Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High residual C-peptide likely contributes to glycemic control in type 1 diabetes.

BACKGROUND Residual C-peptide is detected in many people for years following the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes; however, the physiologic significance of low levels of detectable C-peptide is not known. METHODS We studied sixty-three adults with type 1 diabetes classified by peak mixed-meal tolerance test (MMTT) C-peptide as negative (<0.007; n =15), low (0.017-0.200; n =16), intermediate (>0.200-0.400; n =15), or high (>0.400 pmol/mL; n =17). We compared the groups' glycemia from continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), β-cell secretory responses from a glucose-potentiated arginine (GPA) test, insulin sensitivity from a hyperinsulinemia euglycemic (EU) clamp, and glucose counterregulatory responses from a subsequent hypoglycemic (HYPO) clamp. RESULTS Low and intermediate MMTT C-peptide groups did not exhibit β-cell secretory responses to hyperglycemia, whereas the high C-peptide group showed increases in both C-peptide and proinsulin (P ≤0.01). All groups with detectable MMTT C-peptide demonstrated acute C-peptide and proinsulin responses to arginine that were positively correlated with peak MMTT C-peptide (P <0.0001 for both analytes). During the EU-HYPO clamp, C-peptide levels were proportionately suppressed in the low, intermediate, and high C-peptide compared to the negative group (P ≤0.0001), whereas glucagon increased from EU to HYPO only in the high C-peptide group compared to negative (P =0.01). CGM demonstrated lower mean glucose and more time-in-range for the high C-peptide group. CONCLUSION These results indicate that in adults with type 1 diabetes, β-cell responsiveness to hyperglycemia and α-cell responsiveness to hypoglycemia are only observed at high levels of residual C-peptide that likely contribute to glycemic control.
Hair follicle stem cells regulate retinoid metabolism to maintain the self-renewal niche for melanocyte stem cells

Metabolites are major biological parameters sensed by many cell types in vivo, whether they function as signaling mediators of SC and niche cross talk to regulate tissue regeneration is largely unknown. We show here that deletion of the Notch pathway co-factor RBP-J specifically in mouse HFSCs triggers adjacent McSCs to precociously differentiate in their shared niche. Transcriptome screen and in vivo functional studies revealed that the elevated level of retinoic acid (RA) caused by de-repression of RA metabolic process genes as a result of RBP-J deletion in HFSCs triggers ectopic McSCs differentiation in the niche. Mechanistically the increased level of RA sensitizes McSCs to differentiation signal KIT-ligand by increasing its c-Kit receptor protein level in vivo. Using genetic approach, we further pinpointed HFSCs as the source of KIT-ligand in the niche. We discover that HFSCs regulate the metabolite RA level in vivo to allow self-renewal of neighboring McSCs.
Testing the Status-Legitimacy Hypothesis in China: Objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status Divergently Predict System Justification

The status-legitimacy hypothesis proposes that people with lower socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to justify the social system than those with higher SES. However, empirical studies found inconsistent findings. In the present research, we argue that at least part of the confusion stems from the possibility that objective and subjective SES are differently related to system justification. On one hand, subjective SES is more related to status maintenance motivation and may increase system justification. On the other hand, objective SES is more related to access to information about the social reality, which may increase criticism about the system and lead to lower system justification. These hypotheses were supported by evidence from five studies (total N = 26,134) involving both adult and adolescent samples in China. We recommend that future research on status-related issues needs to distinguish the potential divergent roles of objective and subjective SES.
Computed Tomography Perfusion Identifies Patients With Stroke With Impaired Cardiac Function

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. Background and Purpose— Low left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) leads to worse outcomes after stroke. We hypothesized that the arterial input function (AIF) variability on perfusion computed tomography, especially the time between scan onset and end of AIF (SO-EndAIF), would reflect reduction of cardiac output. Methods— Retrospective analysis of consecutive stroke patients, who underwent computed tomography between January 2013 and September 2018, was performed in 2 parts. (1) To determine the correlation between SO-EndAIF and LVEF, all patients with a transthoracic echocardiogram performed ±6 months from the time of stroke were included. LVEF was dichotomized as either normal (≥50%) or decreased (<50%). (2) AIF was compared with hypoperfusion volume, defined as delay time >3 seconds and with clinical outcome measured using 3-month modified Rankin Scale. Results— A total of 732 ischemic stroke patients underwent computed tomography, 231 with transthoracic echocardiogram were included in part (1), 393 with outcome data were included in part (2). In part (1), 193/231 (83.5%) had normal LVEF (median 61%) and 38/231 (16.5%) decreased LVEF (median 39%). The low-LVEF group had significantly prolonged SO-EndAIF compared with normal-LVEF group (mean of 39.7 versus 26 second; P<0.001), and larger hypoperfusion lesions (94.9 versus 37.6 mL; P<0.001). SO-EndAIF time was strongly associated with EF, with an area under the curve of 0.86. Twenty nine seconds was the best threshold to distinguish between normal and impaired EF (area under the curve, 0.77). In part (2), the SO-EndAIF ≥29 second group had larger hypoperfusion volumes (21.8 versus 89.7 mL; P<0.001) and infarct core (12.2 versus 2.3 mL; P<0.0001) and patients with SO-EndAIF ≥29 seconds had fewer excellent or good clinical outcomes (modified Rankin Scale score 0–1; 40% versus 22%; OR, 2.79; P<0.001, modified Rankin Scale score 0–2; 65% versus 35%; OR, 1.41; P=0.033). Conclusions— AIF width correlates with ejection fraction in acute ischemic stroke. A 29-second threshold from scan onset to end of AIF accurately predicts reduced LVEF and identifies patients more likely to have worse outcomes after stroke.
Prevotella intermedia produces two proteins homologous to Porphyromonas gingivalis HmuY but with different heme coordination mode.

As part of the infective process, Porphyromonas gingivalis must acquire heme which is indispensable for life and enables the microorganism to survive and multiply at the infection site. This oral pathogenic bacterium uses a newly discovered novel hmu heme uptake system with a leading role played by the HmuY hemophore-like protein, responsible for acquiring heme and increasing virulence of this periodontopathogen. We demonstrated that Prevotella intermedia produces two HmuY homologs, termed PinO and PinA. Both proteins were produced at higher mRNA and protein levels when the bacterium grew under low-iron/heme conditions. PinO and PinA bound heme, but preferentially under reducing conditions, and in a manner different to that of the P. gingivalis HmuY. The analysis of the three-dimensional structures confirmed differences between apo-PinO and apo-HmuY, mainly in the fold forming the heme-binding pocket. Instead of two histidine residues coordinating heme iron in P. gingivalis HmuY, PinO and PinA could use one methionine residue to fulfil this function, with potential support of additional methionine residue/s. The P. intermedia proteins sequestered heme only from the host albumin-heme complex under reducing conditions. Our findings suggest that HmuY-like family might comprise proteins subjected during evolution to significant diversification, resulting in different heme coordination mode. The newer data presented in this manuscript on HmuY homologs produced by P. intermedia sheds more light on the novel mechanism of heme uptake, could be helpful in discovering their biological function, and in developing novel therapeutic approaches.
Interactive Simulation of Scattering Effects in Participating Media Using a Neural Network Model

Rendering participating media is important to the creation of photorealistic images. Participating media has a translucent aspect that comes from light being scattered inside the material. For materials with a small mean-free-path (mfp), multiple scattering effects dominate. Simulating these effects is computationally intensive, as it requires tracking a large number of scattering events inside the material. Existing approaches precompute multiple scattering events inside the material and store the results in a table. During rendering time, this table is used to compute the scattering effects. While these methods are faster than explicit scattering computation, they incur higher storage costs. In this paper, we present a new representation for double and multiple scattering effects that uses a neural network model. The scattering response from all homogeneous participating media is encoded into a neural network in a preprocessing step. At run time, the neural network is then used to predict the double and multiple scattering effects. We demonstrate the effects combined with Virtual Ray Lights (VRL), although our approach can be integrated with other rendering algorithms. Our algorithm is implemented on GPU. Double and multiple scattering effects for the entire participating media space are encoded using only 23.6 KB of memory. Our method achieves 50 ms per frame in typical scenes and provides results almost identical to the reference.
Recurrence and mortality after breast-conserving surgery without radiation.

Background Breast-conserving surgery (bcs) and radiation therapy (rt) are the standard of care for early breast cancer; studies have demonstrated that adjuvant rt confers a protective effect with respect to recurrence, although no randomized trials have shown a survival benefit. Methods This retrospective cohort study used Ontario data linked through ices to examine patients treated for breast cancer between 1 April 2007 and 31 March 2014. The primary outcome was death or recurrence. Outcomes were compared between patients who did and did not receive rt. Results The total cohort size was 26,279. The hazard ratios (hrs) for various outcomes were significantly higher for patients who did not receive rt than for patients who did: recurrence or death combined [hr: 2.49; 95% confidence interval (ci): 2.25 to 2.75], recurrence (hr: 2.33; 95% ci: 1.91 to 2.84), and death (hr: 2.28; 95% ci: 2.03 to 2.56). The hr for death was 1.81 (95% ci: 1.65 to 1.99) for patients having stage ii cancer compared with those having stage i disease. The hr for death was 1.97 (95% ci: 1.74 to 2.22) for patients having high comorbidity compared with those having little comorbidity. Conclusions Adjuvant rt carries a protective effect with respect to recurrence and survival in patients with early-stage breast cancer. That survival benefit has not been appreciated in previous randomized trials and underscores the importance of rt as a component of breast cancer treatment.
Electrode Degradation in Lithium-Ion Batteries.

Although Li-ion batteries have emerged as the battery of choice for electric-drive vehicles and large-scale smart grids, significant research efforts are devoted to identifying materials that offer higher energy density, longer cycle life, lower cost, and/or improved safety compared with conventional Li ion batteries based on intercalation electrodes. By moving beyond intercalation chemistry, gravimetric capacities that are two-to-five times higher than conventional intercalation materials (e.g., LiCoO2 and graphite) can be achieved. The transition to higher-capacity electrode materials in commercial applications is complicated by several factors. This Review highlights the developments of electrode materials and characterization tools for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, with a focus on the structural and electrochemical degradation mechanisms that plague these systems.
Accurate Tensor Completion via Adaptive Low-Rank Representation

Low-rank representation-based approaches that assume low-rank tensors and exploit their low-rank structure with appropriate prior models have underpinned much of the recent progress in tensor completion. However, real tensor data only approximately comply with the low-rank requirement in most cases, viz., the tensor consists of low-rank (e.g., principle part) as well as non-low-rank (e.g., details) structures, which limit the completion accuracy of these approaches. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive low-rank representation model for tensor completion that represents low-rank and non-low-rank structures of a latent tensor separately in a Bayesian framework. Specifically, we reformulate the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor rank and develop a sparsity-induced prior for the low-rank structure that can be used to determine tensor rank automatically. Then, the non-low-rank structure is modeled using a mixture of Gaussians prior that is shown to be sufficiently flexible and powerful to inform the completion process for a variety of real tensor data. With these two priors, we develop a Bayesian minimum mean-squared error estimate framework for inference. The developed framework can capture the important distinctions between low-rank and non-low-rank structures, thereby enabling more accurate model, and ultimately, completion. For various applications, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model yields more accurate completion results.
Loss of Immunohistochemical Reactivity in Association With Handling-Induced Dark Neurons in Mouse Brains

The handling-induced dark neuron is a histological artifact observed in brain samples handled before fixation with aldehydes. To explore associations between dark neurons and immunohistochemical alterations in mouse brains, we examined protein products encoded by Cav3 (neuronal perikarya/neurites), Rbbp4 (neuronal nuclei), Gfap (astroglia), and Aif1 (microglia) genes in adjacent tissue sections. Here, dark neurons were incidental findings from our prior project, studying the effects of age and high-fat diet on metabolic homeostasis in male C57BL/6N mice. Available were brains from 4 study groups: middle-aged/control diet, middle-aged/high-fat diet, old/control diet, and old/high-fat diet. Young/control diet mice were used as baseline. The hemibrains were immersion-fixed with paraformaldehyde and paraffin-embedded. In the hippocampal formation, we found negative correlations between dark neuron hyperbasophilia and immunoreactivity for CAV3, RBBP4, and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) using quantitative image analysis. There was no significant difference in dark neuron hyperbasophilia or immunoreactivity for any protein examined among all groups. In contrast, in the hippocampal fimbria, old age seemed to be associated with higher immunoreactivity for GFAP and allograft inflammatory factor-1. Our findings suggest that loss of immunohistochemical reactivity for CAV3, RBBP4, and GFAP in the hippocampal formation is an artifact associated with the occurrence of dark neurons. The unawareness of dark neurons may lead to misinterpretation of immunohistochemical reactivity alterations.
Motor tract integrity predicts walking recovery

Objective To identify candidate biomarkers of walking recovery with motor tract integrity measurements using fractional anisotropy (FA) from the corticospinal tract (CST) and alternative motor pathways in patients with moderate to severe subacute stroke. Methods Walking recovery was first assessed with generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with repeated measures of walking scores (WS) over 2 years of follow-up in a longitudinal study of 29 patients with subacute ischemic stroke. Baseline FA measures from the ipsilesional and contralesional CST (i-CST and c-CST), cortico-reticulospinal pathway (i-CRP and c-CRP), and cerebellar peduncles were derived from a 60-direction diffusion MRI sequence on a 3T scanner. We performed correlation tests between WS and FA measures. Third, we investigated using GLMM whether motor tract integrity contributes to predict walking recovery. Results We observed significant improvements of WS over time with a plateau reached at ≈6 months after stroke. WS significantly correlated with FA measures from i-CST, c-CST, i-CRP, and bilateral cerebellar peduncles. Walking recovery was predicted by FA measures from 3 tracts: i-CST, i-CRP, and contralesional superior cerebellar peduncle (c-SCP). Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) predictors captured 80.5% of the unexplained variance of the model without DTI. Conclusions We identified i-CST and alternative motor-related tracts (namely i-CRP and c-SCP) as candidate biomarkers of walking recovery. The role of the SCP in walk recovery may rely on cerebellar nuclei projections to the thalamus, red nucleus, and reticular formation. Our findings suggest that a set of white matter tracts, part of subcortical motor networks, contribute to walking recovery in patients with moderate to severe stroke.
Anxiety disorders comorbidity in pediatric bipolar disorder: a meta‐analysis and meta‐regression study

Anxiety disorders (AD) are known for its comorbidity and negative impact on the course of adult bipolar disorder (BD). However, there is limited research on AD comorbidity in pediatric BD (PBD). Here, we aimed to conduct a meta‐analysis and meta‐regression study about the comorbidity and covariates of AD and PBD.
Coherent Pattern in Multi-Layer Brain Networks: Application to Epilepsy Identification

Currently, how to conjointly fuse structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) for identifying brain diseases is a hot topic in the area of brain network analysis. Most of the existing works combine two types of connectivity in decision level, thus ignoring the underlying relationship between SC and FC. To solve this problem, in this paper, we model the brain network as the multi-layer network formed by the SC and FC, and then propose a coherent pattern to represent structural information of the multi-layer network for the brain disease identification. The proposed coherent pattern consists of a paired-subgraph extracted from the FC and SC within the same node-set. Compared with the previous methods, this coherent pattern not only describes the connectivity information of both SC and FC by subgraphs at each layer, but also reflects their intrinsic relationship by the co-occurrence pattern of the paired-subgraph. Based on this coherent pattern, we further develop a framework for identifying brain diseases. Specifically, we first construct multi-layer networks by using SC and FC for each subject and then mine coherent patterns that frequently appear in each group. Next, we select the discriminative coherent pattern from these frequent coherent patterns according to their frequency of occurrence. Finally, we construct a feature matrix for each subject based on the binary indicator vector and then use the support vector machine (SVM) as its classifier. Experimental results on real epilepsy datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in the tasks of brain disease classification.
Therapeutic Effect of Balance Cupping Therapy on Non-specific Low Back Pain

Objective To observe the therapeutic effect of balance cupping therapy on non-specific low back pain.Methods 75 patients with non-specific low back pain were randomly divided into the control group (n=25), cupping therapy group (n=25) and balance cupping therapy group (n=25). The patients in the control group were received diclofenac sodium enteric-coated capsule; the cases in other two groups were treated with cupping therapy and balance cupping therapy separately. After 3 weeks' treatment, the changes of the visual analogous scores and Oswestry disability index of two groups' patients were observed.Results The visual analogous scores and Oswestry disability index of the balance cupping therapy group were significantly lower than that of the control group and cupping therapy group ( P0.05) after 3 weeks' treatment. But between the control group and cupping therapy group there was no difference.Conclusion Balance cupping therapy is one of effective treatment methods for non-specific low back pain.
Unexplored Aspects of the Meaning of Living with Chronic Heart Failure: A Phenomenological Study within the Framework of the Model of Interpersonal Relationship between the Nurse and the Person/Family Cared for

The complicated situation experienced by chronic heart failure (CHF) patients affects their entire well-being but clinical practice continues to fail to adequately respond to their demands. The aim of this study was to understand the meaning of living with CHF from the patient’s perspective. A hermeneutic phenomenological study was conducted according to Van Manen’s phenomenology of practice method. Individual conversational interviews were held with 20 outpatients with CHF. Six main themes emerged from the analysis: (1) Living with CHF involves a profound change in the person; (2) The person living with CHF has to accept their situation; (3) The person with CHF needs to feel that their life is normal and demonstrate it to others; (4) The person with CHF needs to have hope; (5) Having CHF makes the person continuously aware of the possibility of dying; (6) The person with CHF feels that it negatively influences their close environment.