Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Magnetic resonance imaging of the wrist in early rheumatoid arthritis reveals a high prevalence of erosions at four months after symptom onset

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the role of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the wrist in detecting early joint damage in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS MRI was performed on 42 patients with early RA (median symptom duration of four months). Scans were scored separately by two musculoskeletal radiologists using a newly devised scoring system, which was validated. MRI findings were compared with plain radiography, clinical measures, and HLA-DRB*01/04 genotyping. RESULTS Interobserver reliability for the overall MRI score was high (r = 0.81) as was intraobserver reliability (r = 0.94 for observer 1 and 0.81 for observer 2). There was more variation in scoring synovitis (interobserver reliability: r = 0.74). Erosions were detected in 45% of scans (19 of 42), compared with 15% of plain radiographs. The most common site for erosions was the capitate (39%), for synovitis the ulnar aspect of the radiocarpal joint, and for tendonitis, the extensor carpi ulnaris tendon. The total MRI score and MRI synovitis score correlated most significantly with C reactive protein (r = 0.40 and 0.42 respectively, p<0.01). The MRI erosion score was highly correlated with MRI bone marrow oedema (r = 0.83) as well as the Ritchie score and disease activity score (r = 0.32, p<0.05). HLA-DRB1*04 or *01 (shared epitope +ve) was found in 76% of patients; 84% of those with MRI erosions and 69% of those without (NS, p = 0.3). CONCLUSIONS A high proportion of RA patients develop MRI erosions very early in their disease, when plain radiography is frequently normal. MRI of the dominant wrist may identify those requiring early aggressive treatment.
Bacterial Sinusitis and Otitis Media following Influenza Virus Infection in Ferrets

ABSTRACT Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading cause of otitis media, sinusitis, and pneumonia. Many of these infections result from antecedent influenza virus infections. In this study we sought to determine whether the frequency and character of secondary pneumococcal infections differed depending on the strain of influenza virus that preceded bacterial challenge. In young ferrets infected with influenza virus and then challenged with pneumococcus, influenza viruses of any subtype increased bacterial colonization of the nasopharynx. Nine out of 10 ferrets infected with H3N2 subtype influenza A viruses developed either sinusitis or otitis media, while only 1 out of 11 ferrets infected with either an H1N1 influenza A virus or an influenza B virus did so. These data may partially explain why bacterial complication rates are higher during seasons when H3N2 viruses predominate. This animal model will be useful for further study of the mechanisms that underlie viral-bacterial synergism.
THE INFLUENCE OF A STRUCTURED PHYSICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM ON ADOLESCENT PERSONALITY. FINAL REPORT.

A STRUCTURED PHYSICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM CONSISTING MOSTLY OF BODY BUILDING EXERCISES AND WEIGHT LIFTING WAS USED TO GIVE PHYSICALLY UNDERDEVELOPED BOYS A SENSE OF PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT. JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL BOYS FROM GRADES SEVEN, EIGHT, AND NINE. CLASSIFIED ON THE BASIS OF LACK OF ATHLETIC ABILITY, WERE GIVEN THE CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGICAL INVENTORY (CPI) AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SCHOOL YEAR AND AGAIN JUST BEFORE THE SCHOOL YEAR ENDED. A CORRELATION MATRIX OF THE 18 CPI VARIABLES WAS SUBMITTED TO A PRINCIPLE-COMPONENT FACTOR. ANALYSIS PROGRAM. A DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS WAS MADE. THE UNDERDEVELOPED BOYS HAD SIGNIFICANT GAINS IN 10 OF THE 18 CPI SCALES. PHYSICALLY UNDERDEVELOPED BOYS WERE FOUND TO BE LESS SOCIALLY ADJUSTED. AND TO HAVE A LOWER SELFESTEEM AND SENSE OF PERSONAL WORTH THAN ATHLETIC BOYS. THE UNDERDEVELOPED BOYS SHOWED SIGNIFICANT GAINS. INDICATING AN INCREASE IN SOCIAL' ADJUSTMENT. FURTHER STUDY INVESTIGATING THE GENERAL APPLICABILITY OF ALLOWING STUDENTS TO RELATE GROWTH TO PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENT FREE FROM EXTERNAL STANDARDS IS
Palliative treatment of hepatic tumours

Approximately 25 per cent of all patients with cancer have or will develop hepatic metastases and less than 20 per cent of these individuals can be considered for radical liver surgery. For the remainder other effective treatments are desirable, given the poor quality of life for most patients with liver metastases. Earlier studies of the natural history of liver metastases, carried out some 20 years ago by my group and others, showed that the median survival time in primary liver cancer was only 2 months and that in the case of metastases from pancreatic, gastric, breast and colorectal cancer it ranged from 2 to 5 months. As only the most healthy patients receive active treatment, with its risk of severe side-effects, we have suggested as a guideline that any treatment which does not quadruple the survival figures mentioned above should not be used outside the context of controlled studies. Employing this definition, most of the treatments now used should still be regarded as experimental, particularly in the case of metastases from colorectal cancer.
Guar Gum Stimulates Biogenic Sulfide Production at Elevated Pressures: Implications for Shale Gas Extraction

Biogenic sulfide production is a common problem in the oil industry, and can lead to costly hydrocarbon processing and corrosion of extraction infrastructure. The same phenomenon has recently been identified in shale gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing, and organic additives in fracturing fluid have been hypothesized to stimulate this process. Constraining the relative effects of the numerous organic additives on microbial metabolism in situ is, however, extremely challenging. Using a bespoke bioreactor system we sought to assess the potential for guar gum, the most commonly used gelling agent in fracturing fluids, to stimulate biogenic sulfide production by sulfate-reducing microorganisms at elevated pressure. Two pressurized bioreactors were fed with either sulfate-amended freshwater medium, or low-sulfate natural surface water, in addition to guar gum (0.05 w/v%) and an inoculum of sulfate-reducing bacteria for a period of 77 days. Sulfide production was observed in both bioreactors, even when the sulfate concentration was low. Analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences indicate that heterotrophic bacteria closely associated with the genera Brevundimonas and Acinetobacter became enriched early in the bioreactor experiments, followed by an increase in relative abundance of 16S rRNA genes associated with sulfate-reducing bacteria (Desulfosporosinus and Desulfobacteraceae) at later time points. Results demonstrate that guar gum can stimulate acid- and sulfide-producing microorganisms at elevated pressure, and may have implications for the potential role in microbially induced corrosion during hydraulic fracturing operations. Key differences between experimental and in situ conditions are discussed, as well as additional sources of carbon and energy for biogenic sulfide production during shale gas extraction. Our laboratory approach can be tailored to better simulate deep subsurface conditions in order to probe the role of other fracturing fluid additives and downhole parameters on microbial metabolisms observed in these systems. Such baseline studies will prove essential for effective future development of shale gas worldwide.
Entropy and Search Distance in Peer-to-Peer Networks

We had previously shown that the average search distance in unstructured peer-to-peer networks having an Erdos-Renyi random graph search topology is minimized when the number of replicas of objects is proportional to the object request probabilities and this results in a minimum search distance is equal to the entropy in object request probabilities minus the logarithm of per-node cache size. In this paper we show that these results also hold for DHT-based peer-to-peer networks that employ prefix-based routing. The advantage of proportional replication in minimizing the search distance adds to the benefits of proportional replication for download time, network resources usage and fairness we have found in our earlier work. In order to show the above result, we generalize a recently proposed replication approach where an object is replicated at nodes with ids adjacent to the id of the node responsible for the object. We show that the average search distance for an object is logarithmically related to the number of replicas of the object in prefix-routingbased DHT systems when the replicas are placed in the manner described. This result can be easily extended to randomized DHTs that make exponential progress to the destination address in O(1) steps. Finally, we generalize the relation between the optimal average search distance and entropy in object request probabilities to any peer-to-peer network with an overlay topology that exhibits exponential expansion regardless of whether the network is structured or unstructured by mapping the search problem in a peer-topeer network to a coding problem.
Accumulation of p53 tumor suppressor gene protein: an independent marker of prognosis in breast cancers.

BACKGROUND Mutations of the tumor suppressor gene p53 have been identified in breast cancer cell lines, and some breast carcinomas are detectable by immunohistochemical assay because of p53 protein accumulation. PURPOSE This study was designed to determine whether p53 protein accumulation in breast cancers correlates with p53 gene mutation, with survival, and with five pathobiologic factors associated with prognosis. METHODS IgG1 monoclonal antibody to human p53 protein (PAb 1801) and immunohistochemical methods were used to detect p53 protein accumulation in archival formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded, randomly selected carcinomas. We studied 295 invasive ductal carcinomas from the Massachusetts General Hospital; 151 were determined to be sporadic (not hereditary). We also studied 97 invasive ductal carcinomas--21 sporadic and 76 familial (hereditary)--from Creighton University. In addition, we examined 31 archival in situ carcinomas, 15 snap-frozen invasive ductal carcinomas, primary cell cultures from three benign breast tissue samples, and breast carcinoma cell lines MDA-MB-231 and MDA-MB-468. RESULTS Nuclear p53 protein was observed in 16% of the 31 in situ carcinomas, 22% of the 172 sporadic carcinomas, 34% of the 50 tumors from patients with familial breast cancer, 52% of the 23 tumors from patients with the familial breast and ovarian cancer syndrome, and all three tumors from two patients with the Li-Fraumeni syndrome. There was complete concordance between p53 gene mutation and p53 protein accumulation in the 15 snap-frozen carcinomas and in both breast carcinoma cell lines. Statistically significant associations of p53 protein accumulation with estrogen receptor negativity and with high nuclear grade were found. There were statistically significant associations, independent of other prognostic factors, between p53 protein accumulation and metastasis-free and overall survival, for randomly accrued and for both sporadic and familial tumors. CONCLUSIONS Immunohistochemically detected p53 protein accumulation was an independent marker of shortened survival and was seen more often in familial than in sporadic carcinomas. Our findings also suggest a correlation between p53 protein accumulation and p53 gene mutation.
Comparison of caching strategies in modern cellular backhaul networks

Recent popularity of smartphones drives rapid growth in the demand for cellular network bandwidth. Unfortunately, due to the centralized architecture of cellular networks, increasing the physical backhaul bandwidth is challenging. While content caching in the cellular network could be beneficial, relatively few characteristics of the cellular traffic is known to come up with a highly-effetive caching strategy. In this work, we provide insight into flow and content-level characteristics of modern 3G traffic at a large cellular ISP in South Korea. We first develop a scalable deep flow inspection (DFI) system that can manage hundreds of thousands of concurrent TCP flows on a commodity multicore server. Our DFI system collects various HTTP/TCP-level statistics and produces logs for analyzing the effectiveness of conventional Web caching, prefix-based Web caching, and TCP-level redundancy elimination (RE) without a single packet drop at a 10~Gbps link. Our week-long measurements of over 370 TBs of the 3G traffic reveal that standard Web caching can reduce download bandwidth consumption up to 27.1% while simple TCP-level RE can save the bandwidth consumption up to 42.0% with a cache of 512~GB of RAM. We also find that applying TCP-level RE on the largest 9.4% flows eliminates 68.4% of the total redundancy. Most of the redundancy (52.1%~58.9%) comes from serving the same HTTP objects while the contribution by aliased URLs is up to 38.9%.
A systematic review and synthesis of the quantitative and qualitative evidence behind patient-centred goal setting in stroke rehabilitation

Objective: To map out from the literature the nature, extent and effects of application of patient-centred goal setting in stroke rehabilitation practice. Design: Systematic review. Data sources: A search was conducted in the Cochrane (Wiley), AMED, Medline (EBSCO), Embase, Sports discuss, Medline (Ovid) and CINAHL databases. Secondary search based on references from the preliminary search was undertaken. Review methods: Quantitative and qualitative studies that included aspects of patient-centredness and goal setting in stroke patients from 1980 to June 2010 were collected. Studies were scrutinized for relevance and quality based on published methodology. The findings were synthesized by aggregating the themes from the qualitative studies and relating them to relevant findings from the quantitative studies. Results: Eighteen qualitative and eight quantitative and one mixed method study conducted in stroke rehabilitation services ranging from acute to community rehabilitation were included. Themes that emerged were related to perceptions of patients and professionals regarding patient-centredness, nominal adoption of this concept, consequences of discrepancies in the perceptions and practice, related ethical conflicts, challenges to application and strategies to improve its application. The effects of following patient-centred goal-setting practice have been studied mostly with weak methodologies and studies show some benefit with psychological outcomes. Conclusion: Patient-centred goal setting is minimally adopted in goal-setting practice due to various barriers. Since the effects of incorporating this concept have not been evaluated rigorously it is suggested that further research is essential to investigate its effect on patient outcomes.
Phosphodiesterase Type 5 Is Highly Expressed in the Hypertrophied Human Right Ventricle, and Acute Inhibition of Phosphodiesterase Type 5 Improves Contractility

Background— Sildenafil was recently approved for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension. The beneficial effects of phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) inhibitors in pulmonary arterial hypertension are thought to result from relatively selective vasodilatory and antiproliferative effects on the pulmonary vasculature and, on the basis of early data showing lack of significant PDE5 expression in the normal heart, are thought to spare the myocardium. Methods and Results— We studied surgical specimens from 9 patients and show here for the first time that although PDE5 is not expressed in the myocardium of the normal human right ventricle (RV), mRNA and protein are markedly upregulated in hypertrophied RV (RVH) myocardium. PDE5 also is upregulated in rat RVH. PDE5 inhibition (with either MY-5445 or sildenafil) significantly increases contractility, measured in the perfused heart (modified Langendorff preparation) and isolated cardiomyocytes, in RVH but not normal RV. PDE5 inhibition leads to increases in both cGMP and cAMP in RVH but not normal RV. Protein kinase G activity is suppressed in RVH, explaining why the PDE5 inhibitor–induced increase in cGMP does not lead to inhibition of contractility. Rather, it leads to inhibition of the cGMP-sensitive PDE3, explaining the increase in cAMP and contractility. This is further supported by our findings that, in RVH protein kinase A, inhibition completely inhibits PDE5-induced inotropy, whereas protein kinase G inhibition does not. Conclusions— The ability of PDE5 inhibitors to increase RV inotropy and to decrease RV afterload without significantly affecting systemic hemodynamics makes them ideal for the treatment of diseases affecting the RV, including pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Development of Severe Anemia and Changes in Hemoglobin in a Cohort of HIV-Infected Ugandan Adults Receiving Zidovudine-, Stavudine-, and Tenofovir-Containing Antiretroviral Regimens

Introduction: Anemia is a common problem in HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. We describe the contribution of antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimen to the incidence of anemia and changes in hemoglobin (Hb) in HIV-infected patients in Uganda. Methods: This study was nested in a prevention of cryptococcal disease trial (CRYPTOPRO; ISCRTN7648152). Patients received 3 different backbones of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor in a nonrandomized manner. Results: Of the 852 patients (161 on zidovudine [ZDV], 628 on stavudine [d4T], and 63 on tenofovir [TDF]; all received lamuvidine), the risk of developing grade 4 anemia was higher (adjusted hazard ratio 2.7) for those receiving ZDV than those receiving d4T. Those receivingd4T had a higher average increase in Hb than those receiving ZDV (P = .024) or TDF (P = .014). Conclusion: In this observational study, ZDV was associated with severe anemia compared to d4T or TDF; those receiving ZDV and TDF had smaller increases in Hb after ART initiation. We encourage publication of data on cohorts using TDF from Africa.
Terminology-Based Patterns for Natural Language Definitions in Ontologies

Natural language content in ontologies is crucial to any human interaction with them, but scarcely available. Terminology science centers on best practices in domain-specific natural languages. Hence, ontologies can benefit from the systematic approach of terminology to natural language definitions. This paper proposes an Annotation Ontology Design Pattern named "Natural Language Definition ODP" that provides natural language definitions for ontology classes. For this purpose, a (semi-)automated method for implementing this pattern combining ontology verbalization and information extraction is investigated herein and exemplified in the domain of finance.
Dengue and its vectors in Thailand: calculated transmission risk from total pupal counts of Aedes aegypti and association of wing-length measurements with aspects of the larval habitat.

Working in a village dengue focus in Chachoengsao Province, Thailand, aedine mosquito larvae and pupae were counted in all containers of 10 houses per month. The wings of female Aedes aegypti (L.) emerging from pupae were measured. Number of pupae and size of emerging females increased in containers with qualities that favored availability of larval food sources (e.g., uncovered containers). The small size of most mosquitoes compared with those raised in the laboratory indicated that the larval population as a whole was under nutritional stress. Applying the number of pupae per house and measurement of air and water temperature with an existing model, the risk of dengue transmission was greatest in May and June. The estimated number of female Ae. aegypti per house was well above the threshold for increasing transmission in all months but December through February. A phased approach to sampling immature aedine mosquitoes in Thailand is proposed, which would consist of routine surveillance of larval index and occasional total counts with measurement of wing size. Such a system would combine the benefits of the simple application of larval surveillance with the valuable data gathered from pupal counts and wing measurements.
Different growth factor requirements for human Th2 cells may reflect in vivo induced anergy

We previously reported the isolation of allergen‐specific Th2 lines and clones from atopy patch test (APT) sites of atopic dermatitis (AD) patients. Upon stimulation with allergen or anti‐CD3+phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) IL‐4 was released with or without IL‐5, while no (or extremely low concentrations of) IL‐2 and interferon‐gamma (IFN‐γ) were detectable. A high IL‐4/IFN‐γ ratio facilitates production of allergen‐specific IgE, of which high levels are observed in AD patients. Here, we show that the above mentioned Th2 cells are notably different from murine Th2 cells. Not IL‐4, which is the autocrine acting growth factor for murine Th2 cells, but IL‐2 was needed for proliferation of these human APT‐derived Th2 lines and clones. Of significance, unless exogenous lL‐2 was added, no proliferative response to allergen, presented by Epstein‐Barr virus‐transformed B (EBV‐B) cells, non‐T cells or IgE‐bearing Langerhans cells (LC), occurred. Lack of proliferation and IL‐2 production after full T cell receptor (TCR) triggering is a characteristic first described for in vitro anergized T cells. However, like the clones we describe in this study, anergic T cells may retain production of cytokines other than IL‐2. A further resemblance between anergic T cells and the human Th2 clones reported here is that IL‐4 can enhance IL‐2‐driven proliferation, but is not capable of inducing T cell growth by itself. The absence of IL‐4‐driven proliferation differentiates human Th2 cells from murine Th2 cells. Both produce IL‐4 when stimulated in a cognate fashion, but only murine Th2 cells will proliferate. We conclude that the presently reported human Th2 cells are different from murine Th2 cells, in that they need other T cells lo produce IL‐2 required for their expansion. Moreover, the Th2 cells phenotypically resemble anergic T cells. As yet, however, we have no clue as to whether these features account for the current Th2 cells only or for human Th2 cells in general. We hypothesize that the Th2 phenotype of AD skin‐derived, allergen‐specific T cells may be induced in vivo by LC, which lack CD80, and therefore do not provide secondary signals through CD28‐CD80 interaction.