Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of Attrition and Response in Cognitive Processing Therapy for Interpersonal Trauma Survivors with PTSD

With the establishment of empirically validated treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), concerns remain regarding the effectiveness of such treatments in real-world clinical settings. Specifically, premature termination and treatment response limit the effectiveness of these interventions. The current study investigated factors potentially related to premature termination and treatment response in Cognitive Processing Therapy with Account (CPT-A). Participants in this study included 42 women (Mage = 30.70 SDage = 9.40) with PTSD from exposure to interpersonal trauma. Demographic characteristics, pre-treatment symptoms of PTSD and depression, and transdiagnostic factors were examined as predictors of attrition and treatment response. Hierarchical regression and logistic regression models were analyzed to test the variance explained and predictive value of these factors. The present study revealed that age was a significant factor related to dropout from CPT-A whereas baseline PTSD symptom severity was significantly related to treatment response. Results of this study suggest the importance of the interrelationships among pre-treatment predictors as well as the consideration of attrition and treatment response as distinct metrics of treatment outcome. Further, these results inform the application of CPT-A for PTSD in survivors of interpersonal trauma, as consideration of the identified predictors of dropout and non-response at intake may contribute to treatment retention and response.
Speech feature profiles in Swedish 5-year-olds with speech sound disorder related to suspected childhood apraxia of speech or cleft palate

Abstract Purpose: To study the occurrence of speech features commonly associated with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) in Swedish children with suspected CAS (sCAS) or Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) related to Cleft Palate and/or Lip (CP ± L). Method: Thirty-four children (4.10–5.11) with SSD related to sCAS (n = 15) or repaired CP ± L (n = 19) participated. Consensus judgement of presence/absence of CAS features in single words were based on a checklist with operationalised definitions. Speech sound production measures were based on semi-narrow phonetic transcription. Intra- and inter-transcriber agreement was determined. Result: Twelve participants (ten with sCAS (67%) and two with CP ± L (11%)) shared a CAS profile of phonemic speech inconsistency for consonants and vowels and a set of four features: vowel error, voicing error, difficulty achieving initial articulatory configurations or transitionary movement gestures and stress errors. The most frequent speech difficulties in children with non-CAS CP ± L (n = 17) were consonant distortion (88%) and hypernasal resonance (76%). Prosodic impairment was rare. Conclusion: A distinct CAS speech feature profile was found for children with CAS, differing in number and distribution compared to children with CP ± L and SSD. CAS was found more frequently in CP ± L and SSD compared to reported estimates of clinical prevalence.
Increasing astrogenesis in the developing hippocampus induces autistic‐like behavior in mice via enhancing inhibitory synaptic transmission

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder characterized primarily by impaired social communication and rigid, repetitive, and stereotyped behaviors. Many studies implicate abnormal synapse development and the resultant abnormalities in synaptic excitatory–inhibitory (E/I) balance may underlie many features of the disease, suggesting aberrant neuronal connections and networks are prone to occur in the developing autistic brain. Astrocytes are crucial for synaptic formation and function, and defects in astrocytic activation and function during a critical developmental period may also contribute to the pathogenesis of ASD. Here, we report that increasing hippocampal astrogenesis during development induces autistic‐like behavior in mice and a concurrent decreased E/I ratio in the hippocampus that results from enhanced GABAergic transmission in CA1 pyramidal neurons. Suppressing the aberrantly elevated GABAergic synaptic transmission in hippocampal CA1 area rescues autistic‐like behavior and restores the E/I balance. Thus, we provide direct evidence for a developmental role of astrocytes in driving the behavioral phenotypes of ASD, and our results support that targeting the altered GABAergic neurotransmission may represent a promising therapeutic strategy for ASD.
Emerging roles for dynamic aquaporin-4 subcellular relocalization in CNS water homeostasis

Abstract Aquaporin channels facilitate bidirectional water flow in all cells and tissues. AQP4 is highly expressed in astrocytes. In the CNS, it is enriched in astrocyte endfeet, at synapses, and at the glia limitans, where it mediates water exchange across the blood–spinal cord and blood–brain barriers (BSCB/BBB), and controls cell volume, extracellular space volume, and astrocyte migration. Perivascular enrichment of AQP4 at the BSCB/BBB suggests a role in glymphatic function. Recently, we have demonstrated that AQP4 localization is also dynamically regulated at the subcellular level, affecting membrane water permeability. Ageing, cerebrovascular disease, traumatic CNS injury, and sleep disruption are established and emerging risk factors in developing neurodegeneration, and in animal models of each, impairment of glymphatic function is associated with changes in perivascular AQP4 localization. CNS oedema is caused by passive water influx through AQP4 in response to osmotic imbalances. We have demonstrated that reducing dynamic relocalization of AQP4 to the BSCB/BBB reduces CNS oedema and accelerates functional recovery in rodent models. Given the difficulties in developing pore-blocking AQP4 inhibitors, targeting AQP4 subcellular localization opens up new treatment avenues for CNS oedema, neurovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, and provides a framework to address fundamental questions about water homeostasis in health and disease.
Measurement of Intersectional Microaggressions: Conceptual Barriers and Recommendations

Since Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, researchers of bias have struggled with how to capture the complexity and intricacies of intersectional identities and microaggressions experienced by individuals holding these identities within the quantitative framework that dominates psychology. Although scholarship has grown in the exploration of experiences such as racialized sexual harassment, or sexual racism within queer and trans communities, there is no strong consensus on how this might be measured systematically in ways that allow for inferences regarding the experiences of populations of interest. With an emphasis on the experiences of queer and trans people of color, this article explores intersectional identities through three main points: First, we define what is meant by intersectionality and the real-world experiences that are important for advancing an understanding of microaggressions; second, we review the existing measures and their ability to capture the breadth and depth of the lived experience of those with intersectional identities; and third, we propose a framework for the development of a more accurate and comprehensive measure of microaggressions.
The dynamic mask: Facial correlates of character portrayal in professional actors

Actors make modifications to their face, voice, and body to match standard gestural conceptions of the fictional characters they are portraying during stage performances. However, the gestural manifestations of acting have not been quantified experimentally, least of all in group-level analyses. To quantify the facial correlates of character portrayal in professional actors for the first time, we had 24 actors portray a contrastive series of nine stock characters (e.g., king, bully, lover) that were organised according to a predictive scheme based on the two statistically independent personality dimensions of assertiveness (i.e., the tendency to satisfy personal concerns) and cooperativeness (i.e., the tendency to satisfy others’ concerns). We used three-dimensional motion capture to examine changes in facial dimensions, with an emphasis on the relative expansion/contraction of four facial segments related to the brow, eyebrows, lips, and jaw, respectively. The results demonstrated that expansions in both upper- and lower-facial segments were related to increases in the levels of character cooperativeness, but not assertiveness. These findings demonstrate that actors reliably manipulate their facial features in a contrastive manner to differentiate characters based on their underlying personality traits.
Seasonal coronavirus–specific B cells with limited SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactivity dominate the IgG response in severe COVID-19

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Little is known about the interplay between preexisting immunity to endemic seasonal coronaviruses and the development of a SARS-CoV-2-specific IgG response. We investigated the kinetics, breadth, magnitude, and level of cross-reactivity of IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and heterologous seasonal and epidemic coronaviruses at the clonal level in patients with mild or severe COVID-19 as well as in disease control patients. We assessed antibody reactivity to nucleocapsid and spike antigens and correlated this IgG response to SARS-CoV-2 neutralization. Patients with COVID-19 mounted a mostly type-specific SARS-CoV-2 response. Additionally, IgG clones directed against a seasonal coronavirus were boosted in patients with severe COVID-19. These boosted clones showed limited cross-reactivity and did not neutralize SARS-CoV-2. These findings indicate a boost of poorly protective CoV-specific antibodies in patients with COVID-19 that correlated with disease severity, revealing "original antigenic sin. "
POVERTY ALLEVIATION THROUGH NEIGHBOURHOOD GROUPS – A STUDY IN ERNAKULUM DISTRICT OF KERALA STATE, INDIA

Poverty in India, like the nation’s population, is predominantly rural but remarkably responsive to economic growth.as the economy grows, poverty diminishes, faster when growth is strong, slower when it is not. The approach of poverty alleviation through economic growth focuses on the poverty reducing potentials of growth process by appropriate choice of policies and strategies which would enhance the flow of benefits to the poor. Therefore the government of India has implemented variousschemes to reduce poverty, for empowering poor women and topromote gainful employment. Kudumbashree is a comprehensive poverty alleviation programme in the state of Kerala and it focuses primarily on micro finance and micro enterprise development. The mission of Kudumbashree is “to eradicate absolute poverty in ten years through concerted community action under the leadership of local self-governments, by facilitating organization of the poor for combining self-help groups with demand led convergence of available services and resources to tackle the multiple dimensions and manifestation of poverty holistically”. The aim of the project is to examine the extent to which NHGs have contributed to poverty alleviation and household welfare. For the collection of data, both primary and secondary sources were used. Interview schedule was administered for collecting primary data. The finding reveals that kudumbashree NHG movement has achieved remarkable success in making the poor economically active by way of increasing the employment and income levels as well as the asset base. KeywordsKudumbashree, Micro Enterprise, Micro Finance, NHGs
Fine Tuning of Deep Contexts Toward Improved Perceptual Quality of In-Paintings

Over the recent years, a number of deep learning approaches are successfully introduced to tackle the problem of image in-painting for achieving better perceptual effects. However, there still exist obvious hole-edge artifacts in these deep learning-based approaches, which need to be rectified before they become useful for practical applications. In this article, we propose an iteration-driven in-painting approach, which combines the deep context model with the backpropagation mechanism to fine-tune the learning-based in-painting process and hence, achieves further improvement over the existing state of the arts. Our iterative approach fine tunes the image generated by a pretrained deep context model via backpropagation using a weighted context loss. Extensive experiments on public available test sets, including the CelebA, Paris Streets, and PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, show that our proposed method achieves better visual perceptual quality in terms of hole-edge artifacts compared with the state-of-the-art in-painting methods using various context models.
Update on bone health: the International Menopause Society White Paper 2021

Abstract Osteoporosis and associated fractures present a major challenge in improving global health outcomes. Key clinical aspects are the definition of osteoporosis and associated fractures, fracture risk prediction, stratification of risk of fracture, intervention thresholds and the most appropriate intervention based on integration of aforementioned. Correct understanding and application of these concepts are essential to stem the increasing tide of fragility fractures associated with an aging population. The role of muscle strength and function, sarcopenia, and the newly emerging concept of osteosarcopenia in maintaining bone health are discussed in detail.
The conceptual building blocks of everyday thought: Tracking the emergence and dynamics of ruminative and nonruminative thinking.

How do thoughts arise, unfold, and change over time? Are the contents and dynamics of everyday thought rooted in conceptual associations within one's semantic networks? To address these questions, we developed the Free Association Semantic task (FAST), whereby participants generate dynamic chains of conceptual associations in response to seed words that vary in valence. Ninety-four adults from a community sample completed the FAST task and additionally described and rated six of their most frequently occurring everyday thoughts. Text analysis and valence ratings revealed similarities in thematic and affective content between FAST concept chains and recurrent autobiographical thoughts. Dynamic analyses revealed that individuals higher in rumination were more strongly attracted to negative conceptual spaces and more likely to remain there longer. Overall, these findings provide quantitative evidence that conceptual associations may act as a semantic scaffold for more complex everyday thoughts, and that more negative and less dynamic conceptual associations in ruminative individuals mirror maladaptive repetitive thoughts in daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Hypoalbuminemia as a prognostic biomarker for higher mortality and treatment complications in acute myeloid leukemia

Older age and poor performance status lead to worse outcomes in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients. Hypoalbuminemia is a negative predictor of morbidity and mortality in several malignancies. We evaluated the relationship between baseline serum albumin levels on treatment‐related complications, as well as short‐term mortality and overall survival (OS) in 756 newly diagnosed AML patients. We conducted a retrospective multicenter study to examine treatment‐related complications and OS according to pretreatment serum albumin levels: normal albumin ≥3.5 g/dl, marked hypoalbuminemia <2.5 g/dl, and hypoalbuminemia 2.5–3.4 g/dl. In an adjusted multivariate analysis, a lower baseline albumin was independently associated with a higher number of grade ≥3 complications when adjusting for age, secondary AML, sex and intensive treatment. When comparing normal to markedly low albumin levels, the estimated mean number of complications increases by a factor of 1.35. Patients who had a normal baseline albumin had a 30 day‐mortality rate of 4.8%, which was significantly lower compared with patients with hypoalbuminemia (16.5%) and marked hypoalbuminemia (33.9%; p < 0.01). Similarly, 60‐day mortality rate was significantly higher in the hypoalbuminemia group (24.0%) and marked hypoalbuminemia group (45%) compared with normal albumin group (8.3%; p < 0.01). Patients with lower baseline albumin levels have increased treatment‐related morbidity and mortality, suggesting that pre‐treatment serum albumin is an important independent prognostic marker.
A Comparative Study of Ropivacaine and Ropivacaine with Dexmedetomidine during Interscalene Brachial Plexus Block in Upper Arm Surgeries

Pain is a complex multidimensional human perception. It is divine to allay pain, Says Galen. In treatise on gout and rheumatism English physician Thomas Sydenham in 17th century wrote-“Among the remedies, which it has pleased Almighty God to give man to relieve his suffering none is so universal and as efficacious as opium. ” Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that adding dexmedetomidine significantly prolongs the duration of analgesia. Another objective of the study was to assess the extent to which the duration of analgesia and Anaesthesia is prolonged with the addition of Dexmedetomidine. Ropivacaine 0.50% used in brachial plexus block is well tolerated and provides effective surgical Anaesthesia as well as relief of postoperative pain. Dexmedetomidine as an adjuvant to ropivacaine enhances the quality of ISB block by faster onset of sensory and motor block. Dexmedetomidie increases the duration of both sensory and motor blockade. Duration of analgesia was significantly increased by dexmedetomidine when added to ropivacaine in brachial plexus block. Though statistically insignificant, addition of dexmedetomidine results in more intraoperative hemodynamic stability. Both dexmedetomidine and ropivacaine do not cause any major side effects in anaesthesia techniques. Thus, this study shows that dexmedetomidine 150 μg added to ropivacaine 0.50% in an appropriate technique has low side effect profile with considerable therapeutic benefit and enhances the quality of ISB block.
Conflict and Poverty in Afghanistan’s Transition

Abstract Despite record economic growth in the decade that followed the fall of the Taliban regime, poverty remained stubbornly high in Afghanistan, declining substantially only in regions that suffered more from conflict. This paper aims to explain this apparent puzzle by combining conflict-related indicators at the province level with household level observations. Estimates, which start in 2007 and stop in 2014 because of data availability constraints, show that large troop deployments reduced conflict intensity but also boosted local consumption, an effect reinforced by foreign aid flows being larger in conflict-affected areas. The robustness of these findings is assessed through an out-of-sample simulation of the impact of declining international troops and foreign aid after 2014. The simulation accurately predicts the sharp deterioration in living standards uncovered by a 2016 household survey.
An enhanced global context-aware network for road extraction from high-resolution imagery

ABSTRACT Currently, the automation of road segmentation in high-resolution satellite imagery is inadequate, and a part of the road network information is affected by the loss of spatial features and lack of global context information. To overcome this, we propose a deep convolutional neural network called the enhanced global context-aware network (EGC-Net). The EGC-Net employs a newly enhanced global context-aware module, which adds convolution kernels of different scales based on atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP). In addition, the feature aggregation and self-attention modules further improve the accuracy of road segmentation. Our experimental results show that the performance of EGC-Net is superior to that of state-of-the-art methods. When tested using the Massachusetts Roads Dataset, the EGC-Net achieved an F1-score (evaluation metric for the harmonic mean of the precision and recall metrics) of 0.8234, accuracy of 0.9466, and the intersection of the prediction and ground truth regions over their union (IoU) of 0.8195. Overall, EGC-Net performs better than other deep learning algorithms under different evaluation indexes. The ablation study indicates that the IoU score of our enhanced global context-aware module is higher than that of ASPP by 0.0207, and each component is required to obtain the best road detection results.
Is Regular Access to Internet Services Associated with Comprehensive Correct HIV/AIDS Knowledge among People Aged 15–49 Years in Nigeria? Findings from the 2018 Demographic Health Survey

Abstract Regular internet access is suggested to facilitate Comprehensive Correct HIV/AIDS Knowledge (CCAK). We assessed this association using the 2018 Nigeria Demographic Health Survey data, including 30,784 participants. CCAK was defined as knowing two primary HIV prevention methods, healthy-looking persons can have HIV, and rejecting two HIV misconceptions. Regular internet access was defined as at least weekly internet access. Using survey-featured multivariable logistic regression, we assessed this association. Overall, 49.6% (12,385) of participants had CCAK, while 17.4% (4,080) had regular internet access. People with regular internet access had higher odds of CCAK (aOR 1.55, 95% CI 1.38 − 1.73), confirming the association.
Using nature preserve creek cleanups to quantify anthropogenic litter accumulation in an urban watershed

Urban watersheds collect anthropogenic litter from populous areas and carry it through creeks and rivers to downstream ecosystems. Aquatic litter pollution has increasingly been addressed with the help of public engagement. Community science with amateur (citizen) scientist participation has focused on the assessment and remediation of plastic litter pollution through monitoring or cleanups. However, community science and more analytical research approaches have rarely been combined in upstream urban habitats where anthropogenic litter often originates. In freshwater streams, litter may be retained by natural and constructed obstructions, including beaver dams or restoration structures designed to mimic natural dams, but such retention has not yet been studied. Through community science cleanups, this study investigated the sources, material composition, functions, accumulation rates, and temporal and spatial distribution of litter in Mill Creek in the Blue Heron Nature Preserve, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. In 6 ∼monthly cleanups, we removed, counted, and categorized 14,520 pieces of litter. Polystyrene was the most frequently collected material type (56.4%). Fragments that could not be functionally classified were the most abundant functional category (70.8%). Of the items that could be categorized by function, single-use plastics, such as food and beverage packaging, were most numerous. Presence of stream infrastructure, including beaver dam analogues (BDAs), increased the retention of total litter and most litter material types, but these effects often varied with time. BDAs affected litter capture patterns directly, as a barrier catching debris in the water column and floating on the water surface, and indirectly, by diverting flood waters over the banks and depositing litter into the floodplain. There were no consistent effects of rain-event magnitude, frequency, or total rain between cleanups on litter-accumulation rates. The dynamic temporal interactions of rain and litter are complex, but the functional types and spatial distribution of litter suggest that most litter was carried indirectly from consumers in the commercial, residential, and public roadway areas within the watershed. This study showed that community cleanup efforts can be coupled with quantitative and qualitative data collection. This multifaceted approach can help address anthropogenic litter problems, create opportunities for engagement and outreach, and contribute valuable information to ongoing community and scientific dialogs.