Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An open-source probabilistic record linkage process for records with family-level information: Simulation study and applied analysis

Research with administrative records involves the challenge of limited information in any single data source to answer policy-related questions. Record linkage provides researchers with a tool to supplement administrative datasets with other information about the same people when identified in separate sources as matched pairs. Several solutions are available for undertaking record linkage, producing linkage keys for merging data sources for positively matched pairs of records. In the current manuscript, we demonstrate a new application of the Python RecordLinkage package to family-based record linkages with machine learning algorithms for probability scoring, which we call probabilistic record linkage for families (PRLF). First, a simulation of administrative records identifies PRLF accuracy with variations in match and data degradation percentages. Accuracy is largely influenced by degradation (e.g., missing data fields, mismatched values) compared to the percentage of simulated matches. Second, an application of data linkage is presented to compare regression model estimate performance across three record linkage solutions (PRLF, ChoiceMaker, and Link Plus). Our findings indicate that all three solutions, when optimized, provide similar results for researchers. Strengths of our process, such as the use of ensemble methods, to improve match accuracy are discussed. We then identify caveats of record linkage in the context of administrative data.
Wetland productivity determines trade‐off between biodiversity support and greenhouse gas production

Abstract Establishing wetlands for nutrient capture and biodiversity support may introduce trade‐offs between environmentally beneficial functions and detrimental greenhouse gas emissions. Investigating the interaction of nutrient capture, primary production, greenhouse gas production and biodiversity support is imperative to understanding the overall function of wetlands and determining possible beneficial synergistic effects and trade‐offs. Here, we present temporally replicated data from 17 wetlands in hemi‐boreal Sweden. We explored the relationship between nutrient load, primary producing algae, production of methane and nitrous oxide, and emergence rates of chironomids to determine what factors affected each and how they related to each other. Chironomid emergence rates correlated positively with methane production and negatively with nitrous oxide production, where water temperature was the main driving factor. Increasing nutrient loads reduced methanogenesis through elevated nitrogen concentrations, while simultaneously enhancing nitrous oxide production. Nutrient loads only indirectly increased chironomid emergence rates through increased chlorophyll‐a concentration, via increased phosphorus concentrations, with certain taxa and food preference functional groups benefitting from increased chlorophyll‐a concentrations. However, water temperature seemed to be the main driving factor for chironomid emergence rates, community composition and diversity, as well as for greenhouse gas production. These findings increase our understanding of the governing relationships between biodiversity support and greenhouse gas production, and should inform future management when constructing wetlands.
Atrial septal defect closure is associated with improved clinical status in patients ≤ 10 kg with bronchopulmonary dysplasia

Abstract Patients with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) have shown clinical improvement after secundum atrial septal defect (ASD) closure. We sought to determine if this post‐ASD closure improvement is secondary to the expected course in BPD patients or related to the closure itself. A novel BPD‐ASD score was created to assess patients' clinical status (higher score = worse disease) and applied to 10 BPD‐ASD inpatients weighing ≤ 10 kg who underwent ASD closure. The score and its subcomponents were retrospectively calculated serially ranging from 8 weeks pre‐ to 8 weeks post‐intervention, and pre‐ and post‐intervention score slopes were created. These slopes were compared using mixed regression modeling with an interaction term. There was a significant difference in pre‐ versus post‐intervention slope with the most score drop the first week post‐intervention (−2.1 + /− 0.8, p = 0.014). The mean score also dropped through weeks 2 (slope −0.8 + /− 0.8, p = 0.013) and 4 (slope −1.0 + /− 0.5, p = 0.001) post‐intervention. There was a significant difference in pre‐ and post‐intervention slopes for diuretics (p = 0.018) and the combined score of respiratory support, FiO2 need, and respiratory symptoms (p = 0.018). This study demonstrated significant improvement in BPD‐ASD score, diuretic need, and respiratory status after ASD closure in BPD‐ASD patients ≤ 10 kg that was outside of the natural course of BPD. Our study was limited by its small, single‐center, retrospective nature. Future studies should be performed in a larger multicenter population to both validate the scoring system and compare to non‐intervention infants.
Effects of common interest groups on rural women and youth livelihood: A qualitative study from Central Ethiopia

The study was conducted to examine the implications of the Common Interest Group (CIG) scheme for rural livelihood change in the selected areas of the Wara-Jarso woreda, Central Ethiopia. The study focuses on the activities of the CIGs, their effectiveness, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, along with the changes in the livelihood status of CIG members. Four CIGs that fits into the aim of the study were purposively selected from the CIGs operating in the woreda. Among a qualitative research approach, a case study was employed. The data were collected from January 1, 2021 to February 28, 2021. Primary data were gathered using Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interviews. A thorough desk review of official documents and other secondary sources was made as an auxiliary method to capture sets of relevant information. The data organization was performed by the MAXQDA 2020 qualitative data analysis package program. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, relational analysis, and content analysis methods. It was found that the CIGs have encouraged strong social capital among members and becomes an important alternative financial source. It was also found that the CIGs operation has encountered problems related to lack of entrepreneurial education and skill training, monitoring and evaluation, workplace, coordination among stakeholders, inadequate and improper financial use, and non-existence of market linkage. Their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities were also indicated. For successful rural women and youth livelihood change through the CIGs scheme, the study recommends access to entrepreneurial skill training, coordination among relevant stakeholders, strong monitoring and evaluation, access to market linkage and workplace, and adequate funding.
Trace Water Changes Metal Ion Speciation in Deep Eutectic Solvents: Ce3+ Solvation and Nanoscale Water Clustering in Choline Chloride–Urea–Water Mixtures

Eutectic mixtures of choline chloride, urea, and water in deep eutectic solvent (DES)/water molar hydration ratios (w) of 2, 5, and 10, with dissolved cerium salt, were measured using neutron diffraction with isotopic substitution. Structures were modeled using empirical potential structure refinement (EPSR). Ce3+ was found to form highly charged complexes with a mean coordination number between 7 and 8, with the shell containing mostly chloride, followed by water. The shell composition is strongly affected by the molar ratio of dilution, as opposed to the mass or volume fraction, due to the high affinity of Cl– and H2O ligands that displace less favorable interactions with ligands such as urea and choline. The presence of Ce3+ salt disrupted the bulk DES structure slightly, making it more electrolyte-like. The measured coordination shell of choline showed significant discrepancies from the statistical noninteracting distribution, highlighting the nonideality of the blend. Cluster analysis revealed the trace presence of percolating water clusters (25 ≥ n ≥ 2) in solvent compositions of 5 and 10w for the first time.
Young Adult ADHD Symptoms in the General Population and Neurocognitive Impairment

Objective: Neurocognitive impairments are associated with child and adult ADHD in clinical settings. However, it is unknown whether adult ADHD symptoms in the general population are associated with the same pattern of cognitive impairment. We examined this using a prospective, population-based cohort spanning birth to age 25 years. Methods: We examined associations between self-reported adult ADHD symptoms and cognitive task performance (attention and response inhibition) in adulthood and childhood. Results: Self-rated ADHD symptoms at age 25 were associated with poorer performance in age 25 cognitive tasks capturing ADHD-related functioning (attention B = −0.03, 95% CI [0.05, −0.01], p = .005; response inhibition B = −0.03, 95% CI [−0.05, −0.01], p = .002). Conclusions: Neurocognitive impairments linked to adult ADHD symptoms in the general population, are similar to those found in people with childhood ADHD symptoms and are consistent with findings in adult ADHD clinical samples.
VR for Vocational and Ecological Rehabilitation of Patients With Cognitive Impairment: A Survey

Cognitive impairment arises from various brain injuries or diseases, such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, schizophrenia, or cancer-related cognitive impairment. Cognitive impairment can be an obstacle for patients to the return-to-work. Research suggests various interventions using technology for cognitive and vocational rehabilitation. The present work offers an overview of sixteen vocational or ecological VR-based clinical studies among patients with cognitive impairment. The objective is to analyze these studies from a VR perspective focusing on the VR apparatus and tasks, adaptivity, transferability, and immersion of the interventions. Our results highlight how a higher level of immersion could bring the participants to a deeper level of engagement and transferability, rarely assessed in current literature, and a lack of adaptivity in studies involving patients with cognitive impairments. From these considerations, we discuss the challenges of creating a standardized yet adaptive protocol and the perspectives of using immersive technologies to allow precise monitoring, personalized rehabilitation and increased commitment.
“Too Many Jobs and Not Enough Hands”: Immigrant and Refugee Community Health Workers at the Frontlines of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Refugees and immigrants have experienced heightened health inequities related to COVID-19. As community-embedded frontline health personnel, refugee and immigrant community health workers (riCHWs) played essential roles in the provision of informational, instrumental, and emotional support during the unprecedented first year of the pandemic. Despite the importance of this workforce, riCHWs are at high risk for burnout due to low recognition and demanding workloads. This was exacerbated as riCHWs navigated a new and uncertain health delivery landscape. We sought to glean insight into riCHWs’ stressors, coping strategies and resources, and self-efficacy to identify ways to support their work and wellbeing. Using a narrative inquiry approach, we conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 11 riCHWs working in a midsized city in the midwestern United States. We generated three distinct yet interrelated themes: (1) Rapid and trustworthy information is key, (2) Creativity and perseverance are good … structural support is better, and (3) Integrating riCHW expertise into health promotion programming and decision-making. Although riCHWs were deeply committed to enhancing community wellbeing, quickly shifting responsibilities in tandem with structural-level health inequities diminished their self-efficacy and mental health. riCHWs relied on work-based friends/colleagues for informational and emotional support to enhance their capacity to deliver services. Findings suggest increasing opportunities for peer support and idea-exchange, professional development, and integration of riCHW expertise in health promotion decision-making are effective strategies to enhance riCHWs’ professional self-efficacy and personal wellbeing.
Large-scale meta–genome-wide association study reveals common genetic factors linked to radiation-induced acute toxicities across cancer types

Abstract Background This study was designed to identify common genetic susceptibility and shared genetic variants associated with acute radiation-induced toxicity across 4 cancer types (prostate, head and neck, breast, and lung). Methods A genome-wide association study meta-analysis was performed using 19 cohorts totaling 12 042 patients. Acute standardized total average toxicity (STATacute) was modelled using a generalized linear regression model for additive effect of genetic variants, adjusted for demographic and clinical covariates (rSTATacute). Linkage disequilibrium score regression estimated shared single-nucleotide variation (SNV—formerly SNP)–based heritability of rSTATacute in all patients and for each cancer type. Results Shared SNV-based heritability of STATacute among all cancer types was estimated at 10% (SE = 0.02) and was higher for prostate (17%, SE = 0.07), head and neck (27%, SE = 0.09), and breast (16%, SE = 0.09) cancers. We identified 130 suggestive associated SNVs with rSTATacute (5.0 × 10‒8 < P < 1.0 × 10‒5) across 25 genomic regions. rs142667902 showed the strongest association (effect allele A; effect size ‒0.17; P = 1.7 × 10‒7), which is located near DPPA4, encoding a protein involved in pluripotency in stem cells, which are essential for repair of radiation-induced tissue injury. Gene-set enrichment analysis identified ‘RNA splicing via endonucleolytic cleavage and ligation’ (P = 5.1 × 10‒6, P = .079 corrected) as the top gene set associated with rSTATacute among all patients. In silico gene expression analysis showed that the genes associated with rSTATacute were statistically significantly up-regulated in skin (not sun exposed P = .004 corrected; sun exposed P = .026 corrected). Conclusions There is shared SNV-based heritability for acute radiation-induced toxicity across and within individual cancer sites. Future meta–genome-wide association studies among large radiation therapy patient cohorts are worthwhile to identify the common causal variants for acute radiotoxicity across cancer types.
A comparative analysis on the nutritional contents of two varieties of pineapple of Chittagong region

The macro- and micro-nutrients of locally produced pineapples namely Giant Kew and Honey Queen were compared. The Giant Kew variety contained 6 g% of TSS, 3.88 g% of total sugar and 1.75 g% of non reducing sugar. On the contrary, the Honey Queen variety contained 10 g% of TSS, 4.84 g% of total sugar and 1.59 g% of non reducing sugar. The comparative study indicates that the Honey Queen variety is superior in nutritional content as well as sweetness than the Giant Kew variety of pineapple. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/cujbs.v5i1. 13375 The Chittagong Univ. J. B. Sci.,Vol. 5(1 &2):105-112, 2010
Factors Associated With Intent to Leave the Profession for the Allied Health Workforce: A Rapid Review

Shortages of satisfied and well-trained health care professionals are an urgent threat for health systems worldwide. Although numerous studies have focused on retention issues for nurses and physicians, the situation for the allied health workforce remains understudied. We conducted a rapid review of the literature on allied health workers to investigate the main reasons for leaving their profession. 1,305 original research articles were retrieved from databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycInfo, and Epistemonikos, of which 29 were eligible for data extraction. Reviewed studies featured mainly pharmacists, psychologists, dietitians, physical therapists, emergency medical professionals, and occupational therapists. We categorized 17 typical factors of the intent to leave as organizational, psychological, team and management, and job characteristics. The relative importance of each factor was assessed by measuring its prevalence in the selected literature. By revealing common themes across allied health professions, our work suggests actionable insights to improve retention in these vital services.
MFTrans: Modality-Masked Fusion Transformer for Incomplete Multi-Modality Brain Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation is a fundamental task and existing approaches usually rely on multi-modality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images for accurate segmentation. However, the common problem of missing/incomplete modalities in clinical practice would severely degrade their segmentation performance, and existing fusion strategies for incomplete multi-modality brain tumor segmentation are far from ideal. In this work, we propose a novel framework named M<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>FTrans to explore and fuse cross-modality features through modality-masked fusion transformers under various incomplete multi-modality settings. Considering vanilla self-attention is sensitive to missing tokens/inputs, both learnable fusion tokens and masked self-attention are introduced to stably build long-range dependency across modalities while being more flexible to learn from incomplete modalities. In addition, to avoid being biased toward certain dominant modalities, modality-specific features are further re-weighted through spatial weight attention and channel-wise fusion transformers for feature redundancy reduction and modality re-balancing. In this way, the fusion strategy in M<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>FTrans is more robust to missing modalities. Experimental results on the widely-used BraTS2018, BraTS2020, and BraTS2021 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of M<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>FTrans, outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches with large margins under various incomplete modalities for brain tumor segmentation.
Optimizing ErCas12a for efficient gene editing in Arabidopsis thaliana

Summary The ErCas12a nuclease, also known as MAD7, is part of a CRISPR/Cas system from Eubacterium rectale and distantly related to Cas12a nucleases. As it shares only 31% sequence homology with the commonly used AsCas12a, its intellectual property may not be covered by the granted patent rights for Cas12a nucleases. Thus, ErCas12a became an attractive alternative for practical applications. However, the editing efficiency of ErCas12a is strongly target sequence‐ and temperature‐dependent. Therefore, optimization of the enzyme activity through protein engineering is especially attractive for its application in plants, as they are cultivated at lower temperatures. Based on the knowledge obtained from the optimization of Cas12a nucleases, we opted to improve the gene editing efficiency of ErCas12a by introducing analogous amino acid exchanges. Interestingly, neither of these mutations analogous to those in the enhanced or Ultra versions of AsCas12a resulted in significant editing enhancement of ErCas12a in Arabidopsis thaliana. However, two different mutations, V156R and K172R, in putative alpha helical structures of the enzyme showed a detectable improvement in editing. By combining these two mutations, we obtained an improved ErCas12a (imErCas12a) variant, showing several‐fold increase in activity in comparison to the wild‐type enzyme in Arabidopsis. This variant yields strong editing efficiencies at 22 °C which could be further increased by raising the cultivation temperature to 28 °C and even enabled editing of formerly inaccessible targets. Additionally, no enhanced off‐site activity was detected. Thus, imErCas12a is an economically attractive and efficient alternative to other CRISPR/Cas systems for plant genome engineering.
Free-Living Peak Cadence in Multiple Sclerosis: A New Measure of Real-World Walking?

Background Physical function and walking performance have become important outcomes in clinical trials and rehabilitation involving persons with multiple sclerosis (MS). However, assessments conducted in controlled settings may not reflect real-world capacity and movement in a natural environment. Peak cadence via accelerometry might represent a novel measure of walking intensity and prolonged natural effort under free-living conditions. Objective We compared peak 30-minute cadence, peak 1-minute cadence, and time spent in incremental cadence bands between persons with MS and healthy controls, and examined the associations between peak cadence and laboratory-assessed physical function and walking performance. Methods Participants (147 MS and 54 healthy controls) completed questionnaires on disability status and self-reported physical activity, underwent the Short Physical Performance Battery, Timed 25-Foot Walk, Timed Up and Go, and 6-Minute Walk, and wore an accelerometer for 7 days. We performed independent samples t-tests and Spearman bivariate and partial correlations adjusting for daily steps. Results The MS sample demonstrated lower physical function and walking performance scores, daily steps, and peak cadence (P < .001), and spent less time in purposeful steps and slow-to-brisk walking (40-119 steps/minutes), but accumulated more incidental movement (1-19 steps/minutes) than healthy controls. The associations between peak cadence and performance outcomes were strong in MS (|rs| = 0.59-0.68) and remained significant after controlling for daily steps (|prs| = 0.22-0.44), P-values < . 01. Peak cadence was inversely correlated with age and disability, regardless of daily steps (P < .01). Conclusions Our findings provide preliminary evidence for the potential use of peak cadence with step-based metrics for comprehensively evaluating free-living walking performance in MS.
Canagliflozin and irbesartan ameliorate renal fibrosis via the TGF-β1/Smad signaling pathway in Dahl salt-sensitive rats

Objectives This study assessed the antifibrotic effects of canagliflozin, with or without irbesartan, on renal injury in Dahl salt-sensitive (SS) rats fed a high-salt (HS) diet. Methods After the preconditioning stage, Dahl SS rats (n = 47) were divided into five experimental groups as follows: low-salt (LS, n = 7), HS (n = 10), HS with canagliflozin (n = 10), HS with irbesartan (n = 10), and HS with canagliflozin and irbesartan (n = 10). Results The HS diet increased systolic blood pressure (SBP), renal fibrosis, fibrotic protein expression, and transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1)/Smad2/3 pathway protein expression compared with the findings in the LS group. Irbesartan reduced SBP and slowed the loss of renal function. Canagliflozin significantly reduced body weight and renal fibrosis and suppressed the TGF-β1/Smad2/3 pathway. The combined therapy exerted better renoprotective effects on all outcome parameters. Conclusions These results indicate that canagliflozin and irbesartan exert different effects on renal injury in SS hypertensive rats, and the combined regimen could have stronger effects than either monotherapy.