Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cerebral ischemia and neuroregeneration

Cerebral ischemia is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although stroke (a form of cerebral ischemia)-related costs are expected to reach 240.67 billion dollars by 2030, options for treatment against cerebral ischemia/stroke are limited. All therapies except anti-thrombolytics (i.e., tissue plasminogen activator) and hypothermia have failed to reduce neuronal injury, neurological deficits, and mortality rates following cerebral ischemia, which suggests that development of novel therapies against stroke/cerebral ischemia are urgently needed. Here, we discuss the possible mechanism(s) underlying cerebral ischemia-induced brain injury, as well as current and future novel therapies (i.e., growth factors, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, melatonin, resveratrol, protein kinase C isozymes, pifithrin, hypothermia, fatty acids, sympathoplegic drugs, and stem cells) as it relates to cerebral ischemia.
What does self rated health measure? Results from the British Whitehall II and French Gazel cohort studies

Objectives: To investigate the determinants of self rated health (SRH) in men and women in the British Whitehall II study and the French Gazel cohort study. Methods: The cross sectional analyses reported in this paper use data from wave 1 of the Whitehall II study (1985–88) and wave 2 of the Gazel study (1990). Determinants were either self reported or obtained through medical screening and employer’s records. The Whitehall II study is based on 20 civil service departments located in London. The Gazel study is based on employees of France’s national gas and electricity company (EDF-GDF). SRH data were available on 6889 men and 3403 women in Whitehall II and 13 008 men and 4688 women in Gazel. Results: Correlation analysis was used to identify determinants of SRH from 35 measures in Whitehall II and 33 in Gazel. Stepwise multiple regressions identified five determinants (symptom score, sickness absence, longstanding illness, minor psychiatric morbidity, number of recurring health problems) in Whitehall II, explaining 34.7% of the variance in SRH. In Gazel, four measures (physical tiredness, number of health problems in the past year, physical mobility, number of prescription drugs used) explained 41.4% of the variance in SRH. Conclusion: Measures of mental and physical health status contribute most to the SRH construct. The part played by age, early life factors, family history, sociodemographic variables, psychosocial factors, and health behaviours in these two occupational cohorts is modest.
Correlation of rs1122608 SNP with acute myocardial infarction susceptibility and clinical characteristics in a Chinese Han population: A case-control study

Objective: The correlation of the BRG1 rs1122608 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has been reported in American and European populations. However, whether rs1122608 acts as a protective factor or a risk factor for AMI is controversial. In this study, we aimed to detect the associations between rs1122608 and the clinical characteristics of AMI as well as susceptibility, gene–environment interactions, and risk factors for AMI in a Chinese Han population. Methods: In this study, 300 AMI patients and 300 healthy controls of Chinese Han ancestry were enrolled. PCR-RFLP was used to genotype rs1122608 SNPs. Genotypic and allelic frequencies of rs1122608 were compared between the AMI and control groups and among four AMI subgroups, which were subdivided by typical symptom, diagnosis time (DT), infarction location andserious complication. Results: Significant differences were detected between the AMI patients and the controls in both the genotypic and allelic frequencies of rs1122608 (p<0.001 for each). There were also interactions between the subjects with a minor T allele and smoking or alcohol consumption (p<0.001 for each). Conclusion: In the Chinese Han study population, the mutant GT and TT genotypes and minor T allele of rs1122608 were positively correlated with the risk of AMI. For the first time, we discovered that the GT genotype of the rs1122608 SNP is significantly correlated with diagnosis time of AMI. In addition, the interactions between the minor T allele of rs1122608 and smoking or alcohol use and between the rs1122608 CC genotype and alcohol use appear to increase the risk of AMI.
Prevalence of overweight and obesity in adolescent Tehrani students, 2000–2001: an epidemic health problem

Abstract Objective: Overweight has become a public health problem in most developing countries. Evidence suggests that adolescence is a critical period in determining adulthood obesity and its complications. The present study was carried out to assess the prevalence of overweight and obesity among secondary school students. Design and setting: This descriptive study was conducted in Tehran city, 2000–2001. Body weight and height were measured and body mass index (BMI) values were calculated. Underweight, overweight and obesity were defined as <5th, ≥85th and ≥95th percentile, respectively, of age- and sex-specific BMI values from the National Center for Health Statistics/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000). Subjects: Using a multistage sampling method, 2321 students (1068 males and 1253 females) aged 11–16 years were assessed in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Results: The overall prevalences of overweight and obesity were 21.1 and 7.8%, respectively. The prevalence of overweight among girl students (i.e. 23.1%; 95% confidence interval (CI) 20.8–25.4) was significantly higher than that among boys (i.e. 18.8%; 95% CI 16.5–21.1, P = 0.01) even after adjustment for age (odds ratio 1.26, 95% CI 1.03–1.55, P = 0.02). No significant risk of obesity associated with age was found in girls or boys. In both sexes, median values of age-specific BMI in this study were statistically higher than corresponding values collected in Tehrani adolescents 10 years ago (P = 0.03). Similarly, a significant difference was seen between girl students in this study and the reference population (P = 0.03). Conclusion: According to this study, overweight, especially in girls, should be considered an epidemic health problem among adolescent students in Tehran.
Characterization and prognostic relevance of circulating microvesicles in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Abstract Microvescicles (MV) are shedding particles released by normal and neoplastic cells, whose levels in biological fluids highlight their potential role as disease biomarkers and therapeutic targets. By analyzing 131 newly diagnosed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), we found that the absolute number of serum CLL MV was significantly higher than in controls, in particular in advanced stages of disease. In addition, CD19 + and CD37+, B-cell derived MV, significantly correlated with high tumor burden. Absolute MV number cutoff selected by ROC analysis distinguished Rai stage 0 patients with shorter time to treatment (TTT) from those with more stable disease. Likewise, in the entire cohort, two groups of patients with different overall survival (OS) and different TTT were identified. At multivariate analysis, serum MV independently predicted for OS (along with Rai stage) and TTT (along with Rai stage, lymphocytes and CD38). In conclusion, circulating MV represent a new potential prognostic biomarker in CLL.
Multimodality Imaging and Clinical Significance of Congenital Ventricular Outpouchings: Recesses, Diverticula, Aneurysms, Clefts, and Crypts

The high spatial resolution of cardiac computed tomography (CT) and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) permit the diagnosis of congenital ventricular outpouchings (CVOs), including congenital ventricular diverticula (CVD), congenital ventricular aneurysms (CVA), clefts, and crypts. A unique classification has not been established, and these terms are used interchangeably with confounding terminology. Moreover, their significance is not univocal. A research was performed using PubMed on six subjects: (1) congenital left ventricular outpouchings; (2) congenital ventricular diverticulum; (3) congenital ventricular aneurysm; (4) ventricular clefts; (5) ventricular crypts; and (6) ventricular crevices. Usually, CVOs are small with a preserved contraction and in asymptomatic patients, the clinical relevance may be minimal, although electrocardiographic anomalies are often present. CVA and diverticula may carry an embolic risk and cases of arrhythmia and rupture are described. In the presence of clefts, or crypts a cardiomyopathy should be excluded. A simple classification can be proposed: CVD extend beyond the myocardial wall and fibrous type may be termed CVA, acquired forms should be kept distinct. Clefts, or crypts, are small recesses extending for more than 50% of the ventricular wall but not beyond its margin. The presence of fibrosis may be evaluated by CMR. A multicenter prospective registry would be helpful to investigate potential clinical implications and to exclude dubious forms of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or ventricular noncompaction. In conclusion, CVOs have been described with different terminologies and classifications. Their significance needs to be interpreted in the clinical setting and with the help of a multimodality imaging, particularly of CMR.
NeuroImage: Clinical Decoding moral emotions in obsessive-compulsive disorder

A B S T A Background: Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) exhibit abnormal neural responses when they experience particular emotions or when they evaluate stimuli with emotional value. Whether these brain responses are su ﬃ ciently distinctive to discriminate between OCD patients and healthy controls is unknown. The present study is the ﬁ rst to investigate the discriminative power of multivariate pattern analysis of regional fMRI responses to moral and non-moral emotions. Method: To accomplish this goal, we performed a searchlight-based multivariate pattern analysis to unveil brain regions that could discriminate 18 OCD patients from 18 matched healthy controls during provoked guilt, disgust, compassion, and anger. We also investigated the existence of distinctive neural patterns while com-bining those four emotions (herein termed multiemotion analysis). Results: We found that di ﬀ erent frontostriatal regions discriminated OCD patients from controls based on individual emotional experiences. Most notably, the left nucleus accumbens (NAcc) discriminated OCD patients from controls during both disgust and the multiemotion analysis. Among other regions, the angular gyrus responses to anger and the lingual and the middle temporal gyri in the multi-emotion analysis were highly dis- criminant between samples. Additional BOLD analyses supported the directionality of these ﬁ ndings. Conclusions: In line with previous studies, di ﬀ erential activity in regions beyond the frontostriatal circuitry di ﬀ erentiates OCD from healthy volunteers. The ﬁ nding that the response of the left NAcc to di ﬀ erent basic and moral emotions is highly discriminative for a diagnosis of OCD con ﬁ rms current pathophysiological models and points to new venues of research.
vHaul: Towards Optimal Scheduling of Live Multi-VM Migration for Multi-tier Applications

Live virtual machine (VM) migration enables seamless movement of an online server from one location to another to achieve failure recovery, load balancing, and system maintenance. Beyond single VM migration, a multi-tier application involves a group of correlated VMs and its live migration will require careful scheduling of the migrations of the member VMs. Our observations from extensive experiments using a variety of multi-tier applications suggest that, in a dedicated data center with dedicated migration links, different migration strategies result in distinct performance impacts on a multi-tier application. The root cause of the problem is the inter-dependence between functional components of a multitier application. We leverage these observations in vHaul, a system that coordinates multi-VM migration to approximate the optimal scheduling. Our evaluation of a vHaul prototype on Xen suggests that vHaul yields the optimal multi-VM live migration schedules. Further, our application-level evaluation using Apache Olio, a web 2.0 cloud application, shows that the optimal migration schedule produced by vHaul outperforms the worst-case schedule by 43% in application throughput. Moreover, the optimal schedule significantly reduces service latency during migration by up to 70%.
Endophytic Fungi : A Potential Source of Bioactive Compounds

Endophytic fungi are ubiquitous in nature and reside intercellular or intracellular in the plants, at least for a portion of their lives without causing apparent symptoms of infection. Almost all plants are known to harbor endophytes. The choice of the plant to be used for exploring endophytes for bioactive compounds is important. Secondary metabolites serve in multiple physiologic functions, many of which are common to both plants and microorganisms, and in a way it is intuitive that the same or similar compounds can be produced by ecologically associated entities. Thus, the aim to exploit botanical diversity for the discovery of novel drugs has led to the finding of microbial strains able to synthesize bioactive compounds which previously considered as typical plant products. In the last 25 years, the general evidence that all plants are inhabited by endophytic microorganisms, but in newer finding it was revealed that the latter are also capable of producing plant metabolites, which are considered as a major factor influencing the establishment and evolution of mutualistic interrelations. Therefore, medicinal plants which are known to be used since centuries as an alternative source of medicine are valuable source for bioprospecting endophytes. The fossil record indicates that plants have been associated with endophytic [1] and mycorrhizal [2] fungi for > 400 million year and was likely associated when plants colonized land, thus playing a long and important role in driving the evolution of life on land. For treating infectious diseases, bioactive natural products and their derivatives have historically served as a major source of therapeutic agents [3]. Endophytes have proven to be a rich source of novel natural compounds with structural diversity possessing a wide-spectrum of biological activities. However, fungi isolation in pure cultures has been limited. Less than 5% fungal isolates have been successfully isolated into pure cultures out of over one million fungal endophytes existed in the nature [4]. Endophytic fungi isolated from medicinal plants are more likely exhibit pharmaceutical potentials.
An applied analysis of high-dimensional logistic regression

In the high dimensional setting, we investigate common regularization approaches for fitting logistic regression models with binary response variables. A literature review is provided on generalized linear models, regularization approaches which include the lasso, ridge, elastic net and relaxed lasso, and recent post-selection methods for obtaining p-values of coefficient estimates proposed by Lockhart et. al. and Buhlmann et. al. We consider varying n, p conditions, and assess model performance based on several evaluation metrics such as their sparsity, accuracy and algorithmic time efficiency. Through a simulation study, we find that Buhlmann et. al’s multi sample splitting method performed poorly when selected covariates were highly correlated. When λ was chosen through cross validation, the elastic net had similar levels of performance as compared to the lasso, but it did not possess the level of sparsity Zou and Hastie have suggested.
Disease‐modifying approaches for Parkinson disease

377 W test, and strongly suspect is multifactorial, leading to significant heterogeneity. Two hundred years after its initial description, this is preciselywherewe find ourselves with Parkinson disease. By the time a patient is first diagnosed, there has been significant cell death and, as such, it seems likely that at best anydisease-modifying therapy will arrest or, more likely, only slow continued cell death. While data from the recent phase 2 study repurposing the diabetes treatment exenatide offer hope, the field has previously been disappointed by a catalogue of trials that have failed to translate into clinical practice. While clearly too brief, it is hoped that this article will provide the reader with some appreciation of this rapidly expanding topic.
Alginate in Wound Dressings

Alginate is a biopolymer used in a variety of biomedical applications due to its favourable properties, such as biocompatibility and non-toxicity. It has been particularly attractive in wound healing applications to date. It can be tailored to materials with properties suitable for wound healing. Alginate has been used to prepare different forms of materials for wound dressings, such as hydrogels, films, wafers, foams, nanofibres, and in topical formulations. The wound dressings prepared from alginate are able to absorb excess wound fluid, maintain a physiologically moist environment, and minimize bacterial infections at the wound site. The therapeutic efficacy of these wound dressings is influenced by the ratio of other polymers used in combination with alginate, the nature of cross linkers used, the time of crosslinking, nature of excipients used, the incorporation of nanoparticles, and antibacterial agents. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the different forms of wound dressings containing alginate, in vitro, and in vivo results.
Preparation of Triptolide-liposome and Its in vivo Antitumor Activity

OBJECTIVE To prepare triptolide-liposome by infusion method,and investigte the properties,such as morphology,encapsulation efficiency,and anti-H22 cell lines effect in vivo.METHODS Triptolide-liposome was obtained by infusion method,its morphologic characteristics and encapsulation efficiency was detected by optical microscope,dynamic light scattering instrument and HPLC,respectively.Otherwise,its anti-H22 cell lines effect was evaluted by using mice bearing H22 tumor. RESULTS The shape of triptolide-liposome was regular and narrowly-distributed with average diameter of 45.6nm;but its encapsulated efficiency was just reached 46.7%;In vivo anti-tumor assay indicated that triptolideliposome had strong anti-H22 tumor activity,which was positively correlated with its concentration,and manifested less toxicity than free triptolide only.CONCLUSION Triptolide-liposome has great anti-tumor activity with less toxicity.
Akt inhibitors in cancer treatment: The long journey from drug discovery to clinical use (Review)

Targeted cancer therapies are used to inhibit the growth, progression, and metastasis of the tumor by interfering with specific molecular targets and are currently the focus of anticancer drug development. Protein kinase B, also known as Akt, plays a central role in many types of cancer and has been validated as a therapeutic target nearly two decades ago. This review summarizes the intracellular functions of Akt as a pivotal point of converging signaling pathways involved in cell growth, proliferation, apoptotis and neo-angiogenesis, and focuses on the drug design strategies to develop potent anticancer agents targeting Akt. The discovery process of Akt inhibitors has evolved from adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-competitive agents to alternative approaches employing allosteric sites in order to overcome the high degree of structural similarity between Akt isoforms in the catalytic domain, and considerable structural analogy to the AGC kinase family. This process has led to the discovery of inhibitors with greater specificity, reduced side-effects and lower toxicity. A second generation of Akt has inhibitors emerged by incorporating a chemically reactive Michael acceptor template to target the nucleophile cysteines in the catalytic activation loop. The review outlines the development of several promising drug candidates emphasizing the importance of each chemical scaffold. We explore the pipeline of Akt inhibitors and their preclinical and clinical examination status, presenting the potential clinical application of these agents as a monotherapy or in combination with ionizing radiation, other targeted therapies, or chemotherapy.
Expression and Functional Characterization of Retinoic Acid-Inducible Gene-I-Like Receptors of Mast Cells in Response to Viral Infection

To investigate the precise mechanisms of virus recognition by mast cells, the expression and functional characteristics of virus recognition receptors that lead to mast cell activation were investigated. Our results suggest that mast cells are partly responsible for the early in vivo production of antiviral cytokines and chemokines upon vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) infection. Analysis of the expression of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) recognition receptors in murine bone marrow-derived mast cells (BMMCs) revealed that BMMCs express melanoma differentiation-associated gene 5 (MDA5), protein kinase RNA-activated, retinoic acid-inducible gene-I (RIG-I) and Toll-like receptor 3. The expression levels of these receptors were found to increase upon stimulation of mast cells with VSV as well as synthetic dsRNA: polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid. Moreover, small interfering RNA analysis to identify the receptors responsible for mast cell activation by VSV revealed that both RIG-I and MDA5 were involved in cytokine production but not in the degranulation of mast cells. Our findings suggest that mast cells produce cytokines and chemokines in the early infection stage after recognizing viruses via RIG-I and MDA5, and may contribute to antiviral responses. These data provide additional novel information that improves our understanding of antiviral innate responses that involve mast cells.
A Rare Presentation of Actinic Keratosis Affecting the Tarsal Conjunctiva and Review of the Literature

We report an unusual case of actinic keratosis (AK) of the tarsal conjunctiva in a 63-year-old man. Examination revealed a crusty, leukoplakic lesion prone to bleeding on the tarsal conjunctiva of the right upper eyelid. This was treated by surgical excisional biopsy. At 1-year follow-up, there was no evidence of recurrence and the surgical site was completely healed without conjunctival scarring. Current opinion cites excessive exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation, in particular UV-B in sunlight, as the causative agent in developing AK. In the case we present, the tarsal conjunctiva is an unusual place for actinic keratosis due to the lack of direct UV-light exposure. The key learning points are to evert the upper eyelid during examination especially if the lesion involves the eyelid margin and, secondly, to ensure risk factors are addressed during the history.