Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Health of Senior Australians and the Out-of-Pocket Healthcare Costs They Face

The survey was funded through an NHMRC program grant to the Menzies Centre for Health Policy. The survey discussed in this report was funded by Menzies Centre for Health Policy as part of the Serious and Continuing Illness Policy and Practice Study, and was managed by staff at the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute. The survey sample was drawn from members of National Seniors Australia, and the authors thank National Seniors Australia for their assistance in providing this sample, and members of National Seniors Australia for their willingness to respond to the study.
Sistema de encuesta virtual sobre los políticos en Perú basado en redes sociales

En la actualidad, existen muchas encuestadoras que realizan estudios acerca de la sensibilidad politica que tiene la sociedad peruana, como IPSOS y DATUM PERU, hacia personalidades como congresistas, presidentes, gobernantes, entre otros. Por medio de este analisis pueden determinar el impacto que han tenido dichos gobernantes, mediante sus obras, diligencias, avances de gobierno, etc. Este trabajo no investigara el ambito politico; sin embargo, empleara el ‘data-mining’ como medio para obtener estadisticos o conclusiones de apreciacion politica mucho mas seguros ya que la extraccion de data se hace directamente de comentarios publicos sin alteracion. Esta alteracion ha sido detectada por los ciudadanos cuando las encuestas declaraban ratios que no iban necesariamente con lo situacion real. Por otro lado, para realizar encuestas se destinan recursos de tiempo y costo incluso, a veces, durante largos periodos de tiempos. Las tecnicas de data-mining proveen una solucion mas sencilla y eficaz sin el uso de muchos recursos, solo de personal experimentado para aplicarla. Existen otras aplicaciones sobre todo en el sector empresarial que manejan gran cantidad de datos (comentarios de sus clientes acerca de determinado servicio o producto) y en base a ello analizan el progreso de su negocio, detectando problemas e incluso oportunidades de desarrollar productos. En este documento nos enfocaremos en determinar la apreciacion de la sociedad peruana hacia los principales personajes politicos: Martin Vizcarra, Keiko Fujimori, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia.
Geographical and Social Inequalities in Health and Health Behaviour in the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study(HUNT)

The global obesity epidemic is a major public health concern and there is strong evidence that the drivers are varied and operate via diverse pathways. Taking a systems approach allows the contextual influences operating upon the individual to be identified and quantified. We adopt such a perspective in this study, where longitudinal data from a cohort of 24,966 settled individuals participating in two major health surveys, the Nord-Trondelag Health Study (HUNT 1 and 2) in the county of Nord-Trondelag, Norway, were used to investigate associations between individual, family and area characteristics and two outcomes: body mass index (BMI) at follow-up and BMI change over an 11 year period. Linear multilevel models were fitted, with individuals nested in 17,500 families, 447 wards and 24 municipalities. A range of putative individual, family, and area predictors were tested. We found both outcomes were strongly associated with individual characteristics, with higher BMIs generally being amongst males, unmarried participants, non-smokers, those of lower education and those undertaking physically demanding work but participating in less physical activity outside work. The characteristics of those in the sample exhibiting higher BMI gain were rather similar except that women gained more and those with no employment income gained less. Contextual influences were also found to be important: although just 1% of the unexplained variance was located on the neighbourhood and municipality levels respectively, and hence suggesting small environmental influences, between 10 and 13% could be attributed to families, highlighting the importance of the familial contextual environment. Rather little is known about the manner by which family influences may operate on bodyweight hence further work is needed to understand likely mechanisms and guide future interventions. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Association of ACE Polymorphism and Diabetic Nephropathy in South Indian Patients

ABSTRACTObjective To study the association of ACEgene polymorphism and diabetic nephropathyin South Indian subjects. Setting Outpatient clinic of a specializedhospital. Patients The study included 109 South Indiantype 2 diabetic patients (72 males and 37females; age 56.7±9.0 years, mean±SD). Thepatients were subdivided into two groups:nephropathic (n=86) and normoalbuminuricpatients (n=23). Interventions Genomic DNA was isolatedfrom the peripheral blood leukocytes. Todetermine the ACE genotype, genomic DNAwas amplified by PCR initially using a flankingprimer pair and, subsequently when necessary,with a primer pair that recognizes the insertionspecific sequence for confirmation of thespecificity of the amplification reactions. Main outcome measures ACE genotypedistribution in the two study groups. Results In the nephropathic patients, ID andDD genotypes were present in 52.3% and27.9% of the patients, respectively as comparedto 34.8% and 21.7% respectively in those withnormoalbuminuria. The D allele was present in80.2% of the nephropathic patients and 56.5%of the normoalbuminuric patients χ
Comparing gene regulatory inferring algorithms with different perspective

More than hundred algorithms were developed to infer Gene Regulatory Networks (GRN) describing relations between genes. GRN construction has been a field of interest to researchers since the beginning of the current century. Many competitions were held to encourage the development of GRN inference algorithms, such competitions offer synthetic data to enable the validation of proposed algorithms. A GRN is constructed from an adjacency matrix which contains relations between genes. The developers of many of the GRN inference algorithms set a threshold on the adjacency matrix to construct GRN based on high gene-gene relation weights. This threshold strategy was followed in previous studies to increase the accuracy of any algorithm but yet based on no well-known rule. A different perspective here is to compare different GRN inference algorithms without setting any threshold. Comparison in this work is among different GRN inference algorithms by implementing all algorithms with no threshold on values of adjacency matrices: Differential Equation methods (TSNI), Granger Causality, GP4GRN, GENIE3, NIMEFI (SVR), and PLSNET. Another comparison between different distance metric equations to create adjacency matrix is also studied in an attempt to construct GRN. GP4GRN and GENIE3 participate in producing best results for dream4 InSilico_Size10 while GENIE3 produce best results for all networks of dream4 InSilico_Size100.
Lovastatin Inhibits HIV-1-Induced MHC-I Downregulation by Targeting Nef–AP-1 Complex Formation: A New Strategy to Boost Immune Eradication of HIV-1 Infected Cells

Current combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) mainly targets 3 of the 15 HIV proteins leaving many potential viral vulnerabilities unexploited. To purge the HIV-1 latent reservoir, various strategies including “shock and kill” have been developed. A key question is how to restore impaired immune surveillance. HIV-1 protein Nef has long been known to mediate the downregulation of cell-surface MHC-I and assist HIV-1 to evade the immune system. Through high throughput screening of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs, we identified lovastatin, a statin drug, to significantly antagonize Nef to downregulate MHC-I, CD4, and SERINC5, and inhibit the intrinsic infectivity of virions. In addition, lovastatin boosted autologous CTLs to eradicate the infected cells and effectively inhibit the subsequent viral rebound in CD4+ T-lymphocytes isolated from HIV-1-infected individuals receiving suppressive cART. Furthermore, we found that lovastatin inhibits Nef-induced MHC-I downregulation by directly binding with Nef and disrupting the Nef–AP-1 complex. These results demonstrate that lovastatin is a promising agent for counteracting Nef-mediated downregulation of MHC-I, CD4, and SERINC5. Lovastatin could potentially be used in the clinic to enhance anti-HIV-1 immune surveillance.
Semantic Incongruency Interferes With Endogenous Attention in Cross-Modal Integration of Semantically Congruent Objects

Efficient multisensory integration is often influenced by other cognitive processes including, but not limited to, semantic congruency and focused endogenous attention. Semantic congruency can re-allocate processing resources to the location of a congruent stimulus, while attention can prioritize the integration of multi-sensory stimuli under focus. Here, we explore the robustness of this phenomenon in the context of three stimuli, two of which are in the focus of endogenous attention. Participants completed an endogenous attention task with a stimulus compound consisting of 3 different objects: (1) a visual object (V) in the foreground, (2) an auditory object (A), and (3) a visual background scene object (B). Three groups of participants focused their attention on either the visual object and auditory sound (Group VA, n = 30), the visual object and the background (VB, n = 27), or the auditory sound and the background (AB, n = 30), and judged the semantic congruency of the objects under focus. Congruency varied systematically across all 3 stimuli: All stimuli could be semantically incongruent (e.g., V, ambulance; A, church bell; and B, swimming-pool) or all could be congruent (e.g., V, lion; A, roar; and B, savannah), or two objects could be congruent with the remaining one incongruent to the other two (e.g., V, duck; A, quack; and B, phone booth). Participants exhibited a distinct pattern of errors: when participants attended two congruent objects (e.g., group VA: V, lion; A, roar), in the presence of an unattended, incongruent third object (e.g., B, bath room) they tended to make more errors than in any other stimulus combination. Drift diffusion modeling of the behavioral data revealed a significantly smaller drift rate in two-congruent-attended condition, indicating slower evidence accumulation, which was likely due to interference from the unattended, incongruent object. Interference with evidence accumulation occurred independently of which pair of objects was in the focus of attention, which suggests that the vulnerability of congruency judgments to incongruent unattended distractors is not affected by sensory modalities. A control analysis ruled out the simple explanation of a negative response bias. These findings implicate that our perceptual system is highly sensitive to semantic incongruencies even when they are not endogenously attended.
Past, Current, and Future of Immunotherapies for Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common cancer in men, and the second leading cause of cancer related death in men in Western countries. The standard therapy for metastatic PCa is androgen suppression therapy (AST). Men undergoing AST eventually develop metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), of which there are limited treatment options available. Immunotherapy has presented substantial benefits for many types of cancer, but only a marginal benefit for mCRPC, at least in part, due to the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). Current clinical trials are investigating monotherapies or combination therapies involving adoptive cellular therapy, viral, DNA vaccines, oncolytic viruses, and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). Immunotherapies are also being combined with chemotherapy, radiation, and AST. Additionally, preclinical investigations show promise with the recent description of alternative ways to circumvent the immunosuppressive nature of the prostate tumor microenvironment, including harnessing the immune stimulatory NKG2D pathway, inhibiting myeloid derived suppressor cells, and utilizing immunomodulatory oncolytic viruses. Herein we provide an overview of recent preclinical and clinical developments in cancer immunotherapies and discuss the perspectives for future immunotherapies in PCa.
Diffusion-driven enhancement of the antibiotic resistance selection window

The current crisis of antimicrobial resistance in clinically relevant pathogens has highlighted our limited understanding of the ecological and evolutionary forces that drive drug resistance adaptation. For instance, although human tissues are highly heterogeneous, most of our mechanistic understanding about antibiotic resistance evolution is based on constant and well-mixed environmental conditions. A consequence of considering spatial heterogeneity is that, even if antibiotics are prescribed at high dosages, the penetration of drug molecules through tissues inevitably produces antibiotic gradients, exposing bacterial populations to a range of selective pressures and generating a dynamic fitness landscape that changes in space and time. In this paper, we will use a combination of mathematical modelling and computer simulations to study the population dynamics of susceptible and resistant strains competing for resources in a network of micro-environments with varying degrees of connectivity. Our main result is that highly connected environments increase diffusion of drug molecules, enabling resistant phenotypes to colonize a larger number of spatial locations. We validated this theoretical result by culturing fluorescently labelled Escherichia coli in 3D-printed devices that allow us to control the rate of diffusion of antibiotics between neighbouring compartments and quantify the spatio-temporal distribution of resistant and susceptible bacterial cells.
Update of the European paediatric respiratory medicine syllabus

The 10-year-old European syllabus for paediatric respiratory medicine (PRM; also known as paediatric pulmonology) was updated by a consensus-based method using an expert task force for redrafting, and a subsequent Delphi process to achieve consensus. There was a high degree of consensus for the final syllabus, which has been streamlined and made more relevant to current practice. All modules are now mandatory apart from the undertaking of research projects, which is optional. Although there are still a number of countries in Europe which do not recognise PRM as a separate subspecialty, there are paediatric respiratory physicians practising in every country in Europe, and a current and harmonised European syllabus in the subspecialty remains important for defining the training and areas of practice of PRM practitioners. The European syllabus for paediatric respiratory medicine has been updated by a task force in conjunction with the ERS Paediatric Assembly and designated national experts. It has several new modules, and only one optional module remains. http://bit.ly/2KB9wcy
A Trilobite Cluster from the Silurian Rochester Shale of New York: Predation Patterns and Possible Defensive Behavior

ABSTRACT Evidence of predator-prey interactions in the fossil record offers important insights into extinct ecosystems. As direct predator-prey relationships are rarely preserved, records of failed predation upon prey species are often considered. The biomineralized exoskeleton of trilobites is exemplary for recording injuries that have resulted from predation. Despite the extensive documentation of trilobite injuries, abnormal specimens are often documented in isolation, with examples of injuries among clustered individuals being poorly known. Here we document a well-preserved body cluster of 18 individuals of the large lichid trilobite Arctinurus boltoni from the mid-Silurian (Wenlock) Rochester Shale of New York, with eight specimens showing injuries. Landmark geometric morphometrics of the specimens is used to explore possible patterns between injured and noninjured specimens. Results of the morphometric analysis indicate that injured and noninjured specimens do not show any systematic difference in overall shape of the exoskeleton, but many of the larger specimens have injuries. The majority of injuries are posteriorly located and right-side dominant, highlighting the possibility of predator or prey lateralization. Biostratinomic evidence suggests that the cluster represents a biological aggregation that was rapidly buried in situ. Potential reasons for this gregarious behavior are discussed, including the possibility that individuals of A. boltoni grouped together to provide “safety in numbers” against predatory attack.
A Multimodal Interface for Virtual Character Animation Based on Live Performance and Natural Language Processing

ABSTRACT Virtual character animation is receiving an ever-growing attention by researchers, who proposed already many tools with the aim to improve the effectiveness of the production process. In particular, significant efforts are devoted to create animation systems suited also to non-skilled users, in order to let them benefit from a powerful communication instrument that can improve information sharing in many contexts like product design, education, marketing, etc. Apart from methods based on the traditional Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer (WIMP) paradigms, solutions devised so far leverage approaches based on motion capture/retargeting (the so-called performance-based approaches), on non-conventional interfaces (voice inputs, sketches, tangible props, etc.), or on natural language processing (NLP) over text descriptions (e.g., to automatically trigger actions from a library). Each approach has its drawbacks, though. Performance-based methods are difficult to use for creating non-ordinary movements (flips, handstands, etc.); natural interfaces are often used for rough posing, but results need to be later refined; automatic techniques still produce poorly realistic animations. To deal with the above limitations, we propose a multimodal animation system that combines performance- and NLP-based methods. The system recognizes natural commands (gestures, voice inputs) issued by the performer, extracts scene data from a text description and creates live animations in which pre-recorded character actions can be blended with performer’s motion to increase naturalness.
Academic detailing as a method of continuing medical education

Introduction Academic detailing is an interactive educational outreach to prescribers to present unbiased, non-commercial, evidence-based information, mostly about medications, with the goal of improving patient care. Academic detailing in Norway is an approach for providing continuing medical education to general practitioners (GPs). The basis of academic detailing is a one-to-one discussion between a trained health professional (the academic detailer) and the GP at the GP’s workplace. Method Our first campaign was named “Better use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)”, which aim was to reduce the use of diclofenac due to the risk of serious cardiovascular adverse events. At the same time we advised the GPs to use naproxen as the drug of choice if an NSAID was needed. We did a one-to-one intervention in two cities, where a trained academic detailer met the GP during office hours. A total of 247 GPs were invited to participate and 213 visits (86%) were completed. This article reviews the theoretical framework underlying the method and describes the development and implementation of academic detailing to GPs in Norway. Results More than 90% the participating GPs considered academic detailing a suitable method for providing up-to-date evidence-based, manufacturer-independent information, and nearly all would most likely or probably welcome another visit. After the intervention there was a reduction of diclofenac prescribing of 16% and 18%, respectively, in the two cities. Conclusion We consider that academic detailing is a suitable method to bring the best available evidence to the point at which care is delivered, to achieve the best for the patients. According to the Norwegian GPs’ evaluation, it is a key supplement to other methods of continuing medical education. To have maximum impact, it is important that academic detailing is practiced according to the consensus that has evolved in the USA and Australia.
Functional expression and impact of testis-specific gene antigen 10 in breast cancer: a combined in vitro and in silico analysis

Introduction: Testis-specific gene antigen 10 (TSGA10) is a less-known gene, which is involved in the vague biological paths of different cancers. Here, we investigated the TSGA10 expression using different concentrations of glucose under hypoxia and also its interaction with the hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1). Methods: The breast cancer MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells were cultured with different concentrations of glucose (5.5, 11.0 and 25.0 mM) under normoxia/hypoxia for 24, 48, and 72 hours and examined for the HIF-1α expression and cell migration by Western blotting and scratch assays. The qPCR was employed to analyze the expression of TSGA10. Three-dimensional (3D) structure and the energy minimization of the interacting domain of TSGA10 were performed by MODELLER v9.17 and Swiss-PDB viewer v4.1. 0/UCSF Chimera v1.11. The UCSF Chimera v1.13. 1 and Hex 6.0 were used for the molecular docking simulation. The Cytoscape v3.7. 1 and STRING v11.0 were used for protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis. The HIF-1a related hypoxia pathways were obtained from BioModels database and reconstructed in CellDesigner v4.4. 2. Results: The increased expression of TSGA10 was found to be significantly associated with the reduced metastasis in the MDA-MB-231 cells, while an inverse relationship was seen between the TSGA10 mRNA level and cellular migration but not in the MCF-7 cells. The C-terminal domain of TSGA10 interacted with HIF-1α with high affinity, resulting in PPI network with 10 key nodes (HIF-1α, VEGFA, HSP90AA1, AKT1, ARNT, TP53, TSGA10, VHL, JUN, and EGFR). Conclusions: Collectively, TSGA10 functional expression alters under the hyper-/hypo-glycemia and hypoxia, which indicates its importance as a candidate bio-target for the cancer therapy.