Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biological Functions of TNKS1 and Its Relationship with Wnt/β-Catenin Pathway in Astrocytoma

Background Tankyrase1 (TNKS1), which often shows abnormal expression in many malignant tumor cells, plays an important role in tumor progression. In our previous study, we found that TNKS1 is also closely related to pathologic grade in human astrocytoma and its expression level is positively correlated with the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. This study is aimed to further elucidate the biological functions of TNKS1 as well as its relationship with the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. Methods TNSK1 overexpression and knockdown vectors were constructed and transfected into glioblastoma cell lines U251 MG and U87, respectively. Viability, apoptosis, cell cycle and cell invasiveness in the treated cells were investigated. Results In comparison with untreated cells, U251 and U87 cells overexpressing TNSK1 showed significantly increased cell viability and decreased apoptosis, while the TNKS1 knockdown U251 and U87 cells had reduced cell invasive ability and increased apoptosis, respectively. In addition, immunoprecipitation study showed that TNKS1 could be detected by β-catenin antibody after pull-down, indicating that TNKS1 directly interacts with β-catenin, further indicating that TNKS1 could be regarded as a positive regulator of the Wnt/β-catenin pathway in astrocytoma. Moreover, knockdown of TNKS1 in U251 and U87 cells also leads to suppressed Wnt/β-catenin signaling, and subsequent decrease of cell growth and proliferation, reduced invasion ability and increased apoptosis. Conclusion Our findings suggest that TNKS1 might be a potential new therapeutic target for human astrocytoma in gene therapy.
Dysregulation of DPP4 Is Associated with the AMPK/JAK2/STAT3 Pathway in Adipocytes Under Insulin Resistance Status and Liraglutide Intervention

Purpose Dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) is one of the newly identified adipokines, which acts as paracrine in adipose tissue and as endocrine hormones in the liver, muscles and central nervous system. Expression of DPP4 was significantly upregulated in obese patients upon insulin resistance (IR) conditions, but the mechanism underlying the dysregulation of DPP4 remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the DPP4 expression in adipose tissue and adipocytes under IR conditions or with liraglutide intervention, and explore the potential molecular mechanisms. Methods Obesity-associated IR animal and cell models were, respectively, constructed by using high-fat diet and palmitic acid (PA) stimulation. Expression of DPP4 in adipose tissues and adipocytes was estimated by quantitative real-time RT-PCR and Western-blot. Effects of the AMPK/JAK2/STAT3 pathway on DPP4 were examined by regulating the activity of AMPK and the JAK2/STAT signaling. The therapeutic efficacy of liraglutide in the IR models was evaluated, and its regulatory effects on DPP4 expression and the underlying molecular mechanisms were explored. Results The expression of DPP4 was markedly upregulated in both the animal and cell IR models. In the adipocyte, DPP4 expression was found to be suppressed by the activation of AMPK, and this inhibition effect was mediated by the JAK2/STAT3 signaling. Moreover, liraglutide could alleviate the obesity-induced IR, and led to the downregulation of DPP4 in IR animal and cell models. Liraglutide intervention resulted in the activation of AMPK and deactivation of the JAK2/STAT3 signaling in the adipocytes. Conclusion Taken together, the expression of DPP4 is upregulated in adipose tissues and adipocytes upon IR conditions, but is reduced after liraglutide intervention. The dysregulation of DPP4 in the adipocytes may be performed by the AMPK/JAK2/STAT3 pathway.
Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor and Its Role in Pancreatic Cancer Treatment Mediated by Nanoparticles

Abstract Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a disease with a high incidence and a dreary prognosis. Its lack of symptomatology and late diagnosis contribute to the dearth and inefficiency of therapeutic schemes. Studies show that overexpressed epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a common occurrence, linking this to the progression of pancreatic cancer, although the association between its expression and the survival rate is rather controversial. EGFR-targeted therapy has not shown the results expected, leaving at hand more questions than answers; clearly, there is a need for a better understanding of the molecular pathways involved. Nanoparticles have been used in trying to improve the efficacy of antitumor treatment; thus, using EGFR’s ligand, EGF, for nanoconjugation, showed promising results in increasing the cellular uptake mechanisms and apoptosis of the targeted cells.
The effectiveness of adapalene 0.1% with intense pulsed light versus benzoyl peroxide 5% with intense pulsed light in the treatment of acne vulgaris: A comparative study

Background: Acne vulgaris (AV) is one of the most common skin diseases with major psychological impacts. Hence, selecting the best treatment modality is so important; there are different ways to treat AV such as topical and systemic agents, laser, and also photodynamic therapy. In this study, we tried to assess the difference between the efficacy of combination therapy with intense pulsed light (IPL) and benzoyl peroxide (BPO) in comparison with IPL and adapalene (AD) in the treatment of the mild to moderate AV. Materials and Methods: Thirty Iranian females in reproductive age with mild to moderate acne were enrolled in this study. The left and right side of the patients were randomized to receive either AD 0.1% or BPO 5% every other day plus three sessions of monthly apart IPL in the treatment of AV. Different parameters of AV such as acne severity index (ASI), total acne lesions counting (TLC), and Acne Global Severity Scale (AGSS) were measured before, during, and after the treatments. Results: There was a significant difference regarding AGSS, TLC, and ASI before and after treatment with AD plus IPL (P < 0.001). Furthermore, there was a significant difference regarding AGSS, TLC, and ASI before and after treatment with BP plus IPL (P < 0.001). However, no significant difference regarding AGSS, TLC, and ASI were observed between the 2 groups after treatment (P > 0.05). No significant side effects were observed in both groups. Conclusion: Our study shows that there was not any significant difference between combining IPL with either AD or BPO so we can use either one of these combinations to achieve similar efficacy.
Association Between the Communication Skills of Physicians and the Signing of Do-Not-Resuscitate Consent for Terminally Ill Patients in Emergency Rooms (Cross-Sectional Study)

Background The signing of do-not-resuscitate (DNR) consent is mandatory in providing a palliative approach in the end-of-life care for the terminally ill patients and requires an effective communication between the physician and the patients or their family members. This study aimed to investigate the association between the communication skills of physicians who participated in the SHARE (supportive environment, how to deliver the bad news, additional information, reassurance, and emotional support) model course on the patient notification and the signing of do-not-resuscitate (DNR) consent by the terminally ill patients at emergency rooms. Methods Between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018, a total of 109 terminally ill patients were enrolled in this study, of which 70 had signed a DNR and 39 had not. Data regarding the patients’ medical records, a questionnaire survey completed by family members, and patient observation forms were used for the assessment of physicians’ communication skills during patient notification. The observation form was designed based on the SHARE model. A multivariate logistic regression model was applied to identify the independent significant factors of the patient and family member variables as well as the four main components of the observation form. Results The results revealed that knowing how to convey bad news and providing reassurance and emotional support were significantly correlated with a higher rate of signing DNR consent. Additionally, physician-initiated discussion with family members and a predicted limited life expectancy were negative independent significant factors for signing DNR consent. Conclusion This study revealed that good communication skills help to increase the signing of DNR consent. The learning of such skills from attendance of the SHARE model course is encouraged for the physicians in the palliative care of terminally ill patients in an emergency room.
Overview of microRNA-199a Regulation in Cancer

Abstract microRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of endogenous short, non-coding RNAs that regulate a multitude of genes at the post-transcriptional level. miR-199, which is a highly conserved miRNA family, consists of miR-199a and miR-199b. Researchers mainly focused on miR-199a over the past few years. Functional studies have demonstrated that mature miR-199a is a key player in the maintenance of normal homeostasis and in the regulation of disease pathogenesis. Here, we summarize the biological functions of miR-199a and review recent research on its roles in the physiological processes of cancer cells, such as proliferation, migration, invasion, apoptosis, autophagy and glycometabolism.
Antimicrobial Resistance and Molecular Characteristics of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Isolates from Children Patients in Iran

Introduction Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) causes high rates of mortality and a substantial burden to health systems worldwide. Here, we investigated the antimicrobial susceptibility and molecular characteristics of MRSA isolated from children referred to Children’s Medical Center in Tehran. Materials and methods A total of 98 MRSA isolates were collected from children. Antimicrobial resistance patterns were determined using the disk diffusion and E-test methods. The presence of biofilm encoding genes and the pvl gene were determined by PCR. We used the microtiter plate method to assess the ability of biofilm formation. The MRSA isolates were further analyzed using PFGE and SCCmec typing. Results Antibiotic susceptibility testing showed that the highest and the lowest antibiotic resistance percentage were related to erythromycin (62%) and minocycline (10%), respectively. Overall, 63% of MRSA isolates were biofilm producers. Resistance to two antibiotics such as erythromycin (72% vs 28%, P=0.01) and clindamycin (71% vs 29%, P=0.04) was higher among biofilm producers than non-biofilm producers. All strains had biofilm-forming genes and the prevalence of pvl gene was 41%. Most MRSA isolates belonged to SCCmec IVa (75%) and SCCmec III (18%). In PFGE technique, 5 common types and 2 single types were identified; Common type 1 with 37 isolates was dominant clone. Conclusion We thus report preliminary data on the prevalence and distribution of MRSA genotypes in Tehran Children’s Hospital. These findings characterize the MRSA colonization dynamics in child patients in Iran and may aid the design of strategies to prevent MRSA infection and dissemination.
On the Robustness of Active Learning

Active Learning is concerned with the question of how to identify the most useful samples for a Machine Learning algorithm to be trained with. When applied correctly, it can be a very powerful tool to counteract the immense data requirements of Artificial Neural Networks. However, we find that it is often applied with not enough care and domain knowledge. As a consequence, unrealistic hopes are raised and transfer of the experimental results from one dataset to another becomes unnecessarily hard. In this work we analyse the robustness of different Active Learning methods with respect to classifier capacity, exchangeability and type, as well as hyperparameters and falsely labelled data. Experiments reveal possible biases towards the architecture used for sample selection, resulting in suboptimal performance for other classifiers. We further propose the new "Sum of Squared Logits" method based on the Simpson diversity index and investigate the effect of using the confusion matrix for balancing in sample selection.
High Risk Drug Use Sites, Meaning and Practice: Implications for AidS Prevention

A study of drug use locations in Hartford, CT, Is designed to understand the environmental and social conditions within “high risk sites” where drug users inject drugs or smoke crack, In order to develop AIDS prevention models that build upon the physical and social organization of these locations. The study assesses high-risk sites characterized on the basis of type of location or structure, presence and strength of gatekeepers, and presence and strength of HIV prevention opportunities and pressures. A combination of ethnographic, epidemiological, and social network methods are used to document the characteristics, social organization, natural history, and dynamics of these sites, the network relations of site users, and the various opportunities for, or barriers to, on-site social-level HIV prevention intervention. This paper provides an overview of the study and presents preliminary findings, Including the degree to which drug injectors and crack smokers use specific types of sites in Hartford. The paper also discusses the ways these findings Inform development of on-site, type-specific and peer-led or structural HIV-prevention Interventions.
VAE-PGN based Abstractive Model in Multi-stage Architecture for Text Summarization

This paper describes our submission to the TL;DR challenge. Neural abstractive summarization models have been successful in generating fluent and consistent summaries with advancements like the copy (Pointer-generator) and coverage mechanisms. However, these models suffer from their extractive nature as they learn to copy words from the source text. In this paper, we propose a novel abstractive model based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to address this issue. We also propose a Unified Summarization Framework for the generation of summaries. Our model eliminates non-critical information at a sentence-level with an extractive summarization module and generates the summary word by word using an abstractive summarization module. To implement our framework, we combine submodules with state-of-the-art techniques including Pointer-Generator Network (PGN) and BERT while also using our new VAE-PGN abstractive model. We evaluate our model on the benchmark Reddit corpus as part of the TL;DR challenge and show that our model outperforms the baseline in ROUGE score while generating diverse summaries.
Baseline Assessment of Primary Healthcare Delivery Through Subcenters of Northern India

Background Our study assessed the status of facilities and services available at the subcenter level and identified the gaps that deter the realization of universal health coverage. Methods A cross-sectional observational study design was used for assessing the subcenters of the Ambala district, Haryana, India with a predesigned, semi-structured tool containing 88 items marked on an ordinal scale. The subcenters were assessed and scored as per their functioning and delivery of various services, their coverage, and quality in terms of various national health programs. Results We found that the essential infrastructure of most of the buildings was average. The types of equipment for antenatal examination, vital medicines, and prominent display boards in the local language were present in all subcenters. The majority of the health workers (n = 27; 93%) successfully demonstrated proper handwashing techniques; 65% correctly measured blood pressure during an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), and 48% could correctly estimate hemoglobin with a hemoglobinometer. Sound knowledge regarding maternal and child healthcare practices and guidelines was noted in 89% of the health workers. Conclusions The health system of Haryana has scope for improvement in terms of health centers. It is pertinent for the realization of universal health coverage. Therefore, internal audits similar to what we performed must be planned and executed as a regular activity within the framework of existing health systems.
An Examination of the Association of Sex and Gender and the Motives for Lying in Intimate Relationships

The current thesis examined the most common motives for lying in intimate relationships and the possible sex and gender differences in lying behavior. Student participants (N= 250), aged between 19-25 years old, at the University of Rhode Island, completed an anonymous questionnaire concerning motives for lying in intimate relationships. All participants were currently involved in a romantic relationship at the time of the study or had been involved in such a relationship in the recent past. Participants were asked to recall a prior serious deceptive experience with a relational partner. In the second part of the questionnaire students completed a Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp 1974). This instrument is composed of twenty-four bipolar items describing personal characteristics, on each of which respondents are to rate themselves on a five-point
Laughing, breathing, clicking the prosody of nonverbal vocalisations

When analysing human spoken communication the focus on the linguistic side lies on speech with its verbal message, whereas the focus on the non-linguistic side usually is on the visually transported information such as gestures and facial expression. However, speech, especially in talk-in-interaction, also features numerous nonverbal vocalisations including various forms of laughter and inhalation noises as their most frequent forms. Although nonverbal vocalisations are usually short in duration they may provide rich information on linguistic, paralinguistic and extralinguistic levels including prosodic phrasing, cognitive load, affective state or speaker identity. The paper provides an overview of the phonetic and prosodic structure and the timing of laughter and audible breathing. Special attention is given on conversational speech, where we can frequently find situations in which interlocutors overlap temporally and on apical click sounds that often occur with inhalation before upcoming articulation but also during word-finding difficulties.
Labeling expressive speech in L2 Italian: the role of prosody in auto-and external annotation

The present study is intended to compare two approaches of labeling expressive corpora: auto-annotation and annotation by external lay listeners. These two methods have been applied to the semi-spontaneous emotional speech produced by Chinese learners of L2 Italian, involved in the CardTask, a mood-induction procedure that allows us to control the context of interaction, preserving the spontaneity of reactions. The emotional responses to the stimuli presented in the task were the object of an auto-annotation session. The same samples were then administered only in the auditory mode to 20 Italian and 20 Chinese lay listeners. The results of perceptual tests have underlined some similarities and differences between both auto- and external annotation, and between the ratings given by external Italian and Chinese listeners. The labels chosen by native Italians were similar to those selected in the auto-annotation session, particularly in the case of anxiety, fear and disgust. The correspondence between the results of the two annotation methods may be ascribed to the different prosodic patterns characterizing the emotional states. The results of the annotation made by Chinese listeners show that they found it hard to give a specific emotional label to utterances produced in a second language relying solely on prosodic patterns.
Variation in list intonation in American Jewish English

Yiddish-inﬂuenced intonation has been previously noted as a potential deﬁning characteristic of American Jewish English and, speciﬁcally, list intonation identiﬁed as a possible area of differentiation. However, apart from remarks in general de-scriptions of Standard American English (SAE) prosody, a systematic study of list intonation has not been conducted in SAE. In this study, lists were deﬁned, and extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with Jewish women with varying degrees of exposure to Yiddish. Speakers from different language back-grounds differed signiﬁcantly in their use of contours, boundary tones and pitch accents on list items, with speakers with less exposure to Yiddish using more of the standard English contour (H* H-L%) than speakers with more exposure to Yiddish. Yiddish bilinguals were more likely to use a rise fall contour (L+H* L-L%), fewer H-L% boundary tones and H* pitch accents, and more rising pitch accents (L+H* and L*+H) than non-bilinguals. In addition, speakers of all language back-grounds used a variety of list intonations, showing the need for more systematic study into the uses and meanings, social and otherwise, of list intonations in English.
Correlation between the Characteristics and Quality of Life of Hypertensive Outpatients at a Private Hospital in Yogyakarta

Many factors can affect a person’s quality of life, including therapy with antihypertensive drugs that often have uncomfortable side effects and lead to decreased quality of life. This study aimed to determine the statistical relationship between the characteristics and quality of life of hypertensive outpatients at a private hospital in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This cross-sectional study used the EQ5D questionnaire to measure the quality of life of 56 respondents, who had met the inclusion criteria, after three months of antihypertensive therapy. The data were processed by scoring the questionnaire items and then converting the EQ5D dimensions to EQ5D Index based on the Malaysian value set. The data analysis also included descriptive statistics andchi-square test. The results showed that the quality of life, as represented by the EQ-5D index, ranged from 0.375 (lowest) to 0.933 (highest). The severe problems in the quality of life were identified in three dimensions, namely anxiety/ depression (7.14%), pain/discomfort (5.36%), and usual activities (3.57%). Meanwhile, difficulties were not found in the other two dimensions, namely self-care (89.29%) and mobility (55.36%). The results showed that the patients’ characteristics, namely sex, age, employment, education, and complication, correlated with quality of life at different levels (p-values), i.e., 0.350, 0.418, 0.992, 0.726, and 0.099, respectively. As a conclusion, there is no significant relationship between patients’ characteristics and quality of life (p-values> 0.05). Keywords—characteristics, quality of life, hypertensive, outpatient.