Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trajectory of Excess Medical Expenditures 10 Years Before and After Diabetes Diagnosis Among U.S. Adults Aged 25–64 Years, 2001–2013

OBJECTIVE We assessed the excess medical expenditures for adults newly diagnosed with diabetes, for up to 10 years before and after diabetes diagnosis. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Using the 2001–2013 MarketScan data, we identified people with newly diagnosed diabetes among adults aged 25–64 years (diabetes cohort) and matched them with people who did not have diagnosed diabetes (control cohort) using 1:1 propensity score matching. We followed these two cohorts up to ±10 years from the index date, with annual matched cohort sizes ranging from 3,922 to 39,726 individuals. We estimated the yearly and cumulative excess medical expenditures of the diabetes cohorts before and after the diagnosis of diabetes. RESULTS The per capita annual total excess medical expenditure for the diabetes cohort was higher for the entire 10 years prior to their index date, ranging between $1,043 in year −10 and $4,492 in year −1. Excess expenditure spiked in year 1 ($8,109), declined in year 2, and then increased steadily, ranging from $4,261 to $6,162 in years 2–10. The cumulative excess expenditure for the diabetes cohort during the entire 20 years of follow-up was $69,177 ($18,732 before and $50,445 after diagnosis). CONCLUSIONS People diagnosed with diabetes had higher medical expenditures compared with their counterparts, not only after diagnosis but also up to 10 years prior to diagnosis. Managing risk factors for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease before diagnosis, and for diabetes-related complications after diagnosis, could alleviate medical expenditure in people with diabetes.
Moral Judgment: An Overlooked Deficient Domain in Multiple Sclerosis?

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system through which patients can suffer from sensory, motor, cerebellar, emotional, and cognitive symptoms. Although cognitive and behavioral dysfunctions are frequently encountered in MS patients, they have previously received little attention. Among the most frequently impaired cognitive domains are attention, information processing speed, and working memory, which have been extensively addressed in this population. However, less emphasis has been placed on other domains like moral judgment. The latter is a complex cognitive sphere that implies the individuals’ ability to judge others’ actions and relies on numerous affective and cognitive processes. Moral cognition is crucial for healthy and adequate interpersonal relationships, and its alteration might have drastic impacts on patients’ quality of life. This work aims to analyze the studies that have addressed moral cognition in MS. Only three works have previously addressed moral judgement in this clinical population compared to healthy controls, and none included neuroimaging or physiological measures. Although scarce, the available data suggest a complex pattern of moral judgments that deviate from normal response. This finding was accompanied by socio-emotional and cognitive deficits. Only preliminary data are available on moral cognition in MS, and its neurobiological foundations are still needing to be explored. Future studies would benefit from combining moral cognitive measures with comprehensive neuropsychological batteries and neuroimaging/neurophysiological modalities (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging, tractography, evoked potentials, electroencephalography) aiming to decipher the neural underpinning of moral judgement deficits and subsequently conceive potential interventions in MS patients.
DNA Replication: From Radioisotopes to Click Chemistry

The replication of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA are basic processes assuring the doubling of the genetic information of eukaryotic cells. In research of the basic principles of DNA replication, and also in the studies focused on the cell cycle, an important role is played by artificially-prepared nucleoside and nucleotide analogues that serve as markers of newly synthesized DNA. These analogues are incorporated into the DNA during DNA replication, and are subsequently visualized. Several methods are used for their detection, including the highly popular click chemistry. This review aims to provide the readers with basic information about the various possibilities of the detection of replication activity using nucleoside and nucleotide analogues, and to show the strengths and weaknesses of those different detection systems, including click chemistry for microscopic studies.
Omega-3 Monoacylglyceride Effects on Longevity, Mitochondrial Metabolism and Oxidative Stress: Insights from Drosophila melanogaster

During the last decade, essential polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) such as eicosatetraenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) derived from marine sources have been investigated as nonpharmacological dietary supplements to improve different pathological conditions, as well as aging. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of dietary n-3 PUFA monoacylglycerides (MAG, both EPA and DHA) on the mitochondrial metabolism and oxidative stress of a short-lifespan model, Drosophila melanogaster, sampled at five different ages. Our results showed that diets supplemented with MAG-EPA and MAG-DHA increased median lifespan by 14.6% and decreased mitochondrial proton leak resulting in an increase of mitochondrial coupling. The flies fed on MAG-EPA also had higher electron transport system capacity and mitochondrial oxidative capacities. Moreover, both n-3 PUFAs delayed the occurrence of lipid peroxidation but only flies fed the MAG-EPA diet showed maintenance of superoxide dismutase activity during aging. Our study therefore highlights the potential of n-3 PUFA monoacylglycerides as nutraceutical compounds to delay the onset of senescence by acting directly or indirectly on the mitochondrial metabolism and suggests that Drosophila could be a relevant model for the study of the fundamental mechanisms linking the effects of n-3 PUFAs to aging.
Measures of Accuracy for Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Blood Glucose Monitoring Devices

Currently, patients with diabetes may choose between two major types of system for glucose measurement: blood glucose monitoring (BGM) systems measuring glucose within capillary blood and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems measuring glucose within interstitial fluid. Although BGM and CGM systems offer different functionality, both types of system are intended to help users achieve improved glucose control. Another area in which BGM and CGM systems differ is measurement accuracy. In the literature, BGM system accuracy is assessed mainly according to ISO 15197:2013 accuracy requirements, whereas CGM accuracy has hitherto mainly been assessed by MARD, although often results from additional analyses such as bias analysis or error grid analysis are provided. The intention of this review is to provide a comparison of different approaches used to determine the accuracy of BGM and CGM systems and factors that should be considered when using these different measures of accuracy to make comparisons between the analytical performance (ie, accuracy) of BGM and CGM systems. In addition, real-world implications of accuracy and its relevance are discussed.
Plasmonic Metasurface Absorber Based on Electro-Optic Substrate for Energy Harvesting

A highly efficient and broad light absorber capable of wide-angle absorption in the visible and near infrared range is presented and numerically investigated for energy harvesting in a simple geometry. According to the calculated results, the proposed device has a peak absorption level of about 99.95%. The actual absorption efficiency is 76.35%, which is approaching that of complex multilayer absorbers with 88 layers working in the wavelength range of 300 nm to 2000 nm. The electro-optic material has the potential of shifting the absorption peak position, compensating fabrication errors and thus reducing the fabrication technique difficulties. Also, the high electro-optic tunability can be used for filters, infrared detection, and imaging applications. More directly, the proposed absorber can be potentially deployed in solar cells and solar thermals.
Dying in Long-Term Care: Perspectives from Sexual and Gender Minority Older Adults about Their Fears and Hopes for End of Life

Abstract As lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities age, many individuals expect a need to enter the long-term care system toward the end of life. Not unlike most aging Canadians, this anticipation is met with concern and fear. However, previous research suggests that older LGBTQ + individuals have unique fears often related to personal safety and discrimination. This qualitative study examined the hopes and fears of older LGBTQ + adults considering long-term care as they face end of life. Data were collected from three focus groups in Ontario, Canada, and analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Specific and frequent reference to fear of entering long-term care homes was common across all focus groups, as participants anticipated: social isolation, decreased independence and capacity for decision-making, increased vulnerability to LGBTQ+-related stigma as well as exposure to unsafe social and physical environments. The results from this study, therefore, emphasize the need for palliative care specialists and long-term care home staff to address the unique health needs of older LGBTQ + adults nearing the end of life in order to work toward allaying fears and creating supportive and inclusive long-term care environments.
Analysis of Common Design Choices in Deep Learning Systems for Downbeat Tracking

Downbeat tracking consists of annotating a piece of musical audio with the estimated position of the ﬁrst beat of each bar. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to applying deep learning models to this task, and various architectures have been proposed, leading to a signiﬁcant improvement in accuracy. However, there are few insights about the role of the various design choices and the delicate interactions between them. In this paper we offer a systematic investigation of the impact of largely adopted variants. We study the effects of the temporal granularity of the input representation (i.e. beat-level vs tatum-level) and the encoding of the networks outputs. We also investigate the potential of convolutional-recurrent networks, which have not been explored in previous downbeat tracking systems. To this end, we exploit a state-of-the-art recurrent neural network where we introduce those variants, while keeping the training data, network learning parameters and post-processing stages ﬁxed. We ﬁnd that temporal granularity has a signiﬁcant impact on performance, and we analyze its interaction with the encoding of the networks outputs.
Service managers’ experiences of how the participation of people with intellectual disabilities can be promoted in Swedish group homes

BACKGROUND People with intellectual disabilities in staffed group homes often need lifelong support and dependency on others. Thereby, special demands are placed on staff and service managers to ensure opportunities for participation in everyday life. This study aims to explore how service managers promote participation in Swedish group homes for adults with intellectual disabilities. METHOD A qualitative research design involving individual interviews with 14 service managers was used to gain an understanding of how the participation of adults with intellectual disabilities can be promoted in Swedish group homes. RESULTS The results comprise two main themes; Creating preconditions for participation and Barriers for promotion of participation. CONCLUSIONS Service managers experienced that promoting service user participation in group homes was an important part of their responsibility. The findings indicate that structural strategies such as coaching, supervision and reflection are important and should be further developed.
M3: Multimodal Memory Modelling for Video Captioning

Video captioning which automatically translates video clips into natural language sentences is a very important task in computer vision. By virtue of recent deep learning technologies, video captioning has made great progress. However, learning an effective mapping from the visual sequence space to the language space is still a challenging problem due to the long-term multimodal dependency modelling and semantic misalignment. Inspired by the facts that memory modelling poses potential advantages to long-term sequential problems [35] and working memory is the key factor of visual attention [33], we propose a Multimodal Memory Model (M3) to describe videos, which builds a visual and textual shared memory to model the long-term visual-textual dependency and further guide visual attention on described visual targets to solve visual-textual alignments. Specifically, similar to [10], the proposed M3 attaches an external memory to store and retrieve both visual and textual contents by interacting with video and sentence with multiple read and write operations. To evaluate the proposed model, we perform experiments on two public datasets: MSVD and MSR-VTT. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of BLEU and METEOR.
Comparative Analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum vlhA Promoters

Mycoplasma gallisepticum is an intracellular parasite affecting respiratory tract of poultry that belongs to class Mollicutes. M. gallisepticum features numerous variable lipoprotein hemagglutinin genes (vlhA) that play a role in immune escape. The vlhA promoters have a set of distinct properties in comparison to promoters of the other genes. The vlhA promoters carry a variable GAA repeats region at approximately 40 nts upstream of transcription start site. The promoters have been considered active only in the presence of exactly 12 GAA repeats. The mechanisms of vlhA expression regulation and GAA number variation are not described. Here we tried to understand these mechanisms using different computational methods. We conducted a comparative analysis among several M. gallisepticum strains. Nucleotide sequences analysis showed the presence of highly conserved regions flanking repeated trinucleotides that are not linked to GAA number variation. VlhA genes with 12 GAA repeats and their orthologs in 12 M. gallisepticum strains are more conserved than other vlhA genes and have narrower GAA number distribution. We conducted comparative analysis of physicochemical profiles of M. gallisepticum vlhA and sigma-70 promoters. Stress-induced duplex destabilization (SIDD) profiles showed that sigma-70 group is characterized by the common to prokaryotic promoters sharp maxima while vlhA promoters are hardly destabilized with the region between GAA repeats and transcription start site having zero opening probability. Electrostatic potential profiles of vlhA promoters indicate the presence of the distinct patterns that appear to govern initial stages of specific DNA-protein recognition. Open state dynamics profiles of vlhA demonstrate the pattern that might facilitate transcription bubble formation. Obtained data could be the basis for experimental identification of mechanisms of phase variation in M. gallisepticum.
Oral Sessions

INTRODUCTION: Obesity continues to be a global issue, and physical, psychological, and social consequences of living with obesity are detrimental to individuals and costly for the health care system. Tier 3 weight management services are commissioned by the NHS in the UK to support those with complex obesity via psychological, dietetic, and medical support and are often delivered in secondary care (hospital) settings. Current literature indicates that Tier 3 services have a shortto midrange improvement on weight and health for service users, but there is limited data on outcomes beyond 6 months. This service evaluation looks at the outcomes at 1 year for service users who have completed this community-based Tier 3 weight management program MATERIALS AND METHODS: Service users are referred by healthcare professionals, and inclusion criteria include a BMI > 35 with comorbidities or >40 with or without comorbidities. The multidisciplinary team include a psychologist, dietitian, and exercise professional who assess and advise on those with complex needs. The program is made up of 12 weekly, group-based sessions which include nutrition and physical activity education and utilise behavior change and therapeutic techniques in a “psychologically informed” way (such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The 12 weekly sessions are followed by nine monthly sessions that seek to support ongoing behavior change. Weight and psychological measures (PHQ-9 for depression symptoms and GAD-7 for anxiety symptoms) are first collected at referral and finally at 12 months. RESULTS: Between April 2020 and March 2021, 55 clients completed the 12-month program. Weight at week 1 (M = 125.49, SD = 23.53) was significantly higher than at 12 months (M = 116.68, SD = 21.84) t(54) = 39.55, p = 0.00. Mean weight loss was 8.82 kg (SD = 8.39) or 6.79% (SD = 6.27) of their original weight. Thirty-nine of the 55 lost over 3% of their original weight and 35 of the 55 lost over 5% of their original weight. PHQ-9 scores at week 1 (M = 10.83, SD = 6.47) were significantly higher than at 12 months (M = 7.49, SD = 6.00), t(55) = 12.54, p = 0.00. GAD-7 scores at week 1 (M = 6.91, SD = 6.18) were significantly higher than at 12 months (M = 4.57, SD = 4.22), t (55) = 8.37, p = 0.00. CONCLUSION: Tier 3 weight management services utilizing a “psychologically informed” group-based approach can lead to significant improvements in both weight and mental health outcomes at 1 year. Services can be successfully delivered in community settings which may reduce costs associated with secondary care services and improve access for those who have challenges travelling and can deliver outcomes comparable, or even superior, with traditional models. DISCLOSURE OF INTEREST: S. Edwards Employee of: MoreLife, P. Gately Employee of: MoreLife.
Epigenetic meta-analysis across three civilian cohorts identifies NRG1 and HGS as blood-based biomarkers for post-traumatic stress disorder.

AIM Trauma exposure is a necessary, but not deterministic, contributor to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Epigenetic factors may distinguish between trauma-exposed individuals with versus without PTSD. MATERIALS & METHODS We conducted a meta-analysis of PTSD epigenome-wide association studies in trauma-exposed cohorts drawn from civilian contexts. Whole blood-derived DNA methylation levels were analyzed in 545 study participants, drawn from the three civilian cohorts participating in the PTSD working group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. RESULTS Two CpG sites significantly associated with current PTSD in NRG1 (cg23637605) and in HGS (cg19577098). CONCLUSION PTSD is associated with differential methylation, measured in blood, within HGS and NRG1 across three civilian cohorts.
A Timbre-based Approach to Estimate Key Velocity from Polyphonic Piano Recordings

Estimating the key velocity of each note from poly-phonic piano music is a highly challenging task. Previous work addressed the problem by estimating note intensity using a polyphonic note model. However, they are limited because the note intensity is vulnerable to various factors in a recording environment. In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the key velocity focusing on timbre change which is another cue associated with the key velocity. To this end, we separate individual notes of poly-phonic piano music using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and feed them into a neural network that is trained to discriminate the timbre change according to the key velocity. Combining the note intensity from the separated notes with the statistics of the neural network prediction, the proposed method estimates the key velocity in the dimension of MIDI note velocity. The evaluation on Saar-land Music Data and the MAPS dataset shows promising results in terms of robustness to changes in the recording environment.
In-Host Adaptation of Salmonella enterica Serotype Dublin during Prosthetic Hip Joint Infection

Genome degradation has been central to the adaptation of Salmonella enterica serotypes to their hosts throughout evolution. We witnessed the patho-adaptation of a strain of Salmonella Dublin (a cattle-adapted serotype) to a human host during the course of a recurrent prosthetic hip joint infection evolving over several years.
Fiber Bragg Gratings in CYTOP Fibers Embedded in a 3D-Printed Flexible Support for Assessment of Human–Robot Interaction Forces

We developed a flexible support with embedded polymer optical fiber (POF) sensors for the assessment of human–robot interaction forces. The supports were fabricated with a three-dimensional (3D) printer, where an acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) rigid structure was used in the region of the support in which the exoskeleton was attached, whereas a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) flexible structure was printed in the region where the users placed their legs. In addition, fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), inscribed in low-loss, cyclic, transparent, optical polymer (CYTOP) using the direct-write, plane-by-plane femtosecond laser inscription method, were embedded in the TPU structure. In this case, a 2-FBG array was embedded in two supports for human–robot interaction force assessment at two points on the users’ legs. Both FBG sensors were characterized with respect to temperature and force; additionally, the creep response of the polymer, where temperature influences the force sensitivity, was analyzed. Following the characterization, a compensation method for the creep and temperature influence was derived, showing relative errors below 4.5%. Such errors were lower than the ones obtained with similar sensors in previously published works. The instrumented support was attached to an exoskeleton for knee rehabilitation exercises, where the human–robot interaction forces were measured in flexion and extension cycles.