Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validity of two oral health-related quality of life measures.

OBJECTIVES To assess the validity of the Oral Impacts on Daily Performance (OIDP) and the short form of the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP 14) in the UK. SETTING Primary care department at a UK dental hospital. SAMPLE Consecutive patients. METHOD Cross-sectional comparison of impacts using OIDP and OHIP 14 against clinical findings, Global Oral Health Ratings and pain. RESULTS A total of 179 patients participated (83.2% response rate). OIDP had weak face validity because it contained contingency questions. Both instruments were developed from the same theoretical model and appeared to have reasonable content validity. In regression analyses, the number of impacts detected by each measure and the total score using OHIP 14 were related to the presence of oral disease and inversely related to age. No suitable transformation could be found to allow regression analysis of OIDP total scores. OHIP 14 correlated more closely with Global Oral Health Ratings but both measures correlated similarly to the experience of pain (0.43 < r < 0.47). The correlation between OHIP and OIDP scores was +0.78. The use of a simple additive method for calculating the total OHIP 14 score did not compromise its validity. CONCLUSION Both instruments have some validity as measures of Oral Health-Related Quality of Life (OHRQoL) among dental hospital patients. The superior face, criterion and convergent validity and greater amenability to analysis of OHIP 14 render it more suitable for questionnaire-based research and for comparing groups. The additive method may be used to calculate the total score for OHIP 14.
Health Care Utilization by Adult Long-term Survivors of Hematopoietic Cell Transplant: Report from the Bone Marrow Transplant Survivor Study

The high intensity of therapy and prolonged immune suppression after hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) increase the risk of long-term complications and health care needs among survivors. The aim of this study was to evaluate the current status of health care utilization by long-term HCT survivors and to identify factors associated with lack of utilization. A total of 845 individuals who had undergone HCT between 1974 and 1998 at age 21 years or older and survived 2 or more years after HCT participated in the study. Health care utilization was assessed through a mailed questionnaire in three domains: general contact with health care system, general physical examination, and cancer/HCT–related visit. The median age at HCT was 38.2 years, and the median length of follow-up was 6.4 years. Overall, 98% of allogeneic and 94% of autologous HCT survivors reported medical contact 11+ years after HCT. Cancer/HCT–related visits decreased with increasing time from HCT (allogeneic HCT, 98-57%; autologous HCT, 94-63%). The prevalence of general physical examination increased with time (allogeneic HCT, 56-74%; autologous HCT, 72-81%). Primary care physicians provide health care for an increasing number of adult long-term survivors of HCT, emphasizing the need for increased awareness of the long-term follow-up needs of the HCT survivors by the health care providers. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(4):834–9)
Sequelae from meningococcal meningitis in children: a critical analysis of dexamethasone therapy.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of dexamethasone as an adjunctive therapy to antibiotics in children with meningococcal meningitis. METHOD A total of 81 children diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis hospitalized in sequence were studied at the University Hospital of São Paulo University, with the objective of evaluating the presence of sequelae in four different groups of patients, following the administration of dexamethasone: Group I - 25 patients who received the first dose at least 10 minutes before the introduction of the antibiotic therapy; Group II - 19 patients who received the corticosteroid concomitantly; Group III - 14 patients for which the dexamethasone was administered after beginning the antibiotic scheme; Group IV - 23 patients that did not receive dexamethasone. The groups were evaluated for homogeneity through the prognostic indexes and clinical and laboratory characteristics, based on the records obtained at hospitalization. RESULTS Some degree of sequelae occurred in 16 (26.22%) of the survivors and 23 patients (28.39%) coursed with sequelae or died. The mean period of neurological attendance was 36.97 months and neurological alterations were detected in 16.17% of the patients. No significant difference was found between the four groups. There was also no statistical difference in the comparison of the neurological sequelae in the children from group IV with the children of groups I and II or even with groups I, II and III analyzed as a whole. The presence of hearing loss occurred in 11.11% of the patients, again there was no significant difference between the four groups. Psychological evaluation was performed using the WPSSI and WISC tests. A mild mental disability was detected in one patient from group I and another in group III. The overall analysis of the sequelae (neurological, auditory and intellectual level) also did not demonstrate any significant difference between the four groups. Comparing the children from groups I and II together and also groups I, II and III as a whole with the children in group IV also failed to detect a significant difference arising from the use or nonuse of the corticosteroid. CONCLUSION Dexamethasone was not proven to be effective in decreasing the number of sequelae among patients with meningococcal meningitis.
Public roles of US physicians: community participation, political involvement, and collective advocacy.

CONTEXT Whether physicians have a professional responsibility to address health-related issues beyond providing care to individual patients has been vigorously debated. Yet little is known about practicing physicians' attitudes about or the extent to which they participate in public roles, which we defined as community participation, political involvement, and collective advocacy. OBJECTIVES To determine the importance physicians assign to public roles, their participation in related activities, and sociodemographic and practice factors related to physicians' rated levels of importance and activity. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Mail survey conducted between November 2003 and June 2004 of 1662 US physicians engaged in direct patient care selected from primary care specialties (family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics) and 3 non-primary care specialties (anesthesiology, general surgery, cardiology). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Rated importance of community participation, political involvement, collective advocacy, and relevant self-reported activities encompassing the previous 3 years; rated importance of physician action on different issues. RESULTS Community participation, political involvement, and collective advocacy were rated as important by more than 90% of respondents, and a majority rated community participation and collective advocacy as very important. Nutrition, immunization, substance abuse, and road safety issues were rated as very important by more physicians than were access-to-care issues, unemployment, or illiteracy. Two thirds of respondents had participated in at least 1 of the 3 types of activities in the previous 3 years. Factors independently related to high overall rating of importance (civic-mindedness) included age, female sex, underrepresented race/ethnicity, and graduation from a non-US or non-Canadian medical school. Civic mindedness, medical specialty, practice type, underrepresented race/ethnicity, preceptors of physicians in training, rural practice, and graduation from a non-US or non-Canadian medical school were independently related to civic activity. CONCLUSIONS Public roles are definable entities that have widespread support among physicians. Civic-mindedness is associated primarily with sociodemographic factors, but civic action is associated with specialty and practice-based factors.
Induction of Mycobacterium avium gene expression following phagocytosis by human macrophages

Little is known about the bacterial factors that enable pathogenic mycobacteria to survive and multiply within the macrophages of the infected host. By preparing cDNA from Mycobacterium avium bacilli grown in human-derived macrophages and in broth culture and using subtractive hybridization to remove commonly expressed genes, a procedure was developed to identify genes of M. avium that are specifically expressed when the bacilli are growing within macrophages. Total RNA was isolated from M. avium recovered 5 days after infection of human macrophages and from bacilli grown in vitro in broth. Mycobacterial mRNAs were converted to cDNA by reverse transcription. Biotin-modified cDNAs prepared from M. avium grown in broth culture were used to subtract the housekeeping genes from the cDNAs of the macrophage-derived M. avium. After each round of subtraction, a sample of the unsubtracted cDNA was amplified, labeled, and hybridized to cosmid clones of M. avium DNA. After three rounds of subtraction, the amplified DNA hybridized to approximately 1% of the cosmid clones under stringent conditions. Although the majority of the genes that are induced in phagocytized M. avium cells are expressed in the broth-grown bacilli, one DNA fragment that was identified coded for an mRNA that is highly specific for M. avium in phagosomes. This procedure will be especially useful for identifying genes that are expressed in response to growth in specific environments from organisms with genetic systems that are not well characterized.
Decreased Recognition of SUMO-Sensitive Target Genes following Modification of SF-1 (NR5A1)

ABSTRACT SUMO modification of nuclear receptors, including the constitutively active receptor steroidogenic factor 1 (SF-1; NR5A1), is proposed to repress their transcriptional activity. We examined the functional and structural consequences of SF-1 sumoylation at two conserved lysines (Lys119 and Lys194) that reside adjacent to the DNA-binding domain (DBD) and ligand-binding domain (LBD), respectively. Surprisingly, while previous loss-of-function studies predicted that sumoylation at Lys194 would greatly impact SF-1 function, the conformation and coregulator recruitment of fully sumoylated SF-1 LBD protein was either unchanged or modestly impaired. Sumoylation at Lys194 also modestly reduced Ser203 phosphorylation. In contrast to these findings, sumoylation of the DBD at Lys119 resulted in a marked and selective loss of DNA binding to noncanonical SF-1 targets, such as inhibinα; this binding deficit was extended to all sites when the sumoylated human mutant (R92Q) protein, which exhibits lower activity, was used. Consistent with this result, the K119R mutant, compared to wild-type SF-1, was selectively recruited to a “SUMO-sensitive” site in the endogenous inhibinα promoter, leading to increased transcription. DNA binding and sumoylation of Lys119 appeared to be mutually exclusive, suggesting that once SF-1 is bound to DNA, sumoylation may be less important in regulating SF-1 activity. We propose that sumoylation of nuclear receptors imposes an active posttranslational mark that dampens recognition of SUMO-sensitive target genes to restrain their expression.
Neurogenesis and aging: FGF‐2 and HB‐EGF restore neurogenesis in hippocampus and subventricular zone of aged mice

Neurogenesis, which may contribute to the ability of the adult brain to function normally and adapt to disease, nevertheless declines with advancing age. Adult neurogenesis can be enhanced by administration of growth factors, but whether the aged brain remains responsive to these factors is unknown. We compared the effects of intracerebroventricular fibroblast growth factor (FGF)‐2 and heparin‐binding epidermal growth factor‐like growth factor (HB‐EGF) on neurogenesis in the hippocampal dentate subgranular zone (SGZ) and the subventricular zone (SVZ) of young adult (3‐month) and aged (20‐month) mice. Neurogenesis, measured by labelling with bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) and by expression of doublecortin, was reduced by ∼90% in SGZ and by ∼50% in SVZ of aged mice. HB‐EGF increased BrdU labelling in SGZ at 3 months by ∼60% and at 20 months by ∼450%, which increased the number of BrdU‐labelled cells in SGZ of aged mice to ∼25% of that in young adults. FGF‐2 also stimulated BrdU labelling in SGZ, by ∼25% at 3 months and by ∼250% at 20 months, increasing the number of newborn neurones in older mice to ∼20% of that in younger mice. In SVZ, HB‐EGF and FGF‐2 increased BrdU incorporation by ∼140% at 3 months and ∼170% at 20 months, so the number of BrdU‐labelled cells was comparable in untreated 3‐month‐old and growth factor‐treated 20‐month‐old mice. These results demonstrate that the aged brain retains the capacity to respond to exogenous growth factors with increased neurogenesis, which may have implications for the therapeutic potential of neurogenesis enhancement in age‐associated neurological disorders.
The financial impact of divestment from fossil fuels

Divesting from fossil companies has been put forward as a means to address climate change. We study the impact of such divesting on investment portfolio performance. To this extent, we systematically investigate the investment performance of portfolios with and without fossil fuel company stocks. We investigate mispricing in stock returns and test for the impact of (reduced) diversification by excluding fossil fuel companies from the portfolio. While the fossil fuel industry outperforms other industries based on returns only, we show that this is due to the higher systematic risk of this industry, as there is no statistically significant difference between the riskadjusted performance of stocks in the fossil fuel sample and the non-fossil fuel sample. We conclude that divesting from fossil fuels does not have a statistically significant impact on overall portfolio performance, and only a very marginal impact on the utility derived from such portfolios. The policy implication is that investors can divest from fossil fuels without significantly hurting their financial performance.
Adequacy of Data for Mining Individual Friendship Pattern from Cellular Phone Call Logs

In this paper, we study a new problem of mining individual friendship pattern (IFP) for characterizing the interaction behavior of each user in cellular phone call logs. The IFP represents the user’s recent frequent relationships and their importance in social lives, which is a unique feature like fingerprint and is useful for many applications such as user resolution and viral marketing etc. We first give the definition and the efficient mining algorithm of the IFP. Then we solve the problem that how much data or time is adequate for characterizing the pattern by introducing a concept of the stable time and a hybrid similarity measure between the IFPs. The experimental result on the real massive cellular phone call logs demonstrates that most users’ IFPs can be characterized by a small data set or time.
[The Probabilistic Efficiency Frontier: A Value Assessment of Treatment Options in Hepatitis C].

BACKGROUND The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) recommends the concept of the efficiency frontier to assess health care interventions. The efficiency frontier supports regulatory decisions on reimbursement prices for the appropriate allocation of health care resources. Until today this cost-benefit assessment framework has only been applied on the basis of individual patient-relevant endpoints. This contradicts the reality of a multi-dimensional patient benefit. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to illustrate the operationalization of multi-dimensional benefit considering the uncertainty in clinical effects and preference data in order to calculate the efficiency of different treatment options for hepatitis C (HCV). This case study shows how methodological challenges could be overcome in order to use the efficiency frontier for economic analysis and health care decision-making. METHOD The operationalization of patient benefit was carried out on several patient-relevant endpoints. Preference data from a discrete choice experiment (DCE) study and clinical data based on clinical trials, which reflected the patient and the clinical perspective, respectively, were used for the aggregation of an overall benefit score. A probabilistic efficiency frontier was constructed in a Monte Carlo simulation with 10000 random draws. Patient-relevant endpoints were modeled with a beta distribution and preference data with a normal distribution. The assessment of overall benefit and costs provided information about the adequacy of the treatment prices. The parameter uncertainty was illustrated by the price-acceptability-curve and the net monetary benefit. RESULTS Based on the clinical and preference data in Germany, the interferon-free treatment options proved to be efficient for the current price level. The interferon-free therapies of the latest generation achieved a positive net cost-benefit. Within the decision model, these therapies showed a maximum overall benefit. Due to their high additional benefit and approved prices, the therapies lie above of the extrapolated efficiency frontier, which suggests that these options have efficient reimbursement prices. Considering uncertainty, even a higher price would have resulted in a positive cost-benefit ratio. CONCLUSION IQWiG's efficiency frontier was used to assess the value of different treatment options in HCV. This study demonstrates that the probabilistic efficiency frontier, price-acceptability-curve and the net monetary benefit can contribute essential information to reimbursement decisions and price negotiations.
Immune responses to "Plasmodium falciparum" in Mozambican infants receiving Intermittent Preventive Treatment with Sulfadoxine Pyrimethamine

La malaria causa una elevada mortalidad en ninos menores de 5 anos de edad en zonas endemicas. Estrategias de control, y mas recientemente de eliminacion, consisten en implementar varias medidas simultaneamente, como el control del vector, las vacunas y los farmacos. Los actuales Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio pretenden reducir la mortalidad y la morbilidad debidas a la malaria en los dos grupos mas vulnerables de la poblacion: las mujeres embarazadas y los ninos. El Tratamiento Preventivo Intermitente en ninos con Sulfadoxina-Pirimetamina (IPTi-SP) administrado a traves de los programas nacionales de vacunacion ha demostrado ser eficaz en zonas con diferentes patrones de trasmision. La OMS ha recomendado recientemente su implementacion como herramienta de control contra la malaria. Sin embargo, una de las principales preocupaciones en relacion al IPTi ha sido su posible interferencia en la adquisicion de la inmunidad natural frente a la malaria. Esta tesis presenta una serie de estudios realizados en una zona endemica de malaria en Manhica, Mozambique, en los que se ha evaluado el impacto del IPTi-SP en el desarrollo de las respuestas inmunes contra el parasito Plasmodium falciparum. En este trabajo se han medido diversos parametros inmunologicos, tanto respuestas de anticuerpos como respuestas celulares, considerados los mas importantes marcadores de proteccion contra la malaria identificados hasta ahora. La observacion mas consistente ha sido que el IPTi-SP no modifica la magnitud de las respuestas inmunes adquiridas a lo largo de los dos primeros anos de vida en ninos mozambiquenos. Ademas, se describen los factores que afectan a las respuestas humorales y celulares, y los factores que se correlacionan con la incidencia de malaria. En base a los estudios aqui presentados, podemos concluir que el IPTi-SP no interfiere con respuestas inmunitarias que se consideran relevantes para la adquisicion de inmunidad protectora contra la malaria en la infancia. En resumen, esta tesis contribuye a una evaluacion mas completa del IPTi como medida de control que posiblemente sera implementada en un futuro proximo en zonas endemicas de malaria en Africa y otras partes del mundo. Ademas, pretende contribuir al avance del conocimiento sobre la adquisicion de la inmunidad natural en la infancia, de la cual tenemos datos limitados. Finalmente, esta informacion ayudara a entender mejor los factores que deben ser tomados en cuenta a la hora de disenar e implementar otras medidas de control de la malaria en este grupo de edad.
The low-cost packet radio

Research on packet switched radio networks requires reconfigurable testbeds with large numbers of readily deployable radios. This motivated the development of a small, low-cost packet radio (LPR) with the flexibility to support extensive network experiments, and to be amenable to tailoring to specific end-use applications. The LPR incorporates a digitally controlled direct sequence minimum shift keyed spread-spectrum radio and a microprocessor-based packet switch. Code changeable surface acoustic wave (SAW) matched filtering provides processing gain at burst symbol rates of 100k and 400k symbols per second in the presence of interference. Coherent recursive integration enhances synchronization performance, provides synchronous detection of the data, and serves the adaptive multipath accumulator. Forward error correction utilizing convolutional encoding and sequential decoding is incorporated at four different code rates for both burst symbol rates. The microprocessor runs the networking software. Requirements, design, and performance data for the LPR engineering model are presented.