Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating clinically meaningful change on the ITP-PAQ: preliminary estimates of minimal important differences

ABSTRACT Objective: Interpretation of data from health-related quality of life (HRQoL) questionnaires can be enhanced with the availability of minimally important difference (MID) estimates. This information will aid clinicians in interpreting HRQoL differences within patients over time and between treatment groups. The Immune Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP)-Patient Assessment Questionnaire (PAQ) is the only comprehensive HRQoL questionnaire available for adults with ITP. Research design and methods: Forty centers from within the US and Europe enrolled ITP patients into one of two multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, 6-month, phase III clinical trials of romiplostim. Patients enrolled in these studies self-administered the ITP-PAQ and two items assessing global change (anchors) at baseline and weeks 4, 12, and 24. Using data from the ITP-PAQ and these two anchors, an anchor-based estimate was computed and combined with the standard error of measurement and standard deviation to compute a distribution-based estimate in order to provide an MID range for each of the 11 scales of the ITP-PAQ. Results: A total of 125 patients participated in these clinical trials and provided data for use in these analyses. Combining results from anchor- and distribution-based approaches, MID values were computed for 9 of the 11 scales. MIDs ranged from 8 to 12 points for Symptoms, Bother, Psychological, Overall QOL, Social Activity, Menstrual Symptoms, and Fertility, while the range was 10 to 15 points for the Fatigue and Activity scales of the ITP-PAQ. These estimates, while slightly higher than other published MID estimates, were consistent with moderate effect sizes. Conclusions: These MID estimates will serve as a useful tool to researchers and clinicians using the ITP-PAQ, providing guidance for interpretation of baseline scores as well as changes in ITP-PAQ scores over time. Additional work should be done to finalize these initial estimates using more appropriate anchors that correlate more highly with the ITP-PAQ scales.
The Effect of Manipulating the IL-6 Response to Exercise on Biomarkers and Exercise Performance

Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a pluripotent cytokine which has inflammatory properties. It is suggested to mediate a variety of processes including increased perception of fatigue during inflammatory states. In addition, prolonged exercise can cause a marked increase in circulating IL-6, and although there is a widely reported association between plasma IL-6 and fatigue in disease and inflammatory conditions, this relationship has remained relatively unexplored in healthy individuals during exercise. Therefore, the aims of this thesis were firstly, to develop a repeatable preload time trial in order to examine the variability of circulating IL-6 and other signalling molecules in response to an exercise challenge; secondly, to investigate the effect of plasma IL-6 and signalling molecules on fatigue and performance during a pre-loaded time trial; and thirdly, to evaluate the impact of nutritional interventions (glutamine intake during exercise, manipulation of pre-exercise diet and carbohydrate intake during exercise) on the response of circulating IL-6, IL-6 signalling molecules and biomarkers associated with IL-6 during exercise and their effect on preload time trial performance. Results from the studies determined that there was large variability in the plasma IL-6 and signalling receptors response to the pre-loaded time trial (8-20%) but that the exercise protocol was repeatable. Nutritional interventions did not alter the signalling receptor response, nor biomarkers associated with IL-6, including hepcidin. However, carbohydrate intake during exercise attenuated the circulating IL-6 response to exercise by 49% which correlated well with an improved time trial performance. Regardless of the intervention, a consistent finding in all studies indicated that a greater plasma IL-6 response to the preload exercise bout correlated well with a reduced relative exercise performance as a percentage of velocity at VO 2max during the subsequent time trial. To summarise, the findings from this thesis indicate that elevated levels of plasma IL-6 are associated with a decrement in exercise performance. Associated IL-6 signalling molecules are elevated in response to exercise but are not associated with performance and are unaltered by nutritional interventions.
Telomere Length Varies by DNA Extraction Method: Implications for Epidemiologic Research—Response

We thank Hofmann and colleagues (1) for their report corroborating our discovery that the method used to extractDNA fromblood cells influences themeasurement of telomere length (2). Hoffman and colleagues found that peripheral leukocyte telomere lengthsmeasured by quantitative PCR were significantly longer in DNA that had been extracted by the ReliaPrep magnetic bead capture chemistry than in DNA extracted by the QIAamp column method. This echoes our finding that QIAamp DNA extraction yielded shorter telomeres than DNA extracted by either liquid phase phenol/chloroform or the salting out method Puregene. In addition, Hofmann and colleagues determined that QIAamp extracted samples had a higher copy number of mitochondrial (mt)DNA than mtDNA extracted by ReliaPrep. We acknowledge their important contribution highlighting that DNA extraction method may affect our ability to compare results across studies of not only telomere length but alsowith regard to mtDNA copy number. These new results underscore our conclusion that the use of QIAamp extracted DNA for telomere length quantification is subject to systematic measurement error that may limit studies in detecting associations between telomere length and outcomes.
Focusing on abuse, not use: A proposed new direction for US drug policy

How professionals and societies deal with drugs and drug consumption is premised on how abuse is defined. The “War on Drugs” approach promotes the belief that “any use is abuse” where the currently illicit drugs are concerned. Regrettably, any distinction between use and abuse has been notably absent from most public policy decisions on drug issues. Even a cursory review of both supply and demand reduction policies of the past century reveals a startling lack of awareness of this distinction. The failure of differentiation undermines prevention, treatment, and the criminal justice system. Treatment, thus, tends to show a bias toward ineffective models such as “boot camps” and “tough love”. It has contributed to controversy over maintenance treatments, such as methadone, buprenorphine, and heroin, which have proven to be highly effective for some addicted persons. It leads to treatment options for the addictions being far more limited and constrained than is typical in other areas of health care. Admittedly, studying non-problematic drug use has been a challenge, but clearly the use of illegal drugs is often not harmful, any more than is moderate alcohol use. Addiction is a fatal disease for some and that disease should be the focus of our policies.
Vagal innervation is required for pulmonary function phenotype in Htr4-/- mice.

Human genome-wide association studies have identified over 50 loci associated with pulmonary function and related phenotypes, yet follow-up studies to determine causal genes or variants are rare. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in serotonin receptor 4 (HTR4) are associated with human pulmonary function in genome-wide association studies and follow-up animal work has demonstrated that Htr4 is causally associated with pulmonary function in mice, although the precise mechanisms were not identified. We sought to elucidate the role of neural innervation and pulmonary architecture in the lung phenotype of Htr4-/- animals. We report here that the Htr4-/- phenotype in mouse is dependent on vagal innervation to the lung. Both ex vivo tracheal ring reactivity and in vivo flexiVent pulmonary functional analyses demonstrate that vagotomy abrogates the Htr4-/- airway hyperresponsiveness phenotype. Hyperpolarized 3He gas magnetic resonance imaging and stereological assessment of wild-type and Htr4-/- mice reveal no observable differences in lung volume, inflation characteristics, or pulmonary microarchitecture. Finally, control of breathing experiments reveal substantive differences in baseline breathing characteristics between mice with/without functional HTR4 in breathing frequency, relaxation time, flow rate, minute volume, time of inspiration and expiration and breathing pauses. These results suggest that HTR4's role in pulmonary function likely relates to neural innervation and control of breathing.
Evaluation of Machine Learning-based Anomaly Detection Algorithms on an Industrial Modbus/TCP Data Set

In the context of the Industrial Internet of Things, communication technology, originally used in home and office environments, is introduced into industrial applications. Commercial off-the-shelf products, as well as unified and well-established communication protocols make this technology easy to integrate and use. Furthermore, productivity is increased in comparison to classic industrial control by making systems easier to manage, set up and configure. Unfortunately, most attack surfaces of home and office environments are introduced into industrial applications as well, which usually have very few security mechanisms in place. Over the last years, several technologies tackling that issue have been researched. In this work, machine learning-based anomaly detection algorithms are employed to find malicious traffic in a synthetically generated data set of Modbus/TCP communication of a fictitious industrial scenario. The applied algorithms are Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, k-nearest neighbour and k-means clustering. Due to the synthetic data set, supervised learning is possible. Support Vector Machine and k-nearest neighbour perform well with different data sets, while k-nearest neighbour and k-means clustering do not perform satisfactorily.
Apnea patients characterized by 0.02 Hz peak in the multitaper spectrogram of electrocardiogram signals

The authors present a method for identifying patients suffering from the sleep disorder apnea on the basis of their Electro-Cardiograms (EGCs). The method is a simple algorithm which utilises characteristic features present in the ECG spectrogram. Additionally they describe extensions which enable assessment of whether a subject is experiencing apnea on a minute by minute basis. The authors find that the most informative spectral feature is a previously observed low frequency oscillation at 0.02 Hz. The oscillation is present during apnea episodes in both the raw ECG signal and also the point process signal formed from the beat times. This indicates that there is a change in the intrinsic dynamics of the system regulating the cardiac cycle heart during apnea episodes. The method was applied to a test set of data provided by Dr Penzel for the 'Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2000' competition and classified all subjects correctly (30/30=100%) and scored 15257/17268=88% on the minute by minute classification. Entrant 7 Entry numbers 20000503.123923 and 20000916.193931.
Prosody perception and musical pitch discrimination in adults using cochlear implants

Abstract Objectives: This study investigated prosodic perception and musical pitch discrimination in adults using cochlear implants (CI), and examined the relationship between prosody perception scores and non-linguistic auditory measures, demographic variables, and speech recognition scores. Design: Participants were given four subtests of the PEPS-C (profiling elements of prosody in speech-communication), the adult paralanguage subtest of the DANVA 2 (diagnostic analysis of non verbal accuracy 2), and the contour and interval subtests of the MBEA (Montreal battery of evaluation of amusia). Study sample: Twelve CI users aged 25;5 to 78;0 years participated. Results: CI participants performed significantly more poorly than normative values for New Zealand adults for PEPS-C turn-end, affect, and contrastive stress reception subtests, but were not different from the norm for the chunking reception subtest. Performance on the DANVA 2 adult paralanguage subtest was lower than the normative mean reported by Saindon (2010). Most of the CI participants performed at chance level on both MBEA subtests. Conclusion: CI users have difficulty perceiving prosodic information accurately. Difficulty in understanding different aspects of prosody and music may be associated with reduced pitch perception ability.
Endometrial Cancer: Combined MR Volumetry and Diffusion-weighted Imaging for Assessment of Myometrial and Lymphovascular Invasion and Tumor Grade.

PURPOSE To investigate magnetic resonance (MR) volumetry of endometrial tumors and its association with deep myometrial invasion, tumor grade, and lymphovascular invasion and to assess the value of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) histographic analysis of the whole tumor volume for prediction of tumor grade and lymphovascular invasion. MATERIALS AND METHODS The institutional review board approved this retrospective study; patient consent was not required. Between May 2010 and May 2012, 70 women (mean age, 64 years; range, 24-91 years) with endometrial cancer underwent preoperative MR imaging, including axial oblique and sagittal T2-weighted, dynamic contrast material-enhanced, and diffusion-weighted imaging. Volumetry of the tumor and uterus was performed during the six sequences, with manual tracing of each section, and the tumor volume ratio (TVR) was calculated. ADC histograms were generated from pixel ADCs from the whole tumor volume. The threshold of TVR associated with myometrial invasion was assessed by using receiver operating characteristic curves. An independent sample Mann Whitney U test was used to compare differences in ADCs, skewness, and kurtosis between tumor grade and the presence of lymphovascular invasion. RESULTS No significant difference in tumor volume and TVR was found among the six MR imaging sequences (P = .95 and .86, respectively). A TVR greater than or equal to 25% allowed prediction of deep myometrial invasion with sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 93% (area under the curve, 0.96; 95% confidence interval: 0.86, 0.99) at axial oblique diffusion-weighted imaging. A TVR of greater than or equal to 25% was associated with grade 3 tumors (P = .0007) and with lymphovascular invasion (P < .0001). There was no significant difference in the ADCs between grades 1 and 2 tumors (P > .05). The minimum, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile ADCs were significantly lower in grade 3 tumors than in grades 1 and 2 tumors (P < .02). CONCLUSION The combination of whole tumor volume and ADC can be used for prediction of tumor grade, lymphovascular invasion, and depth of myometrial invasion.
Deficiência de iodo e fatores associados em lactentes e pré-escolares de um município do semiárido de Minas Gerais, Brasil, 2008

The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of iodine deficiency in children aged 6 to 71 months in Novo Cruzeiro, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. A total of 475 children, allocated by stratified probability sampling, were analyzed with respect to the iodine concentrations in the salt consumed by the family and urinary iodine. Iodine deficiency was verified in 34.4% of the children, of which 23.5% showed slight deficiency, 5.9% moderate and 5% serious deficiency. A difference in the distribution of iodine deficiency was observed between the urban and the rural environments (p < 0.001) where average urinary iodine concentrations of 150.8 and 114. 3µg/L respectively were found. A greater proportion of iodine deficiency was observed among children where the proportion of iodine in the salt consumed was below the recommended level. Although expressive, iodine deficiency in Novo Cruzeiro is not a public health problem according to World Health Organization (WHO), The limitrophe distribution of the urinary iodine associated with low iodine levels in salt suggests that efforts to control this deficiency are not yet complete.
Quality of Life: An Important Issue in Geriatric Research

Quality of life (QOL) is a popular term that conveys an overall sense of well-being, including aspects of happiness and satisfaction with life as a whole. It is broad and subjective rather than specific and objective. What makes it so challenging to measure is that, although the term “quality of life” has meaning for nearly everyone and every academic discipline, what it actually means is somewhat different for each individual and group. How do you reach accord about a measure for quality of life? Perhaps the strongest area of a consensus is that quality of life is extraordinarily broad and conceptually complex, yet measures are most meaningful when they measure key concepts in a logical way and are as precise as possible.
Randomized trial of a behavioral intervention to prevent excessive gestational weight gain: the Fit for Delivery Study.

BACKGROUND Excessive weight gain during pregnancy is a major risk factor for postpartum weight retention and future weight gain and obesity in women, but few adequately powered randomized controlled trials have examined the efficacy of a behavioral weight-control intervention during pregnancy. OBJECTIVE This study examined whether a behavioral intervention during pregnancy could decrease the proportion of women who exceeded the 1990 Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommendations for gestational weight gains and increase the proportion of women who returned to pregravid weights by 6 mo postpartum. DESIGN This study was a randomized, assessor-blind, controlled trial. Participants were pregnant (13.5 wk gestation), normal-weight (NW; n = 201) and overweight or obese (OW/OB; n = 200) women whose average age was 28.8 y. Participants were randomly assigned within the 1990 IOM weight category (NW compared with OW/OB) to standard care (n = 200) or to a behavioral intervention to prevent excessive gestational weight gain (n = 201). The intervention included one face-to-face visit; weekly mailed materials that promoted an appropriate weight gain, healthy eating, and exercise; individual graphs of weight gain; and telephone-based feedback. The retention at the 6-mo postpartum assessment was 82%. RESULTS Intent-to-treat analyses showed that the intervention, compared with standard care, decreased the percentage of NW women who exceeded IOM recommendations (40.2% compared with 52.1%; P = 0.003) and increased the percentages of NW and OW/OB women who returned to their pregravid weights or below by 6 mo postpartum (30.7% compared with 18.7%; P = 0.005). CONCLUSION A low-intensity behavioral intervention during pregnancy reduced excessive gestational weight gains in NW women and prevented postpartum weight retention in NW and OW/OB women. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01117961.
Galenic formulation and antimicrobial activities of tablets made from essential oil of Lippia multiflora Moldenke (Verbenaceae)

Essential oil-containing tablets made from essential oil of Lippia muItiflora Moldenke have been developed with an intention to treat buccal and pharyngeal infections after perlingual administration. Tablets were accomplished with Arabic gum, mannitol and L. multfloraessential oils (2.5‰ w/w) and tested for antimicrobial activity using agar dilution techniques. The tablets were tested against strains from buccal and pharyngeal flora like Streptococcus βhemolyticus A, Streptococcus α hemolyticus, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus nonaureus, Enterococcus faecalis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and fungi Candida albicans. Galenical and biogalenical controls proved to be satisfactory. Essential oil-containing tablets possessed significant antimicrobial effect. Gram-positive bacteria and fungi were more sensitive to test tablets than Gram-negative bacteria. The essential oil of L. multiflora formulated in tablets retained its antimicrobial activity against oral and pharyngeal pathogen. Key words: Lippia multiflora, essential oil, essential oil-containing tablets, antimicrobial.
Transcatheter Closure of Atrial Septal Defect

Background and Objectives:We report our initial experience with percutaneous transvenous closure of atrial septal defects (ASD). Materials and Method:Between September 1997 and May 2000, we attempted transcatheter closure of ASD in 18 patients using CardioSEALTM (8), STARFlexTM (4) and Amplatzer septal occluder (6). The ages of patients ranged from 4.5-64.8 (mean 32.8) years, with body weight ranging from 1676 (mean 51) kg, Qp/Qs ratio from 1.3-3.4 (mean 2.2). Results:Embolization of the device occurred in two patients;right pulmonary artery in one and left atrium in the other. In one patient, the device slipped into the right atrium before detachment. After retrieval of the device, the defect was thought to be too large for transcatheter closure. There were no other complications apart from a transient aggravation of pre-existing atrial premature beats in two patients. There was no significant size difference observed between the data measured by transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography. The stretched ASD diameter was larger (5.1±3.2 mm) than the size measured by transesophageal echocardiography. In the remaining 15 patients, complete closure of the defects was confirmed by transthoracic echocardiography on the 1-day or 1-month follow-up. During the same period, transcatheter closure of the patent foramen ovale(PFO) was also attempted in 7 stroke patients. The guidewire could not be passed in 2 of the patients. In the other 5 patients, transcatheter closure was successfully performed without any problems. Though the follow-up period may have been short, no patients demonstrated further stroke attack. Conclusion:Transcatheter closure of ASD can be performed with high efficiency and safety if patient selection criteria is adequate. The indication for ASD closure can be extended to patients with larger defects. Transcatheter closure of PFO is an easy and safe procedure, although the indications of PFO closure in patients with stroke remain unclear. Further evaluation is required to discern the long-term results. (Korean Circulation J 2001;31(6):576-583)
THE RELATIONSHIP OF SCHOOL UNIFORMS TO STUDENT ATTENDANCE, ACHIEVEMENT, AND DISCIPLINE

This causal-comparative study examined the relationship of school uniforms to attendance, academic achievement, and discipline referral rates, using data collected from two high schools in rural southwest Georgia county school systems, one with a uniforms program and one without a uniforms program. After accounting for race and students with disabilities status, School A (with uniforms) had significantly better attendance and somewhat fewer minor behavior infractions, but trended lower in standardized math scores and more intermediate and major behavioral infractions than School B (without uniforms). These findings failed to demonstrate an unambiguous advantage of school uniforms, consistent with the mixed results across reports in the published literature. Implications and suggestions for further research are detailed.