Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Low back pain, lifestyle factors and physical activity: a population based-study.

OBJECTIVE AND DESIGN The prevalence of low back pain was assessed in relation to physical activity, for both work and leisure activities, in a randomly selected population in the northern part of Sweden. Additionally, the associations between age, sex, level of education, lifestyle factors, demographic characteristics, and low back pain were evaluated. SUBJECTS A total of 5798 subjects aged 25-79 years were selected randomly from a geographically well-defined area in northern Sweden. METHODS Additional questions concerning people's experience of low back pain were added to the questionnaire of the World Health Organization MONICA (MONItoring of trends and determinants in CArdiovascular disease) health survey with the aim of investigating prevalence rates and factors associated with low back pain. RESULTS Forty-one percent of the participants reported having low back pain (of these 55% were women and 45% men). The prevalence rate was highest in the age group 55-64 years. Chronic low back pain was the most frequent occurring problem. Of those with low back pain, 43% of the women and 37% of the men reported having continuous low back pain for more than 6 months. Individuals with low back pain often experienced a more physically heavy workload at work and lower physical activity during leisure time, and they were also more likely to have been smokers, have had higher body mass index, lived in smaller communities, and were less educated than people without low back pain. CONCLUSION Low back pain seems to be associated with physical activity at work and in leisure time, certain lifestyle factors and demographic characteristics.
On the Sequencing of the Human Genome

Philosophy is the product of wonder… . the romance of human thought. “ 1 Two papers in the current issue of Hypertension , “Evidence for a Gene Influencing Blood Pressure on Chromosome 17: Genome Scan Linkage Results for Longitudinal Blood Pressure Phenotypes in Subjects from the Framingham Heart Study” by Levy et al and “Possible Locus on Chromosome 18q Influencing Postural Systolic Blood Pressure Changes” by Pankow et al use genomic markers and epidemiological studies to identify candidate loci for involvement in human hypertension.2 3 This work is representative of the current state of genetic research into polygenic conditions. Although neither study conclusively identifies a gene that plays a role in hypertension, these studies, in combination with many similar efforts, presage an important new chapter in the investigation and treatment of human disease. Progress in this area will probably come rapidly in large part because of the methodological and technical advances that are now occurring, including those in genome sequencing. Indeed, the successful sequencing of a prototypical human genome was recently announced. Finishing touches, perhaps more laborious than some may think, are now being applied. What are the implications of this achievement? Is it more than simply the next logical step in a process of scientific discovery that began in earnest almost 50 years ago? Is it, as some have implied, as much hype as achievement given the complex nature of polygenic traits? 4 With increasing frequency over the last half millennium, science has produced theories and results that manifestly changed the way humankind thinks. The discovery of the heliocentric solar system, the development of Newtonian mechanics, the invention of the microscope, the demonstration that species evolve, and the creation of modern physics are examples that readily come to mind. The feat of determining the ordered nucleotides that comprise the …
Male stem Cell Niche and Spermatogenesis in the Drosophila testis — A Tale of Germline-Soma Communication

A fundamental question in biology is how communication and exchange of short-range signals shape the microenvironment for setting up functional tissues. In all adult tissues and organs harboring stem cells, tissue homeostasis and repair relies on the proper communication of stem cells and their differentiating daughter cells with the local tissue microenvironment that homes them [1, 2]. Stem cell research has made outstanding contributions on the factors that maintain stem cells or drive them to generate differentiated daughter cells. The use of stem cells in the development of cell-based medicine and in repairing malformed, damaged or aging tissues demands a better understanding of stem cells at a molecular level and of how they behave in their physiological context.
Cardiorespiratory Function during Exercise in Obese Children

ABSTRACT. Fifteen obese children, aged 4 to 16 years and ranging in body weight from 27.3 to 95 kg (median 67.5) and percentage overweight from 22 to 127% (median 40), underwent graded exercise testing on a treadmill and were compared with healthy peers of comparable age. Cardiorespiratory performance capacity was assessed by determination of the ventilatory threshold. This was defined as the highest oxygen uptake at which the pulmonary ventilation stops to increase linearly with increasing exercise intensity. The ventilatory threshold, expressed as ml O2/min/kg, was significantly (p<0.05) lower than in normal children and averaged 70.6±13.5% of the normal mean value, matched for age. The habitual level of physical activity, assessed by a questionnaire, was 27% lower (p<0.01) in the obese children compared to healthy controls. As the ventilatory threshold was strikingly lower and also exceeded sooner in the majority of the obese children, compared with normal controls, it may be assumed that obese children avoid moderate or strenuous exercise, because of the higher degree of effort needed. This may contribute to the maintenance of overweight.
Increased Hypothalamic Noradrenergic Activity in One‐Kidney, One‐Clip Renovascular Hypertensive Rats

Summary To further define central and peripheral sympathetic nerve activity in the one-kidney and two-kidney, one-clip models of renovascular hypertension, plasma catecholamines and regional brain norepinephrine of these models were compared with the activities of their brain biosynthetic enzymes: tyrosine hydroxylase (TYH) and dopamine-beta-hydroxylase (DBH). Findings in the groups of 20 one-kidney and 17 two-kidney female Wistar rats were compared with those in 10 sham-operated rats. Systolic blood pressure, measured indirectly, and the mean arterial pressure, measured directly from the femoral arteries, verified development of renovascular hypertension in both the one-and two-kidney animals. Plasma norepinephrine increased from 248 ± 46 to 401 ± 66 pg/ml in the one-kidney group only (p <0.001). Hypothalamic TYH and DBH activities of the one-kidney animals were 48 and 34% greater than those of the two-kidney animals and 28 and 39% greater than the sham-operated animals. The multiple t-test indicated significant differences between the mean hypothalamic TYH of the one- and two-kidney groups and between the hypothalamic DBH of the one-kidney animals and those of the two-kidney and sham groups (α = 0.05). Moreover, the mean norepinephrine content of the hypothalamus in the one-kidney animals was 66% greater than that of the two-kidney and sham groups (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that central noradrenergic pathways of the hypothalamus may be involved in the genesis of one-kidney renovascular hypertension.
Object classification and localization with spatially localized features

Object classification and localization are important components of image understanding. For a computer to interact with our world, it will need to identify the objects in our world. At a more basic level, these tasks are crucial to many practical applications: image organization, visual search, autonomous vehicles, and surveillance. This thesis presents alternatives to the currently popular approaches to object classification and localization, specifically focusing on methods that more tightly integrate location information with the visual features. We start by improving on Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor (NBNN), an alternative to the standard bag-of-words/spatial pyramid classification pipeline. This model matches localized spatial domain features between a test image and the entire training set in order to classify an image as belonging to one of several categories. We improve this method’s classification performance and algorithmic complexity. However, the nature of NBNN results in prohibitive memory requirements in large datasets. This leads to our second contribution: a bag-of-words model based on a clustering of the location-augmented features. This a simple and more flexible approach to modeling location information than the commonly used spatial pyramid. By using location-augmented features, location information is captured simply in the nearest-neighbor coding of the bag-of-words model. This results in a more efficient use of model dimensions than the spatial pyramid and higher classification performance than state-of-the-art alternatives. Last, we present the design of an object localization system using this highperformance classifier. Such design is made more difficult by the fact that our model does not satisfy the assumptions made by recent efficient localization al-
Structure- Activity Relationship Study and Function-Based Petidomimetic Design of Human Opiorphin with Improved Bioavailability Property and Unaltered Analgesic Activity

Human opiorphin inhibits enkephalin-inactivating ectopeptidases to produce analgesic and antidepressant-like effects in standard murine models via activation of μ and/or δ opioid pathways. It is an endogenous peptide regulator of enkephalin bioavailability. Opiorphin molecule, a QRFSR-peptide, is thus a promising prototype for the design of an improved class of analgesics. The major limitation on the clinical use of peptide drugs is their rapid degradation by circulating peptidases. Our goal was, therefore, to search for functional derivatives of opiorphin with improved metabolic stability. In order to identify the functional amino acid groups required for opiorphin inhibitory potency toward both AP-N and NEP human ectopeptidases, we used the Structure-Activity Relationship (SAR) method. From this data, a series of opiorphin derivatives was designed and selected. The best performing compound then underwent a complete metabolic profile using in vitro kinetic models. Finally, its safety profile relative to the native peptide as well as its efficacy in an in vivo rat model was evaluated. We demonstrated a tight structural selectivity in the functional interaction of opiorphin with both human NEP and AP-N targets by SAR studies. Nevertheless, we found that the addition of an N-terminal Zn-chelating group, a Cys-thiol group and the replacement of the first labile peptide bond by a polyethylene surrogate, a [CH2]6 linker,and, finally, the substitution of Ser4 by Ser-O-[CH2]8, results in a high performing C-[(CH2)6]-QRF[S-O-[CH2]8]-R peptidomimetic product. This designed opiorphin analog shows reinforced inhibitory potency toward human AP-N activity (more than 10-fold increase) and NEP activities (more than 40-fold increase) relative to the QRFSR native peptide. It also has increased metabolic stability in human plasma and yet retains full analgesic activity in the behavioral formalin-induced rat pain model. C-[(CH2)6]-QRF[S-O-[CH2]8]-R thus represents a very attractive and promising analgesic drug-candidate.
Environmental, maternal, and child factors which contribute to early childhood caries: a unifying conceptual model.

OBJECTIVES Although the general pathways connecting the external social environment and child risk factors of early childhood caries (ECC) have been previously identified, the maternal and other links to ECC are not well understood. The aim of this paper is to propose a unifying conceptual model that ties together the broad social environmental, maternal, and child factors that are commonly associated with ECC. METHODS The aetiological factors of ECC are first reviewed individually to demonstrate their connections with ECC risk followed by presentation of the unifying conceptual model. RESULTS In severe ECC cases, there is usually a background of social disadvantage associated with low socioeconomic status, ethnicity or immigrant status, and low maternal educational level. These factors are commonly associated with economic and familial stresses which may in turn result in maternal psychological distress. The distress may be compounded by difficult temperaments of the children and can lead to dysfunctional parenting behaviours that place a child at risk for ECC. CONCLUSIONS The proposed conceptual model provides a framework that connects the social, psychological, and behavioural mediating factors involved in ECC. It demonstrates that the causative pathways involved are best explored using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research.
Glycogen Synthase Sensitivity to Glucose-6-P Is Important for Controlling Glycogen Accumulation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae*

Glycogen is a storage form of glucose utilized as an energy reserve by many organisms. Glycogen synthase, which is essential for synthesizing this glucose polymer, is regulated by both covalent phosphorylation and the concentration of glucose-6-P. With the yeast glycogen synthase Gsy2p, we recently identified two mutants, R579A/R581A/R582A and R586A/R588A/R591A, in which multiple arginine residues were mutated to alanine that were completely insensitive to activation by glucose-6-P in vitro (Pederson, B. A., Cheng, C., Wilson, W. A., and Roach, P. J. (2000) J. Biol. Chem. 275, 27753–27761). We report here the expression of these mutants in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and, as expected from our findings in vitro, they were not activated by glucose-6-P. The R579A/R581A/R582A mutant, which is also resistant to inhibition by phosphorylation, caused hyperaccumulation of glycogen. In contrast, the mutant R586A/R588A/R591A, which retains the ability to be inactivated by phosphorylation, resulted in lower glycogen accumulation when compared with wild-type cells. When intracellular glucose-6-P levels were increased by mutating the PFK2 gene, glycogen storage due to the wild-type enzyme was increased, whereas that associated with R579A/R581A/R582A was not greatly changed. This is the first direct demonstration that activation of glycogen synthase by glucose-6-P in vivo is necessary for normal glycogen accumulation.
The Role of Women in Politics and in the Sustenance of Democracy in Nigeria

This study examined the role of women in politics and in the sustenance of democracy in Nigeria. It elicited their challenges, experiences and contributions to the democratic process. Strategies that can assist women realize their political leadership potentials were proffered. Questionnaires were administered on 700 randomly selected female politicians, activists and professionals in government and dominant parties across the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. Also, interview schedules were conducted with 10 of the randomly selected respondents. Results revealed that women are marginalized and feature minimally in government because Nigeria lacks a legislative framework that secures quotas for women in political parties. Patriarchal attitudes, poor informal networks/mentoring, finance, religion and educational status were found to militate against women’s participation in politics and governance. To overcome these problems, the study recommended amongst others, the development of electoral reforms that promote equitable representation of women and respect for due process. Empowerment of women by ensuring their access to credit facilities was proffered. The study concluded that the institutionalization of varieties of special mechanisms is most needed in increasing women’s participation in governance.
AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

User engagement (UE) is a relevant affective state in learning contexts. UE detection based on machine vision has recently gained attention; however, there is a shortage of datasets for automated detection of UE. In fact, the ambiguity of the task and domain-specific features of the data make annotation difficult in this domain, especially for large scale data. Thus, we aim to investigate UE detection in a large volume of data based on a small fraction of annotated data. To do so, we apply a safe semi-supervised support vector machine (S4VM) noting that its pure supervised version (SVM) has been successfully applied in UE detection. To compare the results, both SVM and S4VM are applied to our collected data. According to the results, S4VM consistently achieves better performance than SVM. The level of performance is also acceptable according to the literature; however, acquiring high accuracy in UE detection requires more investigation.
Clinical significance of radiation-induced liver disease after stereotactic body radiation therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma

Background/Aims The aim of this study was to investigate parameters that predict radiation-induced liver disease (RILD) following stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and to identify the clinical significance of RILD. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 117 HCC patients who were treated by SBRT from March 2011 to February 2015. RILD was defined as elevated liver transaminases more than five times the upper normal limit or a worsening of Child-Pugh (CP) score by 2 within 3 months after SBRT. All patients were assessed at 1 month and every 3 months after SBRT. Results Median follow-up was 22.5 months (range, 3 to 56) after SBRT. RILD was developed in 29 of the 117 patients (24.7%). On univariate analysis, significant predictive factors of RILD were pretreatment CP score (p < 0.001) and normal liver volume (p = 0.002). Multivariate analysis showed that CP score was a significant predictor of RILD (p < 0.001). The incidence of RILD increased above a CP score of 6 remarkably. The rate of recovery from RILD decreased significantly above a CP score of 8. Survival analysis showed that CP score was an independent prognostic factor of overall survival (p = 0.001). Conclusions CP score is a significant factor to predict RILD in patients with chronic liver disease. RILD can be tolerated by patients with a CP score ≤ 7. However, careful monitoring of liver function is needed for patients with a CP score 7 after SBRT.
Immunogenicity and efficacy of oral or intranasal Shigella flexneri 2a and Shigella sonnei proteosome-lipopolysaccharide vaccines in animal models

Immunity against shigellosis has been shown to correlate with the presence of antibodies specific for Shigella lipopolysaccharide (LPS). We here propose a new candidate vaccine for shigellosis composed of purified Shigella flexneri 2a or Shigella sonnei LPS hydrophobically complexed with group C type 2b Neisseria meningitidis outer membrane protein proteosomes. Immunization of mice either orally or intranasally with this complex induced specific homologous anti-LPS antibodies in both intestinal and respiratory secretions as well as in sera. Strong anamnestic responses were found after two or three immunizations. LPS alone, alkaline-detoxified LPS, or alkaline-detoxified LPS complexed with proteosomes was not effective. Oral or intranasal immunization of guinea pigs with two or more doses of this proteosome-LPS vaccine elicited homologous protection against Shigella keratoconjunctivitis (Serény test). These data demonstrate that proteosomes can be used as an effective mucosal vaccine delivery system and that orally or intranasally administered acellular vaccines can protect against Shigella infections.
Lateral bending of tapered piezo-semiconductive nanostructures for ultra-sensitive mechanical force to voltage conversion

Quasi-1D piezoelectric nanostructures may offer unprecedented sensitivity for transducing minuscule input mechanical forces into high output voltages due to both scaling laws and increased piezoelectric coefficients. However, until now both theoretical and experimental studies have suggested that, for a given mechanical force, lateral bending of piezoelectric nanowires results in lower output electric potentials than vertical compression. Here we demonstrate that this result only applies to nanostructures with a constant cross-section. Moreover, though it is commonly believed that the output electric potential of a strained piezo-semiconductive device can only be reduced by the presence of free charges, we show that the output piezopotential of laterally bent tapered nanostructures, with typical doping levels and very small input forces, can be even increased up to two times by free charges. Our analyses confirm that, though not optimal for piezoelectric energy harvesting, lateral bending of tapered nanostructures with typical doping levels can be ideal for transducing tiny input mechanical forces into high and accessible piezopotentials. Our results provide guidelines for designing high-performance piezo-nano-devices for energy harvesting, mechanical sensing, piezotronics, piezo-phototronics, and piezo-controlled chemical reactions, among others.
Atomoxetine in autism spectrum disorder: no effects on social functioning; some beneficial effects on stereotyped behaviors, inappropriate speech, and fear of change.

UNLABELLED Abstract Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate the short-term treatment effects of atomoxetine on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms in children and adolescents with both ASD and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). METHODS A total of 97 patients 6-17 years of age, with ASD and ADHD, were treated with 1.2 mg/kg/day of atomoxetine during an 8 week double-blind placebo-controlled period. Here, we investigated effects on two parent-based secondary outcome measures, the Aberrant Behavior Checklist (ABC) and the Children's Social Behavior Questionnaire (CSBQ). RESULTS After 8 weeks of double-blind treatment, atomoxetine administration was associated with significant treatment effects on the ABC subscales Hyperactivity, Inappropriate Speech, and Stereotypic Behavior, and on the CSBQ subscale Fear for Changes. CONCLUSIONS Our study results indicate no beneficial effects of atomoxetine on social functioning. However, atomoxetine may ameliorate restricted and stereotyped behaviors and communication. This study has been registered in ClinicalTrials.gov ( www.clinicaltrials.gov ) under registration number NCT00380692.
Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease (BEHAVE-AD) Rating Scale

Before the development of the Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease (BEHAVE-AD) rating scale in 1987 by Reisberg and colleagues and its predecessor scale, the Symptoms of Psychosis in Alzheimer's Disease (SPAD) rating scale, in 1985 by Reisberg and Ferris, other scales were available for measuring behavioral disturbances and psychiatric disorders in patients with Alzheimer's disease. However, these scales generally mixed together cognitive disturbances with behavioral symptoms and sometimes included functional impairments as well. These predecessor scales also were not specifically designed to assess the types of behavioral problems seen in Alzheimer's disease. If a scale did address behavioral disturbances of dementia, it tended to be seriously underspecified in terms of the nature of behavioral disturbances.