. Additional analyses showed that for slower participants, priming is more equivalent for words and pseudowords, suggesting episodic stimulus–response associations that suppress familiarity-based mechanisms that ordinarily enhance word priming. By relating behavioural priming to the time-course of pseudoword identification we showed that under normal listening conditions (Experiment 1) priming reflects facilitation of both perceptual and decision components, whereas in effortful listening conditions (Experiment 2) priming effects primarily reflect enhanced decision/response generation processes. Both stimulus–response associations and enhanced processing of sensory input seem to be voice independent, providing novel evidence concerning the degree of perceptual abstraction in the recognition of spoken words and pseudowords.