Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Hormonal Contraceptives on Haematological Parameters among Women in the Cape Coast Metropolis, Ghana

Background: The widespread use of hormonal contraceptives gives grounds for assessing their influence on various biochemical parameters of the human system since its safety has become controversial. This study assessed the effects of hormonal contraceptives on haematological parameters among users in the Cape Coast Metropolis. Original Research Article Coffie et al.; AHRJ, 3(1): 1-9, 2020; Article no.AHRJ. 54811 2 Materials and Methods: A simple randomized case-control study approach was used to recruit 94 healthy women of which 54 were hormonal contraceptive users and 40 healthy age-matched noncontraceptive users served as controls. Venous blood samples were taken for full blood count (FBC) analyses using an automated haematology analyser. Data was analysed using SPSS (V.22.0). Data was expressed in means (Mean ±SD) for the different variables. T-test statistic was used to compare the mean scores of two groups whilst one-way ANOVA was used to compare more than two groups. Pearson correlation was used to determine association between the various parameters. P-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The study observed mean red blood cell (RBC) count to be significantly higher among hormonal contraceptive users compared to non-users (P=0.030). Additionally, the duration of contraceptive usage had an influence on the blood cell parameters in various ways, with a significant negative correlation between duration of contraceptive use and red cell distribution width (RDW) (r= -0.303, P= 0.026). Conclusion and Recommendation: Hormonal contraceptives cause significant increase in red blood cell (RBC) count among users. Its effects also depend largely on duration of contraceptive use. The main limitation to this study was that blood films were not prepared to confirm the results the haematology analyser, hence study is recommended with the incorporation of blood films.
Oral Treatment of Central Serous Chorioretinopathy Patients Using Propranolol Tablets

Purpose: To evaluate the pharmacological effects of propranolol treatment of patients with central serous chorioretinopathy (CSCR) over 4 months. Results: Among the 89 male and 31 female patients, the mean BCVA decreased to 0.42 ± 0.08 logMAR during CSCR attacks. Oral propranolol showed good effectiveness in reducing CSCR signs after at least 4 months of treatment. The final BCVA of the patients in groups 1 and 2 was 0.09 ± 0.01 and 0.19 ± 0.03 logMAR, respectively (p < 0.05). Moreover, the mean complete remission time in groups 1 and 2 was 1.9 and 3.5 months, respectively (p < 0.05), while the “success” rate in groups 1 and 2 was 95.0% (57/60) and 78.3% (47/60), respectively (p < 0.05). The recurrence rate in groups 1 and 2 was 5.3% (3/57) and 25.5% (12/47) after a further 5 months of follow-up, respectively (p < 0.05). Materials and Methods: One hundred and twenty patients were enrolled and randomly divided into two groups that both underwent a visual acuity test and optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanning, between April and December 2017. The 60 patients in group 1 were requested to take propranolol for 4 months, while the other 60 subjects (group 2) received placebo therapy during the same period. The best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) of every volunteer and an OCT image of each patient were checked and recorded at the beginning of the study and each week thereafter. If the signs of CSCR disappeared completely from the OCT scans, the case was considered a “success” and treatment stopped at once. However, the “success” subjects were further evaluated in follow-ups throughout the next 5 months to determine the rate of recurrence in groups 1 and 2. The time of total complete remission of CSCR from the OCT scans was also measured in groups 1 and 2. Conclusion: CSCR patients revealed an excellent prognosis and success rate of 95.0% after taking propranolol. The treatment was able to enhance subretinal fluid (SRF) absorption, shorten the time to total complete remission, and significantly decrease CSCR recurrence. As such, we suggest that taking propranolol may be an alternative and viable choice for CSCR patients, given that the new method was shown to be safe, cheap, effective, well tolerated and convenient.
Delayed surgery after mechanical circulatory support for ventricular septal rupture with cardiogenic shock.

OBJECTIVES The effectiveness of delayed surgery for ventricular septal rupture (VSR) following myocardial infarction (MI) in patients with cardiogenic shock remains unknown. We aimed to investigate the outcomes of delayed surgery following mechanical circulatory support for patients in cardiogenic shock after VSR. METHODS We reviewed 8 patients with post-MI VSR and cardiogenic shock who underwent delayed surgery at our institution between July 2015 and November 2017. Surgery was delayed until haemodynamic stabilization and improved organ ischaemia were achieved by initiating intra-aortic balloon pumping with or without veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). We investigated the operative mortality, morbidity and late survival. RESULTS All 8 patients had preoperative intra-aortic balloon pump support, and 5 had additional veno-arterial ECMO support. Emergency repair was successfully avoided in all cases. The median time from the onset of MI to operation was 7.1 (3.7-9.9) days, and that from the diagnosis of VSR to operation was 1.9 (1.3-2.3) days. The operative mortality was 12.5%, and complications related to mechanical circulatory support occurred in 1 case (12.5%). The 2-year survival rate was 62.5%. CONCLUSIONS A combination of preoperative mechanical circulatory support and delayed surgery may improve the outcomes of patients with post-MI VSR, which was complicated by cardiogenic shock. The key to a better surgical outcome may be delaying the surgery for improving end-organ perfusion. This requires further investigation, especially for determining the optimal duration of support.
Studying Individual Differences in Spatial Cognition Through Differential Item Functioning Analysis

Background: In the field of spatial cognition, the study of individual differences represents a typical research topic. Gender and age have been prominently investigated. A promising statistical technique used to identify the different responses to items in relation to different group memberships is the Differential Item Functioning Analysis (DIF). The aim of the present study was to investigate the DIF of the Landmark positioning on a Map (LPM) task, across age groups (young and elderly) and gender, in a sample of 400 healthy human participants. Methods: LPM is a hometown map completion test based on well-known and familiar landmarks used to assess allocentric mental representations. DIF was assessed on LPM items two times: on categorical (i.e., positions) and coordinate (i.e., distances) scores, separately. Results: When positions and distances were difficult to assess with respect to the intended reference point, the probability to endorse the items seemed to get worse for the elderly compared to the younger participants. Instead other features of landmarks (high pleasantness, restorativeness) seemed to improve the elderly performance. A gender-related improvement of probability to endorse distance estimation of some landmarks, favoring women, emerged, probably associated with their repeated experiences with those landmarks. Overall, the complexity of the task seemed to have a differential impact on young and elderly people while gender-oriented activities and places seemed to have a differential impact on men and women. Conclusions: For the first time DIF was applied to a spatial mental representation task, based on the schematic sketch maps of the participants. The application of DIF to the study of individual differences in spatial cognition should become a systematic routine to early detect differential items, improving knowledge, as well as experimental control, on individual differences.
Advances in deep learning with limited supervision and computational resources

Deep neural networks are the cornerstone of state-of-the-art systems for a wide range of tasks, including object recognition, language modelling and machine translation. In the last decade, research in the field of deep learning has led to numerous key advances in designing novel architectures and training algorithms for neural networks. However, most success stories in deep learning heavily relied on two main factors: the availability of large amounts of labelled data and massive computational resources. This thesis by articles makes several contributions to advancing deep learning, specifically in problems with limited or no labelled data, or with constrained computational resources. The first article addresses sparsity of labelled data that emerges in the application field of recommender systems. We propose a multi-task learning framework that leverages natural language reviews in improving recommendation. Specifically, we apply neural-network-based methods for learning representations of products from review text, while learning from rating data. We demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Amazon Reviews dataset. The second article tackles computational challenges in training large-scale deep neural networks. We propose a conditional computation network architecture which can adaptively assign its capacity, and hence computations, across different regions of the input. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on visual recognition tasks where objects are spatially localized within the input, while maintaining much lower computational overhead than standard network architectures. The third article contributes to the domain of unsupervised learning with the generative adversarial networks paradigm. We introduce a flexible adversarial training framework, in which not only the generator converges to the true data distribution, but also the discriminator recovers the relative density of the data at the optimum. We validate our framework empirically by showing that the discriminator is able to accurately estimate the true energy of data while obtaining state-of-the-art quality of samples. Finally, in the fourth article, we address the problem of unsupervised domain translation. We propose a model which can learn flexible, many-to-many mappings across domains from unpaired data. We validate our approach on several image datasets, and we show that it
Acute and Subchronic Oral and Dermal Toxicological Studies of Salvia Verbenaca Extracts in Mice and Rats

ABSTRACT The acute and subchronic toxicological effects of Salvia verbenaca extracts in hexane, ethyl acetate, n-butanol, were investigated. The extracts were not toxic at 2000 mg Kg−1. A normal body weight evolution was observed during the 14 treatment days where there was no difference between the control and the treated groups. No abnormalities were seen in the haematological and biochemical parameters with the exception of an increase of the platelets. S. verbenaca may be recommended to boost platelets formation when compromised. Biochemical analysis revealed normal physiological levels of alanine transaminase (ALAT) and aspartate transaminase (ASAT). Histopathological examination showed a normal architecture with no morphological changes in the major vital examined organs.
Extracts of Cherry and Sweet Cherry Fruit as Active Ingredients of Body Wash Formulations

As a response to the growing demand of consumers for active, natural ingredients of cosmetic preparations, manufacturers are looking for new raw materials, rich in compounds with high antioxidative activity. In this research an attempt were made to evaluate the content of phenolic compounds, L-ascorbic acid and the antioxidant potential (DPPH • , ABTS •+ method) of aqueous and aqueous-glycerine extracts from cherry ( Prunus avium L), and sweet cherry ( Prunus cerasus L.). The next stage of this work was the application of analysed extracts to cleaning preparations. The best antioxidant properties were demonstrated for the aqueous-glycerine extract of sweet cherry fruit, which also was exhibit the highest phenol and L-ascorbic acid content. After application of analysed extract aqueous-glycerine extract of sweet cherry fruit to the gel, it was showed high foam stability. The model formulations enriched with the aqueous extracts of cherries and sweet cherries had a higher foaming ability, compared to the formulations containing the aqueous-glycerine extracts. The addition of both cherry and sweet cherry fruit extracts to the formulations resulted in a decrease in viscosity, in comparison with the baseline sample. The highest decline in viscosity (15% in relation to the baseline sample) was noted for the aqueous extract of sweet cherry fruit. None of model formulations, containing analysed extracts, did not induce skin lesions in the epidermal patch tests. The results indicate that the extracts can be used as a valuable cosmetic raw material, which have strong antioxidant ability and at the same time did not adversely affecting the usable properties of the washing gel.
Identification of Circulating miR-22-3p and miR-93-5p as Stable Endogenous Control in Tuberculosis Study

The diagnosis and prognosis of tuberculosis remains challenging and necessitates the development of a new test that can accurately diagnose and monitor treatment responses. In this regard, miRNA is becoming a potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarker which differentiates treatment respondents from non-respondents for various non-infectious and infectious diseases, including tuberculosis. The concentration of miRNAs varies based on cell type, disease, and site of infection, implicating that selection of an optimal reference gene is crucial, and determines the quantification of transcript level and biological interpretation of the data. Thus, the study evaluated the stability and expression level of five candidate miRNAs (let-7i-5p, let-7a-5p, miRNA-16-5p, miRNA-22-3p and miRNA-93-5p), including U6 Small Nuclear RNA (RNU6B) to normalize circulating miRNAs in the plasma of 68 participants (26 healthy controls, 23 latent, and 19 pulmonary tuberculosis infected) recruited from four health centers and three hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The expression levels of miRNAs isolated from plasma of culture confirmed newly diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis patients were compared with latently infected and non-infected healthy controls. The qPCR data were analyzed using four independent statistical tools: Best Keeper, Genorm, Normfinder and comparative delta-Ct methods, and the data showed that miRNA-22-3p and miRNA-93-5p were suitable plasma reference miRNAs in a tuberculosis study.
Investigation of the presence and seasonal prevalence of Salmonella spp., Salmonella Typhimurium, and its monophasic variant I 4,5,12:i:- in United States swine feed mills

Salmonella is an important pathogen of public health concern. Each year, Salmonella costs the food industry approximately $2.3 billion. In recent years, the number of cases of Salmonella linked to pork products has also increased in the United States (US). Although pork has the lowest association with human foodborne illness when compared to beef and chicken, it is the most consumed meat in the world. Therefore, Salmonella is a significant food safety concern for the American swine industry. This pathogen can be present along all the food production chain from farm to fork and recent studies reported the isolation of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (ST) and its monophasic variant 4,[5],12:i:(STM) in feed and feed ingredients. The occurrence of these pathogens in the pre-harvest environment can translate to entry and contamination of the human food chain. Nevertheless, little is known about Salmonella incidence and association with these types of environments. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the presence and seasonal prevalence of Salmonella spp. , ST and STM in selected feed mills, among the major US swine feed production areas. Eleven swine feed mills in eight different states were selected. Six mills produced only mash feed, while the other five facilities produced both mash and pelleted feed. Visits were conducted during fall 2016, early spring 2017 and summer 2017. Twelve environmental samples were collected within each facility and season, representative of the production flow, from receiving of ingredients to the finished product, including floor surfaces, equipment dust, workers’ shoes, and finished feed. Samples were analyzed following the USDA-FSIS guidelines and culture positive samples were analyzed by PCR. A multiplex PCR assay was also performed to differentiate Salmonella Typhimurium and Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:from the other serotypes. Associations between mill, season, mill type, sample site and Salmonella prevalence were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models (P < 0.05). From the 383 samples collected, 49 (12.8%) were identified as Salmonella spp. ; two (5.1%) were identified from feed, while the other 47 (13.7%) originated from equipment or surfaces. Two samples were positive for ST and three for STM by multiplex PCR. Mill (P = 0.003) and season (P = 0.006) were statistically associated with the presence of Salmonella, with higher prevalence in fall and summer (13.2%) as compared to spring (3.6%). These findings demonstrate the seasonal prevalence of Salmonella spp. , ST and STM in feed mills across the US, highlighting the potential role of the feed mill environment as a microbial entry route into the human food chain. The data presented can be also used as a tool to assist in the implementation of mitigation strategies for pre-harvest food safety.
Comparative Effects of Pterostilbene and Its Parent Compound Resveratrol on Oxidative Stress and Inflammation in Steatohepatitis Induced by High-Fat High-Fructose Feeding

Different studies have revealed that oxidative stress and inflammation are crucial in NAFLD (Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). The aim of this study is to analyze whether pterostilbene and resveratrol are able to either avoid or delay the progression of non-alcoholic liver steatosis towards steatohepatitis. This has been performed by examining their effects on oxidative stress, inflammation, fibrosis and pre-carcinogenic stages. Rats were distributed into five experimental groups and were fed with either a standard diet or a high-fat high-fructose diet, supplemented or not with pterostilbene (15 or 30 mg/kg/d) or resveratrol (30 mg/kg/d), for 8 weeks. Liver histological analysis was carried out by haematoxylin–eosin staining. Serum and hepatic oxidative stress-related parameters were assessed using spectrophotometry, and the expression of genes related to inflammation, fibrosis and cancer by qRT-PCR. The dietary model used in this study led to the development of steatohepatitis, where rats displayed oxidative stress, inflammation and ballooning, although not fibrosis. It also modified the expression of hepatocarcinoma-related genes. The results show, for the first time, that pterostilbene was able to partially prevent these alterations, with the exception of changes in hepatocarcinoma-related genes, mainly at 30 mg/kg/d. Pterostilbene was more effective than its parent compound resveratrol, probably due to its high bioavailability and higher anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory activities, attributable to its different chemical structure.
Synaptic Organization of Anterior Olfactory Nucleus Inputs to Piriform Cortex

Odors activate distributed ensembles of neurons within the piriform cortex, forming cortical representations of odor thought to be essential to olfactory learning and behaviors. This odor response is driven by direct input from the olfactory bulb, but is also shaped by a dense network of associative or intracortical inputs to piriform, which may enhance or constrain the cortical odor representation. With optogenetic techniques, it is possible to functionally isolate defined inputs to piriform cortex and assess their potential to activate or inhibit piriform pyramidal neurons. The anterior olfactory nucleus (AON) receives direct input from the olfactory bulb and sends an associative projection to piriform cortex that has potential roles in the state-dependent processing of olfactory behaviors. Here, we provide a detailed functional assessment of the AON afferents to piriform in male and female C57Bl/6J mice. We confirm that the AON forms glutamatergic excitatory synapses onto piriform pyramidal neurons; and while these inputs are not as strong as piriform recurrent collaterals, they are less constrained by disynaptic inhibition. Moreover, AON-to-piriform synapses contain a substantial NMDAR-mediated current that prolongs the synaptic response at depolarized potentials. These properties of limited inhibition and slow NMDAR-mediated currents result in strong temporal summation of AON inputs within piriform pyramidal neurons, and suggest that the AON could powerfully enhance activation of piriform neurons in response to odor. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Odor information is transmitted from olfactory receptors to olfactory bulb, and then to piriform cortex, where ensembles of activated neurons form neural representations of the odor. While these ensembles are driven by primary bulbar afferents, and shaped by intracortical recurrent connections, the potential for another early olfactory area, the anterior olfactory nucleus (AON), to contribute to piriform activity is not known. Here, we use optogenetic circuit-mapping methods to demonstrate that AON inputs can significantly activate piriform neurons, as they are coupled to NMDAR currents and to relatively modest disynaptic inhibition. The AON may enhance the piriform odor response, encouraging further study to determine the states or behaviors through which AON potentiates the cortical response to odor.
Rapid reshaping: the evolution of morphological changes in an introduced beach daisy

Thousands of species have been introduced to new ranges worldwide. These introductions provide opportunities for researchers to study evolutionary changes in form and function in response to new environmental conditions. However, almost all previous studies of morphological change in introduced species have compared introduced populations to populations from across the species' native range, so variation within native ranges probably confounds estimates of evolutionary change. In this study, we used microsatellites to locate the source population for the beach daisy Arctotheca populifolia that had been introduced to eastern Australia. We then compared four introduced populations from Australia with their original South African source population in a common-environment experiment. Despite being separated for less than 100 years, source and introduced populations of A. populifolia display substantial heritable morphological differences. Contrary to the evolution of increased competitive ability hypothesis, introduced plants were shorter than source plants, and introduced and source plants did not differ in total biomass. Contrary to predictions based on higher rainfall in the introduced range, introduced plants had smaller, thicker leaves than source plants. Finally, while source plants develop lobed adult leaves, introduced plants retain their spathulate juvenile leaf shape into adulthood. These changes indicate that rapid evolution in introduced species happens, but not always in the direction predicted by theory.