Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of mild-intensity exercise training with capsiate intake on fat deposition and substrate utilization during exercise in diet-induced obese mice

[Purpose] While the anti-obesity effects of exercise and capsiate are well-observed individually, the effect of exercise with capsiate intake has not been systematically explored yet. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether the anti-obesity effects of exercise training can be further enhanced by capsiate intake. [Methods] 8-week-old male mice were divided into 3 groups (n = 8 per group): sedentary group (SED; nontrained), exercise-trained group (EXE) and exercisetrained group with 10 mg/kg of capsiate intake (EXE+CAP). All mice were offered high-fat diet and water ad libitum. The mild-intensity treadmill training was conducted 5 times a week for 8 weeks. After 8 weeks, metabolism during exercise and abdominal fat weight were measured. [Results] Body weight and the rate of total abdominal fat were significantly less in EXE+CAP than in SED but not between EXE and SED. The average of respiratory exchange rate during exercise was significantly much lower in EXE+SED (p = 0.003) compared to the difference between EXE and SED (p = 0.025). Likewise, the fat oxidation during exercise was significantly much higher in EXE+SED (p = 0.016) compared to the difference between EXE and SED (p = 0.045). Then, the carbohydrate oxidation during exercise was significantly much lower in EXE+SED (p = 0.003) compared to the difference between EXE and SED (p = 0.028). [Conclusion] In conclusion, the anti-obesity functions of exercise training can be further enhanced by capsiate intake by increasing fat oxidation during exercise. Therefore, we suggest that capsiate could be a candidate supplement which can additively ameliorate obesity when combined with exercise.
SUSTAINED EFFICACY OF INCOBOTULINUMTOXINA FOLLOWING REPEATED INJECTIONS FOR UPPER-LIMB POST-STROKE SPASTICITY: A POST HOC ANALYSIS

Objective This post hoc analysis assessed the impact of repeated incobotulinumtoxinA injections on muscle tone, disability, and caregiver burden in adults with upper-limb post-stroke spasticity. Design Data from the double-blind, placebo-controlled main period and three open-label extension cycles of two Phase 3, randomized, multicentre trials were pooled. Methods Subjects received incobotulinumtoxinA 400 Units at 12-week intervals (±3 days) (study 3001, NCT01392300) or ≤ 400 Units at ≥12-week intervals based on clinical need (study 0410, NCT00432666). Ashworth Scale (AS) arm sumscore (sum of elbow, wrist, finger and thumb flexor, and forearm pronator AS scores), Disability Assessment Scale (DAS), and Carer Burden Scale (CBS) scores were assessed. Results Among 465 subjects, from study baseline to 4 weeks post-injection, mean (standard deviation) AS arm sumscore improved continuously: main period, –3.23 (2.55) (placebo, –1.49 (2.09)); extension cycles 1, 2, and 3, –4.38 (2.85), –4.87 (3.05), and –5.03 (3.02), respectively. DAS principal target domain responder rate increased from 47.4% in the main period (placebo 27.2%) to 66.6% in extension cycle 3. Significant improvements in CBS scores 4 weeks post-injection accompanied improved functional disability in all cycles. Conclusion IncobotulinumtoxinA conferred sustained improvements in muscle tone, disability, and caregiver burden in subjects with upper-limb poststroke spasticity. LAY ABSTRACT Spasticity (muscle overactivity) often occurs in patients after stroke and may lead to further disability. The results of 2 clinical trials were used to assess the effect of incobotulinumtoxinA injections (maximum dose used per injection session 400 Units) on arm and hand spasticity in patients after stroke. This study looked at the impact of treatment on disability and the burden on carers. The results from 4 treatment cycles were assessed. There was a continuous decrease in spasticity, together with improvements in disability in all treatment cycles. The burden on those who cared for patients also decreased. We showed that repeated incobotulinumtoxinA treatment across 4 cycles led to a decrease in spasticity, patient disability and burden on carers.
Experiences of patients and physiotherapists with blended internet-based vestibular rehabilitation: a qualitative interview study

Background Internet-based vestibular rehabilitation (VR) with physiotherapy support, known as blended VR, was effective in reducing vestibular symptoms in a recent randomised controlled trial. Blended VR is a complex intervention comprised of physiotherapeutic visits, the vertigo training website, and VR exercises. Because of these interacting components, it is important to understand how blended VR works, for whom it works best, and how it should ideally be delivered. Aim To investigate the experiences of both patients and physiotherapists with blended internet-based VR. Design & setting A qualitative interview study was performed with patients who received blended internet-based VR with physiotherapy support, and physiotherapists who provided this support. Method Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 patients and eight physiotherapists after the 6-month follow-up of the randomised trial. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and thematically analysed. Results According to both patients and physiotherapists, the physiotherapist visits were useful in providing personal attention, helping patients safely execute exercises, and improving patients’ adherence to therapy. Some patients said they did not need physiotherapist support and, according to physiotherapists, both the necessity and the optimal way to deliver guidance differed greatly between patients. The Vertigo Training website and exercises provided patients with a sense of control over their symptoms. Patients reported that the VR exercises were easy to perform and most patients continued to use them long after the trial ended. Conclusion In blended VR, physiotherapeutic visits appear to offer benefits above the vertigo training website and VR exercises alone. Physiotherapy support may best be used when individually tailored.
The difference in knowledge and attitudes of using mobile health applications between actual user and non-user among adults aged 50 and older

Background Despite the great benefits of mobile health applications (mHAs) in managing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) internationally, studies have documented general challenges to broad adoption of mHAs among older age groups. By focusing on broad adoption, these studies have been limited in their evaluation of adults aged 50 and older who have high risk of NCDs and can benefit the most from the functionalities provided by mHAs. Objective This study aims to evaluate the knowledge, self-confidence, perceived benefits, and barriers of using mHAs depending on experience with mHAs among adults aged 50 and older. Furthermore, we aim to identify the factors associated with the actual use of mHAs. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional survey at a single tertiary hospital in Seoul, Korea, between May 1 and May 31, 2018. Of the 625 participants who were contacted, 323 participants were granted full inclusion to the study. We compared demographics, knowledge, self-confidence, and perceived benefits and barriers by experience with using mHAs, then performed logistic regression to identify the factors associated with mHA use. Results Among the participants, 64.1% (N = 207) had experience using mHAs. Those in the experienced group were more likely to have more than college education (55.1% vs. 27.5%, P < 0.001) and to report a higher monthly income (≥ $7,000, 22.7% vs. 18.1%, P = 0.05) than their less-experienced counterparts. Although the experienced group was more likely to have higher self-confidence in using mHAs, about half of the study participants, including people with experience using mHAs, did not have appropriate knowledge of mobile technology. With adjusted logistic model, higher educated (adjusted PR (aPR) = 1.53, 95% CI, 1.26–1.80), higher perceived benefits of mHAs (aPR = 1.43, 95% CI, 1.04–1.83), and higher self-confidence using mHAs (aPR = 1.41, 95% CI, 1.12–1.70) were significant factors associated with mHA use. Conclusions The use of mHAs among adults aged 50 and older is becoming more common globally; nevertheless, there are still people unable to use mHAs properly because of lack of experience and knowledge. Strategies are needed to encourage the reliable usage of mHAs among those who may need it the most by improving self-confidence and better articulating benefits.
Prognostic and clinicopathological significance of pretreatment mean platelet volume in cancer: a meta-analysis

Objective Our study aimed to evaluate the prognostic and clinicopathological significance of pretreatment mean platelet volume (MPV) on cancer by using meta-analysis of published studies. Design Meta-analysis. Data sources Relevant studies available before 22 December 2019 were identified by searching MEDLINE, EMBASE. Eligibility criteria All published studies that assessed the prognostic and clinicopathological significance of pretreatment MPV on cancer were included. Data extraction and synthesis Studies were identified and extracted by two reviewers independently. The HR/OR and its 95% CIs of survival outcomes and clinicopathological parameters were calculated. Results A total of 38 eligible studies (41 subsets) with 9894 patients with cancer were included in the final meta-analysis. MPV level was not significantly associated with both overall survival (HR 0.98, 95% CI 0.84 to 1.14) and disease-free survival (HR 1.22, 95% CI 0.86 to 1.73) of patients with cancer. Neither advanced nor mixed-stage tumour patients showed significant association between MPV and overall survival (HR 1.36, 95% CI 0.96 to 1.94, HR 0.90, 95% CI 0.74 to 1.09). However, high MPV had the strongest relationship with poor overall survival (HR 2.01; 95% CI 1.08 to 3.41) in gastric cancer, followed by pancreatic cancer (HR 1.54; 95% CI 1.31 to 1.82). Whereas in the subgroup using receiver operating characteristic curve method to define cut-off values, low MPV was significantly related to poor overall survival (HR 0.78, 95% CI 0.64 to 0.95). In addition, MPV had no significant association with age (OR 0.96, 95% CI 0.90 to 1.02), sex (OR 1.04, 95% CI 1.00 to 1.09), depth of cancer invasion (OR 0.90, 95% CI 0.77 to 1.04) and tumour stage (OR 0.91, 95% CI 0.78 to 1.07). Conclusions Pretreatment MPV level is of no clearly prognostic significance in cancers and no significant association with clinicopathological parameters of patients with cancers.
The environment of the nursing team's professional practice in inpatient units of a university hospital.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the environment of the professional practice of the nursing staff from inpatient units and to compare it according to professional and work characteristics. METHOD A cross-sectional analytical study conducted in southern Brazil. Data was collected through the Brazilian version of the Nursing Work Index-Revised with a sample of (n=142) professionals, them being nurses (n=56; 34.9%) and nursing technicians/assistants (n=86; 60.6%). The analysis was performed by means of descriptive and analytical statistics. RESULTS The professional practice environment was considered favorable in all the subscales. The subscale of relationships between physicians/nursing staff showed a significant difference among the professional categories, with better results for nurses. The afternoon shift stood out in the favorable assessment. Longer working time at the institution and unit tended to have worse assessments for autonomy and control, respectively. CONCLUSION The assessment of the practice environment was favorable; however, the study signals opportunities for improvements for the nursing team.
Surface-associated lipid droplets: an intermediate site for lipid transport in human adipocytes?

ABSTRACT Adipose tissue plays a major role in regulating whole-body energy metabolism. While the biochemical processes regulating storage and release of excess energy are well known, the temporal organization of these events is much less defined. In this study, we have characterized the presence of small surface-associated lipid droplets, distinct from the central droplet, in primary human adipocytes. Based on microscopy analyses, we illustrate the distribution of mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum and lysosomes in the vicinity of these specialized lipid droplets. Ultrastructure analysis confirmed the presence of small droplets in intact adipose tissue. Further, CIDEC, known to bind and regulate lipid droplet expansion, clearly localized at these lipid droplets. Neither acute or prolonged stimulation with insulin or isoprenaline, or pharmacologic intervention to suppress lipid flux, affected the presence of these lipid droplets. Still, phosphorylated perilipin and hormone-sensitive lipase accumulated at these droplets following adrenergic stimuli, which supports metabolic activity at these locations. Altogether, we propose these lipid droplet clusters represent an intermediate site involved in lipid transport in primary adipocytes.
Protective Effect of Ursolic Acid in Prunella vulgaris L on LPS-induced asthenozoospermia via Bcl-2/Bax Apoptosis Signaling Pathway.

BACKGROUND Asthenozoospermia, also known as lack of sperm motility, accounts for about 27.8% of male infertility as a separate factor, and is often associated with abnormal quantity and morphology of spermatozoa. Therefore, oligozoospermia has become one of the most important factors affecting male infertility. METHODS Ursolic acid (UA), also known as wusu acid, is the main active component isolated from Prunella vulgaris L and has a variety of pharmacological effects. However, the protective effect of UA on asthenozoospermia disease has not been reported. In the current study, the purpose of this study was to investigate the regulatory effect of UA in rats with LPSinduced asthenozoospermia disease. SD rats were treated with 5 mg/kg LPS respectively. RESULTS After different concentrations of UA were infused into the stomach of SD rats, microscopy, flow cytometry, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), qRT-PCR and western blot were used to detect sperm motility, apoptosis, the levels of TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-6, and Bcl-2/Bax apoptosis pathway related proteins in rat serum and epididymis tissues. DISCUSSION Compared with normal group, the sperm motility and Bcl-2 level in LPS group decreased significantly, while the expression of inflammatory factors and Bax proteins increased significantly (P<0.05). Compared with LPS group, UA intervention group has the opposite result and dose dependence. CONCLUSION This study shows that UA can protect LPS-induced asthenozoospermia of rat by increasing sperm density and motility, regulating Bcl-2/Bax apoptosis pathway and reducing inflammatory apoptosis response. This experiment provides ideas for improving the clinical treatment of infertile patients with oligoasthenospermia.
Effectiveness and Safety of Anti-interleukin-17 Therapies in Elderly Patients with Psoriasis

Anti-interleukin-17 agents have recently been developed for the treatment of psoriasis. This study evaluated the tolerance and effectiveness of anti-interleukin-17 agents for psoriasis in elderly patients in daily practice. A multicentre, retrospective study was performed, involving psoriatic patients aged ≥65 years who had received an anti-interleukin-17 agent, including secukinumab, ixekizumab or brodalumab. A total of 114 patients were included: 72 received secukinumab, 35 ixekizumab, and 7 brodalumab. Treatment was stopped in 32 patients (28.9%), because of relapses in 14 patients (41.2%), primary failures in 11 patients (32.4%), or adverse events in 7 patients (20.6%). The 3 most frequently reported adverse events were injection site reactions (n = 4), oral candidiasis (n = 3), and influenza-like illness (n = 3). Regarding effectiveness, 80 patients (70%) reached a Physician Global Assessment score of 0/1, 6 months after treatment initiation. In conclusion, anti-interleukin-17 therapy appears to be an effective and safe therapeutic option for psoriasis treatment in patients aged ≥ 65 years.
Efficient Code Generation of a Lattice Boltzmann Phase-Field Model for Immiscible Fluids with High Density Ratios and High Reynolds Numbers

In this thesis, a high-performance implementation of a multiphase lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) based on the conservative Allen-Cahn model supporting high density differences and high Reynolds numbers is presented.Metaprogramming techniques are used to generate optimised code for CPUs and GPUs automatically. The coupled model is specified in a high-level symbolic description and optimised through automatic transformations. The code generation approach allows investigating many different versions of the model, using different lattices and finite-difference approximations. A careful analysis of the generated models is done with the study of spurious currents around a static air bubble in liquid to examine the numerical accuracy. Further, validation of the implementation is shown in physically relevant scenarios– a three-dimensional rising air bubble in water and the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI). The memory pressure of the resulting algorithm is reduced through the fusion of compute kernels. A roofline analysis demonstrates the excellent efficiency of the generated code on a single GPU. The resulting single GPU code can be integrated into the multiphysics framework waLBerla to run massively parallel simulations on huge domains. Communication hiding and GPUDirect-enabled MPI yield near-perfect scaling behaviour. Scaling experiments are conducted on the Piz Daint supercomputer with up to 2048 GPUs, simulating several hundred fully resolved bubbles.
Total and Extractable Toxic Metal in Water and Sediments of River Kaduna Within Kaduna Metropolis

Geochemical analysis of some heavy metals in water, sediment and their speciation in the sediment samples were carried out in river Kaduna within Kaduna metropolis to determined the distribution and association of heavy metals namely As, Cd, Co, Cr and Pb. The method adopted for the analysis of these metals is Atomic Absorption Spectrometer (A.A.S.). The results for the study revealed that the metal levels in the water from the study areas range from 0.013 – 0.420, 0.002 – 0.880, 0.011– 1.330, 0.010 – 0.990 and 0.020 – 0.850 mg/L for As, Cd, Co, Cr and Pb respectively, while in the sediment samples from the same location, the levels of the same metals ranged from 7.250 – 9.850, 2.200 – 5.550, 14.550 – 27.970, 10.550 – 25.890 and 39.650 – 55.650 mg/g for As, Cd, Co, Cr and Pb respectively. Water and sediment samples contained higher concentrations of the toxic metal determined in the study sites as compared to the toxic metals from control areas indicating the presence of contaminants particles in the area A five-step sequential extraction protocol of toxic metals “As, Cd, Co, Cr and Pb” in sediments from River Kaduna within Kaduna metropolis indicated that Cr, Pb, and Cd contribute significant quantities in the exchangeable and acid extractable fractions (mobile phase), making them easily bio available while As and Co, residual fractions contributed the maximum, which is inert form and hence the environmental effect may not be significant. Detection of these heavy metals especially Cd and Co at higher concentrations in sediment samples calls for sustained monitoring since transfer of metals across the food chain and accumulation are most probable with resultant health problems.
Finding Bugs Using Your Own Code: Detecting Functionally-similar yet Inconsistent Code

Probabilistic classiﬁcation has shown success in detecting known types of software bugs. However, the works following this approach tend to require a large amount of specimenstotraintheirmodels. Wepresentanewmachine learning-based bug detection technique that does not require any external code or samples for training. Instead, our technique learns from the very codebase on which the bug detection is performed, and therefore, obviates the need for the cumbersome task of gathering and cleansing training samples (e.g., buggy code of certain kinds). The key idea behind our technique is a novel two-step clustering process applied on a given codebase. This clustering process identiﬁes code snippets in a project that are functionally-similar yet appear in inconsistent forms. Such inconsistencies are found to cause a wide range of bugs, anything from missing checks to unsafe type conversions. Unlike previous works, our technique is generic and not speciﬁc to one type of inconsistency or bug. We prototyped our technique and evaluated it using 5 popular open source software, including QEMU and OpenSSL. With a minimal amount of manual analysis on the inconsistencies detected by our tool, we discovered 22 new unique bugs, despite the fact that many of these programs are constantly undergoing bug scans and new bugs in them are believed to be rare.
EchoNet-Dynamic: a Large New Cardiac Motion Video Data Resource for Medical Machine Learning

Machine learning analysis of biomedical images has seen signiﬁcant recent advances. In contrast, there has been much less work on medical videos, despite the fact that videos are routinely used in many clinical settings. A major bottleneck for this is the the lack of openly available and well annotated medical video data. Computer vision has beneﬁted greatly from many open databases which allow for collaboration, comparison, and creation of medical task speciﬁc architectures. We present the EchoNet-Dynamic Dataset of 10,036 echocardiography videos, spanning the range of typical echocardiography lab imaging conditions, with corresponding labeled measurements including ejection fraction, left ventricular volume at end-systole and end-diastole, and human expert tracings of the left ventricle as an aid in studying automated approaches to evaluate cardiac function. We additionally present the performance of three 3D convolutional architectures for video classiﬁ-cation used to assess ejection fraction to near-expert human performance and as a benchmark for further collaboration, comparison, and creation of task-speciﬁc architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest labeled medical video dataset made available publicly to researchers and medical professionals and ﬁrst public report of video-based 3D convolutional architectures to assess cardiac function.
A shallow-water equation based one- dimensional dynamic wave model with non- hydrostatic pressure

Coastal wave is one of major forces that dominate coastal hydronydamics, sediment transport, morphology and threaten coastal infrastructures. In recent years, the non-hydrostatic technique for solving Reynoldsaveraged Navier-Stokes equations has been developed for wave propagation study. It has been shown that this method has a comparable accuracy for wave simulation to Boussinesq-type approaches and a better computing efficiency.