Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plasmodium sporozoites on the move: Switching from cell traversal to productive invasion of hepatocytes

Parasites of the genus Plasmodium, the etiological agent of malaria, are transmitted through the bite of anopheline mosquitoes, which deposit sporozoites into the host skin. Sporozoites migrate through the dermis, enter the bloodstream, and rapidly traffic to the liver. They cross the liver sinusoidal barrier and traverse several hepatocytes before switching to productive invasion of a final one for replication inside a parasitophorous vacuole. Cell traversal and productive invasion are functionally independent processes that require proteins secreted from specialized secretory organelles known as micronemes. In this review, we summarize the current understanding of how sporozoites traverse through cells and productively invade hepatocytes, and discuss the role of environmental sensing in switching from a migratory to an invasive state. We propose that timely controlled secretion of distinct microneme subsets could play a key role in successful migration and infection of hepatocytes. A better understanding of these essential biological features of the Plasmodium sporozoite may contribute to the development of new strategies to fight against the very first and asymptomatic stage of malaria.
Comparative efficacy of different types of antihypertensive drugs in reversing left ventricular hypertrophy as determined with echocardiography in hypertensive patients: A network meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials

Reversing left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) can reduce the incidence of adverse cardiovascular events. However, there is no clear superiority–inferiority differentiation between angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI), angiotensin receptor blockers (ARB), beta‐blockers (BB), calcium channel blockers (CCB), and diuretics in reversing LVH in hypertensive patients. To provide further evidence for choosing the optimal antihypertensive drug for improving LVH, we performed a network meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) based on the Cochrane library database, Embase, and Pubmed, and identified 49 studies involving 5402 patients that were eligible for inclusion. It was found that ARB could improve LVH in hypertensive patients more effectively than CCB (MD −4.07, 95%CI −8.03 to −0.24) and BB (MD −4.57, 95%CI −8.07 to −1.12). Matched comparison of renin‐angiotensin system inhibitors (RASi) showed that the effect of ACEI in reducing left ventricular mass index (LVMi) was not effective as that of ARB (MD −3.72, 95%CI −7.52 to −0.11). The surface under the cumulative ranking for each intervention indicated that the use of ARB was more effective among the different types of antihypertensive drugs (97%). This network meta‐analysis revealed that the use of ARB in antihypertensive therapy could achieve better efficacy in reversing LVH in hypertensive patients.
Spatio-temporal trends in anaemia among pregnant women, adolescents and preschool children in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract Objective: We investigated the spatiotemporal trends in the burden of maternal, adolescent and child anaemia in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and evaluated some individual and household predictors of anaemia. Design: Average Hb concentrations and anaemia prevalence were estimated, plotted over time and mapped by country and sub-region. Multilevel linear regression models were used to evaluate individual and household predictors of Hb concentration. Participants: Data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) spanning 2000–2018 were merged into data sets for 37 623 pregnant women, 89 815 older adolescent girls and 401 438 preschool children. Setting: The merged DHS represent nationally representative samples from thirty-three countries. Results: Prevalence of anaemia remains high in SSA, affecting 60, 36 and 44 % of children, adolescents and pregnant women, respectively. Anaemia prevalence among children did not materially improve from 2000 to 2018. Anaemia prevalence among older adolescent girls and pregnant women did not also improve, but this masks a period of improvement followed by depreciation in population anaemia status. Pregnant adolescents had 12·5 g/l (95 % CI: 11·3, 13·6) lower Hb concentration compared with non-pregnant adolescents and 1·7 g/l (95 % CI: 0·7, 2·6) lower Hb concentration compared with pregnant women > 40 years, respectively. Stunting and wasting were associated with 1·3–3·3 g/l lower Hb concentration among children. Other significant predictors of Hb concentration were educational attainment, wealth quintiles, source of drinking water, number of children < 5 years in the household and possession of bed-nets. Conclusion: Anaemia in SSA has not improved remarkably since year 2000 and remains excessive among children.
Eastern North Carolina Head Start Teachers’ personal and professional experiences with healthy eating and physical activity: a qualitative exploration

Abstract Objective: Explore the interrelationship between teachers’ personal and professional socio-ecological structures while examining Head Start (HS) teachers’ experiences with (1) trying to eat healthy and engage in physical activity (PA) and (2) promote healthy eating and PA in their classrooms. Design: In-depth semi-structured interviews were collected from March through June 2017. Researchers designed the data collection and analysis methods using a phenomenological approach. All interviews were recorded using digital audio and transcribed verbatim. Setting: Seven HS centres in two rural eastern North Carolina counties. Participants: Teachers (n 15) who had recently participated in a healthy eating and physical activity intervention. Participants were 100 % female, an average age of 43 years (sd 9·6) and primarily Black/African American (93·3 %). Results: Eighteen primary themes were identified providing unique insight into individual, social and environmental determinants that may influence teachers’ personal health behaviours and professional health promotion practices. Findings indicated that teachers want to improve health behaviours personally (individual/family health) and professionally (children/families served); however, barriers exist at all levels impacting their ability to improve their own health and facilitate positive behaviours among the children/families they serve. Many teachers observed connections between their personal and professional experiences, but not beyond the individual level. Conclusions: Study findings highlight the importance of considering and emphasising the potential relationship between personal and professional determinants of health when working with early childhood teachers. Findings from this study may be useful for informing the development, implementation and evaluation of future health promotion interventions using teachers as implementers.
Is being gender nonconforming distressing? It depends where you live: gender equality across 15 nations predicts how much gender nonconformity is related to self-esteem

Abstract Background Individuals exhibiting gender nonconforming behaviors experience low self-esteem and a number of other mental health conditions, including elevated suicide risk. Most of the relevant evidence is confined to US studies, however. Adopting a cross-national approach, we examined the pervasiveness of the psychological burden associated with gender nonconformity. Because self-esteem is sensitive to the fulfillment of societal expectations for gender conformity, we reasoned that the relationship between gender conformity and self-esteem ought to decrease as societies become less restrictive in their gender norms. Methods To test this proposition, we conducted two studies including 18 national samples from 15 countries varying in gender equality. Participants responded to an online survey that included measures of gender conformity and self-esteem (N = 4486). Results Using multilevel analyses and meta-analytic statistics over the samples of both studies, we found that as gender equality increased, the association between gender conformity and self-esteem decreased. Conclusions The results suggest that rather than being inherently noxious, gender non-conformity becomes detrimental to self-esteem when it clashes with restrictive gender role norms that are enacted by the macrosocial context. We suggest that previous findings on psychological problems related to gender nonconformity be considered within a broader macrosocial context that may constrain people's freedom to move against gender role norms.
Service Quality on Patients Satisfaction in Federal Medical Centre, Keffi, Nasarawa State

This study examines the relationship between service quality and patients' satisfaction in Federal Medical Centre, Keffi, Nasarawa state. Data was collected using an adapted instrument on past research related to hospital's service quality. Similarly, the sample size determined for analysis of this study is 265 patients and hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analysis. Besides, the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 22.0 was used for the analysis of data. The findings provided support for some of the hypothesised relationship for this study. Specifically, assurance, corporate image and reliability showed a significant relationship with patients' satisfaction in the hospital. Additionally, empathy, responsiveness, and tangibility showed an insignificant relationship with patients' satisfaction for this study. This research could potentially provide a significant contribution and inputs which might be useful in the process of decision-making regarding service quality, patients' satisfaction, Medical Doctors and Nurses working in Federal Medical Centre, Keffi, Nasarawa State. It is recommended that management should channel more resources to those constructs such as assurance, corporate image and reliability that show a significant relationship with patients' satisfaction in the hospital. This would help to increase patients' satisfaction leading to improve service quality in the healthcare operator in the hospital.
Adult Krabbe Disease That Was Successfully Treated with Intravenous Immunoglobulin

Krabbe disease involves the accumulation of neurotoxic metabolites due to lysosomal galactocerebrosidase enzyme deficiency, which results in widespread demyelination of central and peripheral nerves. Generally, Krabbe disease presents as spastic paraplegia with a slow progressive course; however, some cases may show clinical symptoms similar to those of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). No previously reported studies have investigated the efficacy of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) for treating Krabbe disease, and reporting a case involving IVIg treatment may be informative in the clinical setting. A 14-year-old girl who developed Guillain-Barré syndrome-like limb weakness was administered IVIg, and her limb weakness improved. At 16 years old, she developed abnormal sensory perception and weakness of both upper limbs. A nerve conduction study revealed demyelination, which led us to suspect CIDP. IVIg was administered, and her symptoms gradually improved. A nerve biopsy, enzyme activity, and genetic test results indicated adult Krabbe disease. In some cases, IVIg may be an effective treatment for Krabbe disease.
No Gender Difference Exists in Academic Self-Efficacy Improvement for Higher Education Blended Foreign Language Learning

In order to determine whether gender difference exists in academic self-efficacy (ASE) improvement for blended foreign language learning, the current study uses a larger sample than the previous study, and tests the interaction between the intervention effect and gender directly. The results show that a statistically significant interaction was found between the intervention effect and gender in repeated measures ANOVA, and that ASE improvement was found to be greater for the female students than for the male students. However, since the female ASE scores were lesser than the male ones, regardless of the intervention, the current study conducted a further analysis to test the hypothesis that ASE learners with lower scores show larger improvement than the ASE learners with higher scores. The difference between the pre-intervention ASE and post-intervention ASE was significantly correlated with the pre-intervention ASE. Also, when the difference between the pre-intervention ASE and post-intervention ASE was included as a confounding covariate in ANOVA, no significant interaction was found between the intervention effect and gender. These results indicate that there is no gender difference in ASE improvement for blended foreign language learning, and that the difference occurs as a result of lower ASE scores at the pre-intervention period, regardless of gender. The current study implies that when using ASE, teachers and researchers may need to pay attention not to gender difference but to the lower ASE scores before intervention.
Blockchain as an IPFS (Interplanetary File System) Storage Index

-The web has always been an open and neutral place for the world to share knowledge it desires, but its open nature makes it susceptible to many flaws. The current web is insecure; it doesn't offer any security measures by itself. It is centralized and hence poses a danger of single point of failure; this means a central body has total control over it. Blockchain attempts create permanent records of data by distributing and duplicating it and storing it in long immutable ledgers. It provides a democratized trust and validation protocol that has already disrupted banking and is on the verge of overhauling healthcare, financial services, social apps, cryptocurrencies and ICOs. However, the blockchain isn’t a complete solution itself to solve the above mentioned problems of the Web. The proof of work consensus mechanisms which are currently in use have slowed transaction speeds to near crippling levels. This makes storing data or large files on the blockchain not feasible. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. IPFS can be seen as a Distributed Web, and can be utilized as a data store and index the data hash in blockchain. Combined with the latest Asymmetric Encryption protocols the data can be digitally signed and encrypted so it can be only accessed by authorized bodies. This paper aims to combine the advantages of IPFS, Blockchain & Asymmetric Encryption technologies to overcome their shortcomings to create a web that’s distributed, secure and immutable.
Applications of Internet of Things in Health Care: A Survey Study

— This paper focuses on the applications of Internet of Things (IoTs) in medical field followed by health care. Health care is sector in medical science where various specialized doctors care patients. As technology updates day by day, health care is to be managed by internet-based technology and patients are loved to take advantages by those doctors at anywhere and at any time. By this IoT technology, surviving life of patients will be increased and now a days cloud becomes an important part of life for anybody. Therefore, cloud plays a role to deal with sharing details immediately on the moments. The work is also described with architecture and services of IoT in terms of health care. Conclusive work is carried out by the application-oriented tasks.
Phytochemical screening, in vitro antioxidant and antibacterial activities of methanolic extracts of Capparis Spionsa L. different parts from Tunisia

I. Rajhi , M.T. Ben Dhia , M. Abderrabba , I. Ouzari-Hadda , S. Ayadi * Université de Tunis El Manar, Faculté des Sciences de Tunis, Campus Universitaire 2092, El Manar, Tunis, Tunisie 2 Laboratoire Matériaux Molécules et Applications (LMMA), IPEST, BP51, La Marsa 2070, Tunisia. Université de Tunis El-Manar, Faculté des Sciences Mathématiques, Physiques et Naturelles de Tunis Laboratoire de Chimie Organique Structurale : Synthèse et Etudes Physico-Chimiques Laboratoire Microorganismes et Biomolécules Actives, Faculté des Sciences de Tunis, université de Tunis El Manar, 2092 Tunis, Tunisia Institut National des Sciences et Technologies de la Mer (INSTM), Laboratoire Milieu Marin, Centre la Goulette, Tunisie. "
An Effective Nearest Neighbor Classiﬁcation Technique Using Medoid Based Weighting Scheme

— The k -nearest neighbor decision rule is a simple, robust and widely used classiﬁer. The method puts a point into a particular class, if the class has the maximum representation among the k nearest neighbors of the point in the training set. However, determining the value of k is difﬁcult. Moreover, nearest neighbor classiﬁcation techniques put more stress on the data points that lie on the boundary region of individual classes. These methods rely upon those boundary points to decide the class label of a new data point, but, the boundary points may not be a good representation of a particular class. A method is thus proposed here in spirit of the nearest neighbor classiﬁcation technique using a medoid based weighting scheme to overcome these limitations. The experimental results using various standard benchmark data sets have shown that the proposed method outperforms different state of the art classiﬁers.
The Marshallian industrial district and inclusive urban growth strategy

Abstract: One of the aspects of industrial district theory still little discussed is its relation with the city as a socio-economic entity and with theories that study the city. Building this ‘bridge’ is a task of enormous difficulty that can hardly be solved in an article. In this article, we contribute to this bridge by exploring one of its most urgent and relevant aspects: the relationship between the industrial district and inclusive urban growth.
A Study On The Effect Of Integrated Yoga On Pregnancy Complications

BackgroundFor any woman, becoming a mother is a joyous occasion for her and the whole family but during pregnancy, some discomforts are encountered due to hormones and other changes in the body. Regular yoga exercises and follow up had a positive impact on results regarding outcome improvement and reduced complication rate. ObjectiveThe purpose of the present study was to assess the effect of yogic package on pregnancy complications. MethodIn this study, 80 primigravida (age group of 20-30 years) have been taken, belonged to urban area of Chhattisgarh and purposively selected, then subjects randomly divided in two groups, control group (n=40) and experimental group (n=40). The control group did not take any package. They were instructed to just walk in the morning for 10 minutes. To assess their general health, the researcher has communicating time to time to the subjects. Then the experimental group was divided into Subgroups so that all subjects can be accessed. Each group had taken the yogic practices for 6 days in a week. They performed 45 minutes yoga included physical posture, breathing, chanting of mantra and relaxation techniques. FindingsResults shows that p<22.84 and significant at 0.001 significant level. Hence yogic practices significantly increase the level of health and decrease the pregnancy complications in the experimental group as compared to control group. ConclusionThe findings suggest that yogic package are very effective for mother, it decrease the level pregnancy complications and provide better health during pregnancy and after delivery. KeywordsPrimigravida, Yoga, Pregnancy Complications, Health.
Assessment of Glyceamic control in Diabetic patients Attending

Important biochemical indices used to assess glycaemic control include fasting blood glucose, 2hours post prandial glucose and glycated haemoglobin. The objective of this study was to assess glycaemic control in diabetic patients attending medical out-patient Department clinic (MOPD), of Ahmadu Bello university Teaching Hospital (ABUTH), Zaria. The study population was 170 type 2 diabetic patients. Diabetes mellitus (DM) was confirmed according to the new diagnostic criteria based on 2 fasting or 2 random serum glucose levels of more than 7.0 mmol/L and 11.1 mmol/L respectively. A concise history of the patients, physical examination and laboratory findings were recorded on a proforma. Glycated haemoglobin (GHbA1c) and concentrations of serum FBG and RBG were measured. The reference values of glycated haemoglobin was established using a standard protocol. The mean values of GHbA1c and serum FBG as well as RBG were significantly higher in diabetic patients than in control subjects (p<0.01). It was concluded from the findings of the present study that there is poor glycaemic control in the studied patients, which could be as a result of poor compliance of patients to treatment. The established reference value (mean±2SD) for glycated haemoglobin was (6.3-6.7 %).
Saliency Bias in Mutual Fund Portfolios and its Implications for Stock Price Efficiency: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to the salient events using hurricane strikes as a natural experiment. Specifically, we analyze the trading response of mutual fund managers to the hurricane strikes with respect to the firms located in the disaster zone. We report two major findings. First, we find that managers close to the disaster zone underweight diaster zone firms more than that underweighted by the distant managers. Second, the underweighting of disaster zone firms is not driven by information asymmetry between the close and distant managers, rather this underweighting is driven by saliency bias. This saliency bias driven underweighting decreases with both time and distance. Finally, the managerial overreaction to the salient event is costly to the fund investors. A long-short strategy exploiting the extent of overreaction by close fund managers generates economically and statistically significant risk-adjusted returns. Overall, our paper provides causal evidence supporting the idea that the supposedly rational portfolio managers act in a behaviorally biased way by overreacting to the salient events.
The Impact of a Right of First Refusal Clause in a First-Price Auction with Unknown Heterogeneous Risk-Aversion

We consider that a seller wishes to sell an asset by means of a first-price auction to two potential buyers. One of them may be granted a Right of First Refusal (ROFR) clause which gives him the opportunity to match the bid of the other buyer. When both buyers exhibit heterogeneous risk-attitudes and do not exactly know the competitor’s degree of risk-aversion, we first determine strategic bidding behaviors with and without the ROFR clause. Then, we show that granting the least risk-averse bidder a ROFR can increase the seller’s expected profit. Moreover, we show that the ROFR grows the expected joint profit of the seller and the right-holder but always decreases the nonright-holder expected utility. Finally, we determine the conditions under which the ROFR clause can increase the seller’s expected profit in an open modified auction. JEL classification: D44; D81.