Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Medically assisted hydration for palliative care patients.

BACKGROUND Many palliative care patients have reduced oral intake during their illness. The management of this can include the provision of medically assisted hydration with the aim of prolonging the length of life of a patient, improving their quality of life, or both. OBJECTIVES To determine the effect of medically assisted hydration in palliative care patients on their quality and length of life. SEARCH STRATEGY Studies were identified from searching CENTRAL, MEDLINE (1966 to 2008), EMBASE (1980 to 2008), CINAHL, CANCERLIT, Caresearch, Dissertation abstracts, SCIENCE CITATION INDEX and the reference lists of all eligible studies, key textbooks, and previous systematic reviews. The date of the latest search was February 2008. SELECTION CRITERIA All relevant randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or prospective controlled studies of medically assisted hydration in palliative care patients. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Five relevant studies were identified. These included two RCTs (93 participants), and three prospective controlled trials (360 participants). These were assessed independently by two review authors for quality and validity. The small number of studies and the heterogeneity of the data meant that a quantitative analysis was not possible, so a description of the main findings was included only. MAIN RESULTS One study found that sedation and myoclonus (involuntary contractions of muscles) were improved more in the intervention group (28 - hydration, 23 - placebo). Another study found that dehydration was significantly higher in the non-hydration group, but that some fluid retention symptoms (pleural effusion, peripheral oedema and ascites) were significantly higher in the hydration group (59 - hydration group, 167 - non -hydration group). The other three studies did not show significant differences in outcomes between the two groups. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS There are insufficient good quality studies to make any recommendations for practice with regard to the use of medically assisted hydration in palliative care patients.
Misperception of political connection and speculation : Evidence from Korean presidential elections July 20 , 2018

This paper examines that misperception on political connection could be a source of heterogeneous belief and lead to speculative investor behavior. In Korea, stock price of firms who are believed to have a certain type of connection with presidential candidates (PCFs) experience a strong boom and bust pattern during the six months pre-election period. However, I find that the perceived connections cannot add values to outside shareholders or to the firms. I provide evidences that consistent with the joint effect of heterogeneous beliefs and short-sale constraints. Moreover, I find that speculations on PCFs are more pronounced by individual investors and this lead to substantial trading losses.
Prevalence of Hepatitis B surface antigen in children with sickle cell anemia

Background: Hepatitis B virus is known to be endemic in Africa. The seroepidemiological studies of HBV have shown that infection commonly occurs in childhood in Africa resulting in an increased tendency to chronicity. This cross-sectional study was undertaken to determine the seroprevalence of hepatitis B surface antigen among pediatric patients with homozygous hemoglobin S. Materials and Methods: Three hundred sickle cell anemia children aged 6 months-15 years (both in steady state and in crises) attending the SCA clinic and on admission in emergency pediatrics unit and pediatrics medical ward, Usmanu Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital, Sokoto, Nigeria, were screened for hepatitis B infection using HBsAg as marker of infection. The sensitive enzyme linked immunosorbent assay method was used for detection of the marker. Three hundred children with minor illness attending pediatrics outpatient department and on admission in EPU/PMW for various treatment in the same hospital served as gender- and age-marched controls cohorts. Results: The sero-prevalence of HBsAg seropositivity for hepatitis B virus infection among SCA children was 17.3% (52/300) compared to 10.7% (32/300) of the control ( P = 0.0875). The peak prevalence age group for HBV infection among SCA children was in the age group 1.1-5.0 years (6%) compared to 10.1-15.0 years (4.7%) in the control. Risk factors for HBV infection such as blood transfusion, traditional scarification/circumcision/uvulectomy, and tattooing did not significantly affect the prevalence of HBV infection in both SCA children and controls. Conclusion: Hepatitis B infection is common in Sokoto. The need for strict adherence to HBV immunization and further community-based studies on the risk factors are recommended.
Epidemiology of Neurovasculit is

Vasculitis is defined as inflammation of blood vessel walls for at least some time during the course of the disease and affects arteries and veins of varying calibers. Two Chapel Hill Consensus Conferences (CHCC), one in 1994 and the other in 2012, provided consensus on nosology and definitions for the commonest forms of vasculitis. The revised CHCC nomenclature serves as a guide for the categorization of diverse forms of vasculitis based on the vessels involved and provides a scheme for the neurologic aspects thereof (Box 1). Large vessel vasculitis (LVV), including giant cell arteritis (GCA) and Takayasu arteritis (TAK), affects the aorta, its major branches, and analogous veins. Medium vessel vasculitis (MVV), inclusive of polyarteritis nodosa (PAN) and Kawasaki disease (KD), involves main visceral arteries and veins and initial branches. The category of small vessel vasculitis (SVV) recognizes involvement of intraparenchymal arteries, arterioles, capillaries, veins, and venules, with a disease mechanism related to antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA) and immune
Determinants of meat consumption pattern among university students in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

There is a dearth of information on factors influencing the feeding habits and daily consumption of meat among university students in the Eastern Cape Province (ECP) of South Africa. As a result, this study was conducted by administering questionnaires to a total of 150 respondents from the black dominated and the white dominated Universities in the ECP. The results revealed that students from black dominated University (35%) showed more inclinations towards self-catering. Most of the males (80%) between 18 and 38 years, consumed above the recommended daily meat intake. On the contrary, female students from the white dominated university indicated higher preference for fast food due to availability of more disposable income and personal ethics. Probit regression model (χ 2 :(9) 64.07(0.0000). Log likelihood: -52.860879 Pseudo R 2 :37.73) showed that age (0.0506), monthly allowances (0.0002), amount spent on food (-0.0004), campus location (0.6587) and consumption of close substitutes such as fish (-3.3067) and vegetables (-86.4090) were significant determinants of meat consumption among university students.
Dying to Know

Public disclosure of the comparative performance of health care providers is seen as one mechanism for improving quality of care and controlling health care costs. This report the result of a collaboration between the Nuffield Trust in London and RAND, assesses the U.S. experience with publicly releasing health care performance data and offers guidelines for establishing public disclosure policy in the United Kingdom. Because the United States leads the world in reporting clinical information by hospital and by physician name, this report will be of interest to any country considering public release of performance data. Principal findings: Despite a rapidly expanding report card industry, U.S. physicians are skeptical about report cards, and consumers and purchasers rarely use them. Hospitals may respond to performance data with internal changes, especially in a competitive environment. Publishing comparative mortality data seems to improve outcomes, but the mechanism by which this happens is unclear. Key recommendations: Public disclosure should be viewed as an evolutionary process, becoming more sophisticated and comprehensive over time. Disclosure should be a tool to support all quality initiatives in the U.K. National Health Service. Provider organizations should be a key audience for performance information. Health professionals should be fully involved in the public disclosure process. Both process and outcome measures of quality should be published. Public disclosure should be accompanied by possible explanations for the variations reported.
A prototype theory of consumer expense misprediction

The present research theorizes that consumer expense predictions are shaped by prototype attributes that come to mind with relative ease when predictions are being constructed. These attributes represent average spending, where “average” is akin to the mode of a consumer’s expense distribution. This leads to an expense prediction bias in which consumers under-predict their expenses because the distribution of consumer expenses is positively skewed with mode < mean. Accordingly, it is proposed that prompting consumers to consider reasons why their expenses might be different than usual will increase prediction accuracy by making atypical expenses easier to retrieve. Five studies, including a longitudinal field study with members of a financial cooperative, provide support for this account of the bias.
Asymmetric Oil Price Shocks and Economic Activity in Developing Oil-importing Economies : The Case of Jordan

The aim of this paper is to examine the asymmetric effect of oil price shocks on economic activity in Jordan, proxied by industrial production growth. Accommodating for non-linearity and employing different oil price shock measures, the findings suggest that positive oil shocks have a negative and significant effect on growth, while oil price declines have no impact on growth. This suggests that drops in oil prices are not necessarily an incentive for industrial growth in oil-importing countries. Based on symmetry specifications, oil price shocks and growth are found to be negatively correlated.
Factors affecting Disrespect and Abuse during facility-based care in rural and urban setting in Kano, northwest Nigeria; A mixed-method study

Objectives: This study was undertaken to explore various factors affecting disrespect and abuse (D&A) of women during childbirths in health facilities in selected locations in Kano, a north-west Nigerian State. Method: Ethical approval and informed consent were obtained. The study adopted quantitative and qualitative data collection methods. A sample size of 292 women who delivered in the past 1year preceding the study. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (chi-square). Qualitative data was analyzed along themes using Atlas. ti. P value is ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The age group 25-29years had the highest proportion of D&A (61.84%). Those who were single had more proportion of D&A (55.6%) compared to those who were married (45.7%). The women that leaved in urban setting (75.3%) had more proportion of D&A compared to those who lived in a rural setting (18.3%). The proportion of D&A was highest among parity group 7-8 (100%). D&A greater if the respondent spends 2days (95.7%) and above in the hospital compared to when they spent <2 (45.8%). 94.2% of those who will not recommend the facility for delivery had D&A compared to 22.4% of those who will recommend the facility. Health system inadequacies including lack of supervision, poor remuneration, inadequate staffing and supplies were common barriers mentioned. Conclusion: Socio-demographic, obstetrics, level of health facility, health system inadequacy and social class affect occurrence of D&A. improved socio-demographic status and health systems can reduce the occurrence of D&A.
Oral health status of sensory impaired children in Delhi and Gurgaon

Background: Sensory impairments can compromise an individual’s efficiency to maintenance of oral health care. Aims: To evaluate the prevalence of dental caries, gingivitis, malocclusion and traumatic injury to upper anterior teeth in sensory impaired children. Materials and Methods: A total of 614 children with varying sensory impairments (blindness, deafness/ muteness) within the age group of 5-16 years attending special schools in Delhi and Gurgaon were included. Results: The prevalence of dental caries was more in the deaf/mute children at 72.43% while in the blind it was 59.68%, gingivitis was more in the blind at 71.53%, than the deaf/mute at 49.65%. The prevalence of malocclusion was 58% in the deaf/mute, while in the blind it was 30.69% and for trauma it was almost doubles in the blind (44.28%) when compared with the deaf (24.48%). Conclusion: The prevalence of dental diseases especially dental caries and gingivitis is as high as that seen in the normal children (60-70%) and that there is a need for administration of proper and professional dental treatment in these children.
Understanding the Attention Demand of Touch and Tangible Interaction on a Composite Task

Bimanual input is frequently used on touch and tangible interaction on tabletop surfaces. Considering a composite task, such as moving a set of objects, attention, decision making and fine motor control have to be phased with the coordination of the two hands. However, attention demand is an important factor to design easy to learn and recall interaction techniques. This, determining what interaction modality demands less attention and which one performs better in these conditions is important to improve design. In this work, we present the first empirical results on this matter. We report that users are consistent in their assessments of the attention demand for both touch and tangible modalities, even under different hands synchronicity, and different population sizes and densities. Our findings indicate that the one hand condition and small populations demand less attention comparing to respectively, two hands conditions and bigger populations. Also, we show that tangible modality reduces significantly the attention when using two hands synchronous movements or when moving the sparse populations, decreases the movement time over touch modality, without compromising the traveled distance. We use our findings to outline a set of guidelines to assist touch and tangible design.
Effects Of Health Programs on Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa

One of a series prepared by the National Research Council on the demography of Africa this report focuses on the effectiveness of health and child survival programs. Specific interventions and their effects on infant and child mortality are examined. Specific chapters are devoted to the epidemiology prevention and treatment program coverage and other disease-specific issues for the following diseases: measles whooping cough tuberculosis leprosy tetanus diarrhea malaria and acute respiratory infections (ARI). Chapters are also devoted to a discussion of nutrition and integrated and general health programs. Health programs in Africa expanded and improved during 1970-90 and infant and child mortality declined. Most research concerned with the health effects of interventions was small scale and specifically directed to the effects of a single intervention. Most national health programs in Africa have never been evaluated in terms of their impact on mortality. Measles vaccination programs covered about 50% of all children in Africa. Substantial declines in mortality were found in several studies on the west coast of Africa and in Zaire. Improved case management is recommended particularly in serious cases until coverage is higher. Diarrhea treatment has involved oral rehydration therapy. Coverage would need to be about 36% of episodes treated in order to effect mortality. Targeting of treatment and the quality of treatment would also need to be improved. Chloroquine administration has been the standard treatment for malarial fevers; proper case control studies were difficult to produce because of widespread presumptive use of chloroquine and the presence of resistant strains. Insecticide-impregnated bed nets were found to reduce mortality. Use of antibiotics in case management of ARI was found in community-based trials to be effective in reducing mortality. Recommendations are for directing programs toward age-specific mortality. Evaluations should be long-term and include measurement of coverage and promptness of services. Declines in infant and child mortality should remain the primary measures of the effectiveness of child health interventions in Africa.
Engagement Modeling in Dyadic Interaction

In the recent years, engagement modeling has gained increasing attention due the important role it plays in human-agent interaction. The agent should be able to detect, in real time, the engagement level of the user in order to react accordingly. In this context, our goal is to develop a computational model to predict engagement level of the user in real time. Relying on previous findings, we use facial expressions, head movements and gaze direction as predictive features. Moreover, engagement is not only measured from single cues, but from the combination of several cues that arise over a certain time window. Thus, for better engagement prediction, we consider the variation of multimodal behaviors over time. To this end, we rely on LSTM that can jointly model the temporality and the sequentiality of multimodal behaviors.
Bi-modality Fusion for Emotion Recognition in the Wild

The emotion recognition in the wild has been a hot research topic in the field of affective computing. Though some progresses have been achieved, the emotion recognition in the wild is still an unsolved problem due to the challenge of head movement, face deformation, illumination variation etc. To deal with these unconstrained challenges, we propose a bi-modality fusion method for video based emotion recognition in the wild. The proposed framework takes advantages of the visual information from facial expression sequences and the speech information from audio. The state-of-the-art CNN based object recognition models are employed to facilitate the facial expression recognition performance. A bi-direction long short term Memory (Bi-LSTM) is employed to capture dynamic information of the learned features. Additionally, to take full advantages of the facial expression information, the VGG16 network is trained on AffectNet dataset to learn a specialized facial expression recognition model. On the other hand, the audio based features, like low level descriptor (LLD) and deep features obtained by spectrogram image, are also developed to improve the emotion recognition performance. The best experimental result shows that the overall accuracy of our algorithm on the Test dataset of the EmotiW challenge is 62.78, which outperforms the best result of EmotiW2018 and ranks 2nd at the EmotiW2019 challenge.
Pharmacological and Non-Pharmacological Treatment in Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a spectrum of liver disease, from steatosis to liver cirrhosis in individual who does not consume alcohol in significant amount. The prevalence of NAFLD in Indonesia was estimated around 30%, this condition related to the increased incidence of metabolic disorders. Current understanding of NAFLD pathogenesis is the third-hit theory, in which insulin resistance resulting in free fatty acid accumulation that triggers inflammation causing fibrosis and hepatocyte death, and these conditions are not followed by adequate hepatocyte proliferation. Treatment of NAFLD requires both non-pharmacologic and pharmacologic interventions. Life style intervention includes restricting calories, low saturated fat and low sugar diet, and also physical activity. Bariatric surgery remains controversial since in several study participants had experienced deterioration of disease. There are no definitive treatment for NAFLD currently. Treatment is aimed to improved insulin sensitivity, decreased oxidative stress and inflammation. Several agents use for treatment of NAFLD are insulin sensitizer (metformin and glitazones), statin, omega-3, vitamin E, ursodeoxycholic acid, orlistat, pentoxyphylline, and losartan. Keywords : NAFLD, treatment, pharmacologic, non-pharmacologic
VisualTouch: Enhancing Affective Touch Communication with Multi-modality Stimulation

As one of the most important non-verbal communication channel, touch plays an essential role in interpersonal affective communication. Although some researchers have started exploring the possibility of using wearable devices for conveying emotional information, most of the existing devices still lack the capability to support affective and dynamic touch in interaction. In this paper, we explore the effect of dynamic visual cues on the emotional perception of vibrotactile signals. For this purpose, we developed VisualTouch, a haptic sleeve consisting of a haptic layer and a visual layer. We hypothesized that visual cues would enhance the interpretation of tactile cues when both types of cues are congruent. We first carried out an experiment and selected 4 stimuli producing substantially different responses. Based on that, a second experiment was conducted with 12 participants rating the valence and arousal of 36 stimuli using SAM scales.
Smooth Turn-taking by a Robot Using an Online Continuous Model to Generate Turn-taking Cues

Turn-taking in human-robot interaction is a crucial part of spoken dialogue systems, but current models do not allow for human-like turn-taking speed seen in natural conversation. In this work we propose combining two independent prediction models. A continuous model predicts the upcoming end of the turn in order to generate gaze aversion and fillers as turn-taking cues. This prediction is done while the user is speaking, so turn-taking can be done with little silence between turns, or even overlap. Once a speech recognition result has been received at a later time, a second model uses the lexical information to decide if or when the turn should actually be taken. We constructed the continuous model using the speaker’s prosodic features as inputs and evaluated its online performance. We then conducted a subjective experiment in which we implemented our model in an android robot and asked participants to compare it to one without turn-taking cues, which produces a response when a speech recognition result is received. We found that using both gaze aversion and a filler was preferred when the continuous model correctly predicted the upcoming end of turn, while using only gaze aversion was better if the prediction was wrong.
Clinical Evidence Supporting Early Treatment Of Patients With Spinal Muscular Atrophy: Current Perspectives

Abstract Recent advances in the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have dramatically altered prognosis. Rather than a rapidly lethal disease, SMA type 1, the most severe form with the earliest onset of SMA, has become a disease in which long-term event-free survival with the acquisition of important motor milestones is likely. Prognosis for patients with SMA type 2 has shifted from slow and progressive deterioration to long-term stability. Nevertheless, there is a large heterogeneity in terms of clinical response to currently available treatments, ranging from absence of response to impressive improvement. The only factor identified that is predictive of treatment success is the age of the patient at the initiation of treatment, which is closely related to disease duration. The aim of this paper is to review available evidence that support early intervention using currently available treatment approaches.