Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prostate cancer screening in Portugal: prevalence and perception of potential benefits and adverse effects

Introduction: Opportunistic screening for prostate cancer has been widely used, though organized programs are not recommended. We aimed to estimate the prevalence of prostate cancer screening and the perception of potential benefits and harms of screening, among the Portuguese general population. Methods: A representative sample of Portuguese-speaking inhabitants in mainland Portugal was selected, using a stratified probabilistic sampling procedure; men above 40 were considered for analysis (n = 414). Data on sociodemographic characteristics, lifetime use and usual frequency of prostate cancer screening (prostate-specific antigen test or digital rectal examination) and perception of potential benefits and adverse effects of cancer screening were assessed using face-to-face interviews, by structured questionnaire. Results: The proportion of participants who reported having been submitted to prostate cancer screening at least once in their lifetime was 44.2% (95% confidence interval: 37.5–51.0; 13.8% only digital rectal examination, 12.2% only prostate-specific antigen test, and 18.2% digital rectal examination and prostate-specific antigen test). As potential benefits of cancer screening, the options “knowledge of not having the disease”, “earlier detection” and “more effective treatment” were selected by 55.8%, 12.9% and 31.3% of the participants, respectively. Regarding potential adverse effects, the most and least frequently identified were ‘anxiety while waiting for the results’ (55.1%) and ‘false negatives’ (38.0%), respectively. Conclusions: Almost half of the men between 40 and 79 years old declared that they have been screened for prostate cancer. Nearly one-third of the participants considered that reassurance of a negative result was the main potential benefit of screening, whereas most failed to identify the most frequent adverse effects.
Tim-3在急性髓系白血病患者NK细胞上的表达特征及其临床意义

目的 探讨负性共刺激分子Tim-3在初诊急性髓系白血病（AML）患者外周血自然杀伤细胞（NK细胞）表面的表达特征及其临床意义。 方法 采集2013年6月至2014年6月苏州大学附属第一医院血液内科收治的未经任何临床措施干预的39例AML患者外周血及28名健康志愿者的外周血，采用CD3−、CD56+、Tim-3+为标志，经免疫荧光标记和流式细胞术检测Tim-3在AML患者外周血NK细胞上的表达。 结果 初诊AML患者外周血NK细胞占淋巴细胞比例为（5.74±5.31）%，较正常对照组的（12.55±6.33）%显著下降（t=4.596，P<0.001）；初诊AML患者外周血NK细胞上Tim-3的表达水平为（42.67±19.08）%，较正常对照组的（60.99±20.69）%显著下降（t=3.781，P<0.001）。 AML患者外周血NK细胞比例与其染色体核型相关（t=2.915，P<0.05）；Tim-3在AML患者NK细胞表达水平与患者诱导缓解率、危险分层相关（P值均<0.05）。 结论 AML患者外周血中NK细胞比例及Tim-3表达水平明显下降，Tim-3在AML患者外周血NK细胞上表达下调与AML的预后相关。
Inhibition of the ATR–CHK1 Pathway in Ewing Sarcoma Cells Causes DNA Damage and Apoptosis via the CDK2-Mediated Degradation of RRM2

Inhibition of ribonucleotide reductase (RNR), the rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of deoxyribonucleotides, causes DNA replication stress and activates the ataxia telangiectasia and rad3-related protein (ATR)-checkpoint kinase 1 (CHK1) pathway. Notably, a number of different cancers, including Ewing sarcoma tumors, are sensitive to the combination of RNR and ATR-CHK1 inhibitors. However, multiple, overlapping mechanisms are reported to underlie the toxicity of ATR-CHK1 inhibitors, both as single agents and in combination with RNR inhibitors, toward cancer cells. Here, we identified a feedback loop in Ewing sarcoma cells in which inhibition of the ATR–CHK1 pathway depletes RRM2, the small subunit of RNR, and exacerbates the DNA replication stress and DNA damage caused by RNR inhibitors. Mechanistically, we identified that the inhibition of ATR-CHK1 activates CDK2, which targets RRM2 for degradation via the proteasome. Similarly, activation of CDK2 by inhibition or knockdown of the WEE1 kinase also depletes RRM2 and causes DNA damage and apoptosis. Moreover, we show that the concurrent inhibition of ATR and WEE1 has a synergistic effect in Ewing sarcoma cells. Overall, our results provide novel insight into the response to DNA replication stress, as well as a rationale for targeting the ATR, CHK1, and WEE1 pathways, in Ewing sarcoma tumors. Implications: Targeting the ATR, CHK1, and WEE1 kinases in Ewing sarcoma cells activates CDK2 and increases DNA replication stress by promoting the proteasome-mediated degradation of RRM2.
Instruments To Measure Health-Related Quality Of Life As A Nursing Outcome

LEARNING OBJECTIVES To describe the concept of health-related quality of life To describe the importance of measuring health-related quality of life To differentiate between general and specific measures of health-related quality of life To analyse how different measures of health-related quality of life influence the evidence obtained when conducting nursing research Table of Contents: • Learning objectives • Introduction • Measuring quality of life • Measuring health-related quality of life • Examples of instruments for measuring health-related quality of life  Generic instruments • Nottingham Health Profile • Sickness Impact Profile • McMaster Health Index Questionnaire • Short Form 36 (SF-36)  Condition-specific instruments • Quality of Life after AMI Questionnaire • Quality of Life Index-Cardiac version III • Seattle Angina Questionnaire • Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale • Measuring individual aspects of health related quality of life • Examples of instruments for measuring individual aspects of health-related quality of life  Arizona Social Support Interview Schedule  Total Activities of Daily Living Scale • Conclusion • Discussion questions • References
An approach to acute severe ulcerative colitis

ABSTRACT Introduction: Despite the introduction of novel therapies and treatment strategies for ulcerative colitis (UC), many patients develop acute, severe episodes, warranting prompt care and aggressive management. There is a significant unmet need to improve outcomes in these patients. Clinicians must be able to identify those that will have worse prognosis and plan an aggressive therapy with an early/proactive adjustments in management if needed. Areas covered: The aim of this review is to evaluate the most recent evidence on the assessment and management of patients with acute severe ulcerative colitis. We searched the mainstream literature search engines for the most recent evidence on diagnosis and management of acute UC. Expert Opinion: The approach to patients with severe UC includes clinical and endoscopic assessment of disease severity and ruling out over-infections. While intravenous corticosteroids remain the first line therapy for acute severe colitis, many patients do not respond and require escalation to calcineurin inhibitors or infliximab, and may ultimately require colectomy. Even though several novel therapies are available or in development, their role in acute severe episodes of colitis is unknown.
The long-term results of cemented Oxford unicompartmental knee arthroplasty: A single-center experience.

OBJECTIVES This study aims to investigate the long-term clinical outcomes, complications and survival rates of cemented Oxford medial unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) and to compare the findings with the reported outcomes of UKA and total knee arthroplasty (TKA) in the literature. PATIENTS AND METHODS In the study, 133 knees of 115 patients (16 males, 99 females; mean age 65.5±8.3 years; range, 50 to 88 years) who underwent Oxford medial UKA between May 2007 and August 2013 were followed-up for an average of 126 months. Prosthetic complications and revisions were evaluated. While Kaplan-Meier method was used to evaluate implant survival, Knee Society, Functional Knee Society and visual analog scale scores were used for determining final functional outcomes. RESULTS Totally 29 prosthetic complications (21.6% of total patients) were observed and the most common one was insert dislocation observed in 17 knees (12.6%). Revision surgeries were performed for all of these patients. Among the 17 patients who underwent insert replacement surgeries, the inserts were stable in eight during the follow-up while insert dislocation reoccurred in nine. Revision surgeries were performed in a total of 21 patients (15.6%). There were statistically significant improvements in final follow-up functional knee scores of patients without complications compared to preoperative scores. CONCLUSION According to our findings, while reoperation and early aseptic revision rates of Oxford medial UKA are high compared to the TKA results reported in the literature, functional results are satisfactory for patients with no revision.
Functional Nanomaterials from Waste and Low‐Value Natural Products: A Technological Approach Level (Adv. Mater. Technol. 11/2022)

In article number 2101471, Igor Levchenko and co-workers overview and compare at the technological level the thermochemical and plasmabased techniques for valorization of low and negative value (waste biomass) products, with the aim to use the resulting products for environmental remediation, energy storage, optoelectronics, biomedical, and other applications, and thus to increase sustainability of a wide range of industries.
Corporate Governance and Pension De-Risking Strategies: Evidence from the UK

This research investigates the influence of corporate governance on capital structure using data from FTSE All-share firms for the period 2005-2014. The findings suggest that corporate governance measured by board size and independence is negatively related to debt level, while ownership concentration measured by institutional and insider ownership is positively related to debt level. Bodie et al. (1987) suggest that the pension assets and obligations have generally been regarded as corporate assets and liabilities. This study further examines how corporate governance may influence pension de-risking strategies, defined as the changes in pension asset allocations, switches from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plans, and pension buy-in and buyout transactions. The finding suggest that firms with large and more independent boards are more likely to invest their pension assets in bonds, whereas firms with higher institutional and insider ownership are more likely to invest their pension assets in equities. In addition, firms with more independent boards are more likely to retain their DB pension plans, while firms with greater institutional ownership are more likely to switch from DB to DC pension plans. Overall, pension de-risking strategies and capital structure are found to be influenced by corporate governance.
Development of Adamantane-Conjugated TLR7/8 Agonists for Supramolecular Delivery and Cancer Immunotherapy

Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are often abundant in solid cancers, assuming an immunosuppressive (M2-like) phenotype which supports tumor growth and immune escape. Recent methods have focused on identification of means (e.g., drugs, nanomaterials) that polarize TAMs to a tumor suppressive (M1-like) phenotype; however, reducing the systemic side effects of these therapies and enabling their delivery to TAMs has remained a challenge. Methods: Here, we develop R848-Ad, an adamantane-modified derivative of the toll-like receptor (TLR) 7/8 agonist resiquimod (R848) through iterative drug screening against reporter cell lines. The adamantane undergoes guest-host interaction with cyclodextrin nanoparticles (CDNPs), enabling drug loading under aqueous conditions and TAM-targeted drug delivery. Therapeutic efficacy and systemic side effects were examined in a murine MC38 cancer model. Results: R848-Ad retained macrophage polarizing activity through agonization of TLR7/8, and the adamantane moiety improved drug affinity for the CDNP. In preclinical studies, nanoformulated R848-Ad resulted in a drastic reduction in measurable systemic effects (loss of body weight) relative to similarly formulated R848 alone while arresting tumor growth. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate the ability of strong nanoparticle-drug interactions to limit systemic toxicity of TLR agonists while simultaneously maintaining therapeutic efficacy.
XPLAINING SOCIAL POLICY PREFERENCES : T HE EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE AND NONCOGNITIVE SKILLS

What explains individuals’ social policy preferences? This paper argues for the relevance of basic cognitive and noncognitive skills, which so far have not received much attention in empirical political economy models. It provides empirical evidence on how innate cognitive abilities and noncognitive skills, such as self-confidence and motivation, affect individuals’ preferences. They do so by shaping labor market outcomes, such as educational choices, permanent incomes, and experiences of unemployment spells. This mechanism is tested explicitly by building on recent advances in the statistical analysis of causal mechanisms using high-quality data from the German Socio-Economic Household Panel. In contrast to recent claims made by psychologists, I find that higher cognitive and noncognitive abilities lead to more conservative social policy preferences. My results also confirm that this effect is due to the causal link between skills, labor market outcomes, and preferences. †Duke University, mail@daniel-stegmueller.com
Learning foundation for equilibrium in voting environments with private information∗

We study a dynamic model of learning in order to examine the plausibility of different solution concepts in the literature on voting with private information. Motivated by the evidence that people vote retrospectively, we postulate two simple learning rules under which players vote based on past election outcomes and which require no prior knowledge of the payoff structure or of the rules followed by other players. Voters learn from a biased sample because the consequences of unchosen past alternatives (i.e., counterfactuals) are not observed. We obtain a foundation for two distinct one-shot game solution concepts: Nash equilibrium (when players follow a rule that accounts for selection by updating beliefs only in periods when their vote is pivotal) and a new notion of naive voting (when players follow a rule that updates from all periods). Under the new notion, players vote sincerely but have endogenously determined beliefs. ∗We thank Heski Bar-Isaac, Drew Fudenberg, Johannes Hörner, Navin Kartik, Alessandro Lizzeri, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Emanuel Vespa and several seminar participants for helpful comments. Esponda: 44 W Fourth Street KMC 7-76, New York, NY 10012, iesponda@stern.nyu. edu; Pouzo: 508-1 Evans Hall #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720, dpouzo@econ.berkeley. edu.
Experimental and Theoretical Study of an Actively Lubricated LEG Tilting Pad Bearing

This work presents theoretical and experimental results regarding the feasibility of introducing an active lubrication concept in tilting pad journal bearings (TPJBs) featuring the leading edge groove (LEG) lubrication system. The modification of the oil flow into each pad supply groove by means of servovalves renders the bearing active, due to the resulting alteration of the oil film pressure field. Experimental results obtained in a suitable test rig enables verification of the concept feasibility at the component level, considering a single tilting pad, load on pad configuration, supporting a rigid rotor. Secondly, theoretical results portray the application of this technology in a 5-pad, load between pad LEG TPJB, aimed at performing active control of vibrations in a flexible rotor setup. The proposed technology exhibits benefits in terms of the ability to excite system dynamics to perform in-situ identification experiments, as well as to reduce the rotor vibration amplitude.
PatchDIP: Exploiting Patch Redundancy in Deep Image Prior for Denoising

The structure of a deep convolutional neural network initialized with random weights is able to sufficiently capture the patterns in a natural image. This finding motivates using deep neural network as an effective prior for natural images. In this work, we show that this strong prior, enforced by the structure of a ConvNet, can be augmented with the information that recurs in different patches of a natural image to boost the performance. We demonstrate that the self-similarity in the image patches can be exploited alongside deep image prior by optimizing the network weights to fit patches extracted from a single noisy image. Our results indicate that employing deep image prior on noisy patches provides an additional disincentive for the network to fit noise, and is encouraged to exploit redundancies among the patches yielding better denoising performance.
Investigating Force Feedback in Mid-air Sketching of Multi-planar 3D Curve-Soups

In this paper, we report on our investigation of haptics-enabled mid-air interactions for sketching 3D curve-soups — collections of three-dimensional multi-planar curves. We study pen-based mid air interactions for free-form curve input from the perspective of manual labor, controllability, and kinesthetic feedback. We speciﬁcally study the role of kines-thetic feedback for two aspects of mid-air sketching, namely, drawing curves on planar surfaces and spatial rotation of 3D curve-soups. For this, we implemented a simple haptics-enabled workﬂow for users to draw and compose collections of planar curves on a force-enabled virtual canvas. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of our study-tasks show that there is a rich interaction design space of kinesthetic feedback methods for mid-air sketching beyond physically currently prevalent models.
Anthropometric Parameters and Bone Health Status in Young Adults of District Gurdaspur, Punjab

With increase in life span and longevity, maintenance of healthy bones and skeletal structure might help to escape associated morbidity and economic burden occurring because of bone fragility and fractures during old age. To ensure a healthy bone structure the younger population is needed to be assessed for a timely intervention to improve the bone health to avoid the associated morbidities later in life. Objective: Keeping this in view, the present survey was designed to study anthropometric parameters and bone health status of young adults since it is the time when peak bone mass is attained. Method: The survey was carried out on 1000 college-going boys and girls in the age range of 16-23 years using quantitative ultrasound bone densitometer. Result: Male subjects displayed better skeletal health as well as a higher mean t-score value in all age groups and significantly so in age group 16-17 yrs, 22-23yrs, and in overall data. Mean z-score was significantly different in all the age groups. Male subjects (57.1%) were in a significantly better state of bone health than girls (48.7%). Maximum cases of normal bone health were present in age group 20-21yrs with 89% of males and 83% of females which thereafter decreased to 87.5% in males and 57.1% in females in age group 22-23yrs. In all, 37.8% of male subjects had osteopenia and 5.1% had osteoporosis compared to 44.9% and 6.4% respectively in females. Discussion: Weight, BMI, WC, HC, WHtR affected bone health in studied young females and was observed to have negative correlation in studied young females.
A 50 year-old woman with iron deficiency anemia, renal failure and colitis: case report and brief review of literature

The hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) is defined by the triad of hemolytic anemia, thrombocytopenia, and acute renal failure. The typical presentation of HUS occurs following a diarrheal prodrome. Diarrhea is infectious, usually due to Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli. In typical HUS, the history may include exposure to contaminated food. Symptoms develop 24 hours to 8 days following ingestion of the offending agent. Atypical HUS (aHUS) is being described in a growing body of literature and is more commonly associated with neurologic impairment. Central nervous system involvement may occur in almost half of patients and symptoms vary from mild (lethargy, irritability) to severe (seizures, paresis, coma). Atypical HUS may be caused by a variety of etiologies, each with a different trigger resulting in the final common pathway of inflammatory cascade causing renal endothelial and vascular injury and resultant thrombotic microangiopathy. This report describes the case of a 50-year-old female who developed HUS.
Does frequency of exercise therapy sessions affect pain response in patients with chronic mechanical neck pain?

Background: Chronic neck pain is a common condition affecting many large proportion of population all over the world and in our society. Many physical therapy approaches were used to treat neck pain, and there is high evidence that exercises are effective, but there still is a great debate about which type is more effective. Also there is little evidence about the best parameters of exercises such as frequency, and intensity. Purpose: to investigate the effect of exercising therapy frequency on patient's ache response in instances of persistent mechanical neck pain. Methods: Thirty sufferers recognized as persistent mechanical neck ache have been assigned randomly into equal groups. They have been assessed by pain severity through the usage of visible analogue scale, earlier and after remedy. The primary experimental group (a) received exercise sessions three times a week; while the second experimental organization (b) acquired the equal remedy instances twice a week. Results: In both groups, there was a significant decrease in pain intensity. In addition, there was no significant statistical difference in pain intensity between both groups. Conclusions: It was concluded that exercise therapy twice a week is equally effective as three times per week in patients with chronic mechanical neck pain.
Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) Analysis of Neural Network Controller Based Dynamic Voltage Restorer for Voltage Sag Mitigation

This paper depicts the reduction in level of total harmonic distortion (THD) with Neural Network controller based Dynamic Voltage Restorer for Voltage sag mitigation. In present scenario modern industrial devices and devices in electrical distribution system are mostly based on devices such as electronic drives, microprocessors and programmable logic controllers (PLC) etc. These devices are very sensitive to power quality disturbances. Hence it is required to provide a high quality output power to these devices for their satisfactory operation. Failing to provide a good quality output power to the industrial load may affect the loads badly and sometimes may lead to the complete shutdown of particular equipments or complete industry which results in major financial loss to the industry concerned. So stable, reliable, defect free and high quality uninterruptible power supply must be guaranteed from the supplier or utility side. But the blame for degraded power supply must not be solely put on to the supplier side; it is observed that in most of the cases the reason or the conditions of disrupting the output power quality are generated within the industry. One of the examples of such condition is non linear loads within the plants which may cause transients which may affect the output power quality.