Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of short-term venous stasis on clinical chemistry testing

Abstract Control and standardization of preanalytical variability is a critical factor for achieving accuracy and precision in laboratory testing. Although venous stasis from tourniquet placement during venepuncture should be minimized, as it has been claimed to account for spurious and significant variations for several analytes in plasma, there is controversy surrounding its real impact on laboratory testing. The aim of the present study was the investigation of the influence of short-term venous stasis on routine biochemical testing, by measuring the plasma concentration of 12 common analytes, including proteins, protein-bound substances, enzymes and electrolytes, in plasma specimens collected either without venous stasis or following the application of standardized external pressure of 60mm Hg using a sphygmomanometer for 1 and 3min. Although the overall correlation between measures was acceptable, the pattern of change was mostly dependent on the length of stasis, size and protein-binding characteristics of the analytes, achieving clinical significance for albumin, calcium and potassium after 1-min stasis, and alanine aminotransferase, albumin, calcium, chloride, total cholesterol, glucose and potassium after 3-min stasis. Statistically significant differences could be observed in seven (alanine aminotransferase, albumin, calcium, total cholesterol, creatine kinase, iron and potassium) and ten (alanine aminotransferase, albumin, calcium, chloride, total cholesterol, creatine kinase, creatinine, glucose, iron and potassium) out of the 12 analytes tested, after 1- and 3-min venous stasis, respectively. The most clinically significant changes from standard venepuncture, when compared to the current analytical quality specifications for desirable bias, occurred for potassium (1-min stasis, −2.8%; 3-min stasis, −4.8%, both p<0.001), calcium (1-min stasis, +1.6%, p<0.05; 3-min stasis, +3.6%, p<0.001) and albumin (1-min stasis, +3.5%; 3-min stasis, +8.6%, both p<0.001). As most of these effects are dependent on the stasis time during venepuncture and biochemical or physiological characteristics of the analyte, these variations could likely be anticipated, allowing the most appropriate preventive measures to be adopted.
Trends in risk perceptions and vaccination intentions: a longitudinal study of the first year of the H1N1 pandemic.

OBJECTIVES We sought to evaluate longitudinal trends in people's risk perceptions and vaccination intentions during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. METHODS We used data from 10 waves of a US national survey focusing on the H1N1 pandemic (administered between May 2009 and January 2010) to conduct a longitudinal analysis of adult respondents' risk perceptions and vaccination intentions. RESULTS Self-reported perceived risk of becoming infected with H1N1 paralleled H1N1 activity throughout the pandemic's first year. However, intention to be vaccinated declined from 50% (May 2009) to 16% (January 2010) among those who remained unvaccinated (27% had been vaccinated by January 2010). Respondents who indicated that they had previously been vaccinated against seasonal influenza reported significantly higher H1N1 vaccination intentions than those who had not been vaccinated (67% vs 26%; P < .001). CONCLUSIONS Reported intention to be vaccinated declined well before vaccine became available and decreased throughout the pandemic year. To the extent that prior vaccination for seasonal influenza vaccination is a strong correlate of H1N1 risk perceptions, encouraging seasonal influenza vaccination may benefit pandemic preparedness efforts.
Expression of cytochrome P450 CYP81A6 in rice: tissue specificity, protein subcellular localization, and response to herbicide application

The cytochrome P450 gene CYP81A6 confers tolerance to bentazon and metsulfuron-methyl, two selective herbicides widely used for weed control in rice and wheat fields. Knockout mutants of CYP81A6 are highly susceptible to both herbicides. The present study aimed to characterize the CYP81A6 expression in rice. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analyses demonstrated that foliar treatment of bentazon (500 mg/L) greatly induced expression of CYP81A6 in both wild-type (Jiazhe B) and its knockout mutant (Jiazhe mB): a 10-fold increase at 9 h before returning to basal levels at 24 h in Jiazhe B, while in the mutant the expression level rose to >20-fold at 12 h and maintained at such high level up to 24 h post exposure. In contrast, metsulfuron-methyl (500 mg/L) treatment did not affect the expression of CYP81A6 in Jiazhe B within 80 h; thereafter the expression peaked at 120 h and returned gradually to basal levels by Day 6. We suggest that a metabolite of metsulfuron-methyl, 1H-2,3-benzothiazin-4-(3H)-one-2,2-dioxide, is likely to be responsible for inducing CYP81A6 expression, rather than the metsulfuron-methyl itself. Use of a promoter-GUS reporter construct (CYP81A6Pro::GUS) demonstrated that CYP81A6 was constitutively expressed throughout the plant, with the highest expression in the upper surfaces of leaves. Subcellular localization studies in rice protoplasts showed that CYP81A6 was localized in the endoplasmic reticulum. These observations advance our understanding of CYP81A6 expression in rice, particularly its response to the two herbicides. 摘要目的分析CYP81A6基因在苯达松及甲磺隆处理下的诱导表达模式, 解释该基因与两种除草剂代谢相关的可能原因。 创新点从两种除草剂降解途径中产生的小分子物质的结构相似性出发, 通过基因诱导表达的特点分析, 解释CYP81A6和两种除草剂降解相关的原因。 方法通过实时定量聚合酶链反应(PCR)来分析基因表达的特点; 利用CYP81A6启动子与GUS报告基因构建的载体来分析组织特异性表达; 通过亚细胞定位来确定CYP81A6发挥功能的场所。 结论CYP81A6基因受苯达松及甲磺隆诱导, 在不同的时间点开始上调, 说明了甲磺隆的降解中间产物可以诱导这个基因的表达; CYP81A6是组成型表达, 在根、 茎、 叶中均有表达; 亚细胞定位结果证明CYP81A6是一个内质网上的蛋白。
Breastfeeding policy: a globally comparative analysis.

OBJECTIVE To explore the extent to which national policies guaranteeing breastfeeding breaks to working women may facilitate breastfeeding. METHODS An analysis was conducted of the number of countries that guarantee breastfeeding breaks, the daily number of hours guaranteed, and the duration of guarantees. To obtain current, detailed information on national policies, original legislation as well as secondary sources on 182 of the 193 Member States of the United Nations were examined. Regression analyses were conducted to test the association between national policy and rates of exclusive breastfeeding while controlling for national income level, level of urbanization, female percentage of the labour force and female literacy rate. FINDINGS Breastfeeding breaks with pay are guaranteed in 130 countries (71%) and unpaid breaks are guaranteed in seven (4%). No policy on breastfeeding breaks exists in 45 countries (25%). In multivariate models, the guarantee of paid breastfeeding breaks for at least 6 months was associated with an increase of 8.86 percentage points in the rate of exclusive breastfeeding (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION A greater percentage of women practise exclusive breastfeeding in countries where laws guarantee breastfeeding breaks at work. If these findings are confirmed in longitudinal studies, health outcomes could be improved by passing legislation on breastfeeding breaks in countries that do not yet ensure the right to breastfeed.
Association of APOE Genetic Polymorphism with Cognitive Function and Suicide History in Geriatric Depression

Apolipoprotein E (APOE) has been associated with a variety of late-life neuropsychiatric disorders, including geriatric depression. This study determined whether APOE genotypes affect vulnerability to geriatric depression. We also tested the effect of the presence of the APOE Ε4 (APOE4) allele on age of onset, suicide attempt history and cognitive function in geriatric depressed patients. We genotyped APOE in 111 elderly inpatients diagnosed as having major depression and 144 normal controls. The depressed patients were evaluated at baseline using the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) after admission. Age of onset of depression and suicide attempt history in the depressed group were evaluated by interview and medical record. We found no association between APOE genotypes and geriatric depression (p = 0.342) or APOE4 status and age of onset of depression (p = 0.281). However, compared with depressed subjects lacking the APOE Ε4 allele, depressed subjects who were also APOE4 carriers showed significantly lower MMSE scores (p = 0.021) and an increased suicide attempt history (p = 0.012). The APOE genotype may contribute to cognitive performance and suicidality in geriatric depression, rather than being a specific risk factor for the disorder.
Curtailing privilege escalation attacks over asynchronous channels on Android

Recently we presented QuantDroid [7], a quantitative approach towards mitigating privilege escalation attacks on Android. By monitoring all synchronous IPC via overt channels on-the-fly, a so called flow-graph service detects an abnormal amount of traffic exchanged between DVMs running different Apps to indicate a potential horizontal privilege escalation attack. However, although certainly a valuable first step, our initial QuantDroid approach fails when dealing with asynchronous IPC via persistent storage containers on the Android system. To also address this issue, in this work we extend QuantDroid to QuantDroid++ by providing i) a central storage of taints when operating on system-internal databases of Android, ii) an extension of the SQL cursor object to preserve taints and link requested data with such taints, and, finally iii) an inspection of the information flow with such newly available taints for all relevant database operations.
Patterns of Panic: Financial Crisis Language in Historical Newspapers

This paper presents a new indicator on financial stress from 1889 to 2016 based on the reporting in five major US newspapers. This indicator provides detailed and high-frequency coverage of more than a century of financial history based on a previously untapped corpus of 35 million newspaper titles. I validate the indicator using 23,000 manually coded articles. The indicator displays plausible comovement with key economic variables and other measures of financial instability. Periods of negative financial sentiment predict recessions, rising unemployment, foreshadow lower stock market performance and rising corporate bond spreads.
Time to accelerate integration of human factors and ergonomics in patient safety

Progress toward improving patient safety has been slow despite engagement of the health care community in improvement efforts. A potential reason for this sluggish pace is the inadequate integration of human factors and ergonomics principles and methods in these efforts. Patient safety problems are complex and rarely caused by one factor or component of a work system. Thus, health care would benefit from human factors and ergonomics evaluations to systematically identify the problems, prioritize the right ones, and develop effective and practical solutions. This paper gives an overview of the discipline of human factors and ergonomics and describes its role in improving patient safety. We provide examples of how human factors and ergonomics principles and methods have improved both care processes and patient outcomes. We provide five major recommendations to better integrate human factors and ergonomics in patient safety improvement efforts: build capacity among health care workers to understand human factors and ergonomics, create market forces that demand the integration of human factors and ergonomics design principles into medical technologies, increase the number of human factors and ergonomic practitioners in health care organizations, expand investments in improvement efforts informed by human factors and ergonomics, and support interdisciplinary research to improve patient safety. In conclusion, human factors and ergonomics must play a more prominent role in health care if we want to increase the pace in improving patient safety.
Transient Surface Delivery of Invariant Chain‐MHC II Complexes Via Endosomes: a Quantitative Study

Newly synthesized major histocompatibility complex class II needs to be directed to late endocytic compartments to combine with peptide antigens. Efficient transport requires complexes of major histocompatibility complex class II and invariant chain (αβIi). Since such complexes have been detected on the plasma membrane in human cells, this compartment was proposed as the primary destination for αβIi exiting the trans‐Golgi network. Here, I have used density gradient electrophoresis and selective biotinylation to investigate the trafficking route of αβIi quantitatively. Density gradient electrophoresis analysis showed that αβIi was transported from the trans‐Golgi network to endosomes at ∼ 1.7% min−1. Surface delivery of αβIi was delayed relative to endosome transport by ∼ 10 min and showed slower kinetics (∼ 0.4% min−1), suggesting that αβIi reached the plasma membrane only after arrival in endosomes. A biotinylation assay revealed that 20–40% of endosomal αβIi was delivered to the plasma membrane at steady state, suggesting that surface αβIi was entirely derived from endosomes. Surface αβIi was rapidly re‐internalized and either returned to the cell surface or accessed degradative compartments. Peptide loading commenced ∼ 30 min after delivery to endosomes. Thus αβIi directly traffics from trans‐Golgi network to endosomes and enters an endosome–plasma membrane ‘carousel’ until transport to peptide‐loading compartments ensues.
Genetic analysis of the Rous sarcoma virus subgroup D env gene: mammal tropism correlates with temperature sensitivity of gp85

Subgroup D avian sarcoma and leukosis viruses can penetrate a variety of mammalian cells in addition to cells from their natural host, chickens. Sequences derived from the gp85-coding domain within the env gene of a mammal-tropic subgroup D virus (Schmidt-Ruppin D strain of Rous sarcoma virus [SR-D RSV]) and a non-mammal-tropic subgroup B virus (Rous-associated virus type 2) were recombined to map genetic determinants that allow penetration of mammalian cells. The following conclusions were based on host range analysis of the recombinant viruses. (i) The determinants of gp85 that result in the mammal tropism phenotype of SR-D RSV are encoded within the 160 codons that lie 3' of codon 121 from the corresponding amino terminus of the gp85 protein. (ii) Small linear domains of the SR-D RSV gp85-coding domain placed in the subgroup B background did not yield viruses with titers equal to that of the subgroup D virus in a human cell line. (iii) Recombinant viruses that contained subgroup D sequences within the hr1 variable domain of gp85 showed modest-to-significant increases in infectivity on human cells relative to chicken cells. A recombinant virus that contained three fortuitous amino acid substitutions in the gp85-coding domain was found to penetrate the human cell line and give a titer similar to that of the subgroup D virus. In addition, we found that the subgroup D virus, the mutant virus, and recombinant viruses with an increased mammal tropism phenotype were unstable at 42 degrees C. These results suggest that the mammal tropism of the SR-D strain is not related to altered receptor specificity but rather to an unstable and fusogenic viral glycoprotein. A temperature sensitivity phenotype for infectivity of mammalian cells was also observed for another mammal-tropic avian retrovirus, the Bratislava 77 strain of RSV, a subgroup C virus, but was not seen for any other avian retrovirus tested, strengthening the correlation between mammal tropism and temperature sensitivity.
Reduction in expression of the benign AR transcriptome is a hallmark of localised prostate cancer progression

Background Despite the importance of androgen receptor (AR) signalling to prostate cancer development, little is known about how this signalling pathway changes with increasing grade and stage of the disease. Objective To explore changes in the normal AR transcriptome in localised prostate cancer, and its relation to adverse pathological features and disease recurrence. Design Publically accessible human prostate cancer expression arrays as well as RNA sequencing data from the prostate TCGA. Tumour associated PSA and PSAD were calculated for a large cohort of men (n=1108) undergoing prostatectomy. Outcome Measurements and Statistical Analysis We performed a meta-analysis of the expression of an androgen-regulated gene set across datasets using Oncomine. Differential expression of selected genes in the prostate TCGA database was probed using the edgeR Bioconductor package. Changes in tumour PSA density with stage and grade were assessed by Student's t-test, and its association with biochemical recurrence explored by Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox regression. Results Meta-analysis revealed a systematic decline in the expression of a previously identified benign prostate androgen-regulated gene set with increasing tumour grade, reaching significance in nine of 25 genes tested despite increasing AR expression. These results were confirmed in a large independent dataset from the TCGA. At the protein level, when serum PSA was corrected for tumour volume, significantly lower levels were observed with increasing tumour grade and stage, and predicted disease recurrence. Conclusions Lower PSA secretion-per-tumour-volume is associated with increasing grade and stage of prostate cancer, has prognostic relevance, and reflects a systematic perturbation of androgen signalling.
A Gaussian Mixture Model Approach to Grouping Patients According to their Hospital Length of Stay

In this paper we propose a new approach capable of determining clinically meaningful patient groups from a given dataset of patient spells. We hypothesise that the skewed distribution of length of stay (LOS) observations, often modelled in the past using mixed exponential equations, is composed of several homogeneous groups that together form the overall skewed LOS distribution. We show how the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) can be used to approximate each group, and discuss each group's possible clinical interpretation and statistical significance. In addition, we show how the health professional can use the outcome of the grouping approach to answer several questions about individual patients and their likely LOS in hospital. Our results demonstrate that the grouping of stroke patient spells estimated by the GMM resembles the clinical experience of stroke patients and the different stroke recovery patterns.
Age Differences in Executive Functions within a Sample of Brazilian Children and Adolescents

Abstract Executive abilities have been suggested to show differential age-related changes. This study aimed to extend this evidence to a Brazilian sample, which was composed of 572 children and adolescents aged 6 to 14 years, assessed in tests of visual and auditory working memory, selective attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, attentional abilities, verbal fluency and planning. ANOVAs revealed significant age effect on performance in all tests, with a trend toward better performance with the progression of age, even in differential ways. Overall, the performance on simpler tests, such as the basic attention, increased with age progression until around 11 or 12 years, when performance becomes more stable. However, in more complex tasks, including working memory tasks, the performance showed a more continuous improvement. There was gender effect in two measures: visual working memory, in which boys outperformed girls, and verbal fluency, in which the girls outperformed boys. In general, the results of this Brazilian sample were similar to those reported by studies conducted in other countries, what suggests that Brazilian socio-cultural specificities, at least of the participants of this sample, were not sufficient to reveal a distinct pattern of progression.
Humanization and Epitope Mapping of Neutralizing Anti-Human Fas Ligand Monoclonal Antibodies: Structural Insights into Fas/Fas Ligand Interaction1

Fas ligand (L)/CD95L, a proapoptotic member of the TNF family, is a potential target for clinical intervention in various diseases. In the present study, we generated a humanized anti-human FasL mAb and characterized the epitopes of neutralizing mAbs by extensive alanine-scanning mutagenesis of human FasL. The predicted molecular model of FasL trimer revealed that the mAbs recognize largely overlapped conformational epitopes that are composed of two clusters, one around the outer tip-forming D-E loop and another near the top of FasL. Both of these sites on FasL are critically involved in the direct interaction with the corresponding receptor, Fas. These results suggest that the mAbs efficiently neutralize FasL cytotoxicity by masking both of these FasL/Fas contact sites.
A current shaping method for PV-AC module DCM-flyback inverter under CCM operation

In the grid interconnected photovoltaic power generation system including PV-AC module system, the output current have to be sinusoidal synchronized with the grid voltage. Concerning the voltage-controlled current-source modification requirement and the characteristics of flyback topology, boundary or discontinuous conduction mode operations are suitable for the PV-AC module flyback inverter. However, the flyback inverter can be operated in continuous conduction mode (CCM) due to its operating conditions in spite of it is designed to operate under boundary or discontinuous conduction mode. Unfortunately, it causes unintended distortion to output current. In this paper, a current shaping method to reduce the output current distortion for the DCM-flyback inverter is proposed. Even though the flyback inverter operates under CCM, the output current distortion can be reduced by the unfolding H-bridge switching technique.
Mortgage debt and time-varying monetary policy transmission

This paper studies the role of monetary policy for the dynamics of US mortgage debt, which accounts for the largest part of household debt. A time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (VAR) model allows us to study the variation in the sensitivity of mortgage debt to monetary policy. We find that an identically sized policy shock became less effective over time. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to show that a fall in the share of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) can replicate this finding. Calibrating the model to the drop in the ARM share since the 1980s yields a decline in the sensitivity of housing debt to monetary policy which is quantitatively similar to the VAR results. A sacrifice ratio for mortgage debt reveals that a policy tightening directed toward reducing household debt became more expensive in terms of a loss in employment. Counterfactuals show that this result cannot be attributed to changes in monetary policy itself.
Resource Abundance and Education

This study explores the links between education, resource incomes, and wealth distribution, using a 2-period household model and data from an Indian fishery. The model predicts an ambiguous and wealth-dependent impact of increasing resource incomes on education. The empirical approach uses geographical variations in exogenously increasing fish catches to show that higher fish catches increase the average education level by increasing the education level of wealthier households but reducing the education level of poorer households.