Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of N-Acetylcysteine on Creatinine Measurement: Protocol for a Systematic Review

Background: N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is an antioxidant which can regenerate glutathione and is primarily used for acetaminophen overdose. It is also a potential therapy to prevent iatrogenic acute kidney injury or slow the progression of chronic kidney disease. It has been considered in this context by many studies with mixed results. Notably, a biological-mechanism rationale for a protective effect of NAC has never been adequately reported. Among conflicting reports, there appears to be evidence that NAC may artificially lower measured serum creatinine without improving kidney function, potentially by assay interference. Given these mixed results, a systematic review of the literature will be conducted to determine whether there is an effect of NAC on kidney function measured with serum creatinine. Objective: To determine the effect of NAC on kidney function. Design: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Settings: Prospective studies, with administration of NAC, in the absence of any other change in kidney function (such as contrast administration or surgery). Patients: Adult humans aged 18 years old or more, either healthy volunteers or with chronic kidney disease, were administered with NAC. Populations having little to no kidney function such as in end-stage kidney disease will be excluded. Measurements: Serum creatinine and/or cystatin C measurements before and after NAC administration. Methods: An information specialist will assist in searching MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane CENTRAL databases to identify all study types including randomized controlled trials, and prospective cohort studies reporting change in serum creatinine after NAC administration. Two reviewers will independently screen the titles and abstracts of the studies obtained from the search using predefined inclusion criteria and will then extract data from the full texts of selected studies. The weighted mean difference will be calculated for change in creatinine with NAC, using random-effects analysis. Quality assessment will be done with the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for randomized trials and the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for observational studies. Results: The outcome of interest is kidney function as reported by either change in serum creatinine and/or serum cystatin C measurement for randomized trials or comparing baseline (pre-NAC dose) values and those following the NAC dose. Limitations: Possible heterogeneity and publication bias and lack of mechanistic data. Conclusions: This systematic review will provide a synthesis of current evidence on the effect of NAC on serum creatinine measurement. These findings will provide clinicians with guidelines and serve as a strong research base for future studies in this field. Systematic review registration: This review is registered with PROSPERO, CRD42017055984
Service Pricing with Loss-Averse Customers

We consider a queueing system in which customers are loss averse towards both price and delay attributes: customers compare these two attributes to their rational expectations of the outcomes, with losses being more painful than equal-sized gains being pleasant. We first study customers' equilibrium queueing strategies. We find that, in contrast to the traditional case in which loss aversion is not considered, there could exist three equilibrium strategies, among which one is an evolutionarily stable strategy. We then study the optimal pricing problem for a monopoly server. We show that loss aversion polarizes queues, making long queues even longer and short queues even shorter. Furthermore, loss aversion towards the delay attribute drives down the optimal price whereas loss aversion towards the price attribute pushes up the optimal price. We also find that profit- and welfare-maximizing prices are not the same in a monopoly market. Finally we consider pricing competition in a duopoly market. We find that (1) in a symmetric duopoly setting, loss aversion can push up the equilibrium price; (2) in an asymmetric duopoly setting, the market share of the server with a higher service rate is larger than that in the traditional setting when loss aversion is not considered.
Impact of Interdisciplinary Outpatient Specialty Palliative Care on Survival and Quality of Life in Adults With Advanced Cancer: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.

BACKGROUND In advanced cancer, patients want to know how their care options may affect survival and quality of life, but the impact of outpatient specialty palliative care on these outcomes in cancer is uncertain. PURPOSE To estimate the impact of outpatient specialty palliative care programs on survival and quality of life in adults with advanced cancer. METHODS Following PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials comparing outpatient specialty palliative care with usual care in adults with advanced cancer. Primary outcomes were 1 year survival and quality of life. Analyses were stratified to compare preliminary studies against higher-quality studies. Secondary outcomes were survival at other endpoints and physical and psychological quality-of-life measures. RESULTS From 2,307 records, we identified nine studies for review, including five high-quality studies. In the three high-quality studies with long-term survival data (n = 646), patients randomized to outpatient specialty palliative care had a 14% absolute increase in 1 year survival relative to controls (56% vs. 42%, p < .001). The survival advantage was also observed at 6, 9, 15, and 18 months, and median survival was 4.56 months longer (14.55 vs. 9.99 months). In the five high-quality studies with quality-of-life data (n = 1,398), outpatient specialty palliative care improved quality-of-life relative to controls (g = .18, p < .001), including for physical and psychological measures. CONCLUSIONS Patients with advanced cancer randomized to receive outpatient specialty palliative care lived longer and had better quality of life. Findings have implications for improving care in advanced cancer.
Obladi: Oblivious Serializable Transactions in the Cloud

This paper presents the design and implementation of Obladi, the first system to provide ACID transactions while also hiding access patterns. Obladi uses as its building block oblivious RAM, but turns the demands of supporting transactions into a performance opportunity. By executing transactions within epochs and delaying commit decisions until an epoch ends, Obladi reduces the amortized bandwidth costs of oblivious storage and increases overall system throughput. These performance gains, combined with new oblivious mechanisms for concurrency control and recovery, allow Obladi to execute OLTP workloads with reasonable throughput: it comes within 5x to 12x of a non-oblivious baseline on the TPC-C, SmallBank, and FreeHealth applications. Latency overheads, however, are higher (70x on TPC-C).
Associations Between Materialism, Gratitude, and Well-Being in Children of Overseas Filipino Workers

Children left behind by parents who are overseas Filipino workers (OFW) benefit from parental migration because their financial status improves. However, OFW families might emphasize the economic benefits to compensate for their separation, which might lead to materialism among children left behind. Previous research indicates that materialism is associated with lower well-being. The theory is that materialism focuses attention on comparing one’s possessions to others, making one constantly dissatisfied and wanting more. Research also suggests that gratitude mediates this link, with the focus on acquiring more possessions that make one less grateful for current possessions. This study explores the links between materialism, gratitude, and well-being among 129 adolescent children of OFWs. The participants completed measures of materialism, gratitude, and well-being (life satisfaction, self-esteem, positive and negative affect). Results showed that gratitude mediated the negative relationship between materialism and well-being (and its positive relationship with negative affect). Children of OFWs who have strong materialist orientation seek well-being from possessions they do not have and might find it difficult to be grateful of their situation, contributing to lower well-being. The findings provide further evidence for the mediated relationship between materialism and well-being in a population that has not been previously studied in the related literature. The findings also point to two possible targets for psychosocial interventions for families and children of OFWs.
On Controls in Ancient Microbiome Studies, and Microbial Resilience in Ancient Samples

In the following comment, we reply to Eisenhofer and Weyrich’s letter “Proper authentication of ancient DNA is still essential” responding to the article “Gut Microbiome and Putative Resistome of Inca and Italian Nobility Mummies” by Santiago-Rodriguez et al. One of the concerns raised was the possibility that the patterns noted in the gut microbiome of pre-Inca/Inca and Italian nobility mummies were due to contamination of the blank control. When examining the blank controls and filtering the operational taxonomic units (OTUs) present in the blank controls, and further performing in-silico contamination analyses, we noticed very similar patterns as those previously reported. We also discuss controls in ancient microbiome studies, and aspects of microbial resilience in ancient samples.
Characteristics of Spontaneous Spinal Cord Infarction and Proposed Diagnostic Criteria

Importance Spinal cord infarction (SCI) is often disabling, and the diagnosis can be challenging without an inciting event (eg, aortic surgery). Patients with a spontaneous SCI are often misdiagnosed as having transverse myelitis. Diagnostic criteria for SCI are lacking, hindering clinical care and research. Objective To describe the characteristics of spontaneous SCI and propose diagnostic criteria. Design, Setting, and Participants An institution-based search tool was used to identify patients evaluated at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, from January 1997 to December 2017 with a spontaneous SCI. Patients provided written consent to use their records for research. Participants were 18 years and older with a diagnosis of spontaneous SCI (n = 133), and controls were selected from a database of alternative myelopathy etiologies for validation of the proposed diagnostic criteria (n = 280). Main Outcomes and Measures A descriptive analysis of SCI was performed and used to propose diagnostic criteria, and the criteria were validated. Results Of 133 included patients with a spontaneous SCI, the median (interquartile range) age at presentation was 60 (52-69) years, and 101 (76%) had vascular risk factors. Rapid onset of severe deficits reaching nadir within 12 hours was typical (102 [77%]); some had a stuttering decline (31 [23%]). Sensory loss occurred in 126 patients (95%), selectively affecting pain/temperature in 49 (39%). Initial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) spine results were normal in 30 patients (24%). Characteristic MRI T2-hyperintense patterns included owl eyes (82 [65%]) and pencil-like hyperintensity (50 [40%]); gadolinium enhancement (37 of 96 [39%]) was often linear and located in the anterior gray matter. Confirmatory MRI findings included diffusion-weighted imaging/apparent diffusion coefficient restriction (19 of 29 [67%]), adjacent dissection/occlusion (16 of 82 [20%]), and vertebral body infarction (11 [9%]). Cerebrospinal fluid showed mild inflammation in 7 of 89 patients (8%). Diagnostic criteria was proposed for definite, probable, and possible SCI of periprocedural and spontaneous onset. In the validation cohort (n = 280), 9 patients (3%) met criteria for possible SCI, and none met criteria for probable SCI. Conclusions and Relevance This large series of spontaneous SCIs provides clinical, laboratory, and MRI clues to SCI diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria proposed here will aid clinicians in making the correct diagnosis and ideally improve future care for patients with SCI. The validation of these criteria supports their utility in the evaluation of acute myelopathy.
Adiponectin and resistin in acutely ill and weight-recovered adolescent anorexia nervosa: Association with psychiatric symptoms

Abstract Objectives: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a chronic illness where restriction of food intake results in decreased adipose tissue. The aim of this study was to measure the concentration of adiponectin and resistin in acute and partially weight-recovered anorectic inpatients. The associations of their levels with eating disorder symptoms were also assessed. Methods: A longitudinal study was conducted on 76 adolescent patients (ANG) and 30 age-matched healthy girls (CG). Selected adipokines serum levels, as well as the severity of depressive, obsessive-compulsive and disturbed eating behaviours, were analysed in the group of anorectic patients before (accAN) and after weight gain (recAN) and compared with the CG. Results: The concentration of adiponectin in the accAN was higher than in the CG (P = 0.05) and increased in recAN (P = 0.01). Resistin concentrations were lower in accAN and recAN than in the CG (P = 0.00). A negative correlation between adiponectin and the scores in Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale as well as positive between resistin and Beck Depression Inventory were found. Conclusions: In the acute AN, adiponectin and resistin levels are impaired and partial weight recovery fails to normalise them thus we suggest that they can be involved in the chronicity of certain symptoms. The level of adiponectin is associated with obsessive and compulsive symptoms and resistin with depressive symptoms, which indicates their potential contribution to the regulation of emotions and behaviours in AN.
Diagnostic Single Gene Analyses Beyond Sanger

Summary Molecular testing of congenital coagulation and platelet disorders offers confirmation of clinical diagnoses, supports genetic counselling, and enables predictive and prenatal diagnosis. In some cases, genotype-phenotype correlations are important for predicting the clinical course of the disease and adaptation of individualized therapy. Until recently, genotyping has been mainly performed by Sanger sequencing. While next generation sequencing (NGS) enables the parallel analysis of multiple genes, the cost-value ratio of custom-made panels can be unfavorable for analyses of specific small genes. The aim of this study was to transfer genotyping of small genes involved in congenital coagulation and platelet disorders from Sanger sequencing to an NGS-based method. A LR-PCR approach for target enrichment of the entire genomic regions of the genes F7, F10, F11, F12, GATA1, MYH9, TUBB1 and WAS was combined with high-throughput sequencing on a MiSeq platform. NGS detected all variants that had previously been identified by Sanger sequencing. Our results demonstrate that this approach is an accurate and flexible tool for molecular genetic diagnostics of single small genes.
Iterative quality enhancement via residual-artifact learning networks for low-dose CT

Radiation exposure and the associated risk of cancer for patients in computed tomography (CT) scans have been major clinical concerns. The radiation exposure can be reduced effectively via lowering the x-ray tube current (mA). However, this strategy may lead to excessive noise and streak artifacts in the conventional filtered back-projection reconstructed images. To address this issue, some deep convolutional neural network (ConvNet) based approaches have been developed for low-dose CT imaging inspired by the recent development of machine learning. Nevertheless, some of the image textures reconstructed by the ConvNet could be corrupted by the severe streaks, especially in ultra-low-dose cases, which could be close to prostheses and hamper diagnosis. Therefore, in this work, we propose an iterative residual-artifact learning ConvNet (IRLNet) approach to improve the reconstruction performance over the ConvNet based approaches. Specifically, the proposed IRLNet estimates the high-frequency details within the noise and then removes them iteratively; after eliminating severe streaks in the low-dose CT images, the residual low-frequency details can be processed through the conventional network. Moreover, the proposed IRLNet scheme can be extended for robust handling of quantitative dual energy CT/cerebral perfusion CT imaging, and statistical iterative reconstruction. Real patient data are used to evaluate the proposed IRLNet, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IRLNet approach outperforms the previous ConvNet based approaches in reducing the image noise and streak artifacts efficiently at the same time as preserving edge details well, suggesting that the proposed IRLNet approach can be used to improve the CT image quality, especially in ultra-low-dose cases.
Do Better Quality Embedding Potentials Accelerate the Convergence of QM/MM Models? The Case of Solvated Acid Clusters

This study examines whether the use of more accurate embedding potentials improves the convergence of quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) models with respect to the size of the QM region. In conjunction with density functional theory calculations using the ωB97X-D functional, various embedding potentials including the TIP3P water model, the effective fragment potential (EFP), and semi-empirical methods (PM6, PM7, and DFTB) were used to simulate the deprotonation energies of solvated acid clusters. The calculations were performed on solvated neutral (HA) and cationic (HB+) acids clusters containing 160 and 480 water molecules using configurations sampled from molecular dynamics simulations. Consistently, the ωB97X-D/EFP model performed the best when using a minimal QM region size. The performance for the other potentials appears to be highly sensitive to the charge character of the acid/base pair. Neutral acids display the expected trend that semi-empirical methods generally perform better than TIP3P; however, an opposite trend was observed for the cationic acids. Additionally, electronic embedding provided an improvement over mechanical embedding for the cationic systems, but not the neutral acids. For the best performing ωB97X-D/EFP model, a QM region containing about 6% of the total number of solvent molecules is needed to approach within 10 kJ mol−1 of the pure QM result if the QM region was chosen based on the distance from the reaction centre.
An Improved Yaw Estimation Algorithm for Land Vehicles Using MARG Sensors

This paper presents a linear Kalman filter for yaw estimation of land vehicles using magnetic angular rate and gravity (MARG) sensors. A gyroscope measurement update depending on the vehicle status and constraining yaw estimation is introduced. To determine the vehicle status, the correlations between outputs from different sensors are analyzed based on the vehicle kinematic model and Coriolis theorem, and a vehicle status marker is constructed. In addition, a two-step measurement update method is designed. The method treats the magnetometer measurement update separately after the other updates and eliminates its impact on attitude estimation. The performances of the proposed algorithm are tested in experiments and the results show that: the introduced measurement update is an effective supplement to the magnetometer measurement update in magnetically disturbed environments; the two-step measurement update method makes attitude estimation immune to errors induced by magnetometer measurement update, and the proposed algorithm provides more reliable yaw estimation for land vehicles than the conventional algorithm.
Preserving executive functions in nondominant frontal lobe glioma surgery: an intraoperative tool.

OBJECTIVEThe goal of surgery for gliomas is maximal tumor removal while preserving the patient's full functional integrity. At present during frontal tumor removal, this goal is mostly achieved, although the risk of impairing the executive functions (EFs), and thus the quality of life, remains significant. The authors investigated the accuracy of an intraoperative version of the Stroop task (iST), adapted for intraoperative mapping, to detect EF-related brain sites by evaluating the impact of the iST brain mapping on preserving functional integrity following a maximal tumor resection.METHODSForty-five patients with nondominant frontal gliomas underwent awake surgery; brain mapping was used to establish the functional boundaries for the resection. In 18 patients language, praxis, and motor functions, but not EFs (control group), were mapped intraoperatively at the cortical-subcortical level. In 27 patients, in addition to language, praxis, and motor functions, EFs were mapped with the iST at the cortical-subcortical level (Stroop group). In both groups the EF performance was evaluated preoperatively, at 7 days and 3 months after surgery.RESULTSThe iST was successfully administered in all patients. Consistent interferences, such as color-word inversion/latency, were obtained by stimulating precise white matter sites below the inferior and middle frontal gyri, anterior to the insula and over the putamen, and these were used to establish the posterior functional limit of the resection. Procedures implemented with iST dramatically reduced the EF deficits at 3 months. The EOR was similar in Stroop and control groups.CONCLUSIONSBrain mapping with the iST allows identification and preservation of the frontal lobe structures involved in inhibition of automatic responses, reducing the incidence of postoperative EF deficits and enhancing the further posterior and inferior margin of tumor resection.
Effects of repeated fumonisin B1 exposure on markers of oxidative stress in liver, kidneys, and lungs of C57BL/6 mice

Abstract Fu monisin B1 (FB1) is a mycotoxin commonly found in maize and maize-based products. Ingestion of FB1-contaminated causes a myriad of dose- and species-dependent toxic effects to human and animal health. In the present study we evaluated the effects of FB1 (8 mg/kg, i.p. for 4 days) on body weight and oxidative stress parameters in the liver, kidney and lung of C57BL/6 male mice. No changes in the organ-to-body weight ratio, organ-to-adrenal gland weight ratio or organ-to-brain weight ratio were found. On the other hand, FB1 exposure increased NPSH levels in liver and lungs whereas decreased FRAP content in liver and kidneys. Levels of TBARS, ascorbic acid and NOx content were not altered by FB1. In summary, four days of FB1 exposure are sufficient to disrupt antioxidant defenses in liver, kidneys and lungs of C57BL/6 male mice without concomitant changes in organs weight.
Binding of Red Clover Isoflavones to Actin as A Potential Mechanism of Anti-Metastatic Activity Restricting the Migration of Cancer Cells

Actin functions are crucial for the ability of the cell to execute dynamic cytoskeleton reorganization and movement. Nutraceuticals that form complexes with actin and reduce its polymerization can be used in cancer therapy to prevent cell migration and metastasis of tumors. The aim of this study was to evaluate the ability of isoflavones to form complexes with actin. Docking simulation and isothermal titration calorimetry were used for this purpose. The formation of complexes by hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic and π-π interactions was demonstrated. Interactions occurred at the ATP binding site, which may limit the rotation of the actin molecule observed during polymerization and also at the site responsible for contacts during polymerization, reducing the ability of the molecule to form filaments. The greatest therapeutic potential was demonstrated by isoflavones occurring in red clover sprouts, i.e., biochanin A and formononetin, being methoxy derivatives of genistein and daidzein.